by Rona Jaffe
As her car climbed the mountain Leila knew it was going to rain. It had been raining steadily since the beginning of December in Cidade d’Azul, the blue city at the top of the sky. Already the air was cool and moist. Along the side of the narrow road were wild hydrangeas, blue and purple, rain flowers, some as pale as water, some azure and rich with the color of the sky itself. All the years that she had been coming up this road to Cidade d’Azul, Leila had been looking at those hydrangeas, and to her they were the color of tears.
Her fingers reached for the dials of the car radio, and she tapped the dashboard nervously waiting for the music. She wanted jazz, American jazz, or perhaps Carnival music. Carnival music always made her happy. She was humming between her teeth, her face set, her long black hair blowing around her face in the wind from the open windows. The first drops of rain appeared on the windshield, and rain blew in on the wind, dampening her face and sleeve, but Leila did not close the window. She sang with the jazz, her eyes wide open and fixed now on the difficult road that was a demon even though she knew it so well by now, her foot on the accelerator making speed.
Leila Silva e Costa was a beautiful woman, or perhaps it might better be said, a beautiful girl. There was something in her face that was the look of an adolescent girl—not the features, or even the expression, but something reaching from inside, a confusion and restlessness and innocence. She had black hair and, like many Brazilian women, large blue-green eyes with long black lashes, like the eyes of a cat. Her eyes were her best feature, very striking in her tanned face. The rest of her face was delicately molded, and, unlike many Brazilians, she had good teeth, white and small and her own. When she had been a child fighting with her older brother she had often resorted to biting him, and sometimes scratching, so he had given her the nickname of Gatinha. Her brother was gone, they were all gone, and no one had called her Little Cat in years.
She reached Cidade d’Azul in pouring rain. It was gray and cold, the kind of miserable grayness that seems to have set in for weeks and weeks. Leila parked her car across the street from a small German restaurant and ran through the ankle-deep puddles to the shelter of the warm room. There was a large Brazilian family eating at one table, the parents and the old grandparents and the many children all together. At a small table against the wall was an English couple dressed in Bermuda shorts and raincoats. They had probably rented a house in Cidade d’Azul for the summer, not knowing about the rainy season—their pallor gave this away, and their look of bleak bewilderment. Leila sat at a table removed from the ones that were occupied and ordered broiled chicken with fried potatoes and palmitos and a bottle of beer.
She tried to keep her thoughts confined to this small, brightly lighted room with the painted biscuit tins lined up on shelves, and the huge wheels of cheeses, and bottles of wine beside them, but already in her mind these bright everyday things were melting away and she could see the gray, secret walls of the convent. Even on a sunny day the convent seemed gray, silent, with a hidden life somewhere within that even she could never know. She knew the nuns had a garden in which they raised all their own vegetables, and perhaps flowers too, but it was a secret garden. All Leila knew was the outside of the building, and the small visitor’s room with the picture of Saint Peter on the wall and the double row of bars behind which, one afternoon a month, she was permitted to see the face of her mother.
She paid the waiter and ran out again into the rain. Imagine! she thought. To live here where it rains every day all summer and is so cold! She wondered if her mother minded—or even noticed—the rain. Strange that she had never thought to ask. She always had questions ready, but when she was face to face with her mother in that short time she always forgot everything she had planned to say.
She parked the car at the curb in front of the convent and ran up the steps, splashing water on the hem of her dress. The little custodian dressed in black who opened the door knew Leila well and gave her a reserved, timid smile. Only her eyes showed friendliness. You are fortunate, the eyes said. How proud you must be.
“You may enter.”
Walking down the immaculately polished floor of the narrow corridor Leila felt her heart beginning to pound, as it always did when she came here. She was acutely conscious of her wet shoes and of the sound they were making in the great silence. She felt like a little girl again, a naughty child with wet feet, and she stiffened, trying to walk as quietly as possible. Not that it could offend anyone, really; the entire place seemed deserted, everyone hidden away. The custodian left her in the tiny visitor’s room and shut the door.
The only furniture in the room was a hard wooden chair and a small table with a drawer in the front of it. Once Leila had opened the drawer and found it empty. The walls were painted a dull, indistinguishable color. The picture of Saint Peter on the wall was the only decoration. But none of this mattered. The focal point of all eyes, of everything in the room and its reason for existing at all, was a kind of great window in one wall, completely barred with metal bars set two inches apart and bearing short, sharp, metal spikes pointing outside at the visitor. Two or three feet inside this row of spiked bars was another row of bars, this time without spikes. Behind them was a thin black curtain blotting out all sight. Looking at this forbidding array you could not help feeling that whatever was on the other side being protected was somehow superhuman, unreal. You could not believe that the black-robed figures who might speak to you were really only women, pious women, who had said farewell to whatever you knew of life. And perhaps they no longer were.
