by Rona Jaffe
Sergio swam quickly to the edge of the pool in a shower of spray and climbed up. “Hurry,” he said. “You have to dress for lunch.”
“A dress or slacks?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He held out his hands to pull her up to the side of the pool, thrust a dry towel at her, and then they were running breathlessly to the house. Helen had the strangest feeling that she was a young girl again, that they were both only in their teens, dating and in love under the considerate eye of the family. The whole household, silently, seemed dominated by the presence of Sergio’s father. It was not anything anyone had said; it was simply the way Sergio looked at him and he looked at Sergio and at her.
She felt it more clearly at lunch, when all the conversation through the entire meal was directed to the father and for him. He sat at the head of a long, polished, wood table, with beautifully hand-embroidered linen mats at each place. Sergio sat at the foot, and she and Guillerme across from each other at the middle. There was a large space between each person at the table, which necessitated speaking in a rather loud voice. It was a long, enormous meal, with course after course, most of them unfamiliar to her. With each course the father turned to her and said proudly that the food had been grown on their own farm. Even the cheese came from their own cows. There was a light, delicate Brazilian wine. The butler who served all this was still wearing the white gloves, and Helen wondered if he were very hot.
“He has been with me for fifty years,” the father said, gesturing at the butler, who continued walking around the table with platters while they talked about him, as if he were entirely deaf. “He came here as a child of five. He was brought as a companion for my younger brother, who is dead now. They were exactly the same age. Have you these same companions in your country?”
“Many years ago … yes, I think so.”
“It is very good. A poor child has a good home, then stays to work for the family. I was in the United States in nineteen twenty-six.”
He smiled, remembering. “I went to many speakeasies.”
“It is much different now.”
“What else is different?”
“Oh, everything,” Helen said. “The buildings. The old buildings are gone, many of them, and new buildings have been built.”
The father nodded politely but he did not seem very interested. For a while he concentrated on his food. Helen wondered how such an old man could eat such a heavily spiced, large meal every noon in the heat of the day, particularly when he already looked so white and frail. “I like to go to the Riviera,” he said. “I take my servant there with me every year. We go to Paris, too. Do you like Paris?”
“I have never seen it.”
“No?” He seemed horrified. “You come to Brazil and never go to Europe?”
“My … husband works here.”
“Ah. Very good. I understand.”
“These plums and pears come from our own trees,” Sergio said. “Eat them with cheese, Helen; it’s good that way.”
She gave him a weak smile and tried to eat, for him at least, if not for the father. She pushed the food around on her plate, trying to make it look as if she had eaten a great deal, when actually she had been able to force down almost nothing. She sipped some of the wine.
Sergio and his father began to talk about the management of the paper factory. Helen was relieved that she did not have to say anything any more. Guillerme kept looking at her across the table as if he were trying to figure out to whom she belonged, and that made her nervous. She dropped her fork on the floor. The butler immediately brought another one, on a small silver tray with a white doily on it. She felt as if the meal were going on forever. Guillerme said nothing at all, but looked at her, and gorged himself, mixing all the food together on his plate as children sometimes do. She had never seen a family that liked to eat so much; they seemed to devour everything with an intense loyalty, because it came from their farm (they kept mentioning it to her) and because they thought it was the best in the world, and because indirectly they had created it themselves and therefore it had to be eaten and appreciated and complimented upon and brought back for second huge helpings. Actually, it was all delicious, but she was almost ill with nervousness and the dining room was very hot.
Finally the butler brought tiny china cups half filled with sugar and poured the strong black Brazilian coffee into them. Helen drank her coffee without stirring it, quickly, hoping she could get at it before all that sugar melted. Even so, it tasted like sirup.
“You don’t have a spoon to stir your cafezenho?” the father asked, concerned. He glanced at the butler, who sprang to attention.
“Yes, thank you. I like it this way.”
The father looked at her as if she were crazy, and then smiled indulgently and chose a long cigar from a silver box. The butler lighted it for him. Then the old man stood, with obvious effort, the butler at his side. The lunch was over.
She had thought she would be alone with Sergio after lunch but instead the old man insisted on taking her on a tour of the house. “The doctor says I should take a rest after lunch,” the father said, “but I don’t listen to him.”
“You should,” Sergio said.
“Ah.” He put his arm around Helen’s waist. “I’ll rest in heaven.”
“That won’t be for a long time,” Sergio said quickly.
“Did I say it wouldn’t?”
The house was built on two floors, but it was very large. There were corridors with room after room leading off them, a white breakfast room separate from the dining room where they had had lunch, an office, a library, the living room, another living room, six large guestrooms, which had formerly been rooms for the old man’s children, and before that rooms in which he and his brothers and sisters had grown up. His other brothers and sisters, Sergio’s uncles and aunts, were either dead or traveling in Europe, except for one brother who lived on and operated a neighboring fazenda.
“At Christmas the whole house was filled,” he said. “All the grandchildren, and friends. Parties every night. What a noise!” He gave Helen’s waist a squeeze. “You must come back when there are more friends here. It will be more amusing for you.”
“Thank you.”
