“Betrayed?”
“—not just by my parents and Mathias, but by the whole town. Everyone knew, Cora.”
“You were very young.”
Julia said nothing. She took the gourd and poured in the bubbling hot water. The steam danced before disappearing.
“I don’t get why you’ve only told me this now.”
She slid her hand over my face, her pinkie catching between my lips, I immediately hooked my finger in a belt loop of her jeans. If there was one thing I loved, it was pulling someone by the belt loops. It was long, like a kiss of reconciliation should be.
“Right,” I said when she finished.
She laughed.
“Right what?”
“I want to know what happened with Marcela.”
“Marcela. Marcela lives in Porto Alegre, as far as I know. She never apologized and I never saw my plastic vomit again.”
“You’d have found out sooner or later.”
“I’d just rather it had come from my mom.”
In the yard, we spread out a sarong with the same pattern as the cobbled sidewalk at Copacabana and sat on it, passing the maté between us for hours and hours. That afternoon, I felt like I was moving along a strange path of happiness that was too narrow for two people to pass side by side. I had a sudden desire to take to the road, even though we were only supposed to leave the house the following day. I wanted to drive in the dark. I rested my head on Julia’s lap, thinking about driving in the dark. I was saying one thing as I visualized something else, which was the countryside, cut down the middle by a dirt track and the barely sufficient glare of my headlights. Then finally I told her that we had to leave that day, as soon as night fell, I would be careful, as long as she let me listen to Bruce Springsteen until we arrived in Bagé, if you really want to, she replied with that little laugh that showed she didn’t quite get me, who am I to say no, who am I, it’ll be fun, I concluded, it’ll be fun, she repeated, but Cora, do we need to run off and pack our things right this minute?
From the yard to the bedroom, Julia in front, me behind. She sat on the bed. She gestured with her hand, I understood that I should stay standing for now. She ordered me to take off my shorts. Jesus, what an evolution, I thought, as I gently forced the fabric over my hips, the shorts slipping to the floor, me stepping out of them. But that wasn’t any more revealing than wearing a bathrobe or the kind of old t-shirt you sleep in. She ordered me to take off my top as well. I waited for a second before moving, I looked hard at Julia and she was serious and focused like an employer conducting interviews, in which hypothesis I would be the half-slut half-dancer candidate, proportions under scrutiny, waist, breasts, firmness of glutes, that untamed hair, private pole dance and sofa test. She rotated her finger as if mixing an imaginary drink. I turned round slowly, following her instructions, one foot, then the other, in tiny steps until I was standing with my back to her. I felt my heart pounding. Julia Ceratti, you frisky thing, what’s going on in that head of yours, Lady Half-Light, Miss Amethyst 1999, youngest child, room 23 of the Maria Imaculada all-girls residence, very attractive Latina immigrant seeks First World man for serious relationship, occasional lesbian when no one’s watching, what is going on in that little head. I felt a kiss at the height of my shoulder blades, then a hand, then they both descended, synchronized and greedily, mouth and hand, they fitted into the curves of my back, they released my panties, proper black panties, they threw me on the proper mattress in that proper house. I began to breathe like an asthmatic.
Before we left the house, we closed all the windows, turned off the gas, disconnected the freezer, folded the sheets, checked the front gate to prevent any stray dog, horse or cow invading the yard, then finally we handed the keys over to the care of the neighbor. A smell of coffee wafted through the door.
“You didn’t see the open mine, I can’t believe it, the water’s so blue, it’s beautiful. Why drive by night when you could leave tomorrow morning, hmm?”
“Do you happen to know how long it takes to get to Bagé?”
“About two hours, two and a half. That is, about two and a half for someone who’s not used to dirt roads, and at night. After that it’s asphalt all the way. Very good asphalt.”
