by Rolf Potts
It didn’t take long for the Adonis to make his exit. He saved face by studying his showy watch for a long time, as if he was worried he’d miss some appointment. Then he sighed loudly and stood up stretching. The smell of some expensive spice-laden aftershave lotion flooded the carriage as he slithered out. My companion smiled at me. It was a weary smile but a smile nonetheless.
“Thanks,” I said in Russian. For a moment he was confused.
“Thanks,” I said again and followed up by telling him who I was. He was still confused.
“Are you a dream?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Then you must be an angel.” This made me laugh. No one had ever mistaken me for an angel. I told him this. He told me his story.
He was from Moldova. He had been a music teacher, but times were so tough that he’d been reduced to playing his fiddle in the streets. His wife, also educated, was unemployed. His child was sick.
“All children are sick in Moldova now,” he said ominously as the train lurched, giving his statement an edge of unreality, like something in the theatre or in a dream. Even I was beginning to wonder if we were in a dream, the desperate man and the holidaymaker thrown into the same dark carriage of someone’s imagination. He was on his way to Lisbon where he told me many of his compatriots had gone in search of work.
Of course, they were “illegals.” He’d paid “some people” $4,000 that his family and friends had managed to put together after selling their instruments, their furniture, their wedding rings. The “some people” gave him a visa that had him down as a sports trainer and then smuggled him across borders in a truck along with several other single men. “We did not speak to each other,” he said sadly. “We might have been able to help each other but it’s a dangerous business and it’s better if you don’t speak.” He was left with a railway ticket, no money and no help in some back room of a dive in Padua. He thought he was going to die. He hadn’t eaten or slept in days. After forty-eight hours he was kicked out of the room and he made his way, somehow, to the station where he met the pilgrim. The pilgrim! I suddenly saw her in a different light. Thank God for the pilgrim! His words were beginning to slur. I could see he was exhausted. I gave him some fruit that I had in my bag and ordered him to eat though, as he said, he was beyond the point of hunger. “You are an angel,” he kept saying, not as a compliment to me but as a way of explanation. It was, I had to admit, an amazing thing that he had chanced upon me here, in the first-class carriage of the night train to Nice, the smart train of European travelers, the Riviera train, the romantic train from Venice. I told him to stretch out and go to sleep.
“You are safe,” I repeated more than once, “You are safe and I will watch over you.” Like an angel. I grimaced at the thought. He gave me his passport and his rail ticket.
He was worried about the inspector.
“I’ll sort him out,” I said.
“You have got to be an angel,” he murmured and fell asleep instantly, the dead sleep of total exhaustion. While he slept I wrestled with a whole battalion of thoughts. How to help this man? The inspector was easy. If necessary, I’d pay the difference. But what about afterward? What about getting him safely to Lisbon? I switched on the small light above my seat and studied his ticket because I suddenly had a terrible thought that he’d been duped again by “those people.” I compared the ticket to my own. It looked legitimate enough. I could see that there were two more changes of train he had to make after Nice. I remembered the pilgrim saying she was on her way to Spain. I wondered if I could count on her. I rummaged in my bag and found a pen and a rather decent envelope containing the account from a hotel in Singapore. I screwed up the account and threw it back into my bag. And then I wrote on the envelope, first in English and then in French, a “please can you help this traveler” set of directions that I figured he could show to people if he got into trouble on his journey to Lisbon. This feverish burst of activity made me feel better, as if I had somehow managed, by my inadequate scribbling, to stave off the strange sense of panic and gloom that had suddenly filled my night. I took a look at the “illegal” who was dead to the world and I switched off the light.
The train was skirting the coast. In rapid succession the window was black or filled with the lights of some coastal town. Occasionally there was the sea, blue-black in the night, chopping between the two colors, flecked with lights whose source was invisible but might have been the moon. At one point the train seemed to move through a beach party like an invisible guest. I saw people dancing on well-lit sand, I heard loud music and voices, and I saw the shore dotted with figures of partygoers who’d been hard at it all night. Summer nights on the Riviera. It must have been five o’clock in the morning and, like the people on the beach, I had not slept. When the light began to stream into the carriage, the Moldovan woke with a deep shudder. He looked around confused for a moment but he recognized me and remembered who I was.
“An angel!” he exclaimed and gave a real smile.
“Like hell!” I said and we both laughed. There wasn’t much time left until Nice. I gave him the envelope, which, in the light of day, revealed itself as a fragile and shabby piece of armor against the world. Nevertheless, I translated it for him. After his sleep, he was a different person, quick on the uptake, humorous and almost optimistic. He told me that his friends would be waiting for him in Lisbon.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“You can always rely on friends,” he said. And I didn’t doubt that someone would be waiting for him in Lisbon, no matter when he arrived. My own family, after all, had been refugees in some distant past that had never been thrown in quite the same relief as it was now. I felt I had to help him. I did not consider the implications of his being an “illegal.” Up close, like this, you don’t worry about the status of a person. Legal. Illegal. Here was a man in a state of desperation. The worry was to get him to Lisbon. I left him in charge of the luggage and went in search of the pilgrim. I found her sprawled on the floor of a carriage full of backpackers. It was a cheerful unruly scene. Normal. I wondered why I’d ever gone into first-class. The pilgrim followed me into the corridor where I told her his story.
