by Sarah Faber
And suddenly he’s vaulted out of paradise and forward in time, and sees Luiza startling awake on the beach that day, rising quickly to her knees and clutching her sisters to her as they protest the destruction of her giant sand-legs. He imagines that as she looked out over the water she was struck all at once by the terrifying and incomprehensible unity of the image. She had told him that this sometimes happened when she was especially tired, that if she saw something quickly, took anything in too abruptly, she became frightened—she was unable to break it down into identifiable parts. He’s sure he can see what she saw: three endless bands before her (white, green, blue), massive bloody clots to her left, a large-breasted dead man to her right. Hugo blinks as she must have blinked, his breathing slowing with hers as the images fall into place: sand, water, sky. The girls’ red towels, dropped in wet heaps, just as she always told them not to do. And Mr. Dawsey buried up to the neck, fissures in his sand-breasts as he snored. She told him she’d often perceive such distortions, the grotesque in the perfectly banal. She worried it was something malformed in her brain. He falters, wonders: maybe she’d felt it too, that sudden desolation, and it was too much for her—or too little—the way the world could, in an instant, tilt away from the sun, turn cold. Had it come upon her, that swift thrust toward the unconstellated periphery of experience? The terrifying estrangement from oneself. Was that why she didn’t fight? Did she suffer, or was slipping underwater a kind of release? No, he thinks. It never got that bad for her. He would have known if she felt such vacant loneliness. She was so lively, so much better than him. She would never have wanted to die.
And yet, though he tells no one, the truth is that he wakes in the night, muscles sore, clenched by nightmares, certain he should have known what was coming, should have watched her more closely—surely someone so lovely must be only loaned to them from some other sphere.
‘What else?’ he asks too loudly and the girls jump. ‘What did you do next?’
‘Luiza said she wanted to go for a quick swim alone and rinse the sand off,’ says Magda.
‘She was supposed to take us in the water when she got back,’ adds Evie, her voice trailing off at the end.
‘Well, then what?’
‘We went over to the rocks to catch fish.’
Hugo strides out toward the rough breakwater, Evie and Magda scrambling a little to keep up. There are three ancient black men fishing and Hugo feels incandescently white, over-friendly and jocular.
‘How d’you do?’ False, corncobby strains, accompanied by the flourish of a little bow. Why in English? Why an accent that’s not his own?
He and the girls slip off their shoes before climbing onto the breakwater, Magda and Evie standing together on a large boulder, their own planet, buckets in hand, while Hugo stands on another rock beside them. The girls gaze at the submerged rocks below, turned green and gold by the sun’s water-broken beams. Seaweed crusted with barnacles grows in a circle around each one, rippling with the gentle waves.
‘See, I said it’s like a monk’s hair, only long and slimy,’ says Evie. ‘But Magda said a movie star’s hair. She said her rock was Marilyn Monroe and I had to have Rosemary Clooney.’
‘But then I said that game was stupid,’ spits Magda, ‘and I went to catch a fish.’ And as though it’s nothing, she dips her bucket in the water, sits perfectly still for a moment, then lifts the full bucket smoothly and quickly, something silver flashing inside. ‘I like these ones that eat slime off the rocks. They’re shiny but not very quick.’ She reaches in the bucket and grasps the fish with both hands, lifting it out to show him its skin.
‘The quincunx,’ he breathes, grateful. Let his mind settle elsewhere for a bit.
‘The what?’ demands Magda.
‘The quincunx. A quadrilateral diamond shape found in fish but also in plants: the diamond shape of the sunflower seed, those of pomegranates. And look,’ he says, reaching into the water and pulling up plants from the ocean floor. ‘It is in the roots of water ferns, in lilies. It is a design of nature, and it’s everywhere.’ Water drips down his arms, soaking the cuffs of his rolled-up shirt sleeves. ‘Like the leafless deciduous trees you have never seen. Like the branched veins on the softer side of leaves and human wrists. The branches of rivers and tributaries are like veins also, carrying bodies, like blood, away from hearts. Or like ships, travelling up through the Caribbean, along the Gulf Coast and all the way to the St. Lawrence, to Canada.’
‘But what does it look like?’ asks Magda, his little inquisitor.
Has he been talking to them all this time and taught them nothing? Making connections no one else sees? He takes the slow-moving fish from the bucket and lifts it to their faces.