Sergio’s father occupied an enormous suite. It had the best view in the house, looking over the gardens, and it had evidently been reconverted from several rooms. Helen felt a moment of pity for him, as it must be for him now, taking over rooms that other people had gone away from forever, converting loneliness into solitary luxury. She wondered why he had never remarried.
“This is my bedroom,” he said. There was a huge, old-fashioned double bed, with a canopy. All the furniture was of the dark, heavy, carved, antique Brazilian kind that she had seen once in the museum in Petropolis. “How do you like my paintings?” He pointed with great pride at four water colors that hung on either side of the bed. They were of young girls, naked to the waist, with enormously overblown and uptilted breasts and shapely legs in black mesh stockings. They had the faces of twelve-year-olds, with innocently pursed lips, rosy cheeks, and flowers in their hair. They were even worse than calendar art.
“This one is called ‘Beautiful Hawaii,’” the father said. “See the lei around her neck? Do you like my little girls?”
“They’re … lovely.”
In one corner of the room Helen noticed a font for holy water, which seemed to have been intricately fashioned out of solid gold. Next to it there was a large oil painting of a nude woman reclining on a sofa, the kind you used to see hanging over the bar in a Western saloon. On the opposite wall was an oil painting of a saint with a gleaming halo, his eyes piously upturned to sacred thoughts and away from the nudes. Beside it there was an ivory crucifix, with the figure of Christ on it.
The dresser, which was as long and heavy as a coffin, bore an assortment of prescription bottles, liquids and pills, and glasses and spoons. And beside them, as casually put there as any decoration you might see on anyone’
s dresser, was a small bronze pornographic statue portraying a goat doing something to a nude woman that was only suitable for him to be doing to another goat. Helen looked away from it quickly, but not before the old man saw her eyes.
“Do you like my statue?” he asked, and began to guffaw. “Isn’t that funny? A friend sent it to me for my birthday.”
“His seventieth birthday,” Sergio said, but he looked at Helen earnestly, with apology in his eyes. She did not know whether his feeling for his father was awe or respect or pity or love, or perhaps a painful emotion compounded of all four. She did not know what she would do if she had a father like his, whether she could accept his senile eccentricity with such filial loyalty that she would even bring someone she loved to be a part of it. It was all very new to her. She moved away from the father’s encircling arm and sat in a chair far away from them both. She felt very much alone.
“You have to rest,” Sergio said firmly to his father. He guided the old man to the high bed and helped him climb up on it. He removed his father’s tie and shoes.
“Don’t help me,” the old man said. “I’m not dead yet.” But his voice was much weaker than it had been during lunch. “I want this beautiful girl to help me, not you. Go away.” He smiled weakly at Helen, a pitiful effort at a lecherous grin, and closed his eyes. Next to the clean white pillowcase his face looked a soiled gray.
“Let’s go,” Sergio whispered in English.
They walked quickly and quietly out of the room, down the silent corridor, and out into the bright sunlight. The sunshine was a relief; Helen felt cleansed. Birds were chirping and calling and singing from trees everywhere, and the hot air sang of its own heat. There was life in the thick grass, and insects crisscrossing in the air. A gardener was putting red and white striped canvas cushions on the tiles beside the swimming pool.
“I hope you weren’t offended,” Sergio said. “I forgot about that statue.”
“It’s all right.” She leaned down to take off her shoes, and felt the live grass under her feet. “I guess people have to hold on to life in their own way.”
“You are a tender woman,” he said. “You will always make someone happy.”
“You?”
“Me. Others too. Whoever loves you.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Helen said.
“It doesn’t have to be forever. One day is a gift. You saw that with him. All he has now are days. They told him months ago he would die. There’s something wrong with his blood.”
They walked on for a while in silence. “I’ll take you for a tour in the jeep,” he said.
They drove on the narrow road around the lake, and Helen saw ducks swimming on it, and several small bridges, and a canoe pulled up to the shore at the water’s edge. Then they drove down another road past green en tout cas tennis courts, immaculately kept and deserted, their white tapes gleaming in the sun. Farther on there was a soccer field with bleachers.
“The futebol field is for the workers,” Sergio said, pointing.
“For the workers!”
“They have to do something with their spare time. Do you like horses?” He drove up a bumpy side road past flower gardens, and Helen saw stables and a few horses wandering about in a large enclosure. Sergio stopped the jeep outside the gate and they walked through. The horses were in their stalls, each stall with a plaque with the horse’s name on it. Emperor, Sultan, King, Omar Khayyám, Vizier, Pasha, Mahmud. And at the end a stall with a white pony in it and a plaque that said: Roy Rogers.
“My son’s,” Sergio said. “He’s crazy about America.”
“So funny. And your father’s practically never heard of it.”
“Is that so different from the generations in your country?” He took her past another row of stalls. “Polo ponies.” He patted one horse’s nose and spoke to it. Then he took her back to the jeep. “We can ride tomorrow morning if you like. Do you like to ride a horse?”
“I haven’t done it since I was a child at camp. I wasn’t made for the feudal life, I guess.”
