“What place I talked about?”
We could see the entire town from here. Barely a thing was moving. Cockerels sang who knows why or where. The mine wagons on display in front of Cine Rodeio seemed to be pining for the depths of the world. Behind us stood the aged structure of a billboard. What could it have been trying to sell people forty years earlier?
“Okay, not exactly this place, but like an out-of-the-way place, a place that’s pretty much no place at all, get it? I can’t believe you don’t remember that conversation!”
Julia turned to face me, her hair spilling across my lap. Suddenly, she gave a little laugh that wasn’t a yes or a no. I smiled, resigned.
“I just thought it might be here.”
We sat in silence for a while. We were in a strange part of town; as well as the billboard, there was, on top of the hill, a metal star stuck to a plinth about fifteen feet tall, as well as a tower that was freely inspired by the architecture of medieval castles. A spiral staircase, speckled with rusty holes, circled the exterior.
“Where did we talk about this place thing?”
“In the car. Then in the residence.”
“Was I drunk?”
“Totally.”
“Wild times,” she said, drawing out the syllables.
Wild times indeed. Julia naked in front of me under a bluish light. Her eyes straining to pick out some horrendous detail in the decor, then standing up and walking as if her legs were glued together, trying to hide something that was honestly a waste of time trying to hide, while I said something along the lines of—what was I saying? I was saying: can I have a drink? Everything okay? I never thought you …”
I came back to Minas do Camaquã.
A friend once told me that the ideal length for pendants and necklaces should be determined by what you choose as a “point of interest” (yours to others), and not by any factors such as seasonal trends or your height, so naturally the smart girls chose to nestle their good luck charms, rare bird feathers, stopped clocks and silver turtles in that incomparably delicious region between the breasts. Julia appeared to be following this advice to the letter. And the fact that there was a saint dangling from it, well, I think don’t think that made a whole lot of difference.
I kept watching Julia, Julia watched the town, the town watched the eucalyptus trees, and the eucalyptus trees might well have been striving to catch a glimpse of their home, the distant shores of Oceania. Then I said: “Shall we go back?”
“Sure.”
It was our first day in Minas do Camaquã, if we took into account that the night before we had arrived too late and too tired to do anything other than find the house, eat and sleep. Contrary to my expectations, the town wasn’t completely deserted, even less falling to pieces, although the number of people was clearly far lower than the number of properties, which led me to conclude that their owners must live elsewhere, visiting only when they had the time, when they got such a notion for isolation into their heads that they just had to fill the car with stuff and get there as quickly as possible. Julia and I had been told by an elderly man that all those houses used to belong to the Brazilian Copper Company, which had then organized an auction and sold them for peanuts a few years earlier, almost certainly with the aim of preventing the town from disappearing completely. When I say peanuts, I mean the price you’d pay for an old motorbike.
It was rather an odd town, to be honest, where cattle grazed the stubborn grass growing in the middle of the road. No cars, no people to be seen. A few scrawny horses roamed loose, up and down, as if they didn’t need any assistance finding their way home. And what could be said about the Wild West-style movie theater? We were passing it now.
“When are you heading back to Paris?”
My face immediately revealed my shock. It must have seemed a disproportionate reaction, given that the question, to Julia, was banal enough. I couldn’t put off that conversation any longer.
“I think we need to talk about that.”
“Talk about what?”
“About Paris. My dad. My brother.”
“You’re an only child, Cora.”
“Till Monday.”
She stopped in the middle of the street.
“My dad’s going to have a son.”
“What? What do you mean, why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Did your dad get married again?”
“More or less. I mean, yes. I ran out of the wedding.”
“And you didn’t have time to tell me?”
“Didn’t have the courage, I think. The thing is … I pulled a pretty shameful trick.”
“You ran out of the wedding.”
