We All Loved Cowboys

by Carol Bensimon

  So that was what the Portal Project was all about, the observation of flashing colored lights and telepathic conversations with beings from other planets. To tell the truth, I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner. Lucian talked for a while, Julia humored him and, as for me, I hoped with all my being that we would laugh about all this later.

  Several times a year, the group of ufologists traveled to Minas do Camaquã because, according to Lucian, it was frequently visited by extraterrestrials; there was a relatively intense flow of craft in the early hours of the morning, naturally, over the area devastated by the “reject.” I didn’t ask why the little green men had chosen such a place as their destination, even though my instinct was to rip to shreds those idiotic beliefs held by Lucian and the other followers of the Portal Project. As Lauro had explained to us a few days earlier, in Caçapava do Sul, the reject was nothing more than a desert of hundreds of acres, made by men, his own father among them, no need for other-worldly explanations, it was all entirely plausible, you go chucking bits of stone on the ground and pretty soon it’s bye bye ecosystem. Regardless, all I could think while we were talking to Lucian was that someone needed to notify the ETs that they would learn a lot more about mankind, if that was indeed their intention, in the dirty, violent streets of a metropolis than in discreet visits to the middle of Kansas or the depths of South America. That just seemed to be a sign of stupidity. But my irrefutable argument was this: if they had developed their advanced technology to the point of traveling through galaxies and more galaxies to finally arrive here, why the hell would they lack the capability to create something as fundamental as fashion? My God, those same tunics every time!

  The guys at the Portal Project were building a city in Mato Grosso do Sul. I’m not kidding. That’s what Lucian said, that the guys at the Portal Project were building a city in Mato Grosso do Sul called Zigurats City, where all the roofs would be rounded or pyramid shaped, so that they would be ready for the events of the next six thousand years. What were the events of the next six thousand years? I haven’t the slightest idea. But Lucian had to get going. Bye, Lucian. Say hi to those nice folks from the eleventh dimension.

  Monday 24th March, the day João Pedro would be born. We turned on Julia’s cell. No signal. Then Julia went home, saying “good luck.” She gave me a kiss. I went off to look for a public telephone.

  Collect call. A fortune-teller’s visiting card was stuck to the machine. It was windy, a fresh wind that bent all the treetops in the same direction; I turned to the side and for the first time noticed a restaurant that was simply called restaurant, the sunlight falling in such a way that it was impossible to make out anything other than the door.

  Bring back your love, said the fortune-teller.

  My dad didn’t answer the phone.

  It wasn’t until the fifth day in Minas do Camaquã that Julia decided to talk about her little brother. It had all begun one afternoon with a stupid fight with a classmate called Marcela, who at the age of twelve had already built a solid and definitive reputation as a bad girl. Marcela would run to see the boys skin their knees on the coarse sand of the playing field, Marcela used the tips of her sneakers to flip over dead birds, bats, and cats (dried blood stains on the rubber soles of her Reeboks), Marcela would ask barefoot vagrants, practically mute, with booze breath and scabs from the advanced stages of illnesses, where they lived, how their families were, whether they had a photo of a loved one in their pocket.

  She had dark eyes like two total eclipses, very fine eyebrows, the kind of childish nose that would struggle to hold a pair of glasses, at that moment perhaps she didn’t have the slightest suspicion that she’d become a very pretty teenager, and that her dad would die in a head-on collision on the RS-386, on the way back from a group dynamic for the vacant position of warehouse supervisor.

  When Marcela was nervous, she repeated Bhaskara’s formula under her breath: x equals minus b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c over 2 a. She must have read the formula in one of her sisters’ exercise books, because the sixth grade were still learning multiplication and division of fractions with Miss Suzana. Marcela was the youngest child. Her family and Julia’s lived on the same hill, just six houses apart, which led naturally to an intimacy forged less out of mutual friendship than inertia and the tedium of never-ending summer afternoons. To get to Marcela’s by bike, there was no need to even pedal. Julia would drag her Caloi Ceci out of the garage, place some toy or board game in the basket because her friend had no more than three Barbies, hand-me-down building blocks, a Care Bear and a box of peg solitaire, and so Julia would cycle down the street, legs dangling, hands firmly gripping the handlebars, for yet another stifling day at the bad girl’s house.