“That’s all there is to do here. Eat, swim, ride horseback, play tennis, walk, play cards, sleep. My father and Guillerme’s father manage the farm, and now they are teaching Guillerme to do it. I think he will do it well.”
They drove past the paper factory, an old-fashioned building with tall smokestacks, and then through some fields where sugar cane grew. The land stretched out on either side until there seemed to be no end to it except the sky. No planes crossed the blue sky, no cars appeared on the long dusty road; it was like a land out of another time. On one side of the road there were rice paddies, and then later there were little hills where lettuce and beans and tomatoes grew, and farther on there were miles of coffee bushes with the small green coffee beans on them. There were fruit trees: pears, plums, oranges, papaya, mango, avocado and banana trees. Every tree that did not give fruit was a tree that could be cut down to make paper from its wood. Everything on the fazenda could be of some use.
Then the road led past what seemed like a housing development, with small private houses surrounded by gardens and wooden fences. There were chickens, and small pigs in pens, and children playing in the front yards and on the road, who looked up to wave respectfully when the jeep drove past.
“These houses are where the workers live.”
“They’re so pretty. I wouldn’t mind living in one myself,” Helen said. “That pink one, for instance.”
“I’ll take you to the liquor factory.”
It was the strangest feeling; she felt like someone out of Gone with the Wind. The closer they came to the distillery the more people there were near the road, and every one of them knew Sergio, or at least recognized the jeep, and every one of them greeted him the way a peasant greets a feudal lord. They drove through a small village square with a chapel, a post office, a general store, a bar and a movie theater. There was a horse-drawn wagon standing in front of the post office. Sergio stopped the jeep while a priest came out of the chapel leading a line of children. The priest and the children looked up at him, smiled and called greetings, and walked on across to the other side of the village square.
“What town is this?” Helen asked.
“It’s no town. It’s just part of the farm.”
The chapel bells were ringing when they drove out of the square, and when they approached the distillery Helen could smell the heavy sweetish odor of crushed sugar cane. She had never seen a distillery, but this one looked more like a still from Prohibition days than what she had imagined. Everything was very primitive. There was a large shed made of boards, where great piles of cut sugar cane were stored, and in front of this shed two oxen stood patiently attached to a wagon while flies bit at them and circled greedily, attracted by the sweetness of the sugar juices and the live flesh. Barefoot workers brought armfuls of sugar cane to the wagon, and the wagon brought it to another shed, where it was apparently crushed in some machinery. There was an overhead system of tubes that transferred the juice to a huge vat standing outside another shed. The air was heavy with the sweet-sourish, slightly spoiled smell of fermenting sugar cane juice that would eventually make cachaça, the firewater white liquor of the poor.
The vat had been decorated with all sorts of odd pictures cut from magazines and comic books and pasted on, and even with some old whisky bottle labels. Evidently the workers had some affection for it. Inside this last shed there were tables set in rows, where young barefooted girls and a few very young boys, really only children, were pasting labels on sealed bottles of the colorless cachaça, and packing them carefully in excelsior-lined crates. The young girls nodded shyly when they saw Sergio, and a few of the older ones stared and then giggled and looked down at their packing, pretending to be very busy. Evidently he bore the status of young lord of the manor even with these adolescent girls, who were at the hero-worship age and seemed to have long-distance crushes on him.
“Did you ever taste cachaça?”
“No. Can we tr
y some here?”
Sergio reached to take a bottle from the table and then stopped. “We’ll get some at the house. I forgot, all the bottles are counted. My father will think one of the girls took it.”
“Well, can’t you take it and tell him?”
“You forget, darling, this is a business. There’s plenty at the house.”
Yes, Helen thought; locked up. This was a strange family, stranger the longer she knew them. If not a millionaire, the old man was as close to it as anyone wanted to be. But whisky, which came pouring out of the cane of his fields, was locked up in his own home and doled out as if it were either precious or dangerous. In many ways, ill and old, he was already slightly dotty, but to his grown and mature children his word and will were law. She knew it was only she, the outsider, who remarked on this. His children and grandchildren accepted him. But the outside modern world had already started to come into his ordered, protected life and take things away, just as she the outsider had driven up this morning in a car with his youngest son. The polo ponies stood patiently in their stalls, the tennis courts were rolled every morning and then stood all day in the sun untouched by anything but insects and butterflies. The canoe rested on its side on the shore of the lake. The ducks swam. The servant put out the red and white striped cushions at noon and then took them away again at dark. His children traveled by ship and plane and soon by jet. The priest in his long black coat and flat black hat walked slowly across the square in the village that was only part of the old man’s farm, followed by a line of village children, while the old man’s own children traveled to Europe and America to gape as tourists at the priests and children of other villages.
Roy Rogers stamped in his stall next to Omar Khayyám. Guillerme, who was learning to be a feudal lord of all this land, parroted the slang of love songs that had been written by a people whose unchaperoned dating habits he was probably already beginning to copy. The old man, who was the past, changed only with the unpredictable personal quirks of the old and ill. Whatever odd thing he did, Helen realized she could understand it. But it was Sergio, here with her, the man she loved, who was really the difficult one to understand, even though he seemed so much more simple.