We all have the same basic body parts: lips, teeth, tongues, palates, all leading to a series of tiny muscles in our throats covered in mucus the same consistency as hospital Jell-O. We take a breath, air hits the tiny folds of these muscles, they vibrate and produce sound. If we are lucky, they can produce song. It’s more complicated than this, of course; we might all have the same body parts, the same ability to make sound, but not every voice is made equal.
For Graça, singing was as natural as breathing. For me, singing was like attempting to lift a thirty-kilo sack of sugar over my head—something I could certainly do, with time, but not without great practice and effort. This didn’t discourage me. My twelve-year-old brain did not consider the fact of raw talent, of having a natural gift, of Graça’s vocal cords being somehow better made than my own. Instead, it seemed natural that I had to work at singing while Graça did not—she was a Little Miss, after all, and Little Misses worked for nothing. I, on the other hand, had been raised to believe that anything worthwhile came through struggle.
Each day after our interminable lessons with Bruxa, we ran to the parlor and argued over which record to place on the turntable. One afternoon, Graça and I froze at the parlor door; the Senhora sat in a cushioned chair beside the phonograph, a blanket over her shoulders, her red hair freshly washed and wound into a thick braid.
“I ask Tita to keep my door open, so I can hear you girls,” Senhora Pimentel said. “But today I wanted to watch you.”
Graça and I shuffled toward the phonograph. It didn’t seem proper to argue in front of the Senhora, so I let Graça choose the first record. She picked the Caruso—the most difficult to sing—of course. When we were alone, I often closed my eyes when I sang, while Graça liked to leap and twirl and open her arms to the sky. Sometimes I copied her and we dropped into a fit of giggles by song’s end. That day, with the Senhora watching us, we stood shoulder to shoulder as we did at the beginning of Bruxa’s lessons when she inspected behind our ears and under our nails for dirt. Behind us, the record began spinning. There was Caruso starting out at a sprint, hurdling over the notes of “Nessun dorma.” Graça and I sang in whispers at first, but then our favorite part of the song arrived—when Caruso’s voice becomes pleading, but not in a weak way. It is as if he is shouting to the stars, asking the world for the help he deserves. I didn’t know Italian, and neither did Graça; the song’s lyrics were nonsense to us. It was only decades later that I discovered what Graça and I attempted to sing each day in the Great House parlor:
“But the mystery of me is locked inside me.
No one will know my name!
No, no, I will say it on your mouth,
when the light will shine!
And my kiss will melt the silence
that makes you mine.”
I closed my eyes and held fast to Graça’s hand as my voice tried desperately to keep up with hers. Then the song was over, the record silently spinning, and Senhora Pimentel clapped. I opened my eyes.
“Bravo!” the Senhora cried.
Warmth moved from my chest to my neck, and into my ears, which pulsed and burned.
“Now you must curtsy and bow,” the Senhora said. “It’s how you tell your audience you are grateful to them for listening. You are in their service, after all.”
I looked at Graça for guidance. She shrugged. Senhora Pimentel stood and the blanket slid from her shoulders. She held her silk robe, placed one foot in front of the other, and dipped down, bowing her head. Her hair fell over her shoulder, a red rope with a ribbon at its end. Then the Senhora straightened and collapsed back into her chair.
After this day, we always found Senhora Pimentel waiting for us in the parlor, ready to listen. She was our first audience, and our best.
* * *
—
When we are young, we give ourselves completely. We allow our first friends or first lovers or first songs inside us, to become a part of our unformed being, without ever thinking of the consequences, or of their permanence within us. This is one of the beauties of youth, and one of its burdens.
A few months after our first performance for the Senhora, a doctor arrived from Recife. His motorcar shot through the Great House gate and screeched to a stop at the front door, where Senhor Pimentel waited. In the kitchen there was shouting, scurrying, prayers. Nena, her face so sweaty it looked like glazed clay, poured boiling water into tin pans that the maids hoisted upstairs.
“Jega!” Nena called, after spotting me. “Wipe the sleep out of your eyes and help your Senhora.”
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked.
“The baby’s trying to come early.”
“Baby?”
Nena shook her head. Sweat dripped onto her apron. “She should never have taken you girls to the city. All those bumpy roads. And then coming downstairs every day to listen to that Devil machine’s music! Well now . . .”
Nena wiped her face and ordered me to the laundry, to get clean rags and carry them upstairs. I did as I was told, but all I could think was: There is a baby inside of her. I knew how such things happened; to a child growing up in the countryside, sex is as common as the sun rising and setting. I’d seen Old Euclides breeding his donkeys. The stable boys made sport of it, betting how many times a jenny would buck a jack before he got his way. I’d seen billy goats piss themselves all over before mounting a nanny, and roosters fight each other bloody for the chance at a hen. But the thought of Senhor Pimentel—tanned, muscled, and thin-lipped—doing such things to the Senhora was reprehensible to me. No wonder she was dying.
