by Sarah Faber
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ says Dora, louder now, almost spitting.
‘I’ve done ugly things. Things that frighten me …’
Luiza begins to speak in that way Dora remembers, that mannered, heightened way that has always tired her, sending the heel of her hand to the contracted space between her eyes, trying to erase the confusion. The frustration.
There is something dark and clotted in her blood, Luiza says. She swears it. The same dark moods and hypersensitivities as her father, but also, at times, the same utter indifference to people’s feelings. There were days when her eyes felt enormous, compound—magnifying everything to the thousandth power—and days when the tiny hairs on her arms seemed able to detect every shiver of breath emitted by another human being. She could feel what they were feeling, sense the wind brush over some tender spot on their body. When Odete furrowed her brow as she polished the silver, Luiza could feel the maid’s anxiety, and was herself drained by it. But there were other times when she felt desolate. She knew others were suffering, but she didn’t care, content to merely observe, remotely, as if she were a scientist. Poor Mother. She’s just realized yet again that her life will never be the same.
‘I had to leave before you all hated me.’
‘We have grieved for you. We never hated you.’
‘You would have.’
They’ve left the orchard and are standing in the courtyard by the bell tower. Luiza seems depleted again. Her eyes keep wandering back to the convent behind her, and Dora tries to glean what she is thinking; perhaps how odd it is that there is a weathervane on the roof above the bell tower—an authentic one, which would matter to Luiza, with a rooster and arrows and a little moon, all silhouetted sharply now against the low afternoon sun. It’s the highest thing on the building, higher even than the crucifix directly above the entranceway. Dora keeps watching her, wondering what her daughter is so afraid of. Because she believes nothing Luiza has told her so far.
Another voice now: Had she planned it, knowing they would all mourn her forever? Planned it without considering how the human brain tortures its host: images of Luiza, grey and bulging, shedding skin on the ocean floor. Don’t think these things, Dora chastises herself. Don’t be angry. You got the impossible. You got her back. But something is eating through the relief like an acid.
Dora can feel herself constricting, shrinking again, like she has all these years beside Hugo after he’s made another scene, upset another friend, claimed to have traversed another galaxy. An animal instinct to protect herself. Maybe, without meaning or wanting to, people like Hugo and Luiza give everything, but they take as well—all the sadness, all the beauty, all the air. They cry a sea of tears, then swallow it all back up, all that love and empathy, and leave everyone else floundering in puddles. Dora tried for years to contain them, lead them where she thought they should go, and now she’s caught again in the belly of a whale, in the dark and still alone.
‘I’ve never thought that you have your father’s disorder,’ Dora says, her voice cold. ‘Though it seems some part of you wants it. But even after the disappointment in Florida, even after we thought we’d lost you—he never left us. Did you think about what he might have done to himself? I still worry about it. Every day.’
‘He wouldn’t—I was protecting him. If I had come with you, it would all have been ruined.’
Dora holds her gaze, and she can see that something in Luiza’s face has changed. The entreating, the fear—they’ve vanished, replaced by something harsh and confrontational.
‘You must have known I’d find you. You wanted me to find you.’
‘You were supposed to have left a year ago!’ Luiza’s voice rises, then quickly lowers again. ‘I was trying to make it easier for you to leave. Make him want to leave. Have to leave. I was helping you. Why are you still here?’
Dora studies her, trying to decide whether she’s lying or not, then says quietly, ‘To find you.’
Again, Luiza says nothing.
Dora looks down at her hands, now folded in her lap, the tears gone. ‘You’re not responsible for him, but you did break his heart. You did do that.’
‘You weren’t supposed to stay.’ Petulant, and thin. It’s all Luiza can manage to say.
Dora pulls her daughter to her and holds her close, breathing into her hair. She can feel it happening again: Luiza sliding away from her. Slipping below the surface. Where will she go this time?
