Away from Home

by Rona Jaffe

  Helen looked after her, wondering which one was the man, but he was evidently at the other side of the crowd, over by the shrubbery, and she could not see either him or Leila. She wondered if the man was Leila’s lover, and if he was married. Now she looked at all these people with a new interest, realizing how little she knew about any of them. At home, on the few occasions when she and Bert went to a night club or to a bar in New York, she had been able to look at all the people and imagine she knew exactly what they were like. You could see a lovely young girl dancing with a wealthy-looking older man and you could say to yourself, feeling like an analyzer of life, He’s married. She isn’t. Or you could look at a young couple and think, He’s in love with her and thinks she’s in love with him, but she really doesn’t like him very much. But here, in this strange place, Helen looked at the engaged girl with her fiancé and she had no idea whether or not they were in love with each other, or whether the girl was marrying only for security or escape from her governess. Or perhaps the man thought she would make a good mother for his future children. Would he have a mistress, or even several? Would she take a lover? In the early days of their marriage, when Helen and Bert still had unmarried friends, they could go to a party and Helen could tell which girl was working in an office and now wearing her only good black dress, and if she had come to the party only because she knew it would be a free meal. She could tell which girls had come because they were desperately looking for new men to give them love, or even friendship. Their searching chatter and round eyes that looked as if they could draw someone in to their depths by physical force alone gave them away. She had been able to look at a girl sitting with her elbow on a bar, leaning her chin on her palm and listening to a man talk, and Helen had imagined she even knew how many perfume bottles that girl had at home on her dressing table. But here—she didn’t know anything. She had never even been inside the bedroom of a Brazilian woman like herself, and she had never seen the inside of the homes in which they had grown up and become what they were at this moment.

  “I feel like a stranger,” she said to Bert.

  “Why?” he asked, surprised. “Aren’t you having fun? Haven’t you met people?”

  “I don’t mean at this party; I mean in Brazil.”

  “Well,” he answered, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “we are strangers.”

  But somehow, for some reason, the words hurt her.

  A young woman with a beautiful body, dressed in a tiny bikini, ran out of the bathhouse and jumped into the pool. Another woman followed her, and then two men, all in bathing suits. The women swam and dived like porpoises, their wet hair streaming about their faces, although Helen was sure they had gone to the beauty parlor that very day to prepare for the party. The four of them lined up at the edge of the pool, kicking to stay afloat, smiling and calling out to their friends to jump in too. Their upturned faces glittered in the electric lights under the water, like masks.

  “Helen,” Baby Amaral said, “do you want a bikini? There are several in the dressing room that might fit you.”

  “I don’t know …” she said. To tell the truth, she had not yet gotten the courage to wear the two narrow strips of cloth some of the Brazilian women called a bathing suit, although she had two brief maillots at home.

  “Come!” Baby insisted. “It’s so hot, don’t you think so? Aren’t you too hot? I don’t want you to be too hot; you won’t be able to enjoy your dinner.”

  Helen looked at her watch and smiled at him. It was nearly midnight. She wondered if Bert was suffering from hunger. He disliked waiting until so late to eat. As for herself, she had not realized how late it was. She trotted obediently into the bathhouse and found a bikini lying on a white wooden bench. When she had undressed and put it on she looked at herself in the mirror. Her tan ended at her waist and began again at the top of her thighs, but the bikini revealed a three-inch-wide strip of white skin below the waist that made her look, she thought, like a chorus girl dancing in a night-club line at a southern resort. Oh, well, she thought, what the hell. She ran out and jumped into the shallow end of the pool.

  The water was cool and refreshing, but not too cold. It felt very sensual on her skin. She wanted, crazily, to swim with no bathing suit on at all. She had never felt this freedom. She smiled at a stranger and he smiled back, floating on his back and kicking his feet. Most of the people were swimming or floating, but a few couples were trying to dance in the water to the lively music of the orchestra.

