by Sarah Faber
Now Evie clutches her mallet with both hands while Magda tries to wrench it away.
Darlings, please don’t quarrel over such silly things.
But they don’t answer, don’t even turn their faces toward her. They continue playing their game. Because they haven’t heard? Or because she hasn’t said it? These days, she keeps catching herself talking to someone in her mind, pleading for little mercies, and apologizing too. For what’s been lost, for what she’s failed to save. Gone are their sweet, daily rituals, their family habits and pilgrimages. The girls in their tidy, pressed school uniforms feeding scraps to the birds, the trips to Ipanema to visit her parents and to their little summer house in Petrópolis, outside the city. Trips to church with the maids, where she imagined they found—as she had once—warmth from a peripheral god. All the things that shape a child’s life, make them believe that the world is safe and predictable. She catches herself promising to no one in particular—to them she supposes, or her not-God—that they first just have to do this one thing, just get there, and then things can go back to how they were before everything changed. But things have been changing for so long, which point on the chronological line of their lives is really before? And what was it like?
Yes. There was a before. She looks again at Hugo and thinks of that pristine and hopeful time when they glowed and were beautiful—in all the old pictures, they wore nothing but white. Once, they went up into the sky together. She can’t quite remember now how they had ended up in the balloon with his colleague, an engineer and sometimes hot air balloon pilot. It was in those early, heady days when it seemed like Hugo could do anything, and convince her to come along. Sometimes that meant they ended up in a scandalous club with cracked plaster in Lapa, sitting on the bent knees of cross-dressers, everyone reeking of cachaça, though she’d sworn she’d never go to such a place. But that day it meant holding her hands over her ears as a large stainless steel fan filled the silk of a giant balloon with air. He kept saying how beautiful it would all be: gliding away from the earth with no sense of elevation or even movement, just the shrinking of the world beneath you. This was how he liked to seduce her, impress her, dazzle her: with new worlds. Things she had never seen. It was, at that point, still thrilling. Not yet exhausting.
‘Think of it,’ he kept saying. ‘This is how we have our first accounts of what industrial Victorian cities looked like, what the Civil War battlefields looked like. We take it for granted, but before airplanes, they couldn’t have known. These balloons changed the world, helped incite the French Revolution.’
And he told her that balloons were, by their nature, democratic because for the first time there was a spectacle in which no authorities could intercede, that ascension could not be sequestered for the private, privileged few. It belonged to the many. For the first launch, rather than risk human lives, they sent up a duck, a chicken, and a goat from Versailles and more than a hundred thousand people watched. And when that famous citizen balloonist, the physician Pilâtre de Rozier, launched himself into the air only to have his balloon swallowed by blue flames, he shattered on the rocks of Croy.
‘Fifteen hundred feet, he fell. A foot separated from a leg. He swam in his own blood, I read.’ As de Rozier’s balloon came down, the gathered crowd reached up, extended their arms, as though by this involuntary movement they could, as one, halt the fall, push him back into the sky. Here Hugo’s monologue slowed and he looked at her, rapt by the images he had summoned. ‘He died so that we could experience this, so the populace could gather, spontaneous, ennobled, witnessing en masse a republic foretold.’
How beguiling these dense stories were to her then; his excitement and bravado punctuated by moments of fleeting but such earnest empathy. How large and capable and fearless he had once seemed to her. All his knowledge, the warmth of him, of his convulsing mind, radiating outward—his great strength, his muscles contracted and taut beneath her as he lifted her easily, pulled her up onto his lap, onto dance floors. So many expansive ideas, so much knowledge compressing inside him. Everyone was falling in love with him—her parents, her friends, waiters at the casinos, Bola de Nieve, the deviants of Lapa. The wayward and the divine. All eyes turned toward him and he seemed to emit a low blue light that sometimes flared, sometimes even threatened… not violence, but turbulence, rapid shifts in emotion. When had she realized that there was something more, something corroding his magnetic charm? Not then. Not when he danced one night with a mestiço man in a dress, all thin red limbs and thick, painted lips, then wept on his shoulder at the bar. He later told Dora that it was merely an act of compassion, and that he sometimes cried to disarm those around him so they might trust and feel connected to him.
