The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao

by Martha Batalha

  ‌

  The Invisible

  Life of

  Euridice Gusmao

  A wickedly funny tale of two rebellious sisters in 1940s Rio de Janeiro.

  ‘Extraordinary. You can’t put this book down.’

  Vogue (Brazil)

  ‘A jubilant novel about the emancipation of women.’

  Madame Figaro (France)

  ‘A unique and enchanting novel.’

  Elle (France)

  ‌

  For Juan, who believed in me from the first

  of the four books sacrificed in the name of Euridice.

  For my parents, whose presence in everything

  I do goes far beyond our family name.

  And for the best Portuguese teacher anyone could ask for:

  Solveig, this is the same 12-year-old girl

  paying back all that you taught her.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  More World Fiction from Oneworld

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  Dear Readers,

  Many of the stories found in this book indeed took place. Bodies were once piled up in the streets of Rio as a result of the Spanish flu. The verses uttered by Maria Rita have been borrowed from the poet Olavo Bilac, and the news related to her life appeared in the newspaper Jornal do Commercio.

  Rio also had a bookseller named Garnier – equal parts French and cheapskate – who left his family in a dire financial situation. A very poor young man became rich brewing beer just like Luiz and his Tupã-brand beer (this Luiz was my great-grandfather). Someone did have the singular fate I’ve given Luiz here, as the writer Luiz Edmundo recalls in one of his books of remembrances.

  Heitor Cordeiro, Bebé Silveira, and Raul Régis organized the finest soirées of the newly proclaimed republic. The composer Heitor Villa-Lobos went from school to school teaching the wonders of choral music, and there was indeed a terrific teacher at the Celestino Silva Municipal School, according to my grandfather.

  But the parts of this book most faithful to the truth can be found in the lives of the two protagonists, Euridice and Guida. Many like them can still be found. They’re the women who show up to Christmas parties and spend the bulk of their time sitting there quietly, with their napkins in their hands. They’re the first to arrive and the first to leave. They discuss the seasoning of the cod croquettes, the numerous different desserts and the wine – never drinking too much. They’re the ones who ask you how your husband is doing, if their great-niece has a boyfriend yet, or when another great-nephew will be on the way.

  The lives of Euridice and Guida have drawn inspiration from the women in my family, and perhaps yours as well.

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  ‌Chapter 1

  By the time Euridice Gusmao married Antenor Campelo, the longing she’d felt for her sister’s return had already faded. She found herself able once again to flash a smile when she heard something funny, and now managed to make it through two pages of a book without looking up to wonder where Guida might be at that moment. It’s true that she continued her search, inspecting each female face on the street, and she was even certain once that she’d seen Guida on a tram headed towards Vila Isabel. Later, this certainty passed, like all others before it.

  Why Euridice and Antenor married, no one knows for certain. Some say that the vows were exchanged because José Salviano and Manuel da Costa were already engaged. Others pin the blame for the union on Antenor’s sick aunt. By that time, she was no longer able to wash her nephew’s clothes with her special lavender detergent. Or make the bits of onion in his chicken soup go unnoticed, which she’d done because Antenor enjoyed the taste of onion but hated its texture. A single camouflaged piece in his beans left him queasy and belching the entire afternoon. There are also those who believe that Euridice and Antenor did indeed fall in love, but that their love lasted for all of one dance at a masked ball at the Naval Club.

  The fact is they married, to a packed church, followed by a reception at the bride’s house. Two hundred cod croquettes, two crates of beer, and a bottle of champagne for the toast when the time came to cut the cake. The neighbor – a violin teacher – offered to play at the reception. Everyone pushed their chairs off to the side and the couples danced the waltz.

  Since Euridice had no friends, there were few young women at the reception: there were two of her aunts who weren’t so old, a not-so-attractive neighbor, and another not-so-charming cousin. The most beautiful woman was to be found in the room’s only picture frame.

  ‘Who’s the woman in this picture?’ asked one of the groom’s friends.

  Antenor nudged his friend: What kind of manners are those? The young man looked in embarrassment from side to side, then at the glass in his hand. He set his beer down on the table and walked to the other end of the room.

  It was a simple ceremony, followed by a simple reception, followed by a complicated honeymoon. There was no blood on the sheets, and Antenor grew suspicious.

  Where on earth have you been? I haven’t been anywhere. Like hell you haven’t. No, I haven’t. Don’t go making excuses, you know exactly what we should be seeing here. Yes, I know, my sister explained it to me. A slut, that’s what you are. Don’t say that, Antenor. I’ll say it as many times as I want: slut, slut, slut.

  Alone in bed, her body tucked beneath the sheets, Euridice wept softly with each slut she heard, with each slut the whole block had heard, and because the entire experience had hurt, first between her legs and then inside her heart.

  In the weeks that followed things calmed down, and Antenor decided there was no need to take his wife back to her family. She knew how to make the bits of onion disappear, she washed and ironed well, seldom spoke, and had a terrific rear. What’s more, the incident on their wedding night served to increase his stature within the relationship, so much so that he looked down on his wife when addressing her. Euridice went along with it. She’d always known she wasn’t worth much. No one listing her profession as ‘housewife’ on the census form could be worth much at all.