  “Dancing in the water is like a dream,” she said. “When you try to walk fast and something holds you back.”

  “O que?” he said apologetically.

  She translated, and noticed from the corner of her eye an attractive woman who could only be the wife of this stranger looking at her with a steely glance. For a moment Helen wondered what she had done, and then she realized that it was not what she had done, or was doing, but what she might do. Of course! she thought. This man and I might become lovers! The thought was so outlandish and amusing that she began to laugh out of sheer high spirits, and the stranger, after a momentary look of bewilderment, began to laugh too. If he knew what I was just thinking he wouldn’t think it was so silly, Helen thought. She looked at him really, now, for the first time. He was an attractive man, lean, brown haired, perhaps thirty-two or -three. He had a kind of wolfine look to his face, partly shyness and reserve, partly a natural sex appeal, and partly the aloofness that comes from a certain kind of breeding. She tried to look at his wife more closely, but his wife had turned half away, momentarily in conversation with a friend.

  He swam a little closer to Helen then and said in a low voice in almost unaccented English, “I apologize for playing a trick on you.”

  “You do speak English!”

  He nodded, a barely perceptible nod, with a very small, careful smile. “I wanted to hear you translate,” he said very quietly. “I love your American accent; it’s so amusing. Forgive me.”

  “Of course.”

  He glanced at her, and she realized that standing this way in the shallow part of the pool it would appear to anyone looking at her as if she were not wearing the bottom part of a bathing suit at all. The water lapped just above the cloth. He glanced at her only for an instant, and then he smiled very slightly again and turned and swam away.

  Helen felt strange then, as if she had been discreetly and very personally complimented, although what he had said to her had been impersonal enough. For no reason she suddenly felt rather frightened to be in the water so close to his wife, and she smiled at the woman and then climbed out of the pool. She went into the bathhouse to find a towel.

  When she had dressed she paused in front of the mirror, repairing her make-up. She always carried a little vial of perfume in her purse, which she seldom bothered to use at parties, but now she searched for it and, finding it, put some on her neck and hair. It wasn’t that there was any reason why she wanted to be particularly attractive tonight. Everybody had already seen her. It was just that … she felt like wearing perfume tonight. It made her feel that she was all of a piece—the look and the smell and the sensation inside, all one, all whole together.

  CHAPTER 6

  “I wouldn’t be so sure she’d show up,” Bert said. “Brazilians have a habit of saying yes and then forgetting all about it. Or something important comes up, like their car breaks down.” He looked more amused than regretful for her, and even a little smug, Helen thought with annoyance.

  They were finishing breakfast, and the room was filled with yellow sunshine. Their living room was so huge that Helen had made one end of it into the dining room. She remembered often that their entire apartment in Riverdale, when she and Bert were first married, was the size of just this Rio living room alone.

  “I’m sure she’ll come,” Helen said. She had had difficulty falling asleep after the party, but this morning instead of being tired she felt refreshed. She tried not to think of what would happen if Leila did not appear to take
her to the favellas. The day stretched ahead of her, unbearably hot and dull.

  “They have a word for it here,” Bert said. “Sumiu. It means ‘disappear.’ It was the first word I learned in Brazil. You should learn it too.” He stood up and dropped his napkin on the table. “It’s an especially useful word in business,” he added wryly. “See you tonight.” He kissed Helen coolly on the lips, a gesture as casual as a handshake, and went to the door. She trailed after him.

  “Goodbye …” Somehow she felt for the first time in Brazil as if she were not being left behind but as if her day were just beginning, as it had all those mornings in Westport. She felt like a child who has been driven in an automobile past a tantalizing locked gate every morning for years on his way to a dull day in school, and suddenly has been let out, the car has driven away, the locked gate has opened, and beyond it is revealed a vast, marvelous playground full of other children.

  She gathered up all the clothes that Julie and Roger had outgrown, some of her own things, and a few shirts of Bert’s that could no longer be mended, making a neat package. When the telephone rang she ran to it before waiting for the maid to answer it and then was almost afraid to lift the receiver.

