Amazons

by Ellen Levy

  —Can I come and watch? I asked.

  —You can’t, he said. Sylvana never goes, so you can’t either.

  His tone took me aback. His coldness. I did not like the idea of being left alone in this apartment in a part of town I did not know on my last day here; I wanted to be with him, even if I couldn’t watch him train.

  —I could go for a walk near the club, I said, or sit in the sun and wait for you. I’d rather do that than stay here alone.

  I pressed and in the end he took me along, and there I found Sylvana, waiting for him. It seemed they met there every Sunday at this time.

  Paulinho introduced her as his namorada—his girlfriend—the word he used to apply to me. (He did not say “my fiancé,” and I tried to take some comfort from this.) Sylvana had long straight mouse-brown hair that she pulled up into a ponytail. She had an American build: five feet seven, slender but busty, sturdy, what they called forte in Bahia. She was pretty in a perfectly conventional way.

  Paulinho suggested that Sylvana train on another court, that I sit by the pool and read, but we defied his plans for us and decided to sit together and talk.

  For a while, we sat by the court and watched Paulinho hit a ball back and forth with another guy and Sylvana told me about how she’d met Paulinho. She had been dating the same guy for four years, she said, from the time she was sixteen until she turned twenty, her first boyfriend.

  —I never did anything, she said. I just sat at home. I didn’t even like him so much. I just got used to it. Then Paulinho started courting me. He asked me to try gymnastics. I was resistant at first, but he enrolled me in a class. He paid for my lessons.

  She told me that he had paid for driving lessons, too, and for lessons with a tennis pro. He had bought her a tennis outfit, shoes, a racket, even little matching socks. She told me about the wonders of gymnastics, how they’d go to class together in the afternoon, have dinner, and then go to the university to study at night.

  —Never a moment free to think, I said, more to myself than to her. Sylvana looked hurt and I realized how rude I’d been. I admired that she showed her hurt. Vulnerability is its own kind of courage.

  —No, I said. It’s admirable. But sometimes, when I’m working like that, I feel I’m filling up my life with activities, not living, y’know?

  —I love gymnastics, she said. Before I just sat at home, I never did anything.

  —Of course, I said. I nodded and watched the men play tennis. When Paulinho looked over, I wondered if he was looking at me or her.

  She told me Paulinho gave her vocabulary words. He was helping her to be better .

  I asked her if she wanted these things, the lessons and words, if she liked these things.

  She said not really, not always.

  —He wants me to run with him, she confided. But I don’t like it. It’s so boring.

  I laughed.

  —You want to go to the pool? she asked.

  —Sure, I said, almost liking her.

  As we walked across the grass, I told her about my studies, the grant that had brought me here, INPA, the Amazon. We were almost exactly the same age, but I felt infinitely older. Used up.

  At the pool, we spread out on lawn chairs and faced the sun. She in her tennis minidress; me in my khaki shorts. Both of us tall, tan, slender girls, pretty and young, with long brown hair, sun bleached.

  —I used to have fat thighs, she said, touching her long bare legs. My poor mother-in-law must’ve been horrified when Paulinho first presented me. Oh, what a fat thing.

  In truth, she was beautiful and I might have told her so, that she was beautiful with her long firm thighs, but that was not the kind of thing that girls told girls or so I thought then. Instead I lied.

  —I used to feel that way, I said, but now I think appearance is less important. I am who I am, whether I weigh 57 or 67 kilos.

  —I suppose, she said.

  Neither one of us believed me.

  It was around that point in our conversation that Sylvana began referring to Paulinho’s mother as minha sogra, my mother-in-law. Minha sogra sempre diz, My mother-in-law always says . . . Minha sogra sugeriu este perfume, My mother-in-law suggested this perfume.

