by Rona Jaffe
Sergio, who had married wisely and well but not for love, stood here now beside the woman he would love wisely and well but never think of marrying. He spoke of love to Helen in her own language so skillfully that she often forgot that he thought about her in his own language, which contained not only different words but an entirely different meaning for their meaning. He was the one she would have to try hard to understand, because he deceived her by seeming almost every moment to be so much like herself.
They walked out of the packing shed to the jeep. Sergio nodded to some workers who were outside loading crates on to a truck. They greeted him respectfully and looked at Helen curiously but with their respect for him carried over to his companion, whoever she was. She pretended to herself, in this fairy-tale setting, that she was his wife. What would it be like to be the lady of this great feudal settlement? She could live here all year round, she told herself, and only go into Rio for occasional shopping trips or visits with friends. She would ride about the miles and miles of property on horseback, under the vast blue sky, and vegetate, and love every minute of it. They could have ten children, to fill all the empty rooms of that great house, to laugh and run about in the silent gardens, swim in the pool, fight over whose turn it was to take the canoe out on the lake. And Roger and Julie would be beside themselves with ecstasy in a place like this … it was all a dream. She would never marry Sergio, she would probably never even allow herself to think about it again. It was a momentary fantasy. And yet, how lovely it would be! A strange place like this, different from anything she had ever seen, made Helen feel that anything might be possible for her now; she could even change her life. She pictured herself learning about crops and trees, becoming gracious and lazy like a rich Brazilian housewife, making a tour of the estate her entire daily diversion. She even pictured herself in some anachronistic long-skirted dress, riding sidesaddle; it was an amusing thought. If she was ever lonely she could invite Margie to come for a week or two. Look how my life has changed, she would say to Margie, still not quite able to believe it herself. Look, Margie! Would either of us have imagined all this?
“I have to make a telephone call,” Sergio said. He headed the jeep back toward the square where the post office was.
“Here?”
“There are no phones at the house. My father won’t allow it. For a long time we couldn’t get one—you know how hard it is to get a phone in Brazil. And then one of my cousins got a job with the government, and he said we could have all the telephones we wanted. But by then my father was used to it this way and he refused. In a way, I like it. It’s peaceful.”
The one telephone at the back of the post office, which was actually the one telephone on the entire fazenda, was an old-fashioned wooden boxlike affair with a crank and a black outside bell. It looked like the kind of thing Helen’s Westport friends had used for candy dishes or rewired lamps. It took ten minutes of cranking and shouting to get the operator. Then they waited fifteen minutes, and finally the operator called back and said there would be a delay of an hour and a half to get the call through to Rio.
“Peaceful?” Helen said. “It would make me nervous to have to scream into that thing.”
“I don’t want to make you wait here,” Sergio said. “I don’t even want to wait myself. But this call is important; it’s to my father’s specialist.” He paced about the small back room, looking tense and angry. “I have an idea. Maybe I can get São Paulo. I know somebody who is going to Rio tonight. He can call the doctor when he gets there.” He cranked for the operator again, looking nervous but no longer angry.
Helen lighted a cigarette. How dreadful it would be if there was ever an emergency, she was thinking. You could die here before you would ever get word to the outside world. For the first time she realized how isolated, actually, they were here.
There was a great deal of shouting and repeating in Portuguese from Sergio to the operator, and finally he seemed to be talking to someone at an office. He lowered his voice to its normal tone. He was one of those people who smile and react facially when they speak on a telephone, even though they know the person at the other end cannot see them. She watched him and felt a sudden tenderness. He was so handsome when he smiled—that wolfine grin, a combination of charm and sexuality and a sheer lucky formation of features. And he never seemed to be aware of how handsome he actually was. She had always instinctively disliked people who smile at you while they are talking because they know they look attractive that way and want to bewitch you. Sergio’s face was always a reflection of his reactions to the other person; it was the most perceptively responsive face she had ever seen.
“There was a great deal of flooding because of the rains in São Paulo,” he told her. “I was afraid the lines would be down. It’s all right. We can go now.”
She passed him going to the door and they both stopped at the same instant and stood still, looking at each other. Sergio glanced at the closed door that led to the main room of the post office and then he took hold of her shoulders and drew her to him very slowly, looking into her face.
“You look lovely now,” he said. “You should see yourself.”
“I was thinking that about you. When you were talking on the telephone.”
He smiled. “We’re two beautiful people—to each other, anyway.”
“That’s all I need. I don’t want to take a poll.”
“If we took a poll you wouldn’t have to be afraid. You’d win. I’m not so sure about me.”
“I’m sure about you.”
“Kiss me.”
She kissed him, feeling a momentary instant of shyness at having to be the one to move forward first, as if it were the first time she had ever kissed anyone. But Sergio’s response was so instantaneous and urgent that she felt as though whatever she could give him, he would return it a hundredfold, so that no matter if she hinted or initiated any gesture of love-making she would always be the recipient and the one who gained the most.
The feeling of having been humiliated that had stayed with her since that terrible night with Bert two days ago began to slip away. It was something that had happened to someone else, years and years ago.
