The Caregiver

by Samuel Park

  “Very little,” my mother said. “That you need an actress.”

  He nodded. “It’s an important role. A role that we’re having trouble casting. Can you improvise? Can you stay in character even if something unexpected happens?”

  “Yes and yes.”

  She nodded at him and he nodded back at her. They seemed to be falling into sync.

  “I can do all that,” she repeated. She’d never improvised before, as far as I knew. She always had time to rehearse when she dubbed the Hollywood movies. In fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her act outside of the sound booth. “What is this show? Who will I be doing it with? Raul said it’s ‘real life.’ What does that mean?”

  The man introduced as Pacifier looked over at Octopus, as though they were communicating telepathically. They seemed to be making some decision. Pacifier crossed to the other side and I could no longer see him, even if I moved my head.

  “You’d be performing for a single audience member. A very important man,” said Octopus.

  “Like players acting for the queen?” asked my mother.

  Octopus traded glances with Pacifier. Pacifier shrugged his shoulders. “Is that a chess reference?”

  My mother answered his question with a quick shake of her head and asked, “Who is this important man?”

  “He’s a Police Chief at a station in Ipanema,” said Octopus. “The 13-DP.”

  “And what would I be performing for him?” my mother asked. I could hear in her voice the same skepticism she’d shown when Raul had first brought up the job.

  “You’re going to tell him a story that’s going to keep him out of the station for a couple of hours,” said Octopus.

  His body stopped shifting, became a column, his back to me always. He never put his hands in the pockets of his pants. His legs never rested against each other.

  “What kind of story?” my mother asked.

  “A very good story. A story that me and my colleagues have devised.”

  My mother thought for a second. “And my job would be to make him believe that the story is true?”

  “If he does not believe you, the whole plan falls apart,” said Octopus.

  “The whole plan?” asked my mother.

  “You can use whatever it is you actors use—an accent, tears. The Police Chief must be so convinced by your performance that he will follow you out of the station and leave it unsupervised.”

  What if she refused? They were giving her so much sensitive information. I wondered if everyone in that room knew my mother would end up doing it.

  “What are you and your men going to do while I keep him away from the station? You have people being held in that jail?”

  Octopus hesitated, and traded looks again with the others. They hadn’t smiled once, as far as I knew, since their arrival. There was still time, I wanted to tell my mother, to make them leave.

  “You don’t need to worry about that. What you don’t know, you can’t give away,” said Octopus, pacing around my mother. “I do have an important question for you, though. Something I always ask people who are new to the group.”

  A group? Raul had said only that this was a job.

  My mother sounded skeptical. “What is it?”

  “Do you have any dependents?”

  “Dependents?” my mother echoed nervously, as though to buy time.

  “A sick father who needs care. A child. Someone who wouldn’t survive without you.” Octopus looked away, then added, “In case something happened to you.”

  My mother looked down on the floor. Through the flutter of my eyelids, I could tell she’d grown uneasy. Her face betrayed the churning and burning going through her stomach. My mother had always seemed strong to me, and never more so than in that moment, alone at night in a room with three strange men. I thought of my grandparents, and what they would think if they could see her now. Would she be confirming their prejudiced exhortations? Would this just reaffirm their distance? Or would a forgotten part of them kick in, a primal, evolutionary part that still wanted to protect their offspring?

  I crept back up the bed, leaving the scene that had been playing out in front of me.

  I heard her silence for a moment and then she said quietly, “No. No, I don’t.”

  chapter three

  I RARELY GOT TO RIDE in cars, so the drive from our apartment to the farm in Santos was a thrilling treat. We were in the back, my hands buried deep into the crook of my mother’s arm. Pacifier drove with a man I hadn’t seen before in the passenger seat. Neither Octopus nor Single L came this time.

  Several times my mother whispered to me, “Are you all right?” and I nodded that I was. Each time I said this, she closed her eyes and shook her head slightly, as though I’d just lied to her, even though I hadn’t. With our hands linked I could feel her sweaty palms.

  I couldn’t quite figure out why she was bringing me with her. But there was, first of all, the fact that no one—none of our neighbors, none of her friends—was willing to watch me for the relatively long period that she was expected to stay at the farm—three full days. Janete couldn’t do it; she had picked up work at a nightclub and was out at all hours. And there was the fact that she couldn’t leave me alone in the apartment for those three days.

  In the week since the men had been to our apartment, my mother never brought them up except to say she’d received a new job opportunity. She didn’t know that I’d eavesdropped and I didn’t tell her that I had—that was a milestone, our first serious lies to each other. When she told me she needed to go to a farm in Santos to rehearse for a play, I begged her to let me come along. She had no choice but to tell them that she did indeed have a child. I don’t know exactly how they reacted to her admission, but I was allowed to come. Ana couldn’t help but brag to me that Octopus had confided that her skillful lying had convinced him that she was the woman for the job.

