Away from Home

by Rona Jaffe

  “How old are you?”

  “I’ll be twenty-one next month.”

  “Terribly old,” Neil said. “Disgraceful.”

  “The worst of it is, I have nothing to say to them any more. And they have nothing to say to me. They tell me how nice it is to be married and have babies. And then there’s a long silence.”

  “Not so different from in the States.”

  “Oh, it is different!” Gilda said. “I love the States. There are so many men to go out with. And they treat a girl like a person, not just a wrestling partner. At Radcliffe I went out every night. Well, I don’t know why I’m telling all this to you.”

  “Because you’ve loved me ever since the moment you first saw me,” Neil said.

  “That’s right! How could I have forgotten?”

  They both laughed. Neil wanted very badly to put his arm around her, but this time he felt foolish, like the older man, the executive, the boss chasing the secretary behind the filing cabinets. “Put your mask on again,” he said softly. “Please.”

  She did not ask him why, or even look puzzled. She merely slipped the tiger mask and cap over her head and tucked in the stray wisps of hair. Neil put his arms around her.

  “I can feel your heart beating,” Gilda said.

  “Are you always so candid?”

  “It’s a defense.”

  “If you can say so, it isn’t.”

  “If I say it to you it’s the truth.”

  “Yes,” Neil said. “I believe you.”

  “Do you want to dance?”

  “No,” Neil said. “If I start knocking myself out in there I’ll sublimate.”

  “You frighten me a little.”

  “I do?”

  She smiled. “Because I like you. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Carnival is crazy, isn’t it?”

  “You’re a funny girl.”

  “I’m a freak,” she said lightly. But she stiffened as if he had hurt her.

  He put his chin on the top of her head. “You’re a little girl.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if I were still growing? Maybe I am.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if we all were,” Neil said thoughtfully. “Do you mind if I keep my arms around you?”

  “If you take them away I’ll fall apart like a jigsaw puzzle,” she said very quietly.

  He was touched. He looked down at her face, but all he could see was her pink mouth, with the lipstick smeared where he had kissed her savagely a while before. The smeared lipstick made her look vulnerable. Not sexy and dirty, the way he had pictured his dream pick-up an hour ago when he was drunk, but only vulnerable, and not unattractive either. She had a young mouth, not really finally formed yet, like a little girl’s, and her teeth were very white. He wondered if she was a virgin.

  “I have to go to the Copacabana Ball tonight,” he said, “but I wonder if you would be willing to have dinner with me now. I mean, I’d like to get out of here.”

  “I never eat dinner until ten o’clock.”

  “I’m not hungry either. But we could have a drink. Or, I could.”

  “Rio is a very small town,” Gilda said. “Everybody talks. You and I couldn’t get far in these clothes, even during Carnival.”

  Her transparent attempt at evasion amused him, and at the same time made him rather angry again. “Are you afraid of me?”

  She took a deep breath; he heard it and felt it. “No.”

  “That means yes.”

  “My mother always used to say that a girl is never afraid of a man unless she’s afraid of herself,” she said lightly.

  “I didn’t invite your mother to dinner, I invited you.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of!” she said. She smiled at him, and then Neil could not decide if she really was afraid of him or not.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “We’ll take a taxi to the Barra de Tijuca. That’s at the end of the world.” He took her hand before she had time to reply and began to lead her through the crowd and out of the place. The music was blaring, and all the dancers were dripping with perspiration, as if this were a giant musical Turkish bath. Gilda’s hand was small and cool.

  Near the doorway he noticed Mort Baker dancing with a tall, red-haired girl dressed as Pierrette. Neil turned his face away and walked more hurriedly, so Mort would not see him. He did not feel guilty or nervous, and this reaction rather surprised him. It was only that he felt a need to keep this evening private, whatever might happen. For some reason he felt happier than he had in years. It was this feeling of secret happiness he wanted to keep to himself, not the intrigue of sneaking out to the beach at Tijuca with a girl who worked at his office. It was the odd happiness … He looked down at Gilda walking beside him and he noticed that she held herself very straight, her head high, her chin up, almost a snob. It reminded him of the way Margie walked, but it didn’t hurt; it just reminded him. And then Neil forgot about it, and they went outside into the warm, still-bright evening to find a cab.

