All Is Beauty Now

by Sarah Faber

  ‘Are they the same ones that mate for life?’ Luiza asked.

  But he pointed out that two such exigencies forced on a single variety would be too cruel, and surely would have wiped them out long ago. So they agreed: probably more of a Roman approach.

  Her father made a long face when they came to the bird of paradise plants, saying they looked very poor indeed and also needed cutting back. Some were fragrant and strong, but some had the blight, their blossoms rotting and stinking on their stems. Together they selected the best, her father laying the long stalks across her outstretched arms.

  The flowers now neatly arranged in the basket, they sat for a few minutes on the garden bench and, at last, Luiza felt her heart beating at a regular rhythm, the breeze cool on her neck. She felt neither wild nor empty, nor even conscious of her own skin. This was why one lived: Love. Wind. Red. But think it and the moment’s gone, a saturated and irretrievable snapshot.

  ‘Pensive, poppet?’ her father said, gazing at her. She’d been speaking to him in her head again but hadn’t actually said anything out loud for some time. He seemed to be returning to her for the first time since Florida, and he was physically stronger than he had been for weeks. But she just smiled. No use in saying it: how tired she’d become of her own voice, her own thoughts.

  ‘I was just thinking about your beautiful gardens. What will happen to them when we’re gone? What if the new owners plant ugly things?’

  ‘We’ll have a new garden. Things do grow in Canada, you know. We’re not moving to the Arctic.’

  ‘But only for such a short time.’

  ‘We’ll pick the flowers with the prettiest names. Alyssum, pasques, bleeding hearts.’ He took her hand then and spoke very earnestly. ‘You wait. There’s nothing like spring after a long winter. It shocks you every time. Every year you think it can’t possibly come—nothing will ever live again. And then it does and you breathe with new lungs.’

  She wanted so much to believe him, but she knew too well it was a confidence game. Her father could make anything sound beautiful, but she believed him less and less. Only seeing Carmichael could rearrange this day, relieve the pressure building behind her ribs. From all the numbing tasks she had still to accomplish, he would divert her. She just had to get to him.

  ‘A game, a game!’ Evie and Magda came running through the grass, launching themselves at Hugo’s pant legs. ‘We want you both to play a game with us.’

  They all walked to the playhouse, Evie and Magda bickering about what to play.

  ‘Not bowls again!’ Evie wailed.

  Her father snapped a flower from its stem and tucked it behind Luiza’s ear. Then his smile inverted, and he clapped loudly and broke up the girls, who were shoving each other now. ‘Boules, ladies,’ he said, pushing them apart. ‘Let us say boules. Let us not be vulgar.’

  The cloth bag containing the small wooden balls was found, and they walked toward the green behind the house. Her father scooped Evie up and peeled her hair away from the dirt-streaked trail of tears, and it struck Luiza that at last he was strong enough do this. He was alive again.

  ‘Come, come, Evelyn. No crying. We’ll give Evie the mat, will we?’

  Evie was pacified by this small gesture and aligned the jack.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘this is a venerable and subversive game we’re playing. It goes back to the thirteenth century, conjecturally even the twelfth. In his biography of Thomas Becket—’

  Luiza tried to listen as she pulled the flower from behind her ear, inhaled its scent, and wiped the golden powder from its thin stamen, coating her palms while her father’s voice distantly sketched out medieval London. At the centre of the blossom was a tiny black bug that repelled her with its rapid, writhing movement, so she tried to rake it out with her nail and crush it without damaging the petal—‘… holiday amusements for young men …’ She peeled open the flower only to discover a swarm of the same tiny bugs—‘… leaping, shooting, wrestling, throwing of javelins and casting of stones …’—then killed them all by crushing the flower, and dropping it down in disgust, while Magda barked, ‘That one’s dead, Evie, you don’t get to chalk it!’ ‘In jactu lapidum …’ Her fingers coated in flower juice and dead insects. ‘But it touched!’ ‘Jactu lapidum …’ ‘It did not!’ ‘Lapidum …’

  ‘What did you say?’ Her voice was harsh. She hadn’t meant to say it so loud.

