by Sarah Faber
Magda leads Evie to another vendor selling lança-perfume. She buys a can and sprays it on her arm, then Evie’s, tightening the skin above their wrists. Then she sprays their dresses, and they breathe in the oddly appealing chemical scent. It smells almost sweet and clean, and makes them so dizzy, they begin to giggle. Then Magda drags Evie back into the crowd.
As the sun goes down, the mountains that surround the bay seem larger, emerging above the horizon like the lumpish, threatening shapes of sleeping giants. All around the girls stalk ever more curious creatures, disguised and unidentifiable, their contours sharper now. Passersby take pictures of mock high-fashion models in ski masks who tower on deeply muscled legs and rough feet in too-small heeled sandals, striking poses in the middle of street. A group of skeletons thrust white crucifixes toward anyone who looks at them. Behind them swarms another faceless pack all in red, their eyes winking through holes slashed in their peaked hoods. Evie hears a far-off yelping—a child or an animal? Or a voice saying, Go.
‘How long have we been here?’ Evie asks no one in particular before reaching for Magda’s hand. ‘I want to go home!’
But Magda shakes off her sister’s sweaty palm. ‘No way! I want to see the parade. That’s the whole point.’
‘But maybe we’ve gone this way for too long. Maybe we should go with them,’ she says, motioning to the stream of people moving in the opposite direction, back down toward the beach where their hotel is. ‘Maybe they’re the good stream.’
‘Come on,’ Magda hisses impatiently, her big snake of a sister. Irmãs.
And Magda is off, Evie drifting alongside her again, almost light as snow but for her wrist, which is throbbing and sticky where Magda keeps pulling on it, pulling her, pulling the waves of bodies and light and colour that follow them. Evie wants to tell her that there are sparks falling from her dress, but it’s all she can do to keep up.
It’s almost dark now and people are lighting small torches that they hold in front of their faces like candles, but these have longer, blazing flames. Again Evie wants to ask Magda: how long have they been here? But before she can remember how to speak, the floats begin to wobble down the boulevard and she sees things she’s only imagined or dreamt of until now. There are men painted gold riding golden camels, golden lions. Women in veils—The Arabian Nights!—blowing kisses. Gleaming urns full of flowers. Angels with harps. Spirals of stars. On almost every float that goes by sit women atop some kind of rotating pedestal, blowing more kisses; in wheelbarrows held up by winged, plaster cherubs twice their size, more women. So many women, so many kisses; Evie is awash in them and can feel them land, cooling her hot skin. Everything around them is gleaming now, alight with gold. Women astride a giant sphinx; a brass band in shirts of glinting fabric; spangles hanging from every moving part of the floats, which are edged in twinkling fairy lights. At the rear of the floats sit young boys manning machines that shoot sparks, smoke, phosphorescence, not bothered by the kaleidoscope of paper streamers and confetti that fall around them. I am not afraid! Evie thinks how much Luiza would have loved it, to the see the night so lit up.
Magda huddles around Evie, sprays more lança-perfume on each of their arms, which they inhale deeply. Magda begins to laugh again, the fumes from the can seeming always to relax her, but Evie can feel herself swerving without meaning to, careening into others with each surge of worry. Just a short time ago, she loved everyone—what has changed? Beside them a man wearing a toga and a ring of flowers on his head smiles and waggles his finger, tsk-tsk-tsking in aped disapproval, and Evie thinks his crown is almost like the one she made for Luiza at the going-away party last year. She wonders if he would give it to her, and is still trying to remember the right words to ask when she’s poked in the back of the head. Behind her, a constellation of twirling parasols spin around and around like white planets. But when Evie reaches out to touch one, the woman holding it turns to face her. White face, black mouth, black eyes. A skull, a ghost. Another negro in white greasepaint.
