by Sarah Faber
Applause. They are all delighted. Amused. But as the clapping dies down, Hugo’s gaze moves to the back of the room, as though he’s trying to identify something far off, beyond the walls of the casino. When he speaks again, his voice falters, grows quieter.
‘Soon we leave. Leave the only place I’ve ever considered home. I’d never known what it was to feel free until I came to Rio.’ Tears gloss his eyes now and Dora goes to the edge of the chair and reaches up, hoping to persuade him down with her own urgent gaze. But he doesn’t reach back, doesn’t even look down.
‘We can’t stay in the country that swallowed our girl. That holds her in its gut and exhales her ghost. Tchau, amigos. Tchau, terra infestada.’
Even his Portuguese is failing, thinks Dora, and she tries again to ease Hugo off the chair. This time his body gives. His toast has, however briefly, consumed his energies. Some of their friends stare at her, doe-eyed and exuding unwanted sympathy. Most of them just glance past her, begin their chatter again, light each other’s cigarettes. Someone drops an exhausted champagne bottle into a bucket of ice. Gently, she pulls him toward a seat at the table, but then feels him quicken, reanimated.
‘Let’s dance!’ says Hugo, his eyes dilated and wet, darting across her face.
‘I’m so tired, love. Why don’t we just—’
‘Dance with me. When will we have another chance? I won’t take no for an answer.’
Already he is leading her to the dance floor, and as he holds her there is another slight shift, tremors only she can feel. His body tenses, and he digs his fingertips into her spine and the back of her hand in that way of someone trying to fight the impulse to hurt, to crush.
‘Today was a big day,’ he says cheerfully, and Dora laughs in spite of herself. But then he pulls her even closer and whispers in her ear, ‘That beating was for you. For both of you.’
She feels herself retract, trying to create space for herself within his tightening grasp. Is she supposed to be grateful that he still thinks of her? That Carmichael, pathetic, spitting blood, was some kind of offering? A dead rabbit laid at her feet. She wonders how he found out, after all this time, yet knows she cannot blame him. Together, they broke him.
‘I don’t hate him.’
‘He took her from us,’ Hugo says quietly, and again he’s entreating her, begging her to believe him.
‘We did that,’ she says quietly, afraid that if she says what she’s thinking he will finally enfold her entirely and smother her. ‘I think… we pushed her away.’
‘No.’
‘We… we were so—’
‘Shall we call it a day?’ he says, straightening up, speaking at full volume. ‘I swore to myself I’d never leave here, but I don’t want to hurt you. I’ve been breaking things—cars, faces—and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. I might not be lucid for much longer, and I want you to be safe. I could leave you, go back to Canada on my own, get “help.” You don’t have to come. You could stay here with everyone you’ve ever loved. Because if you come—shh. Hush. No crying. If you come, there will be times when I’ll piss myself and you will vomit orange blossoms and someday we’ll carve up those sweet, good girls, Solomon be damned.’
She tries to push away from him, but he holds her tightly, his fingers pressed into her ribs, her hand squeezed and aching inside his, the vein in his neck pulsing against her cheek. She’s insubstantial, a hollow-boned bird, but she doesn’t want to attract attention by struggling.
‘It has been years now but I still remember when your cheeks ignited, flaming peonies, every part of you sweated, even your ankles and the insides of your wrists. So I will pretend and you will pretend, in this casino by the sea. I’ll pretend that you do not still smell like Carmichael and I didn’t almost have the Andrews boy just now. I won’t tell you how he pleaded with me to follow him with that look I’d forgotten. If you press me, I’ll say—’ She begins to push harder, to beat against his chest ineffectually with the palm of one hand, hoping to quiet him. But the words keep coming, relentless, like an incantation he has rehearsed and cannot stop. ‘I’ll swear he didn’t make sounds you haven’t in years and I won’t tell you that I quite suddenly remembered—at an unfortunate moment indeed—that he once took Luiza to a dance and so I choked him just for a minute until his eyes popped a little and his skin began to light up from the inside. But I stopped because it’s to you, in the end, my mind still speaks. Did you know that? Luiza never comes. Instead, I’m haunted by the living. But all is beauty now, it was beautiful to wreck your lover’s face and the Andrews boy, well, I’m sorry for that. I apologized. So now we dance. The boy is still weeping in the washroom and a wind is whistling over our daughter’s grave.’ He squeezes her closer the faster he speaks and now it’s becoming difficult for her to breathe. For the second time tonight a man is trying to envelop her, and she pushes him away with all her strength.
