There was a video attached. I opened it.
João Pedro was sitting on one of those little chairs for babies that have a large surface for gooey food. He was enthusiastically biting on a plastic rabbit, whose stomach issued a high-pitched squeak when it was pressed. João Pedro wasn’t looking at the camera. In the background, I could hear a man (my dad) saying repeatedly: “Show us your tooth, son. Show us your tooth.” He didn’t show any teeth. One minute ten seconds of those rudiments of humanity. He was affectionate and clumsy, so I ended up laughing to myself and playing it again. However, as soon as the video restarted, it became clear that I was paying more attention to my dad’s insistent voice than my brother’s voracious oral phase. The natural tone, condescending, sweet, was enough to tell me that he wasn’t bothered by the fact that he wasn’t being acknowledged or even understood by his son. Anyway, I wondered whether it wasn’t strange to start it all over again, to have a baby in the house and all the rest, after an interval of time that seemed long enough to have completely fallen out of practice.
I replied with something like “so cute,” and got ready for bed.
The following morning, there was the suggestion of a sunny day outside. It had knocked on the window and now came in discreetly, scattering a kind of luminous powder over the objects arranged on the table: a pile of domestic gaucho paraphernalia that was rather disbelieving of its destiny. Next to the traditional black hat were the final versions of my sketches. I had never felt so satisfied with a piece of work than at that moment. For the umpteenth time, I looked at Jean-Marc. If he were a bit younger, I would send him knocking on the doors of some modeling agencies right away. Something he did with his eyes and eyebrows gave him an unpretentious and relaxed air, so that you might say that Jean-Marc felt more at ease now that when he was wearing his own clothes. Hands in pockets helped a bit too. I moved closer and adjusted Jean-Marc’s bombachas, tucking them into his boots. The leather was cracking unevenly. The large peeling area on the right boot looked like a rodent in attack position.
“What do you think?” Jean-Marc asked, trying to locate himself in a distant mirror.
“Almost perfect.”
He gave a short whistle.
“Looks perfect to me, Cora. Are you telling me you made this shirt?”
“Uh-huh.”
Then he walked towards the mirror, stopped and began to laugh, his hair loose and rebellious as if he’d recently had a run in with the cold minuano wind.
“This is fabric from your land.”
A raw cotton shirt, nice and tight. I had created the cuffs, the collar and the pocket from two neckerchiefs I bought in Bagé. The fabric was shiny like silk, with a delicate pattern and an elegant harmony of colors, which made it very difficult to imagine a gaucho using an accessory of that kind tied around his neck. It must have been a very special gaucho occasion to justify that almost feminine vanity. Anyway, now, integrated in the shirt, the neckerchiefs had definitely gone far beyond the borders of the pampa. The theatrical lead singer of an indie group would kill in that outfit. An artist who hung bicycle parts from museum ceilings would kill in that outfit. A writer whose whole book was a single sentence, five hundred pages long, with no commas would cause a lot of envy among his peers if he wore that outfit.
I was feeling tremendously proud of myself. And there were even more ambitious ideas in my sketches, which fortunately I wasn’t required to execute. For example, the rustic hat with a band of spikes, the vest that alternated a smooth flannel with several embroidered pampa bands, tweed bombachas, capes.
Jean-Marc was looking at me.
“That’s it!” I said. “I know what’s missing, I’ve just realized. A bit of eyeliner and you’ll be perfect.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Just a little bit. No one will even notice.”
“Why bother then?”
“Okay, they will notice. But only in a very positive way.”
