Fany sighed. “We’re tired of not being able to leave here, aren’t we, honey?” she said, running her fingers through her daughter’s hair, the girl limiting herself to a nod of the head. I didn’t immediately understand what that had to do with the lack of water, or rather, the fact that, unlike the rest of the town, there was water here all the time—was such a privilege in fact a constant risk, might people arrive with a stock of empty containers and leave with them full without even asking? Fany laughed, the first time since the previous evening and, astonishingly, she raised the cigarette to her mouth and took a drag. The hotel owner had gone to Porto Alegre, so Fany couldn’t leave the mansion until she returned. Don’t leave the building. Take care of the building. It seemed a bit extreme.
“If you need something, anything, we can get it for you,” said Julia suddenly, looking at the daughter, but addressing the mother. Julia had been quiet for a while. Fany shook her hair loose and re-did her ponytail pulling it even tighter. “You two are sweethearts.” That was all she said before moving away with the girl.
It wasn’t even one of those days that start off unsettled. We visited the Dom Diogo de Souza museum, which until the end of the 90s housed a fragment of the moon, a gift from Nixon to Médici. The former military dictator Emílio Garrastazu Médici was, unfortunately, a gaucho from Bagé. Then the Pedro Osório palace. The Municipal Institute of Fine Arts. The Pedro Wayne House of Culture. A cream donut in Padaria Moderna. Julia taking photos crouched on the cobblestones, saying that this place was a nice surprise. Black men in berets and neckerchiefs. Good weather, a fresh breeze, who knows, it might have been the cold minuano. We discovered that correarias were houses selling gaucho products. They smelled of leather. I bought a pair of espadrilles in the first. In the second, I realized that the fake project I had described to my father, that collection of clothes with a gaucho influence, didn’t seem so bad, I’d even go so far as to say that it began to take on a very personal meaning, of course, why not, I could always present it for some module of the course when I had the opportunity, so I decided to fill a bag with all sorts of accessories and took a pair of size 40 bombachas thinking about using them as a model in the future. Afterwards, we went to the old workers’ village at the Santa Thereza dried meat factory, where we crossed railroad tracks feeling like we were anywhere but Brazil. How many railroads still existed in the whole country? Near the tracks, in addition to the tallest palm trees I’d ever seen, there was a ruined villa covered in graffiti. A group of boys and girls in their early twenties was positioned in an opening, feet dangling in the air, probably in anticipation of the sun setting over the countryside. It would still be a while. In the mean-time, they told stories and laughed. The south of the state was a ruin that refused to go completely to the dogs. Strange as it might seem, I felt a certain solidarity and, more than anything, comfortable in the midst of that decay. We returned to the hotel to brew a maté.
It seemed as though the ideal place to stay and drink our maté for what was left of the evening was a kind of island in the artificial lake at the hotel, where the presence of at least two elements made it a picturesque and almost incomprehensible scene: a bare tree with twisted, black branches, as if it had been struck by lightning long ago; and a cave that was clearly fake, concrete molded to look like an organic form that only nature could have created, two openings, a staircase running down the side, which reminded me of Marie Antoinette when she wanted to play at being a peasant in the middle of the domain of Versailles. Out of place, like Marie Antoinette’s little hamlet.
Julia let the maté rumble away, as custom dictated. She picked up the thermos to pour me another gourd. When she stretched out her arm, the gourd now full in her hand, I leaned in and tried to kiss her. Try wouldn’t be the first word I’d use because to me there was nothing to conquer, it was a kiss that was already won, an obvious kiss, a logical kiss, a kiss that was less discovery and more continuation. Julia, however, chose to shrink from it, turning her face at the last second, and suddenly the word humiliated lighted up in neon above my head. I stared straight ahead, more to avoid Julia than seeking any reason for her rejection. Fany and her daughter were hurrying under the arcades. I realized what had just happened.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said.
“Sorry.”
“It isn’t great knowing that you’re ashamed of me.”
“Cora, it isn’t a question of shame. But why would you put a mother in a situation like that, having to explain to her daughter why sometimes two …”
“Having to explain to her daughter how the world works? I thought that’s what mothers did.”
She didn’t reply.
“I thought you’d got over your, what should I call them, your moral issues.”
Fany had disappeared by now. Julia breathed deeply. I thought for a moment about that group of friends waiting for the sunset. They were laughing inside my head, their legs swinging crazily on the second story of the ruined villa.
“Why did you never introduce me to your parents?”
“They lived in another city.”
“So? Your dad used to go to Porto Alegre sometimes, your brother too, but something always happened and I ended up never meeting them, even though we were together almost all the time back then, you must have noticed, isn’t it strange? I always found it really strange. And then you could have invited me to Soledade with you some time.”
“You would have thought them all idiots, and they would have thought you were crazy. It made no sense.”