‘Enough!’ Dora cries, breaking away at last.
Hugo’s grip loosens, but he hooks his arms slackly again at her waist and slumps onto her shoulder, finally quiet and momentarily exhausted.
‘I’ll call the doctor tomorrow,’ says Dora, now leaning into him, gripping him almost as tightly as he’d held her. ‘We can take you back to Renaissance for treatment before we leave. You need help. You frighten the girls. You’ll never survive three weeks on a boat like this. You have to go. We’ll delay our trip.’
‘For how long?’
‘For as long as you need.’
‘I can’t take that drug again like I did in Florida.’
‘Not that one. The usual ones.’
‘Do it soon then. Tonight, while I’m still willing.’
‘Yes.’ She lays her head on his chest, where she can hear his heart. It surprises her sometimes, to be reminded that he’s as human—mortal—as she is. ‘I want you to know, it ended years ago with Carmichael. These last few days were just… goodbye.’
‘Thank you.’
As they continue to hold each other, the music ends and onto the stage struts a dancer wearing a bikini made from wooden beads. She wears enormous hoop earrings and a headband and unsoled foot coverings like thongs, also made from beads. Her hair is long and thick and uncombed, and she’s dressed in armbands and a loose skirt made from some kind of coarse grass that looks like seaweed. It swings between her legs as she begins to sway, making Dora think of pubic hair, and how unsuitable this country is for tragedy.
LUIZA
DECEMBER 1961
Luiza had arrived early, yet she kept looking down the path for Carmichael, anxious to finally have someone to talk to. It was another hot, clear day, just two weeks before Christmas, as she waited in front of the fountain in the Botanical Gardens, studying its four sculpted muses, holding a bag containing a wrapped book for him. The Waves by Virginia Woolf. Her ears prickled and turned red thinking about how long she’d spent composing the inscription. This made me think of you echoed what he’d written in the book of poems he’d given her when she returned from Florida: thoughtful, possibly even intimate, yet discreet. Friends think of friends all the time. But it might sound like she couldn’t come up with her own ideas. Then Yours, from the Underworld. Meant to be funny, but could be read as too heavy-handed. In the end she had simply signed it From your friend, L. Her initial in loose, hastily written cursive loops. Equivocal.
How silly, she thinks now, to have spent all that time obsessing over the order of these few words, when in a few months she would be gone. Three weeks at sea—crokinole and talent routines and dinner with strangers in the great hall—but this time to Toronto, gelid Protestant city of her father’s birth; the anguish he endured until, he said, he was reborn in Rio. A place where people barely touch, and the land is cold and bald, with spiny trees punctuating the sky. A blank space she couldn’t envision. Life there looked like nothing.
But now tears slid out from under the frames of her sunglasses and she wondered how people hide the fact that they’re weeping in Canada, where half th
e year its pallid faces are laid bare. Then a warm, tentative hand grazed her shoulder and she gave a little cry. He was here, in a short-sleeved linen shirt, a golden cast to his skin.
‘You’ve gotten some sun,’ she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. She clutched the book to her chest, noting he carried nothing. Nor did he remark that she’d just been crying. She wished suddenly she hadn’t brought the book, hadn’t revealed herself in her unwritten sentences. She wished, again, that she couldn’t hear her own nagging, humiliating thoughts.
‘Alice and I were at the beach all weekend,’ he said, and her stomach seized. ‘It was so hot—there was nowhere else to be.’
‘Yes, maybe going to the orchidarium was a silly idea. Should we just go for a walk instead?’
