All Is Beauty Now

by Sarah Faber

  ‘It’s easy sometimes, when you’re young, to get caught up in making all kinds of plans. You don’t need to decide everything now.’

  ‘I don’t have to decide anything, as it turns out. It’s a relief, in a way. But I could still help people. I could tell their stories.’

  ‘How do stories help people?’

  ‘You ought to know, the Great Reader.’

  But the truth was, she had no answer.

  Her paternal grandmother was born in England and used to tell Luiza wonderful stories about growing up on the English moors amid their dense fogs. When I was a girl in England, she liked to say, we spent our holidays in the South and ate whelks on the pier. As a child, Luiza imagined whelks as beautifully intricate, the shells you pressed to your ear to hear the sea roaring back. But then Hugo said they looked like clapped-out genitals. Eventually, Luiza found out her grandmother grew up in Acton, a pleasant but dull little suburb outside London. Perhaps it was in their genes: stories and lies. Like her absurd catalogue-life.

  Carmichael become distracted then as he sometimes did when they were together. Did he want nothing more from her? To be nothing other than a family friend, a concerned uncle figure dispensing books and dry, chaste kisses when they parted?

  Yet, now, with these exquisite poems in her lap, the stink of nicotine on her fingers, she decided again that, yes, there must be more to their relationship. She turned the pages. Tall, uncertain palms.… Your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life. Inscribed in the margin: made me think of you.

  But by that night, whatever feeling Luiza had of being lifted away and grafted to something other, something more, had left her. She was tied again to her family, who didn’t want to go to the village to see the square dances—women in red wigs and freckles, men in straw hats and checked shirts—or applaud the country people dressed up as Country People. Her father felt too weak so instead they all bundled up in sweaters and wool blankets on the stone patio and watched the neighbours and the servants light lanterns, Bishop’s illegal fire balloons. With each one that rose tenuously into the sky, lines from the book came back to her. Paper chambers flush and fill with light.… Flare and falter, wobble and toss. And just as they headed for the mountainside, she saw them burst in her mind—phosphenes—splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff. Other, smarter people had already written whole swaths of her life, more beautifully than she ever could. What was left for her?

  DORA

  They agreed that Carmichael would pick up Dora early the next morning, before Hugo was awake. As she was leaving, the girls were sitting at the kitchen table bickering about something when she heard Brigitta’s name.

  ‘I don’t want you two playing with that girl, understand?’ she said, crouching between them. ‘She’s got a reputation.’

  ‘But—’ began Evie.

  ‘No buts. Just concentrate on getting your bedroom organized. I have errands to run, but when I get back, I’m going to check and see how far you’ve gotten, understand?’ When she kissed the tops of their heads, they barely looked up. They’re getting used to her absences.

  As she walked down the street to where Carmichael was waiting, she reminded herself: it’s for them, too, that she’s doing this. They all need to know. Even if she finds nothing, she must do this so that she can return herself fully to them.

  ‘There are only a few roads wide enough to accommodate cars,’ Carmichael says now, parking at the outskirts of the fishing village, before making sure all the windows are rolled up. ‘It will be easier to continue on foot.’

  Dora sits for a moment after the engine has cut, taking in a few deep breaths, but it’s not until she sees Carmichael coming around to the passenger-side door that she stirs and tries to push the door open before he can do it for her. She must not give him opportunities for chivalry, which he has always loved displaying for her. She must not let him help too much. But when she’s unable to get out of the car, he suggests a walk on the beach before they begin and her resistance dissolves. They’ve barely spoken since he picked her up, except to establish the logistics of the search. He must sense her agitation, that she’s not ready. It makes her anxious, his close attention after all this time.

