by Ed Siegle
Joel wasn’t even sure he trusted the memory he did possess of the first time they took his dad away, when he was nearly five years old. He had an image of men in suits arriving at breakfast, of sitting at the kitchen table drawing a picture of the mountain, Pedra da Gávea. But he had a feeling the details had come from his mum. Was it true that his dad was a changed man after his first time inside? Were the fights rooted in trauma, or a normal part of married life? Perhaps it was the same for every kid: Santa was a lie and your parents fought like cockerels. He couldn’t swear the fights were all that savage – sometimes he thought he’d dreamt of evenings hiding his head beneath his pillow, trying to block the sound of clatter and yelp. Yet he was certain he remembered the aftermath – when they would come and sit on his bed and his mum would stroke his hair and his dad would sing ‘Undiú’ until Joel fell asleep.
Joel finished his lunch. He wondered if he was getting anywhere. He’d put up posters and paced the streets. He was thankful the posters had yielded Nelson – assuming for a moment he wasn’t a charlatan – and Eva was asking her friend to look in the files, but it felt wrong to depend so much on the efforts of others. He paid and strode to Liam’s flat. He logged on to the internet and looked up all the Gilberto Cabrals in an online phone book. There were twenty-two in Rio, but none he hadn’t called before. So he looked up the numbers for government departments and started dialling.
Jackie ate an egg and bacon sandwich and watched Trisha. She wasn’t a fan of daytime television, but she watched it anyway. There’d be racing after lunch then Judge Judy later in the afternoon. As she watched a woman in a sweatshirt fold her arms and spit a comment at an ex-lover, Jackie wondered if she and Tony would get another chance. Their situation wasn’t all that messy; surely all relationships came with complications by the time you were their age? He would call soon – by tomorrow at the latest, she reckoned. She was interested to note the confidence with which she made predictions on the behaviour of men, given the spectacular failures of the past.
The programme came to an end and she played the hijack clip. She paused it on the face of the man Joel claimed was his dad. There was certainly a look in his eyes, whoever he was. He might be drunk, she thought, or a bit mad. But it wasn’t the same as Gilberto’s look, the one that used to ghost into his eyes without warning, just when you’d forgotten it existed. She remembered the first time she’d met that look. They had been standing on the balcony of his flat, on a humid evening in December 1964, and Jackie had been wondering how to tell him she was pregnant. You look so happy, she remembered thinking, standing there, talking to me about your music. Little do you know how much happier you’ll be in a few minutes. She’d waited for a break in the flow, barely listening to his words, as he paced and waved his arms, talking of a song he’d heard, dismissing a new singer he didn’t rate. Finally she said, ‘I’m pregnant,’ the words just spilling out when he was halfway through an anecdote, because she couldn’t keep them inside any more or think of a way to dress them up.
Gilberto finished his sentence and stood, his arms suddenly frozen in front of him, with a look in his eyes she could not translate. She remembered feeling, suddenly, that there was someone else behind his eyes she had not seen before, as if there were another man inside him too, who had only now decided to show her a glimpse of himself, perhaps even as a warning. For the instant this feeling lasted, Jackie felt frightened, and she felt a touch of embarrassment too, so that she blushed, to have revealed her secret not only to the man she loved but to this lurker. Gilberto walked towards her with his hands raised, held her face with his fingers and said, ‘The world is changing – why not us?’ and broke into the widest smile.
The day after Jackie’s revelation, they met Miriam for lunch. Jackie talked and talked and talked about their plans. They were going to get married next November, she said, in a pink church in Tiradentes, when the baby was a few months old. Miriam would be her maid of honour and Frank could give her away. There was so much to be organised and… Jackie saw that Miriam had started to cry.
‘Frank is seeing someone else,’ said Miriam.
‘Impossible!’ said Gilberto.
‘I walked in on them,’ said Miriam.
‘Why didn’t he tell me?’ said Gilberto.
