Leônidas used to look at me properly, especially on those nights, but the only thing he ever dared say was: “Aren’t you cold, honey?” Always the same question.
I would reply with a friendly chuckle. When I got tired of doing nothing in the garden, I went to my room to watch television.
But, as the year progressed, the situation in my house gradually improved, until we returned to the level of accord we’d enjoyed before I was caught in the act. My mom continued asking where I went, and I continued telling the truth only when it was in my interests, that is, on the occasions when my nighttime activities involved someone male. In January, I did the university entrance exam. I got a place to study journalism. A banner was hung on our balcony. WELL DONE, CORA! 8TH IN JOURNALISM—UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL. My dad, whenever he had the chance, went into a bookshop and came out with some great work wrapped up as a gift, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, because at some dinner I had mentioned the words literary journalism, and luckily there was a whole collection of books under that name. By the time classes actually began, I already loved the profession enough to be immune to the disappointments. I made more friends in one semester than in eleven years at school. My appearance began to transform, especially after I read The Empire of Fashion, by Gilles Lipovetsky, for communication theory. It wasn’t the change my aunts expected, of course. For example, I turned some old jeans into very short shorts. I did let my hair hang loose, then I cut it and put a ring in my nose. I liked the idea of becoming more attractive and, to my personal understanding of fashion psychology, that didn’t mean becoming more feminine. On the contrary, I tended to reject anything contaminated by concepts of fragility or an excess of fluff, like bows, polka dots, lace, dolly shoes, gold accessories, heart patterns. None of that had anything to do with me.
So Julia and I became friends and started going around together and more or less forgot about the rest of our classmates, but I had no idea how much she knew about me. I mean, about my sexuality. At that time, I was dating a girl call Amanda, a physical education major, nearly five feet eleven, who drizzled a thin trail of ketchup on each French fry instead of making a red pool with it. That made me uncomfortable. I had told some people I barely knew about Amanda. In the media department, everyone was very committed to being ironic, as well as accepting the eccentricities of their peers as if they were the norm. Therefore declaring oneself to be bisexual was nothing that would cause dirty looks; on the contrary, people end up liking you even more. Even so, I took my time in telling Julia about Amanda, or about how I was attracted to our photography teacher. I had the feeling that she wouldn’t have such a favorable opinion as the guys who spent all evening playing pool in the decrepit hall in the student union. The weeks flew by, and it became increasingly difficult to raise the subject.
Julia and I were parked in a small street on the south side, sitting in the car, passing a joint between our fingertips, when finally I told her. Julia exhaled smoke through a crack in the window, gave a little giggle and said: “It’s not as if I didn’t know, Cora.”
It was a shame to turn up late to my own personal life.
That night, and the nights that followed, I was forced to overcome the shame of having kept an open secret. We went out together more and more. We never invited anyone else. Julia still didn’t like beer, but she began to drink batidas, which involved low quality alcohol mixed copiously with condensed milk. One moment her gaze would lose itself in the dim waters of the Guaíba, the next she would focus on me. One day, she moved closer and gave me a kiss. Then that became more or less the norm: both of us drunk, in the back seat of the car, in motels that charged very little for two-hour stays, in dirty restrooms at gas stations.
Amanda met me one afternoon in a snack bar to say that I always seemed to be annoyed at her, so the best thing was for us to stop seeing each other. I didn’t put up a fight, even though I felt strange watching her get up and leave. I stayed there, nibbling a straw, while there was still some juice in my glass. Then I got up and started walking down the busy street, completely oblivious to the hustle and bustle, the medical appointments, the ergonomic mattresses, the nightstands, the carbon paper, the nightdresses, the people with nowhere to sleep and the crack addicts, the rustic furniture store that was clearing stock. As was the case almost every other night, I had a date with Julia.
Two hours after leaving the Bertussi brothers’ memorial, we arrived in São Francisco de Paula. There was a pretty lake, five minutes from the center, which Julia remembered having visited on a school trip. The Alpine-style mansion in the background had lingered in her memory too, although at that time she didn’t know it was a hotel, the Hotel Cavalinho Branco.