On the main street, three cars passed in convoy in the opposite direction to us. The sky was still grasping onto the last rays of light, making the landscape imprecise and rather threatening. Julia was searching for something in her bag. By the Cine Rodeio, a pick-up took the bend wide and entered the street with its headlights glaring. There were about four people in the back. Julia found what she was looking for, a Tylenol, “headache” she said, then tossed the pill into her mouth and took a long slug of water, her neck leaning back exaggeratedly. When the pick-up passed our car, the driver peered in as if he recognized us immediately, whereas I didn’t have the slightest idea who he might be. Then, he gave three short beeps. I glanced in the rearview mirror. He had stopped a few yards away. The reverse light came on. “Who is it?” I asked Julia, braking abruptly to wait for him to approach. “I think …” The pick-up drew level with us. “Ahem.”
“What’s up, ladies, where are you heading?”
Lucian’s forehead had started to peel. He cranked the window all the way open. In the back of the truck, a woman with frizzy hair and a man with something stuck to his head leaned out to see us.
“We’re leaving,” I replied.
“Oh, stay longer. If you want to come with us, we’re going to the reject right now, there’s going to be a fair bit of activity tonight. Urandir has arrived.”
“Activity? What, like rock, drugs, summer cocktails?”
He didn’t find that funny. He looked at me with a mixture of irritation and embarrassment.
“Like the forty-nine partner races in the project.”
“The forty-nine … okay. Who’s Urandir?”
He laughed, incredulous at such ignorance.
“You don’t watch much TV, do you?”
“Not much.”
“Have you never heard of the ET Bilu?”
“Unfortunately not. Are he and Urandir the same person?”
“Are you kidding me? Of course not. They communicate.”
In the back of the truck, the guy with the thing on his head pressed a button and the thing lighted up, illuminating the interior of our car for a moment. Then darkness again. Julia placed a hand on my leg. That seemed to be her way of showing that we had to be going and, please, don’t get involved in any of this mess.
“Good luck with the flashing lights,” I retorted before accelerating away.
A road at night in the south of Rio Grande do Sul. A gas station announced itself as the last one for fifty-five miles. Machine mochaccino for two reais, pumps with no customers, a lame mongrel pup sticking his muzzle into the discarded remains of a meat pie. A road at night was obscene. White line fever, lunatic truck drivers on their way to Uruguay. It seemed like the right time to leave. I was driving with Bruce Springsteen, three albums and then Bagé. On the face of it, I had the impression that it was a nice town, I had always liked the word Bagé, the merest mention of it sent me into an inexplicable state of excitement. Just don’t tell me that Bagé means something like bluebottle in Guarani, I’d rather not know.
The old houses were pleasant, set directly against the street, with no yards or gardens, each one joined to the next, giving a strange notion of continuity that was broken only by the difference in colors. Narrow doors, the occasional ornament, a balcony where the family was slightly more prosperous, and then came the real palaces with a French accent, stained glass windows, pretentious columns, Bagé had once been a town with money. To my surprise, there was quite a lot of activity on the street, cars, people coming out of restaurants or sitting in the square sipping maté, children on swings, and more black people than anywhere else we had passed through. While we took an aimless spin round, just to see how the town presented itself at half ten on a night in late March, I decided that J
ulia and I should stay in a good hotel, in an excellent hotel, an ostentatious hotel, after all the trip wouldn’t last much longer, and with our nights numbered it wasn’t a problem if I squandered my scant finances. Carpe diem. You never know. Tomorrow is another day.
Julia didn’t seem to favor the idea, she was a proud girl, and let’s just say that, as we discussed it, I became less sure that it was the right thing to do, I might be accused of following rigid and old-fashioned rules of behavior where you pay everything for the women you’re sleeping with; I didn’t want to follow those rules, of course not, and in any case I wasn’t a man, but the fact that I wasn’t a man didn’t absolve me, the fact that I wasn’t a man wasn’t enough to be called a feminist or a democrat or, who knows, a rebel. I was in such a quandary about it all that I almost didn’t notice when Julia said: “Obviously I’d love to stay in a cool hotel.” With the help of some friendly locals, we got directions to a place in a pretty nineteenth-century mansion. It looked like it came straight out of the pages of a historical family saga; there was an internal courtyard with a pond and an arcade under which you could just imagine the dashing captain wooing a pretty young maiden. Or Zorro drawing his sword.