“Wait a minute. Are you admitting that you wanted to keep things separate?”
“Where’s the advantage in mixing them, Cora?”
Now that I had begun, I felt that I had to finish in some way. Finishing, in arguments of this kind, generally means going round in useless circles until someone gets tired. So I pushed the matter. Apart from anything else, I was speechless about the idea that Julia’s family would take me for crazy if we had ever been introduced. The funny thing was that deep down I wanted to come across as a bit of a kook, I always made a point of seeming that way, and yet if someone called me that—look at that screwball across the street!—of course I’d be offended. And so the conversation took an unexpected turn. If you had asked me, I couldn’t have said that I noticed any of this happening, a change in tone of voice, facial movements, an uncontrollable desire to talk, I mean, everything must have been signaling an imminent fight, but I missed the warnings, like someone who prefers the sea on a red flag day. Avoiding complications was no longer an option, and on that bench next to the fake cave I allowed the atmosphere to get angry and probably deserved every blow I was receiving.
“You really wanna know? Sometimes I think you’re just using me as a trophy. Or to prove your wonderful superwoman theory.”
“What superwoman? I don’t have any such theory. And even if I knew what superwoman meant, Julia, have you ever heard me talk about that?”
“You think we’re so hot, don’t you? We’re hot.”
“Yes.”
“It’s so obvious. If you could see how you act with the people we meet, my God, you wear your superiority like a badge. Civilization visits barbarity. Like we’re civilization. The two of us. Together.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with being hot.”
“Civilization, beauty, the right clothes. The right bands. You got a girl and you are a girl, neither of us even close to what you’d expect from girls who go with girls, aesthetically speaking. Which proves that they’re all wrong and that you get so much more out of everything. You need to show that, basically, because if you can’t then it’s no fun. It’s the only way for them to understand that their preconception needs to move on, preferably to be switched for your ideals.”
“Hmm. I don’t know what to tell you. It sounds like a good argument, at least.”
“You know I’m right.”
“I don’t think you’re right. Not much anyway. Right. Perhaps you are.”<
br />
She smiled, partly disappointed in me, partly satisfied at the victory. As for me, I felt a terrible mess. I hadn’t even been able to try to formulate a comeback, why did I put my points across so early, I wondered, shouldn’t I have at least held back a bit? Julia stood up. I asked where she was going. She said she wanted to be alone for a while, she turned her back and then took an eternity to enter the hotel, or so it seemed to me because I didn’t take my eyes off her the entire time. She didn’t look back once. The night sort of contracted over my head. This would be the part of the movie where “The Rain Song” would be playing in the background, you’d see me sitting on that bench for long enough to understand that I was really suffering, it was a Led Zeppelin song, from that album that Julia and I had listened to so often in the Maria Imaculada, a few retrospective scenes would attempt to portray the countless situations I was keeping warm in my memory, her dancing on the Bertussi Memorial, me opening the wine bottle with my boot, her with her feet on the chenille bedspread, the two of us at the canyons with Beto and Petal, the kiss in the toilets at the rest stop, a dirt track whose ruts launched us into giggles, removing panties in haste during those lazy afternoons in Minas do Camaquã. But then we’d unfortunately have to return to reality, to my sad face contemplating the ground, and, soon afterwards, as if responding to the most dramatic part of the song, which rocks everything for five minutes and calms down again with no great traumas, there I am raising my head, not clutching at some kind of ray of optimism or dignity, but because I’ve just seen some headlights, car headlights, my car’s headlights passing through the gate and then vanishing.
There isn’t even time to react. I leave the island slowly. A puppy barks nearby. We are separated only by an almost invisible electric fence behind a pile of bamboo canes, like the kind we used to play with on the street. The neighbor was soft on us, all threat and no action. This was long before I’d chosen Courtney Love as a private sex symbol and a prime example of a strong woman after her brief appearance at the MTV Music Awards, don’t ask me the year, she wore black leather pants. Bamboo canes dated from the uncomplicated part of my life. Courtney Love inaugurated the drama.
For the next hour or more, I wander aimlessly around the hotel grounds. I find the glow from Fany’s window. They are watching television. The girl probably doesn’t even remember having seen two female guests very close to a kiss in the place where she usually plays. The windows of the other three guests are also lighted up. I find the dark window of our empty room. As I follow a gravel path that leads me to a kind of function suite, I sketch out a weak theory in respect of Julia and me.
At that precise moment, ignoring the fact that there might be differences in our expectations or the enthusiasm of each of us for the other, I could sum everything up in a simple conflict between hiding and revealing. Yes, it made sense, I did want to show her off as some grand prize, a trophy, if those were the words put in my mouth, but that happened precisely because she had been rather difficult to win, and precisely because winning was all I’d wanted over the last few weeks. Anyway, I would admit that part of me delighted in confusing others. It was my teenage rebel side that still hadn’t completely disappeared. Another much bigger side, however, was just aiming to have a normal life. That included public displays of affection. Who could blame me?