‘Isn’t that a lie?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘It is a kindness. They feel less alone, less peculiar.’
And she, too, after enough drinks, enjoyed the company of misfits.
But as the balloon filled with air that day more than twenty years ago, she fell silent and thought how loud the fan was and how long it took for the fabric to inflate, and how everything being tipped on its side—the basket, the balloon—gave the impression of haphazardness, and all the many ropes appeared to be tangled as they trembled in the wind, and surely it wasn’t safe the way the pilot kept wandering into the balloon, trampling on its altogether too-thin skin that would lift them into the atmosphere. And as Hugo gently pushed her forward, she could not bear to walk in, to further bruise the fabric. So they watched from the threshold, shoes in the damp grass, and he said how it resembled stained glass, the fabric billowing and translucent, the rising sun bleeding in from behind; and she thought how that was true and how beautifully he always put things. Flames propelled into the centre of the balloon through a narrow opening, licking maliciously at nothing. She thought for a moment of the Hindenburg on fire. How did the fabric not ignite? Tipped upright, the balloon was a fat upside-down tear shivering around a blue flame. She allowed Hugo to help lift her into the basket, but when she asked how they would come down and he answered that there was an anchor on board, she grimaced. He held each of her arms and brought his face down to hers and said, ‘If you really don’t want to go, we won’t.’ She was struck once again by the size and the strength of him, towering over her—Six-foot-four? Six-foot-five? She was too embarrassed to ask. Her father had been a slight man and she had no brothers—she’d never been so close to such a large, strong man, and the force of his body and his words seemed to physically repel the possibility of disaster.
‘Let’s go,’ she said.
It was true what he’d told her—there was no bumping along the ground or feeling of surging suddenly, violently upward. Just a gliding, and the falling away of the earth, the shrinking of relative distance, and the disorienting knowledge that they were leaving the ground without feeling any movement. Gas roared above them, releasing and burning at intervals. His arms around her vibrated, giving off heat, and she thought about how the songs were all wrong: you do not fall. In love, you are aloft. Lifted away.
They have a photograph from that day, after they landed, the two of them standing in front of the basket of the still-inflated balloon. You look like Fitzgerald and Zelda! someone had once said upon seeing it, and Dora had been flattered—it mattered to her that people found them beautiful. But maybe it was an augury: they, too, were doomed.
She wonders now if there was something more in that story about de Rozier. Had Hugo tried to warn her? The balloon ride happened before there were any signs, before they even had children. Perhaps he wasn’t strong enough for the stress and pressure and worry of being a parent, her sometimes-fourth child. She should have saved him too—lifted him back into the sky. Or maybe it would have happened no matter what, no matter who he was with, no matter where or how he lived. How will she manage him, get him on the boat, if anything happens between now and then? How will she keep them all together, pointing north? Stop it. She must think of the girls now, not him. How to help them th
rough this. But he takes up so much space—in a room, in her mind. The sun to all their lesser moons. The girls still look at him as though he’s the smartest man who ever lived. She wants to shake them, tell them he steals half of it from books and the other half is made up. But who could say which half? That’s what he counts on. And then their little necks would hinge, deadheads on a stem, hearts broken like she broke Luiza’s. Her tongue grinds at the back of her teeth, and now who’s making that awful noise? Evie protesting, whining shrilly like a little girl.
‘I don’t care about the rules, I just want to try hitting. The. Baaaall!’ She streaks across the lawn in front of Dora, grasping a mallet tightly to her chest and heading for the house, while Magda follows, brandishing her own mallet like a tomahawk. Poor Evie. Without Luiza to protect her, Magda is always after her, to torment her, to fix her clothes, to inflict some ‘game’ on her.