‘That’s hardly the point,’ said Jackie. ‘Is he… seeing her, or was it just… I mean.’
‘I’ve had my suspicions,’ said Miriam.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ said Jackie.
‘You’re so happy, Jacks. I didn’t want to –’
‘Oh, Miriam!’ said Jackie.
‘I want to go home,’ Miriam said.
Gilberto and Jackie looked at one another.
‘But you can’t go now!’ said Gilberto. ‘Back to cold rain and men like dogs. What you need is a Brazilian man. I know the very one for you; why didn’t I think of it before? I know the very man –’
‘I mean it, Jacks. I want to go home.’
Gilberto slid his arm round Jackie’s waist.
‘But you can’t go!’ said Jackie. ‘We’re in this together… what’ll I do without you – ?’
‘I’ll write every day,’ said Miriam. ‘I’ll come and visit –’
‘We can come and see you in Brighton, one day,’ said Gilberto.
‘I’ll rent a place with a view of the sea,’ said Miriam.
‘You can’t go,’ said Jackie, tearfully.
‘The heat brings me out in a rash,’ said Miriam, trying to laugh through her tears, ‘the food repeats on me, I can’t understand a word anyone says, and it’s not much fun being next to you in a bikini.’
In June 1965, Gilberto wrote a song for the coming child which he was convinced would break the big time. It wasn’t imperative to write songs yourself: look at Elis on O Fino da Bossa – her own weekly show for little more than an interesting voice, not even a refined one. But songwriting would give him an edge. It would show there were more strings to his bow than singing and dancing and raising a laugh with his Sammy Davis brows. He bought a television, so that the swollen Jackie could keep her eye on the latest musical trends. It would help to keep her occupied too, while Gilberto walked the clubs and stalked the record producers. Stars were bursting every night – take that kid Paulinho da Viola: he was huge because of Rosa de Ouro – Rose of Gold – though Gilberto preferred to call the show Rose of Shit. Gilberto would stagger home and tell Jackie his own ideas for a show: Carioca Cowboys it would be called, with a Wild West feel, some American class. He’d play the host, O Duque – the Duke – there’d be gunfights and Elvis covers, choro tunes sung to cowgirls beneath a tropical moon, dancing girls. He’d pen a new song every week to end the show.
Joel was born in Ipanema Hospital, on the 17th of July 1965. Jackie and Gilberto had been sitting on a bench in the Botanical Gardens, beneath an arcade of weeping cypresses, talking about plans for the child, their wedding, Gilberto’s career. He wanted to go part-time to devote more hours to his music, reasoning that the head of his dental practice was a musical man himself and would be sure to understand. Jackie recalled looking at the ground as she searched for the perfect words to draw the focus of the man she loved to his priorities. As she spoke of security, as he paced with alien eyes, a fleshquake started to ripple inside. Soon Gilberto was helping her hobble down endless paths through wild palms and trees with mighty trunks – and into a taxi, flagged dangerously in the street, which speared round the curve of the lake as she puffed and prayed to Cristo high on his hill that she would reach a bed before it was too late.
The baby was born at five to midnight, as Gilberto was singing ‘Only for You’, a song he’d written in its honour, in a new venue in Copacabana. He arrived at dawn and together they gazed through tired eyes at the swaddled infant, then Gilberto sang ‘Only for You’ in his softest voice, as Jackie clasped his hand and felt full to the brim with hope. They decided to call him Joel, in honour of Jackie’s late uncle Joseph and Gilberto’s all-time favourite Flameng
o player.
Joel grew, crawled, walked. He said his first word, ‘mama’, on a Sunday afternoon to a song by Caetano Veloso and Gal Costa called ‘Sunday’, which Jackie took as a sign of great intuition, though it made Gilberto crush the limes for a caipirinha with extra vigour – at the thought of those Bahians inspiring his own child. Wasn’t it enough, he ranted – as he smashed ice wrapped in a towel against the kitchen worktop – that this báfia was stealing the livelihoods of musicians in Rio, without them thieving words from the mouths of children? Why did the world revolve around Bahia? What was wrong with the music of Minas Gerais, his homeland? If you weren’t from Bahia, if you didn’t dress like a freak, none of the producers was interested. Caetano! Bethânia! Gil! Gal! With each name he smacked the ice-stuffed towel.
