The first good mornings Antonio uttered to Guida came between stutters, along with an awkward scratching of his neck. Guida thought it was all very cute. She felt protected next to her sister, and why shouldn’t she accept the good intentions of this mustachioed man with his shirt buttoned up all the way, the man who only called her ‘Senhora Guida’, and with so much more respect than all the other ‘Senhora Guidas’ she’d heard up until then?
Assenting to Antonio’s courtship was like leaving the house with a portable radio tuned to the best shows on the Radio Nacional. He made poetry with his phrases, and everything he said appeared to come from the mouth of a songwriter. Someone like you, just like you, I needed to find. / You’re a star among the Milky Way, the mother of royalty. / You are everything that is beautiful in all the world’s resplendence.
Guida would stand before her admirer, drinking in his words. For many years she had been deaf to male advances, and it was good to hear them once again.
After some time hearing how she was an ‘immaculate camellia,’ a ‘graceful nymph,’ and a ‘dazzling muse,’ Guida thought it was time to open her ‘alabaster breast’ and her ‘mouth full of nectar’ to add to the vocabulary of their courtship phrases like ‘a life together,’ ‘commitment,’ and ‘plans.’ She could see in Antonio’s face the rest of her days. The two of them together in the bachelor’s apartment, Chico gaining the father figure he’d never had. Guida ironing clothes in front of the television set, crochet towels beneath the ornaments on the bookshelf, a lifetime free from dinners of chickpea soup. It wasn’t exactly love that she felt for Antonio. It was affection, which throughout those months of flirting was promoted to love, to justify her dream of ironing clothes in front of the TV and decorating Chico’s room in blue. It was about Chico, in fact, that she wanted to talk on that Saturday afternoon, after they’d ordered pastries and gooseberry juice at the Colombo cafe.
‘Antonio, I understand that you have great esteem for me. And that it would be a gift to have me as your companion. But, as you know, I have a son. And I won’t leave his side, ever.’
Antonio said nothing for a few seconds. He took his handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the sweat from his forehead and began to scratch at a few red spots that had appeared on his neck.
‘Guida, I understand that you have great esteem for me. But, as you know, I have a mother. And I won’t leave her side, ever.’
And Guida, who had been leaning in towards Antonio, sat back in her chair.
Dona Eulália was mother to four children, of which Antonio was the youngest. Her father had been the owner of one of the first breweries in Brazil, the Cervejaria Tupã. In the early days, he made the beer at home to the sound of his wife’s complaining. When she wasn’t feeling queasy because she was pregnant she was feeling queasy because she couldn’t stand the smell of fermented mold. ‘It’s all going to work out, woman,’ he said, as he filled casks and printed labels for the bottles. Luiz was a visionary, capable of seeing imminent wealth in the hand-pulled carts that distributed his product throughout the city center. ‘It’s all going to work out,’ he repeated, even when his bottles were refused by the cellars along the quay – more interested in wines from Portugal, or by the bars of Carioca – more interested in German beer.
It was around this time that the city’s essence was defined, and the residents of Rio ceased to be Portuguese immigrants, Turks by birth, Brazilian-born, Chinese expats, half-white, half-mulatto or half-Indian, to become true Cariocas. And no sooner had they realized that they were now Cariocas than they began to feel a hankering for a glass of ice-cold beer.
A glass of Tupã, please, they started telling dive owners at dusk, thus inventing the habit of a cold one at the end of the day, making Luiz the new republic’s first millionaire.
The brewery was moved from the family kitchen to new premises in the industrial zone. The family kitchen was also moved, from the dirt road in Santo Cristo to a ranch house in the city’s most desirable southern district. A roast chicken no longer had to last three meals, and Luiz acquired a hefty belly, adorned with a pocket watch that he would retrieve less to check the time than to show that it was made of gold. His three daughters soon had a German governess whom he also liked to show off, sending her to the pastry shop for fohr-uh French row-uls, please, which she would always take with a dank you.
Eulália was born in the tiny house in Santo Cristo but only began to make sense of the world at the ranch house in Laranjeiras. Her earliest memories were of the long corridor that separated the eight bedrooms from the main drawing room, the bulky thighs of the black women who spent the whole day working in the kitchen, and the lawn with its border of immaculate flowers that remained in bloom no matter the time of year.