Senhora Pimentel fought that baby for many hours. She was stubborn, like Graça. The Recife doctor sometimes left the Senhora’s room and stood in the hall to smoke or gulp down a mug of coffee. Each time he appeared the doctor looked different: first his suit jacket was gone, then his vest, then his shirt’s buttons were open, then his sleeves rolled up past his elbows. Senhor Pimentel paced the hallway and smoked. Each time the doctor appeared, he ran to the man and asked: “Is it a boy?”
Graça and I hid at the end of the hall, crammed under a credenza.
“The doctor hasn’t left yet,” I whispered. “What’s he doing to her?”
“The baby’s killing her,” Graça said. “I wish I could kill it.”
“You knew about the baby?” I asked.
“You didn’t?” Graça replied.
Without a word between us, we sneaked out of the Great House, past the orchard, where I led Graça to the henhouse. Inside, I slipped eggs out from under the hens’ warm bottoms as I’d done hundreds of times before, for Nena. This time, as soon as we were out of the henhouse, I handed Graça the full basket.
We flung most against a tree. Others we stomped. A few Graça hurled to the ground with such force that bits of shell and yolk spattered my chin. When there were no more eggs, Graça pitched the basket against the henhouse wall and we sat under a tree in the orchard, too afraid to walk back inside.
The child was a boy, a fact that Senhor Pimentel lamented to the maids and kitchen staff and, later, to the handful of relatives who traveled from Recife for the funerals. Senhora Pimentel and Graça’s unborn sibling were buried in the mausoleum in Riacho Doce’s chapel, only fifty meters from the Great House, but a distance I was not allowed to cross. Servants did not attend funerals.
In an interview many years later, when a reporter asked Sofia Salvador what was the saddest moment of her life thus far she’d said, without hesitation and to my great surprise, “Losing my mother when I was a child. Being motherless is a burden I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child. I once watched T-Bone Walker sing this spiritual in a ratty little Los Angeles club with sloped floors and yellowed dollar bills pinned to the walls. I sat in the dark, at the bar, and heard him sing the same line over and over again. At first I didn’t understand his lament
and was annoyed by it. Aren’t we all motherless, eventually? Isn’t it the point for children to outlive their parents? But the power of the song is in one word: Sometimes. As if this feeling is too hard to bear all of the time. As if there are other times, more hopeful times, no matter how brief, when the singer remembers the unassailable comfort of being completely loved.
Listening to T-Bone, I realized that his song wasn’t about losing a mother’s love, but about the feeling of never experiencing it in the first place. If passion is deeply entwined with uncertainty, then a mother’s love is the opposite: it never wavers, never depends on performance, never requires an equal amount of love in return. You have the luxury of brushing off a mother’s love, knowing your scorn or indifference will never make it go away. It is like air—you can forget it exists, and that it is essential to your life. There are those of us, though, who can’t forget; who have never had the sweet reprieve of “sometimes.” My mother was a rumor, a shadow, a bit of dirty gossip, a way for others to insult me. So while I understood Graça’s grief at losing Senhora Pimentel, there was also something about her sadness that made me bitterly angry. Graça had experienced twelve years of buoying love—she’d known what it felt like to breathe in that sweet air, and could therefore carry it within her for the rest of her days. The Senhora was not my mother and I never, not for a second, pretended she was. But she had been kind to me when others were not. Hers were small kindnesses—little whims one bestows on a favored servant—but they were kindnesses all the same. So I grieved for her, too, in my own way.
During the funeral, Nena ordered me out of the kitchen, where she and the girls were preparing the post-funeral meal, and to the orchard to collect limes. It was an easy task, one I could finish in minutes. I left the full fruit basket in the kitchen and tiptoed to the parlor, where the Senhora’s chair sat, empty. I slipped a record from its sleeve. I ran my fingers across its ridges, then slid one into its empty center. How I wanted to hear that music! How I wanted to set the needle on that record and turn the phonograph’s volume to full blast until the house shook with its vibrations! Until the mourners at the chapel, in their black suits and lace mantillas, heard the sound and raised their heads! Until the cane cutters, given the day off out of respect for the Senhora, wandered out of their shacks and wondered where that magnificent sound was coming from! Instead, I held that shellac record in both hands and bent it until it shattered like glass.
“What are you crying for?” Graça stood in the doorway, her black dress wrinkled, her lace mantilla bunched in her fist.
I wiped my eyes with the heels of my palms and answered her question with another: “What are you doing here?”
“That chapel smells like rotten eggs. No one notices if I come or go.” Graça walked into the room and stared at the shards of record at my feet. “We’re running away.”
“To where?” I asked.
“To Rio. Where else?”
“You should go to Recife first. It’s closer,” I said.
Graça shook her head. “Rio’s the only place to be. It’s where they make radio shows. And my aunt said they have movies there. A movie’s a moving picture, Dor. They put them on a screen bigger than a cane field and you see the actors moving on it, playing their parts.”
“Like a theater show?”
“No. It’s not the real people playing the parts. It’s moving pictures of them. So they can be lots of places at once.”