  That afternoon, however, Julia arrived with her basket empty, frothing with rage. She pedaled in spite of the downward slope. Her dad had recently spent a few days in São Paulo and had brought her back one of those plastic replicas of a pool of vomit. The vomit had been an instant success at school. It was placed in classrooms and restrooms and the library and on the long counter in the science laboratories. A girl nearly vomited before she realized it wasn’t real. The laughter was shriller than ever. Julia was proud. But a fortnight had passed, the fun had moved on, the vomit lay forgotten in a closet full of old toys.

  And then her mother whispering, that day, after lunch:

  “Ju, get that thing your father brought you. I want to show it to Aunt Marcia.”

  Marcia smiling and helping herself to maté.

  When Julia opened the drawer, the vomit wasn’t there.

  Then she remembered she had called to ask Marcela over to play the previous Thursday. She recalled that Marcela had been pulling strangely at her t-shirt the entire time. She recalled Marcela suddenly remembering that she had to help her sisters with some new layout of the living room.

  She answered the door herself.

  “Can I come in?”

  Julia doesn’t wait for an answer.

  “I’m just finishing off my geography homework. But we can go up, if you want. Have you already done yours?”

  “Your living room’s just the same.”

  “Living room? Oh, yeah. The thing is, my mom and dad didn’t like it. And they were right. No one had a clear view of the TV.”

  Julia climbs the stairs in front. Marcela comes right behind.

  “X equals minus b plus or minus the square root …”

  “What are you saying?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What’s that you’re whispering?”

  They enter the bedroom. The geography exercise book is lying open on the desk.

  “Nothing. I’m not whispering anything.”

  “Square root of b squared minus fou …”

  “Again!”

  “What did you get for number six? I know nothing about hydrography.”

  “Where’s my vomit, Marcela?”

  “Vomit. That plastic one, I don’t know, have you lost it?”

  Julia heads for the wardrobe. She knows that in the second drawer up Marcela keeps the three Barbies, the hand-me-down building blocks, the Care Bear and the box of peg solitaire. At the age of twelve, no one would come up with a better idea than putting a stolen toy in with the others. As soon as she understands what is happening in her own room, Marcela stands behind Julia and tries to tug her back by the shoulders, not at all gently.

  “Stop that, I didn’t take your vomit!” she shouts.

  There’s no one else home. Julia strains in the opposite direction and manages to stay where she is, but, when she bends down to reach the drawer, her knees waver and she falls on her behind on the floor. That just makes her more annoyed. She gets up again, while Marcela manages to conquer a tiny space between Julia and the wardrobe, and the fight starts to get really ugly, Marcela tries to stop Julia’s hands, Julia escapes and retorts with small punches to the legs, pinches on the arms, Marcela says in a malevolent tone, “You s
hould be looking for your little brother instead,” to which Julia doesn’t pay the slightest bit of attention, because her fingers are now on the drawer handle, and she pulls, and the drawer opens and, on top of the box of building blocks, is her vomit.

  Then Marcela sits on the bed as if she weighs two hundred pounds. A very intense light explodes through the blinds behind her. Some of the light spills between the slats and falls in broad strips on the nightstand, where two objects occupy the side closest to the bed, a Bugs Bunny clock (present from Julia, his arms are the hands of the clock) and a diary with a padlock. Julia has never seen this diary before. She’ll think about that later. She looks back at Marcela. At that moment, it’s hard to say whether Marcela feels humiliated or sorry, or both, her bare feet dangling just above the floor, tears starting to cut a path down the middle of her cheeks, everything exasperatingly silent apart from the occasional snuffles and the tick tock of the Bugs Bunny clock.