  She told me that Paulinho lunched at her parents’ house every Sunday, with the family—a fact he had failed to mention. He told me that he practiced tennis and volleyball on Sundays. She said they were almost always together; he said he hardly saw her. She said they were engaged; he said they weren’t. I tried to figure out whose story was true. I knew that he had lied to me before: he’d told me that I couldn’t come to this club because Sylvana never came, that I couldn’t get in as a nonmember. But here I was and here she was.

  —We’re already buying things for our house, she said.

  —Really? I said.

  —Didn’t Paulo tell you that we’re getting married? she asked.

  —No. I’d heard that from friends, but he’d denied it. He said he isn’t engaged.

  —Well, no, she said, pulling at the hem of her tennis skirt. It’s not official yet, but we’re buying things for our house.

  —Funny. He said he was buying things for his apartment.

  She got up and stretched, drawing a palm over her flat stomach.

  —Is this yours? she picked up the thick beige book.

  —Yeah, I said. I intend to write a thesis next year on why West African cultural practices were diluted in the United States in the wake of the slave trade while they flourished here in Brazil.

  —Do you like that stuff? she asked.

  —Love it, I said.

  —No you don’t, she said. Look, you’ve hardly read any of it.

  She was right, of course. It was, as she evidently suspected, a prop. The textual equivalent of a cigarette, which I hoped would make me appear sophisticated. It was something to hold onto, to clutch, to read, in case I was left alone, had no one to talk to, was dumped.

  I looked out across the pool to the brown hills of Porto Alegre.

  —I’ll never marry, I said, quoting a line Barbara had said to me just before she’d left Bahia, trying to sound as she had—sophisticated, above such conventional arrangements—but I heard how it sounded from my mouth: merely sad.

  —Why not? Sylvana asked, like I was crazy.

  I shrugged.

  —Paulinho and I talked about getting married once, I said. We thought that I’d return here, or he’d come to the States. He tried to come there but couldn’t. We’re too different now. You’ll be great for him. I did not realize how patronizing this sounded, or maybe I did.

  —I’m sorry I’m not very intellectual, she said, putting down the book, as if she were the one who had something to apologize for here.

  As we walked back toward the tennis courts to meet up with Paulinho, I tried to sound smart and tough. She said that I was cynical and I wished I were, but in truth I was only young and in pain and ashamed of being in pain. I believed that I must take things in stride, that I must remain cheerful. I believed it was weak to care too much or show it, except perhaps in regard to a forest, a political cause, human rights and wrongs. I shocked her, I think, which was not hard. She was young and sheltered and not especially smart. But she was honest, sincere, as I was not.

  When we joined Paulinho and his friends for a drink on the patio, Sylvana sat quietly at Paulinho’s side, patiently waiting as he drank a beer and talked with his friends. They asked me questions and I answered, joking with them. Sylvana raised a hand to her mouth and chewed her cuticles nervously. Without taking his eyes from the circle of his friends, Paulinho batted her hand from her mouth.

  I wanted to slug him.

  Paulinho’s friend Koy was pretty as a girl and a flirt. At the tennis club, he invited himself along with us to dinner. So that night, we four went out—Sylvana, Paulinho, Koy, and I. During dinner, Koy whispered to me and told me jokes and fed me spoonfuls of chocolate mousse. He was charming; I was charmed.

  Paulinho watched us from
across the table; occasionally, he tossed little comments in between us. Koy and I dismissed him: Bobagens, meu filho, bobagens, Koy and I said in unison, Foolishness, my child, foolishness, quoting a lyric by Caetano Veloso about seizing the moment and desire; then we laughed.

  We made jokes and puns that Paulinho had to explain to Sylvana. I watched his face as he spoke to her to see if he looked at her the way he looked at me. Sylvana looked on as both men vied for my attention, the handsome blue-eyed friend who was my date, and Paulinho who was hers. In the course of dinner, Paulinho grew sullen.

  He protested when Koy offered to take me home; Paulinho insisted on taking me with him and that Koy drive Sylvana.

  Koy shrugged and said, It was a pleasure to meet you.

  —It was a pleasure, I said.

