The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao

by Martha Batalha

  ‘When am I going to meet your parents?’

  ‘Look, look here, sweetheart,’ Marcos said. ‘Look here. It’s just that my father is traveling.’

  ‘But why is he traveling if he works in the mayor’s office, and if his boss is the mayor of Rio de Janeiro?’

  ‘It’s because he has business in the countryside to take care of. Things you wouldn’t understand, my love. This is a very complex subject for a girl as pretty as you are.’

  The following Saturday, Guida asked if Marcos’s father had finished his ‘business in the countryside.’

  ‘Not yet, sweetheart. Perhaps next week.’

  The following Saturday, Guida asked again.

  Looking at his girlfriend with her crossed arms and pouty lips, Marcos thought the time had come to resolve the ‘business in the countryside.’ But he still wasn’t ready to introduce Guida to his family.

  ‘My poor mother. She suffers from angina.’

  Dona Mariana’s angina lasted another four weeks. Fearing he’d never again see his girlfriend without her arms crossed, or worse yet, fearing he’d never again see his girlfriend’s arms at all, Marcos relented.

  ‘Next Saturday we’ll have lunch with my family.’

  Guida cut her story short when Maria arrived in the living room with a pot of coffee and a tray of biscuits. She accepted a cup and sat back against the sofa.

  ‘Do you remember the week I went to Marcos’s house for the first time?’

  Euridice took a sip of her coffee, considering her reply.

  ‘It was shortly after our fight, wasn’t it? she asked. I’m not sure. You weren’t speaking to me then, Guida.’

  ‘I know. We stopped talking. But it was difficult for me, Euridice. I was so involved with Marcos, so worried about him not introducing me to his parents, and… Francisco?’

  Guida turned around to see the boy at her side entertaining himself with a comic strip.

  ‘Why don’t you go play outside?’

  ‘I don’t wanna.’

  ‘It will be good for you, Francisco. Go play outside.’

  ‘I don’t wanna.’

  ‘Go play outside, Francisco,’ Guida ordered.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go.’

  ‘No.’

  Guida began to wring her hands. Euridice stepped in.

  ‘Perhaps you want to watch some television?’

  The boy nodded his head. Euridice turned the television on and little Chico sat cross-legged on the floor. Guida felt a certain relief, but continued to wring her hands.

  ‘I never told you about this lunch. Oh, Euridice, it was during this lunch that my life began to unravel.’

  That Saturday, Guida had arrived at Marcos’s house wearing a new dress with a floral brooch on the lapel, a blue felt hat and a purse across her shoulder. Hoop earrings that looked like gold, and a real gold necklace with an image of Our Lady. First she showed up at the gate, and after introducing herself to the doorman was permitted to walk up to the front door. There, she had to speak to the butler, and was directed to a small room on the right. There she spoke with a serving-maid, and after declining a coffee she could at last sit quietly and wait for Marcos to appear.

  She heard the sound of far-off footsteps.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart.’

  Marcos kissed Guida on the cheek and took her to the Blue Room, where his family sat together waiting for lunch to be served in the Yellow Room.

  Guida learned many things that afternoon. She learned that a gold necklace with the image of Our Lady could be transformed into brass, if seen by the sinister eyes of three elegant young ladies. She learned that it was possible to speak to someone for half an hour without this person absorbing anything that was said, as was the case when she spoke to Marcos’s mother. Marcos’s mother only knew how to talk about herself; she couldn’t stop repeating that she had been The Most Sought After Woman in All the Soirées in Rio, at a time when Rio still had soirées, or that Rua Dona Mariana had been named in honor of her grandmother, Mariana Godoy Moraes, or that she had been a patron of the Brazilian theater for many years, but had recently become more interested in sponsoring these young boys of the national swim team. Guida also learned that Marcos’s father did not absorb what she said, but in this case it was because nothing she said was of any importance to him. This became clear to her as she stared at the strange man with his narrow eyes. She learned that eating a steak dinner could drag on for a long time, and that even a dessert as refined as profiteroles could lose its flavor. She learned a great deal about Marcos, who also seemed to be a stranger among those people, and about Marcos’s brothers, whose eyes bored into the medallion of Our Lady, and not because they were pious but because the medallion was in the only place they wished to rest their eyes.

