We All Loved Cowboys

by Carol Bensimon

“Uh-huh.”

  “Funny, you don’t seem like your average Brazilian girl.”

  “What’s your average Brazilian girl, the kind you meet in Bois de Boulogne?” He laughed. “What do you think I should do to make my nationality more obvious? That is my intention, after all.”

  Jean-Marc slipped his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling, but the moment of reflection didn’t get him very far; he soon opened his arms in a gesture of defeat.

  “All I know is that Brazil has beautiful beaches, I’d really love to see those beaches. What do you call those wooden houses in the hills? Favelas, is that right? I know something about favelas too. Oh, and aren’t you champions in plastic surgery?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Yes, you are. I saw a documentary about it.”

  “Nowadays you can learn pretty much everything just by watching documentaries.”

  “Precisely,” he said enthusiastically, missing the irony in my observation.

  I started to go a little slower with my Kir Royal.

  On the other side of the window, the street was almost empty. The streetlights imbued the dirty stone of the buildings with a warm yellow glow, corresponding with the common perception of the way the city should look. Despite the authorities’ best efforts, however, there was a great deal of disappointment to be had. Cramped hotel rooms where romances came to an end. Bistros serving frozen food. The Mona Lisa was much smaller than anyone could imagine. The Greeks left the same old shards of crockery on the ground to attract tourists in Rue de la Huchette. Young Hemingway fans walked the banks of the Seine clutching blank Moleskines. Paris was the perfect setting for a story that wasn’t actually happening.

  I turned back to Jean-Marc. He was rolling a cigarette. He had placed a clump of tobacco on the paper, spreading it out more or less evenly, and was now rubbing his thumbs and index fingers together to close it.

  “But what are you doing here, studying?”

  “Yeah, I started a fashion course. In September.”

  He gave an incredulous laugh, then ran his tongue along the adhesive strip.

  “Seriously? That’ll kill you, girl.”

  “Too late.”

  “I mean, you’ve got style, that’s for sure. But you don’t learn to play Beethoven so you can start a rock band.”

  “I don’t suppose so.”

  I gave a reserved smile. I wasn’t particularly interested in debating the point. Jean-Marc asked whether I’d like another Kir Royal, I said yes, please. He stood up. I looked at the tattoo. I had never managed to see the whole thing, but I could make out some of the letters, perhaps an I and an E.

  “What does it say?” I said.

  “Sophie.”

  He raised the sleeve of his t-shirt.

  “Ancient history.”

  “Looks like it was done yesterday.”

  “I got it retouched.”

  “Do you still love her?”

  “No. God, no. But I have a deep respect for my past.”

  That was my conversation with Jean-Marc one night, after which I went for almost a week with entering or even walking past the café, until that morning. I took the last bites of my croissant and searched for my watch under the many layers of clothing. I had less than fifteen minutes to get to the Olivier Gerval Fashion & Design Institute, where I would spend the next few hours watching the evolution of the silhouette throughout history, the only guy in the room (gay), and the pigeons on the neighboring roof. I picked out a few coins in the palm of my hand, then tossed them into the little tray. Jean-Marc came out from behind the counter. When he reached me, I was already on my feet, and the old men were laughing at something a certain Bertrand had done. One of them began to cough. Jean-Marc was standing in front of me, not picking up the coins, as if he was concentrating on something I was completely unaware of. “What is it?” I said, as I put my coat on. He leaned his elbows on the back of an empty chair.

  “You off to class?”

  “Yes. Late like a Latin American.”

  Jean-Marc laughed.

  “You’re funny, Cora.”

  “No one’s ever said that, as far as I can remember.”

  “I was thinking, can I have your number?”

  “My number?”

  “What would you think if I asked you on a date?”

