One day he was at the Copacabana Palace together with the Miss Rio contestants, the next he was in Niterói assessing the damage caused by an accident with fireworks. There was the lunch in the Café Paschoal to honor the president, the debate about the extinction of hand-pulled carts in the streets downtown. The golden plaque given to Santos-Dumont by his friends and the much-anticipated bazaar at the Church of Bom Jesus do Monte. The decrees signed at the transportation department, the fire that razed a shack on the Avenida do Mangue, and the arrest of that blind musician, the one who could always be found on Rua Direita and had twins to raise. His arrest was a bunch of nonsense, which only served to show the cruelty of the police.
It was the only time of the week when peace came to the house. Besides Alvaro’s voice, the only noise was that of the pressure cooker.
Until one day Zélia’s mother’s prophecy came to pass. The girl underwent two tragedies that put a stop to her skipping and jumping. The first was her father’s death. The second was the discovery that she was ugly.
Alvaro Staffa discovered his calling as a reporter at fifteen. At that time, he was already a graduate and postgraduate of the streets of Rio. At eight years of age, he arrived from Italy with his parents; at nine, he became an orphan. How he learned Portuguese, how he learned to read and write, how he didn’t die of starvation, the plague, or a stab wound is a mystery that can only be explained by serendipity. He sold candy on the ferry and lottery tickets at the trolley stop. He shined shoes, washed windows, and delivered papers. He eked out his survival from small jobs on the street and the favors he performed for a respectable type in a suit, who took him to a hotel room in Lapa once a week and asked him to walk nude across his back while singing ‘O Sole Mio.’
Before he reached the age of thirteen, he’d been arrested nine times. He knew how to wield a razor blade, and was feared for his capoeira skills. Feeling that it was time to settle down, he traced out a career plan, which consisted of trying for a promotion. From a delivery boy Alvaro became an office boy in the newsroom. An unthinkable leap forward. It was the first time he’d worked with a roof over his head.
The promotion came not a minute too early. For some months now, Alvaro’s services as a nude singer had no longer been required, due to his being too heavy to walk on the back of the man in the suit. And such privileges he now enjoyed – he had his very own desk, and when he had no tasks to do he could spend the entire afternoon sitting down in the company of a book.
This good life came to an end in the winter of 1918, when the city recorded its first cases of Spanish flu. At the beginning, it was one here, one there. A week later, it was many here, and even more there.
By October, half of Rio’s population had fallen ill. One Wednesday morning, only Alvaro, the newspaper’s editor, Camerino Rocha, and the typographer showed up to the newsroom. Camerino looked over at the boy behind the desk, asked if he could write, and sent him to the street with a pencil and a notepad.
Alvaro spent three hours walking the streets of Rio. He saw men in agony as they vomited blood and children talking to mothers who had already died. Sick people in a delirium, expelled from their homes. Long-bearded prophets proclaiming the end of the world. He heard the screams that preceded death coming from behind closed shutters and counted hundreds of bodies in the streets. In vain. As soon as he’d finished counting, someone else would turn up dead, or the wagon sent by the city government showed up to tow away the bodies. With the wagon scarcely gone, fresh bodies could soon be found on the doorsteps, waiting for the hour that came after the hour of death, the time to enter the competition for space in one of the city’s communal graves, which were being dug every day.
In the weeks that followed, this would be his routine: arrive in the newsroom, grab a pencil and notepad, go out to document the unfolding tragedy and come back with more than enough stories to fill the day’s paper. He seemed immune to the illness and the horrible scenes before him. Why his body resisted is anyone’s guess; his spirit resisted the images because he’d watched his entire family perish, victims of yellow fever.
When the reporters who survived the flu came back to the newsroom, they found Alvaro in front of a typewriter. With the exception of weekends and Christmas Day, the cub reporter could be found in the same place every day and for hours on end, a routine he would maintain until the day he died.