I said that as I rummaged through the drawers of a plastic organizer. Surprisingly enough, Jean-Marc stopped his retorts. He was actually giving me a bit of credit. In the third drawer, I found the charcoal pencil I was looking for. This pencil was a stub now, although I didn’t remember having used it that much in my life; I think the last time had been at the birthday party for the Brazilian poet, and the penultimate time had certainly been much longer ago, months, one day on our trip to the interior, in the hotel room in São Francisco de Paula, where I had opened the wine bottle with my boot, it might have been there, but maybe I didn’t actually care about the eyeliner, because then I saw a straight road with a rest stop in the background, it didn’t last long at all, it gave way to the canyons, the gently rolling hills, the rail tracks, the abandoned house, and all before I could touch the water line of Jean-Marc’s left eye.
“Careful with that.”
Julia was arriving the following day. It was her first time in Paris and our first encounter in five months. I was trying not to worry about it. She had left her job at the Montreal Gazette and, on two separate occasions, had spoken to me about returning to Brazil, but it sounded like the typical speech ex-pats use when they idealize their native land too much, and in order to keep idealizing it they need to renounce it once and for all. The idea that Brazil was the country of the future only convinced those who weren’t there.
“It’s kind of intimate, putting eye make-up on someone, isn’t it?”
“Quit moving.”
Anyway, for the first time since I met her, Julia was showing signs of not knowing what to do next. And I must admit that that left me excited and full of hope. Perhaps she would stay. Perhaps I’d leave with her.
“Ready.”
“Really ready? Can I blink again? I never thought I’d miss being able to do that.”
“Look at me.”
He obeyed.
“You’re hot.”
Jean-Marc examined his reflection in the mirror like a child struggling to recognize himself.
“If the girls like it.”
“You need to promise me you won’t fall in love with Julia.”
“Does she speak French?”
“With a Quebecoise accent.”
“Ah, of course. I’ll try to understand.”
“Jean-Marc, I’m serious.”
“Hey, you don’t need to tell me twice. Apart from anything else, why would she flirt with me when you’re here? Look at yourself. My God, Cora.”
Then I was embarrassed.
“Isn’t it worth trying to be less insecure?”
“Not if the situation begs for insecurity. I’m talking about the girl who never told a soul that we had, I don’t know, any kind of involvement. And you might find me very attractive or whatever—and stop pulling that face—but have you thought that that might not make the slightest bit of difference to her?”
“Can I laugh now?”
“What?”
“Can I laugh at what you’ve just said?”
I threw myself onto the bed. He pulled up a chair next to me.
“Cora, five months ago we sat in the gardens at Bastille with two bottle of rosé because you were sad for no reason (he was using my words), you were impossible the whole night, complaining about your course, your shitty job, your dad’s wife. You complained about a guy playing the guitar because playing guitar in public was, according to your definition, the greatest affront to other people’s liberty.”
I remembered that night. Or, in truth, pieces of it. The guy with the guitar had looked very similar to a neighbor from my childhood, the oldest son of a couple of engineers, he had long hair when all the interesting boys had long hair, or at least the boys that I was interested in, that Company backpack slung over one shoulder, garage ramp skateboarder, tireless repeater of the intro to “Come As You Are,” always up late and frequently flitting across the only illuminated window in his house. For a moment, I had thought it might even be him. We were all over Europe, living off those jobs we’d never accept if we
weren’t far away from home. Then I realized that he looked like my neighbor from eight, ten years earlier, not what he might potentially have become. My neighbor was now something very different to that nostalgic, out-of-context hologram.
“Listen …”
I think I had missed one or two sentences.
“Let me finish. I’ve always liked hanging out with you, Cora. Even on the days when you hate everything, you hate everything with a really passionate intensity, you know? At some point, I started telling you about Sophie. I had never told you before because you never asked directly, I said that maybe she was my lost love …”
“And I replied that you had lied to me about getting your tattoo retouched out of a ‘deep respect’ for your past.”
Jean-Marc laughed.
“Julia came up right after that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Doesn’t matter. Well, you were a bit drunk at the time and you revealed all the spiciest details of your trip. I could barely cope with the richness of your descriptions.”
“I know. That tends to happen with men.”
“Basically, what I’m trying to say is that calling this girl hetero doesn’t really cut it with me.”