  Koy kissed me on the cheek three times before departing. As he bent to embrace me the last time, he said, into my ear, Paulinho is still in love with you. I wanted him to see for himself.

  On the way home, Paulinho was quiet.

  —Koy thinks that I’m jealous, he said.

  —Are you? I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  At home in his apartment, both a little drunk, I leaned in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, while Paulinho took off his shirt. He stood facing me. His bare chest so near that I could feel its warmth.

  —Would I ruin your night if I kissed you? I asked. I was trying to sound like Lauren Bacall, like a heroine from a noir flick, like somebody, anybody, else. But from my mouth, the line sounded less like a seduction than an apology.

  Paulinho looked into my eyes a moment, then dropped his glance and brushed past me into the living room.

  I leaned my head against the wood doorframe. I could hear him in his room. I listened for a while before I rolled off the doorframe and went to bed alone.

  What I thought his kiss could cure, I did not know then. But I think now I wanted nothing less than for him to turn back time, like a fairy tale told in reverse: seeking a kiss that would not wake but send me back to sleep, so that all that had happened in that one year might be undone.

  I thought Paulinho’s desire might orient me, in the absence of my own. I was terrified then that I belonged nowhere, to no one.

  I stretched out on the cool sheets of the bed. Through the doorway, a band of light from his study fell across the bedroom carpet, making a sharp angled form on the rug.

  —Do you want me to shut off your light? I said.

  —Is it disturbing you? He sounded tired.

  —No, I said. I just thought maybe you were sleepy. I’d do it for you, if you wanted.

  He made no response.

  And so I fell asleep like that, waiting for an answer that never came.

  On the way to the airport the next morning, Paulinho told me that it wasn’t for lack of desire that he didn’t make love to me last night.

  —I didn’t want to create a seed of hope, he said.

  —For you there isn’t hope anymore, I said, letting my eyes drift over the city beyond the windshield.

  He turned to me, watching my profile as he spoke.

  —There’s still hope, he said. But like this it’s not greater than myself. It would’ve been, had we made love last night.

  I smiled as if this were merely an interesting line. We were saying lines out of movies, unable to come up with any of our own, afraid, perhaps, of saying what we meant.

  The last time I saw Paulinho, he was a speck of blue seen through a scratchy airplane windowpane, a bit of blue among the concrete and airport crowds, like a piece of fallen sky.

  Last Days

  The last time I saw Nelci she was in the dim interior of the brothel, a few streets over from the apartment we had shared. She had phoned me to say she’d like to meet. So about a month after my return from Manaus, I visited her there. It was an elegant apartment in a fashionable neighborhood, made grim only by the heavy curtains that were drawn at midday, and by the lugubrious madam who answered the door with an air of absentminded dolor.

  The madam had a huge, pallid, moon-like face. She was enormously fat and short and dressed in something flowing and dark. She seemed an unlikely doyenne of the demimonde. Nelci emerged from the gloom of the interior and stepped out with me into the hall. I was surprised how unchanged she was—how ordinary she looked, like any young student. Her dress and hair unaltered from months before, only her expression was sadder, stiller, than it had been then. I think she wore a modest denim skirt, a T-shirt. She did not talk about politics or what she’d read in Veja or what she might yet do. She moved slowly, calmly, as if drugged or old.

  We walked through the streets together, past familiar houses. There was not much to say. She apologized for having turned my apartment into a brothel. And I apologized too.

  She asked me to tell her about the Amazon, and then asked me whether I was doing all right. I asked the same of her. She said her work was not so bad. It paid well and most of the clients were foreigners—“like you, Elena”—lonely visitors who wanted someone to talk to. She had a chance to discuss books, to practice her English.

  We hugged at the door to the brothel, and I watched her in, before walking home alone. I told myself, as I walked, that this was simply a choice she’d made. But that’s not how it felt. It would be years before it occurred to me that hers had been a straightforward calculation of cost and benefit. Everybody, after all, sold something to preserve their independence—nations sold irreplaceable forests, scholars sold years of research.

