by Sarah Faber
When she shuddered awake, Dora immediately narrowed her eyes to see through the gloom. Hugo’s place by the window was empty, as was his place beside her in the bed. Adrenaline surged through her. She was up quickly on the front pads of her feet, and when she opened the door of the nursery, she didn’t expect to see anything horrible exactly, but she sensed something new, an unfamiliar vibration in the air. And there it was, Hugo’s great, strong body, standing sentinel by Luiza’s crib, his back to the door. He turned when she approached, looking toward but through her, his face inanimate but for his mouth, all affect drained. His voice was toneless, unmodulated.
‘That hair, like the sun, I had that hair but mine was yellow also like the sun but the yellow sun not the red sun. That child I was with yellow hair, I killed that child and I can’t find him. When we grow up we kill the children that we were, the purest versions of ourselves. We should instead age backwards and die as single cells, never knowing that we had died, having given birth to our own child-selves, and then for a time we’d all be children together and she would never be alone and never kill her most beautiful self. Where did that little boy go, that sun-haired boy? I killed him. This poor child. Who will take care of this poor, poor child.’
And though the small folds of Luiza’s eyes remained closed, she began to squirm and become unswaddled. Dora had to get him away from the crib, out of the room. So she knelt before him and wrapped her arms around his trunk and pressed her hot cheek against his cool pant leg, for he was still dressed in his day clothes, and tried to pull him back from an invisible but definite precipice, draw him back into the shared secrecy of their little family. For the first time (but not the last), she was afraid that some vital part of Hugo had been irretrievably excised; he was blighted. She waited for his face to rearrange itself into an identifiable expression like it had the past few nights, the corners of his mouth turning strangely upwards as he wept, an inverted grimace, collapsed but familiar and, yes, like that of a child. But he remained somehow inflexible, even as he allowed himself to be led back to bed where, slow and susurrous, she tucked him in, remembering how much she’d always disliked street clothes touching bedsheets. Remembering when such things mattered.
After that night, she began sleeping with Luiza in the guest room and soon hired help. And now, when she remembers this time, before the maids came, it gouges something in her. Hugo’s mind, his body—these, she believed, might be unrecoverable to her. So she wrapped herself around her baby daughter instead and absorbed the warmth of her rosy skin and listened for her shorter, infant breaths, trying to breathe in time with them. And when, years later, Luiza began to cling to Hugo whenever he left the house, Dora told herself it was because he needed their daughter more—needed more of everything—and Luiza was performing his need back to him, just like Hugo had once done for the freaks and the cross-dressers weeping in derelict bars. But still the amputation was shocking—the heat of Luiza’s body pressed against her own in sleep, climbing onto her lap, gone from her now. Only Hugo could hug her, hold her hand as they walked along the shore. Hadn’t she saved Luiza from her father? And then dutifully, as a mother should, kept that rescue a secret from both of them?
Someone takes the seat beside Dora at the table, and she comes slamming back down to the present, into the hard wooden seat at the Municipal Theatre, her ears suddenly filled with the crash of cymbals, some woman’s light-hearted protests (‘You never did and I won’t hear any more about it!’), some man’s low-throated chiding (‘You know absolutely that I did’). A gold streamer has fallen across her lap. Her friends have all gone off dancing and Hugo hasn’t returned.
‘You’re in the clouds tonight.’
The voice is muffled, stifled by a hideous mask with a monkey’s fanged underbite and large, protruding ears. Still, Dora recognizes it, but then she’s known him since they were teenagers and everything about him—his voice, his movements—is familiar. But she waits, motionless and silent, trying to suppress a smile. They sit like that until Dora leans forward and gently pulls away the mask, looking around quickly as she does so: she can’t see Hugo, or this man’s wife. And there it is—this face she hasn’t seen for almost a year, except at the funeral, where it would have been awkward to speak for the first time in so long, but where, touchingly, he had wept. Carmichael’s face is lined around the eyes where the holes of his mask have imprinted the skin, but smiling and welcome.
‘You didn’t come to the party at the house,’ Dora says finally.