  When Guida was led from the Yellow Room to the Blue Room, from the Blue Room to the entry room, from the entry room to the hall, from the hall to the front door, and from the front door to the front entrance, she knew that she would never again step through the immense metal gate that closed behind her, and she felt relief.

  Marcos accompanied her. They walked to the trolley stop hand-in-hand and without saying a word. The further away from the mansion they got, the greater the anger Guida felt in her chest. Anger at having been treated like a fatty cut of meat by those human aberrations. Marcos’s family embodied the cliché of those people who ask, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ But it was they who didn’t know who they were talking to. She was Guida Gusmao, the woman who never lowered her head to anyone. Guida Gusmao, who had never known failure, who redoubled her strength when she encountered obstacles. Shortly before they reached the trolley, she squeezed her boyfriend’s hand.

  ‘Marcos, I’m going to take you away from this place.’

  Two months later they were married, signing the papers in front of a justice of the peace. Guida wore a simple linen dress and held a bouquet of orange blossoms. After the ceremony, they returned to the small house they had rented in Vila Isabel, and only then was Marcos permitted to sleep in the same room as Guida.

  Since Marcos’s family would never allow them to marry, and Guida’s family would never accept a groom without his parents’ permission – Guida thought they should marry on their own and live far from both Santa Teresa and Botafogo. Marcos had some savings and would be able to cover the rent until he graduated from medical school, which was only a matter of months away. Diploma in hand, he would open his own practice. As soon as they were settled – with a house, his practice, the sick coming for treatment and providing enough money to pay the bills – Guida would return home and explain that they’d married in secret. Marcos and Guida’s family would then expand to include Dona Ana, Senhor Manuel, and Euridice.

  ‘I never wanted to spend so much time without seeing all of you.’

  Euridice stared at her sister, fascination in her eyes. It had been a long time since she’d been so interested in something, or in someone.

  ‘But Guida, you never returned.’

  Guida cast her eyes to the floor and then began to clean the biscuit crumbs from the center table.

  ‘You know that game “Pin the Tail on the Donkey”?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The game, “Pin the Tail on the Donkey.” When we blindfold the children and tell them to pin the tail on the donkey. That game we played at church parties.’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘Life is like that game, Euridice. There are times we think we’re doing everything just right, but then we realize that we’re blindfolded and we can’t manage to do anything right at all.’

  ‌

  ‌Chapter 7

  Guida had never been so happy. She had married the man she loved. She lived in a house that was neither large nor small, but just perfect. She spent the day reading ladies’ magazines and the afternoons making herself pretty for her husband. No one knocked on the bathroom door if she lingered, or argued with her when she only wanted to be quiet, or order
ed her to tend the cash register at the greengrocer’s for a few hours. Sometimes she would invite her neighbors in for coffee and they would trade cake recipes, cleaning tips or beauty secrets. She missed her family, but convinced herself that she would see them soon. It was only a matter of time before Marcos established his practice and she would return victorious to Santa Teresa, a gold wedding ring on her finger and a doctor for a husband.

  Marcos, too, had become another man. Or rather, he had been another man before. Now he could be himself. He was no longer obliged to listen to his mother extol the virtues of his cousins Emengarda or Maria Ester, whom he had found rather plain during vacations spent on the plantation, but whom his mother insisted he reconsider, since young women are like caterpillars – it is impossible to predict the beautiful feminine specimens they will become.

