We All Loved Cowboys

by Carol Bensimon

23-07-1981. Missed by all who love you, mom, dad, brother, aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins. God is with you. The dead brother had been called Juliano Ceratti.

  Juliano. That left me speechless. After a tragedy of that immensity, they couldn’t have done anything more disrespectful to Julia than to baptize her Julia, out of all the popular names of the 80s, Fernanda, Mariana, Tatiana, Taís, Camila, Carolina, Daniela, Laura, Gabriela, Paula, Andréa, Luciana, Alessandra, Flávia. I didn’t know her parents, but now I was sure they were the most mistaken people on the planet, and I began to feel really sorry for Julia, as well as having an irresistible urge to explain her entire personality based on what had already been decided before she was born. If she had been called, let’s say, Roberta, would she be quite so concerned with always going in a straight line, or rather, maintaining the appearance of someone who always goes in a straight line and never wavers? Would our own story have been any different? I looked at Julia. I think she was praying. Would Roberta pray too? No, not Roberta.

  “His name was Juliano,” I interrupted. Julia opened her eyes.

  “Uh-huh. Didn’t I tell you that?”

  “No. When did you find out?”

  “The same day as everything else, Mathias, he told me when we were still in the mill. It was really bizarre. I stopped writing my name on my schoolwork.”

  “Seriously?”

  “The teacher knew when we handed it in that the one without a name could only be mine, but she was getting a bit worried about it and called my parents for a chat.” Then Julia laughed, as if it had done no more harm than that and was just another story in the family folklore.

  “The first person you introduce me to is your dead brother. It’s probably best I don’t think too much about what that means.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll go and look up Mathias.”

  “Yes, Mathias. Where is he?”

  “Don’t be difficult, Cora. He and his wife bought a plot in a place called Margem São Bento, it’s in the middle of Soledade. How are you finding my native town?

  “Ugly as sin.”

  We laughed for a while. When we left the cemetery, a fine drizzle had started to fall. I smelled that pleasing aroma of wet earth as we walked to the car in no particular hurry. You could tell the difference between the poor houses and the middle-class houses because the poor ones had goats, hens and sometimes a few ears of corn growing in the yard. We got into the car, Julia looked in every direction, no one, no one, no one, no one, then she leaned over the gear shift and gave me a kiss. Then I asked, “Everything okay?” and she replied, head in the clouds, “Fine, Cora, of course it’s all fine.”

  I drove two blocks to a hotel. We had to cross a long, wide corridor before reaching reception. On the right-hand side, there was a collection of display cases showing precious stones in a variety of formats, discs, pyramids, spheres, necklaces, bracelets. On the left-hand side was the entrance to the snack bar (chairs stacked up, I don’t they ever left that position) and at least three lounges with 1970s furniture that seemed genuinely hurt at the lack of use it was getting. In the spaces between the glass doors, there were also vinyl armchairs with visible rivets and the final, dated touch was provided by some ashtrays with little feet. In the event that one day the hotel was filled to its maximum capacity, which seemed as remote in the past as in the future, and assuming that all the guests suddenly felt the urge to sit somewhere other than their rooms, they could all be catered for quite comfortably; as we would see shortly, even the upper floors had their quota of useless lounges and colonial benches turned to face the walls.

  The man on reception looked like a lunatic. His eyes were open too wide, and his haircut, which seemed to have been molded in a potty, gave him something of the appearance of a gunman in a high school massacre. He wore a shirt with the name of the hotel embroidered on it, his scrawniness making the sleeves unintentionally baggy. I filled out the form. He looked at Julia insistently. I wasn’t sure what to write in the next destination field. Julia turned to the side, obviously embarrassed. I left it blank. He said: “Sorry to ask, but aren’t you the daughter of the precious stone Cerattis?”

