The Caregiver

by Samuel Park

  I pulled away and saw how completely spent she looked, her skin like a wafer about to crack.

  “I’m not going to go to school tomorrow,” I told her firmly. “I’m going to stay home. I want to hear these phone calls myself.”

  When the military took over, my mother was about my age, and everyone had been sure it was only for a few months. After that, the generals would leave, and we’d get to choose a president again. When we all went home that first day, to cook our dinners, water our plants, watch our soaps—no one thought, Oh boy, we are screwed; run for the hills. We slept peacefully at night; we picked fights with our lovers; we died of boredom. Some of us were even glad Goulart was gone—he was so weak, wasn’t he? And wasn’t he a socialist, deep down?

  No one knew they were going to stick around for two decades and kill and torture more than a thousand citizens. Drowning, burning, suffocating, hanging.

  When the dictatorship finally ended, my mother tasted a spoonful of fame. She was interviewed by the Catholic diocese of São Paulo for a book they were writing about what was now termed the “years of gunpowder.” The book consisted mostly of firsthand accounts from victims and survivors. My mother’s story, like the others, was told semi-anonymously, and she was identified only by her name, and her age at the time she was tortured: Ana, 24.

  I’d heard over the years of the clashes between the student guerrillas and the police. Violent protests with Molotov cocktails and cars set on fire. Metallurgical strikes organized by the students. But I wasn’t really a revolutionary. I got involved by chance. I came into the police station on the morning of March 12 as part of an undercover action by the student activist group Revolutionary Popular Movement. Someone must’ve tipped off the chief of police because he told me that he knew who I really was and why I was really there. He demanded to know what the plan was. I refused to say anything. He took me to a soundproofed alcove in the back of the police station, and had me take my clothes off. From the ceiling, cold jets of air kept streaming in. My ears nearly bled from the sounds bursting from the speakers: an airplane turbine, a factory siren, bombs exploding. And then suddenly, silence. And then noise again. The walls started shaking, slammed by hammers and timber blocks. The air felt like sandpaper against my throat. The ventilation was turned off, and oxygen suddenly became scarce. The room remained bright at all times, like the inside of a lamp bulb. He put me in the dragon’s chair, made of corrugated iron, cold and harsh. He held me down with straps covered in foam and inserted clasps on my breasts, fingers, thighs. The chair had wooden slats that held my legs and feet back, and when he pressed a button, the shock made my body lurch violently forward while my legs spasmed, feeling like my body was splitting in half. I could tell he was enjoying this at a personal level. He wouldn’t take his eyes off me and this went on and on. He was pure evil, no compassion whatsoever. At one point the phone rang, and it must’ve been his wife, because I heard him tell her what he wanted for dinner. Chicken with French fries. To this day, I throw up if I see someone eating that. My hands still sometimes shake for no reason. I have to turn around and leave instead of going into a room populated only by men. I can’t stand ceiling fans, because there was one in that alcove. The memory still makes me scream at night.

  Her story only took up half a page. This was how I learned the details of that day.

  Around the time the book came out, eight years after the shootout at the police station, the government offered amnesty to both sides of the struggle—to the members of the military and police, and to the guerrilla groups and activists. My mother, along with other survivors, was invited to join a protest and walk in the front row alongside the TV actresses Lucélia Santos and Christiane Torloni. My mother reported that they were both really pretty in real life, though one of them sweated a bit too much. She was also invited to fancy lunches in ballrooms, where she told her story to rich ladies, and somber panels in front of journalists and politicians. At a party afterward, the singer Chico Buarque told her he’d write a song about her, though he never did. In front of those people, my mother smiled and put on a brave face, but when she got home, she invariably locked herself in the bathroom and cried while she bathed.

  I suppose it had been traumatic to me, too, witnessing what I did when I was only eight, but I didn’t spend much time thinking about it, being distracted by helping my mother. She never asked me how that day had affected me, and she never encouraged me to talk about it. It was as though what happened belonged only to her.