The black curtain moved aside. Leila was a daughter, the closest blood relative, so she could speak without the curtain and she could see. Her hands were so cold they were almost numb. She was filled with resentment and love and loneliness and anguish, and she could hardly speak.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Leila. How are you? You look well.”
You don’t care! Leila wanted to cry out, but she tried to smile. “I’m well. How are you?”
“I am well.” How calm her mother looked, how detached, and how strange. On her pale, scrubbed face, the heavy black, unplucked eyebrows stood out as the main feature. Her eyes were quiet, calm, and said nothing. “How are the children?”
“I don’t know what to do with them!” Leila burst out. “The boys miss their father terribly. They won’t mind me; they won’t do anything I tell them to. And Teresinha is so shy she has no friends at school. I can’t do it myself.”
“He will come back. You must take him back,” her mother said evenly.
“He won’t come back. He’s married. You know he’s married again.”
“He is married to you. There is no other marriage.”
“Mother, I need you,” Leila whispered. She tried not to cry, holding her breath, feeling her heart struggle in her chest like a caught fish straining for life. “I can’t do it myself. I have no one.”
“You have God.”
“I don’t have anybody!”
“You must take your husband back,” her mother said calmly. “Many women have suffered more than you have because of their husband’s sin. He is your husband, and you are his only wife. You can suffer much for him. It has been done before.”
Anger at her mother’s calm, sure tone gave Leila strength. “He doesn’t want to come back,” she said, enunciating clearly. “He left me. He doesn’t want me. He wants her. He doesn’t want to be married to me. He told me so. You know that, Mother. You know that. Only you never will admit it.”
“Your divorce caused me great pain,” her mother said quietly. “It was a sin in the eyes of God. I pray for you, always.”
“I need more than prayers.”
There was silence between them then as they looked at each other, but it was not the kind of silence that makes a bond between two people who love each other. Leila stared at her mother’s face, winged in black cloth like a pale, half-shrouded portrait, and she wondered what her mother was thinking. I don’t know her any more, Le
ila thought. She’s my mother and I don’t even know how she feels about me any more.
“I can’t bear to talk to you from behind these bars like an animal in a cage,” Leila cried.
Her mother smiled distantly. “Your only cage is the prison of your own sin.”
“If I were dying, Mother, if I were dying in the hospital of cancer, would you come out to see me? Would you come to me if I called you from my deathbed?”
Her mother’s smile was less distant. “I would pray for you.”
“But you wouldn’t come out to me.”
“God will take care of you.”
“Sometimes I …” Leila began. Sometimes I hate you. But she could not say the words aloud, even though they were crying out inside her. Something prevented the utterance; perhaps awe, perhaps love.
“I pray for all of you,” her mother said.
“All my life I was guarded,” Leila said. “Don’t do this, don’t go there. You never let me think for myself. I had a governess until the day I was married. And then, for no reason, you disappeared into this convent. I have no one, Mother. I’m alone. I don’t know how to be alone. I don’t know how to take care of myself. What about me? Is my life over now; am I dead for you?”
“I had reasons.”
“You couldn’t face life.”
“Can you?”
“I’m … sorry,” Leila said with effort. “I didn’t mean to come here and fight with you. We always have a fight, don’t we?”
“I have learned how to forgive you.”
“Maybe someday … I’ll be able to understand you,” Leila whispered.
“I must go now,” her mother said gently.
“I’ll come back next month.”
“That will be good. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Mother.” The black curtain dropped, and her mother was gone. There was no sound. Leila wondered for one crazy moment if her mother were still sitting there behind that curtain, if an anguished cry could bring her back even for a minute, for one more goodbye, for all the things that should have been said or perhaps for more things that should never have been said at all. The room was very still. It was such a bare room, with almost nothing in it, but it was so filled with wild, mute thoughts that there was no room for furniture or decoration. No wonder it’s bare, Leila thought bitterly. She stood, and walked around the small table to the bars. She took hold of one of the bars with her hand, between the sharp, neat spikes. The metal was not as smooth to the touch as it was to the eye, and when she took her hand away it smelled metallic.
I can’t even touch you, Leila thought. This metallic scent is all I have of your flesh and blood and bone.
She turned and opened the door, and walked quickly down the silent corridor, not caring now how much noise her shoes made. The custodian let her out.
“Would you like to go into the chapel for a while?”
“No, thank you,” Leila said. “Goodbye. Until later.”
“Happiness.”
“Ah, yes,” Leila said. “Happiness to you, too.”
