by Sarah Faber
As they left the dance floor, the band took a break and Hugo sat beside the piano player, a little round black man in a tuxedo who was preparing to play.
‘What do they call you, my friend? Seu nome?’ When he spoke Portuguese, his accent sounded soft, not harsh like those of other expats she’d known.
‘Bola de Nieve.’
‘Snowball! Excellent. What are we singing?’
‘Yo soy negro social, soy intelectual y chic …’
‘Yo soy negro social! Soy intelectual y chic!’ Hugo sang along beside him as everyone clapped and laughed, until Dora, also laughing, finally coaxed him back to their table, not realizing that would be the first of countless times she would have to pull him away, try to lead him back to somewhere familiar to her.
‘What was I saying?’ he asked her, not waiting for a reply. ‘I think I speak Portuguese quite well already. Didn’t I say I was black and intellectual and chic?’
‘And a high-society negro!’ she answered. ‘But that was Spanish. He’s from somewhere else. Cuba, probably.’
‘Still, I’m doing brilliantly, don’t you think? Let’s celebrate my first show!’
Hugo ushered Dora over to the glass bar where he ordered a bottle of champagne, paid for two glasses, which the bartender said wasn’t really allowed, and pocketed a handful of articulated straws. He carried the bottle and glasses in one of his large hands and took one of Dora’s with the other. As they walked out onto the Copacabana’s front stone patio, they faced the beach, the smooth-capped hills that lined the periphery of the horizon.
‘Look at that, would you?’ he said, as though she were seeing it for the first time. ‘Right there, right in front of us. From the world’s best nightclub to its best beach… minutes away. Like some outrageously perfect playground.’
They waited for a break in traffic and ran out across the road to its unmarked centre, cars whizzing past. Then across the black-and-white mosaic sidewalk, patterned in waves, and onto the white sand. Hugo poured champagne into each glass, which they sipped until Dora became too tired to sit up and stretched out alongside him, using the jacket he’d rolled up for her as a pillow. He placed a straw in her champagne glass and bent it to a right angle, tipping it toward her occasionally while pressing on the straw, every tiny movement allowing a few drops to fall into her mouth.
‘What a place this is,’ he kept saying, emanating a kind of quiet, thrumming joy. ‘Like a collective dream we’re all having. A tribal enchantment. A shared wish of a place.’
‘Except that it’s real,’ said Dora almost inaudibly. She didn’t always understand the things he said, but still she loved listening to him speak.
‘For now,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘For the lucky few. But dreams like this don’t last.’
She pushed herself up onto her elbow. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You must have had a wonderful childhood,’ Hugo said then, gazing back out over the water. ‘I can just see you, a little golden creature scampering all over the beaches.’
‘Yes, I suppose I did.’ Dora rolled onto her belly so she, too, could face the sea. ‘My grandparents had a beautiful old colonial house on a beach in Niterói, but we came down here as well. The mansions all faced the beach just like on the French Riviera, and there were little wooden cabins where you could change. My mother even remembers when women came to the beach in frilled caps and stockings. Garters and stays. But it was still so unspoiled when I was a girl, no buildings along the Avenida. I used to love to slide down those white dunes over there and help the fishermen with their nets and pick pitanga berries.’
‘Let’s go pick some right now!’
‘Oh, those trees are all gone, I’m sure.’
As Dora’s eyes began to close, Hugo was gazing out at the ocean, hungrily awaiting sunrise. Never before, he’d kept telling people earlier that night. He’d never seen the ocean until he came here. Imagine it!
‘You probably can’t,’ he said to her sadly.
Triumphantly, Dora answered, ‘I’ve never seen snow!’
He laughed and seized her arms, crying out, ‘Snow is beautiful! At first you’ll think it’s the loveliest thing you’ve ever seen but you won’t be prepared. You’ll expect it to be warm like sand but then you’ll touch it and it will be cold and you’ll scream and then you’ll grieve for this place but then snow will cover everything and it will be like a kind of lovely death and you’ll be at peace.’ This was how he was, how he spoke, as though he was willing imagined futures into being. Declaring to her, You will come. You will be with me.
When the sun began to rise, Hugo shook Dora’s shoulder. ‘No sleeping!’ he exclaimed. ‘Look!’ It was an almost caustic pink, scattering its reflection across the gently breaking water like, he told her, a diadem of blossoms or the scales of an enormous mythical fish. ‘There are no such colours in Canada,’ he told her. ‘Not of this magnitude. Maybe a flower, but not illuminated like this.’
This was not, he said, an earthly colour. This was the heavens bearing down on them. He was, she can remember thinking then, at once very young and very old. Like an unsettlingly precocious child, full of wonder but also dense with arcana. When, she’d wondered out loud, had he had time to learn so much, to absorb so many different ideas?
‘You mean before there were fuchsia gods or chic negroes or exquisite women?’ he asked, laughing, stretched out beside her. He turned toward her then and said seriously, ‘Before, there was nothing. A grey, nothing kind of life.’ But he couldn’t lie still for long and soon pushed himself back up on his elbow, speaking in a whisper, not even really to her. ‘I didn’t know places like this existed.’