  I had a few comments to make about that. For example, how much Julia had grown up and how different she seemed, they had gone to the same school; once, at recess, you lent me your pogo ball, he added, as if that was proof of old friendship, and what a pity she couldn’t remember it at all. Julia was desperate to get out of the conversation, but the receptionist wouldn’t stop talking for a minute. He talked about Julia’s family. He knew that Ceratti and his wife had moved to a house at the beach, that she had gone to study abroad, where was it again? He wished he could go somewhere far away from here too, Soledade was the wild west now, one of the Lodi family was almost kidnapped, a boy was knifed seven times coming out of a dance because he was messing with someone’s wife, two cars with Novo Hamburgo plates blew up a Sicredi branch, kids of fifteen, all of them, were falling into drink and drugs.

  An hour later, we were on our way to Julia’s house. Her aunt lived there now. She never had children. She had a second husband. Julia squealed when we pulled up in front of the house. She said: “I don’t believe this.” She didn’t believe whatever it was to such an extent that she repeated herself three times. One of those times, she clamped her hand to her forehead, shut her eyes and seemed to hope that she would see something different when she opened them again. It didn’t work. She was still devastated. I asked what the problem was. “Can’t you see? My idiot of an aunt has gone and painted the house purple!” Of course I’d noticed, but there was no way I could have immediately attributed it to her idiot aunt’s bad taste, after all, it was the first time I’d even seen the Ceratti house, where her baby brother had drowned, where Julia was born, where twelve years later a piece of plastic vomit was pilfered from a toy box so that the whole story could come to light. No one in Canada would paint a house purple, Julia was saying, no one, purple simply isn’t an option for painting a goddam house. As for France, could I imagine something like this happening in some godforsaken hole in France? Of course not. Never in France, I replied, without really thinking. She seemed relieved.

  • • •

  He had bought a twelve-acre plot in Margem São Bento, don’t ask me how big an acre is, twelve of them were enough for a large house, the two cars, a kitchen garden and his own little piece of native woodland. I’d say he was expecting us. He was sitting in front of the house drinking maté in a plastic chair, the kind that look like bar chairs sponsored by beer brands, but without the beer logo, or the color, without the night all around, the babble, the friends. He could have been sitting there for a long time, that was my first impression, there was something of a tireless guardian about him, a stubborn man, there was no way he was on his first thermos, the day had dawned and he was already there. The kind of guy who often saw the sun take its first peek above the horizon. The gravel driveway came to an end. Julia told me to park where I liked. We slammed the car doors. Mathias made the straw gurgle.

  He stared at us as he tilted the thermos and topped himself up. He knew exactly how long it took for the water to reach the usual level, slightly below the mound of erva-mate, then he waited the requisite few seconds, set the thermos straight, screwed on the lid and put it on the ground. Then, he very carefully ran his finger over the green surface in the gourd, gently encouraging a fine layer of the herb down into in the steaming water. He didn’t say a word during the entire process. His mouth searched for the straw.

  It had been more than two years since they had seen each other. From inside the house came the sound of a TV, the hammering, crashing and giggles of cartoons, which made me think for a moment that there were children in the living room, but no, there couldn’t have been a child, Mathias wasn’t a father yet, Julia had never spoken of nieces or nephews, I simply had to accept the fact that some adults still entertained themselves watching old episodes of Woody Woodpecker. Julia stopped in front of her brother. I lingered a
step behind. Mathias was almost blond, his cheeks wounded in the pursuit of a perfect shave. By my calculations, he was twenty-nine now, although having to take care of other people’s soya had clearly taken its toll.

  “You don’t seem very surprised.”

  “Auntie phoned me yesterday.”

  “Oh.”

  “What exactly are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know. We were passing, we … were around. Seeing some places. This is Cora.”

  “Hi,” he said, without paying me much attention.

  “I think I’ve told you about her.”

  “You haven’t seen mom and dad yet?”

  “I’m going there tomorrow, maybe. Hey, what’s the deal with our aunt painting the house purple?”

  He coughed, surprised by a curt laugh.

  “You’re being sentimental. It isn’t our house any more.”

  “Can I have some maté?”