“No. Yes, that too, but …”
And so I told her about the plane ticket my dad had bought. Of course he was expecting me to be with him, with Jaqueline and João Pedro and my single mother, for all those weeks, but honestly the thing I had been most concerned about from the outset was sending my car to the mechanic. I was sure it wouldn’t start after so long, and as soon as you arrived, Julia, I packed my bags and dashed off to get you in that crummy hotel near the coach station, where that guy knocked on the window to comment on my boots. If you must know, that seemed like a bad start to me. It’s not like I’m superstitious or believe that things happen out of anything other than, I don’t know, coincidence, but, damn it, sometimes I do see a message where there is no message. I should have stayed in Porto Alegre, everyone was counting on me at that moment, even though all along I had never intended to stay. Even before I said yes, dad, I’ll be at the birth of my half-brother, that prospect was actually a path that led me back, not to them, but to our trip. I’ve known that since we had that conversation. You showed me a corner in Montreal, I saw the boxes behind you, it seemed like there was something really wrong in your life, in that scene, basically, because of those boxes, I think it’s times like these when people tend to take a step back, and I thought okay, I’m going to jump in and fuck the rest of it.
Julia was silent for a while. A man walked by and said good morning. A cream car passed, the color revealing a great deal about its age. Two long-tailed birds were looking for an electricity cable. Then Julia began walking.
“Hey. Where are we going?”
“Home.”
“What home?”
“The house we rented, Cora,” she said with a smile, as if it was absurd that I might have imagined another meaning to that phrase.
It wasn’t pretty. It was what you might call “just a house,” the grass had grown long around it and, inside, the furniture appeared to be cast-offs from other places, with little defects that justified wanting to get rid of it, the sofa leg secured by a piece of wood, a counter with permanent hot pan marks, the television with only the bottom half of the screen working. The tables empty of knickknacks. The walls devoid of pictures. The closest thing to an ornament was the fridge magnet from the gas supplier.
I sat on the sofa. Julia was still standing, but there was a feeling in the air that something was about to happen. This must be what it was like waiting for the announcement of war in an African president’s office, stepping up to the most powerful telescope in the world, the spotlights flashing on stage while the star of the show is behind the scenes dressing in white and sequins. Julia sat beside me, her left thigh fitting into my right thigh, her left shoulder fitting into my right shoulder, as if we were Siamese twins before the separation. Then I slid on top of her. In a matter of seconds, she made herself comfortable underneath me, her calves resting on one arm of the sofa, her head on the other, a narrow two-seat sofa that one day someone didn’t want any more. Her kiss had always been so precise, so cerebral, why not, full of suspense, about-turns, withdrawals, advances, that even when her whole body was engaged, Julia was still concentrating on playing cat and mouse within those narrow confines, pulling at my lip with her teeth, moving away at the high point, then coming in again, re-forging the lost path, sweeping ev
ery corner of my mouth with her tongue over again. I lifted her t-shirt until I found the start of her breasts. The first curve was escaping slightly from the black lace trim. I found this carelessness exceptionally beautiful. I moved away for a better look, trying to prevent her from noticing my desire for contemplation. Perhaps that was too invasive. My next step would be to open the complicated little hooks on her bra. Julia raised her head and leaned forward to facilitate my efforts. Thankfully the clasp gave way before it became one of the frequent comical moments that uncooperative clothing provides. Julia then placed her hands on my hips for the first time.
“Can we go to the bedroom?”
Her voice had changed to another register, the B-side of a delirious record. I took her hand and didn’t look back.
Although the blinds were closed, there was a little bit of light, which I didn’t seem to have noticed even a short while ago, in the living room. It must have been the sight of the bed that made me think of it. We had never had sex anywhere well lighted, with the exception of restrooms at gas stations, and even then, as soon as we went out of the door, there Julia and I were again, in the middle of the night. The night is permissive like a distant uncle. It only has to end for all the flexibility of rules and the potential shortcuts to end too. The paths are longer in the daytime. All of which means to say that we had never screwed before sunset. Never in natural light, always in a half-light drawn by a lamp in another room, or under the dim glow of the static from a television screen. Afternoons, sharp. Nighttime, a blur.