  Cecilia came into the world nine months and one day after the wedding. She was a smiley and pudgy little baby, welcomed with celebration by the relatives, who exclaimed: ‘She’s beautiful!’ Afonso came into the world the following year. He was a smiley and pudgy little baby, greeted with celebration by the relatives, who repeated: ‘It’s a boy!’

  Responsible for doubling the size of her family in under two years, Euridice decided to retire from her marital duties. Since she had no easy way to make Antenor accept her decision, she made herself understood by gaining pound upon pound. Extra pounds talk, extra pounds yell, and scream: Don’t you ever touch me.

  Euridice followed breakfast with a ten o’clock snack, lunch with a four o’clock snack, and dinner with a nine o’clock supper. She soon had a triple chin. It looked as if her eyes had shrunk, and her hair could no longer frame her enormous facial features. When she saw she’d reached the right point – the point of making her husband never again come close to her – she adopted more nutritious forms of sustenance. She would diet on Monday mornings, and during the hours between meals.

  Euridice’s weight soon stabilized, much like the routine of the Gusmao-Campelo family. Antenor would go off to work, the children woul
d go off to school, and Euridice would stay at home, making beef stew and stewing over empty thoughts that made hers an unhappy life. She had no job, she’d already finished her schooling – how was she to fill the hours of the day after tidying up the beds, watering the plants, sweeping the living room, doing the laundry, seasoning the beans, cooking the rice, making the soufflé, and frying up the steaks?

  The thing is, Euridice was brilliant. Give her the proper equations and she would design bridges. Give her a laboratory and she would invent vaccines. Give her blank pages and she would write classics. But instead, she was given dirty underwear, which she washed quickly and left spotless, before sitting on the couch, looking at her nails, and thinking about what she ought to be thinking about. That’s how Euridice decided she shouldn’t think at all, and that in order to not think she ought to keep herself busy every hour of the day. There was only one household activity that brought such a benefit, given it was nearly endless in its daily demands: cooking. Euridice would never be an engineer, would never step foot in a lab, and would never dare to write verse, but she dedicated herself to the only activity with a little something of engineering, science, and poetry.

  Every morning, after waking up, getting ready, feeding and getting rid of her husband and kids, Euridice would open the Aunt Palmira Cookbook. Duck à l’orange made for the perfect dinner, since she would have to buy duck and there were no oranges at home. She would throw on a dress to go out and head to the poultry market to pick out a healthy-sized duck. She took advantage of the opportunity to buy a chicken, since the duck had to spend the night soaking in wine and spices, which meant that day’s dinner would also provide a challenge. The recipe called for a young, plump duck, the chicken needed to have a red comb and a meaty breast. At the market Euridice would grab oranges for the following day, coconut flakes for a cornbread cake, prunes for the stuffing, and a dozen bananas for Afonso and Cecilia, for after they played with their food and cried: I don’t like it.

  Arriving home, she would string up the chicken and the duck by their legs, cut their throats, and then attend to her other chores while the blood ran into the sink. The duck and the chicken were scalded for two minutes, their feathers plucked after the body cooled, a flame passed along the skin to singe the little hairs. The innards and the gizzard, liver and heart were removed with a tiny cut along the belly before roasting the entire bird, or through a large incision in the middle of the body if the dish called for it to be chopped.

  There were also the side dishes. She never simply fried the potatoes, but stuffed them with ham and cheese or added spices and breadcrumbs and deep-fried the whole thing. Her rice was never just white, but adorned with raisins, peas, carrots, tomato sauce, coconut milk, or one of a dozen other ingredients suggested in her cookbook. Custard in a plum sauce, cascade meringues, coconut candy – whatever her cookbook told her, the young housewife did, and everything the young housewife did, she did with flare.

  Euridice’s culinary prowess went unrecognized by her family. Afonso and Cecilia had a phase where they sang an ode to pasta, and Antenor wasn’t the kind of man to be impressed by sea bass with clam sauce. Give us some spaghetti, the children would say. Make me a nice steak, Antenor would chime in, and Euridice would head back into the kitchen to boil water for the spaghetti, promising Antenor a filet mignon free of saffron. After two or three nights of simpler food, she’d return to her cookbook, and surprise her family with pork medallions in rosemary sauce.

  When she’d had a go at all the recipes, Euridice thought the time had come to create her own dishes. While Aunt Palmira knew a great many things, she didn’t know everything, and Euridice had a sneaking suspicion that creamed yucca could serve as a topping for jerky, that guava paste would go well with chicken Milanese, that stuffing could be replaced by this curry seasoning she found in the specialty market, but which was not mentioned in her cookbook. One Thursday morning she put on a dress and off she went to the stationery store on the corner.

  ‘Good morning, Dona Euridice.’

  ‘Good morning, Antonio.’

  ‘Looking for something special?’

  ‘A big, ruled notebook.’