  He no longer had to put up with his father pressuring him about his studies, after learning – from trustworthy sources – about Marcos’s questionable academic performance, only to be reassured that everything would work out in the end ‘because the director of the medical school was a friend of many years.’ He no longer had to avoid his sisters-in-law, so well versed in the art of sneaking obscene looks his way. He no longer had to avoid his brothers, who even as adults tried to torture him as they’d done when they were younger, locking him in the chest in their parents’ bedroom, at times together with a cockroach. Free of all those familial pressures, Marcos finally managed to relax. It was as though he’d just learned how to breathe.

  Towards the end of November, he graduated from the National Academy of Medicine and rented a space for his practice in one of the newly constructed buildings on the Avenida Presidente Vargas. He had a door sign made that read Marcos Godoy, General Practitioner. He ordered five white lab coats with the initials M. G. stitched across the right breast pocket. He treated patients from Monday to Thursday, nine to five. Fridays were reserved for Guida, as well as evenings and sometimes dawn.

  A few months later, Marcos’s happiness was no longer everlasting but rather relative. His practice, which was once so busy that there weren’t enough chairs in the waiting room, now saw only one or two patients per day. This was on a good day. On a bad day, it was just Marcos, all alone. The young doctor spent afternoons playing tic-tac-toe in a notebook, trying to defeat himself.

  The truth was that Marcos was better equipped to be a natural healer than a general practitioner. Despite having rejected his family, the young man retained the haughtiness of his caste. He thought he could do with his studies what his ancestors had done with Brazil: He thought that money could buy his diploma and that his arrogance would bring him knowledge. His grandfathers and great-grandfathers had been made barons and landowners for much less. Graduating with a medical degree would be the fulfillment of a dream, and with the Monteiro Godoys, dreams were transformed into reality with a snap of the fingers, followed by vast sums of money with which to buy possessions and buy off people, along with a few swords, rifles, and whips to accelerate the process.

  Marcos had been right: money had bought his degree. He paid a half-black, half-poor classmate to sign the roll call in his anatomy course. It was this same classmate who took Marcos’s exams, in a sophisticated exchange of papers that took place in the back of the exam room at Praia Vermelha. It was foolproof. The young half-black man had a great deal of talent. So much talent that after graduation he opened a practice and worked in the best hospitals in Rio, leaving behind a life of being half-black for a life of being half-white. Marcos attended a few theory classes, though he performed his homework in a rush. It was in a rush that he opened his notebook, using the brief time he spent sitting on the trolley for matters pertaining to school and the rest for matters pertaining to Guida.

  Marcos received his diploma, but there would be no snapping of the fingers capable of bringing him knowledge. When more difficult cases appeared at his practice, he had no idea what to do. A young girl showed up with a stomach ache and went home with a prescription for penicillin. Another showed up with varicose veins and was prescribed penicillin. Scarlet fever? Penicillin. Mumps? Penicillin. Thrombosis? Penicillin. Penicillin and paregoric, the purpose of which Marcos didn’t quite understand, but he knew it could do no harm.

  Prescribing penicillin wasn’t such a grave mistake, since the antibiotic cured half of the illnesses known at that time. The problem was the other half. Illnesses which penicillin couldn’t do much about. In these cases, it was up to the patients to cure themselves with either prayers or antibodies. The old lady with thrombosis prayed day after day but lost a leg. The young lady with a stomach ache had plenty of antibodies but soon had an ulcer. Before their lives were touched by misfortune, they paid one last visit to Dr Marcos, who scratched his chin, raised a finger and said, ‘Now we just need to adjust the dosage of penicillin.’

  The only reason Marcos’s practice lasted as long as it did were the physical gifts he’d inherited from the now-forgotten theater actor who’d visited his mother’s bedroom. What were the chances that a man like him – tall, refined, with light eyes and a snow-white complexion – could be wreaking havoc with his patients’ health?

  News of the havoc-wreaking doctor gradually spread across the lips and ears of the housewives of Rio de Janeiro, and Marcos’s waiting room was soon empty. By this time, he was driving his pen so intently into his notebook when playing tic-tac-toe that he often tore through the pages. He began to turn off the lights at four in the afternoon, hanging his head as he arrived home and no longer feeling so much joy upon seeing his smiling wife at the front gate.

