It could have been the café at a train station, an airport—hospital time like airport time, the hours of the day losing their fixed identities. Marcos bought two five-ounce bottles of merlot, like the bottles they serve on planes, and poured the wine into plastic cups. News played on a T.V. Doctors in white coats ordered espresso, preparing to stay awake for who knew how many more hours, laughing with each other, secure in the power of the knowledge they possessed.
“We never continued our English lessons,” I said.
“Coração is heart. Filha is daughter. Mulher is woman, wife, it is both.”
“That’s a Portuguese lesson.”
“I think she will be O.K.,” he said after a moment.
“O.K.,” I said.
“Yes—it is what her doctors tell me.”
“I would be terrified. Is she terrified?”
“No, she is calm. There is something inside her. She trusts the world. I don’t want her to lose this trust.”
“I would be thinking about my heart all the time.”
“You are touching your heart right now.”
Marcos’s phone buzzed. “Iara,” he said, and tapped out a reply.
“I assume she doesn’t know I’m here,” I said.
He picked up one of the empty bottles.
“Another?”
He went to the counter and returned with two more.
My phone buzzed. Marcos took a drink of the wine while I tapped out a reply to my husband, who was still at work, he said.
Without looking up from my phone I asked where Iara was.
“She’s at home with Francesca. She doesn’t want Francesca to see her sister like this. She will remember such a thing forever, Iara says.”
“Parenthood seems to involve a great deal of lying,” I said.
“Children also lie.”
“Do you feel guilty?”
“Sometimes the truth is not perfect.”
I said, “My husband wants girls, daughters. I find it interesting, the way people have that kind of preference. Did you want girls?”
“No, boys, of course.”
“Oh.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t. I don’t want. And it’s the one thing you really cannot disagree about.”
My phone buzzed. I replied to my husband. When writing texts, I insisted on punctuation, capitalization, correct syntax; the extra time this required made me hate sending texts. I wished I could stet the errors and not worry, wished I could use the colloquial abbreviations everyone used, my husband used.
“I told him I’m out. I said you’re your wife,” I said.
“Did he ask what you are doing with Iara?”
“He seemed busy.”
“He is,” Marcos said.
He looked at his phone.
“Do you know how many e-mails I have not answered today?”
I touched his hand briefly. I didn’t know why. I was obeying impulse, in response to a passing feeling I wanted to acknowledge before it vanished.
“I think wanting children requires being innately optimistic about the future,” I said.
“That’s—”
His phone buzzed against the table.
“I mean—”
The phone buzzed again.
“It’s—”
The phone buzzed a third time.
“O meu Deus,” Marcos said.
He stood and made a call.
I watched him speaking on the phone, and then I stood, too. He didn’t seem to notice. I walked around the back of the café, away from the clack and hiss of the espresso machine. It was almost ten o’clock. The only people in the halls were the night staff, and the only patients were in their beds. No one was coming or going. If you came to the hospital at ten o’clock at night it was by definition an emergency. When I returned to the table, Marcos was there, drinking the wine.
He didn’t say anything as I sat down.
“What did Iara want?”
“It wasn’t Iara. It was the office.”
“An emergency,” I said.
“No, it’s O.K.”
“But somebody needed you.”
“Yes.”
“Was it a boss or a subordinate? Were you being yelled at or were you the one yelling?”
“It was your husband.”
“Oh,” I said.
“He wanted advice.”
“Advice?”
“About a decision.”
“And he had to call you.”
“It is a significant decision.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him he does not have enough information.”
“But he has to make the decision tonight?”
“He should.”
Marcos drank some wine.
On the T.V. somebody scored a goal, and a crowd cheered.
Marcos said, “I will tell you a story about your husband. A few months ago, one of the men who works with us had a child. But there was a complication. The birth was very difficult for the mother. And so the man, he was out of work, at the hospital with his wife and son, for two or three weeks. During this time, he had a birthday, the new father. Your husband made arrangements for a group of us to go to the hospital, to bring food and gifts, and to spend the afternoon with this man and his family, to make them feel better. This was a very Brazilian thing to do, you know, to behave like this. Your husband was singing, he knew all the words in Portuguese. He was holding the baby. So he was being a good Brazilian, but it made us all very uncomfortable that he was doing this. It is difficult to explain. This is why I don’t tell him about Juliana. I am afraid he will do the same thing for me, come here, and I don’t want that.”
I was silent. The story didn’t sound like my husband at all, like any person I knew. My husband hadn’t said anything about it.
The T.V. above us was showing news of the protests—the footage was from two days ago, and there were plans for more protests soon, yesterday’s news becoming tomorrow’s news. I recognized the banners, slogans, buildings, even the faces, it seemed.
Marcos watched for a moment, then said, “The governor’s in trouble now for the trains.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Bad contracts on the metro system. Bribes. Millions of reais. Now they protest for this as well.”
The café was beginning to close down. The staff were clearing tables and emptying the pastry display.