  I wonder now what I could have done to protect Nelci against the necessity of sale. When I took Nel in, I flattered myself that I was doing something to protect her.

  I cannot help but wonder now why we did so little. Why we stood by—the INPA researchers and I—making a career of loss. Why we settled for documentation, taking notes and making calculations. We could have done something, but we didn’t. Rationales came easily: prostitution was Nelci’s choice; deforestation was an option for the Brazilian government; no one wanted to cultivate dependency. What else could we have done?

  If I had given Nelci half my fellowship, she’d have run through it in time. But I might have tried. As we might have tried to save the forest, as we might still try. I might have brought her back with me to the States to finish her schooling or find a job, when it became clear the university would not reopen soon. Instead of studying the ecological consequences of a dam, we might have fought its construction. Put our bodies in front of bulldozers, our lives on the line. The researchers at INPA could have made it difficult to fell the forest if they’d been willing to sacrifice careers and objectivity.

  My last weeks in Salvador, I spent money as fast as I could. I would rather use it recklessly rather than return it to Rotary; rather than conserve this bounty, I wanted to be the one to squander it.

  In the Porto da Barra, I stopped into a gem shop and bought a ring. I wear it now on my left hand, fourth finger, where a wedding band would be. It is a leaf-green emerald set into a thin gold band. I wanted to bring back something valuable, something precious, to retrieve a tiny scrap of beauty from that year.

  On my return to the States, my mother had the ring appraised for insurance purposes and kept it, after that, in a small plastic baggie in her jewelry box. I didn’t ask for it back and she didn’t return it. I forgot it, as I did so much of that year whose events I’d committed to scraps of paper, put in drawers, walked away from.

  Then a few years ago, while visiting my parents in the home where I grew up, I asked my mother if she had the ring and she brought it out and gave it to me in a little plastic Ziploc bag smaller than my palm, in which was a scrap of paper with the appraiser’s handwriting on it. The appraiser put the value of the ring at $350—a surprisingly modest price for such a lovely stone. The ring’s value, it turns out, was diminished because the stone is full of flaws—cracks that reach the surface and run through—damage unnoticed by me at the time.

  As a child—playing ima
ginary games of adventure in the basement with my best friend, in which dressers became elephants and we rode triumphant through dusty towns and jungles—I loved a piece of costume jewelry made of gold-plated tin and set with fake seed pearls around a large rectangle of deep-green glass. The pendant had once been part of a necklace, but by the time it reached our hands, it was just a fragment, a piece of a broken chain, which nonetheless I loved. I thought it the most beautiful thing I’d seen, that ivy-green glass. Held up to the light, it seemed luminous, magical, and held for me all the promise that I imagined adulthood would, that elegant grown-up world I felt sure (from the vantage point of six, seven, eight) would be full of treasures—wondrous, marvelous things.

  One evening, I caught the bus to Amaralinha to see a film at the local art film house about the life of Gurdjieff, which someone had recommended to me. I went alone, and stood in line with a crowd of others waiting for the previous show to let out so we could go in.

  In front of me stood an enormous blond, big as Texas, or rather, big as a Texan, the same broad barrel chest, the yellow hair, the blue eyes under lids that bore crow’s feet at the corners, as if from squinting into sun; he had a large square Teutonic head, the vast appalling health of the overfed. He made me think of cattle, of dust and ranches and Cadillacs, tract housing.

  He saw me watching him and smiled back a little shyly, gentle in a manner that seemed vaguely stupid to me at the time. Gentleness had so little use. I felt sure that he was American. No other country grew people large as this. Big. Friendly. Stupid.

  I looked away.

  —Paulista? he asked, smiling.

  I was taken for Brazilian wherever I went by then, so I was not surprised he mistook me for a southerner, for a person from São Paulo, but I was surprised that he spoke Portuguese.