Away from Home

by Rona Jaffe

  The door of the favella nearest them did not open, because there was no door. Maria simply came out of the dark hole. She was a light-skinned mulatto girl of about seventeen, with the full-breasted figure of a woman in her mid-twenties. She was carrying a Negro baby with very dark skin who looked as if he were still too young to be weaned. Her breasts looked it, Helen thought; they were still full of milk. Behind Maria trailed a little girl who was barely old enough to walk; she held on to her mother’s skirt tenaciously, and Maria took small, slow steps because she knew that otherwise the child would fall. The little girl was even lighter skinned than Maria, and she had large blue eyes. A few steps behind her came a scrawny little boy of about three, who looked, oddly enough, like an Indian.

  “Good morning, Dona Leila,” Maria said shyly. She would be a more than pretty girl, Helen thought, if she would ever comb her hair.

  “Good morning. This is my friend Dona Helen,” Leila said.

  “Good morning. How are you?”

  “I’m well, thank you,” Helen replied in Portuguese. “How are you?”

  “Well, thank you. Come into my house,” Maria said.

  Leila cast Helen a warning look, as if to say, Don’t act surprised.

  She must think I’m an idiot, Helen thought, a little resentfully and a little ashamed that anything about herself might evoke such an opinion. But as soon as they stepped into the shack Helen realized why Leila had given her the look.

  At first the odor almost made her gag. It was the smell of no plumbing, of no ventilation, sour, old, stale, greasy. Most of all, though, it was the smell of a hopeless life that was not even a life at all but an existence. There was one metal table, painted pea green, with a wooden chair that had once been painted white but now was flaking, and a silvery metal chair with a torn red leatherette seat. The beds were mattresses on the floor, soiled and stained, with neither sheets nor blankets. In one corner there was a large, stained, white enamel pot with a handle, the kind used for cooking, but this one was clearly being used for something quite different.

  Leila did not seem disgusted. “You have a floor!” she said delightedly. “When did you make it?”

  “A friend made it for me,” Maria said. She tugged at her ear-lobe with her thumb and forefinger in the national gesture Brazilians use when they wish to show that something is the ultimate, and she smiled proudly.

  “How beautiful!” Leila said. “I brought you some soap and some rags, so now you can keep the floor clean, and the table too.” She opened the large canvas shopping bag she was carrying and began to put things on the metal table. “Here is canned milk for the children. You must put water in it to make it more, but you must boil the water first. One can of milk and also one and a half cans of water. Can you remember?”

  “One can of milk,” Maria repeated, “and also one and a half cans of water.”

  “She can’t read,” Leila said to Helen in English.

  “Thank you, for the children,” Maria said.

  “It’s nothing. I brought food too. Beef, palmitos, cheese, oranges. And a bag of rice.”

  “Here are clothes for the children,” Helen said. She put her package, unopened, on the table. “Are those three all your children?”

  “Yes,” Maria said, looking down at the children affectionately. She touched the little boy on the head, lightly and with pride. “Riccardo.” Then she touched the older girl, who let go of her mother’s skirt and tumbled to the floor, sucking her thumb and staring at Helen. “Maria Lucia.” Maria touched the baby’s cheek gently. “And Pedro José.”

  “You are very young,” Helen said.

  “Seventeen.”

  She didn’t like to ask the prying questions people often felt they deserved answers to in return for giving charity, but curiosity and surprise nudged her on. “How old is your husband?”

  “I have never had a husband,” Maria said simply.

  “I mean …” Helen said quickly, “the father of the children. The one who takes care of them.” She could see that she was the only one who was in the least embarrassed by all this.

  “I take care of them,” Maria said. She kissed the baby she held in her arms.

  Leila smiled at Maria. “Maria really loves her children,” she said to Helen, in Portuguese so Maria would understand too. “Many of the mothers here don’t. Some of them even sell their children, to people who have no children. But Maria says she will never give any of hers away.”

  “Oh, never!” Maria cried. She hugged the baby even tighter and looked down at the other two: the ragged little boy, the girl who had finally struggled to her feet again and was once more holding on to her mother’s skirt. Maria smiled then, thinking of something wonderful. “Sometimes,” she said, “I dream of going far away. I would like to live on an island, or on a beach where it is very beautiful. Someday I will go away from this place. But if I go, I will always take the children. I dream of my island for the children, too, not only for me. I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t take my children with me. I like them.”

  “Before you have any more children you must get married,” Leila said. “If you love the children. You cannot take care of more than these three unless you have a man to help you.”

  “Oh … I know,” Maria said obediently. “I will try.”

  “You’re beautiful,” Leila said. “I’m sure many men would like to marry you.”

  Maria looked embarrassed. “No, not so beautiful.”

  “Yes you are,” Leila said. “You are much more beautiful than any of the other women here. Really. I will tell you something important and you must think about it and you must listen to me. You must not go down to the beach at night with a man any more, until you marry. If you make love with a man you are going to have another child. You mustn’t have another child until you marry; you’re too young; it’s too difficult for you to care for them alone. And besides,” she added, almost as a useless afterthought, “it is immoral. It is a sin.”