They walked along the alley of giant imperial palm trees, fifty metres high, which almost seemed to close over them. This wasn’t how she’d imagined it. He wasn’t supposed to have come up behind her; he was meant to walk up to her, to have seen her from a distance wearing her oversized sunglasses that he said reminded him of Audrey Hepburn. Then, once he was directly in front of her, she would have lifted them off her face and he would have seen her puffy, tired eyes, and concern would have clouded his usual queer, abbreviated smile, and he would have demanded to know, why? Why so sad, sweet girl?
Now the news wouldn’t be uttered in the hushed tones of forbearance, but would burst out of her, abruptly, shrilly, sharpened by her rising panic.
‘We’re moving to Canada!’ she said, exhaling loudly. She felt something in her uncoil, and she was relieved that he seemed so surprised, distressed even.
‘What? When? Not permanently.’
‘In March.’ Awkwardly, she thrust his gift at him. He took it without even glancing down.
‘But that’s so soon—that’s not enough time to do anything. What about your house? Where will you live?’
‘The company’s going to take care of all that after we’ve gone. Apparently they already found a house for us there.’ She stopped and wandered off the path to lean her back against a tree. ‘I know. I can’t believe it. My mother’s lost her mind.’
He turned to her but hung back, the book still wrapped, still tucked under one arm. He stood silently rubbing his jaw, and the air between them seemed almost to ripple with tension. She wanted to pull him closer but kept her arms pinned to her sides.
At last, he asked, ‘She’s agreed to all this?’
‘It was her idea! But I can’t talk to her about it. She just goes cold and says it’s all for my father’s sake. What can I say to that?’
When her parents had sat her down to tell her about the move (they wanted her to know before the girls), she noticed how orphaned her father seemed, leaning back against the sofa as her mother spoke, his eyes staring. Silently begging Luiza to agree it was the right choice, to make it seem tenable.
‘It’s not how we planned it,’ Dora said crisply, a tight smile setting her face. And because her mother’s feelings had been dulled by years of disappointment, Luiza was just meant to ignore the acute tension in the house, the impossibility of leaving behind everything they’ve ever known. As a Canadian veteran, her father was eligible for free health care in his home country, which had better hospitals and a stable economy—their future, she was told, would be secure. For these practical advantages, a lesser, transactional kind of life. These towering, humid trees, her oceanside city and all its abundance, exchanged for sedate, beige waiting rooms and favourable rates of inflation. She’d swallowed her undigested sadness for him and agreed, Yes, they should go. It was the best thing for the family.
Carmichael placed a hand over his mouth and rubbed it slowly back and forth. Luiza imagined he was pressing his lips shut, holding back all the things he couldn’t say. All at once, he seemed very far away. She returned to his side, and they continued to walk along the path, the towering trees like columns on either side.
‘And you’ll go with them?’ he asked, his eyes fixed on the path.
‘I don’t feel like I have a choice.’
‘Well, it is up to you. It’s your life.’ His eyes were damp and he kept clenching and unclenching his jaw and looking up, as though something had materialized in the corner of his vision.
‘I have no education, no money of my own. Girls like me don’t just live here, alone. I suppose I should have listened to my mother and found a nice boy, then I could have just moved from one man’s house to the next. But you’re married and—’
‘Me? I wasn’t suggesting … ’
She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. ‘I just keep thinking of all the things I haven’t seen yet,’ she said, speaking quickly. She passed her hand over the bark of a palm tree as they walked past and listened for the shrieks of marmoset monkeys that lived in the nearby trees. Here, there were wild animals loose in the city and two-storey trees. Here, there were acres of gardens at the foot of the mountain, watched over by Christ the Redeemer, his arms spread wide. ‘The jungle and the north and Ouro Preto! I—I wanted to go stand outside Elizabeth Bishop’s house and just see it, just once. And I keep thinking of what the beach was like when I was a child, and what I’ll be leaving behind, and it’s too much, my mind can’t contain it all.’
She wanted to stop talking, to reel back her nervous, unimportant remarks, but she could feel her chest shudder and Carmichael still said nothing, still ignored the book she’d given him.