  Then I was gone. I had hurriedly pushed open the café door and, once I was out on the street, set off in the opposite direction from my fashion degree. I, the girl who used to go to Montmartre to buy fabric, who went all the way to a haber-dashery on Rue des Archives to find yellow buttons the size of a two-euro coin, had suddenly decided not to go to class. The sky was overcast with cold. I had the feeling that all the clouds might join together at any moment in a single heavy mass of about forty square miles, in other words, the size of Paris, which, after all, is an unbelievably small city. I fastened my coat to the neck. I was walking towards the Saint-Martin canal, which extended from La Villette, in the northeast, to the public marina of Bastille. A pretty manmade watercourse, with locks and small iron bridges worth walking along at the weekend. I did that sometimes. The streets became pedestrian areas on Sundays. Little kids, new couples, old warriors with their initials carved on ebony canes, they all stopped to watch when a lock started to open, and I must say it was probably one of the slowest processes I’ve seen in my life.

  A curious fact about the Saint-Martin canal: for about two thirds of a mile, it seemed to suddenly disappear. This was because it ran the length of Boulevard Richard Lenoir, between the lanes of cars coming and going, following an unseen subterranean path whose only contact with the surface was via a few air vents. This was exactly the route I took that morning, equivalent to the hidden part of the canal. Twice, I examined the big vents. Dark. Very dark indeed. I said a word out loud, it came back to me. Which word? I don’t know. I searched in the flowerbeds for a stone, then threw it in and promptly heard the sound of water. Someone raised an eyebrow at me. So I started walking again.

  The truth is that big problems become even more problematic during winter. Even memories can be somewhat compromised when your toes are frozen. At the age of sixteen, I watched my dad force two suitcases into the trunk of his Monza Classic. I think I was on the veranda, so I had a good view of that dissatisfied man filling the car with shirts, pants and socks that he hadn’t even chosen, in front of a house that no longer belonged to him. This didn’t seem to signal a particularly good outlook for me, but, when I put my egoism to one side, what I felt for my dad was admiration. What he was finally giving up wasn’t specifically that wife, that house, that daily life with that daughter; he was courageously relinquishing a greater concept, that made even true love seem like something manufactured in China. Marriage. “Marriage is shit.” That was my way of articulating it all at the age of sixteen. I saw the car pull away, and I returned to my room and cried.

  Deep down, I couldn’t have been more wrong in my belief that my dad just wasn’t made for marriage and family, which to my eyes seemed like a great virtue. I saw my dad as a rebel, a fighter, someone who doesn’t conform, no sir, and that protected me, for years and years, from a much greater fall. Then came his girlfriends. But that wasn’t a problem, because they barely lasted. The very notion of a girlfriend intimated the transitory nature of all those women. The first. The second. The third. You get used to it. The fourth. Why memorize names? Pick one and add Roman numerals. The fifth. The sixth. Not bad for a man of forty-six. The seventh. Jeez, you were quick with that one. The eighth. The eighth. The eighth.

  The eighth was called Jaqueline. Jaqueline taught English, my dad was among her pupils, and she was twenty-seven, two years older than me. That means we had watched the same cartoons before school, eaten the same kind of biscuits you can’t get any more, we sang the same irritating jingle for a banana flavored gum, and we were shocked, albeit without really understanding, when Ayrton Senna didn’t make a bend. I can’t say I particularly liked having the same childhood memorie
s as my dad’s girlfriend. This did seem, however, to point to an imminent break up: one day, Jaqueline would surely realize that she needed someone who was more willing to party, with a bit more hair, and, more importantly, that if there was something unresolved in her relationship with her own father (there must have been), the best way to confront it certainly wasn’t with a boyfriend twenty-five years older than her.

  But I was wrong. Jaqueline stayed. Jaqueline spent Friday and Saturday nights at my dad’s apartment. Jaqueline moved into the apartment. One day Jaqueline confided in me her desire to marry. A real party. I kept the secret, but she didn’t. The celebration took place without further ado. I had always wanted to live in Paris. I wasn’t enjoying my journalism classes at all and, what’s more, Julia had gone away. So I moved to Paris.