‘I came here,’ he says.
She’s aware of how close they’re speaking, how careless he seems. There is whisky on his breath. ‘I see that,’ she says, leaning back.
‘I thought it might be uncomfortable.’
‘It would have been. Yet you came last year.’
He runs the palms of his hand over his face now, rubbing so hard the skin stretches. ‘Yes, that was very uncomfortable.’
‘Thank you for your condolences. Afterwards,’ says Dora, handing him the mask, almost wishing he’d put it back on. ‘That was very kind.’
‘I should have liked to come see you, but I thought—’
‘No, it’s better that you didn’t.’
He casts about for something to say. She doesn’t help. Eventually he asks her, ‘How are the girls?’
‘Well. As well as they can be.’
‘The service was lovely.’
‘I saw you there,’ she says, nodding slowly. ‘It was good of you to come.’
More silence. ‘And Evie and Magda, they’re well?’
‘They’re fine.’
‘Sorry. You just said.’ Carmichael puts the mask back on. ‘Well, this isn’t goodbye. Alice said there was an invitation for the Copacabana in a couple of weeks?’
‘Yes, that will be goodbye,’ says Dora, meaning it as a caution but detecting a current of sadness running through her own voice that she hadn’t expected.
He stands, takes her hand, and, bending toward her, touches it to the hard plastic mouth over his own.
As he walks away, Dora thinks of all those times Hugo left her with just the servants and the children—beginning that year he went to England for the war, when Luiza was just a few months old. So many husbands and fathers were going off to war at the time, she knew it was selfish to feel lonely, and he was only gone for a year—far less time than some. And he returned, unhurt. But then there were the times he went into the hospital, sometimes for a month or more—that went on for years. Being alone became unbearable, and she was often still lonely even after he came home. And then there was Carmichael—coaxing, bass notes—a physical approximation of her husband if she drank enough. They promised: fun and brief. A diversion. But it ended painfully when she insisted on their original terms—it meant nothing and no one would ever know. She held him ruthlessly to that promise despite knowing that she, too, had broken the rules. That she had loved him.
HUGO
Hugo must get outside, must go and move and feel unfettered. He’s attended the parties and balls. He has played along. But he won’t forget Luiza, or the letter. For the past two days since they returned from Carnival, he has shut himself in the office as the contents of his house diminished around him, the maids packing, hovering occasionally at the door of his study to see if they can move any more boxes, as Maricota does now.
‘Not yet, Maricota,’ he says, beginning to undo the first few buttons of his shirt. He goes to the door, cuffs and collar open as he greets her. ‘But here, would you like to take the shirt from my back instead? Here, have my tie.’
‘Claro que não!’ she says, then walks away, muttering under her breath. The best offence is a good defence. If he makes her uncomfortable enough, she’ll leave him alone and he won’t be discovered going through Dora’s old letters, her desk. He locks the door behind the maid. You deserve better. He’s said nothing to her about what he found—it’s proof of nothing. Proof only that someone loved—or loves—her. So far it’s the only trace. He
can find nothing else and the air in here is stifling. The shafts of light that fall across the floor from beneath the half-drawn shades are too thin, their glow too meagre.
He shuffles the letters and documents before him, intending to confer some sort of order, align their edges into a tidy stack. But there is a bristling energy in his hands and three of Odete’s potent cafezinhos in his blood, and the papers fan awkwardly in his grasp, their corners jutting at all angles like the points of a dangerous, asymmetrical star. So go for a walk, he orders himself. This is not the time to handle thin parchment or precious things. Find the sun.
As Hugo places his hand on the car door handle, it’s like a miracle; the spotless chrome reflects the sun above and also the one growing inside him, for he has swallowed a star. It is still tiny, embryonic, and will most likely stay contained within him for days, growing but not too quickly. In a week or two it will almost certainly ignite, fluorescing sparks starting in his fingertips before spreading through his entire body.