Contorting herself so that the long ash on her cigarette didn’t drop on the floor, Fany, the hotel manager, guided us round enormous ornate halls with heavy, proud furniture; the floors had jaw-dropping geometric designs and the people in the paintings seemed to be aware that they’d be in them for all eternity. Fany, however, ignored all the historic details, as if the place were just another Ibis or Formula 1 on the outskirts of an irrelevant city. That night, she was too worried, because a monkey called Juju had escaped from the enclosure it shared with the peacocks, guinea fowl and other less interesting animals. It would doubtless return when it was hungry, Fany consoled herself, half a banana in her hand, the name Juju repeated in the dark, while her daughter, a little girl of around ten with indigenous features, observed us from a reserved distance.
I felt like the whole mansion belonged to us. A single door was shut. Probably a room occupied by other guests. In ours, there were two rooms, a kind of ante-room and then the bedroom proper, a canopy of carved wood over the bed, night-stands with marble tops, a bureau above which a picture of a saint had been hung. When we were alone, Julia commented that in the olden days people must have been much smaller. That was the conclusion I had come to after seeing narrow and extremely short beds in French castles, which led me to question the concepts of queen size and king size, that particular royal family didn’t seem to have the slightest bit of interest in spacious mattresses. Too much Coca Cola and chicken packed with hormones, I retorted to Julia. Then I went after the manager.
Of course I could make a collect call, replied Fany. “Dial one for an outside line, okay, dear?” And with that, she turned her back on me, tugging behind her the girl who, without protest, left behind an unfinished drawing and her box of crayons. The drawing showed the mother, Juju and her. I think she still had to create the surroundings, as the two characteristic outlines of tree trunks didn’t yet finish in those plump, cushiony tops. The portrait of the three of them, however, seemed to have been completed, the difference between the monkey and the humans being just two rounded ears on top of the head and a tail. Juju was also a couple of inches taller compared to the girl, and a bit shorter than Fany. As strange as it might seem, the monkey was the only figure that had the right to a smile.
I dialed my dad’s cell number. The ashtray next to the telephone was overflowing with little tubes of ash, and the smell on the mouthpiece was like a nightclub before the smoking ban. It began to ring. One. Two. Three times. On the fourth ring, he answered.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Were you asleep?”
“Cora?”
“It’s me.”
“Jesus. Wait a minute.”
He was probably moving to another room, and as he did so, a door was shut. He breathed deeply.
“I’m just back from the hospital.”
“Yes, of course, I can imagine. And how’s João Pedro?”
“He’s great. Jaque too, thanks for asking. They’re both coming home tomorrow. He’s a chubby little thing, my boy. Twenty-one inches and seven pounds three.”
“Fantastic. And does he look more like an alien or an angry gnome?”
He thought about it.
“I think he looks a bit like me.”
“You can seriously tell that about a newborn? To me they all look like little moles, you know? A bit confused, all wrinkly from the strain and they’d rather not open their eyes to avoid a reality shock, or it could be that, I don’t know, they’re born with too much skin, and then the skeleton just grows underneath and the skin’s made to last a good few months without them needing any more. You’re the doctor, you should know what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Silence.
“What are you doing down there, Cora?”
“You know where I am?”
“Not if you don’t tell me.”
“In Bagé. Dad. Remember when you bought that video camera for our trips to Europe? And I kept imagining that from then on we’d have a whole load of family films like you see in American movies, those kids running in the garden and stuff, the moment when someone opens a present, the mom picks up a tray in the kitchen and nods to the camera as she passes, and then the granddad arrives, always in an enormous car and with enormous glasses, that kind of thing. But you only used the camera on that trip. And then at an otorhinolaryngology conference in the interior of Maranhão, if I’m not mistaken, to which you obviously went alone. I was really gutted about that.”
“I didn’t know all that. Sorry.”
“Do you know where those tapes might be?”
“In your mom’s house, I think. Yeah. In that closet in the office, maybe.”
“Not even she knows what’s in there.”
He laughed and, surprisingly, it was a friendly laugh. Then it sounded like he had slumped onto a sofa or one of those armchairs that swallow you up and are impossible to get out of. It might seem strange, but I couldn’t remember what the furniture in his apartment was like, or how it was arranged. My dad sighed.
“What you did wasn’t great, Cora.”
“You don’t need to tell me that.”
