by Ellen Levy
—Americana, I said, glad to be able to say I was not from here. Refusing to claim this place. Refusing to admit I had any part in this.
—You’re not really American, he said.
—I am, I said.
—Mesmo? Really?
—Claro, Clearly, I shrugged. E voce é de onde? You’re from where?
He told me he was from Rio Grande de Sul, the state where Paulinho lived.
—Gaucho, I said, smiling, Cowboy, the nickname for folks from Rio Grande do Sul.
—Mesmo, he said.
—Claro, I said.
He told me his name was Mario; I told him mine, and for a while we talked about what we were doing here in Salvador. When the line began to move inside, he said he’d like to talk more but that he was here with someone else. He did not specify a gender, a neat trick in a language in which gender is almost always named. He wrote down his number on the back of a business card and handed it to me. He asked me to call him.
—We can go to a movie, he said.
I told him that I was leaving for Rio Grande do Sul soon, that when I returned I’d have only a week before I left for the States.
—We have a week then, he said.
When I returned from seeing Paulinho in Porto Alegre, I dug out Mario’s number and called. It was New Year’s Eve day and I was alone and I was missing Paulinho.
I asked him what he was doing for New Year’s, shamelessly fishing for a date.
He invited me to a New Year’s Eve party at the Bahian Yacht Club, a place I’d long wanted to go. From the first time I first rode the bus down the long winding hill to Barra and saw the sparkling white buildings and glistening blue pool of the yacht club, I had wanted to go there. I took comfort in its superfluous wealth, that oasis of ease. He had two tickets, he said, and his date had cancelled.
I told him I’d be delighted to go.
Mario arrived to pick me up wearing a white dinner jacket, looking really very handsome. I wore the green dress that I’d bought to impress Paulinho, which he never saw, a translucent cotton the color of luna moths. The party was held on the patio around the pool. Overdressed people sat at round metal tables and drank too much champagne. A band played. The moon rose. The pool glowed aquamarine. Some were dancing. But the promise of ease was a lie, after all: it looked lovely only from a distance.
I was bored. The party, swank and dull, was disappointing. I spent the first half of the evening swilling champagne and mistaking strangers for Paulinho, though I knew my obsession was useless, a thing I held onto in the place of love.
We sat at a table watching other people dance, until finally Mario suggested that we take a walk on the beach at Barra. As we walked along the beach, Mario stopped by some rocks and kissed me. He smelled of warm cotton, chlorine bleach, and champagne: a comforting smell; his big warm animal body came as a relief, and as we kissed I thought of Paulinho, though they were not alike. Paulo was small and brown and worried. Mario was not worried, not in the least. Mario was a nice big overfed blond guy, likeable, although I didn’t like him. I was past liking anyone now. I was just going through the motions, waiting for something to change in me or in the world, to happen, to return me to the living from whom I seemed exiled.
I didn’t know then that I would wander like this for years until my heart and all hope had given out, until I had no ambition left, no desire, was done with school, done with everything, done and ready to be dead at twenty-four. I will consider suicide then, and while considering it, I will go camping on the sandy shore of Elephant Butte Reservoir in southern New Mexico, on the edge of White Sands where the first atomic bomb was detonated, the Trinity test.
I will stand on the shore of Elephant Butte Reservoir that first afternoon among a dozen strangers in their Day-Glo nylon jackets and yellow rain slickers, their colorful Guatemalan woolen caps and hiking boots and, inexplicably moved by the loveliness of the pink cliffs across the gray water, I will begin to cry. I will be embarrassed but I will not be surprised.
A few days later, I will be walking alone among the sandy hills beyond camp, among the scrappy creosote that smells of tar, my mind blank as the blue sky, wondering what other people think about when they’re alone, imagining others’ thoughts more interesting than my own, feeling inadequate even in my solitude, as I pick up rocks and pop them in my mouth and suck them to keep my dry mouth wet and quell my thirst, and I will feel sad, and then I will feel deeply lonely, and then I will shift to something beyond loneliness: I will feel unfamiliar to myself, vacant, as if I were an absence more than a presence and in that instant I will seem merely an empty space, an O, a hollow tube with the world showing through both sides, a mirror with the glass punched out, and I will be terrified by this emptiness and at the same time uncannily calm, becalmed, to feel myself indistinguishable from everything around me, to feel that I am nothing, that I am all of it and nothing at all.