Life was hard for a man with a small child, Jackie’s new friends said. She was managing so well, they told her, mastering Portuguese much faster than the other expat wives. In her white bikini she looked just like that Bond girl, they said, if a touch plumper and with redder hair. You could hardly tell she’d had a baby. It was tough for a man, they said. Sometimes Jackie and Gilberto went out together, but she didn’t always feel comfortable leaving Joel with a babysitter. Often Gilberto went out alone – after all, there was his singing career to think about, and who knew when he might catch the ear of an impresario and land himself that crucial deal.
Joel toddled and stars were born, but Gilberto wasn’t one of them. Gilberto and Jackie were finally married in Tiradentes in November 1967, three streets from Gilberto’s childhood home, in a simple service with a couple of Rio friends and a few of his old neighbours. Afterwards they dined in the garden of a mansion where candles burned under Brugmansia trees pungent with trumpet flowers. The locals adored Gilberto’s songs and lauded him for his success on the Rio scene, and Jackie was happy to humour them.
Jackie loved watching father and son together. When he played games with Joel or read to him, Gilberto seemed a different man from the one who kicked the door closed late at night – the same door Joel would run towards when he heard Gilberto’s key in the lock upon his return from work. They looked so similar to one another: the brown of their skin, their pale eyes and uncontrollable hair. How could you love one and not the other? She would always remember the time they rode up Sugarloaf in a cable-car Gilberto had hired just for the three of them. Joel had run round and round inside, as the glass box soared above views of the city, the beaches, the sea. She remembered Gilberto pointing out that the trees on the slopes below had leaves of more than one shade of green – predominantly dark but daubed here and there with shades of lime, which gave them a livelier feel than uniformity could have achieved. Sometimes when she looked at trees, Jackie still thought about that ride.
‘Look at the big mountain, Daddy!’ Joel had said, jumping up and down at the top of Sugarloaf, pointing at the distant anvil head of Pedra da Gávea.
‘We’ll climb it one day,’ Gilberto said. ‘Like two mountain lions.’
1968 was a year full of promise, in spite of the new military regime, and though at times it was frightening to be stopped at roadblocks, to be asked for papers, to read of punishment and disappearance, trouble seemed largely removed from their own lives. Gilberto was earning more and they moved into a larger apartment with a maid and a service lift, nearer the lake and closer to A Gaiola, where Gilberto would sing his own songs to warm applause. They became part of a loose crowd which hung around beaches on the fringes of Rio at weekends and spent evenings in Copacabana. Gilberto sang a couple of times at Teatro Jovem and once was complimented by Aloysio de Oliveira. One Sunday afternoon a melody came to him, and then a rhythm, and he started to sing a song to Joel which he knew at once could become a sensation. ‘Jardim, Jardim’ it would be called, a ballad of love and fatherhood in a garden, with a smooth vocal, a hint of samba, a sexy rhythm. He would show them all: it would be the making of the Minas sound.
One night Gilberto sang ‘Jardim, Jardim’ at A Gaiola. When he came back, far into the night, he opened the door with soft hands and unleashed a tropical storm of kisses upon a sleeping Jackie. He told her that by chance a patient of his had been in the audience – Angelica Branca, the wife of a major in the army, a woman with first-class connections in the music scene. Angelica was ahead of her time, Gilberto said, one of those modern women: neat skirt, flat shoes, flat-curved American hair. Jackie said she knew the type, though she wasn’t sure she did and was pretty sure she didn’t want to. He said that Angelica knew an impresario, with a club in Copacabana, who was on the lookout for modern talent. Angelica couldn’t promise anything but she would have a word in his ear, she said, because there was something fresh and original about Gilberto’s music. Angelica liked the fact that he came from Minas – Angelica’s father came from Ouro Preto – because Minas folk were dependable, prudent, not given to advertising themselves but supremely deserving.
