6.
I HAD GLIMPSED A DARK STAIN right in the middle of the asphalt, but I didn’t say a word. It wasn’t far from the cars in smithereens and the ambulance with its back doors open. The light revolved over the scene like a mute family member. I kept wondering whether they bothered to clean the dark stains afterwards and, if they did, who would be nominated stain remover, would they be thinking about someone in particular as they doused the road with water, and would they have been informed of the owner of the pool of blood when there was no longer a pool there? Since we had passed the accident, I had thought about my mother several times.
Julia was now playing with the seeds from a slice of tomato. The earthenware bowl of bean stew had formed a viscous surface, which gave the impression of a mangrove swamp. I swatted away a fly, then another one. We were in a large dining room with fluorescent strip lights. Apart from our table, only two others were occupied: one, at the back, with four uniformed men and the other, near the door, with a woman and child. I crossed my cutlery on my plate, although it had been a while since I finished eating. On the television, a Palmeiras player committed the worst miss of the round.
“I’m going to call my mom, okay?” I announced to Julia.
She raised her eyes and nodded her head. I went out to the street, passing on the other side of the diner’s large windows. For a moment, as I moved away, I watched Julia and the table and all the reflections as if they were all part of an Edward Hopper canvas.
The public telephone was set slightly away from the rest of the facilities at the gas station. I dialed the number and started looking down the straight line of the almost empty street. How long had it been since I had heard the voice for collect calls? Then that long beep.
“Cora, is that you?”
“Hi, mom.”
“Why didn’t you take my cell phone, honey? Where are you?”
She seemed breathless, as if she had hurried to answer the phone.
“I think it’s a place called Pantano Grande.”
“Pantano Grande?”
“Is that how you say it?”
“What are you doing in Pantano Grande?”
“It’s a long story, mom.”
“Cora, listen. There’s nothing there, honey.”
“In Pantano Grande? It’s fine, we just stopped for lunch.”
“It’s not safe, none of this is safe. Is the main purpose of this trip to leave us here thinking the worst twenty-four hours a day?”
“Oh my God, no, mom. Why do parents always think that everything their children do is specifically to piss them off?”
“I don’t know. But your dad has every right to be pissed at you.”
It had been a while since my mother had ceased to measure her words. You could say it had been ever since the separation. When my father left our house all sense of subtlety seemed to abandon her, and so my adolescence was bombarded with the sincerity of a pessimist. It was as if I needed to have someone analyzing the world around me all the time and issuing regular bulletins about its (mal-)functioning. Beneath the surface, the message always seemed to be the same: you don’t have to see with your own eyes, I’m telling you how it is. And so my mom would accompany me to the garage or to the front door with her last minute recommendations, the themes of which varied from urban violence to the bad influence of certain friends. Come on, I knew perfectly well how extreme it was to live in a big Brazilian city. A guy had fired a gun in front of my college. He didn’t show up in a radio class because he was busy shooting on the other side of the street, and hundreds of students in dozens of classrooms were able to recognize the sound. Now tell me what a tragedy it is for a nation that its entire youth knows what a goddam firearm sounds like.
And of course I would make friends that weren’t worth two cents, the friendly face just waiting for me to turn my back to then comment on my ripped jeans halfway down my ass, that little touch of exhibitionism. I would swallow all ten pills from a pack and throw up in the house of some guy whose name I didn’t remember, and all just to grasp at some lousy rays of light. I would spend the entire night waiting for something that wouldn’t happen even if I went a week without sleeping. I would fall in love with people who changed their minds too quickly. The wrongs just formed part of the rights, and I wasn’t about to cry for the choices I had made, because, however hard the falls, I was left with the feeling that even they had their beauty. But my mom was always more afraid of life than devoted to it.
“I know he’s right,” I said.
A truck prepared to enter the gas station. Its brakes were issuing an increasingly shrill squeal. I covered my ears and had the impression that the driver was finding the scene funny.
“What? I can’t hear you at all!”
“I said that your dad was really angry!”
There was a pause. In that time, the truck moved away, going to park behind the gas pumps, where two men in riding boots were chatting and sharing a single cigarette. I tried to see Julia behind the window of the diner, but the reflection of the sky left everything blue and shining.
“I think he’d like to know why he paid for a plane ticket for you when you’re not here with the family waiting for his son to be born. Cora, listen to me. Two girls alone on the road, that’s not a good idea.”
“Is she still having a caesarian? On the 24th?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Cora. Why don’t you call your dad?”
“Maybe I will.”
“This isn’t France, understand? It’s no good to be driving around down there, people don’t do that. Was this trip Julia’s idea?”
“No, mom.”
“It’s convenient when she doesn’t have a car.”
“I said it wasn’t her suggestion.”
“Sorry, hon, but I honestly just can’t believe that.”