I will stand there, empty, unfamiliar, amidst the tar-stinking creosote and sage, the rocks and sand, under a now gray sky, and as suddenly as I was emptied I will be filled with a great, impersonal joy, overwhelmed by heartbreaking happiness, unearned, unbidden, inexplicable, real as the rock in my mouth. I will feel a sudden great tenderness for all I see—the twisted stinking creosote the sage the smooth flat stones the modest plants the sand the cloud-clotted sky the navy blue water capped with wave foam.
It is hard to describe this sort of thing without sounding like you’ve gone one too many rounds with William James, without sounding like a nut or a salesman. In that moment, I will feel only great joy, profound happiness, as if I am fallen terribly in love with everything and I understand then for the first time that this lovely imperfect world is all there is and it is enough, more than enough. I will feel my senses dilate as they do at the beginning of a love affair, but unlike love this joy will not fade, though it will come and go. Or rather I will come and go from it. This radiance, this joy is like a vast subterranean river, there beneath my life, my days, a current I will step into and out of, but that does not leave me as all else must and will.
Only later will I call it grace. In time, I will become convinced that I’ve been wrong in thinking—as I did throughout my youth, that first quarter century—that we see most clearly when we see through the lens of despair. The truth, I feel now, is that beneath everything is joy: this is the bedrock, that radiance, which, if not precisely god, and certainly not some old man manqué, nevertheless Is, a radiance that feels like desire, that feels like a magnificent longing like saudades.
But I am not there yet. In Salvador, I know none of this.
In Salvador, I spent the first day of 1985 alone in my apartment on Rua João Pondé, listening to bad American pop tunes from the seventies. In my diary from the time, I wrote on that first day of the new year, “I am amazed to have survived 1984.” I noted that I was listening to Carly Simon’s “The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be.” I didn’t mention whether I grasped the irony of the title juxtaposed with that disastrous year, but how could I not have noted the irony? Nothing was the way I’d heard it should be. Nothing even resembled it. Not even close.
I thought a lot that day about what a jerk I’d made of myself in Porto Alegre; I thought a lot about calling Paulinho.
A week later, I gave in and called. Though I knew it would do no good, that it would only compound my humiliation, though I told myself a call would only confirm Paulinho’s worst suspicions about me, confirm my worst suspicions about myself, secretly I hoped that he’d tell me that he loved me and that somehow that would put things right.
I sat on the carpeted floor of my apartment, cross-legged, elbows on the coffee table beside the guardaropa, digging my thumb into the nubbly carpeting as I dialed.
—Hey, I said, when he answered. I was just calling to find out how your New Year’s was. Talk to you before I leave. Say good-bye.
—Of course, he said. His voice was cool and measured, sleepy maybe. I checked my watch; it wasn’t yet 8 o’c
lock.
—Sorry to have called so early, I said. I wanted to make sure that I caught you in. You said you run at 6, so I figured 7:30 was no problem. I laughed. He didn’t.
—It’s no problem, Ellen, he said.
I twirled my index finger in the phone cord. So, I said. (It was clear I should not have called.)
—New Year’s was good, Paulinho said after a long pause. We got a table at the club, Sylvana, Mande, and I. It was good. And you?
—It was great, I said, overcompensating. Terrific.
Outside the sky had been darkening with clouds since dawn. I found it comforting to watch the clouds’ blue bellies beyond the window, the sky growing dim. The line ticked with static and distance.
—My grandfather died on Saturday, Paulinho said.
—The one you were going to spend New Year’s with, in Florianopolis.
—That one, yeah.
I tried to imagine his face just then, his eyes red from crying, his soft brown features tight with pain and guilt for not having spent that final New Year’s with his grandparents, having called off the trip to spend time with me.
