“You girls aren’t vegetarian, are you?”
“Not likely,” Julia replied.
“Excellent. Because Beto’s making carreteiro de charque, and if there’s something he really knows how to do right, it’s salt beef.”
It was chaos inside. As if a group of children had invaded the house, jumped on the sofas, surfed the rugs, pulled the books from the shelves and then piled them precariously on a coffee table in the center. “Sorry about the mess,” said Petal, and replaced a pillow that had fallen on the floor, a gesture she could have made ten hours earlier. “We had some friends round yesterday.” The ashtray overflowing with stubs suggested that it had been a long night.
When I told the story, many months later, of our encounter with Beto and Petal, the first thing I would mention was that our night seemed to be endless too. I wondered how predictable it had been, after all, that we should have shown up when we did. How many times a week did the couple entertain strangers? Who were the people who had been there the previous day? I never found out. But I had rarely met a couple as friendly as Beto and Petal. The two demonstrated an unusual interest in what others had to say, or at least in what Julia and I had to say, which probably stemmed from the belief that all humankind is good, and that no person is worth more than any other. Even though neither Julia nor I had much to contribute when it came to subjects like adventure tourism, park conservation, community orchards and the old-fashioned mindset of people from their hometown of Caxias do Sul, Beto and Petal talked at length, enthusiastically and knowledgeably, about all those things and, eventually, asked us: “But what do you think?” They weren’t just being polite; it seemed more like a kind of radical leftist tic. I had nothing against it, anyway.
At the start of the night, the four of us stood in the kitchen, Beto at the stove. His dreads were held back by a dark blue rolled up bandana, and the black tank top he wore must have already been through the wash about four hundred times. Petal topped up our wine glasses whenever they were half empty. I told them about opening bottles with shoes and they couldn’t stop laughing. They’d lived in Cambará do Sul for a year and a half, providing tourism-related services: they demonstrated how to extract honey, they offered transfers to Parque Serra Geral and Parque Aparados da Serra, pointing out native plants and describing their benefits, they organized excursions to waterfalls that were often known as the wedding veil, they promised wild places you’d never manage to get to alone, and they gathered broom from the roadside to prepare teas to be sampled with colonial products from the region. The rest of the time they enjoyed life, as everyone does when they’ve just entered the realm of their twenties, but let’s just say that these two had an extra dash of spirituality.
So I was drunk, and things were beginning to get a little more complicated. Petal was chopping parsley, her back to Julia and me. I heard the noise of the knife snapping the thin stems, as I watched the pleats of her skirt fall from her hip, sometimes swaying almost in slow motion, to one side, then the other, finally returning to a vertical position. I thought about sudden curves under cotton panties. I thought about skirts slightly shorter at the back. I thought about Catholic schoolgirls from some country that wasn’t ours. And finally, I thought about Julia undressing in the hotel room, in a kind of optimistic anticipation of later that night.
I didn’t have the slightest idea what was being said. When I came to my senses, my eyes were fixed on an empty Formica counter. I looked for the others. Petal was tossing the chopped parsley into the pan. Julia was looking in my direction. Beto had disappeared.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
It was down a narrow corridor. I suddenly bumped into something. Someone shouted: “Cora, are you okay?” and I replied that I was, but I stood there for a while in the dark, my back against the creaking wood. There was a spider somewhere. I remember the fear more than the spider. Then I went through the nearest door, which turned out to be a bedroom. The rumpled covers in the middle of the bed looked like they had been picked up off the floor and dumped there, the mound illuminated by a beam of light from the street, a car passing slowly, perhaps looking for an address, which granted me an opportunity to witness Beto and Petal’s admiration for the East. I had seen those elephants somewhere before, with their rear end facing the door, good luck, that was what they meant, I think; other people’s beliefs always seem more interesting than our own, but Turkish nazars aren’t any better than a handful of rue, and the millennium-old coitus practiced by Indian figurines can’t beat the natural breasts of a Russian prostitute.