“Oh!” she sighed, full of compassion, her tiny mouth forming a perfect circle.
“He’s a good man, you have nothing to fear from him,” I said. She nodded.
“A good Christian man.” I was shameless. She was convinced.
“I will look after him until Spain and then I will put him on the train to Lisbon,” she said with righteous zeal. I was very encouraging. Together, we made our way to first class, our mission clear and our mutual admiration at a high point. The trolley came around. I bought everyone breakfast. We were cheerful. I acted as an interpreter, establishing some communication between the pilgrim and her charge that I thought would make their ongoing journey easier, or at least their silences more comfortable.
In the station at Nice, we parted ways. I gave him some American dollars. Dollars speak all languages. He gave me a telephone number of a relative in St. Petersburg so that I could ring to say I’d seen him and so that I could find out if he made it to Lisbon. Presumably, word would get back to his wife in Moldova. I watched him hoisting his plastic bag and the pilgrim’s large backpack over his broad shoulders. The sun was already hot and the platform was crowded with holidaymakers. My own train to Les Arcs Draguignan and the village in Provence where I was staying with a friend was already at the station. I pushed my way through the crowd moving farther and farther away from the point where I had said goodbye to the music teacher, farther and farther away from the point where my dreams of Venice had collided with his flight. I looked for a second-class carriage and threw myself in with the holiday throng.
Olga Pavlinova Olenich is a widely published Australian writer who lives in Melbourne.
CATHLEEN MILLER
Sacrifices, Desires, New Moon
In Brazil, things are often not as simple as they seem.
Standing on the balcony in my wrap-around bathrobe, naked underneath, I ponder jumping the twenty feet to the ground. I really don’t like this idea because I can’t see in the tarry blackness of the new-moon night, and I remember seeing a flagstone patio somewhere around this end of the house. I might hit that stone and break both legs, and then I certainly would not be able to escape. Even if I land on the grass—so lush and green here in Brazil during the rainy season—the movement would alert Denilda’s four dogs and they would set off again.
Yes, the dogs . . . but now after being jolted awake only a few minutes ago my foggy brain stumbles onto the notion that the dogs are not barking, which is an impossibility considering all the commotion in the house. They must have killed them. If they killed the dogs, then these guys mean business. She was talking to me now, the survival voice, ordering me around.
At this point the adrenaline kicks in and the synapses of my brain start firing like a Formula 1 engine—because I realize another fact: the invaders know that the cook and her husband, who always sleep downstairs in their little room by the laundry, left yesterday for their hometown. After all the madness of Carnival, Denilda had given the servants the weekend off and we are alone in the house . . . a fact the man in the black ski mask surely knows. This is an inside job, and you are screwed.
I try the French doors, the only exit off the balcony, and they are bolted from the inside. I’m hoping the man will just get what he came for and leave. But this line of reasoning is cut short because at the other end of the balcony I see a flashlight beam swing an arc across the night air and come to rest a few inches from my bare feet. I flatten myself up against the house hoping he won’t see me, my arms outstretched against the white stucco wall like Jesus hanging on the cross. The flashlight beam moves back inside, but now through the windows I can see it moving down the hall toward me, scanning the empty rooms. Any second he is going to open this door to the balcony and stare me in the face. Quickly I weigh the options of jumping to the ground versus being shot or kidnapped . . . and who knows what horrors await me then? I determine that anything is better than having them take me, and this is when the voice tells me: Hang from the balcony, in the darkness he won’t see you.
I throw first one leg then the other over the railing, feeling the rough wood chafe against my naked thigh, then lower myself till my weight is suspended by my hands gripping the cool cement floor as I dangle above the ground. But once I’m underneath the balcony I spy a wooden pole holding it up, grab it and shinny down. As soon as my feet hit the moist grass, I start running. I consider hiding in the jungle till they’re gone. Don’t go there—it’s full of snakes. My wobbly legs threatening to give way, I move onto that wretched dirt road, running down the mountain at midnight, over the rocks, the burrs, the branches, the cow manure squishing between my toes, expecting to hear shouting or gunshots any minute, for who knows if they have a lookout stationed at the entrance to the estate. I won’t notice the damage to my bare feet until days later but strangely, in that instant, another thought leaps to mind: You came to Brazil to get a story. Well by God, you’ve got one. Now all you have to do is live to tell it.
This particular story had begun two years prior, back in California at a time when I was desperately trying to finish a biography I’d been working on for ten years. I told a friend that as a reward to myself I intended to take a long vacation to Latin America to relax when I finished the book. As if the universe were listening, the following week I found a brown paper package covered with foreign stamps stuffed into my mailbox. I opened it and hurriedly skimmed the cover letter, which invited me to come to Brazil to write the life story of a woman named Denilda Lizardo dos Santos, all expenses paid. The pitch included a binder of photos of her estate on top of a mountain above Paraty, with breathtaking views of the Atlantic coast in the distance. This is where I’d be staying.