  “I know,” Maria said. She gave a little smile, wistful and almost hopeful. “Sometimes I work so hard trying to make clothes for the children, trying to wash, trying to find food. And I’m so tired. Riccardo cries for a banana, and I feel full of hate and sadness because I have no money to buy him a banana. Not even one banana. I had only this one dress to wear until you gave me more. I never had anything, and the children never had anything, and I was so unhappy I wanted to die. Often I still feel that way. But then I go to walk on the beach at night with a boy, and I look at the sea all shiny with moonlight. We walk in the little water on the sand and we look at the stars. The stars are so beautiful on the beach. When the moon is full and the sand is wet you can see your shadow on the sand. It makes me happy. Then I feel that I don’t want to die. If I go to a beach with a boy and do those things that make more children it is only because those are the only beautiful things in my life.”

  Neither Leila nor Helen answered for a moment. Helen felt touched. It was true, what this girl said, and there was little they could do about it. Helen had seldom, if ever, heard a stranger speak so frankly and so simply to her, and as she had that first evening when Leila had told her of the failure of her marriage, Helen felt as if she had been given a gift. She had grown used to civilized hypocrisy in the name of manners, and evasion and self-deception in the name of dignity. Even now, when it had become fashionable to pretend to a brash self-analysis and public declaration of one’s neuroses, these were only another form of charm, charmless though they often turned out to be.

  “It’s true,” Helen said in English. “It’s true.”

  “There is only one thing to do, then,” Leila said to Maria. “Next week when we come here again I will bring you something. You will see.”

  Maria frowned, not quite sure whether she was being chastised or given another present. “What will you bring me?”

  “Something to prevent children,” Leila said. She shook hands with Maria. “Goodbye. Until later.”

  “Goodbye,” Mar
ia said. “Thank you very much.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Goodbye,” Helen said. Maria held out her hand, and Helen took it, feeling with surprise how rough it was for a girl of that age.

  “Thank you very much,” Maria said.

  “It’s nothing.”

  When they reached the open air again Helen felt as if she had been trying to hold her breath for ten minutes. She gulped in the questionably fresh air. Even the hot sunshine seemed refreshing after the closeness of Maria’s shack. Maria trailed them halfway to the car. “Goodbye,” she called, waving, still holding the baby in one arm. “Come back soon.”

  “If we want to prevent more children,” Leila said to Helen in English, “we had better come back very soon.” She laughed and put the car into gear.

  “I never realized these people live this way,” Helen said. “What did you mean when you said some of them actually sell their children?”

  “They sell them,” Leila said.

  “But that’s barbaric!”

  “It is what they do.”

  “I don’t even want to think about it.”

  “She is a good girl, Maria,” Leila said. “And I think she’s intelligent, too. Did you hear the way she spoke? It was like a kind of poetry.”

  “I’m glad we came,” Helen said.

  “How many children do you have?”

  “Two. A boy and a girl.”

  “I have four. Your parents are living?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they live in the United States?”

  “Yes. In New York.”

  “My mother is a noon,” Leila said.

  “A what?”

  “A noon. In the most cloistered convent in the world.”

  “You mean a nun!”

  “Ah, yes. A nun? You must tell me when I pronounce these words wrong.”

  “I don’t understand …” Helen said. “How can a woman with children become a nun?”

  Leila looked straight ahead, through the windshield. “Her children were all grown,” she said evenly. “They did not need her any more.”

  Helen thought back and remembered that once in the newspaper she had read about an American woman who had entered a convent after her husband had died, after obtaining some sort of special dispensation. She did not remember whether or not this woman had had children. “Your father is dead?”

  “A long time ago.”

  They had nearly descended the mountain now and were able to drive faster. Helen looked out the window and saw in the distance the blue of Guanabara Bay and the small bright specks on it that were the yachts of the rich. From their favellas the people who were the poorest in all Brazil could look down and see the yachts too, and the bay, and the view that was the best in all of Rio. How much in Brazil was a paradox! Even this girl beside her, driving surely down the rough mountain road; the girl whose mother was a nun, and who did not seem to think it was particularly strange that the daughter of a nun was going to teach birth control to a girl in the favellas.

  “If you like,” Leila said, “We can go to the Iate Clube for lunch.”

  “I’d like that very much.” How strange it all is, Helen thought, how strange.

  At the Iate Clube Leila parked her car under the trees in the parking lot and they walked to the terrace in front of the clubhouse that overlooked the water. There were palm trees set in the cement of the terrace, and white wooden tables, most of them empty. At the landing there were several speed boats of various sizes, and many larger yachts, and farther out in the bay were some huge yachts requiring smaller craft to get to them, and one enormous four-masted schooner. There were mountains around the harbor, and then the open water beyond, with islands just visible in the distance, grayish in the heat haze. Leila chose a table under a palm tree, a table that would have comfortably seated eight, and the two of them sat at it.

  “This is one of the places where you come if you don’t want to be seen by anyone,” Leila said with a great smile. “If you are having a flirt with someone else’s husband.… You see, no one will tell his wife because they will also be afraid that someone will tell their wives. How discreet people can be when they also have something to hide!”