MAGDA
Sitting in the hospital waiting room, Magda watches Brigitta as she picks up and examines anything she can—pamphlets, a box of tissues, a telephone, some spider plants, and a family of little plastic deer on fake grass. Brigitta pokes at their forever-open eyes, seeming almost disappointed by how clean and dull everything is. No patients running naked up and down the hallways, no zombies left propped in wheelchairs, abandoned in corners. Everyone appears cared for, but a bit dazed and fuzzy. The nurse is friendly and says she’ll take them up to see Mr. Maurer in five minutes when visiting hours begin.
‘This is what they want you to think,’ Brigitta whispers as they walk behind the nurse. ‘They make it seem like everything’s fine, but then behind closed doors they’re performing lobotomies, cutting out people’s true selves.’
Magda shoots her a dirty look but silently tries to reassure herself: he’s only been in hospital six days. Not enough time to erase someone.
‘You should really read Ken Kesey’s work, both of you. It’s a revelation.’
Then the nurse arrives and tells them they can follow her. Brigitta pulls Evie up, linking their arms, leaving Magda to follow behind. But Evie hangs back, her wrist hooked limply over the girl’s forearm, and gives Magda a wide-eyed glance. Brigitta, too busy trying to peer into every room they pass to notice, continues to drag Evie, her sour doll-child, down the hall.
When they get to their father’s room, they find no restraints, no bandages, no scars. No thrashing or toneless muttering. He is just sitting in a chair by the window, his hands in his lap, a blanket over his legs. Evie seems briefly embarrassed—as though some part of her wanted the crackling father who Brigitta would be delighted by; the father who once hired a barefoot young poet he met in Lapa to come home with him and write them all sonnets. But Magda rushes over to him and bends to give him a hug, and he hugs her back, weakly but warmly. Not a madman, not a poet, not a vegetable. Just a tired, middle-aged man, faded but still so handsome. Of that, even Magda is proud. Evie hugs him too and so does Brigitta, and he gives an abrupt, bemused laugh at being embraced by this strange girl.
Evie leans toward him and murmurs, ‘Brigitta said Mother wanted to shunt you away.’
‘You mustn’t blame your mother for this,’ he says. ‘We won’t do that anymore. Come with me.’ He leads them to a large picture window in the central recreation room and points inland. ‘See that? Up there, on the way up to Corcovado, is the hotel your great-grandfather built, where your mother spent her summers as a child. Down there is Cassino da Urca, where we used to go dancing. It sits almost at the edge of the water, and one night people came in boats to watch us.’
He looks at a point in the distance as he speaks, but his voice is steady, unbreaking. He tells them how he and their mother were once very foolish, and they had danced and shown off to the people in those boats, imagining themselves admired from afar. Thoughtless as children.
‘But then I left her alone with your sister again and again, for more than a thousand days and nights. She changed, but she stayed. And she is losing more than any of us, because even though this family matters more to her than anything, she’s losing the life she was promised.’ He stares out the window for a long time, his lips moving slightly, as though counting, Magda thinks. Enumerating all the things Dora will leave behind. ‘Carmichael,’ he murmurs, moving his lips so minutely that Magda wonders if she’d imagined it. Then, ‘Luiza’ last of all.
‘We won’t blame her,’ he says finally, clearly, and meeting his daughters’ eyes
. ‘She’s the only one who takes care of things, who keeps us safe.’
And Magda can see that he believes it, that their mother will save them.
Brigitta, who has been absorbed in some puzzle pieces laid out on the ping-pong table, suddenly whirls around. ‘We’ve been so worried about you, Mr. Maurer, and wanted to make sure—’
But Magda pushes her aside. ‘We’ll take him outside.’
Evie and Magda follow their father as he makes his way slowly to a picnic table. Giant trees line the grounds, swallows wheeling above them. Patients and their visitors are starting to trickle outside as visiting hours begin.