I researched Denilda and the man who had sent me the package, Jiri Havrda, a Czech documentary filmmaker; he had been friends with Deni for thirty years. Like many of her acquaintances, he had long encouraged her to write the story of her life, one filled to the brim with outrageous incidents of fortune and mayhem. Jiri, experienced in organizing large projects as a producer, volunteered to bring together the elements to put the book project in motion, including finding an author and a translator since Deni spoke no English. Having read Desert Flower, a book I’d written, Jiri determined I was the right woman for the job and he’d composed a very professional pitch designed to lure me to South America.
My collaborators sent me 200 pages of notes Denilda had put down—a record of her life’s events. She had the rather remarkable pedigree of having been a political dissident, maid, refugee, television game show personality, cargo boat cook, exotic dancer, laundress, factory worker, jewelry maker, shepherd, trafficker of leftist guerrillas, fashion model, dishwasher, La Scala Opera slave, restaurateur, chorus girl, innkeeper, and Michael Jackson impersonator. Who could resist this assignment?
When I landed in Rio de Janeiro, waiting for me was Deni herself, a tall muscular negra brasileira with a blinding white smile. Also waiting, with a look of nervous anticipation, was Fernanda, who would serve as our translator while I interviewed Deni. She was very pale, of Italian descent, and had the bulging, luminous black eyes and dramatic mannerisms of a telenovella star. They loaded my two bags into a hired car and the driver remained stoic and silent while the women chattered on like multilingual magpies. “Cachy . . .” Fernanda opened the questioning, demonstrating what I’d learn was Brazilians’ common inability to pronounce Cathy. “We are dying to find out your zodiac sign!”
Four hours later we pulled into the UNESCO heritage site of Paraty, a picturesque colonial village of white stucco buildings and palm trees on the southern coast of Brazil, a resort town popular with Italian and French tourists. I later learned that before I arrived Denilda had been sauntering down Paraty’s cobblestone streets bragging about the “famous American writer” who was coming to research her life story. In a town of 35,000 this type of news travels far and wide and fast.
A mud-splattered Toyota pickup pulled up next to us and I noticed with some alarm that our driver was now taking my red suitcases and tossing them in the back of the 4x4. Next he grabbed my backpack containing $5,000 worth of electronics equipment. “Wait!” I hollered just before he launched it onto the truck bed. “What are you doing?”
“Cachy, we are getting in this vehicle,” said Fernanda.
“Buy why?”
She and Deni grinned. “You’ll see!”
A young white guy with crystalline blue eyes sat behind the wheel of the Toyota, his biceps bulging out of his t-shirt. He adjusted his baseball cap in the rearview mirror, then slid his hand down his jeans. I had no idea at this point in the journey that I would later be seeing him with those jeans off. “This is Cellino, my white son,” Deni said. They both laughed since he was actually the caretaker but it was clear they had an easy and affectionate relationship.
I sat in the back seat of the cab as we left the city. Soon we were chugging in low gear up a rutted dirt road the color of rust. My head bounced on my shoulders as we pitched in and out of gulleys, waded through streams, past waterfalls, whined over boulders, and circled around sleeping cattle. “This . . . is . . . the . . . worst . . . road . . . I . . . have . . . ever . . . seen!” I sputtered and my words strobed with the motion of the truck. “And . . . that . . . includes . . . India . . . and . . . Africa!”
The lurching stopped at the top of the mountain and I hopped out of the cab, caught my breath, and spun around to see the view: thick clumps of forest, blue ridges of distant mountain ranges, horses grazing on the green velvet hillsides, a gorge which fell away sharply hundreds of feet, and off in the distance sailboats bobbing in the harbor of Paraty. Beyond that the Atlantic Ocean. Overhead turkey vultures floated on the thermals, their wings spread majestically. I twirled around—turning and turning—taking it all in.
This magnificent estate
called Casinha Branca would be my home for the next couple of months; it was a somewhat homespun affair having been constructed by a local contractor who hauled the building materials up that awful road on the back of a mule. The design was based on a fantasy that had incubated within Denilda since her mother listened to a song called “Casinha Branca,” a tune expressing the desire to be in a green place, in a white house with a balcony, and watch the sunrise—which I did from the balcony of my suite overlooking the Atlantic.
I quickly settled into the idyllic rhythm of life in the wilderness, waking up early to be greeted by the fresh morning air coming through the open French doors of my room on the second floor. I’d walk out to the balcony and admire the view, the hillside sloping quickly down to Paraty and the sea beyond. About a half mile down the rusty ribbon of road in the distance I could see the little shack where Cellino, the caretaker, lived. There were no other houses around to disturb the tranquility, only the cacophony of tropical birds chattering, greeting the dawn.