Once more Evie stumbles, but this time no one helps and Magda is gone again. Her legs feel heavy as she tries to lift herself up, but the ground is littered with dirty paper and shards of glass from broken bottles and there seems to be no safe place to put her hands. Finally, she is up again but swooning. It’s too much now, too chaotic, her insides are vibrating painfully from all the music and dancing and inhaled fumes. Too many boundaries dissolved—between men and women, black and white. It’s more sinister now than beautiful, yet everyone here is smiling and laughing—at her? Maybe they want to trick her, or they think she’s stupid for no longer being able to tell what they really are, for believing they are all magical, like Luiza: between two worlds. But really it’s a joke and they’re all just wearing gaudy costumes and everyone but Evie knows her sister is gone.
Then she sees it: a halo of shining dust, hair like points of light. Swaying down the boulevard, bright and terrible, its head on fire in the night. Everyone claps and cries out, but they see only a mulatto butterfly, neither man nor woman—or both—wrapped in cheap fabric and sequins. Evie sees it truly: a dark angel with cormorant wings. And it wears a flower crown, just like the laughing toga man. Like Luiza. Evie is queasy with love and dread.
‘Take me home, Magda.’ She means to shout but her voice is thin and weak. And Magda still isn’t there. Evie looks around frantically and finally spots her sister on the sidewalk arguing with a vendor under tissue paper lanterns. Again Evie tries to scream—she knows if the creature sees her, she’ll burn—but her throat is closing and nothing comes.
And now the bird-angel is right in front of her, leaning forward, handing her a flower pulled from Luiza’s crown. It can hear what she’s thinking. It breathes her breath.
Tchau, beleza.
It exhales flame and rain, and Evie is clinging to the boulevard by just her fingertips, tiny hands grasping. Still the creature comes for her, inhaling essential parts of her—her heart, fragments of bone. She’s nothing but a scorched twig now.
‘Evie!’
The creature shrinks, drawing back into the distance, and soon Magda is once again dragging her away by the arm.
‘That was a man, you know!’ Magda sounds afraid, then angry. ‘I don’t know why men always dress up like women the first chance they get.’
Once they are free of the crowd, Magda turns to inspect her, holding her with two erect arms. Deciding she is unharmed, Magda looks at the paper flower in Evie’s hand and holds up a similar one attached to a piece of wire.
‘Oh great—then why did I spend the last of our money buying you this?’
Evie wants to tell Magda: that was not a human. It was animal, bird, lizard—all things but human. When it kissed her, Evie put her hands under the creature’s skirts. Beneath its layers, she saw things from her dreams: huge black cats, giant waves rising out of the sea. Evie tried to reach her hands in, wondering if Luiza’s crown of flowers might be there. But her fingers blistered and touched nothing. Tell. She hears again the ringing in her ears, remembers the bruises that came later, especially ugly on her stark white skin. Long sleeves in summer. Don’t tell. The way he stood there, his face still and blank and big as the moon—he never even saw her. And then he reached out. The backs of her knees sticky with sweat, dirt. I promise. She knew what Luiza’s secret was before tonight but she hadn’t understood that it was important. Luiza kept saying it didn’t matter, not to worry. Now, she can’t retrieve the words.
Besides, Magda won’t listen.
‘We have to get home,’ her sister keeps saying, striding forward, pushing through the crowd.
Home: sad, grey place where they’ll never see such things again.
DORA
At the Municipal Theatre ball on this last night of Carnival, Hugo and Dora sit at a table with their friends amid the fabric waves and painted, plywood boats, a dozen pairs of enormous eyes peering down from where the curved walls meet the ceiling. There are rows of tables like theirs, off to the side
of the crowded dance floor, all covered in white tablecloths, fresh roses, open bottles of champagne, ashtrays crammed full. The brass band is excellent, as always, stationed behind two large pillars, metallic and candy-striped, that jut forward at an angle. Dora knows she should get up and dance—Your last Carnival! chime her friends again and again—but the energy she found for last week’s cocktail party has long dissipated, and she refills her glass, vaguely hoping to retrieve some of it.
It was absurd to think that if she busied herself with parties, she wouldn’t have time to collapse. To believe that if she did what she’d always done, surely life would somehow recalibrate, become recognizable. But now amid the frothy chatter, the giddily flung wrists, she is alone—even farther from Luiza and Hugo than before.