As he slides onto the warm, white leather behind the steering wheel, the car suddenly feels like the wrong place to be, even once the top is down. He is too constrained, a man alone in a metal box. Instead he drives to the nearest trolley station, where he mounts a rickety streetcar and hangs off the side, gripping the metal handle, riding free and exposed into the city that made him. He glides above the tram lines toward the neighbourhood of Copacabana, the horizon before him vaster than what his eye can behold, and he has to turn his head along its axis to take it all in, to look past the beach with its wall of white high-rises, to the mountains that line the water’s edge, then the open ocean, flashing and endless beneath the noonday sun.
When he dismounts, he imagines leaping gracefully but instead lands clumsily and stumbles, finally landing on his knee and one arm. Onlookers laugh from the streetcar, but Hugo rises quickly with a little jump and takes a bow. Downtown the streets are congested and he feels the familiar rush of energy, the orphan thrill. Today the city feels pristine, more vibrant than it has in years. He heads toward the Rua Tonelero propelled by some internal compass that pushes him forward in no identifiable direction; just that way. Sometimes he crosses the street because he is suddenly and irrevocably compelled to be on the opposite side, but still he sticks to his route, ordained yet mysterious. And now he is here, where he was always meant to be, in front of this single-storey corner building, with its low stone wall topped by wide windows and a terracotta tile roof, ferns spilling out of the window boxes that line the entire facade below a red scalloped awning. Le Petit Club, where diners lunch on tiny portions of rich, fussy food in tribute to the Rio of the 1920s and all its early pretensions, when rich women wore French fashions and Mayor Passos imported sparrows so that this city’s squares might echo with the imagined birdsong of Paris. But Hugo’s memory of it is of squandered caviar, because when he and Dora brought Luiza here for dinner once, she squashed the iridescent red eggs with the back of her spoon. Dora said that if she would not eat what she was served, she should go hungry, but Hugo insisted they buy her a burger on the way home, which she ate happily. In every memory now, he searches for clues, for what might have signalled Luiza’s disappearance, even though, as he reminds himself daily, hourly, it might have been a terrible accident. But it doesn’t feel like an accident, and when he’s like this, just barely starting to soar, everything is instinct.
You deserve better. Better than his ability to divine direction from the hot wind that gusts in from the ocean? Detect minute shifts in the air currents? Nothing is better than this.
Like his awareness now of too many bodies brushing past, creating a cool, slightly agitating breeze at his neck. He wants to keep studying the menu posted outside the restaurant, hoping he appears like a potential customer rather than a nostalgic supplicant, but there is the hum of constant movement behind him, the sense that he, too, should be moving. Aspirants and pederasts, Coca-Cola kids and the petite bourgeoisie, migrants and petty thieves. Hawkers, beauty queens, dope dealers. They are all blowing past him on the street. And the noise too; it assaults in a way it never has before, and goads him to keep going, as does the stench, a soup of food cooked in the streets, cloying perfumes, and the far-off but persistent smell of raw sewage from the neighbourhood’s crumbling infrastructure. Before the city can spread any farther, before its buildings can grow any higher, before the whole damn place can swallow his past, he will retrieve his memories and go. Though his feet are stuck fast, his mind now wanders among the billboards, among the remaining colonial and art deco buildings, among the featureless high-rises filled with those trying to buy their little bit of The Copacabana Way of Life.
Still, his memories live in these streets—all those nights of dancing and drinking and swarming with joy—and the degradation brought with it a kind of decadence and seediness he has sometimes sought. But at times, the self-conscious glamour of Anos Dourados—the Golden Years, so named even as they were happening—had been stifling, and so he occasionally fled to the bohemian quarter, at first with Dora and then without. All those nights he left her so he could scrape away the posh, feel less bathed in manufactured auto-celebration. Had she, too, gone somewhere else? It had never occurred to him before now. And all the times he was away—the war, the hospitalizations. A life without him. He never thought to ask.