  “Helen?” Leila’s voice said. “Do you still want to go with me today?”

  “Yes, of course!”

  Leila went on, arranging the few details of their meeting, and Helen noticed how differently she spoke on the telephone, as if the telephone intimidated her. She seemed to have more difficulty with her English, and the words came slower.

  When Leila arrived, Helen was standing outside on the curb with her bundle. I look like an immigrant, she thought, amused. And I am one. Leila was dressed beautifully, in slacks and a shirt that looked as if her dressmaker had created them for her, her black hair loose, her face perfectly made up. She wore no jewelry, not even a wedding ring. She gave the impression not of a local Lady Bountiful going to gloat over her generosity among the poor but rather of a young girl ready for an adventure. Helen could not help liking her; and the feeling surprised her because usually she was not conscious of actively liking or disliking a new friend until she had known the person for some time. And another strange feeling—she was self-conscious. For a while she sat in the car and listened to Leila talking and could not think of anything to say.

  “Have you been anywhere but Rio?” Leila asked. “Have you been to Petropolis? Have you been to Bahia?”

  “No. My husband has been to Bahia, or at least to the State of Bahia, not the city. He travels a lot for business.”

  “You must go to Bahia,” Leila said. “It’s different, very old. Rio isn’t Brazil. I like Rio the best, but it isn’t Brazil.”

  “I feel as though I’ll never know anything about this place,” Helen said.

  “I’ll show you,” Leila said. She sounded delighted. “I’ll introduce you to my friends. Some of them are very intelligent; they know about books, they like to talk about Plato. Do you like Plato?”

  “I … read him a long time ago,” Helen said. “In high school.”

  “I have just discovered it,” Leila said. “I have a very good friend, Carlos Monteiro. Do you remember him? He was at the party last night.”

  “No …”

  “He is very intelligent. The first time I met him he said to me, ‘What do you think of Plato?’ I was so happy.”

  Helen looked at her. Leila was smiling admiringly, as if this Carlos had said to her, “How unique you are!” And perhaps in a way he had.

  “I like very much to talk to him,” Leila went on. “He’s like a philosopher. He says …” She went on, elaborately trying to speak only of Carlos’ brilliant mind, as if he were merely a friend one shows off, and Helen realized Leila must be in love with him. He was probably the man Leila had run to speak to near the hedge at the party. She was so elaborately intellectual about him, and yet she kept talking about him, as though merely to keep the discussion on him gave her the pleasure she missed when he was not actually with her. Helen wondered if he were Leila’s lover. It was odd; a day ago she had not thought about anyone in this way, as lovers or not lovers, but today it was the first thing that came to mind.

  “Do the women really have as many affairs as you said last night?” Helen interrupted.

  “It’s very different here than in America,” Leila said. “My friend I spoke to you about—Carlos Monteiro—has been to America many times. He told me that American women have lovers before they are married, and then when they marry they remain faithful, as if marriage were the end. With us, marriage is the beginning of our lives. A woman is never free in Brazil until she leaves her parents and governess and goes to live with her husband.”

  “How strange,” Helen said. “It seems so cynical.”

  “Cynical? Why?”

  “So unemotional. Unsentimental. I suppose our ways seem strange to you.”

  “But your wives can talk to their husbands about business,” Leila said. “A girl never works in Brazil unless she needs the money badly to live, and even then, she always lives at home with her parents. Some of them take lovers before they marry, but those are very poor girls who find a rich man. It’s a different kind of love affair. My husband used to come home and speak to me of the office sometimes, but he really thought I was much too ignorant to know anything. I used to tell him what I thought he should do, and he hardly paid attention. But then he would do it, and I always turned out to be a help to him. I think he really never knew that it was I who told him, after all.”