How did Alvaro die? There are two versions of that story. The first is that he began to feel a terrible thirst, which caused him to re-evaluate his priorities. Before the onset of this thirst, his time with his kids, haircuts, birthday parties, what he’d had for breakfast, what he would have for dinner, all these were irrelevant details that took place between what was really important: writing, talking about what he’d written, and drinking so he could speak at even greater length about the things he’d written and the things he might yet write. For this new Alvaro Staffa – the one with an unquenchable thirst – the priorities were drinking to put up with his wife and kids, drinking before and after getting his hair cut, attending birthday parties to drink more, and drunken babbling about what he’d written recently.
He could just about make it to the newsroom hung over. He’d catch some grief from Camerino, and to set himself right he began to snort cocaine. The pure stuff, German, direct from the Merck labs, bought on the black market behind the Hotel Glória.
The primary consequence of this change in Alvaro could be seen in the family pantry. Up until then, the pantry was stocked according to a certain logic: it started off full and was empty by the end of the month. After Alvaro began to fall apart, every day seemed like the end of the month. All that remained was a handful of flour, some leftover sugar, a few beans, a single onion. A banana had managed to escape the children’s hunger and turned brown, and in their misery, the family debated whether they should eat the half-rotten fruit.
Alvaro died of cirrhosis at thirty-five. Those of Alvaro’s friends who subscribed to this version of his death spent the wake lamenting the devastating addictions that cut down the country’s greatest talents in their prime.
There is also a second version of this story, in which Alvaro Staffa, this self-made man who raised himself up from nothing – this man who was straight as an arrow, lost his direction, and straightened out again after marrying – continued to harbor certain dubious tendencies. Alvaro liked life on the street, and the people who could be found there. Now and then, the young man would fall for a mixed girl – it had always been the mixed-race girls he found most appetizing. Later he’d fall out of love once more, and life would go on.
Such were his intentions when one Shrove Tuesday he met a samba dancer marching along in a Carnival bloc. She had teeth as white as the white of her eyes, even if it wasn’t possible to see her eyes: Rosa danced with closed eyes and wide-open smile, shaking her hips in a way Alvaro had never seen. Those were hips with personality. Firm, taut, strong, and irresistible.
It took Alvaro three months to properly examine those hips, which he did in Rosa’s boarding-house room. The couple spent entire afternoons exchanging bodily fluids and vows of love, Rosa begging Alvaro to whisper Italian in her ear, Alvaro begging Rosa to parade around nude. Rosa gave herself entirely to the affair. Alvaro gave his penis entirely to the affair.
Until one day Alvaro took his penis and his Italian cooing and left the boarding house. Back home, his wife had already healed from the latest birth, which meant he’d have other ways to fulfill his needs. He said goodbye to Rosa like he might to a great-aunt: knowing he’d never see her again and without much caring.
Rosa couldn’t handle the abandonment. She broke vases, tore up clothes, and considered rat poison. She lost so much weight that in addition to Alvaro she also lost her hips. She soon gained bags under her eyes, disheveled hair, and dismissal from her job as a waitress at one of the taverns on Rua Direita.
It all would have ended there, with Rosa chewing over the bitter loss of her first love, had she not been the daughter of
Oluô Teté, one of the most respected Candomblé priests in Rio. His shrine in Vila da Penha attracted important politicians from across the country. Carriages coming from Botafogo would stop in front of his gate, and out stepped aristocratic ladies with their faces concealed by hats and hidden behind fans. Oluô Teté knew how to revive the sick and converse in the language of the dead. He knew how to channel the spirits and to summon sun and rain.
Seeing his daughter in that state, Oluô did what any father would do: he clenched his fists and wished the dago an eternity spent burning in hell. In his case, his wish was easily fulfilled, since he had a direct line to proper sources. Oluô had a cow killed and asked Rosa to bring him the bedsheets she had shared with Alvaro. He swaddled his daughter in the blood-stained sheets and began to pray or sling curses in some unfamiliar dialect. The drums of the Morro do Cariri slum never ceased playing the entire weekend.