In some strange and twisted turn of events, we were now kneeling on the bed. I had only my panties left on, Julia, nothing at all. I felt her body pushing me back and I gave way only a little bit each time, she came, I withdrew, and all those little withdrawals were, in all honesty, my way of asking her to please lay me down and stretch out on top of me, with her hair tickling my face and everything else. She laid me down. Someone began speaking in the neighboring garden. It was the hoarse voice of a longtime smoker, talking, talking, talking to someone else, who, in turn, limited themselves to agreeing at regular intervals. I smelled cigarette smoke, but beyond that nothing changed inside the room. Julia slipped her hand inside my panties. Her fingers slid like a pair of shoes on a newly waxed floor. Then I raised my hips and the panties disappeared. We listened to Julia finger the smoothest, sweetest song in the universe.
Something that can generally be said about girls who don’t have much experience with other girls is that they tend to make the mistake of being too delicate. Believe it or not, they are afraid of hurting you, even though it’s an unfounded fear because, well, I’ve had things a lot bigger than an index finger inside me before, you know? Julia had started out like all those naïve girls, really slowly, very affectionate, assuming that, because you don’t like men in that way, all supposedly masculine characteristics, such as aggressiveness (which is sometimes confused with pure and simple initiative), should be immediately banned from the act of sex.
Meanwhile, I was trying my best to make things less pleasurable for myself. The club swimming pool on the hottest, most humid day of the year. I’m alone and I slip into the cool water. I almost lose a ring. I concentrate on that, I need to ignore the world if I’m to have anything to offer her, I hold my breath so that I lose hers, my tongue is saying it’s good, nothing was ever this good between us and it could all come undone in a matter of minutes. She closes her eyes, I know, I take the occasional peek, then she digs her nails into my back without meaning to because women never quite know the length of their nails and the involuntary pain they can cause. Her voice no longer comes out in a whisper. The people outside have either fled or they’re listening to Julia moan and then say my name once, as a period, Cora. She says it like that to remember while she forgets that once upon a time she was embarrassed, and that it was all nothing more than a terrible idea.
I was getting dressed now, standing next to the bed. Julia was watching me.
“Do you think that being attracted to a body that’s the same as our own is slightly narcissistic?”
“What I think is that your breasts are bigger than mine.”
“Very funny.”
My jeans had ended up some distance away. I went to retrieve them. A coin fell from my pocket, and oddly enough, it was a ten euro cent coin.
“Wasn’t it Freud who said that, about narcissism and same sex relationships?” I asked.
“No idea. Have you read any Freud?”
“Nah.”
“But you’d go with yourself.”
“Is that a question?”
“I think you would.”
“Would you?”
“Not with myself.”
It was Saturday, two days until the birth of João Pedro. As soon as Julia and I had put our clothes back on, we went out again. The hoarse neighbor was sitting on a deck chair in the middle of the yard. He wasn’t cutting the grass either. His feet disappeared amid clumps of weeds. When we passed the fence, he woke from his torpor, starting to follow us with his eyes, until he finally asked: “Have you seen Baby’s house?”
Baby Pignatari’s house. We went there that afternoon. We jumped the low wall. There was an empty swimming pool and we sat at the edge of it, imagining the people who might have been there before, until it became a kind of game, the pieces of which were Baby himself, his friend with the beard, the woman in a yellow swimsuit, the housekeeper, an intricate plot of jealousy, pride and greed, in which the yellow-costumed woman played a crucial role. To such an extent that the pool wouldn’t have existed, that waterfall, starting at the top of the slope and descending in stages, wouldn’t exist, that fireplace in the middle of the living room wouldn’t exist, and Baby wouldn’t have thought it worth hiding out in the depths of Rio Grande do Sul, if it weren’t for his devastating and uncontrollable passion for the woman in the yellow swimsuit.