All around her twirl gladiators, clowns, and slinky cats, gashes of colour among the many men in white tuxedos. Hugo used to love to dress up for Carnival, but tonight he wears the same tasteful uniform as most of the other men: white jacket and black tie. Dora wears an elegant white, V-neck gown with black gloves and a simple black mask over her eyes. It would have been undignified for them to dress up, but for a moment she is breathless, struck by a swift and sharp pang of nostalgia, remembering how they used to celebrate when they were first married.
Once upon a time, Hugo insisted they join the street parades, even though Dora said they were low-class. They went to a different ball every night—first to the Cassino da Urca, where they danced to Carmen Miranda before she started wearing all that silly fruit on her head, and then to the Artists’ Ball, where most of the men wore costumes, and those who didn’t were sweat-slicked beneath their short-sleeved shirts, unbuttoned almost to their navels, not a tuxedo in sight. Guests threw confetti into the air and grasped one another tightly as they moved in concentric circles around the huge room in a dance-induced trance state. And then to the beach, where everyone spread out, detritus of costumes lost in the sand, and Hugo’s smooth shaven cheek and perfect hand pressed against her thigh as she slept. Then rest for a few hours, before returning to the frenzy of dancing, drinking, sweating—bacchanalia. He always had so much energy, and she did her best to keep up. Had she noticed it then, or were her memories imprinted retrospectively by what she knew now? He hadn’t, even then, been encumbered by the physical needs of normal people. He never seemed to tire, and now she couldn’t remember him ever taking more than a few bites of food before becoming distracted, clapping his hands, and seizing whomever happened to be beside him, proclaiming, ‘Delightful! Have you ever tasted such manna? What wonderful people you all are!’ She still misses it—the fever and delirium—before she knew enough to fear what followed.
‘But you must admit, a certain elegance has gone,’ someone says over the bleating of brass instruments. ‘It’s fine in here, but out there, in the streets, it’s all pau-de-arara.’
Pau-de-arara: migrants from the northeast who come to the city in uncovered trucks. Her friends still have the Rio of their girlhoods in mind, with its wild beaches and the sense that it belonged to them. ‘There have always been the poor,’ they say, ‘but they used to be less… obtrusive.’
‘The South Zone was ours,’ they say.
Those with money, they mean. Those who are claro. Her friends sink into sentimentality when they mourn for those years they claim were untroubled. But for her, those same years were punctuated by chaos and regret. Perhaps it was better for them to leave these people behind, she thinks. People who have never lost anything.
‘Speaking of lost elegance,’ says May Buchanan in a stage whisper, ‘did you hear about Ruthie’s niece? Well, apparently she’s got history. She’s here because her parents had to fire her tutor. There was something there.’
‘Wait,’ Dora says, leaning forward now. ‘Ruthie Cavanagh? What about the girl?’
‘Her niece, Brigitta. Well you know her, Dory—wasn’t she talking to the girls at your party? Lock them up, I say!’
‘But what did the tutor do?’
‘Oh nothing, I don’t think. Ruthie even said it was all the girl’s doing. They gave him two weeks’ pay and a good reference. Ruthie’s sister wanted her somewhere far away for the summer, teach her a lesson to straighten her out.’
‘I’m off to mingle!’ Hugo says now, paying no attention to the conversation.
Is she the only one who notes the subtly higher pitch to his voice, Dora wonders, watchful as he retreats into the crush of bodies crowded into the theatre. Their friends, always so polite, pretend not to notice for as long as they can. But after all these years, all his so-called ‘visits to Canada’ whenever he was hospitalized while Dora remained at home with the girls, she’s sure they suspect the truth.
When Hugo first got sick, Dora hadn’t known what to do, who to call, where to take him. No one spoke about such things—such private matters—until they erupted, and sometimes not even then. At times the politeness and the reticence (for they were all still Americans deep down) was stifling: who could she have asked for help? His family was a continent away, and he barely kept in touch with them. Sometimes she almost believed him when he said he felt like he had been born upon arriving in Brazil, as though he had no life before. He made it clear he didn’t want to remember or discuss his past. Dull place, dull people—let us not waste our thoughts on them, was usually all he said. This is the only life I want. Let us live in the now, like the Buddhists say. So when things escalated in those early years, and he spoke too much and too fast, or he was suddenly drained of colour and took to his bed, people made excuses. Oh, Hugo—you know how he is. Probably had too much to drink. And then they were all having too much to drink, so less was noticed than might have been otherwise, and even less was said.
