“No, Dennis. Not now.”
You held me tighter.
“I was just so angry. Sometimes it helps.”
“Let’s go to bed,” I said.
We unwrapped the bandages in the kitchen and you helped me put on a new, fresh layer. We left arm in arm, through the hallway, toward the bedroom. The light from our open door shone brighter as we approached. We walked, and with each step exhaustion glazed my body, froze me in a sarcophagus of cause and effect. A husband and a wife closed inside a box of light.
Celia called me a few days later and told me that she wanted to teach me Portuguese. I agreed, knowing full well that these lessons were only an excuse for us to talk more often. One phone call turned into two, then three, until she called four or five times a week, all under the pretext that she was my teacher and I was her pupil. I would pour a glass of orange juice and sit on the laundry room floor, phone in my lap, and listen amused as she grappled with which words she wanted me to learn, before we would dissolve into stories about each other’s lives.
My excitement over this new relationship felt like it was alive inside me, growing, wanting to be fed and stroked and played with. I told myself that I couldn’t tell you about Celia, for fear that my sharing it with you would cause the relationship to mature too quickly. You might ask me questions about her, questions I might not have the answers to. You might ask to meet her; you might want to form a relationship with her on your own. I wanted to get to know her on my own terms. I liked having Celia all to myself. The fact that she was for me, and only me, made each interaction with her purely effervescent.
Still, the urge to tell someone, anyone, about her clawed inside me, yearning for a chance to jump out, run around in the open. One morning I blurted it out.
“I think I have a friend,” I said to Marta. She was changing the sheets on our bed, and I was sitting on a chair by the window.
Without missing a beat, she said, “Is that who you talk to on the phone?”
I paused. I hadn’t realized she had heard me on the phone.
“Yes,” I said. “She’s teaching me Portuguese.”
Marta rolled the fitted sheet into a ball and tossed it toward the door. She smiled. “I don’t hear much Portuguese. Just a lot of giggling.”
It was a special power of Marta’s, to always know without precisely knowing.
“What can I say. Portuguese makes me laugh?”
“Where did you meet this friend? At the university?”
“No,” I said. “She’s not with the university. Dennis doesn’t know her.”
I said this more defensively than I’d intended and held my breath, waiting for Marta to respond. She shook a pillow out of its case and let it fall to the floor.
“Actually,” I continued, “maybe you shouldn’t mention her to Dennis. Not that you would, but—”
Marta stopped what she was doing and examined my face. Instinctively I began to chew on my thumbnail.
“It’s none of my business,” she said and walked out of the room with the laundry bundled in her arms.
After this conversation, I began to feel very exposed around Marta, like she had the ability to identify the worst parts of me, parts of me that I didn’t even know existed. Celia embodied the balance of safety and adventure I had been longing for after my father died, but I also felt shameful for keeping her a secret from you. The only way I could do both—stay honest with you while hiding my relationship with Celia—was to deny the excitement I felt about her. I told myself that our relationship wasn’t important enough to share, that it was an afterthought to my days, even though that was the exact opposite of true. I was constantly distracted by thoughts about Celia.
Marta made this denial difficult. She was the vigilant eye, always around, always aware. After Celia started to call more regularly, I would crouch into the corner of the laundry room with the phone receiver tight against my ear, trying to go unnoticed, even when Marta was just on the other side of the door. There was something so precious about our phone conversations, something so fragile and singular, how she’d unwrap each word like a present. It reminded me a bit of the time I went to visit my mother early on in our relationship, and you wrote me a note for every day I was gone. You even made a little box to store the notes in, each carefully folded into a tight square. One had a drawing of a heart with my name in the middle. Another a long rant about a text you were reading for your dissertation. It was an entrance into each other, and my conversations with Celia contained a similar tenderness.
“Lembra, that’s a good one. Eu lembro, você lembra.”
“Eu lembro,” I repeated. “I remember.”
Another day she taught me “I need.” Preciso.
“Eu lembro. Eu preciso. I remember. I need.”
I began to notice the shapes that my mouth preferred, the sounds that came easily and those that wouldn’t.
“I know. Saudades,” she said.
“I’ve heard this word before.”
“It’s like ‘I miss you,’ but it’s much more than that.”
It’s closer. It’s felt more deeply.
“You can have saudades for someone who’s right next to you,” she explained. “I can have saudades for you before you’ve gone.”
Eventually, though, the Portuguese lessons stopped entirely, and we felt comfortable opening up to each other as soon as we picked up the phone. I would tell her about Hartford and Boston, my times of loneliness in Brazil, about us. I’d often jot notes as we were talking, and I’d return to them days later to reflect and recollect. Here’s a selection of ones that I’ve kept over the years. I’ve compiled as much as eu lembro.