  ‘That is what they called it—casting of stones. In jactu lapidum.’ It was the jolt he needed and he was off again. ‘But the game was banned in the reign of Edward the Third, along with many others, of course …’

  The catching on words, their compulsive iteration—her throat tightened as she noted the early signs of oncoming mania: soon there would be unopened shopping bags everywhere, slurred tributes to women’s body parts. A private, internal voyage to a fictive star. ‘… worried it interfered with the practice of archery so vital in battle, the war-mongers … ’ Then, inevitably, several weeks in his ‘winding sheet,’ the blinds drawn.

  ‘Let me show you something,’ he was saying to Evie now, placing a ball in Evie’s hand and her hand in his. ‘Have you heard of a forehand draw?’

  ‘You can’t help her!’ Magda, outraged.

  Luiza knew she should stay, play their little game, be with her family—want to be with her family—stop pulping tiny insects. But the truth was, she couldn’t wait to get away from them.

  DORA

  The bus heaves through the countryside, and Dora sits stiffly, unable to sleep, absentmindedly expecting the luggage stuffed into racks overhead to begin falling into the aisles. Outside, rain pours down so heavily that sections of the flimsy shacks that line the road wash away, bits of tin and wood mixing with garbage, all running into the cataracts of water that overwhelm the gutters and rush downhill past the bus. Staring out the window, Dora sometimes cannot see a road at all. A thirty-hour trip with nothing to look at but water and poverty.

  She has never travelled alone until now, never been on a bus. She has left the girls alone with the maids a few times before, but this time feels different, as though she’s abandoning them somehow; as though during these few days away, they could be lost to her. It’s Evie she worries about most of all. She’s drawn to that low-class girl, Brigitta, in the way of adolescent girls who, for a time, fall in love with one another and turn inward, involute as the whorls of seashell. No one else matters. Magda sees through Brigitta, and Luiza would have too, but Evie is pliable, with a vacuum of wanting inside her since losing Luiza. Girls like Brigitta can tend want. Naive longing. Until they grow bored. She told the maids, ‘Make sure they get to that camp every day. And make sure they come home. No sleepovers. That girl is indecente.’

  As condensation fogs the windows and the structures outside the bus blur into vague grey shapes, Dora watches tiny rivers branch apart against the glass, the wipers pump against the windshield. This is what she has begun to wish for at home in Rio, with its perpetual parties, its ever-hanging white, tropical sun—for the landscape to mirror her grief, to show her some fucking sympathy. Sympathy for her, of all people. When the Confederados arrived in Brazil, her father told her, they found cockroaches the size of a fist, and mosquitoes carrying dengue, malaria, encephalitis. A third of her ancestors died; a third went home, and accepted Northern rule; a third stayed, thrashed and coaxed the landscape. And now she, their descendant, can do almost nothing for herself, by herself. Some part of her is grateful that Canada will be hard. Perhaps all that labour will wash away the slick sheen of her advantages, the way Luiza had said it would, when she was trying to be keen.

  ‘Maybe it will give us character,’ she said. ‘Like pioneers, or tradespeople.’

  ‘It’s not the frontier, my darling,’ Dora said dryly. ‘Toronto is a city with cars and highways and tall buildings.’

  ‘But it’s very cold, isn’t it?’ Luiza asked hopefully. ‘We might suffer terribly!’

  A convent. It was both impossible and somehow
natural. Her poor, unhappy girl—what had he done to her? But there was always some unnamed transgression Luiza seemed to want to atone for, even before Carmichael—some imagined sin she felt they had committed, simply by existing.

  ‘Because we take too much,’ she used to say. ‘We have so much more than we need.’

  At the time, Dora had refused to feel guilty. Cockroaches, mosquitoes, dengue fever. Her people, she told herself, fought for everything: for her and her friends, who played hours of golf each day, and never once changed a bed. Never boarded a bus.