Dora calls out to them, ‘I see you!’ She really says it this time, out loud but too late; the side door to the house is banging shut behind them.
When they see her approaching, they freeze, startled by her attention. It catches Dora behind her ribs, how they sometimes stare at her, as though she’s of some other, unwelcome species who lives only to frown and rebutton the backs of their dresses. But she musters herself and wipes their dust-streaked faces with her skirt. She wants to tell them she loves them, wants to gather them to her and say, I am your mother and I have shattered on the rocks of Croy, but I’ll put myself back together, and your father is still the strongest, most brilliant man who ever lived and we will deliver you from limbo, we promise, and your sister isn’t gone, she is alive inside each of us. Forgive us, we love you. Forgive us, please.
But there are no florid little speeches, no oaths of love. Instead she cries, brightly, and too loudly, ‘I had a call from Judeetchy. Lambretta had her calf today!’
The neighbours in Petrópolis who want to buy their country house, their refuge. The place Luiza loved the best, where Dora can’t bring herself to return. Where, in those early days after Luiza was born, they were almost innocent. That little house surrounded by owls and waterfalls and people they’ve known for decades; the neighbours with all their animals, which she never let her children have.
MAGDA
‘You know,’ their mother says, ‘when we move to Canada, you can have a dog. But while we’re still here, let’s try to have fun!’
This is how their mother reminds Magda and Evie they’ll soon be moving to Canada, just after she cried incomprehensibly about a neighbour’s new calf. Now she bends down to clean their faces with the hem of her skirt, licking the fabric between each gentle wipe. Magda exchanges a quick glance with Evie, both crinkling their noses at the saliva but not wanting to protest this unusual tenderness.
‘And remember,’ Mama adds, ‘tonight will be your last chance to say goodbye to our friends.’ Then she walks away before they can say anything, and Evie wanders off to find the maids.
Magda goes to her room to change, imagining how she and Evie will have to stand at the door like they always do and greet the guests and shake hands. How d’you do? This isn’t even a real party. She knows the real ones happen at the Copacabana, where children aren’t allowed. Luiza used to tell her and Evie the gossip: the biggest musicians who played and who had flirted with whom, and who got terribly drunk and fell down. The parties at the Copacabana were amusing, Luiza said, but not really that special because nobody really listened to anything anyone had to say—everyone just talked over one another. And Magda isn’t fooled: tonight is really just the same cocktail hour they have every year to mark the start of Carnival. Like their toy house or toy tea set, this is a toy party.
Once she is dressed, she goes into the living room and stretches her legs out on the window seat, feeling weary. So they’re moving, for real this time—who cares? She hates it here anyway. She hates the dark upholstery of their furniture, and that crystal duck on the coffee table. She hates this whole house, with its starched linens and bunches of hard, glittering amethyst grapes sitting in a bowl on the coffee table, never eaten. She hates the heavy silver roosters that she used to chase Evie with, terrifying her, and the new white, broadloom carpets that her mother put in to make the house look nicer for buyers but which make Magda sneeze. She hates how the house is always quiet, always still, when really her family is caught in a tempest: the trees in the yard should be plunging, stripped of their leaves, the sinks filled with stinking water, maggots in the wet, rotting carpets. That’s how it should be. That’s how it feels. In her mind’s eye, the garden is filled with uprooted plants, slimy flowers in smashed pots, insects’ wings torn off their bodies. But really, the flowers stand upright, turning their bright faces to watch her whenever she walks by. And the sun burns on—never any shade—and grains of pollen drift prettily through its beams. And the birds still sing, and Cat, the then-kitten Luiza brought home last year, still stalks through the tall grass. Only the gardenia plant, forlorn and neglected, seems to have realized what’s happened: its leaves film over with a black coating that Magda wipes off daily with a soft cloth.
