It Is Wood, It Is Stone

by Gabriella Burnham

  “Don’t worry,” she said and pulled me toward her. “Look up. Smile.”

  Celia danced the best. I saw men watch her and try to move in, but she kept her attention on me, pushing my chin up when I stepped on her toes.

  Then the guitarist played a song I had heard many times before. So had the crowd. If it were any other moment or any other place, they may have rolled their eyes—we heard this song in grocery stores and pharmacies, in car radios and restaurants. I even heard it at coffee shops and in elevators back home. But the familiarity was welcomed here. We all wanted to sing along. The guitarist tapped against the side of his guitar and sang the first lines to “Águas de Março” without any chords. Immediately the room erupted with joy.

  “É pau, é pedra, é o fim do caminho.”

  It is wood, it is stone. It is the end of the road.

  Then the guitar strings broke in and we danced. Celia took my hand and pressed me close to her, then twirled me away. We sang loudly, looking at each other straight in the eyes, the lyrics flowing from my smiling mouth in a way Portuguese never had before.

  “É a vida, é o sol. É a noite, é a morte.”

  It is life, it is sun. It is night, it is death.

  A young man who had been watching us from the side finally decided to step in. He wore an open green vest and a crystalline smile. He asked if he could dance with me. Celia obliged, finding it amusing, but stayed nearby. He danced at a respectful distance, perhaps too nervous to venture closer. Celia had stopped to have a sip of beer and clap for the guitarist. I had painted an image of us in my mind, catching fish off the shore, growing papaya and lime trees behind a thatched roof hut, with our own pier leading to the water, sleeping on the sand with Claudius curled at our feet. This already felt like our life. It is the waters of March ending the summer. For a moment, I had forgotten we had anything else.

  The young man must have noticed that I hadn’t paid him much attention. As soon as the song ended, he walked away without saying goodbye.

  I went over to Celia.

  “I’m tired. Let’s go back home.”

  We shared a cigarette on our walk to the hostel. On the way, we saw Victor and Felipe riding their bicycles over the cobblestones.

  “No photos!” Victor shouted.

  “Cara de pau,” Celia muttered, laughing, and we turned in to the hostel gates, the camping ground baked with the smells of soil and cut grass.

  We went to bed in our separate bunks, clicked off the light, and let the lava lamp run. Then I heard Celia whisper: Psst. I think I hear a noise.

  “Do you hear the noise?” she asked.

  I told her no, I didn’t hear a noise.

  “I think the boys are outside. Felipe and Victor.”

  I paused to see if I could hear anything. I couldn’t—only the chirr of crickets. I heard her rise from her bed and climb down the ladder.

  “Could I sleep next to you?”

  “Are you really afraid?” I asked and moved over to the edge of the mattress.

  “I would prefer it, yes.”

  We both turned on our sides to fit, our arms unnaturally rigid. I could feel the awake energy between us, as if every hair on my body was pointing toward her. We lay like this for a few minutes before Celia spoke again.

  “Are you asleep?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She reached an arm around me, her armpit cupped on top of my shoulder, her hand limp against my stomach.

  “I need to stretch,” she said. “Is this okay?”

  I nodded, but I feared she could sense my heart pounding through me. Her breath deepened, not with sleep but with strength, so that her chest pushed against my back and her exhales blew against the top of my head.

  “Linda,” I heard her whisper, then she inched her hand across my stomach, lifting up my gown. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  Again I said nothing. I let her move her hand deeper and retreat, deeper and retreat, like a cat toying with a fish at the edge of a pond. I rolled over, her face and mine now touching, and kissed her chin—I couldn’t make out where she was in the dark—then inched up and found her mouth.

  I have a memory that I thought, No, I can’t do this, and that I tried to get out. Dennis, I remember thinking. Where are you? But I also think it’s possible that I invented this memory, as a defense, because in the moment I didn’t stop. I started, I kept going, I allowed her, I got on top of her, I moved down her body, dragged her clothes down and up. I harnessed a sharp memory of my own pleasures. I remembered what I enjoy, what firmness I liked, what slowness, what my body needed, and I gave it to her. I ducked below her belly button and closed my eyes; it felt as though I could have been pressing my mouth against a warm, soft-bearded face. Except that Celia smelled like the expensive Italian soap she’d packed, and when I brushed my lips against hers, she kissed back with the press of her hips and the tips of her fingers against my forehead. Go on. I listened to her voice and followed. At first I was eager and nervous, tongue stiff and imprecise, but she held on to my shoulder and slowed me down. I kept pace, and she folded her hands behind her head. I realized that I already knew the way—her pleasure was mine and mine hers. The curves of our sensation mirrored each other, up, around, and down again. I too enjoyed the mystery when all sensations but touch and sound evaporated. She shook, grabbed on to my hair, and pulled me up, hugged me, kissed my mouth, and then let go.

  I wasn’t looking to turn away from you; I wasn’t looking to replace you; I was searching for another version of myself. I found her in Celia—with her I was adventurous, I was new, I was the green of a leaf just peeking from the bulb. We pushed the sheets off the bed and pulled the fan up against our feet. She curled up and fell asleep pressed against the wall, and I stared, wide-eyed, at the springs underneath the top mattress.

