The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao

by Martha Batalha

  But Antenor had no use for mere ideas. He wanted to go straight to what mattered, which was: Let’s see if this girl is capable of getting up each day at the same time, if she won’t wait until the sheets are cold to make up the bed, if she’ll have the coffee ready at the exact moment I sit down at the table. He wanted floors so clean he could eat from them, a basket of fresh fruit from the Wednesday market, and the security that comes with someone breathing heavily next to you in the same bed every single night.

  He asked his cousin about the girl framed by fruit crates. He learned that her name was Euridice, that she played the recorder like an angel, but after her sister had run away she had never blown another note. He learned that she had completed high school and was good with numbers, but that she had interrupted her studies to help her parents out at the greengrocer’s.

  As he watched the sunset, Antenor concluded that there was no spot more peaceful or more beautiful in all of Rio. He said goodbye to his cousin around six o’clock and walked to the store. Euridice was still there, her head bent over a notebook.

  ‘Good evening. My name is Antenor and I’d like us to get to know each other a bit better.’

  Their courtship went as smoothly as the married life Antenor hoped would follow. Conversations in Euridice’s living room, with the glowing lamp on one side and Dona Ana darning socks on the other. Strolls through the neighborhood, with Senhor Manuel keeping an eye on the clock, waiting for them to return. There were no trips to the movies; Euridice’s parents didn’t want to take the risk.

  The formal marriage proposal was made to Senhor Manuel and Dona Ana. Euridice’s mother shed some tears and Senhor Manuel – who would have thought? – shed some of his own. He hugged his daughter, saying, ‘You’re our only daughter, our only daughter.’

  Did Euridice want to marry? Perhaps. She considered marriage something rather endemic, something that men and women caught between the age of eighteen and twenty-five. Like the flu, except not quite so bad. What Euridice truly wanted was to travel the world playing her recorder. She wanted to be an engineer and work with numbers. She wanted to transform her parents’ greengrocer’s into a general store, the general store into a franchise, the franchise into a conglomerate. But she didn’t know she wanted all that.

  In the years that followed Guida’s disappearance, she knew even less. Euridice had quashed her desires, leaving only the exemplary young woman she was on the surface. The one who never raised her voice or her skirt. The one whose only dreams were the dreams her parents had for her. The one who only said ‘Yes, senhora,’ and ‘No, senhor,’ without stopping to ask herself what she was saying yes or no to.

  Antenor met Euridice while she was in this catatonic stage. He mistook her restraint for balance, and thought: That’s the perfect woman. He mistook her inertia for mediocrity, and thought: Here’s a woman to marry. But soon after the wedding she began entertaining those daydreams that so frightened Antenor, and he found himself reminding her of the rules of matrimony at the top of his lungs, telling Euridice that she needed to just sit still.

  In the end, Euridice did sit still. After her adventure as a seamstress, she sat still in her post on the sofa, in front of the bookshelf. And that’s where she remained – half-drowsed, half-dull, half-dead. The silence that followed was awful, and after a while Antenor stopped wondering whether he’d married a second Dalva or a second Maria Rita. He only wanted Euridice, his Euridice, back. He found himself trying to make conversation.

  ‘Want to walk to the square after dinner?’

  ‘It looks as if the jasmine trees are going to flower next week.’

  ‘It’s been a while since you made me those turkey-breast medallions, with the brown stuff on top.’

  Euridice responded with weak smiles and um-hums. She would agree to everything, as long as she didn’t need to say anything else. The woman had decided to take a break of sorts, after the recorder fever, the flirting drama, her kitchen dreams and sewing plans. ‘Mama, make me a dress, Mama, make me some oatmeal,’ the children would ask, to see if they could cheer her up, and they did – a bit. It was the bigger side of Euridice that they couldn’t get through to.

  When the doorbell rang, it was Maria who would answer; when the visit was over, it was Maria who shut the door. She even took care of things without even speaking to Euridice. ‘Ah, the knives are back from sharpening, let me grab the money for you, senhor.’ ‘Ah, yes, the bread – add these two loaves to the household account, please.’ It was only when she wasn’t sure how to solve a problem that she roused Euridice from her contemplative state.

  One Wednesday, the doorbell rang and Maria wasn’t sure what to do. She walked back into the living room and stood between the bookshelf and her boss.

  ‘Don’Euridice, there’s a young woman at the door who says she’s your sister.’

  ‌

  ‌Chapter 6

  Guida. She was still beautiful, but if she had always looked the part of Euridice’s older sister, she now appeared to be her much older sister. She had no make-up on and wore her hair up in a bun, clearly arranged to ensure the least amount of work possible. In one hand she held the suitcase that had disappeared with her from the Rua Almirante Alexandrino. In the other, a chubby little boy, more or less Cecilia’s age. She wore a beige coat over a green dress.

  ‘May I come in?’

  Of all the hugs Euridice had received in her life, that was the strangest. It was a hug that seemed to say, ‘Let me touch you to see if you really exist, if you’re really standing here before me.’ It was true: that was Guida, but not the same Guida as before, a fact that became clear after hearing her sister’s story.