I hung up as soon as I could, promising my mother that I’d call again in a few days. When I returned to the diner, Julia was no longer there. No one was there, not even the girl serving tables. Our plates had been cleared. The freshly baked cakes made the window perspire. I walked out again. There was a street vendor on the terrace, he must have been there a long time, although I hadn’t noticed him before. I wondered why someone would buy a plush heart with the words I love you while traveling down the RS-290. When I moved closer, I began to hear something about violence in the Mexican cartels. Someone had been beheaded, just to make the message clear. Among the caps, fans and sunglasses made in China, a mini television was now showing the exterior of a single-story house surrounded by reddish soil, where the head had been found. The vendor was staring at the screen, sitting in one of those camping stools. There was a girl of about eighteen near him, probably a daughter, but she was filing her nails with her back to her father and the TV, wearing too much eye shadow, a foundation that made her orange face appear separate from the rest of her body, and a top revealing a couple of inches of flaccid belly. The man said: “Take a look at the sunglasses, miss?” I said no and entered the restroom.
The only light was the natural daylight from outside, which entered dimly through a strip of slanting windows. Four cubicles. I began to examine the gap between the floor and the doors. In the third, Julia’s sneakers appeared. We had never swapped shoes, I don’t think, although it was a regular practice among friends of a certain age and with a certain level of intimacy. Julia turned round, her heels suddenly swiveling into view. She flushed the toilet.
“Did you talk to your mom?”
“Mmhm.”
She looked for soap, but there was none, in liquid or bar form. Resigned, she cupped her hands under the stream of water, which dripped into a chipped basin the color of dead skin. She looked for a paper towel, there were none. So she started shaking her hands, and with them shook the Navajo bracelet, the other times with Eric, the shared bed, the fits of homesickness, a road in the wilderness of Arizona. Some droplets hit my face. I closed my eyes and opened them again. The situation made me slightly nervous because it sma
cked of something that had already happened, me, Julia and a public restroom, there was a real labyrinth of public conveniences in my head, perhaps more than motel rooms, sometimes I had to ask for the key from the gas station attendant, sometimes it dangled from an empty carton of motor oil so that people didn’t accidentally make off with it in their pocket. The walk to the restroom was always rather ridiculous. Julia would allow herself to be led. Then it was hard to say whether it was me pressing her up against the door, or her positioning herself, delicately, between me and the outside world.
Now Julia was inspecting herself in a tarnished rectangular mirror. A cloud had made everything slightly darker. I began to say:
“I was thinking that you …”
She drew close to me, just two seconds of certainty, she reached up to my mouth and, almost crazily, kissed me. When she withdrew, she was smiling, perhaps because of my astonishment. She bit her lower lip very discreetly in the middle of that smile.
“What were you thinking?”
I dangled the car key from my fingers.
“That you could drive for a bit.”
Another smiled formed. She grabbed the key.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
The road to the pampa was green and blue, and vast. Fewer people, more ruins. Nightclubs that had closed down long ago. Towns three digits away, indigenous men selling wicker baskets, a used car lot where tiny flags fluttered for potential customers that weren’t there. Julia drove with the seat closer to the steering wheel than I did, which probably said less about our difference in height (a couple of inches of advantage for me) than about certain personality traits. In the rearview mirror, I watched things get small and then even smaller. Like the names of a couple of lovers written on a single grain of rice.
What was that goddam kiss all about?
At times, something like a shack at the side of the highway fashioned out of garbage sacks inspired us to launch into meaningful conversation; whether it was enough that we were sympathetic, and how much the barefoot indigenous kids knew about having been screwed over. At other moments, we played old songs and sang along, No Doubt, Silverchair, Alanis Morissette before her trip to India. That spiritual journey had killed rock, and all the rebel girls from 1996, who grew their hair long so they could shake it in the solitude of their bedrooms, grasped desperately to the last distorted guitars of an era. The baggy t-shirts would soon be switched for the awful ‘baby’ look. I remember it well.
“I must confess that I heard Jewel and liked her.”
“For God’s sake, Julia!”
Her arms were more relaxed on the steering wheel now.
“Listen, it was kind of because of a neighbor of mine, he gave me the Jewel album as a Secret Santa on my English course. Like a message. It said: ‘You Were Meant for Me,’ that’s my favorite.”
“That was everyone’s favorite.”
“Whatever, it was a clear message!”
“Okay, it was.”
“He liked me too.”
“I believe you.”
“Do you have Jewel on your iPod?”
I began to laugh.
“Of course not.”
It was after four when we finally arrived at Pedra do Segredo. From Cambará, we had spent a total of six hours on asphalt and a bit more on a dirt track. We were now in the center of Rio Grande do Sul, gateway to the pampa, something unprecedented for both Julia and me. Our families had never suggested a trip to Uruguay, which would necessarily have introduced us to the southern half of the state. Uruguay had duty free stores at the border, a melancholic capital and above all beaches, beaches with freezing seas, of which the most famous was without doubt Punta del Este. Many of Porto Alegre’s more contemptible residents went to Punta in the summer. Until a few years ago, their cars would return covered in bumper stickers; the colorful emblems of Uruguayan casinos and hotels were one of those silly status symbols, as were the small dice from a certain brewery and the logo of a horse riding competition.