  The fan stopped working. Somehow it had unplugged from the wall. I dragged myself down to the tiled floor and sucked in the coolness. Celia noticed that I had left the bed and reached her hand down for me, then shuffled off and lay on top of me.

  “It’s too hot, Celia.”

  She was heavy on my back. I couldn’t move. She stuck her finger between my legs and dragged it through the moisture.

  “Please, Celia,” I said, and she got up.

  “Do you mind if I shower first?” she asked and took the towel hung on the back of the chair.

  It was the day we were meant to leave. I felt dense with confusion, like I couldn’t remember the order of things: when we’d left, when I last saw you, how long Celia and I had been together. I couldn’t measure what I’d done: Was it big enough to swallow our entire history, or so small it didn’t even deserve an explanation?

  I told myself that love isn’t measured by how much we shared. What love is measured by, though, I couldn’t answer. The shower shut off. I got up from the floor and took my turn. She packed for me while I washed and dressed.

  “Ready?” she asked. We slung our bags over our shoulders and left, her arm hugged around my waist.

  At the bus station I noticed a pay phone across the street. I told Celia I needed to make a call while she bought our tickets. I wanted to see if you were home.

  I twisted the cord around my fingers and read the devotions etched onto the side of the booth: R+J, N+O, L+T. It was Marta who finally picked up. I felt calmed to hear the sound of her voice.

  “Aló?”

  “Oi, Marta. It’s Linda. Is Dennis home?”

  “No. He’s teaching.” She paused. “Where are you?”

  I saw Celia across the street. She had bought a red Popsicle and was leaning against a bus, dragging her tongue against the melting sides.

  “I went to the beach for a few days. I’ll be home in the evening.”

  “Okay. Should I tell Dennis?”

  I told her yes, to let you know I’
d called.

  “Tá bom,” she said, and for a moment the line went silent. “Are you with the woman you know?” she said. “Your Portuguese teacher.”

  I felt the sudden hollowness in my stomach.

  “Yes,” I said and wanted to apologize. “I’ll be home soon.”

  I hung up and walked back across the street to Celia. She handed me her Popsicle, and I bit off the top.

  “Did Dennis answer?” she asked. It was strange to hear your name come out of her mouth.

  “No. It was Marta.”

  She smiled. “How is Marta?”

  “She sounded worried, actually.”

  She handed me my ticket. “Let’s get on the bus then.”

  The ride back to São Paulo was tense. Celia steered the conversation gradually. She told me about a play she hoped to bring to her theater, about how she needed actors, how she thought São Paulo might not be the right location.

  “Will you talk to Rafael when you return?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Let’s see how badly Karina destroyed the house.”

  Neither of us brought up what had happened the night before, until the bus pulled into the station and we said our goodbyes.

  “Last night,” I started to say, and I could feel the emotion rising inside me.

  “Last night was for us and us only,” she said and kissed me on the cheek.

  The moment already felt so far away, and a part of me knew our relationship had reached a pivotal point, in the way a star becomes a supernova before it descends into a black hole.

  When I got home, you pretended you didn’t hear me. I found you at the kitchen table thumbing through a textbook. I dropped my bag and you looked at me over your shoulder, then back down at the book.

  “Oh,” you said. “You’re home.”

  For a moment I thought maybe you’d prefer not to talk about it, so I took my bag and tried to move past you. As I approached, I could feel the fury surrounding you, the kind that develops after days of silent rumination. You had replayed this very moment in your mind over and over again in a way that I hadn’t. I looked through the door into the living room, through the window and at a tiny airplane passing through the sky.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m home. I needed some time away to collect myself, but now I’m back.”

  You stood from the kitchen table, your lips pressed together so hard they turned white. For the first time in our marriage I thought you might hit me. You had reached the point right before the break of anger where you parroted my words back to me. “Home?” you repeated. “Some time?” I had nowhere to go, no argument to make. I braced myself for the blow. But you didn’t get near me, which, at the time, felt worse.

  “I’m going to the library,” you said and picked up your books.

  “Maybe we should talk.”

  “I have nothing to say to you. You should think about what you want to say to me.”

  The door slammed behind you.

  Your reaction dipped into the pits of my anxiety. I thought about how you might return even more angered. By leaving I had threatened the viability of our marriage, and that terrified me. But this terror rubbed against the rejuvenation I felt from my brief stay in Paraty. Celia had pushed me toward my own body, toward my sense of physicality in the world. I had caught a glimmer of myself as someone who dug into her life with teeth and let the juice run down her chin. It was worth it to feel sticky afterward, but it wasn’t worth it to lose you.

  When I had resigned myself to being alone in the foggy cage of my thoughts, Marta suddenly appeared before me, in the living room, with her purse in her hand.

  “Marta.” I gripped my forehead and felt the beads of sweat soak into my fingers. “I didn’t realize you were still here. I’m sorry you had to hear all that.”