  As we drove, I looked out the window as the gray sky chased us. A car could go fast in a way that a bus couldn’t. I watched as the familiar views of Copacabana gave way to the colorless, leafless suburban areas. Identical, morose midrise buildings blocked one another like standing dominoes. Clotheslines hung from every balcony, shirts and pants flapping in the wind like flags of every country. No sign of trees, none of the nature Rio was famous for. In the horizon, the favelas stretched over rolling hills. The makeshift houses, with their varying shades of plywood, concrete, and even brown brick, jutted and abutted with no rhyme or reason. They were like matchboxes that had been poured carelessly over fragile, unstable land. Driving fast, we overtook several buses. The people inside were standing, and having trouble doing so. Every other car was a Beetle: a round shell, their headlights shaped like eyes. The passing drivers had their windows down, not wearing seatbelts, the ones with radios blasting as a form of bragging.

  Before we arrived at the farm, we passed by a row of several adjacent lots with elaborate, painted signs warning us to keep out. Each sign spoke of a different danger. Each gate was high enough to intimidate. Our destination had a green gate, and was void of hysterical placards. But their gate was more secluded than the others, shrouded by dense vegetation. I heard the gravel of an unfinished road rolling under the tires as we approached.

  My mother and I waited while Pacifier got out and undid the metal noodles of chains and locks at the gate. While I watched her, I thought of how hard it was to say no sometimes, to turn back on a decision. It was so much easier to glide forward, to acquiesce. My mother put her arm around my back, as though the more of my body she held, the more I’d be protected. She stared nervously at the gate opening, a man inside waving us on. Pacifier got back in the car, and my mother tensed, and I thought that she wanted to stop all this. But she didn’t want to do it herself. She wanted another person to intervene, or maybe even God himself, through an earthquake or a mudslide. So that while my mother and I extricated ourselves, we could apologize to these men and hold in our heads a version of ourselves as polite, appreciative,
and obedient. We were not like that on our own, but in front of these men who’d offered my mother money, who had something she wanted, we felt the need to be.

  Pacifier drove onto the narrow path. Trees stood like sentinels on both sides, creating the impression of a tunnel. Their large, paddlelike fronds brushed against the windshield, making a slapping noise. Below us, the gravel grew noisier, too, as the tires made the rocks trample and roll over one another, their protests like the gritting of teeth.

  The first thing I noticed, upon our arrival at the house, was that there was a police van parked next to it. When I got out of the car, though, and I could see the other side of the vehicle, I realized it wasn’t really a police van. It was a regular van that a young man was painting green and yellow, using a large acrylic mold to write on. It was the size and shape of police vans I’d grown accustomed to seeing on the streets, carrying officers to dangerous shootouts. The man crouched on the ground, a brush in his hand, his clothes splattered with paint. He said a quick hello to Pacifier and his friend and smiled at my mother and me, as though he knew who we were.

  Pacifier, now that he had fulfilled his job of driving us there, seemed to completely forget about us. He and the other man, who never said a word to us for the entire ride, went ahead into the house and disappeared. My mother and I stood awkwardly for a moment, unsure of what to do. The house was one of the largest I’d ever seen, surrounded by lemon trees and heavy banyan leaves. The front had a deep awning that created a porchlike space presently occupied by a volleyball net and some empty cans of paint. Half the wall was covered in tile, a deep blue pattern cross-sected by the white lines of the grout. The painter, noticing our hesitation, pointed toward the house.

  “Go in,” he said. “There’re people inside.”

  The house smelled like sausages. My stomach growled, and I would’ve been embarrassed if I hadn’t heard my mother’s growl even louder. We hesitated by the foyer, adjusting to the coolness of the house. The living room had hardly any furniture, just stacks and stacks of chairs folded against the wall, and a yellow couch dwarfed by a bookcase overflowing with piles of old magazines. The couch had holes in it, holes that looked like scabs someone had picked.

  My mother and I waited for someone to appear. My earlier feeling of dread was now replaced by confusion. As though we’d been invited to a party, but showed up on the wrong date, or at the wrong place. Finally, my mother walked toward the voices, past a hallway that was nearly as wide as the living room itself, and we found ourselves in a large kitchen with dark, concrete floors. In the far corner, a young woman was stirring the largest pot I’d ever seen, making feijoada in an industrial quantity. Next to her, a short man stood on an empty box of produce so he could reach the sink. He was washing scallions. Both of them glanced at us, then went back to what they were doing.

  “Upstairs,” the woman finally barked, her face momentarily covered by steam.

  We turned back to the living room and walked up the stairs, doing so with purpose, now that we had the permission of the cook. Some of the steps creaked, like piano keys, that my mother’s feet hit first, followed by mine.

  Upstairs, my mother led us toward a bathroom. I didn’t even wait for her to lock the door before I pulled down my underwear and sat on the toilet. I’d been holding it in for the last hour and it felt good not to anymore.