  A cloud of dust falls on Dora’s simple cream-coloured dress as the taxi pulls away the next afternoon. What was she thinking, travelling in a light-coloured fabric? For several minutes, she brushes herself off, feeling fixed to the ground. There is dust on her fine, heeled leather shoes, and she bends to wipe those as well, licking her fingers. Something Luiza would do. Standing in front of the convent from the photograph, she wonders if her daughter could really be inside. But going in and finding nothing would mean her search is finally over. Nothing left to do but sail. The whitewashed building before her is larger than she expected, with small terracotta tiles curved and overlapping on the roof like rows of scales. Above the door is a little recess that houses a statue of Christ, framed by two large windows. If she allows her vision to blur a little, it looks like a face, the mouth agape. There are black, threadlike stains spreading across the white facade from the rain, and except for some scrollwork around the edges of the roof and a pretty little bell tower with a rooster-topped weathervane, the whole building is quite austere.

  When a nun comes out and asks her what help she needs, Dora realizes she’s trembling, unsure whether she’s been standing there for minutes or hours. She explains that she’s looking for Luiza, and the nun tells her there’s no one here by that name, but she should go see the postulants—the new girls who come for a year and receive vocational guidance without having to make a commitment to the convent. If her Luiza is here, she’d have to be among them.

  The nun introduces herself as Sister Medeiros but asks no other questions—perhaps, Dora thinks, it’s not so unusual for people to hide here. As she’s led down the arched, marble hallway very slowly, she has to fight the urge to break into a run ahead of her guide. And where would she run to? There is door after door, and Sister Medeiros continues to plod past each one, expressionless. These must be games the mind plays on anyone who’s ever lost someone, truly lost them. Never seen the proof of her body lowered into the ground, never seen her lie still as she is covered with dirt. Maybe she ran away, maybe she has amnesia, maybe she was stolen. Maybe. The refuge of every mother of a soldier whose body is unrecovered, or whose child has disappeared. Finally, the sister pauses and opens a door.

  Dora scans the row of postulants bent over pews, thinking she sees Luiza in each of their faces, and starting every time as if to run toward them. But it’s not her, not her, not her—she is seasick from her tiny abortive movements—and it’s still not her again and again and again until it is. It is. It’s her. It’s her pale face frowning into the prayer book. It’s her auburn hair tied back sloppily but still so lovely. It’s her body, alive and dry and sitting as calmly wrapped around a book as it so often was at home. Dora starts then stops again because it can’t be her—she will not clutch and slap and weep all over some other woman’s child. But it is her, and Dora finds she runs like she’s in a dream, too slowly. When she finally reaches her, she doesn’t clutch or slap. She falls to her knees, crumples, thanks God, and sobs into her lap.

  Dora lets her hair be stroked for some time before she straightens up and allows herself to see what she already knows—that she has, after all, been crying into the lap of some other woman’s child. And as the girl holds her, Dora wishes so much that Luiza had come here because this is a place where they embrace strangers who weep in their laps.

  After a few minutes, Sister Medeiros gently gathers Dora up, unpeeling her from the young girl who is not Luiza. She offers to give her a tour of the convent, but all Dora can do is stare ahead, her mouth incapable of movement, as she is led toward the door.

  ‘The Poor Clares are contemplative, and our mission is to serve God by being ever prayerful.’

  As the woman speaks, Dora feels grateful for Sister Medeiros, grateful for the heat of her rounded body beside her, for the certainty of her step, for the conviction in her voice. Grateful that she seems to know where she is going and that she’s taking Dora there. The sister clearly believes what she’s saying, and maybe it’s true. Dora is grateful there are people in the world who still believe things. They stop before a painting of a saint holding a lantern.

  ‘By the grace of St. Clarissa’s prayers,’ Sister Medeiros says reverently, ‘the convent in Assisi was miraculously saved from the plundering Saracen hordes. And so we all follow her example, and remain poor. All day and much of the night, we are vigilant sentinels who sit in silent contemplation of God, in adoration of the Blessed Sacraments.’

  Next they go to a room full of women sitting at tables, hunched over handcrafts. They’re making the kinds of little trinkets Maricota likes to give the girls—dried flowers, embroidered handkerchiefs.

