“There’s no ‘why,’ girl,” Nena replied. “The Senhora wants you. That’s that.”
“Is she going to steal my hair?” I blurted.
Next to us, a kitchen girl let out a whoop. Another giggled. Nena shook her head. I was never particularly attached to my hair, but it was mine and I wanted to keep it that way.
“Go before I beat you black and blue, and cut off your hair myself!” she barked.
The front of the house was silent. The maids spoke in whispers. From the front hall I could hear Old Tita plumping pillows in the sitting room. When she saw me in the doorway, Tita sighed, stopped her work, and led me upstairs, to the playroom. Graça was there. With grim determination, she dressed and undressed a series of glass-headed dolls.
“Here,” she said, flinging one at me. “Change her clothes.”
I’d never held a doll before. Her painted eyes were wide, her red mouth open in a dumb kind of awe.
“Why do they call you Jega?” Graça asked.
I met her eyes. “Because I kick and bite.”
Graça stared back, unimpressed. “It’s a stupid name. Probably the stupidest I’ve ever heard.”
I looked down at the doll in my lap so that Graça wouldn’t see me smile. “Do you like these dolls?”
“No,” Graça replied. “I used to play in Mamãe’s closet. I could try on her evening dresses. Her tiaras. But she didn’t bring any of her fine things here.”
I put down the doll and headed toward the playroom door. “Come on,” I said.
“Where?”
“Outside.”
Graça stood. “We can’t go there.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t say we could.”
“So say it. Tell me we’re going outside.”
Graça stared at the limp doll in her hands, then at me. “Tell me your real name first.”
Nena had told me my name—my given name—when I was old enough to remember it. Before she’d died, my mother told the midwife what she’d wanted me to be called. It was the only thing she ever gave me, besides my life.
“Maria das Dores,” I said.
Graça threw her doll into a pile of toys. “Dores, I’m bored. We’re going outside.”
I surprised both myself and Graça then by taking her hand. It was soft and warm, like a small ball of dough that I could easily work between my fingers.
* * *
—
She was Maria das Graças and I was Maria das Dores. Pick any name, starting with any letter of the alphabet, and add Maria in front of it and you’d name three-quarters of the girls from our generation, rich and poor—Maria Emília, Maria Augusta, Maria Benedita, Maria do Carmo, Maria das Neves, and on and on. There were so many Marias that no one ever actually called us Maria. We used our second names instead. So Graça was always Graça, until she became Sofia Salvador, and I was always Jega until she called me Dores.
Americans make my name rhyme with kiss or bliss. There’s no helping it. I try to teach people how to say it properly, the way it is said in Portuguese. “Do-res,” I say, “like dough. And then riche, very soft.” When they ask what it means I tell them without flinching. “Pain,” I say, “hurt.” There is always a frown after this. I understand why; everyone wants a name to mean something lovely. As if our names are our destinies.
Graça and Dores—grace and pain—what a perfect pair. The plantation was our kingdom. I taught Graça how to climb trees in the orchard, how to throw rotten acerola berries at the houseboys, how to sneak oats to the donkeys and pet their soft snouts. She taught me how to play marbles and jacks, how to tie a bow, how to sit straight with our ankles crossed. We stood on barrels and peeked inside the mill, watching the men, their chests glistening with sweat, make the cane into sugar. We stayed away from the fields because the cane leaves were as sharp as Nena’s knives; all the cane cutters had scars across their arms. But after harvest the land was brown and bare like a cake without icing and Graça and I roamed wherever we pleased. Sometimes we escaped to the river for secret swims and returned sunburned and sweating to the Great House, where Senhora Pimentel stood on the back porch (I was not allowed to use the front door) waiting for us.
“Where have you been?” Senhora Pimentel asked Graça. “You can’t play too long in the sun! You’ll brown your face and never be married.”
This was the threat Senhora Pimentel used against Graça in her feeble attempts to discipline her daughter: Don’t chew your nails or you’ll never be married! Don’t scrape your legs on trees or you’ll never be married! Mind your manners or you’ll never be married!