I already knew that I would remember this night distinctly—it felt already like something I was remembering rather than something I was still in the middle of—but that it was nevertheless a night that had no meaning, that made no difference. My mind traveled over the great, dark quantities of city, the checkerboards of light in the apartment towers, the millions and millions of lives, the small, dark streets named for forgotten councilmen; São Paulo. The women working at the café, the men sweeping the floors, they would all have to go home; they would go home via the wide avenues, down those dark, small streets, the last bus of the night. I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t unhappy. My favorite word in Portuguese was either saudade or cidade. I would remember the feeling of being in the hospital at night, on the margins of somebody else’s crisis, and the feeling of this time with Marcos, the only time like this I would spend with him. It was the intimacy of knowing that after this night I would see him less and less, and eventually I wouldn’t see him at all, since I knew that whatever was happening between us was not in fact happening. It was the feeling of knowing the future but being unable to alter it. It was the pleasure of missing something I never had.
“So this was your idea of a second date,” I said.
He smiled.
“Have you had affairs?”
“Well,” he said.
“I have a husband. You have a wife.”
“But that is not the reason you are hesitating.”
“I was very young when I met my husband,” I said.
He waited.
&nb
sp; I said, “I think about the night my husband and I were robbed by those boys. Then I think, what if Marcos and I were having an affair, and instead of my husband I was with Marcos when those boys robbed us? And I think of everything that would have been even more difficult, all the additional lying, which would only lead to more lying, and so on. And I think I would have reacted differently to the situation if it had been you instead of my husband. I can stand being disappointed by my husband, because he is my husband, but I doubt I could stand being disappointed by a man I was only sleeping with, because then what’s the point.”
Marcos listened to this, and then was silent.
“No, I don’t think that is what would happen,” he said at last. And then he laughed.
“Let’s go check on your daughter,” I said.
We took the wine with us. Juliana was still asleep. She was going to be O.K., according to the doctors, according to Marcos. She was a beautiful child. In obvious ways she resembled both Marcos and Iara, who were beautiful parents.
“You are not supposed to say these things,” he said, “but I love Juliana the most. I see myself in her.”
Marcos stood away from the bed now. I recalled the moment, earlier, when he touched his daughter’s foot through the blanket. I had started to see everything in life as performative, every act a possible performance for a possible audience—believing that we only do what we do with the possibility in mind of an audience seeing it—and yet here was something, the father touching his daughter’s foot, that was plainly not a performance, rather an act done out of deep need. He was answering a bolt of feeling. The love for a child was something completely distinct from the love for a spouse. I went to the girl in the bed and touched her foot through the blanket. When I took away my hand, I looked to Marcos, but he had his back to me.
I said, “How did you decide on the name Juliana?”
“A name we liked. Francesca was the same. There is no family meaning.”
“It must be so painful.”
“They give her drugs. But the drugs are another difficulty. You see how small she is. She is strong.”
Marcos’s phone buzzed.
“We want to make a normal life for her. So we don’t talk about it. You know what I think? If we were, you know, bad people, if we hit her, or something like this—it would not be any worse. This is already the worst that is possible. And this is our fault. She is born this way only because we have decided to make her.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. “It is not the same as if you mistreated her.”
His phone buzzed again.
“It is not the same thing because she knows she is loved,” I said.
“Iara is certain she will hate us. Because she will have this all her life. For her, the future is like this. It…difficults our marriage.”
My phone buzzed.
“I know this is not good English,” he said. “But in Portuguese difficult can be a verb also.”
“You’re angry,” I said.
“There is no one to be angry to.”
“People get angry with God.”
“I don’t get angry with God,” he said. “That is not the reason for God.”
His phone buzzed.
I said, “I have it easy. I don’t believe in God.”
“I think that is more difficult,” he said.
My phone buzzed, and then his phone buzzed.
“It difficults some things more than others,” I said.
Marcos was looking at his unconscious daughter.
“Another?” he said.
There was still wine in my cup.
My phone buzzed.
“Two’s enough,” I said.
I looked at my husband’s texts. He was finally leaving work.
“I should go home,” I said.
Marcos nodded. His phone buzzed.
“I’ll finish your wine,” he said.
That night, in bed with my husband, drowsy, loving, games of talk.
“Jazz singers.”
“O.K.,” I said.
“Billie.”
“Nina.”
“Sarah.”
“Ella.”
“Dinah.”
“Ella. That’s the one.”