  From the beach, the little village is pretty, its wooden shacks set into the lush land that slopes up from the harbour, surrounded by large green hills. Some of the stores and larger houses are painted bright colours, and a small, whitewashed colonial chapel rises above the other buildings. Small fishing boats scatter the harbour, and among them bob covered canoes, their frames like ribs fastened to tattered canopies. More canoes line the shore, raised up on wooden platforms, and nets lie spread out in the sun to dry. Across the harbour are more hills, more shacks clustered among them. Perfect places to disappear.

  When Dora’s breathing steadies again, they head away from the beach, along the dirt pathways, past a wandering pig and chickens scratching at nothing. They arrive at the first house at the farthest end of the beach, a ramshackle structure made from old bricks and a corrugated tin roof. A one-eyed cat skirts the shadows from the bougainvillea that climbs the walls. How lovely, that someone so poor has still taken the time to plant something beautiful. But the animal—mouldering, with patches of fur gone from its head and back—should be exterminated. Such thoughts drift in like the fishy stink off the water. She feels Carmichael place his hand on her back as they approach the door, but she shakes it off.

  When the door opens, she holds up the photo, her hand trembling. ‘I’m looking for my daughter,’ she says in Portuguese, her voice too loud.

  A deeply creased, elderly woman invites them in. The woman doesn’t smile, and when she speaks Dora sees that most of her front teeth are gone. At this end of the beach, everybody is missing something.

  She brings them each a cup of hot liquid that tastes like ash, grasses collecting at its bottom. She examines Luiza’s photo for a long time, rubbing her chin. Finally, she says, ‘Sim, sim. I’ve seen the girl. She passed by here some time ago. A troubled soul.’

  ‘My god,’ gasps Dora. ‘Was she wet? Her hair, was it wet?’

  ‘Yes, from head to toe.’

  Dora begins to tremble and leans into Carmichael, standing behind her, to steady herself, and he props her up easily, gently, without making too much contact.

  ‘I’ll get you some more tea,’ the woman says and moves toward the small kitchen.

  Then, seemingly from nowhere, a boy appears. Seven or eight—he looks malnourished, jaundiced; he may be older than his bony frame suggests.

  ‘She knows nothing,’ he says quietly.

  Carmichael speaks now. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The old woman. She’s lying to you.’

  ‘Your grandmother?’ asks Dora.

  ‘She’s not my grandmother. She keeps me for money. My mother is a whore and the old lady takes me out begging because the sight of me touches people.’

  ‘You’re a rude little boy,’ says Carmichael. ‘Off you go.’

  ‘She never saw your daughter. She’s saying what you want her to say so that you’ll give her money.’

  Carmichael coughs but recovers quickly and Dora realizes that the boy thinks he is speaking to Luiza’s father.

  ‘Off you go, boy,’ says Carmichael again, waving his hand dismissively. ‘Stop disrespecting your elders.’

  But the boy doesn’t move. He just stares at Dora—is that sadness or contempt? Indifference, she decides, seeing her own emptiness reflected back. She is swamped by a familiar shame, and wishes she could be the type of person who was immediately moved by these people. The type of person Luiza was. Suddenly, her clay cup hits the floor at her feet and her legs are spattered with black flecks, dregs of the revolting tea.

  The old woman comes shuffling out and cries, ‘It’s broken! You’ll have to pay me for that!’

  The boy retreats calmly, cool and slow-moving. A lizard retreating beneath his rock.

  Dora begins to fumble inside
her purse for her pocketbook, but Carmichael quickly thrusts twenty cruzeiros into the crone’s bent hand and pushes Dora out the door.

  In the days that follow, Dora and Carmichael visit almost every house in the village. Most people are kind, some are drunk, a few won’t speak to them, but no one says they have seen Luiza. Dora tries not to peer into the darkened shacks, their framed-up windows without glass, women sweeping dust out the doorways. How pointless it seems—these places could never be clean. On the third day of their search, she hears singing, wailing, and there are fumes from a slow-moving car somewhere up ahead. Someone tells them that a child has died in the night.