  And now my dad was having a child. I’d been digesting this news for months. Even so, perhaps because I was thousands of miles away, it still seemed rather unreal to me. My halfbrother, however, was already a concrete element. I knew, for example, what his name would be João Pedro). I had seen the ultrasound, as well as photos of his future bedroom (bespoke furniture that already included a desk for studying). Thinking about it, perhaps any lack of concreteness was actually in me. Of course, I received medical updates, photos of the belly, lists of boys’ and girls’ names, reports as the pregnancy progressed. But all of that only went to show exactly where my place was, on the outside.

  While Jaqueline ran her hand over her basketball-sized stomach, turned over and went back to sleep, it was morning in Paris and I was arriving in the Bastille. No matter which boulevard you approached from, the first thing you saw were the hordes of cars whizzing round the imposing column, as if caught in an infinite state of reverence to the golden angel on top. It could be noisy, so much so that I felt the need to move on and leave behind those streets filled with the bicycle bells of attractive women on their way to encounters in quiet cafes, and all the metro entrances, and the stairs to the opera house, where young men with dramatic hairstyles would sit, fifteen-year-old girls smoking, skateboarders in tight pants, and a number of gay boys who had only just realized. All that was sufficiently far away now and once again, the waters of the Saint-Martin canal emerged.

  I sat on a bench. The boats anchored in the marina gave the impression that they would never leave it. Not far from me, some men were playing pétanque. I watched the silver balls for a good while, trying to work out whether it was any different to the Brazilian version of the game. But the truth was that I didn’t really know anything about bowling, except for the story of a third cousin who had his finger ripped off by a bowling ball when he was little. Luckily his parents were quick enough, and they put the finger in a bucket of ice cubes and dashed to the hospital. It all turned out fine. I stopped watching the pétanque players.

  No, I don’t think I wanted to be in Brazil in March, when João Pedro would arrive by caesarian, because all Brazilian women have caesarians now. I could certainly miss ten days, a fortnight of classes, as my dad suggested in his email, then again in three voicemails on my cell, perhaps I could take some work for the journey, but why would I do that? I was freezing, and a slight ache behind my right eye started to nag. I stood up. I was walking along an empty sidewalk when some people came into view. They were leaning on the low wall, looking towards the canal. From left to right: a bearded man smoking, a woman in gym wear, a man in an overcoat holding a suitcase.

  “What is it?” I asked them.

  “A boat’s passing. They’re opening the lock.”

  So I joined the group and waited.

  When Jaqueline appeared in my father’s life, it took me a while to realize that she was just what he was looking for, nothing more nothing less, young and foolish, basically, at precisely the time when I was very busy being young and foolish too. I was betting on any lame horse that appeared in front of me, rehashing the same old dramas until they wore out, I told myself that I had no expectations when expectations were my only fuel.

  I would spend all day thinking about Julia. Then night would fall and I didn’t want to have to accept that we had come to the end of the line. Our final incursions into the city seemed to be a poor imitation of those that had occurred just a short time earlier. I went to the same places to try to generate the same situations. That gas station. The bar where the Doors cover band used to play. We ordered two Brandy Alexanders to go, they tasted the way they always did, and the lid kept coming off the disposable cup if I drove too fast, but it was no longer funny. “Slow down,” Julia might say. And that was a novelty for me. I didn’t know where that freshness of the previous months had gone. From being secret lovers—although the role made me uncomfortable, I admit there was a certain charm in it—Julia and I had regressed to being best friends, who occasionally, very occasionally, took things a bit further.