  I sat by the phone and waited for it to ring. I stared at it for so long, I could see it with my eyes closed: the scratches on its round receiver, the rotary numbers printed in elaborate serif, its gray-blue color. Nerves hissed up and down my spine, as if a snake slithered underneath my clothes. My mother paced a few feet away.

  Finally, the phone rang: an alarm warning us to leave the room, its trill persistent and shrill. Once, twice, the phone vibrated its brass sprockets. I rested my hand over the receiver, wrapping my fingers over its lustrous handle.

  My mother also put her hand over the receiver, and then slowly brought it up. Our foreheads touching slightly, like those of Siamese twins. I directed the mouthpiece closer to her lips.

  “Hello?” she asked.

  Both of us grew tense with expectation. Her eyelids fluttered. The person on the other end of the line breathed heavily, in and out. We listened to his breathing and he listened to ours. We had agreed ahead of time that we had to make him talk.

  “Hello?” she repeated, unable to hide the shakiness in her voice. “If you don’t speak, I’m going to hang up.” I gave her a nod of encouragement and she added, “I know who you are.”

  What a good actress my mother had been when I was a child, leaving no trace of our rehearsals.

  Still, the person did not speak. We listened to his intakes of breath. It wasn’t the heavy, masturbatory panting of an obscene caller. It was the wheeze of someone trapped.

  “All right, then,” my mother continued, adding to the bluff.

  “Wait,” he panted breathlessly now. “Don’t hang up.”

  His voice startled both of us. This monster had human form.

  “After all you’ve done, the least you could do was leave me alone,” my mother said, her eyes widening. She put a hand to her mouth to silence a gasp. I could tell she recognized him for sure now. We were standing so close to each other I could practically feel the vibrations on her skin, the growing dampness on her forehead.

  “I should, but . . .” He hesitated, as though it was as hard for him to speak as it was for us to listen. “I want to know if you still remember me.” As I listened in, I tried to memorize his intonation, and listen for any distinct sounds in the background, like a train or traffic.

  “I wish I didn’t.” She was looking at me when she spoke, and to an observer, it would look as though she were saying that to me.

  “We didn’t spend much time together, but it was very meaningful to me,” he said, sounding sad.

  My mother’s fingers began to shake a little. “You have to stop calling me. I don’t want to hear from you.” She closed her eyes, and seemed to forget that I was there. “You should go back to the pits of hell where you belong.”

  I looked at her, saddened. It had been almost ten years, but it could’ve been yesterday. This man had suddenly cracked her open, and so much pain spilled out, without end, her face glistening.

  “You don’t have to feel the way others tell you to feel,” he said. He sounded like an old man, but not infirm. I could picture him, sitting amidst luxury in a quiet study. “Don’t pretend you weren’t the most alive you’d ever felt. Don’t pretend that it wasn’t both awful and thrilling.”

  He spoke barely above a whisper without disguising his voice. I desperately tried to match his voice to my memory of Lima at the station when I was eight, but I couldn’t really remember. When I thought of him, he was pure image, all muscular bulk, no sounds.

  “I really don’t underst
and what you think you’re accomplishing by calling me. I don’t understand what you want from me,” said my mother, wiping her tears away.

  “I felt like we spoke the same language. I felt a connection with you,” he said. “It’s led to a lifelong attachment.” He said this as though he were admitting something vile.

  “No!” she suddenly yelled, and immediately had to recover from the effort. “I’m going to tell the police.”

  “Tell them what? They worked under me for years; they venerate me.” An admission. He sounded different when he said this; indignant or impugned.

  “I’m not afraid of you. Do you hear me? There’s nothing you can do to me.”

  “That’s not entirely true, though, is it?” he asked, calmly.

  My mother exhaled a breath of fire and yanked the phone away from me. “I’m going to call the papers tomorrow. I’m going to remind them what you’ve done to all of us!”

  I stared at my mother, a bit taken aback by her bravery. I’d never expected her to confront him so directly. She moved the phone away so I could no longer hear. Whatever his reply was, it made my mother’s face contort in anger. I worried for her heart; I wanted her to hang up. He continued talking, and my mother listened, still taking him in. I didn’t understand why. She gritted her teeth, crying, nearing an explosion. I glanced at the lever I could press to end the call.