They were all sitting round the table when I reappeared. Beto served me an enormous plate of his salt beef and rice stew. I held my hand over my glass to prevent Petal from refilling it. I began to eat, I praised the food, I was starting to feel a bit better. A draft came in through the cracks in the house. Julia was looking at me, Petal looked at me occasionally, but never the two of them at the same time.
“I have to tell you something.” Beto crossed his cutlery on the plate. “You have to go to a town called Minas do Camaquã.”
“Nearby?” I asked.
“Quite far away. In the pampa.”
Petal smiled.
“Tell them about the playboy who owned the place.”
“Baby Pignatari. He dated Brigitte Bardot.”
“Brigitte Bardot went to the pampa?” Julia asked, astonished.
“I don’t think so. But Richard Gere got it on with a girl from Bagé.”
Julia and I burst out laughing.
“Hey, I’m not kidding,” said Beto. “It really happened.”
Shortly after Richard Gere came up in conversation, Julia’s cell began to ring. She pulled it out of her jacket pocket, and why it was in her jacket pocket was something I’d like to know. How long had Julia been waiting for that call? She said hello a few times, the signal seemed terrible, she decided to go out to the street. The door slammed. Petal stood up to serve me more wine, and I let her fill my glass above the level of good manners.
“But what’s in this Minas do Camaquã?”
“Nothing. That’s the point. It had copper. Now it has nothing.”
When Julia returned, we sat on the sofa. I eyed the tower of books balancing on the coffee table for a while. There was the complete works of Carlos Castañeda, some Neruda poetry, Latin American novels, biology manuals, history books that mainly covered the military dictatorship in Brazil, all of them precariously piled on that table, as if at the end of the previous night someone had tried to locate a certain passage, unsure as to whether it was part of a sonnet or some journalistic report. I opened a book at random. The Teachings of Don Juan. A dedication dominated the first page, in a large, curving hand, red, so firm that it had marked the following two pages. Beto, for an incredible week, with all the love in the world, Luciane. I shut the book and put it back on the pile. Castañeda was pure lies.
On the way back to the hotel, I remember that I kept searching for the moon with the insistence of someone who’s had a few too many. The porter was napping, but he recomposed himself as soon as we entered reception. He turned to the panel and took key number eight. Ours was a sad room, with that single sixty-watt bulb hanging from a wire. Julia went into the bathroom to get changed.
As I watched the strip of light escaping through the slightly open door, I told myself that it didn’t look like a good sign, or that at the very least it was a reversal of my expectations from the start of the night. Thinking about it, perhaps it did mean something positive, as the naturalness of undressing in front of friends can only be explained by your lack of desire for them. I had never been naked in front of my classmates at high school. If I was ever forced to, I’m sure I at least turned my back, which might have seemed ridiculous at the time, but which years later became one of those immediately obvious clues in the psychologist’s office.
I fell asleep before Julia emerged from the bathroom.
Not a single drop of rain fell in those wee small hours. The wind
had carried the clouds far away and, the following morning, an uninterrupted sun shone over Cambará do Sul. We were standing in front of the hotel waiting for the Ford Rural to arrive. The brightness was troubling me.
“Drink a bit of water.” Julia held out an aluminum bottle on which was written fabriquée au Canada.
“Ta.”
“Don’t you have sunglasses?”
“Left them in Porto Alegre. What an idiot.”
“Cora.”
I squinted and turned to face her.
“Eric called me last night.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t you want to know what he said?”
“I guess so.”
“He said Hey, Julia, tell me where you are, exactly, I’m coming to see you. And Eric, you know, he’s never been interested in Brazil.”
“I don’t think it’s a question of him being interested in Brazil, Julia.”
“I know, but—when things were good between us, I really wanted him to come with me.”
“And now?”
She thought about it.
“Not now.”