  ‘These people, their pain,’ she says to Carmichael. ‘It never ends.’ He nods slowly and begins to lift his arm to her shoulder, but she wraps her arms around herself, shivering despite the heat. ‘But maybe that’s why they don’t feel it like we do,’ she says. ‘Maybe they’ve grown used to it.’

  Carmichael studies her, cocking his head slightly to the side in the same way that Luiza sometimes did, as though Dora is some sort of inscrutable curiosity. But he, at least, is smiling affectionately as he does so.

  ‘You know,’ she says to him as they head toward the outskirts of the village, ‘as a teenager I went to the same movie seven times—I don’t even remember which one—so that I could watch the newsreel footage of the Hindenburg disaster.’

  Seven times she watched it collapse into flames, the fabric eerily sloughing away. The first few times she wept, which was something she hadn’t done since childhood.

  ‘The year before it burned, the airship came here regularly—do you remember? It shuttled between Friedrichshafen, New Jersey, and Rio. The whole city was asleep that first time it landed, but I begged my chauffeur to take me. And when it came we laughed and laughed and were sure no one would believe us—just how enormous it was, and yet how still it seemed as it glided down.’

  But later, in the dark theatre, Dora watched the ship’s tail sinking lower and lower despite repeatedly dropping water ballast, its mooring lines tumbling down, the news announcer intoning gravely: The Hindenburg appeared a conquering giant in the sky, but she proved a puny plaything in the mighty grip of fate. An airship destroyed in less than half a minute. Flames swallowed the ship’s nose, white against the black sky, spreading into a fire that quickly consumed the thin skin of fabric enveloping the frame’s aluminium ribs. It almost seemed as if fate had set the stage for this horrible tragedy. A graceful craft sailing serenely to her doom. Sparks shot into the air and several people jumped, slamming into the ground. An inferno which became a flaming tomb, a twisted mass of girders. And even when she closed her eyes against the screen, the afterimage of the stark flaming cloth collapsing in on itself remained, her vision tattooed with white fire.

  ‘I kept wondering, what if that had happened to me? What would I have done? I told myself it was instructive. By taking on other people’s tragedies, consuming them, studying every imaginable way to die, I could inoculate myself. Maybe then I’d know what not to do. But there was no way out for those people. They chose to jump and die a second later on the ground rather than burn. For that one second they had hope.’

  Hope. The only thing crueller being hopelessness. In hope lived what if what if what if? In hope she looks for Luiza because the search feeds possibility. Or might finally blot it out. Those people had jumped and deferred their hopelessness by a single second and at the time she told herself they would have wanted her to watch, to bear witness, to wish alongside them for that instant despite knowing how it would end. In that instant she imagined each time that someone would run up with a trampoline as though in a cartoon. What if what if what if? Would they really have wanted her to watch? She recalls how anyone who took too eager an interest in her own tragedy was revolting to her. But at the time, she could not stop watching—it was too great a catastrophe. It could not be true. Maybe the next time she watched, it would end differently, with the cartoon trampolines.

  Carmichael remains silent, as though not wanting to startle her out of confiding in him.

  Soon they arrive at the last cluster of houses, at the very edge of the village. These are even shabbier than the rest, with bits of mismatched wood for clapboards, tin siding, and a tarpaper roof. How can these people live just a short drive away from the luxury within her own gates? All her wealth and beautiful things.

  A girl not much older than Luiza answers the door. When Dora shows her the photograph, she shakes her head. ‘Não sei. I work most days and don’t get home until dark. I never see anything. But my sister just sits by the window. You can ask her. She doesn’t talk, but she understands.’

  The sister is monstrous. From the doorway, she appeared merely sickly and plain, but as they approach, her features warp. The far side of her head is bulbous and one eye is entirely clouded. It appears to lie unmoving in her skull while the other eye focuses sharply on Dora, who concentrates on the space between them and extends her hand. It doesn’t shake. Not even beasts frighten her now. She and Carmichael sit on two nearby chairs with blistered paint.

