The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao

by Martha Batalha

  On the afternoon their father gave them the necklaces, the two girls spent hours in front of their mother’s dressing table. Guida felt too old to be doing her sister’s hair, Euridice felt older for doing the same things as her sister. They didn’t notice the March breeze rustling the curtains, or the dog barking in the distance. They didn’t hear the trolley coming down the street, or the song of the neighbor’s canaries.

  Senhor Manuel felt like a rich man. The man who had melted his deceased father’s gold tooth to make his wedding rings was now able to support his family and please his progeny. He permitted himself the luxury of spoiling his daughters, providing them with after-school activities. He spoke with Jean Luc, the confirmed bachelor who lived at the end of the street with five cats (according to the latest count) and gave classes in French and music. Guida chose French and Euridice decided to learn the recorder.

  Guida didn’t make it through the first month of classes. The verb conjugations induced wrinkles on her smooth forehead. How was it possible to combine the letters of the alphabet in so many unfamiliar ways? She soon declared that the French classes were interfering with her performance in school and buried her textbook deep in the bookshelf. She resumed spending long afternoons seated on the sofa, reading novels from the Young Ladies’ Library or leafing through women’s magazines.

  Euridice asked her parents to use the money left over from Guida’s French lessons to pay Jean Luc so that she could have extra classes. She also practiced an hour per day during the week and two hours each Saturday and Sunday. It wasn’t long before the musical exercises became cantatas and sonatas, and the cantatas and sonatas ethereal poetry that lifted the moods of everyone in Santa Teresa.

  The recorder was Euridice’s first love. When she arrived home, she would do her homework, taking care to insert the occasional mistake to please Dona Josefa, and then sit up straight in front of her sheet music. When it was announced that the school would be forming a choir, Euridice offered to provide accompaniment on the recorder, and after the choir director heard the young girl play, Dona Josefa had no way to argue against it. The next month, the famous composer Heitor Villa-Lobos showed up at the school to talk about the benefits of choral singing. Hearing Euridice play, he took the cigar from his mouth and proclaimed: ‘I want this girl to join my conservatoire.’

  Euridice jumped up and down, inside and out, but her parents said no, perhaps not, definitely not. The classes with Senhor Jean Luc were going so well, what more did she need? As far as her parents were concerned, the recorder would never be an end in itself. The recorder was merely the means. The means to increase their daughter’s talents so she could make a good marriage. The means to entertain the family after dinner, when one of them would ask: ‘Play this little march.’ Euridice didn’t need classes with that eccentric composer.

  ‘But I really, really want to,’ the young girl protested, pursing her lips, crossing her arms, furrowing her brow, and pounding her fists against the bedroom door.

  The following days saw unprecedented confrontations. Half of Euridice thought her parents were right, the other half thought they’d lost their minds to throw away an invitation from Villa-Lobos. The Side of Euridice that Didn’t Want Euridice to Be Euridice bolstered her parents’ arguments. How would she get to the conservatoire in Praia Vermelha? Could the interaction with artists be a good thing for a young lady? It was risky. Music ought to be administered in the correct dosage, since a life without melody loses meaning and a life with too much melody could lead to excesses. Artists were people who led abnormal lives and were morally ambiguous, artists were ‘those people.’

  ‘Let me take the girl to the conservatoire!’ Guida said.

  ‘You can’t go because we need you to help at the shop,’ Senhor Manuel responded.

  ‘I’ll work a double shift on Saturday to take Euridice during the week.’

  ‘What you want to know is if there are good-looking boys in this conservatoire. Euridice isn’t going, and you certainly aren’t either.’

  Guida shrugged her shoulders, shot Euridice a look that said I tried, and went back to reading her magazine.