When she awoke each morning, it wasn’t the image of her mother she saw through the curtains of tulle, but that of her nursemaid, who bathed her, dressed her and combed her hair. Hortencia had more important things to do than care for her daughters. She had to learn how to be rich. Life had been simple back in the days of the home brewery, and when the pile of money appeared she wasn’t sure how to act. She would go out in her new carriage to the Rua do Ouvidor, observe the elegance of the ladies in the street, and walk into the French stores, where she bought her fill of hats, parasols, and fans. The problem was matching the accessories with the designer dresses, and during those first few years she was guilty of some excesses. She would show up for Mass in bodices embroidered with gold, and with layers of lacework on her skirts. Her hats could have been slices cut from the Amazon, such was the abundance of plumes, flowers and fruits. Hortencia was at once ignored by the other women and the main topic of their whispered conversations.
On Wednesday nights, she would listen to the sounds of a party coming from a nearby house. Heitor Cordeiro opened his doors to the Carioca elite for a weekly soirée, but Hortencia and Luiz were never invited. They of all people, who lived so close! After all, those were the early years of the republic, when the closed castes of the monarchical era had been replaced by bourgeois meritocracy, so why didn’t Heitor Cordeiro, Bebé Silveira, or Raul Régiz, who organized the finest soirées in Rio, recognize Hortencia and Luiz’s new money as a merit to be considered and invite them to enjoy a drink and recite verse?
They were a band of snobs. What Hortencia needed was to become as snobbish as they were. She tightened her corset even further and added yet more fauna and flora to her hats. On his wife’s orders, Luiz could only leave the house in a dress coat and top hat, a silk vest, and a plastron. Her daughters were perpetually encased in stiff linen, with shiny lace-up boots that hurt their feet.
The ranch house was also transformed. It lost its country-house air and became a castle of Gothic towers and Moorish doors. The garden soon had a fountain, and the fountain soon had a cherub. Hortencia purchased two porcelain lions to guard the entrance to the house and installed statues of Apollo and Jupiter on the veranda. She bought French armchairs upholstered in silk, chairs with backs of fine fabric, tables encrusted with bronze, and books to decorate the library. She bought so many ornaments that she soon needed crystal cabinets to house them all. After acquiring more cabinets she had to buy more ornaments, and if she happened to go overboard with the ornaments she had to buy yet more cabinets, and so on.
After a few years, the ranch had become one of the most exotic places in Rio de Janeiro. There wasn’t a single grande dame who wasn’t longing to enter the mansion in her lace-up boots. Hortencia needed only to prepare the invitations and open the doors of her soirées to what became known as the Great Tupã Ball.
Guests could smell the jasmine covering the grand salon walls from the corner opposite the house. After passing the porcelain lions, they were greeted by an albino black man dressed as a court jester. The pony circus that had disappeared that morning from the public square was reassembled in the garden. Two clowns, a sword-swallower, and a human cannonball performed nonstop. An artificial pond was built in the salon, where a swan br
ought from the countryside could be seen swimming in a sea of Tupã beer. Even an Indian appeared, though he was spared from performing. He was considered indolent for not having learned how to juggle in time for the evening.
Cornish hens, partridges and wild pigeons, egg-yolk threads, foie gras and fruit sorbets, hams with cloves, pork loin, and fillets of whiting were served by twenty-five servants in white Louis XV wigs. Luiz’s beer was the only beverage served, sending an explicit message that from that night on the guests would have to swallow not only the beverage, but also their hosts.
Despite all her years leading a modest life, Hortencia had what it took to please high society, which was a bit of imagination and plenty of bad taste. The very next day she began to receive invites to poetry recitals and soirées throughout the city. After some studying of her new friends’ schedules, it was decided that she would host a soirée on Monday nights.