  “Why did you tell me to look for Mathias?”

  She sniffs harder.

  “Not Mathias, stupid.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your dead brother.”

  “I’ve only got one brother.”

  “Everyone knows about it, except you.”

  It’s two o’ clock in Soledade. Dona Neiva is at her window on the other side of the street, as always, watching for action that never happens. A slight smell of gasoline wafts over from Peixoto Garage. Julia freezes for an instant. Even if Dona Neiva has always been at her window, even if the fuel vapors have hung over that block since before Julia was born, those two pieces of information will gel together today with the typical precision of unexpected facts. She collects her bicycle and starts to pedal. After a few blocks, the houses become sparser, the yards fuller of junk, the walls give way to stumps and barbed wire. She’s always been afraid of passing alone, but now it doesn’t matter. A pig squeals. Julia can now make out the roof of the old mill, ten minutes out of town, where two streams of muddy water meet. All small places like to have something big to show off, and that, apart from grinding wheat, has been the function of the building for decades and decades. She has never been inside. That’s something for older kids. She sees bicycles in the shade of the trees, she drops hers there too.

  The mill is like an L on its side. On the long part, there are a number of names in spray paint by people with serious handwriting issues. Big Head. Spud & Ana Maria 4ever. But the world of vegetation is battling for space with the graffiti tags, some of which have already been covered by the highly adaptable leaves and branches. Ferns grow ten feet high out of the concrete. A creeper has begun to infiltrate through the holes left by the empty windows. If Julia were to stand in front of the mill for about ten years, she would see nature take the upper hand, part of the building collapse, rain enter through the battered roof, a green carpet of moss cover the gaps in the planks, the insect colonies, the birds, the rodents driving their teeth into an old noticeboard, but she’s in a hurry now, she skirts the building, finds an opening between two damp planks, and then she crawls inside.

  The ceiling is quite high, perhaps magnified by the fact that she is now in a gigantic space with nothing more than the diagonal slats of wood above her. She hears laughter, she can’t tell whether it’s Mathias, but she knows he’s among that noisy rabble of teenage exuberance. Mathias is sixteen. She crosses the floor towards a slightly smaller room. The boys seem to be chatting, sitting on the ground in a circle—you need to conquer something these days and the skeleton of this mill is what they have adopted as their own—all five of them jump when they see Julia at the door, then Mathias gets up and pulls her into a third room. This one is really small. The walls are painted light green, there is a pedestal for a kitchen sink and a rectangular table with no chairs. Julia is scared of her brother, she starts to breathe heavily. Three pages torn from a magazine are stuck next to each other on the wall, each showing a full frontal view of a naked woman, one is touching herself between the legs, another is grabbing her own breasts, the third is getting her butt wet in a waterfall. They all have frizzy, voluminous hair and two of them have bangs. It all looks seriously old. They are watching Julia with smiles just like the bad girl’s leer.

  “What are you doing here? Go away.”

  “I just came to ask you something.”

  “Ask me something, are you crazy, can’t you do it later when I get home?”

  “Did we have a brother?”

  Mathias starts to say something, and that something suddenly becomes nothing more than a burst of exhaled air. Then he starts to walk confusedly in all directions, looking at the floor, until he stops in front of the magazine pages. He raises his head and begins to punch the woman in the waterfall furiously, as if it was all her fault. The adhesive tape at one of the upper corners comes away.

  “Who told you that, I’m going to crush whoever it was. It could only have been Marcela.”

  He utters her name through gritted teeth.

  “It was her.”

  “And you still hang out with that deadbeat, I don’t understand you. Haven’t I told you a thousand times she’s a little whore?”

  “Did we have a brother?”

  Another piece of adhesive tape unsticks, and the woman with her butt in the waterfall gives way to an upside down whiskey advertisement. Mathias rips the page from the wall.

  “We did.”

  “A little boy? Why don’t I remember him?”