Her eyes were closing again, and sensing weakness Hugo scooped her upper body toward him.
‘None of that! We’ll have none of that. We’re not mortal tonight. Where to next? I’ve heard of a place called Lapa, full of bohemians and ruffians and brothels. The kind of people who never sleep. Let’s go there.’
Dora’s words were coming out slow and syrupy now. ‘We don’t… Nobody goes there.’
Hugo also spoke more slowly, as though trying to adjust himself to her, filing down his sharper edges. ‘Is that the royal we? All of us, or just you and me?’
‘People… like … me.’
‘Ah. The golden people.’ There was a slight cut to his voice and she wanted to protest—she would not be wanted there either. Cada macaco no seu galho, her mother used to say. Every monkey on his own branch. But she had fallen into that liminal stage before sleep, where she could still hear but not speak, and images shuffled and mixed in her mind.
When Dora felt herself waking, her eyes still flickering, she was already moving. Being moved. Carried. She opened her eyes and saw first the sun, which had fully risen now, then Hugo’s face, which was bright with sunlight, angled not toward her but at some fixed point in the distance. He was frowning slightly with the effort of carrying her, but not struggling—just concentrating on keeping her above the water.
Before she could manage any words, they were in the sea, which was as warm as the air at that time of year. Once they were chest-deep, Hugo began to sway her from side to side, creating an arc in the water with her body. She could feel the fabric of her dress fan out around her, swirling in the eddying waters.
Her eyes opened fully now, she asked him, ‘What are you doing?’
‘You fell asleep in the sand. You were covered with it. I thought you might be uncomfortable.’ He continued to move her through the water for a few minutes, like a parent teaching a child to float on her back, then turned to carry her toward the shore.
‘I can walk from here,’ she said, breaking awkwardly out of his grasp, suddenly embarrassed and swallowing some water.
On the shore he helped her out of her wet dress and offered his suit jacket, the cuffs dangling past her hands. He faced the ocean and the curve of his back muscles swelled beneath his wet, white shirt. It repeated in her head like an invocation: most beautiful. To this
day, however changed, however diminished, he remains the strongest, the most beautiful.
And so now, at the water’s edge, Dora knows she still has not stopped loving her husband, cannot give up, as she sometimes wishes she could, because she remembers the jacket and the sunrise and the benediction. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wonders: if she does everything right, everything she feels she should, might God (whom she doesn’t believe in) give her back her old life? The old, normal life when her daughter was still here. The life Luiza always insisted she never wanted. As though Dora had forced it all upon her.
Dora lets a few more waves wash over her legs, then rises from the sand and walks in the direction of the path. The urubus have hurled themselves back into a loose congregation above the water, ascending indifferently toward the sun.
LUIZA
JANUARY 1961
The family was travelling to Florida by ship when, somewhere around Trinidad, Luiza and her father sat drinking black coffee in the ship’s lounge with its panels of galloping Indians and orange polyester drapes. They were discussing all the things they could do during the four months they’d be living there (though she noticed he never mentioned the reason for their trip). She had ordered as he did, even though her tongue flexed against each bitter sip, and she tried her best to listen, a pleasant, encouraging expression fixed on her face, as he delivered the most recent catalogue of research gleaned from his dense, haphazard library. All the ways in which Florida might enchant them, the adventures they could have. There were mangrove forests—trees that grew in water!—and cypress swamps lurking with ghostly, long-throated egrets, their necks impossibly stretched and sharply bent in the middle. She wanted always to be the one person who affirmed him, a safeguard between him and those who couldn’t understand his singularity, so she tried to smile as his list continued to tumble out—he was so very fond of reciting lists. There were also swamp oak branches closing over winding estuaries and growing into tunnels of vines, a thousand reaching arms, pocked with flowers.
‘We’ll weave through them with nothing more than a raft and a pole, alligators be damned. A passageway to the dark heart of America!’
His speaking like this, as if they were lost in a fairy tale—Hansel and Gretel together beset—had always comforted her father, and her as well. But lately she felt the stories, with their dark forests close and damp around her, inviting her, impossibly, back to childhood. And even he did not seem entirely convinced by his little speeches, smiling painfully as he proclaimed the Everglades, which she knew was nothing more than a poor man’s slimy tropics.
‘I have to go,’ she said, abruptly getting up from the table and knocking over her cup. Her father half stood, reaching toward her with a napkin, his large body crouching awkwardly, causing her to take a step back. ‘I have to get some air,’ she added.
She left her drink upended, its dark, grainy puddle spilling onto the table, and hurried to the doorway. When she looked back, he was driving his thumb and forefinger apart above his brow ridge, leaving a bloodless trail in his skin, his thoughts unerasable.