“I’ve been your age and I know that it’s really nerve-wracking to be young, we want to suffer less and we just suffer too much, too much. I ran away from home once, did you know?”
“You never told me that.”
“At the time, there was a pizzeria in Protásio called Merci. And I fell in love with a waitress there. She was nineteen and I was seventeen, her name was Maria Celeste, my God, the most wonderful face I’ve ever seen. Celeste, I called her Celeste, had come from the interior to study pharmacology, she was crazy about me too, she lived in a bedsit in Salgado Filho, she worked really hard and never passed the entrance exam. I went to her house all the time, until one day I thought damn it, I don’t want to leave, so I packed a bag when your granddad and grandma were out, left a melodramatic note and went to live what I thought was my first true love.”
“And then what happened?”
“Ah. I don’t think she was as keen on the idea as I was. To tell you the truth, it was a terrible idea. Basically, we argued all the time because she wanted me to get a job so that she could study, but I wanted to be a doctor, so I needed to study a lot too. I went home after three weeks.”
“My God, I’ve never heard that story. And her?”
“Well, she tried the entrance exam again, if I’m not mistaken, she didn’t pass and went back to Venâncio Aires. I never heard from her again.”
“Maybe you’d find her on Facebook,” I joked.
“Maybe. Listen, when are you coming to Porto Alegre, Cora?”
“In about a week, I think, at most.”
“Another week of your gaucho tour? Oh well, what can I say?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, I don’t think.”
“How’s Julia?”
“She’s great.”
“I love you, kiddo.”
“Me too. Look, I’m going to hang up now. Don’t forget to say hi to JP for me, okay? And tell him to wait for me with his eyes open.”
The following day had no reason to be a terrible day. We woke up, Julia asked me about the phone call and I told her, I opened the window, the sky was as it always should be in the head of a born optimist, blue with clouds as fine as lacework, I stood watching for a while as she got up to go to the bathroom, “I still can’t believe the size of this,” she shouted from inside, the bathroom was practically the same size as the bedroom, you wondered how many waltzes had been danced in it. Then we walked to the breakfast room, which was in an annex to the main building, from which it was possible to see a swimming pool, cloudy with too much chlorine. The dirty crockery at one of the tables revealed that three guests had passed through, earlier risers than us. The clean place settings for Julia and me completed the headcount: there were only five of us in the hotel. The food was strictly counted like the cups and plates, one slice of ham and one of cheese each, two bread rolls, a hunk of butter, a couple of pots of jelly. Our good mood meant that we didn’t mind.
The day was still giving no clues as to the fact that it would be a terrible one. Fany and her daughter were still after the monkey, and they called us when it appeared at the top of a tree near the enclosure. But Juju didn’t want to come down. Fany had a banana in one hand again and a lighted cigarette in the other. She barely ever took a puff. I asked what kind of monkey it was and for the first time I heard the girl’s voice. “Capuchin,” she said. The four of us stared at the treetop for a long time, Juju merely a dark stain among the branches, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was actually seeing a monkey, perhaps I believed it more because of the banana than because of the blurry form up above. A man in a hat appeared. He left the engine of his pick-up running, said good morning to Julia and me in a subdued fashion, then again more enthusiastically to Fany and her daughter. “Escaped again?” Yes, we said in unison, he shook his head as if there were no solution and, dramatically changing the subject, he asked Fany if he could borrow a bit of water. I find it funny when people use the word ‘borrow’ without the slightest intention of returning whatever it is they supposedly have on loan. In any case, I’d rather not be given back a basin of dirty water. As soon as he left with a couple of gallons, Fany told us that there had been severe rationing in Bagé since January because the Sanga Rasa dam was at lower than normal levels and all the surrounding streams were in a pitiful state, full of loose earth, trickles of water than wouldn’t sate the thirst of the scrawniest ox on the pampa, so that half the city had their supply cut off between three in the afternoon and three in the morning, after which it was the other half who suffered for the next twelve hours. In the hotel, however, water spilled from the faucets twenty-four hours a day and in abundance, something about the water table, an artesian well and other practices which sounded about as legal as keeping a monkey in captivity.
We All Loved Cowboys Page 12