Graça was a Little Miss, and a Little Miss’s destiny was to be married and have a Great House of her own. Riacho Doce’s Great House and all of its lands weren’t meant to be Graça’s; they were destined for her brother, who, much to Senhor Pimentel’s frustration, did not yet exist. During their frequent arguments, Senhor Pimentel asked his wife why, after months exposed to the fresh air and tranquility of the countryside, she wasn’t feeling better. Senhora Pimentel would respond that their move to Riacho Doce hadn’t been for her sake, and she wished her husband would stop pretending it was. They had, she insisted, moved away from the capital for him, and his misguided dreams of becoming a sugar baron. If they’d stayed in Recife, the Senhora yelled, Graça would be in a proper school, have proper friends, learn manners, wear hats and gloves, and, later, be surrounded by a dozen young gentlemen who would want Graça as their wife. “She has the Pimentel name,” the Senhor inevitably responded. “Even if she’s as dull as a post, boys will line up for her. What’s in her head doesn’t matter, querida.”
“My daughter will never be dull,” the Senhora replied.
If Senhor Pimentel believed that, by virtue of Graça’s being a girl child, she was insignificant and therefore invisible, then the Senhora believed it was her duty to give Graça substance and make her be seen. Back then being a woman of substance meant you were charming but never flirtatious, funny but not frivolous, likable but not desperate to be liked, and pious but not self-righteous, and, most important, if you lacked beauty then you had to have grace. A fine family and plenty of money were also requirements, but weren’t things you could be taught; they were prerequisites. I, of course, had neither family nor money, but this didn’t stop Senhora Pimentel from including me in her daughter’s lessons. She expected both Graça and me to excel, but for different reasons: one day, Graça would be a Senhora, and (if I was lucky and smart) I would run her house.
Senhora Pimentel staged elaborate make-believe parties for the three of us, placing a dizzying number of utensils around our place settings and making us memorize which fork was for fish and which for oysters, which glass was for sherry and which goblet for water. Other days, the three of us took long walks together, far from the Great House. To protect their skin, Senhora Pimentel and Graça wore large straw hats that made them look like cane cutters. During these walks, the Senhora taught Graça and me to count in English: one, two, three . . . Then she taught us English words for all the things we saw during our walks: bird, sugar, man, tree, knife, donkey, cart, mill, smoke.
In those days, proper young ladies were required to learn either British English or French. Brazilians from Senhora Pimentel’s set considered anything European the pinnacle of good taste. In Recife, our capital city, the British ran a railroad company, operated enormous textile mills, and even had their own country club and private cemetery. In her youth, Senhora Pimentel had attended a British school and spoke passable, if a bit labored, English. Those English words she taught us entered my brain and stayed there, caught, as if I’d been hungry and had set a trap for them. But they escaped Graça’s memory quite easily, and by the end of our walks both she and her mother pouted and sighed in frustration.
When the Senhora wasn’t feeling well (which was more often as time went by), Graça and I vis
ited her room, where she lay in bed and read us fairy tales from a book she kept at her bedside. Soon, Graça and I were reenacting them. I was the woodcutter, the prince, the old crone, the frog, the troll. Graça was always the princess. Sometimes Senhora Pimentel braided our hair and I liked feeling her cool, pale fingers on my scalp. Once, after I delivered her food tray, she asked me to brush her red hair and my hands grew so slick that the brush fell and startled us both.
The tales Senhora Pimentel read to us and the stories she told of her own childhood contained words I’d never heard before. Big words. Words with so many syllables they seemed like incantations. Petulant. Vanquished. Verdant. Perambulate. I asked Senhora Pimentel to please repeat those new words, and then to define them. She seemed happy to help me. At night, in my bed across from Nena’s, in our tiny room attached to the kitchen, I whispered the words I’d learned that day again and again, as if casting spells of my own. I knew I could never use them outside Senhora Pimentel’s room for fear of being slapped by Nena and told I was acting too fancy for my own good, but how I loved them! Loved the sound of them, and most of all the possibility that they represented: that there was a word for every idea and emotion I could ever fathom, no matter how difficult or strange. I wanted to collect them all. Then, one day, in front of Graça, the Senhora handed me a little notebook—one that fit inside my apron pocket—and a pencil.