THE LABORER
I told her about my father, how he’d been a worker his entire life, committed to a string of union jobs, each lasting six or seven years, the serial monogamist of employment. When I was young he had a job setting up tents, those big white tents people order for weddings and graduations. I remember how magical it was as a child to run around the empty tent before they set up the tables and chairs, barefoot in the dewy grass, the sun echoing a dull light across the canvas peaks. I’d pretend he was a giant, hammering tree trunks into the ground, and he’d pretend I was a rabbit that he wanted to eat for dinner. I still remember the excited fear of running away, and the joy of being scooped up into his large arms and nuzzled.
Before the tent job he worked at a moving company, painted houses, bartended (though he quit that when he quit drinking), and worked as a hardware store clerk. When he worked at the tent job during the day, he took adult education classes at night to get his electrician’s license. That was the last job he had before he got Alzheimer’s. Everything my father did showed in his body—his callused hands and cracked cheekbones, the burns across his arms from live wires, the knobs he developed in his elbows from arthritis. When his body began to deteriorate—when he could no longer control his bladder and the angry confusion that followed, my father, the laborer, the man who would pick me up by the armpits and lift me over his head—it was like he lost his whole identity.
REAL ECUADORIANS
Celia’s childhood was different from mine. Her parents were bohemians who inherited money from her grandparents, and she found this fact shameful from the time she learned what inheritance meant. She told me about the decision she made as a teenager to move to Ecuador, when she declared to her parents that she wanted to relinquish her possessions and sell jewelry in a stand on the side of the road. She was eighteen; they told her she could go, understanding well enough that she would return. She took several buses across the continent and checked in to a hostel close to the beach. She would sit on the shore alone, eating shrimp ceviche from a paper cup. The first three weeks she had the hostel room mostly to herself, except for one quiet Australian woman who stayed only for a few days. Then two men arrived on vacation for the weekend. Th
ey were from the center of Ecuador, but they had been coming to the coast all their lives. They offered to take Celia out to the bars. She agreed, thrilled that she would learn the local spots from two real Ecuadorians.
The next morning, she woke up next to an abandoned barge on the beach, with no memory of getting there. Her purse had been stolen. She cried outside a fish market until she decided she would call her mother, who wired her money immediately. She returned home, and a few months later, she enrolled in acting school in São Paulo.
CRANBERRY GRANOLA
Celia burned through romance, it was her gunpowder, and it made me realize even more how much you and I had built our lives on comfortable love, on an understanding of commitment and shared details. You knew which side of the bed I preferred, what size toothbrush I bought, my favorite kind of cranberry granola. You and I met through a mutual friend in Boston, when you were still in your PhD program. Celia wanted to know everything about Boston, but it was difficult to conjure the specific images and sounds that I had once known so well.
One memory that came vividly to mind was when we had our apartment in the South End and would take walks to the Pru, Copley Square, and through the Boston Common and Public Garden. I remembered once passing by the Berkeley Community Garden, when all the plants were brown and covered for the winter, and a woman in a green straw hat was planting bulbs. When we got to the Public Garden, you stopped and took out your camera, a brand-new Nikon F, and asked me to sit on one of the statues of the bronze ducks so that you could take a picture. It’s such a small, underdeveloped memory. Nothing happened that day: we went to the Pru, looked at the stores, then turned around and went home. Celia loved it. She asked me to describe Boston again, and again, and again.
PATTI
After her experience in Ecuador, Celia gave up men for a long time. She had moved fluidly between men and women since she was a teenager; this was the first time she decisively said she only wanted one, and she chose women. She began dating one of her best friends, a woman named Patti, who baked glazed chocolate cakes and wore ruby cat-eye glasses. Celia described the relationship as romantic psychiatry, where Celia was the patient who couldn’t be sorted out, always longing for more time to undo the complex knots in her mind, and in repayment Patti made love to Celia however Celia wanted to be made love to, which, Celia realized as she said it out loud, wasn’t repayment at all, but one more way in which Patti would give and Celia would happily take.
MARRY A JEWISH WOMAN
Celia’s grandparents were Jewish immigrants who came to Brazil from Poland to escape the Holocaust. They didn’t know each other in Poland; they met in Santos. Two Poles adjusting to the tropics.
She described Santos as a rusted seaport with steamships rimming the horizon, cobblestone roads, and shrines devoted to Pelé. Her grandparents met working on an assembly line at a textile mill. After work, her grandfather would hang around the piers waiting for the cargo ships to arrive. He’d bring a pack of cigarettes and have a smoke with the traders.
“They wanted to know where to meet women,” she said. “He told me he only gave them directions.”
After years of working on the line, her grandfather was promoted to manager and saved enough money to propose to Celia’s grandmother. They were bonded by their love of the Jewish faith and their knowledge of textiles. What they didn’t learn in the factory, they researched at night before reading the Torah in bed.
Eventually Celia’s grandfather formed a side business on the piers. He inspected rug shipments to check for imperfections and charged a fee to the traders. The business grew, and he began trading himself. By 1973 her grandparents had offices in Santos and São Paulo, employees, a teenage son named Ronaldo, and a rug-trading business that spanned the globe—India, the Philippines, Egypt.