  Finally, my mother took the receiver and slammed it on the base.

  We stood still for a moment without exchanging any words. The relief was so big it had to find a place to land.

  “Maybe he won’t call again,” my mother said, “now that he knows what I’m capable of doing.” Our eyes met, and then she collapsed into a coughing fit.

  She slumped on the couch behind her, utterly spent, and I tried to imagine the effort that it had taken to go through that conversation. As much as she tried to bury those memories, they probably came back every time she walked onto an unfamiliar street at night; every time a man bumped into her too aggressively; the shock of static; every time she sensed a presence behind her, just out of view.

  “He won’t stop unless we make him do so,” I replied.

  It wasn’t very hard for me to find where he lived.

  I had spent my share of hours after school handling foxed pages in basement archives. I’d held a part-time job at the municipal library, where I had often been the only person wandering through the ghost-filled aisles of obscure sections. At microfiche stands, I handled the levers and knobs like a seasoned machinist. I had a precocious gift for skimming. A librarian had once told me that any piece of information a scholar wanted had been written down somewhere: a census poll, a deed of purchase. It just took knowing where to look.

  At the municipal records room, I told the clerk I was doing a report on real estate owned by the military police for my geography teacher. I asked for the indexed records of the state revenue collector’s registry. After perusing for hours through the carbon copies he gave me, I eventually learned that Police Chief José Mello de Lima paid property taxes on a house on Avenue Marshal Mascarenhas de Moraes, right here in Copacabana.

  The discovery of his proximity was both thrilling and unnerving.

  That night, I lay in bed awake listening to my exacerbated mother hack and wheeze, trying to decide what to do with that piece of information. I knew where the disembodied voice on the phone was housed and gated.

  I was unsure if I could control myself if I went to his house. Would I do something spectacularly stupid, something that might even land me in juvenile prison? Though I was always a rule-follower, obedient and polite, I could feel a piece of me—a shadow self, I might call it—arriving unannounced, taking possession. I could hear Lima’s low whisper slithering into my ears with overwhelming heat.

  I was struck by the feeling of otherworldly power, perhaps the same that, according to my mother, granted Desdemona and Queen Margaret their powers of prescience. A power that marionetted my actions with sticks of courage. It was a feeling of being myself and not being myself, surrendering to parts of my body not ruled by my brain. Where did such courage come from?

  As I lay in bed, I knew what I would do the next day, and once the question was settled, I was able to fall asleep, washing away all the steps taken to come to the decision. By the time I woke the next morning, I would think the choice had been an unmarked gift, delivered surreptitiously in the night.

  Instead of going to school, and without telling my mother, I took the bus to the west side of Copacabana. I found Lima’s house a few minutes from the beach, less than a mile away from the local shantytown, in the middle of a quiet hillside street with cobblestone pavement. I had to walk up a long stairway to reach it, a steep vertical slope. From the outside, I could see only the imposing gate, next to two-story brick houses with more modest exteriors.

  I pretended, a bit awkwardly, to be waiting for the bus. If someone noticed me, they wouldn’t find anything odd about me being there for a long time; it could take hours sometimes for the buses to arrive.

  I started to question what I was doing there. I didn’t know if I was going to confront Lima in his driveway, or follow him to a public place. Things seemed slippery now, out in three-dimensional reality, than they had in the protection of my bed, my mother, weak as she was, lingering in the next room.

  I waited and waited under the hot morning sun, lowering my eyes and looking away whenever one of the neighbors came out or drove by. Most of them looked wealthy, descendants of old latifundium families. From the street, I couldn’t tell the real size of the houses. The houses weren’t crowded together like the apartment buildings in my neighborhood, but rather had lush lawns and trees and carefully tended flower bushes. Behind Lima’s gate, I guessed his driveway probably led to a big house with many rooms, maybe even a pool, and a view of the apex of the hills.

