■ Felina, the princess in a high turret, birds twitching on her shoulders, frogs leaping at her feet
■ Felina, the chocolate torte his mother made for him when he was a child
■ Felina, a cat that crept in shadows, balanced on windowsills a hundred feet in the air, her spine contorting and twisting to better fit tricky angles
■ Felina, the lonely prisoner, and Luis, a chink in the wall
A few days after she told our mother, I found Felina soaking in the bathtub, something she hardly ever did. Only her breasts, face, and hands peaked from the surface; the rest of her body looked dark underwater, dressed in tiny bubbles that clung to her edges.
I asked her, Have you talked to Pai?
Our father had all but disappeared from the house since the news broke.
He’s spending more time on Pedra Grande, she said.
Yes. He takes a bottle with him.
I don’t expect him to understand, she said, and sank her face into the water. I held on to her hand.
It will be different when the baby is here.
* * *
Felina specifically requested that I go and live with them in São Paulo. She told Luis she needed my help through the pregnancy—that there were things happening with her body that he wouldn’t understand. Felina had dealt with terrible sickness, vomiting day and night. She was skinny in her face, arms, and legs, but with a bulbous stomach, like a black widow spider. Through this sickness she grew intolerant of most people, and Luis was at the center of this intolerance. So he obliged, and we left my parents, my brother, our chickens and bees. We left Atibaia and moved to the city with Luis.
Luis’s home was a gap in space between the other places he had to go. The walls were bare but for a calendar, three years old, hung in the living room. He had a small futon, where I would sleep, and a bedroom with a mattress and a mirror propped on the floor. There weren’t enough cups for each of us to have a drink at the same time, so when we arrived Luis opened a beer from the fridge and poured a little into two glasses, then took the rest himself.
I shouldn’t drink, Felina told me, and gave me her glass.
* * *
My mother begged for me to keep watch over Felina in São Paulo. Though I was just eighteen years old myself, teenage girls were being kidnapped off the streets, shoved into vans, and held for ransom or sold into slavery. In my mother’s words, they would see her and the baby as a two-for-one deal. So I made sure Felina only left Luis’s apartment when I left the apartment, and I only left the apartment to go to and from my job as a maid at several homes in Moema.
* * *
We had heard stories about rich people who wasted water in the shower so that we, the poor people, couldn’t have any. When I thought about these water wasters, I pictured the white couple who owned the jewelry store in town in Atibaia. I didn’t know what real rich was until I began to clean houses in São Paulo. My family was poor, but we weren’t as poor as the farmers in the field houses. I grew up in a neighborhood where everyone worked outside—we all had cracked skin and callused palms. Even the store owners in town had to go outside to lift a box once in a while. I didn’t know how precious hands could be, like the underside of a white rose petal, until I met São Paulo professors. I once saw a dona cut her finger while flipping a newspaper page; a single drop of red blood dotted the real estate section.
* * *
Luis had a few different jobs—as an usher at a downtown movie theater, as a gas station attendant, as a weed dealer at the University of São Paulo. Because of his boyish face, he could easily slip in and out of the campus without provoking other dealers or police officers, or police officer drug dealers, who ran the neighborhood. In fact, the day Luis and Felina met he was hustling in Atibaia, in front of the ice cream store on the square. Felina was eating a coconut ice cream cone with friends after church, when Luis approached her and gave her a hand-rolled joint with a red heart drawn in washable marker on the side. He was visiting his aunt, he told her. They walked behind a plywood wall at a nearby construction site and finished her ice cream, smoked the joint. Felina knew even then that she would be bored by him, but she was fifteen and fascinated by the idea of independence, by the idea of an escape from our parents’ farm, by an escape to São Paulo. Motherhood was her ticket out. She didn’t understand that youth was the best kind of freedom, and she had squandered it for a bit of semen and pot and an admiring eye.
* * *
Her romance with Luis and São Paulo was short-lived. Felina fled in the middle of the night, when she was seven months pregnant. She stole just enough money from Luis to pay for the bus fare back to Atibaia. She left without telling me. Luis and I woke up and found her note taped to the refrigerator.
Luis,
Visit us in Atibaia, always, whenever you need, but
I do not want to raise her in São Paulo. I want her to run
barefoot in the mountains.
My dear Marta,
I will see you at home.
Kisses,
Felina
Luis dug his teeth into his bottom lip and shrieked from the inside of his mouth. Then he pounded his forehead against the refrigerator door, once, and then again, and again. I stood frozen, pretending to be invisible, sure that if I remained still he might forget that I had been there at all. But then he shriveled, decayed, and cried heaving sobs. I wet a dishrag and draped it across his forehead, then sat with him on the floor, my hand on his back, wondering if Felina had made it to Atibaia safely, if she was with my parents, and what they thought about her return. We sat for what must have been an hour, maybe longer, until the phone rang. It was my mother. She had used the neighbor’s phone to call Luis’s.