The great Ernesto Nazareth would appear at the house to compose and practice on the piano. He only looked up from the keys to drink a beer, and then six more for the road. An abashed Olavo Bilac recited poems and sold ten copies of his first collection to Hortencia, which she didn’t read, didn’t want to read, and used to line the cage that housed her cockatoos. The Italian artist Angelo Agostini sat in one of the corners of the room and drew caricatures of the guests while Hortencia, dressed up as an odalisque, offered her banqueters a hookah recently brought from Morocco, full of apple smoke with cannabis that had come highly recommended by a friend. Machado de Assis himself, the greatest writer in the history of Brazil, appeared once too, even if he had come in slippers and only to complain of the noise.
Eulália grew up believing that abundance was a birthright. It was normal to have piles of clothes, even with her body growing in inverse proportion to the possibility of her ever wearing them all. Normal to have her shoelaces tied by her nursemaid, normal to feed the fox terrier the pieces of chicken breast denied to the servants. The poor existed so she could wear new gloves and not soil her hands distributing alms after Mass. School existed for her to learn French, and to know how to order a croissant in a boulangerie during the family vacations in Paris. And the soirées in her house existed for her to meet a suitor of her caliber, marry, and give birth to four children, who would be raised by a nursemaid. Eulália had more important things to worry about than bringing up her own children – being rich, for example.
It was good, intense, and everlasting. Until it wasn’t.
Now in his sixties, Luiz was having a hard time getting around. Even as the owner of the largest brewery in Rio he had never forgotten his years of hardship, and he remembered them especially when faced with a juicy thick steak. He was happiest when the meat barely fit on his plate, and he wolfed it down with fries straight out of the frying pan. He could no longer see his feet, but displayed his new figure with pride, as it was the antithesis of how he had looked during his frugal years.
It was written in his destiny that steak would be the death of him, but not because of clogged arteries. As he left the brewery one afternoon, he crossed the street and underestimated the time it would take to reach the sidewalk. One trolley was coming from one direction, another from the other. Luiz sucked in his belly, but still ended up squished between the two. His insides spilled out under the pressure, dirtying the legs of some passengers. The man’s casket had to remain closed, because his brains had landed on the arms of a passerby.
Hortencia was devastated. Not only because Luiz was the best man she had ever known, but because she was sure her sons-in-law would run the business into the ground in less than a decade. She was wrong. They ran the business into the ground in less than two years.
The mansion was sold to pay off debts. Hortencia moved to a boarding house with a single bed, a chest full of golden dresses, and a box encrusted in mother-of-pearl that contained the money from the sale of the crystal cabinets and the ornaments. Hers was the last room on the top floor and she only left to eat, go to the bathroom or sit in the sun by the clothesline for an hour every afternoon. She became known as the aristocrat with long dresses, who told stories of grand balls, which at times included an albino black man dressed as a court jester and a swan that swam in a pond of beer. On other occasions, it was the albino black man who swam in the beer and the swan that was dressed as the court jester.
No one believed a word that came out of the poor woman’s mouth, but they liked her all the same. When Hortencia lost all the money in her box because she didn’t know how to trade in the mil-réis coins of the new currency introduced in the forties, the other residents pitched in to pay her rent, allowing her to keep her routine of sunbathing and telling wild stories until her death, at the age of 102.
Unfortunately, Eulália didn’t have the same natural ability to adjust to poverty as her mother. She had never known what it was to be poor, and she didn’t like it. She’d had the rug pulled out from under her, with everything upon it – from her Italian shoes to the jacaranda furniture. Moving from the mansion to a two-bedroom apartment in the suburbs was a blow to her senses. A blow that removed any bit of sweetness that her indolent personality might have possessed. The walls of those cubicles were claustrophobic, and she couldn’t see how a family of six could possibly fit there. Within a few short days, they found the answer. They fit because they had to fit. Eulália grew more ill-humored with each day, and made the life of those around her a living hell.
Eulália’s husband, who until then had been known as Onofre Francisco Castro Lima, soon became Onofre the Useless. He came from a family that believed wealth was something endemic. Something that was theirs by birthright, and that they had gained by a simple process of osmosis – they simply needed to remain close to those in power to maintain their privilege. When Onofre’s great-grandfather, the Marquis of Ouriçal, disembarked from the ship with the Portuguese royal family, he had the right to one of the finest houses in Rio. Onofre’s grandfather had the right to a post in the Customs House, to receive a salary without working. Onofre’s father had the right to a distinguished family name, which he traded in to marry the daughter of a slave trafficker. Onofre had the right to what was left of the family name, which he then traded in to marry the daughter of a businessman.