  CHAPTER 14

  Cidade Maravilhosa… coração de meo Brasil.… There were lights strung along the Rio streets at night and bands playing everywhere. You would come upon one of them unexpectedly or it would come upon you; you would turn a corner and there it was, people marching and singing, people dancing in the street. You would be sitting in a churrascuria eating dinner and suddenly you would hear the music of a street band, so you would throw down your napkin and run to the doorway to watch them and perhaps even give in to their invitation to come along. You would turn a corner in the twilight and suddenly the air would be ten degrees warmer from the massed body heat, and young couples would be dancing in an area set off from the rest of the sidewalk by strings of ragged colored streamers. There would be chaperones lined up on the periphery of the group, watching, because this was a dance for the young. Lights bloomed above the streets during the hot, bright days, and people wandered about squirting one another with ether, dressed in half-naked costumes and sweat-streaked make-up; the old and the young and the in-between, even babies in their father’s arms, too young to walk or talk but not too young to be dressed as a black cat or a harlequin with round circles of rouge on their cheeks.

  Marvelous city … heart of my Brazil.… The people pushed against one another in a solid mass for hours to get through the doors of the Copacabana Palace Hotel the night of the Copacabana Ball. “Stop! Wait!” Margie Davidow cried to her friends, trying to stoop in the tightly packed mob. “I’ve dropped one of my contact lenses!” Wherever it had fallen, feet had ground it to dust. Policemen tried vainly to keep the line orderly.

  At the João Caetano Theater the seats had been removed and the Baile des Pederasts was being held. There were the usual yearly protests from some of the Rio citizens that it was immoral for men to disguise themselves as women in such an open way. But a high-ranking city official said firmly, “Somewhere these people have to divert themselves at Carnival.”

  At the Iate Clube there was a Roman orgy. Most of the women came as Cleopatra and most of the men disguised themselves as Nero. There was much eating of grapes, reclining on couches, drinking of wine, and much kissing.

  At the Hotel Gloria, where the Baile des Artistes had been held, there were now other balls, less extravagant, less expensive to get into. The music was as loud and unceasing, but the costumes were plainer, some of them not really costumes at all. Everything seemed less bright, the air was hotter, the revelry a little sad. Somehow, revelry in its natural state without the glittering trappings of make-believe is always a little sad, not because it is different from first-class diversion but because you can see more clearly what it is.

  There were balls for children, in the afternoons, with chaperones and soft drinks and elaborately bejeweled, feathered, sequinned costumes that made their tiny wearers seem like midgets, not children at all. On the solemn, beautiful faces of these parading child-midgets you could see the expressions they would be wearing in years to
come when they were adults competing for most unusual costume at the adults’ Carnival balls. There were Roman warriors, and knights, and butterflies, and fairy princesses. Leila Silva e Costa’s children attended, and Helen Sinclair’s children, and Mil Burns’s children. The children had a wonderful time, eating too much, dancing until they were exhausted, showing off. Their mothers, watching them, felt a little sentimental and sad. On these child faces, covered with rouge and lipstick and varicolored paint, smiling and shy and excited, was the look of the future that would come all too soon, and the look of a different past that would never come again to their mothers, who watched them and remembered.

  The afternoon that Neil Davidow and Mort Baker went to the Married Men’s Ball, Margie Davidow and Helen and Bert Sinclair took a streetcar downtown to the center of the city. There were handles along the outside of the streetcar and a narrow running board to stand on when all the seats were occupied. The Sinclairs and Margie stood along this running board, pressed against the side of the trolley, squinting happily against the wind, drawing back whenever cars whizzed along too close beside them, Helen and Margie laughing nervously when the streetcar shot through the tunnel. There was a colored samba band on the streetcar, playing the whole time, and whenever the car stopped for a traffic light the people clinging to the outside would jump off and dance in the streets, running to jump back on again when the car started to move. Children standing on the sidewalk aimed their water pistols and lança perfumas at the passengers on the outside, and the passengers shook their fists at them.