Over the next few weeks he saw Angelica frequently. Angelica knows the business, he would say; she’s teaching me how to play the game. Then one day he announced that Friday would be the night. He would meet Angelica for dinner, she would brief him and they would hit the club where the impresario would give Gilberto a private audience. If all went well, he would sing ‘Jardim, Jardim’ to the public that night. There would be TV people in the audience, she said, and record company boys from Odeon and Philips. Gilberto chirped all week about Angelica, his prospects of a record deal, his dreams of playing Carnegie Hall.
When Friday arrived, Gilberto spent an age slicking his hair and making sure his clothes looked just right. Jackie wanted to come along, but he said this was business, not pleasure, that there would be plenty of opportunities for them to bathe in the moonlight of his success. So when he left she closed the door behind him and sat on the balcony smoking cigarettes she’d secretly bought, listening to people pass in the street talking excitedly because it was Friday, because they were Brazilian. And Jackie remembered asking herself how she had come to be a person who listened to other people being happy. On the very night their lives were supposedly taking a turn for the better, she felt further from home than ever before. She stood and looked into the street then went and sat on Joel’s bed and stroked his hair and watched his stirrings for a while. How easy it would be, she thought, to fetch my passport from the drawer, take some money from the safe and get a taxi to the airport. All it would take would be for my legs to make me stand and my hands to collect the necessary things on my behalf. I could change my life back to the way it was before. Joel would miss me, but he’d be all right with his dad. It would be a good place for him to grow up. His life might well be better without the burden of an unhappy mother. One day he would understand. But it wasn’t possible for her legs or arms to make that move because they were frozen by her love for Joel, and no matter what suffering it meant she knew she could never leave him behind, and she couldn’t just take him away without organising a million things, so she’d simply have to make the best of it. But there would be no siblings to go with Joel, she decided that night, out on the dark balcony at the end of her packet of cigarettes. She would not bear Gilberto another child, no matter how well this business with the music went. She would take the Pill, whatever the risks. She would give her true love to Joel and a cover version to his dad.
When Gilberto returned not long before dawn to breathe fermented breath on the back of her neck, Jackie pretended she was asleep. He hummed one of his tunes and pressed himself into her. For the first time Jackie thought, ‘I hate you,’ and it burned her beautifully to think the words, whatever nonsense anyone said about love, love, love – so she thought them again and again and again until she fell asleep.
Jackie turned off the video, made a cup of tea and smoked a cigarette. She had a bit of a headache so she fetched a wet flannel and lay back with it over her eyes. It wasn’t quite the same as when Joel did it for her, but it still felt soothing. Get me, she thought. Dredging up the past, running fingers over my scars.<
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‘Scars are your stars,’ Miriam always said. ‘Make sure you steer by them.’
She wondered what Tony was doing. Probably in the garden, she thought. I bet he always gardens when there’s something on his mind. In her dreams she’d be running to Tony, not lying here with a wet flannel on her face. How dull it was to consider consequences. She was tempted to throw off the flannel, run upstairs, pick that red dress up off the floor, shake it down, peel off her jeans, slip smaller underwear up her legs, put on a lacier, cuppier bra and wriggle her arse into that blasted frock. She imagined hooking a pair of heels from the wardrobe, fastening their tiny clasps – then wishing she’d done so at the bottom of the stairs, as she half twisted an ankle on the descent. She’d do her lipstick in the hall mirror. She’d look good, though she’d feel less than comfortable – it never did to rush the donning of impractical garments. She would ride across town in a cab and they’d scream at each other and end up screwing the dregs out of their conflict.