“Their hope was that he would one day take over the business,” Celia said of her father. “But it was the seventies. He didn’t want to work in an office.”
While his parents were in Santos tending to the business, Ronaldo stayed at their second home, in São Paulo, dropping LSD and building guitars. His parents gave him an allowance on top of food and a home. He had no urgency to leave his life.
“I wonder sometimes if it had to do with the Holocaust,” Celia said, her voice low, as though she were asking herself.
“How do you mean?”
“They wanted him to be happy. They wanted him to feel freedom, deep, in a way that they couldn’t.”
“Did they remember the war? They were children when they came to Brazil.”
She paused.
“Of course. Even I remember the war. It’s in my bones.”
The one rule they had for Ronaldo was that he had to marry a Jewish woman. Instead he fell in love with a girl from Lebanon, Celia’s mother, at a bookstore café in Pinheiros. His parents never recovered. They continued to give him money, even after they both died, but they never recovered.
THE NIGHT BANDITS
Celia inherited her family’s house in São Paulo—a two-story home with a roof covered in plants, at the bottom of a steep hill in Perdizes—when her grandparents passed. Celia required solitude, and the house gave her that, but she still suffered through deep bouts of loneliness. So she found a couple to move in with her, Karina and Rafael, whom she knew through friends of friends.
Karina and Rafael were lovers and graffiti artists. “The Night Bandits,” they were called. Os Bandidos da Noite. They tagged the tops of skyscrapers with the silhouette of a female bandit, her face obscured with a black bandanna, her hair a single wisp trailing behind her. São Paulo had many talented graffiti artists, but it was the scale and height that gave the Night Bandits a particular edge.
Celia described Karina as a woman sculpted by clay drawn from a river: earthy, essential, hard in the sun, smooth when wet. A Capricorn sun sign, Celia explained, which meant she was grounded and persistent. Karina didn’t care about anyone who wasn’t born with dirt in their pockets and mud in their hair. She took her graffiti art with Rafael particularly seriously. She refused to reveal how they scaled such enormous buildings, sometimes forty stories high, at night, unseen, to spray-paint a twenty-foot-tall woman. Onlookers could see the image clearly from the street, her body so dark it looked like she had crashed through the building. She wouldn’t even tell Celia after living in her house for more than five years.
Rafael was a drifter, a talker, a charmer. Celia’s house was the first place he’d called home for more than a year, a fact that Celia took particular pride in, as though she was able to give him something that no other person had, perhaps not even Karina. Rafael often went to Celia when he and Karina fought. One night, Celia took him to the emergency room because Karina threw a small flowerpot at his head, cracking open his eyebrow. When Celia arrived at home and walked into the scene, Karina was still yelling at Rafael even after she had thrown the pot, while Rafael soaked up a dishrag with blood and potting soil. Karina insisted Rafael had provoked her, that she loved him but that he was killing her, then she stormed into their bedroom and locked the door. Celia convinced Rafael to go with her to the hospital.
Rafael got eleven stitches. To distract him while the doctor threaded through his skin, Celia tried to remind Rafael of why he loved Karina: you scale buildings together, you inspire art in each other, you paint each other’s bodies, you bring her coffee in bed, you listen to records and sing jazz and play guitar.
“You want to know how?” he said to Celia and told the doctor that he had permission to tell the entire hospital the secret process behind the Night Bandits. He didn’t care. “We break into a building in the morning, usually through the freight elevator, and hide on the roof for an entire day. It’s miserable—I spend the day in a panic. Then after eating nuts and dried papaya and drinking coffee from a thermos, when it’s too dark for pedestrians to see, I lower Karina in a metal crate with c
hains strapped to a pulley. I worry about her falling, about the chains giving out. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night with that sound in my head, the clack clack clack of loose chains rattling against the building.” He touched his palm to his wound and winced.
“Maybe I should just let go! Maybe we’d both be better off!” he said, and the doctor gave him a pad of gauze to dab his tears.
By the time Celia and Rafael returned home from the hospital, Karina had unlocked herself from the bedroom and moved to the living room. She was splayed across the couch, naked, her body painted with his favorite color—citron yellow—which he found so amazing that he forgot he was angry. But then he remembered and cried to her, “You can’t throw our plants at me, Karina!” His anger softened when she pressed her yellow body against his and whispered, “Eu sei, eu sei, querido.” Celia listened to them make love on the other side of the wall while she swept up the shattered clay.
We left in a hurry for our rain check dinner at the Provost’s. I didn’t even have time to dress myself properly. You roamed the apartment, picking bits of lint from the bedroom carpet, straightening books on the coffee table, checking your tie in the bathroom mirror. Circling, circling, and in my heart I felt stunted, like my arms couldn’t reach out far enough to break your frenzied rhythm. I took out the iron and pressed a white cotton dress, dashed on a smear of pink lipstick. This was the first time I could leave the apartment without bandages—my palms had finally healed enough. On our way out the door you mentioned, ever so slightly, that we had left on time for once. I asked you to grab the bouquet of tiger lilies and walked out the door first.
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