If that building were a person, it could only have been a very dignified gentleman with a walking stick and some macabre ideas in his head. Naturally, we went inside for a look. The porter was on his coffee break, munching on a slice of bran cake. He wiped his mouth and greeted us. We asked for the rate per night. He told us the price. I looked at the acrylic prints of landscapes of Rio Grande do Sul and felt depressed. He said: “It’s low season, I can give you a discount.” Julia turned to me and twitched her shoulders, just a tiny spasm, as if she agreed with the idea of staying there as long as it was me who publicly stated our intention. “This building is historic, it was going to be a casino,” the porter explained. “But then the president at that time, Eurico Gaspar Dutra, signed a decree prohibiting gambling in Brazil. It never even opened, it was still under construction. Imagine the job opportunities if they hadn’t banned it. Dumb country, don’t you think?”
As I filled in the form, I tried to imagine the last night of Brazilian casinos. I saw that eleventh-hour spin of the roulette wheel in a hall full of mirrors in Copacabana Palace. Everything in black and white, of course. The crowd around the table, men with dark, slicked-back hair, women in long gowns with cigarette holders, doing their best to be seductive, with so much going on I nearly missed seeing the winning number (I was, apart from anything else, entirely inappropriately dressed). Fourteen, red. A man became discreetly elated, silently punching the air.
“Third floor, on the right,” said the porter.
We went upstairs. The wallpaper along the dark corridors exuded a slight odor of mold.
We were in the room now. It was already nighttime. Julia had pulled a chair up to the edge of the bed and was sitting on it, slipping her size 36 feet, dark nail polish, tiny star on the back, under the long outdated bedspread (was chenille the name of that fabric?). She stared at me, as if to check that there would be no tricks. As for me, I was standing in the middle of the room. I stretched out my arm and grabbed one of our bottles of wine from the table. I had removed the seal a few minutes earlier. Then, I picked up one of my boots and lowered the bottle into it, so that it sat in the heel.
“You won’t manage it,” Julia said.
I gave her a confident smile. It was simple, I’d seen tutorials, even drunk people could do it. And what’s more, I’d once seen it with my own eyes, Jean-Marc, by the banks of the Seine, against the stonework of the most famous bridge in the city. What was Jean-Marc doing now? I began to beat the Doc Martens against the wall. I must admit that my far-from-subtle trick to remove the cork made one hell of a noise. It seemed as though I was trying to bring the whole building down, bit by bit. Julia watched me incredulously, and even I was no longer quite so certain that it was possible to substitute a corkscrew with a mere shoe. But giving up was out of the question. When the stopper finally began to give way, and a tiny bit of cork peeked out above the mouth of the bottle, immediately transforming my clumsy maneuver into something of a miracle, our tension gave way to a fit of giggles. I laughed at how much Julia laughed, until I had no strength left in my arms. Luckily, the cork was already halfway out. I dismantled my contraption and put the bottle on the table. The dark liquid was shaken up, tiny bubbles surging to the surface.
Julia tried to compose herself. She breathed deeply, straightened he
r spine.
“Is that what they’ve been teaching you in Paris, Cora?”
I felt proud to be the girl who didn’t need a corkscrew. I picked up two tumblers from the top of the mini-bar.
“I’d say so. Among other things.”
“And here I was thinking the French were a bit more elegant.”
“They know how to live.”
The wine was terrible, but I didn’t say anything. You just had to drink it to forget. On the whole Brazilian wines were truly awful, with a few exceptions that I certainly hadn’t had the pleasure of trying.
“Nice wine, isn’t it?”
“It’s okay.”
Julia lay on her front to adjust the iPod, legs dangling, swinging from time to time. The device was linked to two speakers. I turned the other way. There was a kind of balcony, not big enough for someone to sit on, but from which I could now see the lake and a few dim lights amid the patches of fog. I stood outside with my wine glass.
“Hey, you have this album.”