“When did I do that? Did I use the word hetero?”
“Not that word. But you said she probably wasn’t attracted to you. Yes, in another way, that’s what you meant.”
“And what would you call her, Jean-Marc?”
He got up from the chair and drew back the curtains.
“At best, someone who doesn’t have your courage.”
There was a broad flight of stairs between two parallel streets, which smelled of urine. I sat on it. Sometimes someone would come down it, rarely alone, and from the type of person it was clear where they were going. The large glasses and beards could only mean Pop In. I was waiting for Julia on the fifth step from the top, next to the central handrail. There was some art on the walls on both sides, words on paper telling us to love one another, then a perfect pinball machine, then a girl lying on a cloud scattering who knows what kind of multicolored drops with her watering can. I was sure Julia was feeling a bit jet-lagged. But she wanted to see the city and see the night and see people asking strangers for cigarettes and the metro expelling more and more bodies.
Jean-Marc and Julia had met. That afternoon, he had taken it upon himself to lug her suitcase upstairs while the two of us lingered behind, Julia saying in Portuguese how she was dazzled by my little cul-de-sac, I mean, what are the chances of renting an actual house in Paris? I replied, almost embarrassed by my luck, that it was really a very remote chance. When we got upstairs, Jean-Marc was dragging the case to the foot of my bed. He hadn’t bothered to use those little wheels, even on those perfectly smooth final yards. He looked at Julia and me, then rubbed his hands together, as if ready to receive instructions for another arduous task. There was no other task.
Jean-Marc was going to take a turn round the Saint-Ouen flea market because the afternoon looked as though it would turn nicer rather than worse, on a Parisian scale, of course, but Julia and I had basic tourist spots to cover. She wanted to see the Eiffel Tower or the Seine or the Louvre or the Champs-Elysées to be absolutely sure where she was, which was something I could understand, as long as she didn’t start posting photos of herself in front of those monuments as soon as she got there. I went to the bedroom door to say goodbye to Jean-Marc and he gave me one of those adolescent expressions of approval. That’s the moment that you regret having shared confidences with a friend.
The afternoon was slightly strange and yet predictable. Not that it felt like a faithful copy of the first day of our trip to the interior, nor did it have any similarities in terms of, let’s say, spontaneity as our starting point. A fresh start, I thought. A fresh start. I was allowing things to happen in their own time. So crossing a bridge over the Seine was still just a rehearsal for what might happen later. Julia seemed frightened. But I could stop acting selfishly and admit that not all her psychological states were necessarily related to me. After all, she had no job, she hadn’t spoken to her brother since the fight, and all her best friends in Montreal tended to be Eric’s friends. The best thing I could, and should do was to look like the best alternative.
Julia appeared holding a crepe as I remained sitting on the stairs between the two streets. Banana and Nutella. I had recommended it. She offered me a piece and I bit through the layers of soft dough, recognizing the lunches and dinners of my first months away from home. I handed the crepe back to her. Julia pointed at the corner of my mouth, without touching it, and told me I had Nutella on it. I had to clean it off myself. The sugar seemed to activate something in her after that, so we stayed on those stairs for longer than we needed to, the crepe gone, not complaining about the cold or the stench of urine, chatting like two people who meet to reminisce about the same things year after year. For a moment, Julia seemed to have forgotten that this was Paris, and that she had a whole load of cool things to do and a load of incredible places to see, golden angels blowing trumpets and the phallic legacy of an international fair. Could I have been jealous of my own city? Twenty or thirty minutes passed. Then I said it was time for us to go down the stairs. We took those few steps into my favorite bar, Pop In.