  My mother waited until I was done and then we traded places. While she peed, she leaned forward, putting her elbows on her knees, and her hands over her forehead, muttering something to herself. I looked over again at the second toilet, trying to figure out how it worked. I turned the faucet on tentatively and water began to stream upwards, like a little fountain, though not really far up enough for me to comfortably wash my hands. I turned it back off.

  “I shouldn’t have brought you here,” my mother said, looking at me. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Are they going to feed us?” I asked.

  “That feijoada smelled good, didn’t it?” my mother said. “You could tell she soaked the beans for a long time, like you’re supposed to.”

  She wiped and pulled up her underwear.

  I washed my hands on the actual sink. While I did this, my mother put her hands on my shoulders and stared at the mirror, as though taking a picture of herself. Her gaze looked distant, almost sad. To me, my mother was always smiling, because when she looked at me, she was always smiling. I hadn’t given much thought to what she looked like when she wasn’t looking at me.

  When we came out of the bathroom, a dour-looking man was waiting for us. He beckoned us with a wave of his hairy hand, and led us into a room where some people were chatting. In the room, which was quite large, there was a foosball table against one wall, and a Ping-Pong table against another. Both were covered by maps. The room must’ve been right above the kitchen; the smells floated in freely through a window on the far side. It was one of those windows that opened outward instead of upward, held in place by a folding hinge. There were men and women here, most if not all of them college age, gathered around in a semicircle, sitting on metal folding chairs. Two of the chairs had been placed right into an empty area in the middle of the room, facing each other. The stage, so to speak.

  When my mother and I came in, there was a sudden silence. I recognized Octopus from the other night, even though I’d barely seen his face at the time. He had a certain aura around him that made him hard to miss, not just because of the way he presented himself, but by the way everyone else angled themselves in relation to him. He smiled at my mother, a hint of gratitude in his eyes, as though he hadn’t been sure that she’d come. Someone handed my mother a piece of paper and led her to the chair in the middle. A man stepped forward and took the chair across from her. He introduced himself to my mother as Carlos. A kindly woman with short, boyish hair led me toward an empty chair.

  With the lines in front of her, something about my mother shifted. The woman trembling in the bathroom vanished. The confident woman from Raul’s sound booth took her place—the woman who spoke Portuguese for Katharine Hepburn. She studied her lines, nodding slightly once in a while. Everyone watched—my mother had complete control over the room.

  After a few minutes, she put the sheets away and, making eye contact with her scene partner in the opposite chair, she began.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Chief Lima,” said my mother, adopting the manner of a woman more docile than her.

  “My men said that you had information to give me. What is this referring to?” asked Carlos, in character, as committed to the role as my mother. It was easy to see he wasn’t trained, though. He was doing too much. Moving his head, his hands, more than necessary.

  “The terrorists, of course. Everyone in Rio knows how hard you’re fighting them,” said my mother, sitting quite still, not in the absence of energy, but the repression of it.

  “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about, but if you know anything, I’m willing to listen,” said Carlos. There were tiny pauses, as each of them thought of what to say next. Neither he nor my mother checked their pages—I realized then that they hadn’t been given actual lines, only the situation.

  “I came to you because you’re what’s keeping those communists from ruining our country,” said my mother. When she said communists, the word was met with smiles, even clapping from someone in the back. “When you fight them, you fight them on behalf of all of us.”

  “Thank you. But that’s enough flattery, even for me, mocinha. What did you come here to tell me?”

  My mother nodded slightly and then glanced over at Octopus, as though anticipating his reaction. He watched my mother with intensity.

  “I live in the favela Rio das Pedras. I have the lower unit in a three-floor shanty. Honest, hardworking people. But about a month ago, a new element moved in upstairs. Suspicious-looking, wearing imported shoes. They don’t spend the night, just gather for a few hours during the day. Students from Federal, I could tell. I’ve taken out the trash
in those classrooms.”

  I looked over at the audience and wondered if the many young people in the room were students at that very school.

  “Last week, I was watching my soap during lunchtime and I couldn’t pay attention to whether the protagonist figured out that his new lover was really his old lover in disguise because the conversation upstairs was so loud. I heard male voices, and female voices.” She looked down at her lap and twisted her hands together, a nice touch. “And I heard them talking about bombs, about bombs they would use against the police.”

  Then she stopped, with a look on her face that meant she wasn’t sure what to do next. You could run out of words like you could run out of money. Her scene partner was no help. He’d gone from actor to observer and seemed afraid to jump in, as though even her silences were too good to interrupt. My mother glanced over at Octopus and he returned her gaze with either approval or intimidation, I couldn’t tell. But something in that transaction allowed her to continue.

  “They’re planning a kidnapping. Of the American ambassador.”

  “The American consulate?” Carlos echoed, jolted back into the scene.

  “Yes. They said something about wanting to exchange him for some of their men being held here,” said my mother, and as soon as she said it, two people clapped and howled, independently of each other. Octopus was nodding vigorously. Her use of real bits and pieces of information in her otherwise made-up story seemed to delight, rather than unnerve the revolutionaries.