‘The scales! See its scales? That shape is found again and again in nature. Everything is repeated.’
After a few minutes of having the diamond shapes in its silvery skin examined, the creature still thrashes.
‘It’s suffering!’ Evie is nearly hyperventilating, begging for it to be spared. ‘Maricota says that if someone suffers too much when they die, their soul can’t be at peace.’
As Hugo tries to think of what to say, Magda lifts a rock above her head—the girl has the heart of a python!—but he snatches up the fish and tosses it back into the ocean. It sinks to the bottom and the men beside them look on, faces impassive. Nevermind the quincunx. Today’s lesson: life’s not fair.
Are you there are you there are you there?
‘Papa, we’re right here,’ says Evie quietly, taking his hand.
He hadn’t meant to say it out loud. But it occurs to him that soon they’ll leave this place—Confederação, Rio, Brazil. And when they leave, they’ll be leaving Luiza behind—and the pain of the realization is sharp and fresh. And if they return to visit, years from now, they still won’t be able to swim in this sea, because she’ll still be there, drifting on the ocean floor, debrided by urchins, hermit crabs. Taken but not claimed.
She told him once that until she was thirteen or so, it seemed as though life was illuminated—as if even she herself was lit up from the inside. ‘But in the years since,’ she said, ‘everything has been leaching colour and I don’t know how to retrieve that feeling, that sense of a world suffused I once had.’ She’d lately become preoccupied with writing, and trying to express those sensations in words, but felt unable to.
For him it was the reverse—he wasn’t really born until he came here to work for BrazCan, in his late twenties. He’d never known what it was to feel free until he found Rio. Free to feed his assorted ‘appetites’ away from Toronto’s scolding, puritanical gaze; he liked to eat and fuck and dance and embrace, and sometimes he cried, overwhelmed by both the beauty and horror of existence. Such earnest statements didn’t go over well at home but were considered downright charming here. Grey faces, grey minds, grey city—all left behind for Brazil’s bacchanalia. Rio was a demented Eden, crackling with newness and feeling. It was Avenida Atlantica, passengers hanging out of trolleys on one side and pale sand merging with the sea on the other. Undulating waves of black-and-white mosaic tiles underfoot, carrying him toward Cassino da Copacabana, filled to the gills with those sequined showgirls, all happy little things, pretty and so young. Everything was yayaya: baccarat, champagne, the foxtrot. The first time he took Dora, they saw Errol Flynn at the craps table, and a month later, Lana Turner; he stood shoulder to shoulder with her as she dragged a heap of poker chips toward her, and drank in the scent of her hair. In Rio, everyone had appetites—the Cariocas, the celebrities, the showgirls. In Rio, he didn’t stand out. Here, he was home. Here, he cheered watching games of futebol, and was embraced by the stranger beside him in the stands while the players wept and kissed one another each time they scored. Here, he’d seen a black man on the pavement, holding a rose and openly shedding tears after Vargas committed suicide; he’d seen grown men in suits climb telephone poles, crying and laughing as they waited for the Brazilian Expeditionary Force to return from the war after f
ighting the Italians. He danced with the travesti Juju, a fine-boned man who, in drag, made a strangely beautiful woman. Here, below the equator, as the Brazilians say, there is no sin.
But now he’s eaten too much, felt too much, desired too much. Soon he’ll be cast out, on a ship back to winter, graceless and deracinated. Tchau, Brazil. Surely, having driven her away, they, too, must go.
‘This is boring now,’ says Magda, and he sees that he is no longer touching them; he is standing apart, a few feet away on a separate rock, a bucket dangling from his hand. Magda has her arm protectively around Evie, whose eyes are red. They’re smaller somehow. ‘We want to go home.’
‘Of course, of course.’ Hugo busies himself gathering up the girls’ shoes. ‘Anyway, I suppose it’s cooling off.’ Lit up from the inside, that was just how she’d put it. How could someone that alive die? Back and forth, to and fro. He wishes he could stay with Evie and Magda for longer, but she’s always there, pulling him away. And yet some part of him believes that in slipping further from everyone else, he’s getting closer to her.
Back at their house, the girls ask if they can watch TV.
‘Go ahead—as much as you like,’ says Hugo. ‘I’ll ask the maids to fix your supper.’