Driving back down the mountain, she was forced to go slowly because of the great patches of fog that made her feel as though she were in an enormous, cold, Turkish bath. In some places she could not see anything ahead, even with the lights of her car turned on. Perhaps this was what Heaven would be like—clouds and quiet, and a sense of limitless height. Perhaps this was the dream that sustained her mother’s life. Leila believed in heaven implicitly, as she believed all the things she had been taught, but since her divorce she had begun to read books that told her of psychology and love and lust and earth. She had begun to read avidly out of frustration and loneliness, and a feeling that if she had not been such a limited person perhaps her marriage would not have failed. Somewhere in those books there must be an answer to the bitterness of life and to the questions faith could not answer. A few years before it had been chic among her friends to be intensely religious, to go to church and speak of God. It had been a fad, in a way, and Leila had not been able to join in it, although she of all people, with a mother in the convent … And now psychology was the rage. Women who had been given the most perfunctory of educations, aimed completely at a protected marriage, were trying to read and to talk about what they had read.
She had talked once of a book she liked with a friend who seemed extraordinarily intelligent. And later she had seen all her friend’s comments, verbatim, in a magazine review. Leila had been so annoyed at this deception that she had not even realized until much later that at least the friend had had the intelligence to read and memorize the review. But it was a fad, like memorizing a new card game or a new dance step.
Emerging from the fog to lower ground, she pressed the accelerator down, driving faster, recklessly. She turned on the radio, finding jazz. There was no answer in her books, none at all, for loneliness and dependence and desertion. She had married when she was still an adolescent girl, and she had leaned on João Alberto, depended on him, expected he would be there forever. During the years of her marriage she had never changed at all, not even when she had begun to suspect that her husband was interested in someone else. She had suffered, she had wept, she had waited; but she had not changed. When he finally left her and married someone else, Leila had mourned for three years, as if she had been a widow instead of a divorcée. She did not have the slightest idea of what to do with her life. She had been a matron at seventeen and now she was a teen-ager at twenty-nine.
Life was easier for the young girls in Brazil marrying today, because they had more freedom than she had been given, and they at least had an idea of how to think for themselves. Some of them had gone to the university. Some of them had even taken jobs, even though they did not need the money. When they became engaged many of them were permitted to go out with their fiancés without a chaperone’s coming along too. It was all different today. Often Leila felt she did not belong anywhere. The old, sheltered, governed order which had prepared her for its own kind of world still existed, but it was inhabited by married women with families, who led the life they had been trained to lead. For the modern young girls of Brazil, freedom was a gift. The ones who had it knew what to do with it. But Leila was right in between the old and the new, and freedom meant not adventure but peril, loneliness, and unwanted responsibilities which belonged better to men.
No matter what happened to her, it always made her think of her husband. Her friends teased her; they said no man could be as unforgettable as all that. She still spoke of him often: “My husband used to say …” or “When I was with my husband …” Even while she was speaking about him and praising this or that which he used to do or say, Leila was aware that João Alberto was not really such a unique, superior, and marvelous person as she pretended; it was simply that he was her husband and she loved him. She looked back at the days of her marriage, even the unhappiest days, as a sanctuary. Now that she was separated from them by time and had read all those books, she could see certain events more objectively and she realized that she had not known João Alberto as well as she thought she had, even though they had known each other since childhood.
In the world in which she had been raised you grew up together and married each other; it was a simple, small world for all its formalities. João Alberto was three years older than she, and she had always adored him because he was handsome and intelligent and sensitive. During the summers in Cidade d’Ouro all the children played together; her older sisters and brother, João Alberto and his sisters and brothers, and the young cousins of the two families. She had always wanted to marry him, ever since she could remember, and then from the time she was fourteen on she had known she was going to marry him.
She remembered often the day he had written the poem for her. And she remembered too that he would read poetry to her from a book and it was so beautiful that she would cry. Looking back now, she remembered other things that were not so sentimental and lovely. She remembered that when the children had gotten into some sort of mischi
ef together and had been caught it was always João Alberto who would be the first to confess and to tell on the others. She wondered now if it was that weak trait in him that had made him leave her years later, if perhaps their entire lives together from childhood were paved with clues that would explain the harm they had visited on each other as adults.
She remembered her eighteenth birthday, the first one she had ever spent away from home. João Alberto had taken her to Monti-video, in Uruguay, for a vacation just after the twins were born. It was not far from home, but she was homesick, and awakening in that strange bed in the strange hotel on the morning of her eighteenth birthday Leila realized that only a year before she had been a virgin and a child, and now she was a wife and the mother of two infants. The entire situation seemed overwhelming, and recalling her parents’ house where she had happily spent all previous birthdays Leila was so depressed she could not speak. The worst of it was that João Alberto was not in the room when she awakened, and she could not imagine where he was. She lay on her back and stared at the sunlight on the ceiling, inert under the weight of her homesickness.