We remained silent for a while. Around us, we could hear snatches of conversation, as if the living dead of the previous day had some reason to feel better now. A woman walked past, talking loudly into her cell phone. Another had bought a dozen warm bread rolls, the plastic bag sweaty between her chubby arms. I took a few steps forwards and sat on the sidewalk. Beto and Petal were at least ten minutes late.
Julia followed and stood next to me. I raised my head and shielded my eyes with my hand.
“But I could never imagine Eric here, see, doing this trip,” she said. She seemed to regret what she had said before.
“That’s fine,” I replied, and looked ahead again.
“What is your problem, Cora? Why are you so quiet?”
“Just call him and say you don’t want him to come.”
“Calm down, I told him that yesterday.”
“You really said that?”
“God, of course I did! I don’t know why you need to be so mistrusting of everything, I mean, why would I lie about this? I told him I was going to keep traveling with you. That I didn’t want him to come at all.”
Now it was she who was getting angry. I tried to smile, but I feared that it was too late. Then, relieved, I said: “They’re here.” And I stood up. Julia turned round to look. Inside the jeep, Petal was waving frenetically, as if it was still necessary to call our attention to the fact that they had arrived. We waved in return, with slightly less enthusiasm. The Ford Rural was even more beautiful in the sunlight. Beto pulled over to the curb. It was Julia who moved first to open the door. Turning to me, she retorted: “Anyway, I’ve turned off my cell.”
That really got to me and I climbed into the back seat without much in the way of niceties. For the start of the journey, I spoke only when necessary, smiled only when necessary too, thinking, as I looked out of the window, about that last utterance of Julia’s. It seemed like the vindictive conclusion of a conjugal row. The couple is arguing and suddenly the wife says: “And look what I bought for you today,” tossing the now meaningless surprise of good intentions into the other’s lap.
The journey to the canyons wasn’t as tough as I had imagined. Occasionally the car had to zigzag in order to avoid the ruts in the track. Just imagine a man throwing an entire sack of gravel into a deep hole. That was the noise the road made. All around us was an infinite countryside, with a few horses, always alone, like the lost pieces of a plastic toy farm. If you watched for a while, you’d be surprised at their sudden bolts down the slope, which weren’t to escape from another animal, or to get to water or food, nor to find other horses, but, so you would think, just for their red manes to stand on end, for their hooves to barely touch the soil, before they came back up again; those horses ran like the wind, not to put out a fire or mend a broken heart, but just because they wanted to have fun. I felt rather jealous of those horses.
Inside the car, the climate was improving. Julia had now spoken to me directly, sometimes her eyes even demanded contact with mine. Whether this was because we were in the company of other people and therefore had to keep up appearances, I couldn’t say.
“Look at that over there. Now that’s a hotel.”
Beto pointed to the left.
“They have towel heaters in every bathroom, you know? Towel heaters,” he added, as if that item was the height of superfluity.
I leaned over for a better look. The immense grounds were surrounded by a high wall. From our position, however, it was possible to survey the entire hotel as it had been built on top of a hill. It looked like a drug baron’s house, but with some aesthetic consideration. I kept imagining my mother’s friends draping over loungers, drinking cocktails that tasted of their youth.
When we caught sight of the archway at the entrance to Parque da Serra Geral, Beto reduced his speed to almost zero and turned round. Not for a car that might have been coming, nor for a detail on the roadside that he’d forgotten to show us; Beto looked directly at me and at Julia.
“Do you have any idea how beautiful the two of you are?” I think he had been observing us in the rearview mirror for some time. “Seriously. Apart from Petal, of course, I’ve never seen girls so sexy and stylish.”