But instead he wanders into his office, still feeling that some undiscovered detail is waiting to be found. He’s learned nothing new today. What had he expected? Some clue or trace still on the beach after all this time? He must stop looking, stop waiting for messages or meaning to come to him. What if he were to write down everything he remembers, every conversation they had, every perfect thing she ever said? Surely something would reveal itself? The piece still missing, some aspect of Luiza he has failed to understand. These past months, he’s been confined by grief—gelded and ineffectual. A perforated half-man. But now he must know—why did she leave him? He thinks of her, always of her. He must speak to her now while he can still conjure her, write to her now while he can. Yes, he will write her back into being.
He begins to rifle through his desk drawers, finding nothing. His notepads, pens—all taken. What was Dora thinking, letting the maids touch his things so long before they are meant to sail? Did she think he would sit and stare at the wall until she was ready to go?
And she insists on locking her desk, which shares his study, even though she almost never uses it. While normally he can find the key easily enough, today he’s forced to hunt around, find a letter opener, molest the lock. Toward the back of the drawer lies a single folded page, hastily shoved in. He’s broken into her desk countless times and is sure he’s never seen it before. The paper is yellowing, the crease lines deep and permanent. Not new. It’s something she must have extracted recently from some more hidden, more secret place. A letter. A love letter, he realizes quickly: How beautiful she is, how she’s the only woman the writer has ever loved. How she deserves better. It is undated, unsigned—just a series of tiny Xs in the space where a name might go. He wrote her letters once, but never rubbish like this. He wonders briefly if perhaps she wrote it to herself, the trivial romantic diversion of a neglected housewife. But Dora is not the type, and the type is not Dora’s; the top of the O always fills in on her old Corona typewriter, and these Os are perfect, clean circles, tiny holes for his heart to slip through. How could this person pretend to love his wife and take so little responsibility, providing neither date nor name, no place for him to direct his rising anger? Has it been kept in here for months, or years? Is it from a lover or just the infatuated teenaged son of a neighbour, for there have been several of those—she is still the most beautiful woman he knows. Perhaps it was a trifle, an oath from a lost soul, and being merely flattered, she kept it to remind herself that she was desired.
He buckles a little now and leans against the desk. Why? But another, bitter voice volleys back: You know why. A thousand times, a thousand different ways, he has absolved himself. For years, he hasn’t wanted her to see him, really see him, so he slinked out of Dora’s view, ashamed of what she had seen, his mind turned inside out. Instead, he wrapped himself in Luiza’s uncomplicated admiration—her child’s love, for a time unconditional. But he would not survive losing another beloved.
Doesn’t she know? He was always planning to repair things, to show her how much he still loves her. He just needed to get better. He was always going to come back for her.
DORA
The sand beneath Dora’s feet is hot, covered by a thin crust where it dried after the tide went out. For reasons that she can’t articulate, even to herself, she has been coming to the beach nearest their house every morning for the past five days since the ceremony—her first visits since Luiza disappeared. The beach is still quiet in the mornings, not like the beaches in the city, and only a handful of bathers are spread out on the wide stretch of white sand. Farther along sit a few tumbledown houses built into the promontory at the south end of the beach, part of the fishing village on the other side of the headland, and several dozen boats are setting out in the distance toward the horizon, where the sun has just risen, orange and dilated.
Dora told the maids that she needed a break from all the packing, the preparations, but there is something more drawing her here. Now up to her knees in the water, she hears a cry and turns sharply toward the sound. At the end of the beach, her end, a flock of birds wheels above a little wooded peninsula that juts out into the water and she smiles briefly to see them soar and dive. That point is at least a mile away and yet the birds seem closer, and she has to blink several times to understand why: they are very large and black, urubus—carrion birds. It’s their size that makes them appear closer. Their expansive soar contracts into a tight, agitated circle as their enormous wings beat the air before they drop down, vanishing into the woods. They have found something. Dora lets out a sharp gasp as she dives into the too-shallow water, scraping the fronts of her thighs and tasting salt. Worried someone might have seen, she tries to recover, and rather than stand up she propels herself deeper, pulling with her arms and pushing off with her feet until she is swimming. No, she tells herself. No, it isn’t possible. After so many months. All the searches. The urubus have simply found some animal and she won’t go look. She forces herself to swim instead, to keep moving.