Once they find an empty table, Papa turns to Magda and whispers, now quite audibly, ‘But what are you doing here, my girl? You’re much too sensible for this sort of thing. You need to get your sister away from—’ and he jerks his head in a stagey nod toward Brigitta, who’s just gone skipping off across the lawn, an idiot wanderer.
She wants to tell him about Maricota and Odete, about how thoughtless she was to imagine she could be more important to them than their own families. Instead she says, ‘I had to make sure you get out of here.’
‘I will get out. I’m not a prisoner. They make sure I get rest here, but I’ll be home in a few weeks.’
‘Can we stay a little longer?’
In a few minutes, Brigitta comes at them with a wheelchair, but when Magda moves to push it away, remarkably, her father eases into it.
‘Go on then, take me for a spin.’
Together, the three girls take turns pushing him on the bright green lawn, while they gossip about the other patients. Her father tells them who howls at the moon at night and who thinks she’s Queen Anne. None of it is true, they understand, but they laugh anyway, and when visiting hours are over, they all three labour to push him back over the grass.
‘I can walk, you know, but I quite enjoy having underlings.’ Some things are not the disease talking, as Mother would say. Some things are him.
There is a narrow concrete ramp leading up to the door. Evie and Brigitta walk ahead and hold the door open so that Magda can push him up by herself. At the top of the ramp she turns him around, but instead of guiding him into the building, she lets go. The slope is gradual, so the chair rolls down slowly, then rocks forward only slightly as it hits the grass. But he emits a stuttering sound as he goes down, and she’s not sure for a moment if it’s laughter or fear.
‘Again,’ he says, his voice younger and lighter than before. And so they push him back up the ramp and release him again and again until an orderly says it’s nearly dinnertime and they have to go in.
DORA
Luiza’s bedroom is narrow, with just enough room for the bed, a small side table, and a desk in the corner opposite the bed, though there is a large window. The bed is also narrow, so they must lie close, the lengths of their bodies touching as they stare up at the ceiling, which is unusually high at over twelve feet. And yet despite the actual dimensions of the room, there is a feeling of spaciousness, of openness. All the furniture, doors, and trims are made from lustrous wood, and the walls are off-white and calming, and as they lie on the bed, some part of Dora finds herself understanding the pull of this place. To have your spaces so clearly defined, so circumscribed, your choices almost entirely made for you.
They’ve ended up here because they don’t know where else to go. Some incalculable distance has been traversed and even though there are still moments when rage flashes through her, Dora wants only to be beside her daughter, this warm body that was once her baby, her child—more familiar and real and precious to her than her own. When Luiza was little and bumped her head or scraped a knee, Dora used to tease her, ‘You be careful with that little body! I made that body!’
All those times when Hugo went away for treatment and she used to let Luiza sleep in her bed. Let her—she needed her there. She wanted her child so close that she could reach out and wrap her fingers around Luiza’s ankle, remind herself that she was safe. By morning Dora always ended up curved around Luiza’s perfect, little body. An ear within an ear. But when Hugo came back, what happened then? She can’t remember. Luiza must have gone back to sleeping in her own bed, alone. Pressed against her daughter now, maybe she can absorb some understanding of her, see past the queer expressions that keep settling on her lovely face—haughty, sympathetic, aggrieved. All tried on. All fake. All meant to push Dora back to the threshold.
On the walls are a few small statues of sublime human bodies, eyes upturned in ecstasy. Convenient, she thinks, that there are no ugly saints. Believing what these women believed meant you could spend your days in quiet reflection, making things with your hands, singing, praying, gardening—devoted to a clear, singular purpose. If you believed. She envies them. Will she spend her life seeking what they already have? It doesn’t seem possible for people with lives like hers. Imagine always knowing what to do next, believing that one’s actions have worth and beauty and grace—a perfect kind of peace. Free of constant, plaguing doubt, wondering if you’ve done the right thing for your family, wondering if you’ve been good enough. But now that she’s had her children, she can’t imagine another life, a life without them. She can’t wish herself backwards. She can only nudge herself forward with her mind, try to heed that low, hissing voice: Get them out. Save them. But which ones?