Where is Felina?
She’s not with you?
That is exactly where she is. And you let her leave the apartment without you?
Mãe—she didn’t tell me she was leaving. She left in the middle of the night.
And you didn’t wake? How could you not have woken? Does Luis live in a castle?
I heard something, but I thought maybe she was going to the bathroom. I didn’t think she would leave for good!
You need to keep an eye on your sister.
Is she safe?
Yes. She is eating a banana in the living room.
* * *
I stayed with Luis in São Paulo until Felina’s baby was born. There were several reasons for this, the biggest one being that I did not want to go back to the farm. Since I had started making more money, enough to give half to my parents and keep half for myself, I could see a future outside of Atibaia. I could see a future in São Paulo. I had been cleaning apartments for the university for about three months by the time Felina left. I liked working for the professors. They too hoarded books in unusual places—underneath their beds, on the kitchen table, beside the toilet, on the windowsill. I liked to dust and replace them in their specially organized disorder, carefully fanning them in wobbly stacks. Sometimes I would open up the pages and search for graphs, just to admire the scattered dots that, to me, looked like birds taking flight. It was all new, and now, in a few short months, everything from my life before appeared worn in my memory; a bare tree covered in caterpillar webs.
* * *
It took me weeks to call Felina after she left. She wouldn’t call me for fear that Luis would answer, so that gave me space to approach her on my own. I was upset that she left without telling me. But that anger broke like a fever in the night, and more than ever I missed my sister.
I called the neighbors and asked if they could get Felina for me. I gave them the number to call me back, then waited. I pictured Felina, pregnant, pulling herself off the rocking chair my father built and dragging her bare feet across the grass.
Olá? she said as soon as she heard the
receiver pick up.
Felina.
Why haven’t you called me?
You left without warning.
You left me every day when I was in São Paulo.
I didn’t leave you. I was working.
I was alone in that apartment, day in and day out, with nothing but my thoughts. I could have died from boredom.
What did you want me to do? Not go to work?
That’s why I left. Now you can go to your job without worrying about me.
I came to São Paulo for you.
And you stayed for?
My job, filha.
I heard her wince, like the baby had pressed against her.
I don’t want to fight, she said. Will you be back to see the baby?
I’ll come back to Atibaia when the baby is born.
I heard her breath blow into the phone.
I miss you, Marta. I hope the baby comes soon.
* * *
None of the professors I worked for knew anything about Atibaia. Often I would have to point to the town on a map to prove that it was real. Because they hadn’t heard of Atibaia, they also hadn’t heard of me or my family or the people I grew up with. When they inevitably asked the question What was it like to grow up in Atibaia? I somehow found it easier to invent an answer rather than explain the truth.
I told them that I was an only child of two schoolteachers. I said that my parents had homeschooled me until I was eighteen years old. It made the professors feel comfortable, relieved even, that their maid wasn’t another poor black girl, and this gave me relief too. Each professor told the Provost that I was a top-notch maid: intelligent, forthright, discerning. I soon became one of their most in-demand employees. Like my mother, I have learned when it’s important to stay quiet, and when I can play guitar and sing.
* * *
I sometimes wonder, even still, how my life would be different if I had stayed in São Paulo instead of going back to Atibaia to help Felina. Would I have met a man myself? A rich, widowed professor who owned one of the apartments I cleaned? Would I have worked my way up the university hierarchy, a maid turned lecturer? Would I have saved enough money to buy my own apartment and my own car and start my own business?
In reality, I don’t think my life would have been much different than it is now. Maybe I would have married a man and spent my life cleaning the house for him. I can’t choose how far I want my destiny to stretch, as a girl from Atibaia, parts made from a black bricklayer and a maid. My years were stitched together long before my parents had begun to pray for something different, before the thread could come undone. I am happy with the life I have sewn.
* * *
This is how I weave happiness into my days:
■ I shell shrimp to make stock. I like to pull the translucent casing off of the white flesh and watch it boil.
■ I listen to my nephew Mateus sing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” in English.
■ I read the poetry books Henrique brings me, and I drink the wine he brings too.
■ I watch my mother sit in the first pew at church, tapping her foot to the sound of the organ chords.
■ I sit on the kitchen floor with Felina, after the children have gone to bed, and we read each other’s horoscopes. We chase imagined worlds together from the protection of our home.
* * *
The day Felina gave birth to her first child, Sebastian (a baby boy, contrary to what she’d dreamt), no one from the neighborhood came to witness. This was at Felina’s request. She only wanted me, Mãe, Pai, Henrique, and our aunt present. Not even Luis came—he claimed it would be too painful—but Felina didn’t even seem to notice.