  ‘There’s roast beef for dinner, my love.’

  A few weeks later, Marcos announced they would be moving.

  ‘We’re going to Piedade, sweetheart. We’ll have more peace there, you’re going to love it.’

  When they moved in the middle of the night, Guida grew suspicious. ‘The moving truck could only come at this hour, sweetheart.’ The promise of a more peaceful neighborhood only increased her suspicions. Peace, there? Only if Marcos considered the relief one felt after the train passed by their house as some sort of peace.

  By that point, married life was no longer so easy. Accustomed to a life amid pergolas and Carrara marble, Marcos had stretched the limits of resilience to rent the house in Vila Isabel. It was small, it was simple, but it had everything he’d needed: Guida in low-cut dresses and lingerie. But after they moved to Piedade, Marcos began to see his surroundings with the eyes of a naturalist writer – even Guida, with her perfumes and soft skin, could no longer filter out reality. The endless drip from the faucet in the only bathroom in the house, the rust on the white marble sink, the corners of the ceilings stained with mold, the floorboards so old they had lifted. Then there were the marks left by old picture frames on the white living-room wall, and the minuscule kitchen with its missing floor tiles.

  Worse than the house itself were the surroundings. They lived in front of the train tracks and next to a live poultry market. If they opened the window, they were inundated with dust from the train cars and the smell of chickens; if they closed it, they’d suffocate from the heat. There were so many bloodthirsty mosquitoes that Marcos had to sleep with a pillow covering his face, which made it impossible to admire Guida’s curves in the twilight. There were also the neighbor’s gamecocks, which began clucking at five in the morning. Their clucking woke the hens in the poultry market, who began clucking even more loudly, and soon there was one big, hellish chorus of clucking chickens that could drive even the most level-headed person to grab a machete and resolve the situation once and for all.

  A few months later, Marcos announced he would be moving his practice.

  ‘There’s an office in a new building in the Bandeira Square. It’s all first-class; there will be no shortage of patients for me there.’

  Guida gave her silent approval and served the chickpea soup they were eating nearly every night, adding two slices of sausage for Marcos and one for her. The money her husba
nd left each day for the groceries was slowly coming to an end. Guida’s luck was that she grew up in a house of Portuguese immigrants who taught her how to make a decent dinner out of tripe, and a bountiful lunch out of leftovers. But something wasn’t right. How was it that she, wife to a doctor, had to pinch pennies to do the weekly groceries when the lady at the end of the block, wife to a Candomblé priest, ate steak five days a week?

  The good days at the new practice were also numbered. Soon, Marcos didn’t have a single patient to treat. He would slump into the seat on the train ride home, trying to make sense of this strange reality where one could not simply buy one’s way to the top. And even if it were possible, he no longer had the money to do so.

  That April, Marcos had an epiphany. The March rains that had accumulated in the vases around the house increased the breeding grounds of mosquitoes. The aggressive swarms of insects showed no respect for the mosquito coils set around the house. They were constantly buzzing in Marcos’s ears, and he slapped and shook every which way, trying to dodge the little pests. One night Marcos was sure a mosquito had flown into his ear – the zoom-zoom-zoom seemed to come from within his own head. He spent hours boxing his own ears.

  At 3 a.m., he got up, unsure whether he had slept or not. He had the feeling he’d woken up from a bad dream but was still sleeping, because everything around him was like a nightmare. Marcos was slow, but at that moment he found himself able to make sense of many things. The house so old it looked abandoned, the unbearable dinners of chickpea soup, the roosters, chickens and insects that interrupted life at every turn, the noisy train on its route downtown even before sunrise, the inconvenient lawyer who sought him out alleging it was his fault that a client had lost a leg (What was that man thinking, that he had some way to create a new leg?), and, more recently, Guida with her hands on her hips, distrusting of everything, complaining all the time, repeating the same question over and over: ‘Why do we have to live such a frugal life?’