“We go to the house,” Sergio said softly, his arms still around her, his lips on her neck. “We lie down for a little while.”
He made it sound so companionable, so full of mystery and promise, that it was almost as if they might be going to lie down together on a bed to rest after all. She could not even remember when she had last made love in the middle of the afternoon instead of waiting for any planned and special time of isolation in her own unprivate household. Sergio had suddenly made the thought of the act of love seem as new as if she had not done it for years. She felt herself trembling in the hot sunshine as they drove in the open jeep, trembling inside and outside as well with a combination of anticipation and shyness and need. She felt as though nothing could make her stop this delicate shaking except the entire weight of his body on hers to keep her from flying apart.
He drove the jeep to the driveway of her small guesthouse. It was so still outside in the sun that Helen could hear the buzzing of the bees and the crack of someone hitting a golf ball on the lawn in front of the big house. When the golf ball whizzed across her driveway in a white blur she looked at it as unrecognizingly as if it had been a missile from outer space.
Guillerme followed it, running, shouting, waving his arms and his golf club. “I have been waiting for you!” he shouted. “Where have you been?”
“Play golf somewhere else,” Sergio said nastily. “You’ll break a window and Uncle will break your stupid head.”
“I’m bored.” He gave Helen a milky smile.
“Make him go away,” she said softly in English. “Please.”
“Get out of here,” Sergio told him. “Disappear. Kill yourself.” The words were sharp but he looked in control of himself again; he was even smiling to soften their unkindness. “I want to talk with my noiva alone. Go away.”
“What’s noiva?” Helen asked.
“Fiancée.”
She looked down at the path, taken with embarrassment.
Guillerme swung his golf club, cutting off the heads of flowers at the edge of the path. “Nobody lets me bring my girl friend here,” he said sulkily. “Do you think I like to be here? All the time with cows and horses. I wish I was in Rio with my fiancée.”
“You’d better not have a fiancée,” Sergio said. “I know what kind of girls you take up to that empty apartment. The janitor gives you the key. Ha! I know all about you. Go away and leave the grownups alone.”
Guillerme smoothed back his sun-streaked hair with one hand. He tried to look winning. “Helen likes me,” he said pleadingly, more to her than to Sergio. “You like me, Helen, don’t you? Let’s all go and have a drink together.”
Sergio gave his cousin a not unfriendly push. “I know what I’m going to do for you if you’re so lonely,” he said. “I’ll talk to your father next week. He has a very nice, dull, fat girl for you to marry. A rich girl. Someone like Glorinha.”
“No!” Guillerme howled in mock horror. “Not Glorinha!”
“She would love to marry you. Your father likes to play cards with her father, so I’m sure he would approve. She’d make a good wife for you; she’s just out of the convent. I’ll tell your father—”
“I wouldn’t support that fat cow,” Guillerme said. “One dress would cost me a year’s pay for the material alone.”
“Listen to the millionaire! She could support you.”
They were smiling at each other now and roughing each other up, Sergio giving his cousin a light punch and Guillerme fending it off and feinting a jab in return. Helen felt odd: everything was so open and unserious now that in one more minute Sergio would probably announce that he was going to go to bed with her and take her through the door. She didn’t feel like herself, she felt like some stranger, some casual girl who says, “Excuse me, I’m going to go make love now,” as if she were going off to the powder room.
“Let’s go and have a drink,” she said, interrupting them. Her voice sounded strained. “All three of us.”
They walked back to the house, Sergio in the middle. Guillerme swung his golf club and chattered happily, almost triumphantly, one arm linked through Sergio’s. Sergio was holding Helen’s hand. He glanced at her from time to time and his eyes were troubled. Guillerme ran ahead to see if he could cajole the key to the whisky cabinet from his uncle.
“He’s jealous,” Sergio said.
“That’s not much consolation for me.”
“I know, darling. What shall I do—kill him? Gun, sword? You tell me how.”
“Poison.”
“All right. In the drink. No, then he couldn’t marry Glorinha. I wouldn’t want to spare him that.”
“Would you really make an arranged marriage for him?”
“It would be good for him,” Sergio said. “But he won’t do it. He’ll marry someone he’s known all his life, but at least he’ll pick the one.”
“Did … you?”
“I chose her myself,” Sergio said, almost defensively.
“I mean, did you know … her … all your life?”
“Yes.”
“Now I know,” Helen said lightly. “I don’t know why I asked, because knowing that doesn’t really make me know anything anyway, does it?”
“You mean, do I love her? I told you before. Don’t talk about it here.”
“Can I ask you one more thing?”
“Her name is Mariza,” Sergio said.
Sergio’s father was enchanted enough at the presence of a young female in his house that he opened his liquor cabinet and allowed each one of them a small glass of cachaça. It tasted sickly sweet and much too strong to Helen, who choked over the first sip, but she felt honor-bound to drink it if it killed her, if only so that the old man could not pour it back into the bottle. Dinner was to be served early in order to give them all time to go to the movie at their own theater. The doctor had told Sergio’s father not to go to bed late, so he was having the movie shown at seven. There was one movie theater on the fazenda, and whenever any member of the family planned to attend, word was sent out with one of the servants and the picture was held up until the family arrived.