But sometimes he had to get away, from everyone trying to laugh louder than the person beside them, drained champagne bottles tipped on end in buckets of melting ice, women’s pencilled brows smudged, erased in places. A tepid, fetal-looking shrimp snarled in tinsel and dropped into an ashtray. Eventually, he had to struggle to keep pace. Then, curtains drawn at midday. Sleep for weeks. Then back again. Copacabana was hedonism, miscegenation, but it was also more: the most. An escape from labour and reason and pragmatism. You could come and live a life entire, never leave because there was no need—it had everything. Until you died, that is, because there are no cemeteries in the neighbourhood. That would bring down the mood.
He commands himself, Keep walking. There can be no stasis when embarking on an odyssey. He strains one last time to see them again—Dora and himself, Luiza brandishing her tiny spoon—through the reflection of the huge, modern building that glances off the window of Le Petit Club, but they’ve gone. And then he, too, is moving, heading in a southwesterly direction, beneath the rubber trees that line the sidewalks of Domingos Ferreira, branches reaching toward one another to create a canopy above the cars honking below. Above the trees, air-conditioners jut from windows overhead, dripping condensation from apartment buildings onto the sidewalks below, onto his head. No matter. Soon he will be washed clean by the waves.
When he arrives at Copacabana Beach, its miles of white sand, bounded by the mosaic sidewalks in front and green mountains on either side, stretches out into impossibly blue water dotted with bathers. He has seen it thousands of times and yet today he can’t see it, not really. He sees instead the beach near their house, the one that took her, superimposed on top. It’s dusk now and he cannot see her well, but he can hear a woman splashing in the waves, laughing. He has to fight the instinct to jump into the water with her, just like that night when Luiza turned fifteen. At the time he could feel inside him the beginnings of a pleasant straining, that still-gentle effervescing, much like he does tonight. Not content to sit around the freshly polished silver tea service from India after dinner, he performed. He dazzled. But his laughter must have become too loud, too fierce, because Dora, glaring, finally said to him, through smiling, clenched teeth, ‘Hugo, love—maybe you’ve delighted our guests long enough. You look so tired.’
It was the wrong thing to say. He was the opposite of tired, and he could feel the tension in his skin from just how very awake he was. It was Dora, he understands now, who was tired. You deserve better.
‘Mother!’ Luiza hissed at the time. ‘Why can’t you just let him be?’
But Dora knew better than Luiza what was coming.
‘My dear wife,’
he said, ‘if you’d rather I leave you and this gathering of wholly mediocre minds you’ve assembled here tonight to bore our daughter and me senseless, nothing would make me happier. Come, Luiza, let us away.’
He grasped Luiza’s hand then and pulled her, almost skipping, away from the dinner party so that she, too, had to skip to keep up. He noted rare tears forming in Dora’s eyes, but there could be no turning back now. Luiza giggled as he lifted her high off the veranda steps and twirled her next to the azaleas before they unlocked the gate and sprinted into the dark.
They half ran, half danced all the way to the beach that night, and when she complained of blisters, Hugo crouched down so she could climb onto his back as he cantered along the dirt road, kicking up pebbles and dust. As soon as they reached the sand, he let her down, pulled off his shoes and tie, and made for the breakwater of large rocks. She had loved this beach more than any of the other famous Brazilian beaches they’d visited—Copacabana, Ipanema, Urca—because it had the softest gold-hued sand and seemed to stretch on forever, a headland at the far end that he couldn’t imagine ever reaching. A few times they had tried walking toward them, walked for more than an hour, but the bluffs appeared no closer than when they’d begun.
Hugo held her hand and helped her clamber over the dark, slick rocks until they reached the very end of the breakwater. The moon, not quite full, shone in pieces in the water, and they sat down, not caring that the seats of their clothes were soaked. He took a flask from his breast pocket and intoned mock-seriously that she was allowed to have just a few sips because it was her birthday after all and she was practically a woman now. But she took too much, so he pulled the flask back saying she should always remember that drunken women weren’t appealing, never mind that he and his friends, the women included, were drunk most of the time.
But Luiza ignored his warnings. She flung her arms above her head, then around his neck—excited as she had been as a child, before terms like ‘hypomanic’ and ‘psychosis’ had intruded, colonized her vocabulary, her perceptions of him. When she used to tell him he was the funniest, the tallest, the smartest, the most.