  She explained that she was supposed to have left thirty minutes ago. She was running late. She had missed her bus.

  “The next one is in two hours,” she said.

  The consequences of my decision extended beyond our relationship. Marta, too, would feel the impact. And although she was stronger than the mistakes I’d made, it wasn’t fair that I had implicated her.

  “Well,” I said, sitting down in the kitchen chair. “I may not be the best company right now, but I’d really love for you to stay awhile.”

  I could see her ponder whether she should leave. She looked to her left down the hall, and then toward the back door. Then she looked at me.

  “I can’t stay long,” she said. She put her purse on the table and sat in the chair next to me. It was such a relief that she agreed to stay, as though a vise had been released from my lungs.

  Marta pulled out her fan and waved it at her face as she leaned her head against the kitchen wall. I could feel the breeze blow back to me, and I leaned forward to feel some more.

  “How was Dennis?” I asked. “While I was gone.”

  She hummed and rocked her head back and forth. “Oh, he’ll be all right.”

  “Do you really think so? Even if I’ve done something horrendous.”

  “Maybe you have. But that doesn’t mean he won’t forgive you. He’s angry because he loves you very much.”

  This made me sad, not only for you but because Marta was being so compassionate.

  “I’m sorry I brought you into this. If you want us to leave, I understand. We could go to a hotel. You shouldn’t have to suffer because I turned up and caused this mess.”

  She laughed. “So you want to leave again? I know what it feels like to want to flee. But you cannot sacrifice your family for a taste of something new.”

  “I don’t even think I want to flee anymore. I thought that was what I wanted, but I think more so I wanted to disappear. I wanted to become so unburdened that I would actually become invisible. And at the same time, I wanted desperately to be seen.”

  I slumped onto the table and rested my face on the cool surface. “I’m exhausted.”

  “You know, you remind me a little of my sister. She has made some bad decisions in her life. But she’s not a bad person. She hasn’t learned enough about herself to see how she reflects out on the world.”

  As I studied my reflection in the table, Marta began to tell me about her sister, Felina, and how their relationship had evolved since they were children. I sat up and listened. I didn’t interrupt her; I didn’t ask questions. I just listened. She told me that at first she bore the burden of protecting Felina from the wildness of the world. Now they carry that burden together. Even then I understood that Marta was giving me something valuable by telling me about her life. At one point, in what felt like an enormous accomplishment, I got up to make us coffee and she let me make it for her. She did not stop speaking.

  I want to pass on to you what Marta gave to me, her life’s story, but I know it should be told in Marta’s own words. My attempt to recollect what she said won’t do the story justice. If I learned anything from our time in São Paulo, spent with Marta, with Celia, with you, it’s that our collective experience should shape how history is remembered. I want my story to be remembered by how I evolved not only for myself, but for the important people in my life.

  MARTA’S STORY

  My family claimed me by body parts from the day I was born. I had my father’s toes, collarbones, and crooked hairline; my mother’s spine, bowed lips, and soft belly. She’s ours, they told our aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors, who had filled our creaky living room to witness my birth. They said they prayed on it before I was born, whose parts would be whose. And when I came out slick like a peeled plum boiled in sugar water, they saw in me the same life that they had seen for themselves.

  * * *

  I grew up in Atibaia, a small country town an hour away from São Paulo, during the 1964 military coup d’état. My brother, sister, and I were all born where we were raised and where I
still live today, in the house my father built in our neighborhood, Portão. Pai worked as a bricklayer, so he knew how to make a strong home, one that could stand against flooding and hailstorms. Other houses were strung together with found materials: plywood, black tarps, plastic piping, palm leaves. We were lucky, our mother told us nearly every day, because ours had sturdy walls and a roof, and a yard that kept a chicken coop, a beehive, and a brown-and-black mule named Beto.

  I still have a drawing Mãe made of our house when we were children. Its thick shades of brown and green, a dirt road out front with dusty dogs wading in a dry basin. Our neighbors, many Tupi and African like us, tilled soil, picked strawberries, sold roses out of a metal pushcart in town. These were the people we danced next to in the congada line—our community, our church family. Today, though, my neighborhood is a faint reflection of what it used to be. I see houses with satellite dishes and swimming pools. Where a person once stood in the field, a machine now rumbles.

  * * *

  My sister and I slept in the bedroom, my brother in the living room, and my parents in a shed in the back. Once a month, Pai would take Beto into town to get drinking water and big burlap bags of rice and beans that he slung across Beto’s hind legs and hobbled up the steep roads. Pai liked these trips because he liked to be alone, even when he was around people. I saw myself in him. A snail rolled into a shell. He had deep, dark skin, the kind you fall into, and that was mine too. The other side of the moon kind. A crystal lake at dusk kind. My mother’s complexion turned the world cross-eyed. She looked browner than the Japanese farmers who lived in the strawberry fields, but lighter than Pai and me, and darker than Felina and Henrique. Depending on the angle of the sun, she could be any number of constellations. Her mother called her light, her sister called her dark, the rest called her parda, a color in between.