His ‘spells’ (Dora had, at the time, no other name by which to call them) were relatively mild at first, marked by a seductive exuberance followed by melancholy, and lasted only a few days or weeks at a time. For a time, the spells made him a more brilliant, more appealing, more exciting version of himself. Nights when they stayed out until dawn and he took her to places she’d never otherwise go and they made love for hours. But soon small, knotted obsessions began to take root—Keats’s poetry, Beethoven’s concertos—and he would stay up all night even after they’d been out to the casinos, reading and listening to music. Then things would change; he didn’t want to go out, to dance, to shimmer or seduce. And while his lows were defined, distinct, and harder for Dora to understand, there existed a word in Portuguese for his more melancholy moods. Saudade. A longing or nostalgia for a lost place or person, or something beloved that you once had, that you ached for still. So everyone said, Oh you know, Hugo—so far from home. It’s just saudade. Not just a feeling but a collective temperament that marked the Brazilian people, who were a commingled diaspora, far-flung from their native countries. It was normal, wasn’t it? It was even, perhaps, an act of empathy on his part. He was, in his heart, a true brasileiro.
Early on, there were breaks, plateaus, during which he was good and forthright, decisive and smart—himself. And enough time would lapse between each cycle of high and low that the last was nearly forgotten when the next arrived; too few and far between for a clear pattern to emerge. And the truth was, once his peculiarities—for still she had no name for them—became impossible to deny, it was really just a confirmation of what Dora had known for some time, that they were not just a quirk of personality but a thing. A condition. Something that should be named. And following the naming of it, what? She didn’t know. It worsened while she was pregnant with Luiza, when he barely touched Dora and she was surprised by how much she missed him, missed the weight and heat of him, missed the way his thick, warm arms wrapped around her in the kitchen. Even that was enough, just an embrace as she made coffee, as though he needed to hold her. Needed her. Was it her naked, pregnant body that alarmed him? The livid, purple fissures spreading from her vagina toward her belly button, like inverted veins on the surface of her skin. By this time the war had started and she wo
rried it would have seemed childish—unpatriotic!—to demand too much attention. She knew he was doing important things at work, drawing blueprints for the Allies. So she busied herself playing canasta with friends and told them Hugo was occupied with work requisitioned by the Department of Defence. Top secret. Something to do with bridges.
Everything seemed fine, and if occasionally his laugh was particularly loud, particularly abrupt, or if he ran his fingers so roughly against his scalp that it left channels in his Brylcreemed hair, then she told herself it was the stress of the war, of not sleeping well, of his new executive position, of having a baby on the way. When the baby comes, she told herself, that will help focus him. He had always loved children. He was meant to be a father.
But after Luiza was born, things only got worse. She was a colicky infant, crying for hours every day for the first few months of her life. (Was it because she sensed what was coming? Silly thought, but Dora couldn’t help it.) She noticed that Hugo became more distracted and withdrawn than normal, but so was she—they were exhausted, after all. Lack of sleep could make anyone feel crazy.
Until one night something inside him cracked in an almost audible way, as though his sane self ruptured and some other being was secreted. He was standing by the window when she entered their bedroom, and it startled her, the sight of him, so rigid. It had been almost a week since she’d seen his full height, seen him stand upright all on his own, and he seemed even larger somehow. She tried again to coax him toward the bed, but that night he wouldn’t come. He didn’t resist or get angry, he just stayed staring silently out the window, solid and inert as a granite block. Dora didn’t know what else to do.
Eventually, she climbed into bed, resolved not to fall asleep in case he moved from the room. To keep herself awake, she listed in her mind the things she loved most in Petrópolis, where they would soon return.