Mama and Papa live on faraway planets. Their eyes are empty or pitifully sad, depending on the number of cocktails drunk. And Evie, little stray, always wandering, hovering right at the edge of this hole into which the rest of them have already fallen. Evie still sees flowers as they really are. She sees the sun, and it makes her feel warm. Some days Magda wants to push her back from that edge, take her away to somewhere bright and clean, feed her jam sandwiches. Other days she wants to yank the hem of her dress and bring her tumbling down like a rag doll, ribs snapping as she falls. Down here with the rest of them. With Luiza gone, and their parents barely here, Magda needs Evie in ways she can’t say. Yet Evie seems changed somehow too. Even if their parents haven’t, Magda has noticed the bruises on her knees, her scraped hands—how she’s become more distant and reckless than usual, running off into the trees, wanting to be on her own. But Evie is always changing, always trembling like a weak wind or a leaf. She can’t cope. She’s told Magda that her body feels everything, every movement, so she changes with whatever changes around her. But Magda keeps herself very still, so she’s more like a tree trunk than a leaf. Instead of her body, it’s her mind that grabs hold of everything. Evie remembers stories, conversations, people’s faces, things they did when they were little, but Magda remembers information, place names, even dates. Important things. She is the Smart One.
Some part of Magda wants to move to Canada—soon, everyone keeps saying it will be soon—a blank, white horizon where everything will be new, where no one will know that Luiza’s gone and their family is broken. But she can’t picture it, this empty space; a world without Luiza, or the maids. Who will sing to her at night, or tell her stories until she falls asleep? Magda has always liked the old family tales best, especially the ones about adventure and peril, people travelling into dark, unknown places. Her parents tell these stories as habitually as prayers, so that even the maids know them all by heart. But lately Maricota has been telling Magda a story she hasn’t heard before. Maricota says Luiza told it to her and she’s been saving it until Magda was ready.
‘Your people,’ she whispered one night last week at Magda’s bedside after Evie fell asleep. ‘After they left America, they journeyed up the Amazon for days by canoe. The first night they slept in a fazenda, stretched on heaps of rice, rags around their heads to keep the grains out of their ears.’
But as they went on, they saw fewer and fewer homes—just the occasional hut thatched with palm leaves built into the steep riverbanks. More like corncribs than homes. So much living matter but so few people, and sensed all around them, beyond that dense veil of trees, creatures consuming other creatures. Invisible things being eaten.
Suddenly, a young mother grabbed the boat driver’s hand and asked, ‘But where are all the people?’ even though he couldn’t understand her. Then her little girl made a church with her first two fingers, then a
steeple, and then she turned her little hands inside out and showed her mother her wriggling inner fingers. The woman hugged her daughter and said what a great adventure it would all be and never again showed her fear.
‘The girl grew up to be fierce and smart and always knew which bends in the river were favoured by alligators and which months brought the worst rains.’
When Maricota leaned over to kiss her goodnight, Magda wouldn’t let her go. All their lives, the maids have given them everything that mattered: love and church and time. Countless meals in the kitchen with Maricota and Odete while their parents ate alone or with guests in the dining room, living their parallel lives. The warm church pews where Magda and her sisters sat conjoined, pressed between the maids, heads hung and breathing incense; Magda knew all the prayers by rote even if she couldn’t understand the words, their constancy making her still inside. All the maids’ stories about their huge, devout, warm-hearted families: Maricota’s tender mother with eighteen children, one who nearly died as a baby. She swore to God that if he spared her child’s life, she’d never cut her hair, so now when she sweeps her dirt floors, her hair is piled impossibly high above her head, a thickly coiled braid. Because of the maids, their consoling tales, these are things Magda has always known.
And now, sitting in the window seat, Magda wants rain more than anything. So much rain. She wants rivers and floods. Black clouds, cracked branches, birds falling from the skies, horses trampling flower beds, Mother’s fruit trees stripped bare. She wants the skies ripped open. And she wants fountains of water to shoot out of the ocean floor and spit Luiza up from its insides.