Julia parked my car in front of a small brick house where we were supposed to meet a man called Lauro. It was the middle of nowhere. We got out. Everything was so quiet that saying something in a loud voice would seem like a heinous environmental crime. We took a moment to stretch our legs. Suspended above what was perhaps the start of a trail was a wooden, hand-carved plaque that read: PEDRA DO SEGREDO CONSERVATION UNIT. This path went on to disappear in the tangle of undergrowth after an abrupt bend. Even further away, at a distance that was hard to pinpoint, sat the secret stone itself, recalling the head of a furious monkey. In a cartoon this would definitely be the mountain where the exhausted hero would arrive after a thousand adventures and the stone would open into a magical passage to reveal a world that was full of advantages over the real world, beautiful women, muscular men, walls studded with diamonds, cooperation, peace.
The door of the brick house creaked.
“Afternoon,” someone said.
I looked. There was a man standing there. He took a step outside, as if to allow himself to be examined. He was one of those bald guys who prefer to shave their head than to seem in any way incomplete, around forty, skin quite sunburned. The print on his t-shirt was of a beach in California, where he had probably never been.
“Hi,” I replied. “You must be Lauro.”
Of course it was Lauro. Beto had told us he lived here alone, in the rural belt around the town of Caçapava do Sul, taking care of those protected acres day and night. Before that, Lauro had lived for two and a half years in Pantanal, where he had led treks for eco-tourists, been bitten on the fingers by baby caiman, as well as being dumped by the love of his life, a very short Nicaraguan lady who was only in love with Brazil. Julia approached him and made the introductions. For a moment, I wondered whether it wasn’t dangerous for the two of us to be alone with a stranger; shouting wouldn’t help in this place, there was no one to hear us. Ah, but what idiocy, I thought immediately, apparently I’m acting just like my mother, because of that telephone conversation earlier, and the confirmation that my dad was furious with me certainly didn’t help much either, even though it was impossible for him not to be furious under the circumstances and, well, even if he turned to cheap psychologies in search of an explanation, for example that I was jealous of Jaqueline and the baby, that I felt I’d been replaced, rejected, abandoned, he would no doubt conclude that accepting a plane ticket only to disappear into the interior of Rio Grande do Sul was what you might call rather a disloyal attitude.
“Rent it for about a week,” Julia was saying when I started paying attention again. Lauro was leaning against the door-frame.
“The house at the mines?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“Of course, let’s go see it. It sleeps four. There are two double beds.”
He took a discreet look towards the car.
“It’s just the two of us,” I said.
“Ah, good. Don’t you want to come in?”
I said okay.
Inside, the place seemed even smaller, a single room, most of which was taken up by a brightly colored motorcycle. There was, as well as the motorbike, a closet with double doors, a single bed, a corner to make food, and a table with a computer. I stared at the screen in sleep mode. Family of sea lions. Aerial view with pine trees. Large block of blue ice.
“Huh, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen Beto. Is he still in Cambará?”
“Mmhm.”
“And you two came from there in one go?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Courageous, eh.”
Lauro turned his back to us and filled three glasses with water from the faucet.
“I was born in Minas do Camaquã.”
“Really?”
“Seventy-one, I was raised there, my dad was a miner, but it’s a ghost town now. I mean, there are still some people living there, a few. If that’s what you’re looking for …”
“Precisely that,” I said promptly.<
br />
He sat down at the computer. Julia and I stayed standing, politely sipping our water. What was Lauro going to show us? Photos of the house? I didn’t need to see it, I just wanted to get away with the key and some directions, as long as it had a bed (and it did, two of them), it was all good. The map of Brazil appeared on the screen, in satellite mode. Lauro typed in a geographic coordinate. It took a moment for the country to disappear, eventually replaced by smudges that gradually sharpened. There was Minas do Camaquã. It seemed like a miniature town made by scale model fanatics. Everything fitted into one glance. The soccer field. The rows of houses. “In my day, it even had a movie theater, Cine Rodeio, you’ll see the building,” said Lauro. Then he pointed to a blue smudge, which looked like a lake but which wasn’t actually a lake but a deactivated open mine that had been accumulating rainwater since 1996. The blur that had caught my eye, however, was a different one, further to the right, sand colored, four or five times bigger than what you might class as the urban perimeter. I asked what it was. Lauro replied, askance: “That’s the reject.” I didn’t have the slightest idea what that meant, so I asked again. I had the impression I was touching on a secret. Everything that came out of the mines that wasn’t copper, he explained, was thrown onto that piece of ground. Piles and piles of stone ground down for a hundred and fifty years. Ninety-eight percent of what comes out of a mine is useless, so do the math, nothing is ever going to grow there. A manmade desert. I think Lauro’s father had been one of those men. Perhaps that was why he was here now, watching over a bit of native wood. Sometimes children must inherit the sins of their parents.
7.
“I THINK THIS IS THE PLACE YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT,” I said. Julia rearranged herself to get comfortable on the low wall, and as her hips found a new position, for an instant, I felt her entire weight against my thighs. Her knees pointed at the overcast sky.
We All Loved Cowboys Page 9