  Finally, about an hour after my arrival, Lima’s gate opened, and a green Monza emerged. It had tinted windows, and at first I couldn’t see its passengers, only its slick, shiny exterior, which looked freshly washed and waxed. But as I brazenly craned my head toward the car and the driver turned onto the main road, the passenger in the back lowered his window slightly. I spotted his pale, wrinkled forehead, and caught a tiny glimpse of his eyes. He looked, to me, like a lizard.

  I wanted to scream, but the sound died before it reached my lips. It struck me then, the futility of me being there, and I decided to walk away and not come back. There had to be a more normal way of dealing with this, like going to the police, moving to another house, or even changing phone numbers. It had taken months to get ours installed, and it’d take another few to get a new one, but in the meantime maybe Lima would find another hobby. Or die.

  Lima’s car had turned the corner and I adjusted my shoulder bag, preparing to leave. I followed the uneven cobblestones, expecting that at any moment a maid or butler would materialize behind the gate, asking who I was or what I was doing there. I was nervous like a shaking cattail trapped in the wind.

  Suddenly, someone did appear, but it wasn’t a maid. It was a teenage boy about my age, wearing a bright neon purple T-shirt and what looked like surfer shorts. His light brown hair was long overdue for a cut, and his skin looked deeply tanned. He smiled lopsidedly at me as if he knew me, as if he’d been waiting for me.

  “What are you selling?” he asked, leaning down and pulling up the metal lever that kept the wooden gate in its place.

  “Me? I—I’m not selling anything,” I said, nervously.

  “You look too young to be a journalist. And my dad doesn’t give interviews,” he drawled, sounding as if under the effect of narcotics. I was surprised that he was Lima’s son, and not his grandson, unless he was referring to someone else. He closed and glided out from behind the gate, with a smile that suggested he didn’t want to go back in, as if whatever waited inside wasn’t as enjoyable as talking to this complete stranger in front of his house. I felt almost sorry for him, suddenly.

  “No, I�
��m not a—a journalist, either,” I said, wondering if the press was trying to get men like Lima to admit to the survivors’ accusations. “I was just lost, and I saw the gate open, and thought there might be somebody here.” My fingers were shaking slightly, and I hid them behind my back.

  The young man had moved the gate almost all the way to the front, but instead of shutting it, he kept it open a crack so he could speak to me. “And what were you looking for?” he asked, still speaking in a relaxed drawl, still smiling.

  “What?” I asked, confused. I had no idea what he meant.

  “You want directions, I can give you directions. Just tell me where you were trying to get to.”

  “I was—I was looking for the beach,” I said, trying to sound convincing. I hoped that this would be the end, and he would let me go.

  The young man smiled again, scratching his long bare arms. “That’s great, then. I was just there, I only came back to grab a blanket. I can not only tell you, I can actually walk you there.” He smiled. “What’s your name?”

  I turned to him, about to say that I’d changed my mind, and I’d decided not to go to the beach. But then I realized he might find that contradictory and odd—might find me odd—and tell his father about the stranger loitering outside their house.

  “Betania,” I found myself saying. “And yes, you can show me the way. Thank you,” I replied, unable to stop looking at the set of keys in the boy’s hands.

  His name was Lazarus. He had chosen that day, of all days, to play hooky, and if I’d come a day earlier or a day later, I would’ve missed him. Was it luck or something more menacing?

  It was about ten minutes walking from their house to the beach. Being midday, most of the people at Copacabana Beach—and there were plenty of people there—were either pickpockets who had dropped out of school, old retirees reading Istoé under large umbrellas, or prostitutes trying to get dates with the tourists in the nearby hotels. The sandwich sellers walked by with their straw baskets, holding up samples in the air. They were mostly effeminate men on this side of the beach, their swim trunks tiny, their eyes covered by cheap sunglasses. Copacabana’s glorious, bohemian past had long been erased by constant violence and muggings. Copacabana seemed to me like a showgirl whose best days were behind her, who sparkled most vividly in people’s nostalgic memories.