‘Did I ever tell you how I used to visit my grandparents in Ipanema?’ she said, her voice lower. ‘I’d wake at dawn, the house still silent, then walk out past the praça. I used to run past the end of the tramline to where there was nothing but white sand dunes and a few grand, old houses. I picked pitanga berries—they were so sour and good—then went down to the water.’
Sometimes, she told him, she would ask the fishermen, ‘Do you have any whelks?’ But they only laughed and let her help haul their nets in and spread them out to dry, and then she watched as they covered them with tiny squid. The skins were stretched tight, like a membrane of jellied wine. Somehow, they stayed clean of sand, as if the nets were borne aloft, never touching the ground.
‘That landscape, that beach—it was paradise. And there were no high-rises—just those beautiful mansions that faced the sea like in France and—’
He stopped short in the path. ‘Wait, where do you mean? Here in the city?’
‘Yes, when I was little.’
‘No high-rises? Luiza. There haven’t been houses on that strip in over forty years. Even the casinos were built in the twenties.’
‘I know, but I remember—’
‘You must be thinking of another beach outside the city. Copacabana, Ipanema—the beaches downtown haven’t been anything like what you’re describing in decades. Maybe when I was a kid. Long before you were born.’
‘But I remember it, vividly. It was here.’
She knew he must be right—the details of her memory were, of course, impossible. But where else could it have been? In her mind, she could see the coves on either side of her and the hills that stretched out into the water for miles. She saw the exact silhouettes that she would see if she left this garden and went to sit on the beach right now. There was no futebol, no paper coffee cups, no car motors. Just the shrieks of seagulls and the greetings of fishermen, creased and smiling broadly, waving to her as she ran across the sand to them. Tchau, boneca! This memory, not hers. Scaffolding giving way.
It was unlike him to argue with her over something like that—her stolen memory—so trivial to him. He kept clearing his throat and shifting the unwrapped book from hand to hand as they walked. She wanted to draw him back to her but she didn’t know how. For months she had tried to push the thought away: she might never have anything of her own. Even her memories weren’t really, reliably hers. But maybe she could take this one thing for herself. That tuneless, high-pitched tone between them, calming her whenever they were together—she could have that, at least, for now.
As they stood before a stone archway, she took his free hand, pulled him off the path toward the cover of some smaller trees, toward her. Her parents’ shrinking lives, Carmichael’s pained smile, their diminishing expectations—enough of all that. ‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘I’m sad too. And so touched.’ She pulled his face toward her and kissed him. For a moment he seemed to pull away, but then his hand lifted to her face, his fingertips on her cheeks. She felt something like pain and told herself it could be love.
DORA
Dora sits on Luiza’s bed, turning over a pair of kid gloves in her hands, Luiza’s favourite. They had belonged to Dora’s mother, but Luiza liked to wear them to parties, despite—or because of—how old-fashioned they looked. There is a stain inside the wrist of the left glove that wasn’t there when Luiza commandeered them, something that once would have upset Dora. Luiza always so inattentive, even with old, precious things. Cleanliness, propriety—they once gave Dora a sense of order, a scrim between her and the world.
But last night, Hugo had called out ‘I’m not crazy!’ as she turned to leave his hospital room, the nurses preparing to sedate him. ‘Just haunted. Beset by a secretion from the numinous space between life and death where our eldest daughter dwells!’ His voice echoed after her as she hurried down the hall. Yes, her husband was a ‘madman,’ and things might go on like this forever: hospitals, drug studies, stuttering hopes. But containing it, hiding it—she couldn’t do it anymore. Afterwards she didn’t even plead with her chauffeur not to tell anyone, like she used to. She hadn’t the energy to worry anymore who might find out. Bechelli had waited while she wept silently for a minute in the back seat before taking her home, and when she nodded into the rear-view mirror, giving him the signal to go, she saw that he was crying too. All these good people—she would never know them again. She reminds herself they have no choice: Hugo has had another breakdown, and if they stay, soon they will no longer be able to afford his care here. They can’t go on like this.