  He opened the thermos. The water burbled. As I was superfluous to the conversation, I tried to look around me and feign some interest in the landscape, but it was as monotonous as the paintings sold at a craft fair. Soya and more soya as far as the eye could see.

  “But purple is ridiculous, isn’t it. It could be, I don’t know, a salmon color? That beige was too discreet for our aunt, I know, she does like those enormous necklaces with dyed agate. And her bedroom, my God!”

  Julia grasped the gourd and took her first sip.

  “This here is my house. Your house is in Montreal. Mom and dad’s house is now …”

  “Okay, Mathias, I get it.”

  When I remembered that it was my fault in a way that the two of us were here, out of some kind of moral obligation from our college days, a belated proof that there was nothing to hide from one side (me) or the other (family), regardless, when I remembered that we had driven nearly two hundred and fifty miles to see a grave, a house, an aggressive brother, a town where every corner reaffirmed its deplorable condition, and that none of this would relieve the weight of our personal problems, that none of this would make us happier, that none of this would postpone the end of our trip, the imminent separation, whether we liked it or not, I felt like disappearing.

  Time dragged in Margem São Bento. We stayed at the back of the house, slumped in two reclining chairs. Not a hint of a breeze. The immense parasol stretched out a tolerable shadow in the exact space occupied by our chairs. Moving our feet just a couple of inches would plunge us into another temperature zone. If we happened to look behind, we would see Gisele, Mathias’s wife, chopping onions, garlic and cabbage for our lunch. Our proximity to the kitchen window was probably what kept our mouths shut. Mathias had gone to sort out a few things on a nearby hacienda, and sorting things out meant giving a lot of care and attention to hundreds of acres of soya. If there are two kinds of plant that have come to symbolize supreme evil in Rio Grande do Sul in recent decades, they are without a shadow of a doubt eucalyptus and soya. Eucalyptus, that withered tree that someone decided to import from Australia and treat as if it was native. Any smallholder or environmentalist could tell you a lot about the spirit of domination and extermination contained within the deep roots of a single eucalyptus. I had often heard about that. And as for soya, suffice it to say that it made the words Monsanto and monoculture instantly spring to mind. No one with a free spirit would believe in things like Monsanto and monoculture.

  When Mathias returned, the stew was smelling good, the wife was smiling and the table was set. He asked Julia if she had looked in on Tempestade, he was blind in one eye now, but still happy. Julia replied with an uninterested yes, a very brief spasm of sympathy flitted across her face, then she said, “Is there any farofa?” and Gisele ran to the kitchen berating herself for forgetting the traditional accompaniment. The submissive wife embraces any blame without hesitation. The miracle was that Tempestade was still alive, Mathias was saying as he piled a mountain of food onto his plate, remember when he was run over twice in three weeks by Renato Colnaghi’s dad? Julia smiled shyly and buried her face in her plate as if thinking: not that story again! Then, before I realized what I was about to do, I let out a shrill giggle and asked Mathias to please tell me what happened.

  It was the first time he had spoken directly to me, and I confess that it made me feel good, even though the fact that I was his audience was nothing more than circumstantial; after all I was the only person at the table who had never heard about the two unfortunate accidents, Tempestade’s bravery as he lay maimed in the middle of the tarmac, the heavy rain that was falling (those nights that, on their own, produce more than the average rainfall predicted for the entire month), Renato Colnaghi’s dad covering his son’s eyes and shouting: “It was just an accident! It was just an accident!” But Mathias fell far short of Julia when it came to telling stories. Firstly, he emphasized irrelevant details. Secondly, he interrupted the dramatic parts with lengthy parentheses, the function of which seemed to be merely to destroy our presumed interest in the main story. Finally, and always an indication of failure: he, the narrator, laughed much more than any of those listening to him.