  “He was born and died a few years before you.”

  Mathias’s voice is measured and monotonous, as if he’s forcing himself to act like a proper adult, and as if being adult means, among other things, regarding the death of a baby as something entirely everyday. Julia begins to cry, as two of the boys from the other room spy on the scene from afar, not understanding a thing. She wants to go home, but home seems to have become a terrible place too. Her mother’s arms have become tentacles. And the constant dizzy spells and Saturday afternoons when mom had to lie in bed and that period when she took leave from the bank and went to Aunt Ana Lúcia’s place in Barros Cassal to rest suddenly seem to make more sense. The same goes for her father, shut away in the little room at the back where he makes models out of matchsticks and listens to LPs of gaucho music and doesn’t like being interrupted at all. Mathias looks at his sister, still unwilling.

  “It’s all fine.”

  “Tell me how he died.”

  “It was kind of stupid, I think. In a bathtub.”

  Julia starts sobbing again.

  “We had a bathtub?”

  “Where our shower cubicle is now.”

  “Was my room his room then?”

  “Come on, Ju, that’s enough. We’re going home now. Mom’ll talk to you herself.”

  “No, I don’t want to go home ever again!”

  Her voice echoes through the carcass of the mill and she is somehow frightened by her own presence. She runs out, bumps into something, cries some more, her mom will tend to her cut knees with antiseptic and warm blows before starting to tell her about the accident in the bathtub.

  8.

  HOW LONG HAD WE BEEN sitting like this, one in front of the other? I uncrossed my legs, the one on the bottom had of course gone to sleep. Julia was inspecting her nails. There was a crack in the wall, right behind the sofa, thick like Indian ink, giving the strange impression that it was coming out of the middle of her head. Julia used one nail to push back the cuticle of another. She moved slightly to one side, the crack lost its meaning, I stood up.

  “I’m going to brew up some maté, okay.”

  The bag issued a generous cascade of erva-mate, and a cloud of dust enveloped the gourd before finally settling, partly inside, partly on the counter. I filled the kettle with water, the smell had never been one of the best, I looked for the lighter, turned on the gas, a click, and the flame drew an ancestral circle.

  Julia was at the door. She looked like she had just woken from a siesta as long as a night
’s sleep.

  “Are you tired?”

  “A bit. Can you tell?”

  She shuffled over to the table and stood there, playing with the lid of the thermos. After a while, the kettle began to make a slight noise. I turned off the flame and asked what had happened in the bathtub before she was born. She turned to face me with an oh-so-we’re-still-talking-about-this expression, and said that he had simply drowned, his mother left the room for a second, the faucet was running, a few inches of water perhaps, he must have fallen in and couldn’t turn over. I thought about insects that wind up with their feet in the air and can only hope for some kind of miracle to release them from that position, as ridiculous to us as it is fatal to them. I was still preparing the maté. The ground herbs filled just under half the gourd now, and I tipped it to one side to distribute them evenly.

  “Do you leave it to settle with hot water?”

  “I do.”

  “Most people do it with cold or tepid, don’t they?”

  “To be honest, I’ve never noticed the difference, I think it’s mostly gaucho affectation.”

  I dug in the straw and took the first sip.

  “How old was he?”

  “Seven months.”

  “Jesus, seven months.”

  “I’ve never seen a photo of him, there are none, not that there was much time for photos. There’s one of my mom pregnant and I always thought she was pregnant with me, but when she told me the story she said: that was your brother. There wasn’t a date on it. I just can’t really think of him like that, as a brother, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “I think I see him more as an accident. The accident. Those few seconds that screw up everything that comes after. It took me quite a while to stop feeling like a victim of history, like, okay, you left, now I’m the one who has to get through this shitty childhood and adolescence that’s all patched together because no one can face the fact that you died in a stupid situation when they should have been taking care of you. No one takes care of anyone else in that house. And then it’s like I’ve been betrayed—”