  They were speeding down the highway now, away from the suburb of Copacabana and toward the city of Rio itself. They passed through a tunnel, and ahead of them Helen could see a mountain covered with so many flimsy little shacks that the grass between them was hardly visible. They turned off the road and began to leave this civilized, asphalt-paved place, and climbed into a world that was leafy, damp, hot, and filled with strange smells and sounds. Below them there were the homes of the rich, and the bay, bright blue in the sun, and the mountains across it; the Sugar Loaf, black and humped like the back of a buffalo, with the thin thread stretching between it and the next mountain, the thread that was the cable that held the traveling car of sightseers who went daily to the top of the Sugar Loaf to gape at the view below. There was the Corcovado: the great white statue of Christ standing on top of the highest mountain with arms outstretched to bless and protect the harbor and the city. The sky was sapphire blue, but today because of the humidity there were clouds ringing the top of the mountain where the Corcovado stood, so it seemed as if the Christ were supernaturally perched on top of the clouds instead of on earth. It looked like a great white peaceful bird in the sky, motionless, wings outspread, hovering and yet permanent.

  A black sow walked across the road in front of their car, udders swaying from side to side, her hide caked with mud. She was followed by what seemed like a herd of little shoats, plump and hairy and lively, and the one tiny runt, the extra baby for whom there was no teat to feed, so skinny it did not look like a pig at all, but rather like a large tailless rat. The mother sow was ugliness itself: obese, wrinkled, waddling, worn out, grunting; an elephant of a sow, a monster. The little shoats were rather cute; you could almost imagine one as some child’s pet. It was hard to believe that they would soon grow to be as gross and ugly as their mother, and sad to believe that she had once been as pleasant to look at as they. Leila stopped the car to let them pass.

  “Look at them,” Helen said. “She produces, and feeds, and produces, and feeds, and then she dies. You’re supposed to think it’s noble, but it makes you think life’s grotesque to see something grown that ugly.”

  “Wait until you see some of the people here,” Leila said.

  The shacks were hidden behind the trees and foliage, so that traveling along the rutted path in Leila’s big American car Helen had the feeling someone might jump out of nowhere and menace them. Despite Leila’s casual look, Helen was afraid. Her throat was dry. She did not trust peo
ple who were as desperately poor as these; not because they were any worse than anyone else, but because they lived with feelings she could only imagine: hunger, hopelessness, bitterness, envy, desperation. Knowing someone has basic feelings much stronger than your own always makes you fear him, especially if he is a stranger.

  Leila drove through an opening between the trees. Now shacks could be seen, made of rough gray boards and corrugated metal and sheets of heavy paper. Leila stopped the car. “We have to walk from now on.”

  Helen’s first instinct was to protest: But won’t someone steal the car? But she said nothing, and got out of the car carrying her package, thinking, What a way to do charity, not with an open heart but with the suspicion you’re going to be murdered for coming here at all!

  “There is one girl I always visit here,” Leila said. “I like her.”

  There was a small clearing with shacks all around it. In the center of the clearing there was a sort of barbecue erection made of stones, with a flat piece of tin laid across the top of it. Smoke was coming out and there were two pots on this makeshift stove with food cooking in them. A middle-aged colored woman dressed in a shapeless white cotton shift that showed traces of once having been blue was standing over the pots, stirring first one and then the other. Several brown chickens scratched and pecked in the dirt around where she stood, and nearby on the ground there was a baby about five months old lying on a soiled towel, kicking its feet in the sunshine. The baby had a dirty pacifier in its mouth. In front of the favellas were ropes of clothesline attached to trees, holding a vast amount of clean washing—white sheets and shirts and rich-looking Turkish towels. There were some children’s dresses that looked nearly new. Helen remembered the story Mil Burns had told her about what the washerwoman did with the rich people’s clothing here in the favellas and she wondered if it were true.

  “Good morning,” Leila called in Portuguese. “Where is Maria?”

  “Maria,” the woman called out hoarsely. “Maria! Your friend is here.” When she opened her mouth Helen saw that she had only four teeth, and these did not meet.