  The legendary tales about the little dog Tempestade, however, didn’t lead Mathias and I to establish anything more than a temporary communion. Over dessert, he looked at me and seemed suddenly shocked to find sitting in his dining room a girl with dyed hair, black eyeliner, and visible bra straps, who must surely have reminded him of some little whore you’d pick up on an empty road in the middle of the desert, a cross between an almost perfect crime and a vague feeling of freedom. Why did Julia insist on going about with someone who had nothing good to offer? The sago balls were not well cooked. They clung to the depressions in my molars, I needed to poke around with the tip of my tongue with my mouth closed, holding that pose while the other three chatted. Tempestade barked because a cockerel crowed near by. Julia hadn’t seen Tempestade and his blind eye at all. At no point had we left those reclining chairs.

  “We went to look for Juliano yesterday.”

  “Juliano who?”

  “Our brother, Mathias.”

  His spoon remained suspended in the air.

  “Hang on. You were in the cemetery looking for some fucking grave?”

  Julia began to bite the cuticle of her middle finger.

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen it. So?”

  “Don’t you think that, deep down, mom and dad moved away because of it?”

  “Don’t you think this is kind of something for family only?”

  “You mean Gisele and Cora should leave the room for us to continue? Oh Mathias, just stop it.”

  “What? For God’s sake, Gisele is my wife, Julia, you’ve known her ten years. We’re married, there was a party, you were there, you drank too much, you even danced to I don’t know what song with Renato Colnaghi, then you came up to me and said that the decorations, that our decorations, seemed, what was it? Tacky.”

  “I know.”

  “She is family.”

  “I told Cora about Juliano.”

  “Listen …” I said.

  “It’s fine, Cora, stay there. I told Cora about Juliano and I don’t know why it took me so long to do it.”

  Gisele looked like a very tired living statue. Standing at the same crossroads every day. She was looking down. In front of her, the sago and the cream had turned into a single, sticky mauve substance with little balls sitting in it. I tried to leave a few times. Julia stretched out her arm to keep me there. The first time, Mathias was saying that it had been a stupid idea to pay for accommodation in Villablanca when practically her whole goddamn family lived there, uncles, aunts, cousins, his own house with two huge rooms that weren’t in use, so that everyone would go thinking they weren’t good enough for her or something much worse than that. Or something much worse than that. The second time, it had all begun with Mathias accusing Julia of acting like a teenager, and seemingly there’s no greater offense among human beings than that, so Julia compl
etely lost her calm and began a ranting counter-argument along the lines of I’ve-been-getting-by-on-my-own-for-a-long-time-now, for example I pay three times what any other Canadian pays to study because I’m foreign, for fuck’s sake. I tried to stand up. She grabbed my hand and said, “Cora.” What exactly was my closed mouth needed for? I sat down again. Gisele finished her sago. “Studying,” Mathias was saying. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about! How old are you, Julia, shouldn’t you be qualified for something, anything?”

  That was the third time.

  “Seriously, I’m going.”

  I got up from the table, tripped over a rug, caught a glimpse of a wedding photo above the fireplace, I thought I was going to fall, as well as a photo of Gisele looking very young wearing a woolen hat, a framed agronomy diploma, I tried to pretend nothing was happening, but I trod so heavily towards the door that it must have seemed like I wanted to crush something. That wasn’t entirely untrue.

  Outside, I leaned against the car for a good few minutes, looking at Mathias’s house. Nothing moved. The house stayed the same. The door stayed the same. I got into the car, reclined the seat and, in that moment, almost forgot to wait. I closed my eyes. The only information that remained was that I was somewhere light. For some strange reason, disconnected images from the streets of Paris began to flit across my mind, as if I was in the middle of the street, as if I was lying in the center of the asphalt on a day with no cars, the rigid lines of buildings on either side, wrought iron balconies, an open window in the slate roof, a girl watering a single flowerpot, it made me think how lucky it was to see such a sunny day in Paris, the tiny clouds beginning their long and tiring journey to the other side of La Mancha, even though just focusing on those small clouds gave me vertigo.

  The door slammed. Julia was crying, her face turned away in unnecessary shame. “Can we go already?” She sniffed before saying that, she sniffed afterwards, I found a paper tissue from somewhere, I turned on the engine and moved off hesitantly down the street. Soya and more soya all around.