She gave birth to Sebastian in the same living room where she and Henrique and I were born. My aunt took Felina’s hands and guided them to Sebastian’s body so that she could pull him into the world herself. She placed him on her chest, and he cried and cried and didn’t stop crying until he fell asleep.
He has your forehead. And he’s loud like you, my mother said.
He is strong like you too, I said.
I don’t know, Felina said, wiping his eyes and ears with a warm, soaked dish towel. I think this child is new. I think he knows more about himself than I could ever tell him.
You would hardly look at me after I returned home from Paraty, let alone speak to me. Instead, you took your anger out on the apartment. You left dirty plates next to the mattress where you now ate dinner; you spat toothpaste into the kitchen sink and allowed it to crust; you ate in the middle of the night and left sticky surfaces to attract ants and flies.
If there was a silver lining, it was that my relationship with Marta had taken flight ever since we spent those hours together, when she told me about her childhood in Atibaia. Though she and I understood the paradox in your aggression—that it was, in this sense, my fault—she knew that I was sorry and that I wanted to make it right. She didn’t blame me, she forgave me, and for that I was eternally grateful. We became unlikely allies during your time of anger, braving the passing storm together. One day I found her scraping a pan with eggs that you burnt. I apologized.
“Oh god,” I said. “Let me.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, removing globs of egg from the drain. “He spilled something in the bathroom that I’ll let you handle.”
Her humor and ease about the situation made everything a bit easier.
You began to come home from school earlier. You stopped offering office hours. You wrote and researched at home. Sometimes you even returned home for lunch and then left briefly for your afternoon lecture and returned again. You were afraid that I was going to leave you again, and I worried that if I left the apartment at all you’d explode, accuse me of abandoning you, and then wreck our home even more. So I stayed near you, even if we didn’t interact. The two of us, and Marta.
Celia didn’t call. I began to assume that I had done something wrong. Maybe it had been a mistake to sleep with her—maybe I had disintegrated a necessary distinction between friend and lover. I had been driven by a desire to know her body better than I knew my own body, to envelop myself in her sensuality, and though that desire felt complete, finished, I missed my friend. Her absence built inside the clock, the hands ticking slower and slower, hours clogged with minutes, until a week passed and I couldn’t wait any longer. I tried to call her. The phone rang. She didn’t answer. Another week passed. My thoughts evolved like the phases of the moon—sometimes whole, sometimes just a sliver, sometimes gone all together. I concocted situations: Maybe someone had died. Maybe she had left unexpectedly for work. This possibility only provided momentary relief until I unraveled it. Of course someone hadn’t died! How could it ever be so simple? I had to invent another horrific scenario to yield any comfort.
The truth is, I couldn’t divide my experiences into the nows, the forgottens, and the forevers, the way that Celia did. The past and the future entered and exited my thoughts like two rivers running against each other. This difference allowed Celia to keep me in her past, and made it impossible for me to remove her from my future.
One day Marta decided to cook a big lunch so we’d have to eat at the kitchen table together. She didn’t say so, but I knew that was her plan.
I sat down against the wall, expecting you to sit across from me, but you sat beside me (probably so that you didn’t have to look at me) as though we were two judges on a panel, watching Marta perform in the kitchen. You offered her suggestions and praise—Not so much salt for me, Marta; Linda put the colander in the upper cabinet; I like your shoes, Marta. Did you buy them in São Paulo?
She put plates of chicken Milanese in front of us.
“Nice that you are eating lunch together,” she said and smiled at me, then tried to retreat into the laundry room. You reached out your hand, desperately, and asked her to stay.
“Please. Eat with us!”
She didn’t verbalize her hesitation, just inched toward the laundry room.
“Marta,” you said again and caught her arm. “I insist.”
So she made herself a small plate and sat at the table across from us.
She ate in a hurry, finishing half her food before you were finished talking about your latest research on the American whaling industry in the eighteenth century. You broke down an entire whale from head to tail at the kitchen table: how they used the oil from blubber to burn lanterns, the bones for scrimshaw, the whale’s digestive infections for perfume and soap. I soon lost my appetite. When you finally stopped speaking to try a bite of food, Marta asked if you were on a break from school.
“No,” you responded. “Why?”
“You’ve been home more.”
You scoffed. “Ask Linda.”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s because she needs company.” You pointed your thumb at me.
“That’s not true,” I said.
Marta placed her utensils on the empty plate and edged out her chair.
“Getting more food?” you asked. “You should have some more.”
“I need to finish cleaning,” she said. “My sister will be here soon.”
“Don’t worry about the apartment,” you said. “We can live with a little dust on the shelves—”
“Come on, Dennis,” I interrupted. “Let her go.”
“So now everyone wants to leave!” you said and pushed out your chair. I thought you might cry.
It Is Wood, It Is Stone Page 16