  On the sidewalk an elderly man dressed as a Bahiana, with rouged cheeks, flounced quickly along, swishing his ruffled skirts, his head held high, looking neither to left nor right, anticipating taunts and yells and pretending to ignore them. The ice-cream vendors were out in full force, and there were stands set up along the street where men sold hot foods. In some streets there was no traffic at all, only people strolling or dancing or gaping at the others. Some of the people had been out in the street for three days without stopping to sleep.

  Some people slept, sometimes. They went to bed at half past eight in the morning when the sun was bright and other people were soaking out hangovers on the beach. They slept fitfully in hot, darkened rooms, the air faintly perfumed from their damp, ether-soaked costumes that had been dropped on the floor or flung across chairs. They awoke to twilight, or to nighttime dark, breakfasting at dinner time, feeling like inhabitants of a nightmare world, putting on their soiled costumes again—or perhaps new, more imaginative costumes—and setting out for another ball.

  No one, anywhere, went to work. Sometimes, miraculously, mail was delivered. More often not. A mailman, bending under his sack of undelivered letters at four o’clock in the afternoon, suddenly straightened up and tossed all the letters into the gutter. Another mailman, neater, burned his. It was inhuman to think of making anyone work at Carnival. Rei Momo, the king of joy, was sovereign in the city.

  One night there was the parade of the Escolas de Samba—the samba schools—who had been practicing for this great night all through the months before. New songs had been written for the occasion, songs that had already swept Brazil with their rhythms, played by orchestras at all the balls. The costumes for the parade would be hand-made, and fantastic, the product of a year of planning and work and unexpressed dreams. First there would be floats. The parade would go on all night, and from the provinces the poor came to watch, bringing their children, older children and babies who slept peacefully on blankets spread out on the sidewalk of the main plaza. There were benches for early-comers to stand on, but they were all occupied by the morning before the parade. The plaza was paved, and there were little trees growing on it. There were twenty-five-foot-high painted wooden figures that had been erected for Carnival—a pirate, a Bahiana, a clown. The bases of these figures were hollow wooden rectangles, twelve feet high, and people helped each other to climb up on top of them, clinging precariously, to watch the Escolas de Samba parade from above the heads of the crowd. At the foot of the wooden figures were entire families, mothers with five or six children, some of whom had taken the bus from villages as far as a day away, and who had been sitting there surrounded by ragged blankets and parcels of food for as long as ten hours. For them this was the event of the year, the one night of magic and beauty, the only Carnival party that was entirely free.

  Every samba school from every district near Rio was represented, parading slowly by, each dressed entirely in its own chosen color: pale green, violet, red, blue. They did not march, they danced. They were all Negroes, the men dressed as wealthy Colonials of a period of feudal history not long past, with lace cuffs and satin jackets, powdered wigs, costumes compounded of history and fantasy. Reality, even tinged with nostalgia, had never been this beautiful. The women wore huge hoopskirts, pale satin with lace and glitter, white wigs, flowers, glass jewels. Some played instruments, all danced, all who did not play an instrument sang. Levanta Mangueira …

  The onlookers stood on each other’s shoulders, leaned against strangers, supported each other, gaped and cried out in wonder. “Look!” Helen said, pointing. “That Bahiana must weigh a hundred and fifty kilos!” The enormously fat Bahiana whirled by slowly, a great tray of fruit on her head, her bright pink hoopskirts bordered in lace, looking somehow all dignity and not ludicrous at all.