—I’m so sorry, I whispered.
—Yeah.
I rolled little balls of lint across the carpet and stuffed them into the burrow I’d made with my thumb. For a long time we were quiet, listening to the static. Probably one of us should have hung up. Probably it should have been me. But worse than the prospect of saying stupid things was the prospect of not having anyone to say stupid things to, not having anyone I cared enough, longed for enough to be stupid over.
—You know, I said. I mean, I know, rationally, that it ended between us. But, well, I was calling to find out whether maybe you’d thought about us since I left.
Paulinho sighed. This was not a good sign, I knew.
—I really haven’t had time to think about anything since Saturday, Ellen.
—Of course, I said. I stabbed at lint balls with my finger.
—But Ellen, he said.
—Yeah?
—I’m not what you lack, he said. I’m not what you need.
I remember the tone of his voice, the brief repeated phrase; I remember the sense of the words and my sense of humiliation, but curiously enough I did not write them down, his final words to me. The rest of our conversation is recorded verbatim in my diary but not his last words to me; still, I feel sure that he used the word falta, which means “to lack” as well as “to miss,” to err, to fail. To say, as I think he did, “Não sou o que voce falta” would thus mean at once I’m not what you lack, what you miss, what you fail.
It is only after I lose all hope that I give in to the simple loveliness of what is and begin to enjoy my last days in Salvador. I begin to go to the beach to tan in the mornings before the sun gets too hot. I buy sucos from the ice cream shop in the port, buy coconuts from boys who sell them on the beach and who lop off the ends of the green husks with one clear swing of a machete, leaving a hole in the brown skull through which the boy pushes a straw and I drink warm salty gray milk from the trees.
I begin to visit distant beaches, just to see the beautiful places I have only heard about: Abayaté, Itapoa. I am catching the bus in Barra one morning, on my way to an outlying beach, when I see him, Chequinho, crossing the street toward me with another man. I am standing under the plastic bus shelter as they approach. There is nowhere really to go.
—Tudo bem, Elena, he says, coming to stand beside me. Faz muito tempo, né? It’s been a long time.
I ignore him.
—Voce é bem Bahiana, he continues. He looks me up and down. Tá mas magra, né? You’ve lost weight, haven’t you?
I have, but oddly after so much effort, it no longer seems important; loss no longer seems a good thing. I am weary of the effort to lose, and not to.
He introduces his friend. A tall, fat, jovial guy, who smiles at me. He looks all right. He doesn’t look like a creep, I mean. This has become my standard, creep and non-creep.
—Tudo bem? the friend asks. He doesn’t hold out a hand, so I do not have to decline it.
—Tudo bom, I say. I greet the friend formally, not wanting to appear afraid or even moved by this chance meeting, this reunion.
—Ta bem loura, Chequinho says, bem preto. You’re very blond, he says, very tanned.
I look at him with what I hope is clear contempt.
When the bus comes, I get on; they do too. I sit up front, near the driver, in a long seat that faces the aisle. Chequinho takes a seat across from me. His friend sits beside him, on a seat facing the front.
Chequinho tells me I should come to the racetrack with them. He tells his companion that I am an old friend, then winks at him.
—We are old friends, he brags.
His companion frowns, raises his eyebrows, as if impressed.
—We are not friends, I say, looking Chequinho dead in the eye.
Chequinho loses his smile, then grins, as if it were a joke.
—Não fica assim, Elena, he says. Don’t be like that. She’s just angry, he tells his friend, because I didn’t call her.
And that is when I say—slowly, as if speaking to a child or a foreigner who’d not yet mastered the language and needed to be spoken to slowly in order to comprehend, as if what I have to say were of great importance, a thing he needed to understand—
—Vai pra porra, mal educado. Meaning Fuck yourself, dirtbag. Literally, Go to the whores, ill-educated one.
I needn’t have spoken slowly, of course. The words were familiar, easily understood, spoken in the street all the time here, unmistakable.