As she made her way slowly along the ship’s lower deck, Luiza prickled with envy as she watched the other passengers, some cheerily playing games, others reclining in canvas deck chairs, their limbs spilling languidly over the sides. Happy, relaxed bodies enjoying the ship’s distractions while her own family twanged with anticipation. The journey to Florida alone would take nearly two weeks and her sisters were already pinging off one another, bickering, then emitting high-pitched squeals, shared jokes. Her mother had told her to think of it as a family vacation: a voyage on the famous S.S. Brasil, a visit to America. Yet the few times her sisters tried to enlist Luiza in some dull activity or other—shuffleboard, swimming in the pool, a routine for the talent show—she couldn’t seem to focus for more than half an hour at a time before guiltily slinking away, saying she had a headache. The truth was her whole body felt taut, strained. She chewed at her cuticles as the base of her spine buzzed constantly—excitement or fear, she couldn’t tell. They were off to find the miracle cure that could retrieve her father from his extreme states, and return him permanently to the flat, tenable space somewhere safely in the middle. But weren’t those vagaries also his gift—the source of his pure, undiluted genius? And more importantly, weren’t they an appropriate response to life—all the pain and joy and, as he often said, the beauty and horror of existence? And weren’t they also so fucking exhausting?
Dora had first told her about the trip to Florida while arranging flowers—poorly—at the dining-room table for a dinner party. She seemed untroubled, almost blithe about the drug study, which made Luiza fight her harder.
‘You just want to make him like everyone else,’ she said. ‘Average.’
‘Up, down—we’re always being pulled behind him.’ Dora wouldn’t look at her, and instead took up a small pair of kitchen scissors, snipping robotically at the stems in her hand, cutting them too short. ‘Don’t you ever wonder what our lives could be like if we didn’t have to follow him? If we could lead our own lives.’
‘I already know. Golf at the club. Dinner at Le Petit. Dancing at the casinos. The exact same life as everyone else we know.’
‘If all that bores you so much, find something else,’ said Dora, finally meeting her gaze before shoving three stubby gladiolus tops into the vase so that they stood, bruised and too upright, above the rest. ‘You could have a completely different kind of life—whatever you want. For myself, I just want something normal! I want to know what’s coming from one day to the next.’
‘No one knows that.’
Her mother had snorted then and turned her back to Luiza to signal she was tired of her hazy philosophical truisms.
But now, on this ship heading toward the Gulf of Mexico, Luiza did wonder what a life of her own might mean. She was nineteen, but instead of thinking about going away to school (her father had always promised to pay) or dating boys (her mother was forever pointing out nice young men), she was accompanying her family to Florida as a glorified, unpaid nanny and caretaker.
‘And what kind of life could that be if I’ll always be stuck babysitting?’ Luiza had asked her mother’s back. ‘Why can’t we bring the maids? Why should I have to look after the girls?’
Dora clutched a handful of wilting stems in one hand and wiped the other on Maricota’s old apron. ‘What else do you have to do?’
As her mother’s question came back to her, Luiza was struck by the realization that soon she might be able to—might have to—live on her own. Her breath caught in her chest. Would she even know where to go, what to do, how to be, if not in proximity to her father? If she didn’t have to be his echo. What would it be like if she wasn’t tethered to him, always calculating his distance from earth’s flat surfaces, predicting when he might next wheel away or plummet. Then retrieving him, reviving him. Taking crusted dishes, stale underwear, empty pill bottles off his bed, unfolding his clean socks. Hope and dread—could there be a life in between?
You’re not responsible for him. Even now she could hear her mother’s voice. It’s chemical. Stop mythologizing a disease. Dora always made it sound so simple, as though he was nothing more than the competing chemicals in his brain, which, if acted upon by some magical drug, could restore him to a neutral, unmodulated self. Without moods, without mercury. But to Luiza, the moods were him. His mind, his soul—could a drug act on those, take them too? Maybe it would leave him transfigured, a Frankenstein version of himself, patched together and only half alive. Or maybe it would take just the damaged parts, the suspicion and the glassy eyes and the worst, dead days. The part that could cut through them so casually; the part that had, on Dora’s birthday a few years before, made a toast at dinner to her glorious cunt. (Dora should have known what was coming given the way everyone kept imploring him: Slow down, Hugo. You’re wearing us out, Hugo. Now she and her mother have an arrangement, and such entreaties are Luiza’s cue to make excuses, get him away bef
ore things requiring morning apologies are said.)
Later that infamous night, after their dinner guests had long gone home, she woke to find her father in her room, his eyes ferociously alive.
‘I’m going to take you to the mountains and show you snow!’ he said. It was three a.m. ‘We’ll drive for hours.’
But then he backed the car into a cedar tree on the sidewalk, so instead they rifled through the garage until they found their musty old roller-skates and skated down the street in the dark, Luiza shrieking with happiness because her body couldn’t contain the feeling, and it spurted out of her in shrill, almost painful sounds that she hadn’t known she could make. Then her mother came out, pleading in her see-through nightgown: a neighbour had phoned and said someone was screaming outside their house. But her father just took Luiza by the hand and they skated away. Outside the gates, she wasn’t afraid as long as she was with him. That was back when she still loved him unequivocally.