  Marcos and Guida had met one Saturday afternoon outside the Cine Odeon. He had been standing in the doorway since the beginning of the show, reasoning that if the girl with the long eyelashes had gone inside, she’d also have to leave. Guida walked out two hours later with a group of friends. She kept on walking even after he tried to introduce himself, and she didn’t stop walking, not even after he followed her to Cavé Pastries, where she ordered a chocolate eclair and removed her white gloves to display her long fingers as she ate.

  All that walking was Guida’s way of turning the boy into a sort of train for her dress. She wanted to stroll around just to watch Marcos following her every step. After all, wasn’t that love, according to the magazines, films, and the romantic novels from the Young Ladies’ Library series? It was the woman’s job to startle the man with her beauty, and it was the man’s job to fight for this woman after the first few moments of paralysis brought on by the startling beauty of The Chosen One.

  Marcos played his role. For three Saturdays in a row, he waited for Guida to leave the cinema. Guida also played her part, ignoring the young man so that the next week he would return with even greater interest. After a month, she agreed to let Marcos sit with her as she ate her eclair. Guida nibbled at the confection with particular fervor, bringing her fingers to her lips when they became covered in chocolate, something that seemed to happen more frequently since her admirer showed up. Marcos’s eyes drifted between the eclair and the girl’s mouth.

  The following week, Guida’s parents were informed of the courtship. Marcos paid a visit to the apartment in Santa Teresa, spent the afternoon holding on to his hat and responding to the couple’s questions in monosyllables. Senhor Manuel and Dona Ana were suspicious. Marcos was much too refined. Much too polite. Much too careful with his appearance. Those nails of this – were they manicured? Good Lord.

  Marcos’s parents did not look favorably upon their son’s courtship either. In fact, in the beginning, they didn’t look upon it at all, because the boy, who wasn’t stupid, thought it better to delay the first meeting between his new love and his family. What they did notice, however, was that Marcos became much happier from one moment to the next, and they grew suspicious. He was the youngest of six children, and the only one who was still a bachelor. A good catch, whom his parents wished to see m
arry an equally good catch. That’s how it had been with their other children, and that’s how it had been with Marcos’s parents.

  For three centuries, the members of that family had married among themselves. It was the only way to keep the entire set of English porcelain and silverware in the family and to serve, on that porcelain and with that silverware, a series of feasts that would no longer be possible were the children to marry outside of the family. Inside the mansion, Marcos wasn’t Marcos, but Marcos Godoy de Moraes. His father, Augusto Moraes, had married Mariana Godoy, both of them descendants of Moraes Godoy and Godoy Moraeses. Every now and then there would appear a Pádua, or a Castro, but the Moraeses and Godoys had reproduced sufficiently to make matrimonial decisions among cousins minimally exciting, such that variations on the same theme had remained a constant throughout the colonial, imperial, and republican eras.

  This continual interfamilial fornication resulted in men and women who all looked rather alike. The men boasted enormous cheeks, and heads that went bald before thirty. The women were born and grew up without waistlines, acquiring a rectangular shape early in childhood. They had an abundance of body hair, and while some waxed their upper lips, others had no problem with allowing their mustaches to grow. And they all resembled one another, principally, in the bank accounts they held, the number of properties they owned, and in their vaults replete with gold coins and pink pearl necklaces.

  Every now and then, one of the Godoys or the Moraeses cast off the curse of resemblance. For this they owed thanks to God and to their mothers, who, feeling a fire beneath the frills of their skirts, had arranged for it to be extinguished through the years by two priests, three doctors, an explorer lost among the mountains of Rio, and five young black men. This was the case with Marcos, who was larger and more fair-skinned at birth than he should have been, increasing the family’s belief in the evolution of the species, and his mother’s belief in the Brazilian theater. It had been in the Municipal Theater that she had met a svelte actor, who was responsible for bringing some excitement to her otherwise staid and middle-aged life.

  Marcos’s father had grown up on one of the five coffee plantations his family maintained in the Paraiba Valley. After the 1929 crash, he sold four of his properties and moved his family closer to the seat of the federal government. He decorated their stately home with settees and loveseats brought from one of the plantations, made by the master carpenter to Emperor Dom Pedro II. He soon found that it was much easier and more lucrative to make a living from politics alone, instead of mixing politics and coffee production, as his parents and grandparents had done. Before running for the Brazilian senate, he made use of his many contacts to take his first bureaucratic measures as chief of staff to the city’s mayor.

  Marcos shared the mansion in Botafogo with his parents, his three brothers, and their wives. Two of them had begun their political ascent, becoming hand in glove with the highest rung of the Vargas government, to later become the hand and the glove of the highest rung of the Vargas government: Francisco Godoy was named director of the National Department of Coffee and Armando Godoy became president of the Federal Council of Public Works, an institution so abstract in its conception that not even he knew its purpose. Paulo Godoy graduated from law school, where he made some friends, who had other friends, who said he ought not to spread the word but soon the government would create the Federal Workers’ Court. He soon became the youngest judge in Brazil.