RETURN
This happens later, in Lisbon. I’m standing at a little bar, open to the square, and one of the men there sells me a ginjinha, the cherry brandy special to this part of Portugal. Patrons linger—men, all of them men—having a drink, then another. I am a woman by herself, and so they look at me a certain way. I drink a little of the liqueur and chew the fruit that sits at the bottom. I don’t like the taste, I knew I wouldn’t, it is too sweet, but all the guidebooks mention the ginjinha, to the point that it seems like bad manners not to try it. And a sip won’t hurt. This is the future, but everything around me is the same as it was years ago, down to the men selling cherry brandy on the square—that’s the charm of a city like Lisbon, where change takes so long to arrive. There is always comfort in knowing that something hasn’t changed. The air is pleasant, cool. Today, after meetings, I almost decided to go back to the hotel to sleep; instead, with the afternoon free, I took the train out to the suburb of Belém, on the Tagus River. There I saw the Padrão dos Descobrimentos. Salazar ordered it built as a tribute to Portugal’s history of exploration and empire, just as that history was coming to an end. I stared for a long time, as tourists came and went, taking pictures with their phones. It is a really hideous, fascistic thing, ugly and weathered with age, yet somehow moving. At the base of the monument, there are statues of Portuguese explorers, men who left home and sailed to Africa and Asia and America. There is Henry the Navigator, and Pedro Álvares Cabral, who discovered Brazil. Their stone bodies ascend a kind of ramp, as if they’re all preparing to dive into the Tagus. I was struck by the visual echo of the Monumento às Bandeiras in São Paulo: the concrete bandeirantes march toward destiny in a similar way. It, too, commemorates an act of exploration. The bandeirantes—pioneers, the men who opened the Brazilian interior. They hacked through jungle and warred with Indians and died of disease. Exploration is a strange impulse, one I used to think of as essentially male, something in the wiring that compels a man to depart rather than remain and improve the place where he is. A long time ago, a male friend, who was also studying anthropology, said to me that when a man goes to a place where he looks different from the natives, he can be sure of two things: the women will want to sleep with him and the men will want to kill him. Sex with unusual women must be worth the risk, I’d replied. I spent the rest of the afternoon in Belém—visiting the Saint Jerome monastery, the old military tower, eating the local pastry with its dense white heart of cream—and thought of the young Portuguese sailors who, centuries before, had set out from this place on the mouth of the Tagus. Inside the monastery was Vasco da Gama’s tomb. He had died in India; his remains were returned to Portugal years later. Now he lay in effigy, in white marble, palms joined in prayer. How strange that so long after his death the remains of one of the world’s most famous explorers were repatriated out of a belief that no matter where he has been in life a man should lie forever in the place where he was born. Now that I seem to be always on a plane (I am now a person with that sort of job), I admit it pleases me, departure. Departures are always more interesting than returns; but I never think of not returning. Night was falling by the time the train from Belém deposited me back in Lisbon. Lisbon is an attractive place; I liked it at once. Now it’s dark. It’s time to move on. I throw away the plastic cup with the last of the ginjinha and walk away from the square. I want to wander a little in the streets. I listen for something warm, familiar—music coming from a bar, the noise of conversation in a restaurant. Nothing. Portugal is famous for fado music, but it’s hard to find it performed anywhere, it seems; you bring an idea to a country when you visit. At last I come across a café. I sit and ask for tea—chá, a word I remember. Another customer looks at me, but he doesn’t say anything. A group of young Po
rtuguese men and women talk animatedly, huddled around a table, students, maybe. All day I have been surrounded by the Portuguese language, and surely this is the reason for the memories of Brazil that have surfaced. The Portuguese in Portugal is different from the Portuguese of Brazil, but I am happy to listen to it; to my ear it’s a friendly sound. The flight home is tomorrow. I’m a little disappointed already at the thought of returning to America; I find myself restless when I’m there. It’s difficult to care about the politics, the T.V. shows, the things people want to talk about. Without thinking, I use the word home to refer to the hotel in a city where I’m spending a few nights as easily as I use it to refer to the apartment where I live. Home is everywhere and nowhere; there’s no weight left in the word for me. We rent an apartment and in not so long we will rent a different apartment. I understand this is a privileged kind of displacement. I have a home; I have good reasons to return there. I know how serious the word home is for other people. At breakfast that morning I saw footage on CNN of the refugees who have come into Greece, Hungary, Serbia, the same continent where I now drink tea in a quiet café. On the flight from Newark to Lisbon, I read an article in the New Yorker about a man who fled from Syria to Lebanon, then Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, and then through Hungary to Austria, Germany, and finally Sweden. His journey was terrible, his circumstances, but, instead of feeling sympathy for him, I was angry, because he left his wife behind. She was to follow him once he was settled, to make the journey alone. He lives in Gothenburg now, cashing benefits checks from the Swedish government, while his wife listens to bombs falling over Damascus. This seems to me unforgivable; but surely I’m not in a position to say. I pay for the tea and go. I get a little lost, things aren’t quite what I remember; eventually I find my way. I was ready to head home—back to the hotel, I mean—but now the pleasure of walking, of solitude, seizes me again, and I slow down, almost involuntarily. Soon enough I’ll be forbidden from traveling, at least for a while; I don’t know the next time I’ll have a moment like this to savor. Once upon a time America represented the ends of the earth, virgin territory, a place that men like Vasco da Gama dreamed of. Now from almost every corner of the globe you can take a nonstop flight to New York. “I hate traveling and explorers,” wrote Lévi-Strauss at the beginning of Tristes Tropiques. In Brazil, the protests are starting again, a new wave of protests; people’s anger is not yet exhausted. The president seems to be headed for impeachment. Some Brazilians even say they want the return of military dictatorship. The world is filled with unthinkable things. I put a hand on my stomach; I am always doing that now; another cliché. Now that we have this. I turn a corner and see the hotel—I’m here. For a moment, I stand motionless on this street in an unfamiliar city, and then I continue toward the hotel doors, because it is late already, and he is at home, waiting for me to call, wondering where I am.
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