“For you to remember our words, Dores,” the Senhora said.
Our words. They belonged to us both.
It was a simple little book with a cloth cover. The pencil was stubby and poorly sharpened. But I held them so tightly in my hand—afraid they would be snatched away—that my fingers ached. It is said that no love can compare to your first love, and I also believe that no gift can compare to your first gift, no matter how small and insignificant it might have seemed to the giver.
I kept my head down and shut my eyes but a hot, fat tear escaped and ran down my cheek. The Senhora clucked. She pressed a soft hand to my face. In that moment I hoped, in the silly way a child does, to exert power over time and make it stop completely.
“I’m bored,” Graça snapped. “This room has no air.”
The Senhora’s hand left my cheek. “Ask Nena for some water and a slice of cake,” she said.
I reluctantly followed Graça out of the room and down the stairs, but she did not go to the kitchen. Instead, she left the Great House and headed to the river.
There, we both stripped off our dresses and waded into the cool water, but never too far, for fear of being carried away by the current.
“Tell me about the ghost again,” Graça ordered.
I obliged, telling Graça the legend of the drowned woman leading people into the river with her songs. She listened intently, then shook her head.
“She doesn’t want company,” Graça said, staring into the murky water around us. “She wants to be rescued. Someone put her here, someone terrible, and she wants people to save her, but no one pays attention.”
“That’s not the story,” I said.
“It’s the story I want,” Graça replied.
“You can’t do that. You can’t change a story just because you want to. That’s not how it goes.”
“Yes it is,” Graça yelled, slapping the water. “Because I say so. Because I’m the Little Miss, not you, no matter how many stupid words you know! You don’t even need a notebook. You don’t even know how to write.”
She’d had schooling before Riacho Doce. I hadn’t. But that wasn’t what bothered me about Graça’s outburst. It was the first time she’d called herself “Little Miss” in front of me. Before that, we’d laughed at the name. We’d mocked it, as if the Little Miss was another girl and we’d run away from her to play by ourselves.
We had our first fight there, in the water. Graça pushed me. I pushed back. We grappled and snatched at each other, our hands sliding over our wet arms. We pulled hair and tugged each other’s soggy camisoles. By the time we stomped back onto the shore, we were both crying, our arms red, our scalps sore. Side by side, we sat in the red dirt of the riverbank, catching our breath. I put my head between my knees and covered my neck with my arms, the way I sometimes did when Nena hit me. Usually in those moments with Nena I felt a calm determination to wait her out, to see things through to the finish. I tried to find that same calm with Graça as we sat on the riverbank, but instead I felt an extraordinary loneliness. She’d called herself Little Miss, and I saw the hopelessness of our friendship.
The sun was bright; I felt its heat on my shoulders. Then there was another kind of heat, along my left side. Graça scooted beside me, her leg pressed against my leg, her hip against my hip.
“I can’t write, either,” she said. “I had a tutor in Recife but it was no good. I’m dumb as a rock.”
I lifted my head. Graça squinted at me, her cheeks and nose bright pink.
“Your face is burned,” I said. “Now you’ll never be married.”
Graça smiled. She threaded her fingers through mine and we squeezed our sweaty palms tight. Then we both leaned back, closed our eyes, and sat in the sun, together.
* * *
—
The little notebook Senhora Pimentel gifted me remained in my pocket, its pages empty. Graça and I didn’t fight again, but our visits to her mother’s room weren’t the same. Graça shifted and sighed, stared out the window, fidgeted with her dress and the buckles of her shoes. After a few weeks, she announced that Senhora Pimentel’s stories were boring and her hair-braiding annoying, and her room smelled of mothballs. One day, after a morning gallivanting around Riacho Doce, instead of returning to see her mother in the Great House as we always did, Graça insisted we visit the mill.