After having his investment in a tranquil future shredded between two trolleys, Onofre wasn’t sure what to do. The truth was that he had never known what to do, but now the consequences were more serious. He had six mouths to feed, and after spending several long days trying to think of a solution to his problems, he had no alternative but to stop thinking and start doing something. He managed to get a job in a real-estate agency, but the days he worked were as frequent as leap years. The commissions he earned were even rarer than leap years, and the money that did come in couldn’t match their expenses. To run from this dreadful monster called reality, Onofre began to drink. First, just a bit of port wine. Later, a cachaça known as Angel’s Piss, capable of corroding stomachs and dissolving livers.
Onofre the Useless died of cirrhosis. Eulália the Bitter took her children out of school and sent them to work. At the end of the month she would seize her sons’ earnings and, if the mood struck her, she would give them some change to buy a cigarette – one cigarette. She discovered she’d given birth to some truly romantic boys, who barely reached eighteen before announcing marriages to girls who would never meet with their mother’s approval. Before leaving the house they each wrote their new address in a little notebook, in handwriting not even a seer could decipher.
Each year, she lost a son. By the time Eulália realized it, the only one left was her youngest, Antonio. She clung to the boy like an octopus, making the apartment her kingdom and Antonio her servant. ‘You will never leave me, ever,’ she decreed.
It was around that time that she began to experience health problems. Heart palpitations, formication, and ailments mysterious even to the doctors who tended to her. If Eulália had a cough, she thought it was tuberculosis; if she had a headache, it could b
e a tumor. Each illness arrived with a premonition. If she went to sleep thinking about heartburn she would wake up with a burning sensation. If she went to sleep thinking about her circulation she woke up with swollen feet. Chest colds were transformed into pneumonia; a rash could be psoriasis; and her heart, which had never pounded on account of anyone, suddenly experienced a constant murmur.
Eulália’s illnesses grew more frequent during her remaining son’s early adult years, when he was the right-hand man of the proprietors of Rio’s most popular stationery shop. They worsened when the young man left his job to open his own business, attracting visits from perfumed young women who never seemed to have working pens at home. Eulália improved in the following decade, when Antonio began to grow white hairs and confirmed his only interest was stamp collecting.
It was genetics that made Eulália sick. Not anything present in her own DNA, but in the DNA of her son. Antonio was a big man, with a chest like a shield and tufts of black hair that fell into his eyes, which induced in women the desire to comb it. His perfect teeth made young girls blush when they discovered they were capable of dreaming up other uses for their mouths beyond the usual mealtimes. One young woman fainted in the stationery store after seeing Antonio’s biceps exploding beneath his shirt as he lifted a box of paper. She came to a few minutes later in an undesirable location: it was Eulália whose lap she was resting against and who patted her cheeks, the smell of her onion breath filling the young woman’s nostrils.
Chapter 11
Only two women among the 189 who went to Antonio’s stationery store in search of something besides blotting paper managed to break through Eulália’s curses. The first was Isabelle Bouquier. Isabelle was daughter to the owner of the largest bookstore in Rio, the Frenchman Jean Bouquier. She played piano, spoke four languages, wasn’t ugly, and spent summers in Paris. Isabelle could have had any man who walked down the Rua do Ouvidor or the Boulevard Saint Germain. And, to prove that she could have any man, she wanted one who walked neither down the Rua do Ouvidor or on the streets of Paris. She met Antonio one boring Sunday as she went with her family to see the military band play at the bandstand in the park. The young man’s head stuck out among the crowd. He liked to eat popcorn one kernel at a time, and watched the band with the interest others displayed when watching an opera at the municipal theater. After the show, the crowd dispersed and Isabelle was able to assess the rest of Antonio. An alpaca suit, ordinary shoes, and an older lady whom he took by the arm.
The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao Page 13