An agitated, energetic guitar began to play. It was the start of “The Song Remains the Same,” the first track on Led Zeppelin’s best album.
“God, it’s a long time since I’ve heard this.”
And what if I said that I hadn’t either, because it reminded me of those nights in the residence, and I wasn’t sure whether returning to those nights was such a good thing. If it hadn’t been for us, the record player would have been thrown out. Mathias was getting rid of old junk. Mathias was getting married. I wasn’t invited. There would be a big celebration at Clube Comercial de Soledade. The only chance that someone like that lady with the bright lipstick, itching to get on the dance floor, would get to wear that imported shade of red, which slipped through the checkout almost unnoticed at the Rivera tax-free store, between the Black & Decker drill and her husband’s three bottles of Ballantine’s. Julia wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about the wedding. She kept saying nasty things about the family and some of the other guests she’d have to encounter, which for me was a novelty. Where had this cattier version of Julia come from? Could I have had something to do with it?
Julia spoke less and less about her family. She no longer went to Soledade every weekend, although she still wasn’t able to tell her parents that she stayed in Porto Alegre because she wanted to. On the phone she still had to resort to some kind of excuse involving her studies. We continued going for drives or listening to vinyl in the residence. One of the two of us had the idea of the Unplanned Journey. And yet neither of us lifted a finger to move. Driving around within the city limits. Playing music at low volume so as not to wake the sisters. Talking about the trip.
“And you could drive,” Julia said one night, drunk, like I was, “and we could go really far away and then we’d get someplace, and the place would be pretty as anything, and there wouldn’t be anyone there, and we could stay a few days, or weeks even, and then decide whether or not to come back.”
More or less a month later, Julia announced, in an almost mechanical tone, that she was going to study in Montreal.
I was still on the balcony, looking towards the lake. It looked as though the fog that was hiding sections of the landscape was forming directly above the water, giving the impression of a really lousy special effect in a horror movie. It wasn’t believable, even though it was happening. Only dregs of wine remained in Julia’s glass.
“It’s ‘The Rain Song’ next,” I said.
She sat near me, half inside half outside, leaning on the doorframe.
“It’s a nice one.”
She swirled the wine round in her glass, as if it would reveal a secret message or some kind of prediction of the future. Down below, for a few seconds, car headlights lighted up the narrow gravel path leading to the parking lot. There was a moment of silence, then the banging of doors. I took a step towards the balustrade, in time to see the new guests pass under the arch at the entrance. A small and adorable family of three.
4.
THE CHINESE BOY was carrying the dragon as if it were a salver, pushing his way along the chaotic Rue du Faubourg du Temple. Sixty-odd teeth that had been perfectly shaped into spikes in the back of the patisserie, and yet were entirely devoid of any sense of nobility. The door of my building banged behind me and I greeted the lad, whom I often saw carrying the Styrofoam structures. He moved his head slowly and returned my greeting. When I started walking, he was already way ahead of me.
Paris was blue that day. Paris was blue every single day in January. The sun left the scene and was replaced by a kind of oscillating neon light that looked on the verge of breaking down. The green of the dragon, further and further away now, was the only green that would be seen until the leaves started to bud again in the trees, surrounded by more cigarette butts than soil. I lived right in front of the patisserie that provided the Chinese community with its Styrofoam sculptures, on the fourth story, view of the street, one single window. A hundred and sixty square feet in total. It smelled of fried food when they were frying, cigarettes when they smoked. Once a week, it reeked of Peking-style eggplant.
I had been in Paris for almost three years, and this wasn’t my first address in the city, or the smallest. I had lived, in the following order, in a single bedroom rented from an old lady, in two university residences, a top bunk in a post-graduate’s room, on an inflatable mattress set up in the living room of an employee of the Brazilian embassy. Let’s just say that the apartment on Rue du Faubourg du Temple was the belated fulfillment of my initial fantasies of Paris. Not by chance, it had appeared at a moment when my life seemed to be relatively calm, although when it came down to it, I sometimes doubted that it was what I was really expecting from my days in France. So, every morning, I walked to the discreet door of a place called the Olivier Gerval Fashion & Design Institute, where I was no more than a regular first year student of fashion. Sitting in one of the middle rows, I never asked questions, no matter what the subject, the history of brocade, corsets, accounting, was Chanel a lesbian, who invented flares, why is a bias cut best here? Then I went home to make lunch.