Well, the canyons were truly impressive, with plateaus and crevices, like they’d been swallowed by the earth and were fighting to stay. Everything was green, looking like moss from a distance, but it could have been grasses, bushes, trees, reminding us how it all began with the breaking up of the supercontinent Gondwana, and here the four of us were today, walking under the sun. We had seen the sea. There was a piece of land at the bottom, divided into plantations, then came the coast, a strip that was just slightly bluer than the sky. We sat at the edge of a precipice to eat our sandwiches. The stone was warm. I thought about my little brother who would be born in a week. I thought about Eric, and whether Julia might have used me to make him jealous, whether he would have come to Brazil if she had said yes, whether she really had said no.
We passed ten or so people in a circle, arms around one another’s shoulders, in preparation for a long trek. One by one, they were telling the rest of the group their name, age and profession. Introductions made, the guide asked, in a voice that was accustomed to the unfavorable acoustics of the vastness, whether they had all remembered to bring sunscreen. One man had forgotten. The woman wearing a yellow tank top and a visor offered him her tube of factor thirty, and he timidly thanked her. He began to smear the cream over his neck, then his face, then his arms, with an expression of disgust. Apart from that group, there weren’t many other visitors in Parque da Serra Geral.
The same couldn’t be said for Aparados da Serra, our afternoon destination, where the famous Itaimbezinho canyon was located. Coaches were accumulating in the parking lot. This second park was less wild than the first. You could spend hours here without your skin reacting to any spiny plants. There were clean restrooms, picnic tables, a scale model of the canyons, school groups being restrained by young teachers with their hair in buns. We followed a paved trail. Julia and Petal had dropped behind at the first viewpoint.
Beto was walking briskly.
“Can I ask you something, or will you get annoyed?” he said, without lessening the rhythm of the walk.
“Shoot.”
A couple approached from the opposite direction. I exchanged a polite smile when they passed.
“You and Julia, you’re lovers, aren’t you?”
I laughed.
“Why did you wait for that couple to pass to ask me that?”
“Who knows. I think maybe it was so I didn’t embarrass you.” Then he pulled the face of someone who isn’t sure they’ve given the right answer.
“Do you really think that would embarrass me?”
“Well, to be honest, quite the opposite. I think it would be sensational if you are actually lovers.”
“In the sense of ‘
wow, two girls together, how delicious’ or in the sense of ‘love is plural and infinite, it doesn’t choose gender, race or creed’?”
Beto stopped.
“What are you talking about?”
“Forget it.”
He stood facing me for a few moments. I could bet that Beto was the type to trust his own judgment. He had read the Carlos Castañeda books. He believed in energy configuration, luminous eggs, that kind of thing.
“I think I get it,” he said eventually.
“Get what?”
“It’s complicated, isn’t it?”
“Not for me.”
“But for her.”
“Maybe, Beto.”
Luckily, Petal and Julia had almost caught up with us. Julia said: “Tell Cora the story about the delegate.” Petal told me about the delegate. Julia found it hilarious all over again. We continued along the trail, far beyond where the paving ended. Two hours later, we listened to an explanation about the area’s geology in front of a scale model of the canyons and, rather unwillingly, looked round an exhibition of photography of regional birds. By that time, I was tired of nature.
The last thing we did together that day was to take a photo in front of Beto and Petal’s house, with the Ford Rural in the background. Julia set the timer on the camera. We moved closer together and froze in a leer while the little light flashed on the device. Afterwards, we checked the image and concluded that we had all come out well enough.
When we left, after hugs all round, turned the corner and walked up the road in silence, I still had the feeling that we would see each other again. Perhaps somewhere else. There was a small piece of paper folded in my purse, and on that paper was the name of a man, the name of a stone, the name of a ghost hamlet in the poor pampa. It didn’t rain. Julia and I ate soup in a basement diner. The table was near the fire. Thanks to a half bottle of cachaça, visible behind the counter, the hotel receptionist was fast asleep. I stretched out my arm and took key number eight. He opened his eyes when we began to giggle, and his head moved slowly to the left, but in seconds his eyelids dropped and he was asleep again, as if we were no more than part of a dream, as if it made no sense for us to be there.
We All Loved Cowboys Page 8