His afternoon rest seemed to have revived Sergio’s father. During the dinner, which was slightly less long and complicated than their huge midday meal, he leaned forward often to speak to Helen alone, made private jokes which she could not understand but which amused him, gave her alternately coy and covetous glances, and in short behaved as if the sight of her had convinced him that he could still use a girl instead of a hot-water bottle in his bed. He was always chivalrous about it all, never crass or outright, but there was something about his eyes—twinkling at the corners with patriarchal amity and probing from their depths with proprietary lust—that made Helen acutely uncomfortable.
The light chilled wine was delicious, and the evening air had become less muggy. There was the same cheese before dessert, followed by fruit and then a sweet creamy custard with caramel sauce. Sergio continued to discuss conditions in the outside world of Rio and São Paulo with his father, never including Helen since she was only a woman and knew only about dressmakers and hairdressers. It was as if she were already a member of the family. The butler walked silently about the table, bringing and removing plates with his deft, white-gloved hands. Guillerme mixed up all the food on his plate, as he had at lunch, and devoured it indiscriminately. Helen thought he would be a wonderful person to have to get rid of left-overs, since he didn’t seem to know what he was eating anyway once he had destroyed it.
It was so easy to imagine she belonged here. Even the father’s changing attitude, his growing intimacy, showed that he had accepted her. Everyone obviously knew—or believed—that she was Sergio’s mistress. No one seemed shocked. The old man was, after all, Sergio’s father, not his wife’s father. The children were not here. The tight, family air of the fazenda was dissipated this holiday and had been replaced by the spirit of fun. She wondered what the meals were like when Sergio was here with … Mariza. She remembered his wife only vaguely from the swimming pool: a chic, cool woman with a frighteningly knowledgeable look in her eyes. A woman who knew by instinct when her husband was becoming interested in someone else. Or perhaps knew from experience.…
“What is the movie tonight?” Helen asked.
“Who knows?” Guillerme said. “An antique, of course.”
“It will be amusing for you,” Sergio told her.
When they finally rose from the table a light rain had started. Helen could hear it outside on the leaves. Everyone seemed happy about the rain, because they were farmers. Sergio went to get the jeep and drove it under the overhang of the front porch so she would not get wet.
She drove with Sergio in the jeep, with the top up, safe and dry, while he whizzed down the unlighted dirt roads he had known since childhood. His father and Guillerme had gone in the father’s chauffeur-driven limousine, an ancient black Mercedes-Benz. The movie theater was a small yellow stucco building set on the edge of a village square of its own. Beside it was a general store with an open front, inside which Helen could see bolts of rough cotton materials stacked on shelves, huge sacks of rice and beans and flour open at the top and containing large tin scoops for measuring, and a wooden counter with glass jars of hard candies. On the other side of the movie house was a bar with swinging doors. A short distance apart from them was a small gasoline and repair station.
Workers were already gathered on the narrow, crude sidewalk in front of the movie theater, taking shelter under the overhang of the roof. The rain dripped off the edge of the roof into the dirt road, making puddles. Sergio drove the jeep up on to the sidewalk and let her out.
The workers looked at her and greeted her with respect. Some of them had women with them, their wives or perhaps fiancées, and many of them had brought their young children because the movie was ea
rly tonight. The children ran around playing tag and teasing one another, dodging the bicycles which many of the workers had used for transportation and which were now parked in a great clutter of wheels and chipped painted handlebars under the small shelter from the rain.
It was twenty minutes past the time the movie had been scheduled to begin, but it had been held up until the family should arrive. Helen and Sergio waited outside until the black Mercedes-Benz drove up, and then the four of them walked into the theater, together, a little like a royal procession, with the workers in their faded clothes parting and bowing slightly on either side.
The inside of the theater was painted a dull yellow, with stucco walls decorated with ancient movie posters, some of them American, which were beginning to come away at the edges from the wall. Helen remembered some of the movies from years ago—she had seen them when she was in college. Some of them she had seen later on television. The family had a box upstairs. Actually, they had the entire balcony, but it was a small one, with straight-backed wooden chairs set in three rows. They all sat in the first row. Below, Helen could see rows and rows of removable chairs, more like a schoolroom than a movie theater. When the family entered their box everyone in the theater looked up at them, as if they had seen visiting celebrities. She almost expected an unseen band to strike up the national anthem.
The lights went out and the film began. It was as much of an antique as Guillerme had said; flickering, scratched, and accompanied by a tinny soundtrack. She could hear the projector whirring in the small projection booth above them. It was almost impossible to follow the action of the film. Everyone spoke very rapidly in Portuguese and jumped up and down and broke into song and dance at odd moments. It was evidently a musical, set in a slum, with men playing music on instruments made of washboards and tops of garbage pails, and a hyperthyroid bleached blonde with a pompadour and blue jeans apparently saving all of these slum dwellers from losing their homes to a wicked landlord. The audience roared appreciatively at all the jokes, but Helen could neither hear very well nor understand the Portuguese slang. There were, of course, no subtitles. She felt completely out of it.