  ‘Have you seen this girl?’

  The girl’s good eye rotates slowly down in its socket, to Luiza’s photo, and then back toward them.

  ‘Outside your window, perhaps? Did you see her go by outside your window?’

  She gazes past them for several seconds, then turns her gaze back to the window. Dora pulls a nearby chair toward the girl and sits so that their faces are level. She holds the photo closer to the girl’s face.

  Suddenly, the girl shoots her arms out straight, pointing out the window. She leans forward, following the trajectory of her finger. It points directly at another house. Dora stands and moves closer to the window, closer to the girl.

  ‘Is that where you saw her go? Past that house? Over that hill behind?’

  The sister sighs. ‘She does that all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.’

  ‘But you said she understands things.’

  The sister looks tired. ‘She does. That doesn’t mean she can help you.’

  As they get up to go, Dora stares into the mute’s milky eye for several seconds then reaches out to shake her hand again. She feels hers snatched up, then thrust out the window toward the exact same house as before. Something is alive inside this girl, Dora is sure—something she means to say, fighting to break out. When Dora turns back toward the sister, her face is blank.

  ‘She can’t help the tremors, ever since she was little.’

  The giant-headed girl crumples against the window frame and Dora must use her other hand to unlace each finger. Once free, she allows Carmichael to guide her, trembling, toward the door.

  They learn nothing more at the last few houses, each visit tiring Dora further until Carmichael has to support her as he leads her to the road where they parked.

  Accordion music drifts up from somewhere closer to the beach. Someone is singing. Finally, Dora can’t help asking Carmichael what she’s been wondering all along, what she knows will make her sound like the bemusing artifact Luiza always considered her.

  ‘Do you think, if she washed up here, she might have seen something to keep her going? Do you really think she kept going?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Why? Why would you think that? Everyone else thinks she’s dead.’

  ‘I think you’re getting very tired, and we should come back tomorrow. There were those houses where no one was home. We’ll come back to those.’

  ‘But we’ve found nothing! This is a fantasy.’

  ‘Neither of us believes she drowned, that she just gave up. We can’t stop looking, but we need a break.’

  ‘How can you be so sure? Maybe she really is gone and we’re just chasing a ghost.’

  Carmichael pauses, runs his hands through his hair and sighs, long and low. ‘She came to me for help, Isadora. I didn’t tell you because I knew—’

  ‘What kind of help?’ Dora says, backing away from him.

  ‘Just a
dvice! She was confused, overwhelmed. She knew how long I’ve known you and Hugo, and she was trying to understand things after Florida.’

  ‘What did she say about Florida?’

  ‘Nothing specific. Just that it was very hard. That things didn’t go as planned. And she was afraid of moving to Canada. But she wouldn’t say why.’

  Because Canada meant the possibility of another failed experiment, Dora thinks. Only farther this time, and more permanent. She lets out a tight little laugh. ‘No, Florida didn’t go as planned. That is what she would say. That’s what I told her to say.’

  ‘But why? What happened?’

  ‘You have no right to ask me that!’ Flushed and sweating, she strides ahead.

  ‘Dora, stop. Talk to me.’

  She can feel him right behind her, nearly beside her, his voice almost in her ear. He is perfectly capable of catching up, but he doesn’t. He knows to stay just out of sight.

  ‘I thought he could be well again. But there’s no cure, and we just hoped for too much. I expected too much.’

  ‘And now he’s making you leave your home, everything you’ve ever known, even though it’s hopeless.’

  ‘He’s not making me do anything. He doesn’t even want to leave. It was my decision. We have no choice.’

  ‘You do have a choice. Do what you should have done years ago. Stay with me.’

  Dora whirls around, her cheeks burning, and slaps him hard across the face. He touches his hand to his reddening skin but says nothing. ‘What happened to her, after she came here?’ she asks. She hates the pleading tone in her voice. ‘Where did she go?’