In the afternoons, I slid sandwiches along a stainless steel counter near Notre-Dame until seven, repeating the names of the ingredients in English, French, or if necessary, a hesitant Spanish with a hint of an Argentinean accent. On that particular Wednesday in January, however, my daily tasks wouldn’t be carried out quite up to par, so to speak. My dad had sent me an email on Sunday, and I hadn’t felt able to formulate a response quite yet, not even something as simple as a yes or a no. I decided to leave the apartment as early as possible. Far away from the computer, my conscience would weigh less heavily.
Two blocks to the left, and there I was, in front of the café I often visited, although rarely at that time of day. The Christmas picture—a snowman with a fake smile hurling snowballs at two children—still hadn’t been removed from the window. I pushed open the door. It was strange, but I had never seen more than four or five people in the place, and that morning there were even fewer, just two elderly men sitting at the counter, talking in low voices, contemplating their glasses, searching for crumbs. A Willie Nelson song was playing. When Jean-Marc came to serve me, I had already taken off my coat and all the accessories needed to survive a winter’s day. “Fucking cold,” I said, and he replied: “You seem to have learned to complain like a real French girl.” I smiled, ordered a coffee and a croissant, and I watched Jean-Marc move away. He had a tattoo on his bicep with the name of a girl from long ago.
During almost three years in Paris, I had naturally met a lot of people. From Namibia, from the swamps of Louisiana, from the totalitarian remains of Estonia and Ukraine. Men of Arab descent served me overly sweet teas. Japanese girls described their Tokyo and Kyoto homes to me with the assistance of electronic translators. At my birthday party on the banks of the Seine, I was given a Peruvian hat and a bottle of tequila with a slightly smoky taste. As for my love life, it also followed a global logic. I frequented, as the French wo
uld say, an Algerian neighbor whose apartment constantly issued the interminable wails of kabyle music. And, at more or less the same time, I had met a nineteen-year-old Argentinian girl called Alejandra in an indie bar called Pop In. Jean-Marc, however, was the first French person who really wanted to talk to me.
The previous week, I had had lunch with Alejandra in a tiny Vietnamese restaurant where the dishes cost peanuts, and I was on my way home, alone. Walking at night. Perhaps that was why so many Brazilians left their country, switching graduate jobs for kitchens and masonry work, and never mind the tiny apartments they’d have to face, never mind family far away, never mind wages that barely stretched, we just wanted the simple pleasure of walking at night. That’s what I was thinking about. I was almost home. The café was dark, the sign switched off and chairs on the tables. Jean-Marc was sweeping the floor. Behind the glass, his silhouette was light, dynamic, and occasionally he would take surprising little leaps, like a character in West Side Story. I found it amusing. I kept watching until Jean-Marc noticed I was there. He spun around holding the broom close to his body. As he came to a stop, he saw me. Then he walked perfectly normally towards the door, stuck his head out, with no visible sign of embarrassment, and said: “Can I offer you a Kir Royal?”
“Is it Cassis you put in that?” I asked, as soon as Jean-Marc set the glasses of red liquid down on the table. I had never tried a Kir Royal.
“Cassis and champagne.”
Jean-Marc sat down in front of me. His hair fell to his shoulders, a few gray strands, fingernails of a guitarist. At precisely that moment, I remember having thought that Jean-Marc was happy in his job. It was good enough. He would never wake up thinking about why he was still a waiter, or blame his absent parents, the years of glue sniffing or the ascent of right-wing politicians. I took the first sip and said it was great, really. He smiled.
“You said you’re from Brazil, right?”
We All Loved Cowboys Page 5