She swims for as long as she can, heading in the direction everyone says Luiza went, though all they said was ‘that way.’ Really, she’s just swimming out into open water. Why wasn’t anyone watching? That is all she’s ever done at the beach—watch her three girls, calculate the distance of each from the shore. Of course, Luiza was much older, so she got to swim out farther, but still Dora watched. And counted. One, two, three. She watched the sun glint off their hair and that’s how she could always tell who was who. One auburn, one blond, one red. None of them close to Dora’s own dark brown. Three little aliens. After each was born, Hugo would hold them up and laugh, asking, ‘Where did you come from?’ So why wasn’t anyone watching, counting, assessing the colour of bright hair beneath sun? Because Dora wasn’t there.
She swims until her sides hurt, until she begins to understand how one might just accidentally swim so far that it would be impossible to turn back. To get back. She feels the water pulling her down, like it must have pulled at her daughter. She feels her arms and legs, her tongue becoming liquid. She knows that if she doesn’t turn back now, she’ll soon be nothing but water. Maybe it was just a terrible accident. She couldn’t go on. Just gave up. But then why not call out? Why not wave and cry for help, tread water until one of those strong men came, more than happy to oblige, to grasp her nearly naked body and carry her to shore? Too far, maybe. Or nobody heard, nobody saw. Nobody watching. And if the tide didn’t carry her away? If she’s still down there, beneath the very spot where Dora is swimming? She imagines a hand reaching up through seaweed, wrapping around her ankle, dragging her beneath the surface. She sputters and chokes and just barely makes it back to shore.
She collapses on the sand, gasping, not bothering to retrieve her towel f
rom higher up on the beach, not caring anymore how foolish she might look, her legs stretched out in the water, her torso on land. Once she’s able to breathe normally again, she feels her legs bend and contract beneath her, her body rising, propelled toward the peninsula. Go home. Go home. An incantation, as though she might invoke a lighted path to elsewhere, summon those great black birds to lift her away from whatever they’re consuming. Don’t let me see. But still she walks and soon stands at the edge of some scrubby bushes. The birds are surprisingly quiet, but she can see their heads bob and dip as they rip away at the flesh of the body they’ve found. Coarse twigs scrape her bare legs as she moves closer, and she can feel the heat and strength of their bodies, so large that they don’t scatter like she expects, don’t seem frightened by her at all. What if she can’t see what they’re tearing apart? What if she can? She stumbles and lets out a little cry and there is the low rustle of wing revolutions in sand, a stuttered whirring, and, finally, a lifting off, black feathered bodies ejected from the bushes, massive wings outspread against the sky. Look down. A few more steps. Look. Just beyond her lies the skeleton of a dog still sheathed in sinew, meat torn inside out. It could never have been her.
Dora walks back along the beach to where her clothes lie in a heap on the sand. She gathers them up and stands still for a moment, unsure of where to go. She knows she should go home, but home is chaos. All the things she should be doing—packing up the house, sorting through Luiza’s bedroom, preparing for their annual cocktail party in a few days to kick off Carnival. It seems absurd to have a party so soon, but she promised her friends and it might mean something to the girls, to get to see all their old friends one last time.
But for now, she can’t quite face going back to the house. Drained, she nearly lets her knees give out beneath her and lands heavily on the sand, then rakes it with her hands. This, too, she has lost: the seaside as a simple, perfect place, once the centre of their lives. Where she and Hugo fell in love, where they practically raised their children. She closes her eyes, tries to remember that night, the very first, when she and Hugo sat together running their hands through the sand just like this, more than twenty years ago. When they burned brightly, solar flares, leaving impressions more vivid and alive to her than who they have become. They went to a masked ball at the Copacabana. The men wore simple black masks while the women’s were more elaborate—feathers and ribbon, sequins and velvet. Dora’s had been peculiar, not pretty like the others: a velvet rabbit with sloping ears, elongated, slanted holes for her eyes, and sequin-trimmed gashes that stretched at an angle far beyond the line of her brow, mirroring the shape of the inelegant, padded ears. The mask was too large; where the other women’s masks covered only their eyes, Dora’s hid her nose and mouth as well, and when Hugo pushed it up to kiss her for the first time—a very quick, almost casual kiss after they danced, gliding together—her eyelashes bent against the velvet pile. Afterwards, she pulled the mask back down to hide her warm cheeks, her buzzing mouth.