On Monday morning, Alvaro began drinking.
Rosa’s hate was so strong and her father’s magic so potent that the curses cast over Alvaro affected all who were product of his seed, putting at risk the lives of his eight children and sixteen bastard kids all over the north side of Rio.
João died the same month as his father. He curled up in his father’s empty bed and cried for three straight days until he was consumed by grief. Julieta fell ill two weeks later. The doctor diagnosed polio and said she’d never walk again.
His widow and remaining children don’t like to remember these months of misery. What is known is that Carlos, then thirteen, became the man of the house. And that the sloths of Campo de Santana began to disappear around the same time the family had its first taste of exotic meats.
Soon after, they were taken in by a relative living in the working-class neighborhood of Bangu – the house had five rooms and one bathroom, an image of Jesus Christ guarding the doorway, chickens and mango trees in the yard. Zélia’s family was given a room and the last spot in line for the bathroom.
When Zélia went to live with her relatives she still had the blue notebook her father had given her. This is for you to write what you think about the world, he’d said to her. Zélia’s little arms had clasped Alvaro’s neck, who, with eyes closed, gave thanks to God for the family he’d been given. The clumsy sentences of the first pages soon evolved into elaborate paragraphs, written throughout those months of suffering. Writing was Zélia’s only solace. A solace that she stashed beneath her mattress, later to be found by her cousins, who, between giggles, read a few passages aloud before dinner. This raised the ire of Zélia’s mother, who defended her daughter with attacks on her nephews, and who was attacked in turn by her brother. Who did she think she was, besides someone who lived off charity?
Later, when Zélia left her aunt and uncle’s house, the notebook was long gone. It went straight into the trash, as Zélia harbored the illusion that if the notebook were buried in the trash, it might take her cousins’ mockery with it. It had all been a bunch of nonsense anyway.
Zélia managed to endure a lot. She endured the patched clothes and the second-hand panties. She endured the same shoes she’d worn for so many years, loose around her ankles in the beginning and pinching her toes by the end. She endured her cousins’ laughter and the lack of affection from her mother, who was always worn out after doing the laundry and cooking for the fifteen people at their new home. She endured the watery soup, and the cries of her younger siblings.
But she couldn’t endure adolescence. When she discovered two bean seeds behind her flat chest, when she had stomach cramps accompanied by bleeding, when she felt unprecedented desires and fears, her unbendable optimism bowed.
Zélia’s mouth is big as a house, Zélia’s mouth is big as a house, was her cousins’ new refrain.
One afternoon when there were only a few people at home, she went into the bathroom. She locked the door and examined her face in the mirror. What she saw was no longer the face of a slightly crossed-eyed child with a huge hair bow hanging across her temple. It was the face of a girl with ill-behaved hair, ill-proportioned eyes and nose, pimples dotting her ill-fitting forehead and a huge mouth full of lips and teeth. It was an abundant, unnecessary, excessive mouth. Two thick lines that cut mercilessly across her face. As Zélia stood there, she arrived at the conclusion she’d hold on to for the rest of her life: she was ugly.
It was written in her fate and on her face that she would be unhappy. The desires and fears she’d gained growing up mixed with a newfound bitterness, which sprouted from her chest like weeds. Even in the early years of adolescence, when Zélia still told herself it was silly to think like that and plucked the bitter little weeds one by one, they grew back unrelentingly and multiplied. Until one day Zélia stopped plucking them, looked once again into the mirror, and decided that the ugliness of her face and the sadness brought by living were perfect companions to the bitterness she felt in her heart.
That’s when the new Zélia was born. The only thing she inherited from the old Zélia was enthusiasm for life, now distorted. She would now classify others according to a cruel system devised to make sense of the world. Zélia didn’t want to be, and wouldn’t be, the only one who was unhappy. From that moment on she was able to find unhappiness everywhere, through things both real and simply rumored, which she spread far and wide with her enormous mouth.