  “My lord,” Helen said, “A married man’s restaurant. But I don’t see why the wives don’t come down here en masse to find out if their husbands are ‘flirting’ with someone.”

  “The wives like very much to play cards in the afternoon,” Leila said. “And they go to the hairdresser, and the dressmaker. On the weekends the families come here. It is very nice. The husbands and wives and all the children, all together very sweetly.”

  “I guess American wives are more aggressive when they think they’re being deceived.”

  “Brazilian women are very jealous,” said Leila. She saw a waiter nearby and hissed for him, between her teeth, like someone calling a cat. He seemed to take this form of appeal completely for granted and sauntered over smiling, bringing two menus. “But then,” Leila added seriously, “I suppose every person has his own way of making trouble when he has been hurt.”

  It was nearly four o’clock when they finished lunch and drove slowly back to Copacabana. Leila let Helen off in front of her apartment building, after they had arranged to telephone each other in a few days and meet again for lunch. Helen watched Leila drive off alone, sitting up very straight behind the wheel, her black hair streaming down to her shoulders, completely contrary to the style of the other Brazilian wives but somehow very chic, and Helen felt sorry for her. She could not decide yet whether the main facet of Leila’s character was the lusty good humor that seemed to bubble up over all the problems life had given her, or whether the smiles and glittering eyes were only a well-put-on veneer and the deep part of her was the sadness. Leila too was a paradox to her, and whether it was because she was a foreigner or a confused and complicated person, Helen could not decide. She knew, of course, that even though Leila spoke in English her thoughts were in Portuguese, but it was easy for a sheltered person like herself who had never before left home to assume through some strange mis-logic that Leila’s thoughts would be American thoughts translated into Portuguese, instead of something vastly different.

  That evening when the sun had gone down and the sky was black and filled with the starry outlines of constellations, Helen looked out of their living-room window at the beach. They had finished supper and the children were in bed. Perhaps that night not long ago when she had seen the couples making love on the beach, perhaps one of the girls might have been Maria. Tonight on the beach Helen saw a lighted candle propped up in the sand, and farther on the beach another, and another, until they made a long wavering line of lighted candles flickering all along the crescent of the beach in the dark. They were Macumba candles, she knew, the signals that somewhere up in the hills there would be strange religious rites tonight. Blood would be shed, even if it was only the blood of a living rooster, and the native believers would be gripped by strange powers and babble in a strange tongue. Some people said Macumba was only for tourists, suckers. And some believed in the black magic so strongly that they would not even whisper the dread word Macumba. But most people said there were two kinds of rites: the special flamboyant ones to impress gullible tourists, and the other ones, the secret ones, held in places that few people knew and wilder by far than the ones that were staged for show. The place on the mountain where Helen had been that morning was near one of the places where Macumbas were held, that she knew, and she was sure that many of the people in the favellas where she had been were believers and participants. Perhaps that middle-aged woman who had been stirring the pots of food. Perhaps even Maria, whose children would be wearing Roger’s and Julie’s clothes. Her own children’s little clothes … That thought somehow made her feel closer than she wanted to be to the weird world of those people on the dark mountain, and Helen drew away from the window into her lighted family room, still seeing the candle lights flickering down there on the beach, and even af
ter she no longer looked at them still knowing they were there.

  Tonight she would be in her apartment, safe with her husband and children, the curtains drawn. Those worshipers on the mountain should only seem like a stage setting to her, for she was an outsider, almost a tourist. But already she had made a friend and seen a world she had never seen before. And in two weeks, after New Year’s Day, Bert would fly to the jungle, to a world that was as remote and different from Rio as it was from those pagans on the mountainside. She knew there was absolutely no reason to feel he had deserted her, and yet this time, unreasonably and almost fearfully, she did not want to be alone with herself in Rio.

  CHAPTER 7

  On New Year’s Eve, the Revillon, Mil and Phil Burns went to an open house at the apartment of some American friends, where everyone crowded onto the small balcony, drank champagne, consumed a cold ham and a cold turkey, and stayed up until three o’clock in the morning. Margie and Neil Davidow and Helen and Bert Sinclair also went to this open house, but they left shortly after midnight for another party to which they had been invited, half an hour’s drive away, where everyone crowded onto the small balcony, drank champagne, consumed a cold ham and a cold turkey, and stayed up until three o’clock in the morning. Leila Silva e Costa spent the Revillon at a night club with a married couple who were close friends of hers and who invited her to come along with them because they thought she might be lonely. She knew nearly everyone in the night club and she danced with the husbands of various friends until seven o’clock in the morning. On New Year’s Day everyone slept until afternoon, and then Helen and Bert took their children to an outdoor churrascaria for lunch. Margie and Neil went to the beach. Leila slept until six o’clock in the evening, being slightly hung-over from drinking champagne, although she had not had very much. Alcohol does not agree with Brazilian women, because of a national weakness of the liver. Altogether, everyone was relieved that New Year’s Eve was over and done with for another year, and by the following day it was altogether forgotten. Work went on as usual, and Bert Sinclair went off to a topaz mine in Rio Grande do Sul, where the darkest, hardest, most valuable gem topazes are found.