  Not that I had been consulted about it. Nor did I feel like starting a what’s-happening-to-us style conversation. So Julia stayed with her boys, and I led my own life. I didn’t like university parties. I would prefer the three subterranean stories of a gay club, where the music, even if it wasn’t the kind I’d listen to in any other context, at least sent the entire dance floor into a state of pure excitement. Meanwhile, Julia was shaking her thing in a club hired by the Electrical Engineering students. Julia made it to the Faculty of Medicine’s famous hundred-day party. Julia dressed as Penelope Pitstop for the Architecture Department’s costume party. She told me the following day about the boys she’d been with, students of all kinds, they would be shy, or perfectly adapted to ordinary life, or bipolar megalomaniacs who were proud of their madness, some of them were convinced that they had only to study management to become millionaires, others operated on the back legs of dogs that had been run over at four in the morning, and there were others who spoke about skeletons of unfinished bridges in the middle of the jungle and the theme of childhood in the poetry of Manuel Bandeira. None of them, however, had won Julia’s heart. That was the part I could call consolation.

  But our story came to an end as a huge storm swept over Porto Alegre. That night, eighty-three trees were ripped from the ground by winds of over sixty miles an hour, telephone wires tangled round the branches that fell, everything went dark and people were forced to wonder for a moment whether they had any candles in the house, and why there were any candles in the house in the first place, while the thunder reverberated and the streets filled with water like a kiddie pool. I was with Julia in the Maria Imaculada residence. The sisters had no problem finding candles to burn, but they didn’t want the young students playing with fire in the solitude of their rooms, so the third floor living room was packed with girls. Legs draped over the side of an armchair, Elisa lamented the fact that she was missing her eight o’clock telenovela; not wanting the evening to be a complete waste of time, she was filing her toenails in the semi-darkness. Four girls were playing cards around a flame that glowed in the center of the table, every round followed by an explosion of laughter, while others lay prostrate on sofas, pondering their fatal tedium. Julia turned to me and said: “Let’s get out of here.” We climbed the stairs with our arms stretched out in front, one step at a time.

  Because the room was pitch black, I instinctively went straight to the window as soon as Julia opened the door. The headlights of the few cars venturing along the avenue allowed a glimpse of the sheet of brown water extending across the asphalt, and you could only guess where the edge of the sidewalk was. I witnessed a bus cause a small tidal wave, then I looked back into the room. Where had Julia gone?

  “Julia?”

  “Here.”

  From her voice, I could only assume she was sitting on the bed.

  “I have to tell you something, Cora.”

  “Have you fallen in love with someone?” I said abruptly, gazing into the black void of the room. For an instant, Julia remained silent. As if my hypothesis had more foundation than I imagined.

  “I’m going to Canada. In a month.”
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  “But why don’t you wait for the holidays? I don’t think you’ll take long to …”

  “I’ve been accepted at a university in Montreal. I mean, to finish the course.”

  “Oh.”

  I was so shocked at the news that I hadn’t even found it strange that Julia had been able to tell me with such sobriety and self-control.

  “Are you happy for me? You should come and stay.”

  “You never told me you wanted to go to Canada.”

  “It isn’t something I’ve been dreaming about since I was little. It’s just something that happened.”

  “Something that happened? No one called you begging you to go, how can this be ‘something that happened’?”

  “I filled out some forms, all right? And I got in, it’s that simple.”

  I could hear the rain falling on the zinc roof in heartrending shards.

  In fifteen minutes’ time, the lights would flicker twice and finally the power would be restored, raising cries and applause from the girls gathered on the third floor, and then I would slam the door of Julia’s room, run down the stairs, colliding with some of them, smiling on the way back to the relative comfort of their rooms. I would reach the ground floor with the feeling that I had swallowed cement, and that this was the last time the sister at reception would bid me goodnight, out to Avenida João Pessoa, a deserted corridor, garbage bags swimming in the flow, part rain and part sewer, my socks sodden with the first step. The rain streaming down my cheeks wouldn’t seem so terrible.

  But there were still fifteen minutes to go before the power returned. Julia let her sneakers drop onto the parquet floor, one foot, then the other.

  “When did you submit your application to the university?’

  “I think it was a couple of months ago.”

  “A couple of months? Christ.”

  “I didn’t know whether they’d accept me.”

  “So? Two months? How could you have done all this behind my back?”

  “This isn’t about us, Cora.”

  “Of course not. It’s never about us. Never.”