  Theirs wasn’t a house with much room for discussion. Dona Ana and Senhor Manuel could hear but could not listen. They were incapable of understanding anything that didn’t interest them, and nothing that was different interested them. The most significant innovation in their lives was trading their tomato stand in Alvarães, Portugal, for a tomato stand on the Rua Almirante Alexandrino, in Rio. When faced with a novelty of some sort, the couple responded with some variation of I haven’t seen it and I don’t like it, I don’t know anything about it and I don’t want to, I don’t want it now and I won’t want it later. There was also the response that consisted simply of making a face and saying Good Lord! Having a daughter study with the greatest composer of the time was far beyond the understanding of those Portuguese immigrants. A strange man, who was never seen without a cigar in his mouth. Good Lord!

  Euridice fought with her parents more during that time than at any other period of her entire life. She screamed at them, something she didn’t even know she was capable of doing. How she wanted to study with Villa-Lobos! When she played the recorder she didn’t feel compelled to make mistakes, she was able to create a perfect melody. Why couldn’t life be like that, too? Why couldn’t she do whatever she pleased, why couldn’t she do everything she ever dreamed of, why couldn’t she play until her fingers and her lips hurt? When she played, the only things that existed were her and the recorder; it was a perfect and tiny world.

  She wanted it so badly that she had no problem playing this game of tug-of-war alone, with sporadic help from her sister, who every now and then lifted her eyes from her magazine to lend Euridice a hand. ‘But Mama, Euridice could play in the symphony one day!’ ‘Quit it, Guida. Don’t stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.’ Euridice tugged and tugged, even though she knew that her parents outweighed her on the other side.

  At some point the two parties grew so exhausted that Euridice only managed to repeat I want to, and her parents’ only response was No. Euridice responded with a Why not?, her parents responded with Because. In the end, it amounted to nothing more than a conversation between a bunch of crazy people who’d forgotten their entire vocabulary, one side asking Why not? and the other responding Because. Why not? Because. Why not? Because. Later, the whole drama, and all that distress, would disappear in a matter of seconds as a result of a single look.

  It happened on a Thursday afternoon at the greengrocer’s. Euridice and Dona Ana were at the cash register, facing opposite directions. The family lunch had been a chorus of Why nots and becauses. Around three o’clock, Dona Jovina walked in with her son José, looking for potatoes. A word here, a word there (Dona Jovina was looking for potatoes, but also for some conversation), and the customer noticed the sour expressions of mother and daughter. She asked what had happened.

  Dona Ana sighed deeply before revealing, with sad eyes, the endless musical debate that occupied the apartment atop their store. She left out the yelling, the broken glasses and all the nights when her daughter didn’t touch her food, as part of a hunger strike that deepened her dimples and her determination to become a professional musician.

  ‘That’s just it, Dona Jovina, I’ve been telling Euridice that she shouldn’t put her energy into a musical career. What she needs is to finish her studies and concentrate on the things girls of her age do. Playing with friends, meeting a boy, and eventually making a family.’

  Dona Jovina nodded in agreement, while José shot Euridice a flirtatious look. The girl lowered her eyes. At that moment, Euridice learned that some gazes are different from others and that some are capable of changing us not simply within but without, as she was suddenly quite unable to sit comfortably in the chair. As the potatoes were chosen, paid for and packaged up, the girl remained unsettled, conscious of her new body, transformed by a gaze.

  She didn’t eat that night, but it wasn’
t because of the recorder. It was because of the young boy’s flirting. From ten until two in the morning she kept thinking about the way José had gazed at her. From two o’clock until six the scene was replayed with the addition of long walks holding hands through the Campo de Santana, a marriage proposal on the Largo dos Guimarães, dinners between the families and a honeymoon in Friburgo. Asleep or wide awake, Euridice thought of nothing else. Not even of her recorder, which hardly required much space.

  When she woke the next day it was as if the dispute about the music classes had never happened. Who was Villa-Lobos? What was a recorder? The Side of Euridice that Didn’t Want Euridice to be Euridice rejoiced; the other part said OK, but this isn’t over yet. Euridice pinched her cheeks to turn them red, tried curling her hair like Guida, went to school happy as could be. She counted the hours until it was time to go home and nestle into the chair beside the cash register at the greengrocer’s.