Chequinho’s friend roars with laughter and rolls in his seat, holding his groin as if he might pee. Chequinho starts up from his seat as if to hit me, but he can’t here, not in public. He knows it, and I know it. Instead, he sits watching me. I hold his gaze, refusing to look away, playing that child’s game—stare down.
I will not look away.
A few stops later, Chequinho says to his companion, C’mon. Let’s get off.
—Why, man? his companion says. We’re not even close.
—C’mon, he says, and pulls the cord to signal a stop.
Chequinho’s hands are shaking as he stands to get off. He brushes close to me, raising one clenched fist near my face. I raise my chin, daring him to touch me. Never taking my eyes off his. Showing I have no fear. He is nothing to fear anymore.
It is not just his reaction that pleases me, or the piquant flavor of the epithet; it is the unexpectedness and incongruity of a young woman of some education, a well-bred Midwestern girl, saying Fuck yourself. Fuck is not the sort of thing a woman like me says. I know this.
And in that moment—for that one moment—I do not wonder what I am supposed to do or be or feel; I am absolutely certain. And in that instant, I seem to have become entirely myself, briefly self-possessed.
On that bus I discover another kind of power than that propriety confers. Propriety’s power is authorized, after all, and can be revoked, like a license. The strength I discover on that city bus is my own, no one has given it to me; I am making it up as I go. It is mine. Maybe it has always been there, in me, all along, as Boa Gente suggested when he said I was a filha de Iañsa, the warrior, an Amazon after all.
Chequinho and his pal get off the bus in the middle of a stretch of beach nowhere and I ride on alone, watching the lapis lazuli Atlantic beside me and that scrim of aquamarine sky, the sand and the suburbs and the Isle of Itaparica where Isa is, behind a wall capped with broken bottles, trapped now by all she has and by the need to protect it. It takes a while for my heart to slow to a normal rhythm, before I cease to hear its percussive throb. It takes a while after Chequinho and his friend depart the bus before my cheeks lose their flush, before my skin loses the needly electrified feeling I get in a fight.
Meantime, I go on.
I do not know then that it will take me years to make it back from here, to find my way; I do not know it will be years before I grieve all thi
s and learn another way to love and live, another kind of desire than this economy allows. It will take time before I assemble these memories—like something that has been broken, torn apart—and begin to make something whole.
It was a small thing that I learned that day, but it was a start: that moment when I recognized that I did not need permission; I did not need someone else to tell me who I was. The first step to claiming yourself, Jamaica Kincaid once said, is anger. I consider anger a badge of honor. The second step, I’d say, is desire. I will be fully twenty-five before I first go to bed with a woman, and when I do, I will claim myself in another and more lasting way, reaching out in desire, without fear of right or wrong, without thought of utility or avarice, a reaching out that feels like a reaching in, that feels like falling back into my body, embracing a logic beyond the categories I had known, as perhaps we must if we are to find an alternative to the logic of commodities that seems to have so dangerously distracted us of late.
It will be years before I learn the end of Orpheus’s story, while rereading Edith Hamilton’s Greek Myths and Legends. Orpehus, so Ovid’s story goes, returned from Hell to the surface of the world and went on alone. One day, he wandered into a forest where he was set upon by maenads. They tore his body limb from limb, severing his torso from his head, scattering his parts. His head, tossed into the Aegean, washed up on the shore of the Isle of Lesbos—made famous by the poet Sappho—and was rescued there. The island’s inhabitants brought Orpheus’s head to Delphi and laid it to rest. They buried his severed head, understanding what it will take me years to learn after leaving Salvador behind, that the head cannot survive cut off from the body. Calculation cannot save us.
I will never again see Nel or Isa, though I will run into Barbara in the cross-campus library at Yale the following autumn where she will be a graduate student and I will be starting my senior year. We will stand among library stacks and speak lightly, glancingly, of Salvador. Barbara will say that she is hoping to return to study dance. I’ll lie and say I’d like to go back too.
In truth, I am relieved to have left it all behind, to have left Salvador, the Amazon, Nel, Isa, that country, my youth, that private history of global loss; I’m relieved to imagine that I have, that I can, that I am safe now. Home.