Zélia had one last glimpse of hope, when she imagined a better life. It was shortly before her eighteenth birthday. For some months she had been trading letters with a distant cousin on her father’s side, a certain Nicolas Staffa, who had settled down with his family in the southern part of the state of Minas Gerais. Nicolas’s father was an entertainment impresario who was quickly becoming an influential person in the city of Lambari. One day Nicolas wrote to Zélia to tell her that he was coming to Rio on account of his father’s business, and that he would take advantage of the trip to stay until the holiday ball at the Clube dos Democráticos. Would Zélia and her sisters like to come along? Zélia wrote back a shy but enthusiastic response: of course, they would love to go.
Zélia Staffa, Zélia Staffa, the young girl repeated to herself with a smile. Life was full of irony. In the months before, she’d been pairing her first name with the last name of all the boys she knew: Zélia Camargo, Zélia Cavalieri, Zélia Calixto. Who would think that among so many possible combinations her name would simply remain Zélia Staffa. Zélia Staffa. The name suited her.
By that point, Zélia was well aware of the size of her mouth and all the other causes for displeasure that surrounded it. But she had found hope in this exchange of letters with Nicolas, for two reasons: the first is that they’d already met, which meant the young man had freely chosen to continue their correspondence, even after becoming acquainted with the generous proportions of her face. The second is that when Zélia put pen to paper, she transformed into one of the most interesting women of her time.
Zélia thought of nothing but the dance. She sang softly, practiced braiding her hair, and during those few days she flashed the very last smiles that recalled those of her childhood. She sewed her own dress, a light pink outfit with a flared skirt and puffed sleeves. She sewed a bolero jacket from ivory-colored fabric, to be worn when entering and leaving the dance. She bought new gloves, bought a hat to be paid off in installments, and borrowed her oldest sister’s earrings. She followed the beauty tips found in the Young Ladies’ Journal. She rested her eyes behind cucumber masks, she left her hair soaking in aloe vera, and added iodine drops to the bathwater to give her skin an amber tone. On the day of the dance, Zélia was so happy she even felt beautiful.
But the dance didn’t go well. The Nicolas at the dance seemed different from the one she knew from their letters. He was polite but restrained. Cheerful but reserved. Their conversations died after the third exchange. There was a great distance between them, even greater than the distance between Lambari and Rio, which they’d managed to bridge so well during their months of correspondence.
At some point in the
middle of the evening, Zélia gave up her hopes of hours of enjoyment like those spent reading Nicolas’s letters. She left the young man standing in the middle of the ballroom, saying she had to retouch her make-up. Nicolas didn’t so much as say ‘uh-huh’, he only nodded his head. Zélia turned her back and broke into tears. The interesting Zélia, or the interesting Zélia she had thought she was in Nicolas’s eyes, gave way to a sad and insecure girl. With each step towards the bathroom her insecurity grew. When, on the way, she checked herself out in the wall-length mirror, all she could see was a crooked skirt, obnoxious puff sleeves, and a mouth as big as a house.
The paucity of Nicolas’s words changed the way Zélia thought of herself. She was sure no one at the dance would like to be at her side. She had no idea how to dress. Her curls weren’t as curly as they should be. The rouge that had given her a special something had already faded. And that red lipstick – why had she decided to use red lipstick? That lipstick attracted more attention than a traffic light. Zélia looked for a chair in the corner of the room and stayed there the rest of the night. She wished she could disappear, which was impossible. She could never disappear with a mouth like hers.
But Zélia’s biggest mistake that night wasn’t the dress, the hair, or the lipstick. Sitting in the corner of the room was Plinio, a young man with a skinny neck and a pained expression on his face, as though he constantly had the urge to take a pee. Plinio was accustomed to sitting in corners, and he felt right at home in that one. When Zélia sat down next to him, he didn’t see a girl with half-undone curls or an oversized mouth. He saw only a girl who, like him, preferred to sit in the corner.
The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao Page 2