  She thought about sharing her secret with her sister. Guida was one of those girls who are born knowing everything or, in her case, everything that was worth knowing about, which was not the same ‘everything’ that Euridice knew. Guida was never an exceptional student, and to that day, even having completed high school, she had to use her fingers to calculate bills at the store, which still provided no guarantee she would do it right. But she knew how to apply red nail polish to the nails of those fingers, and without smudges. Guida also knew how to speak to adults, and it was she who faced Dona Josefa, saying, ‘If I catch you being cruel to my sister, I promise I will tell the principal everything.’ It was because of Guida that Euridice resumed drinking water at night, and it was because of Guida that she relaxed enough to learn to pronounce her ‘Rs’.

  The two girls completed one another. When Euridice woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, swearing that there was a ghost walking in the attic, it was Guida who held her hand and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s only a skunk and her children. It’s the creaking of their footsteps you’re hearing.’ When Guida lost all hope, with head in her hands and elbows resting on a book, on account of all the microorganisms she needed to memorize for a test the following day, it was Euridice who stayed by her side, repeating, ‘We’ll find a way to remember them. Let’s start with the protozoa, who have two types of skeletons and move using flagella or cilia.’

  And when Euridice returned home from school in tears, telling her mother how she’d hurt herself, perhaps climbing aboard the trolley, it was Guida who took over the explanations, handing Euridice much more than the tiny towel Dona Ana gave her ‘to stop the bleeding.’

  ‘Listen here, Euridice, you didn’t injure yourself. From here on out this is going to happen once a month. It means you’re becoming a woman.’

  Guida went beyond the call of sisterly duty and explained to Euridice the reason for this bleeding and what needed to occur to make a woman pregnant. Euridice’s eyes opened wide at this insight into her sister’s world. It was a place where strange things happened and where Guida was the wisest woman of all. Guida went above and beyond yet again. She embraced her sister and told her that one day she would become a beautiful woman, would find a good husband, have many children, and live in a house with a garden.

  How did Guida know all that? She simply knew because she knew. Guida was one of those young women who are born knowing everything.

  Guida also knew how to flirt. She even had experience in the stage that followed. One Sunday in April, shortly before the battles over the recorder, she informed her parents that a young man whom she held in great esteem would be coming to see her after lunch.

  Marcos appeared as the bells of the Church of the Largo marked two o’clock and wasted no time creating a bad impression. Instead of extending his hand to Senhor Manuel he offered a sort of oriental greeting, holding his hat in place and making a bow of respect. That was the strangest greeting the Portuguese man had ever seen, but he bowed in return – perhaps it was the latest fashion among the youth of Rio. Marcos pretended he didn’t see the older man’s discomfort. It was better to invent some exotic form of greeting than to offer a sweaty hand to shake. During the entire visit, he only parted with his hat for a second, to timidly gesture to Euridice, who was pretending to read a book in the corner of the room. In the space of the next half-hour, Dona Ana and Senhor Manuel learned everything they needed to know about the young man with the reddened face.

  ‘Do you work, young man?’

  ‘I’m studying. Medicine.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Botafogo.’

  ‘And your father – what does he do?’

  ‘He’s chief of staff to the mayor.’

  ‘And your mother, what’s her name?’

  ‘Mariana.’

  ‘Do you have siblings?’

  ‘Five of them.’

  ‘And what are your intentions with our daughter?’

  ‘The noblest possible.’

  Perhaps as a result of their surprise at the news, perhaps as a result of Guida’s sureness, perhaps because the interviewee lived in Botafogo and studied medicine, the courtship was accepted without drama or prohibition. Guida was allowed to accompany Marcos to the movies. The rest of the courtship was to take place on the sofa on Rua Almirante Alexandrino, with the lamp on one side and Dona Ana darning socks on the other.