We spied through windowpanes and tried to open doors.
The day ended without us realizing.
Standing in the middle of the street at eleven at night, we began to search for the most obvious constellations in the sky, but I soon realized that I was quite bad at it; not only did I fail to spot any of them myself, I also had enormous difficulty understanding precisely where Julia was pointing. Following a finger to a star isn’t the easiest thing in the world.
On Sunday, we discovered some abandoned buildings near the river. The loose zinc tiles creaked in the wind, the ground was an explosion of dead leaves and bits of wood. There was a flight of stairs, the first couple of which had disappeared. In a doorless cubicle, at the back of the lean-to, a washbasin, and toilet were still intact in their place. Julia took black and white photos. Then, we carried on towards the small beach. The path suddenly became narrow, between the water and stone that seemed to have been hewn by knife. There wasn’t a soul to be seen, which gave a rather apocalyptic feel to the landscape. A bridge appeared up ahead. It was like a fragment of a nonsensical dream that you hurry to take in when you wake. I walked closer to the river, my sneakers began to sink, Julia told me to be careful, I grabbed her hand despite not being particularly concerned, I mean, about the fact that I was losing my balance, then she took my other hand too, giggling, pulling me to a lighter section of sand as if I was completely incapable of doing it without her assistance. As for me, I allowed myself to be led. The slightest bit of physical contact is a victory in certain relationships.
One day until the birth of João Pedro.
After spending a while on the little beach, we returned to the derelict industrial estate. As soon as my car came into view in front of those slightly devastated, slightly dusty buildings that told the tale of deaths and begrudging changes, I had the clear feeling that it fitted perfectly into the scene. That made me shudder, but I said nothing. Julia took some more photos, hardly ever of the two of us. We got into the car and I drove off. A minute later, however, I stopped again at her request because, to our left, there were two long constructions like dormitories,
and the mere fact that they were well cared for was noteworthy enough, but there was also a logo painted on the wall which took them to another level of strangeness. It said: PORTAL PROJECT. And, between the two words, an elliptical shape that any Freudian would call a vagina.
“It’s all shut up,” Julia shouted, after walking round the outside and finishing her inspection at the front of the building.
“The other one too.”
We didn’t find out what on earth the Portal Project was for a couple of days. We spent a long time having sex again and again. Julia said terrible things about Eric. We discussed the ending of Thelma & Louise.
Monday. I woke up feeling only slightly worse than an organ trafficker. My dad had never exactly been bad to me. Could I blame him now for his fear of growing old? If I were in my dad’s shoes and suddenly a woman twenty years younger flirted with me, would I respond with a resounding no in the name of sexual equality? Or because poor middle-aged divorcées didn’t stand the same chance? In case someone pointed a finger at me and called me envious instead of feminist?
I tried to talk about it the next morning, but, while I was chattering fifteen to the dozen, Julia followed my sudden verbosity with a little smile that to me seemed rather mocking, making no comment, as if she hoped that at any moment I would say that I was kidding, that I wasn’t that bothered by it, that, to be honest, the only reason for me to have started speaking about my dad was to prevent us having to talk about the two of us.
Once again, the neighbor was sitting with his feet sunken in the weeds and his head lolling to one side of the deckchair.
We drove back towards the twin buildings of the Portal Project, the vagina portal. This time, a man was on his way out. We watched him. He dropped the key, picked it up from the ground, and only then did he turn in our direction. He had caught a bit too much sun in the last two or three days. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, his pockets stuffed full, and he didn’t seem exactly exultant to see two pretty girls. No more than thirty. Gay, perhaps. He was called Lucian. Not Luciano, but Lucian, from Iporá, interior of Goiás. And Lucian had seen flying saucers all over Brazil.
We All Loved Cowboys Page 10