Initially, we squeezed into the room at the front. I was worried about bumping into Alejandra, which was slightly without foundation, because Alejandra had vanished from the map since our final conversation. Even though I was now an expert in that kind of conversation, I simply hated having to have them, and even more, I hated facing the possibility of encountering my exes again. She had cried! Alejandra had cried, who knows why. After the first tear, she reverted to speaking Spanish, her voice drawling on at length, with the clear intention of stretching out the conversation forever, or until one of us got up and left the café because she was exhausted and couldn’t take any more, which is unfortunately what eventually happened.
As usual, most of Pop In’s clientele was shouting in English. They would lean close in to the other person’s ear to speak, so as to overcome the noisy fug of good music. They were tourists or foreigners who lived in Paris. The French didn’t seem to like rock. They must have grown up thinking about something else, don’t ask me what. The guys at the bar worked like two hyperactive marionettes, opening the beer taps and letting the golden liquid flow into pitchers that wouldn’t look out of place in your grandmother’s house, with ice tea, lemon and ice.
“What do you think?” I asked Julia, after having bought our drinks and returned with my physical and psychological integrity intact.
“About what?”
“This place.”
She looked around her. A very tall man stuck a drinks stirrer shaped like a palm tree into a girl’s cleavage.
“It could be a bar in Montreal.”
“Everywhere looks the same.”
“Minas do Camaquã?”
I smiled.
“Perhaps not there.”
When we tried to follow the tall guy’s advances again, it was already too late; the stirrer had returned to the drink, and the girl was holding her glass the way someone would hold a stranger’s dirty sock. They weren’t even talking to each other.
“Let’s go upstairs,” I said.
Five minutes later, three girls with bangs thought it was time to stretch their naked legs and dance to the next Swedish song destined never to become a hit, vacating a sofa in the process. We leaped onto it.
“Do you remember Sister Dulce?” Julia asked suddenly.
Which of the nuns was Sister Dulce? Perhaps the short one who sat at the entrance to the residence wearing civilian clothing. Or the one with the particularly small mouth like those women in the 20s who used lipstick to draw lips that were much smaller than their own, the difference being that this was a real nun’s mouth, no tricks, no vanities, just the imperfect mouth God gave her. That wasn’t Sister Dulce. That one was called Carmen, Clara, Celina or something like that.
Sister Dulce was the nun who wore a light-gray habit and a ton weight of a cross; it would be easy to kneel with a piece like that, you’d probably just let yourself go, the hard thing would be staying upright. She wanted to catechize me, or at least I think that’s what she was trying to do when sometimes she came up and started to quote Bible passages at me. I couldn’t care less about Isaiah. Anyway, guess what? Julia had met Sister Dulce at the beach. Not just in the tiny center of the coastal town where her parents lived now, but on the actual beach, on the sand, dressed in her habit, wearing sandals, looking towards the horizon. The bottom of her robe was darker. She stood with her feet in the water. What was Sister Dulce doing there? Julia stood watching from a distance for quite a while, and yet the nun didn’t move, and the wind was playing with her veil, and her skirt blew into an aerodynamic peak, and the waves were licking at her shins, but Sister Dulce stayed completely still looking out to sea. Perhaps because the ocean was such an incredible thing, making us think about Africa being right on the other side, even now no one has swallowed that con about the earth being round, I have to tell you something, I said all this to Julia and some more. Her immediate response was to give me a reserved smile. It wasn’t by any means the end of her story. The following day, Julia was walking along the main street. Her dad had asked her to buy a bit of chicken heart for the barbecue, it was the only thing they still needed, and there was Julia, just about to enter the butcher’s, when she realized that Sister Dulce was coming in the opposite direction. This time, like it or not, their eyes met. Of course Sister Dulce recognized Julia, how could she not when we gave the nuns so much trouble during those years, Julia wanted me to go up to her room with her but the rules of the residence stated that strangers were forbidden to enter the bedrooms, I wasn’t a stranger, I was there all the time, I was a girl, after all, we just had to tidy up after ourselves, win over Sister Rose, if they wanted to baptize me, okay, let them baptize me then.
We All Loved Cowboys Page 16