  The greatest ball of all, the climax, was the Municipal. Most tickets had been bought long in advance. It was in the vast Municipal Theater, the seats had been removed, there was a movable catwalk high above the theater floor for the parade of contestants for most beautiful costume. Costumes had been in the making for an entire year. Some of them cost ten thousand dollars, dripping in real fur and jewels. Later when the magazines published photographs of the winners the captions would all state the cost—fifty thousand cruzeiros, a hundred thousand cruzeiros. A huge ramp had been erected leading from the street to the front entrance of the Municipal Theater. The ramp was guarded by rails and police and lighted by floodlights. Below, in the streets, the poor people gathered, waiting to see the show of arrivals. There were television cameras and newsreels. If you were a celebrity you could buy a ticket to a box. The President had a box, so did the generals of the Army, so did the visiting movie stars from Hollywood who had been brought to Rio to add to the Carnival glamour. There were other boxes, ranging in importance according to their position around the ballroom. Below on the theater floor were the people who wanted to dance, or mill around, and those who had only been able to buy a “walking ticket,” which meant you had to push your way about all night with no place to sit and not even a glass of water from the harried waiters. Ether bombs were forbidden. Of course they were there.

  The Sinclairs, the Davidows, and Mort Baker had purchased walking tickets. They had hesitated at first, knowing it would be an ordeal, but finally Carnival excitement had won out. The Municipal was the climax of everything. Anything that came afterward was anticlimactic: you rested and licked your wounds. You could not miss the Municipal; it was the most beautiful ball of all.

  Margie, holding Neil’s and Mort’s hands, watching Helen and Bert, trying to keep the group together, felt like a mother hen. She didn’t like to see anyone get lost, especially at the Municipal, because if you lost whomever you were with you never saw him again. She smiled when she noticed the expression on Helen’s face; Helen was speechless with bliss and amazement. For herself, Margie was already tired. She had been to other Carnivals in Rio, and somehow she never seemed to find that same abandon at any of them that Neil and their friends found. She glanced fondly at Neil. He had been different somehow at this Carnival-happier, younger. It seemed funny to say that Neil was younger; after all, he was only thirty-one. But he had more energy and exuberance this week than she had seen him show in years. She had almost forgotten how handsome he was until this week, and suddenly it struck her with remembered pleasure. Neil had a wonderful smile.

  She had never thought of Carnival as either an en
d or a beginning, although she knew that to many people it was one or the other. Before, Carnival had been only a public orgy to try to enjoy, to get through, to watch and try to participate in. Margie was not much for mass letting-loose. She tried. But she hated to feel so hot that she was bathed in sweat, to feel her clothing shrinking and clammy, to know that her hair was dangling like limp string and her mascara was making black circles under her eyes. The discomfort of Carnival and the constant jumping and hopping, the pressure of strange bodies, the unexpected bruises that appeared the next day on private places of her body, were all a strain for her. She smiled whenever Neil looked at her; she tried to pretend she was one of the group, but secretly she was so tired she wanted to cry. Her legs ached, her back hurt, muscles she had never known she possessed pained and stiffened during the week of Carnival. She really went to Carnival because Neil liked it. But next year, she kept hoping, we will go away to Porto Allegre, or Preto d’Ouro, and stay there all through this madness, quietly and alone.

  How happy everyone looked! They looked as if they were drugged. Margie smiled, she put her arms around Neil’s neck and hopped up and down in the dance with him, trying not to lose her sandals, trying to keep her gold wreath from being knocked off by someone’s elbow, breathless, smiling, thirsty already in the hot, bright room, trying not to be wrenched out of Neil’s arms by exuberant, heedless strangers. It occurred to her suddenly that she did not simply dislike Carnival: it terrified her. For the first time she admitted that to herself. And having admitted it at last, Margie felt a wave of hopeless exhaustion. Why am I so different from all the others? she thought, looking at them. They seemed to have superhuman strength and endurance; they did not feel heat or thirst or physical pain. Someone’s shoe ground against her bare instep and she winced. She had a cramp in her side. Are they the crazy ones or am I?

  She saw Mort standing in one of the camerotes on the theater floor. Trust him to know someone who had a box. He was talking to a girl with bleached blond hair and he was drinking a highball with a lot of ice in it. Margie tugged at Neil.