Following that logic, the real character failing wasn’t mine, but Julia’s; while I wanted to show her off (ergo, I felt proud of her), Julia preferred to keep me hidden (ergo, she was ashamed of me). Retracing the reasons for that shame was, at this stage, pointless. It didn’t matter whether it was the way she was brought up, or how much time she had had to spend in church on Sundays, or whether her romantic ideal had formulated and remained unaltered since the first Barbie and the first Ken. None of that changed the fact that, to all intents and purposes, even though she pushed me between her legs, dug her nails into me, shouted, and laid her head on my stomach afterwards, we were still just good friends.
When Julia returned to the hotel, I was sitting near the enclosure. She stopped the car. With the engine still running, she got out. She left the door open. She walked round to the other side and opened the passenger door wide as well. She held a plastic bag in her hand. “I brought you food,” she said. I didn’t mention a single word of my theory.
9.
THE ARCHWVAY HAD LOST ITS A. That was the first thing we saw. On the right-hand side of the highway, which carried on through the arch, there was a basalt walkway, blackened by traffic. People would stroll and run there when the sun was going down. The town itself didn’t appear for a while. A cheap hotel. Woods. The coach station. Woods. A billboard in pieces. More woods. The precious stone firms were housed in large concrete boxes like any other factories, a few cars parked outside and no interest in displaying their wares. They were called V. Lodi Cristais, Legep Mineração Limitada, Colgemas Pedras Preciosas, MR Lodi Stone. No sign of any sculpted macaws, phallic amethysts, or agate ashtrays.
The urban sprawl became more evident with the sudden appearance of new-and-used car forecourts, mechanics’ workshops, a gas station and suppliers of motor parts. Everything made too much sense and could be summed up in cars and stones. When Julia told me to turn left just after the square, I did as she asked.
“Where’s your house? I wanted to see.”
“We’ll pass it later.”
The street climbed, then started to drop again. In the distance, I could already make out white wall and the two inevitably tall trees that tend to guard the entrance to cemeteries. They weren’t cypresses. The edge of town was close, right behind us, hills as green as golf courses. I stopped the car.
“Look …”
“I want to go in. If you don’t, wait for me here.”
“I’m coming too,” I replied.
She didn’t move. Two girls in shorts passed in front of the windshield, they looked inside, they didn’t recognize either of us and continued walking.
“Have you been here before?”
“No. Did you know that on the local radio every day they read out the names of everyone who was admitted and discharged from hospital?”
“Should that be, well, allowed?”
Julia thought for a moment, shrugged, and got out.
I must have taken a few seconds to do the same, because right then I heard a van with a loud hailer, coming ever closer, I turned to see what it was, it was decorated all over and the exhausted recording was announcing a circus that night and the following evenings. The kombi’s window cut through the clown’s face, it was open and I doubted whether it would even shut properly. I saw the driver sucking on a cigarette, he was looking towards me. As if one thing was leading to the next, he took one more long drag, still staring at me, before flicking away the butt. I walked to the cemetery. Julia was going into the administrative office. I thought it would be sensible to keep my distance, so I did what everyone does in a place like this: first, I felt rather helpless and fragile and aware of my own expiration, looking at the collection of tombs which formed a kind of skyline in a city of the dead, not wanting to imagine what was happening and, more importantly, what was not happening, beneath my boots. So a distraction was needed. The next stage consisted of exactly that, clearing the bad thoughts from my head, which I did by walking, reading the series of inscriptions, inspecting the oval photographs, peering through the dirty glass of the centenarian mausoleums, and, when the second date minus the first date came to anything less than seventy, trying to imagine what on earth had happened to the poor individual to have lived so little. It seems strange, but, after the initial impact, I think that the death of other people makes us think less about our own, that silence, those stones, all those frozen faces were effectively saying that we were alive, that we were going to walk out of there, there was still plenty of time to die.
Julia appeared at my side.
“Come on.”
“Where?”
“He told me where the grave is.”
&nbs
p; “Who did?”
“The gravedigger. Is there a nicer name for that?”
“Not that I know of.”
The stone paths became muddled until they finally disappeared, and after that it was inevitable that we would occasionally stand on the edges of other graves as we moved forward. There must have been a strong storm in Soledade that week because artificial flowers were scattered everywhere, honoring the memory of no one in particular. Some red earth had spilled from a slope in the ground, staining the surrounds to the recently built mausoleums, which looked more like a parcel of the federal government’s low-cost housing. Julia stopped. We had found her brother’s grave. It was next to a smiling lady who had a long life. No flowers. Light marble. The dates almost coincided: M 04-12-1980 >
We All Loved Cowboys Page 13