  Marcos was an especially tall, thin and refined boy. He was also responsible for the Sugarloaf Mountain that grew up between Guida and her family. After she met Marcos, after receiving the tenderness of those hands that had never known true labor and after feeling the gaze of those eyes that had never known worry, Guida began to live in a world much too sophisticated to put up with the others under her roof (an uneducated Portuguese couple and a girl with braids and hairy legs).

  She began to lock herself in her bedroom. To eat meals separately from the others. And to consider family life as consisting only of leafing through the Young Ladies’ Journal on the armchair in the corner of the living room.

  ‘Open this door right now, Guida. Your father came home from work more than an hour ago and wants to see you.’

  ‘I’ll open it in a second. I’m finishing getting ready.’

  ‘Open up right now.’

  The silence that followed convinced Dona Ana that the door would never open.

  ‘What sort of manners are these? Where have you ever seen such a thing? What did I do to deserve such rebels for daughters? Guida wants nothing to do with us and Euridice wants nothing but to complain about the recorder. It was different when I was a child – I’d get it if I treated my parents this way! But in this house one daughter doesn’t ever respond to questions and the other has a response for everything.’

  Afternoon arguments became the norm, and after a while Guida’s parents grew accustomed to their daughter’s distance. They convinced themselves that it was a phase, that there was nothing to worry about. They had one daughter here, another there, neither had become pregnant, so all they needed to worry about was selling tomatoes. It was Euridice who found her sister’s silence disconcerting.

  ‘Guida, want to know what happened today during recess?’

  ‘Hmm…’

  ‘Guida, want to teach me how to make this lemon face mask?’

  ‘Hmm…’

  ‘Guida, shall we do each other’s hair?’

  ‘Hmm…’

  Guida wasn’t in a very talkative phase, but even so Euridice tried to speak to her sister about José’s flirting at the greengrocer’s. She’s going to help me, for old times’ sake, the younger sister thought. Times which weren’t that old at all, just a few months back, but which seemed more remote since Guida’s silence had increased the distance between them. It was all Marcos’s fault. At first, Euridice had found him handsome, but now she thought him ugly because she knew Guida spent all her time speaking to him. She must have spoken to Marcos so much that there were no words left over for her.

  ‘Guida?’

  ‘Hmm…’
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  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘Can’t you see?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, you can. It’s the Young Ladies’ Journal.’

  ‘But what are you reading? Inside the magazine.’

  ‘It wouldn’t interest you.’

  ‘It does interest me, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking.’

  ‘It’s a test. To find out if your boyfriend likes you a lot or just a little.’

  ‘I want to take it.’

  ‘You don’t have a boyfriend.’

  ‘But I want to take it.’

  ‘I already told you, you don’t have a boyfriend.’

  ‘And why are you taking it? Do you think Marcos doesn’t like you?’

  ‘Stop being silly, Euridice. Go play your recorder.’

  Euridice followed orders and went to grab her recorder. Less out of a desire to play and more because the recorder was right next to Guida, and that would give her an opportunity to pull her hair. Guida returned the favor by twisting Euridice’s skin; Euridice defended herself by digging her nails into her sister’s flesh. The two girls were still locked in battle when Dona Ana appeared, broke up the fight and sent them to their rooms.

  ‘I’ve never seen the two of you fighting! And now that you’re grown up I have to punish you both?’

  The fight went some way to helping Euridice, who took advantage of the incident to cry out all the tears she’d been holding back since the beginning of the battle over her recorder. No one in that family understood her, no one wanted what was best for her, and even Guida, whom she could always talk to, no longer paid her any attention. But José, he would understand her. Euridice didn’t need school, the recorder, or Guida. She only needed José.

  She increased her hours helping out at the greengrocer’s. She stole Guida’s lipstick, making her lips redder than she should have. Euridice knew it was only a matter of time until she would see José again. He’s going to show up, she thought, keeping an eye on the street and assisting customers with a patient smile.