  ‘One of our tasks is to make sacred vestments, liturgical robes and stoles,’ the sister continues, seeming to register Dora losing focus, her waning ability to execute movement on her own. ‘Thus we celebrate the Word, the Eucharist, and the sacraments with works from our own hands, made in the glory of God as an act of supplication, adoration, and love. Today Sister Araújo is making candles. You can join her. You see how you do it? You take the wick and dip it in the wax, just a thin layer.’

  And now she is sitting Dora down, taking her hands and manipulating them so that they dip a length of wick into the beeswax, a coin tied to each end for weight, then plunge it into cold water and dip again. She does this a few times, then hangs the wick on a broom balanced between two chairs, leaving two very thin candles to dry. Wick, wax, broom. With the woman’s arms still wrapped around her, Dora wonders if maybe she can stay here, if she could be led through her days by the ringing of church bells and the thick, warm arms of women who believe they are loved by God.

  Eventually, Dora feels Sister Medeiros back away, leaving her to dip her candles again and again, moving like an automaton, soothed by the simplicity and repetition of the action but still thinking. Always thinking. No, she couldn’t stay here because she could never stop thinking and if God had anything to say to her, she’d never hear it. Will she have to wonder forever about Luiza? Maybe pills will make it stop, or a lobotomy, or the shock treatment Hugo hated so much. She’d rather feel nothing than live with never knowing. What did it say that she had been so willing to believe that Luiza could be here, that she would have left them, let them grieve? She remembers her daughter’s long stare, how she always seemed to be looking beyond them, unable to locate within reach whatever is was she needed. And yet, something in Dora, even now, still thinks Luiza could have done it after all. That she could swim and swim away from them and toward these hundreds of mothers.

  But for Dora to have left her family now, with Hugo in the hospital and the girls practically feral, all because she could not let go. How will they ever forgive her.

  Thank you, sweet girl. For taking him from me. For lying with him in bathtubs and deciphering all his strange phrases. Or pretending to. Thank you for staying. All these things she had wanted to say countless times, but the closest she came was in Florida: ‘It’s good that you were here,’ she had said, turning a tumbler of gin in her hands. ‘You spared the girls the worst of it.’

  At the time, Luiza said nothing. She sat and had a drink with her mother, until Dora finally left the room.

  But later, on the voyage home, it seethed out: ‘You. You did this to him. I never wanted to come here. I helped you talk him into it because I believed you. You did this.’

  She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. Wherever Luiza is, Dora tells herself now, a
t least she’s free. Like Dora’s, her life was claimed by men—a madman, a sick man—before it had really begun. But Luiza got away.

  Sister Medeiros comes back to see if Dora would like dinner. When she says no, the sister asks if she would like guidance. Dora blushes, says no again, obrigada, but asks instead if there’s somewhere quiet she could sit for a little while, until she’s ready to go. She’s ashamed to ask for rest but can’t imagine beginning the long journey back into the city feeling this way, turned inside out, nerves peeled back and strafed, yet somehow numb at the same time. She’s led to a beautiful garden and wishes for a moment Hugo could see it. The sister helps her to a bench, and just as the woman is about to go, Dora asks her if there has been a girl here with hair like the other one, the one she embraced, that unusual deep auburn hair. Sister Medeiros says no, no one like that here, but she could give her the addresses of the other convents in Bahia.

  ‘Não, obrigada mas não precisa,’ Dora says. ‘She would have come here.’

  HUGO

  Hugo faces the shore, then kicks his legs, turning back out to sea. He’s not sure what he was expecting. Not her, of course—the drugs have extinguished any hope of holy visions—but at least a feeling, words transmitted to his mind, an electric thrust to his heart. But as he treads circles in the water, a few people have begun to gather on the beach; curious, concerned, they huddle and confer. He sees himself now through their eyes, a grown man, fully dressed, swimming fifty yards out and shouting at nothing. He wants to tear off his clothes, swim out farther, be surrounded by the sea, consumed by a body larger than he can conceive of. But he could strip off his own skin and still not get down to the place where he went wrong; he could swim forever and still never find her. Because she’s not here.