With its smokestack that rose thirty meters above the cane fields, the mill was the tallest building in Riacho Doce and, as far as I knew, the tallest in the world. Only in the weeks after harvest did smoke pour from that narrow brick tower. No one from the Great House was allowed near the mill when it was sugar-making time, and none of us complained about this rule. In the weeks after harvest, the mill ran night and day, turning cane into sugar, and even from the Great House we heard the groan of gears, the snap of logs bursting in huge fires, and the songs of the men who worked in four-hour shifts because the heat was intolerable otherwise. They stirred the copper cauldrons filled with liquid sugar that vomited foam hotter than fire. Sometimes there were screams. Then a group of men, slick with sweat and eyes wide with panic, would appear at the kitchen door holding one of their own and shouting for Nena. Some burns Nena could treat with her herbs and poultices. Others required a doctor’s attention, or a gravedigger’s. One poor soul died right there, in the kitchen in front of us, his skin as charred and papery as a husk of corn placed in the fire.
The day Graça and I went to the mill, Riacho Doce’s cane still grew tall in the hills around us. The mill’s giant wheel was quiet and its cauldrons empty, their copper a sickly greenish hue. Graça moved past the worn tools and ancient-looking machines like a dog following a scent, disinterested in whatever human contraptions surrounded her. At the office door, Graça did not bother to knock. I contemplated running away—invading the empty mill was one thing, but disturbing Senhor Pimentel in his office was quite another. There was no time for me to disappear; Graça strode inside his office and I shut my eyes, prepared to hear Senhor Pimentel’s yells. Instead there was laughter. He opened his arms wide and swung Graça onto his lap.
“To what do I owe this honor?” Senhor Pimentel asked his daughter. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, exposing muscled forearms.
Graça regaled her father with stories about our morning: how we ran through the orchard, climbed trees, sucked on star fruits until our mouths puckered. Neither of them acknowledged my presence at the door. After only a few minutes, however, Senhor Pimentel’s smile faded and he shifted his knees. Graça tumbled from his lap.
&n
bsp; “Time to go,” he said. “Little girls can play all day. Men must work.”
Graça frowned. “But I didn’t tell you the best part!” she said. “We saw a bright red fish jump out of the river and into the air!”
Senhor Pimentel raised his eyebrows.
“We saw it, didn’t we?” Graça asked, staring at me.
Senhor Pimentel looked in my direction. He did not smile or nod, did not say “Hello” or ask me to enter. Yet he kept his eyes fixed on me, acknowledging, for the first time, my very existence.
“Tell us, Jega,” he said. “Is it true what the Little Miss says?”
What is truth? Someone can be completely sincere in their belief of what they saw and when. But another person, seeing the same thing, has a different vision. A red fish becomes purple at sunset, black at night. An ant would call Riacho Doce’s river an ocean. A giant would say it was a trickle. What we see in the world depends so much on who we are at the moment of seeing. Such stories may turn out to be gifts, like bread crumbs leading us out of a dark forest; or they may be terrible diversions, leading deeper into a maze we can never escape.
Graça and I hadn’t gone near the river that morning, but that didn’t matter. Graça stared at me, her eyes pleading. And Senhor Pimentel stared, too, his jaw rigid, his gaze unflinching.
“Yes,” I replied. “We saw it.”
Senhor Pimentel nodded. Graça smiled and turned to her father. I was, once again, forgotten.
“I bet he jumped out of the water to see your pretty face,” Senhor Pimentel said, kissing Graça’s forehead. “Suitors will line up to kiss this face! And you’ll marry the richest man of them all. Rich enough to buy every plantation from here to Paraíba!”
We went to the mill office every day after that. Every day, Graça was coddled and kissed for a few minutes until Senhor Pimentel tired of her and tried to push her off his lap. Graça gripped his neck to stay on. She told taller and taller tales. As long as Graça was entertaining, she would be held.
The Air You Breathe Page 3