Suddenly she’s up on both elbows and shaking Luiza from her sham sleep.
‘You know these places were tombs for women, don’t you? The Portuguese, the plantation-owners—they sent their daughters here to keep them pure, to keep them from committing adultery or losing their virginity. Or if their fathers couldn’t afford to marry them off, this is where those poor girls came. You think your father is the only one who knows anything about history, but I’ll tell you something about your precious cloister. It was just a place to bury women alive. And whether it was by their fathers or their husbands or their church, they were all hidden away. Made to disappear.’
Luiza pulls herself loose from her mother’s grasp and lies back down on the bed.
‘Why did you come here? Really?’ demands Dora.
Luiza’s eyes are open, but she just stares at the ceiling, her arms crossed over her chest, already adopting the position of someone mummified. ‘Tell me a story,’ she says finally, when their breathing has returned to normal. ‘Something about our family.’
Dora understands her daughter is telling her that they are not going to talk about Carmichael. Overtired, she starts to tell her old favourite, about how her parents met: how her grandfather was an entrepreneur who started a company that ferried cargo from large ships to shore. Then, a jute factory, a diamond mine, a hotel on Corcovado Mountain where the wealthy spent their summers, almost airborne, lifted above the heat and filth and the crowds. He became rich. His daughter came home from school to visit in 1891, set to travel from the train station to his house by horseback. But just as she arrived, it began to rain, and she arrived at her father’s house wet, soaked through to the bone! A family friend was visiting, a young dentist, and just as he entered the darkened central parlour off which all the rooms adjoined to light some lanterns, a door suddenly burst open.
‘And in ran my mother, your vóvó, stark naked,’ said Dora. ‘Running from one room to the next to get dry clothes. She never even noticed this young man standing in a corner in the dark. The next day he threw a rose through her bedroom window. He never told her what he’d seen, even after they were married. But he told me.’
‘No more family myths,’ Luiza says. ‘I’m so tired of myths. Tell me something real about our family.’
A relief because Dora, too, is tired of these stories. ‘Myth’ sounds so grand and gilded, almost supernatural—how she herself thought of them not so long ago. But now they feel sticky and vestigial, secreted into her mind even before she could think for herself. A residue she can’t scrape away.
‘Tell me about when you and Father met.’
Her daughter has heard this
story countless times already, even more than the rose story, and it sounds just as make-believe, just as apocryphal. She used to work as a translator at the American embassy (she had once taken dictation from Truman!), and there were always two copies made of each translation: one original, for the Americans, and the carbon that she had to burn in an old sugar tin after transmittal. She always insists on telling this part of the story even though Luiza seems impatient with it. Dora wants her to know: she had another life once.
But today Dora skips ahead to the part Luiza wants to hear, about how, when Hugo stepped into her elevator at the embassy, she immediately thought she’d never known until that day that a man could be beautiful. And when he stepped off the elevator at her floor, she took the hand of her co-worker, a sweet woman named Betty, and whispered to her, That was him. That was the man she was going to marry. The doors closed before they could get out and they were too caught up to press the open button, so they had to walk down three floors, giggling the entire way. Everybody loves the romance of this story, but what it reveals embarrasses Dora now. Her naiveté, her caprice, her shallow attraction to a man she didn’t know. Those few brief moments have become myth, but the truth that followed from them is what now sounds to Dora like something from a fable. Or a warning. Could she bring herself to tell her the truth? That she married a man because he was so very beautiful. He spoke pages from books but moved like an animal beneath his clothes. His tastes, his smells; she craved them, and marrying him was the only way to have them. Thank god the world is changing and her daughters will never know the pressure of having to make that choice: to have to marry someone just to experience their body, to learn they are broken. But she says none of this. What she says instead, her voice breathy and false: ‘And then I turned to Betty and said to her, That’s the man I’m going to marry. And so I did.’