  Antonio pointed to the pile of hardcover notebooks on the shelf. Euridice entertained herself with the choice and Antonio entertained himself with Euridice. Perhaps because he had spent his childhood sleeping amid the bountiful flesh of Chica de Jesus, the black nursemaid responsible for raising Antonio and his brothers while their mother attended Rio’s most exclusive soirées, Antonio found much to like in Euridice’s bountifulness. He also liked her eyes, her pointy nose, her tiny hands, the delicate pendant around her neck, her chubby ankles, and just about every other part of her his eyes could see.

  Euridice took her time with the notebooks. As it was to be her recipe book, she needed to choose the best among the identical ruled notebooks. She leafed through one of the notebooks, found a wrinkled page and placed the notebook back on the pile. She grabbed another, saw a smudge on the cover and put it back on the pile. She looked over a third and found no defects. She was about to deliver the Chosen One to Tinoco, the boy who had been working at the store since forever, when Antonio quickly offered himself to help her check out. They discussed the weather while Euridice waited for her change. She left without realizing that her commentary on the recent rain had been the high point of the man’s week.

  On her way back, Euridice hummed a tune, happy as could be. She quit humming and lost some of that joy when she heard Good morning, comadre!

  It was Zélia, the next-door neighbor. Zélia was a woman with many frustrations, chief among them the fact that she wasn’t the Holy Spirit, able to see and know everything. She was closer to the Big Bad Wolf, because she had big eyes to see with, big ears to hear with and a big mouth, which spread the neighborhood news up and down the block. Zélia also had a turtle’s neck, which seemed to stretch from inside her collar any time she saw someone of interest pass by her house. The woman was stranger than a platypus, and if a person like her didn’t call much attention, it was because Zélia was merely one among many of the same stripe living in that time and place.

  ‘Replenishing the stock of school supplies for the children?’

  Euridice pulled the package to her chest, in a dubious gesture. She wasn’t sure whether she was protecting her chest, or the package.

  ‘Good morning, comadre. This? Oh, it’s just a notebook…to keep track of household expenses.’

  The next day, all the women on the block bemoaned the fact that Euridice and Antenor were facing financial troubles. Well, what do you expect? asked Zélia. Euridice had no limits when it came to her grocery shopping, and how many times could one go to Casas Pedro in search of spices? The scents coming from that kitchen! Exotic aromas, so different from the rice and beans found at the other houses on the block. Sooner or later, she’d have to face reality.

  Since she couldn’t be the Holy Spirit, Zélia contented herself with a lower post, proclaiming herself prophet. Her empirical observations yielded precise prognostications, which had the common characteristic of being gloomy. That one there is going to drag her husband into bankruptcy, she decreed with her pointy chin.

  Zélia hadn’t become a platypus just like that. It’s known that such evolutions take their time. The transformation began while she was still a child, when what should have been a blessing became a curse. From her father she inherited a taste for the news, from her mother, a life restricted to home. The world had brought her heartbreak; fate brought her a lack of options. That’s how her gossipy nature came about.

  Whoever met the young lady would not believe that her stern eyes had once been capable of gazing without malice, whoever saw her sneering smile would never imagine that it had once been just a smile. But that’s exactly what Zélia was like as a child: all smiles and kind looks. During the few years she was happy, she’d thought life was something so incredible that she complained when bedtime rolled around, refusing to sleep. I can listen to
the crickets, I can identify the sounds around the house, I can think about what to do in the morning, and what games to play in the afternoon, she would say to herself, eyes wide open in the dark. Every night, exhaustion got the best of her. She would fall asleep, but she soon discovered that she’d been duped and was always the first to wake up in the morning.

  Zélia woke singing, ate with a smile, and skipped rather than walked. She made up dances, blew kisses, and laughed for laughing’s sake. Everything looked fun to her – picking out the little stones from the beans, folding the dry clothes from the line, finding spider webs on the ceiling, and sweeping the corners of the living room.

  The neighborhood women disapproved of the girl’s impulsive actions – That’s a lack of a good belting, that’s what that is. But her mother paid no mind to such advice. ‘One day she’ll discover that life isn’t how she imagines it, but that day doesn’t have to come today,’ she said, filled with nostalgia at seeing in her daughter’s skipping and jumping her own childhood, many years earlier.

  For Zélia, every day was great, and Saturday the greatest day of all. That was when she would see her father for the first time all week. Alvaro Staffa was a newspaper reporter by day and a carouser by night. By the time he arrived home, his children were already sleeping; when he woke up, they’d already gone off to school. His fatherly duties were fulfilled on the weekends, when he had to entertain the kids while his wife prepared lunch. Alvaro would scratch his head, looking uneasily at his kids, and prepare himself to do the only thing he knew aside from writing and drinking, which was to talk about what he’d written and what he still might write. He would set Zélia on one knee and put Armandinho on the other, sit Francisco off on one side, place Zezinho on the other and tell Carlos, Julieta, and Alice to sit cross-legged on the floor, before closing the bedroom door so as not to wake the youngest. He then would tell his children about his adventures as a reporter.