  Marcos’s sisters didn’t live in the mansion in Botafogo. One married a cousin who had an unshakable belief in coffee production and in his title of Baron of Itaimzim, which had been in the family since his great-great-grandfather’s time. The Baron and Baroness of Itaimzim would spend the next fifty years sitting in the drawing room of their mansion, watching the plaster fall from the walls. His other sister married a diplomat and was at that moment in a Paris cafe, ordering more champagne and discussing with strangers the meteoric liberation of Latina women.

  Perhaps as a result of having been spared the incessant exchange of the same genes, Marcos didn’t want to marry a rectangular woman. He looked at his family with a mix of disdain and loathing. They were all peas from the same pod, and what a pod it was. The jokes, the antics, the tendency to stick their bogies beneath the table, the way of scratching their chins while making a face, the sense of superiority and scorn displayed when talking to anyone who wasn’t one of them – all of that made Marcos want to be only Marcos, instead of the Marcos with the important last names. Dinners were especially annoying, as his sisters-in-law competed to see who had the best husband, judging their qualities according to the number of jewels each wife wore to dinner.

  Marcos felt a constant sense of suffocation. He was uncomfortable not only with what he saw, but with what he didn’t see. If he had invested in his talent as a medium, he would have heard spirits revealing their stories of power grabs within the family, about this or that Godoy murdered as a result, about love stories with mustache-less women and men with hair who’d never officially existed, about the many deformed children born throughout the centuries who were eliminated from official family history, literally and figuratively. All those cousins who had left this world for a better one weren’t in all that better a place. They still believed they had a right to the family’s fortune and remained in a sort of limbo, admiring the earrings of the women of the house and coveting the gold chains across their bosoms, the stress of their presence causing two of Marcos’s sisters-in-law to be secretly committed to a reformatory for those suffering from tuberculosis.

  The resulting emotional burden weighed the house down to such a degree that the most sensitive among the family swore they gained a few inches in height as soon as they left the mansion. That’s how Marcos felt, too. He preferred to spend most of his time at medical school, in the bars of Lapa, and on the streets of the old city center. Unlike his friends, he had no desire to be a twenty-something reveler for all eternity. He didn’t want to close down the bars, to try out the latest rendezvous spots, or to attend the samba circles despised by high society but very much in vogue among the bohemian crowd.

  The only thing that Marcos wanted was someone to talk to. Someone who would listen to everything that had been left unsaid during his two decades of existence. Someone who could further his sentimental education, interrupted so abruptly when he left the arms of his dearest nursemaid for the chairs of São Bento School, where he learned that to be a man with a capital M he could no longer cry for his nursemaid (No more hugs! No more kisses!) or feel sympathy for the cats that had their tails lopped off by the boys who one day would run the country.

  On the day he met Guida, Marcos was out looking for this person he could talk to. When he saw the young girl with wavy hair, a knee-length skirt, and a felt hat, he understood that his search was over. He needed only to wait for her to walk back out of the cinema.

  Guida did walk back out of the cinema, and the pursuit through the streets of the city center lasted four Saturdays. When they finally spoke, she learned in ten minutes everything that she needed to know: his name was Marcos, he was twenty-one years old, he studied medicine, and had a handsome smile.

  Marcos didn’t bother explaining his list of important last names, and he was happy that Guida wasn’t worried about it. All she wanted was a good provider who had Gary Cooper’s looks. A degree in medicine was a guarantee of a middle-class life, the highest of Guida’s aspirations. And if Marcos turned his head a bit, his nose looked just like Gary Cooper’s.

  As time passed, it was inevitable that Marcos would have to reveal the anomalies of his past. ‘Yes, sweetheart, I’ve been to Portugal a couple of times, on the way to Paris. During July vacations, I would go to the plantation in Valença. It was closer than the one in Resende. My father works in politics. But this is a very complicated matter for a girl as pretty as you are.’

  Guida soon came to understand that Marcos wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth but a golden one. She grew happy w
hen she thought about their children who would have golden spoons, and worried when she considered the idea that his family wouldn’t like her. Later she began to think that Marcos only wanted to fool around with her before marrying someone with more of a right to this golden spoon. She decided to cut back on her contact with the boy. His hands were only permitted to touch her hands. Their lips could graze, but only once per week, and nothing behind those lips was allowed to leave other than words. The rest of her body was to be admired from afar, and Guida knew how to draw admiration. She framed her teeth between her half-open lips, showing off the gap in the middle, stretched her thighs as she crossed her legs, and tucked in her belly as she walked with perfect posture.

  The couple went out regularly, with Guida orchestrating their every move. ‘Today we’ll see this film, and then we’ll walk to the Colombo for dessert.’ Or they’d stay at home, with her steering the conversation. ‘Look at this girl’s braids,’ she would say, flicking through a magazine. ‘Do you think my hair would look good like this?’

  Yes. Marcos’s answer to everything was yes. And then, after three months of trips to the cinema and conversations in the living room (at this point Dona Ana had to take up needlepoint since there were no more socks to darn), Guida thought it was time to expand the limits of their relationship, and that this expansion ought to be made in the direction of Botafogo. She posed the question that Marcos most feared.