“Like ghosts?” I asked, thinking of the chapel’s mausoleum and Senhora Pimentel within it, stuffed into a cold stone drawer. “Sounds like a bunch of macumba to me.”
“Well it’s not. You’ll see.”
“How?”
“We’ll hop on a boat. Ride a train. There’re plenty of ways to get down to Rio.”
“We’d need tickets,” I said. “We’d have to buy them.”
“Mamãe left me all sorts of jewelry. It’s in her closet. We’ll take that and sell it along the way.”
“Sell it to who?”
“Stop being such a bore! Who cares how we get there?”
“I do,” I said.
“You’re as dull as dirt!” Graça shrieked. Then she stomped away.
We reconciled eventually; we always did back then. After this argument Graça stopped talking about running away from Riacho Doce, but I knew the idea was within her like a seed in the earth, patiently taking root.
* * *
—
Each year on the sugar plantation there was a great fire. Harvest was always in the summer, the dry time. The river grew narrow, the roads cracked and dusty, the water tasted of earth. But the cane stayed green and thick, its leaves as long and sharp as machetes. If a cutter were to take his cane knife and hack into an unburned paddock, it would be like doing battle with a thousand men. He’d be sliced apart if he wasn’t bitten and killed by a poisonous snake first. So, at the beginning of every harvest, an army of cutters carried cans of gasoline to the edges of the cane fields. It was always dusk, when the temperatures cooled and the winds died down. And the cutters walked in lines, pouring gas onto the brown bottoms of the cane stalks, and then lighting them.
Graça and Senhora Pimentel, when she was alive, always left for Recife during the burnings. Staying was unpleasant. The fires were never near the Great House, but their heat pushed through the house’s walls and made us feel as if we were trapped in an oven. Everyone at Riacho Doce, even Senhor Pimentel, who pretended to supervise the burnings, had to wear wet handkerchiefs over our noses and mouths because of the smoke. Our eyes stung. Our clothes smelled of soot for weeks after the fires died. Ashes floated in the air as if a thousand gray birds had lost their feathers. And in the sky there were probably more than a thousand birds, swooping along the burning cane’s edges and catching the snakes, rats, skunks, and possums that fled the fires.
If the wind shifted suddenly, cutters could be trapped between burning paddocks. Men died. Not every year, but often enough to make the burnings an uneasy time at Riacho Doce. Those of us at the Great House were told to keep away from the fields.
In the months after Senhora Pimentel died, when Graça and I turned thirteen, she was sent away during the cane fires to stay with an aunt in Recife. Senhor Pimentel sent the aunt enough money to buy Graça a new wardrobe. The buttons of Graça’s old blouses strained against her growing bust. Her skirts hugged her thighs. A Recife seamstress could make a dozen loose-fitting dresses for Graça, but even a jute sack would not hide her newly ample figure. It was hard for everyone at Riacho Doce—maids, houseboys, even Old Euclides himself—not to stare when she passed.
Graça was not beautiful; at least, not in the way we’ve been taught to see beauty, as something that provokes either desire or a need to protect. Graça was not sultry or delicate. There was nothing truly extraordinary about her mouth or her eyes or her figure. But when you combined all of her features with her voice, her laughter, her raw and unflappable energy and glimmering motion, Graça made you believe she was beautiful. Being beside her made you feel a part of a great adventure, a fate loaded with meaning and purpose. Her beauty was not a physical trait. Her beauty was an influence you fell under—like a stiff drink or a line of sweet flour—infusing you with bravery and wit and affability that you never knew existed inside yourself until she coaxed it out.
I didn’t know this when we were children, of course. I realized it many years later, when I saw Graça in her coffin. It was surrounded by flowers, and Graça lay inside with her eyes closed and arms crossed over her chest. She wore a red evening gown and her signature red lipstick, yet she looked disturbingly plain—a schoolmarm in an actress’s costume. I leaned over her and pinched her, hard. “Graça, stop joking! Get up. Please?” I whispered until Vinicius pulled me away.
Unlike Graça, during our teenage years I grew tall, not curved. My blouses were too short for my torso; my skirts could not cover my suddenly gangly and
uncooperative legs. I had to duck through the kitchen’s low doorways. Stable boys, millworkers, even Senhor Pimentel himself, had to tilt their heads to meet my eyes. Many years later, when we moved to Los Angeles, being five-foot-ten wasn’t odd among those Amazonian movie starlets and strapping leading men, but in Brazil I was positively massive. As a teenager, my height did not bother me as much as other changes in my body. My chest was tender to the touch, and, to my horror, dark hairs sprouted under my arms and between my legs. The housemaids and kitchen girls had hair in these places, but on them it seemed natural, beautiful even.
At the end of the day, Nena always ordered a few of the kitchen maids back to their stations because they’d forgotten to clean something properly. During the cane fires, Nena sent me to the women’s changing area to fetch the delinquent kitchen girls. A gaggle of them were there, gossiping and taking off their uniforms and aprons so that the laundresses could wash them. I hid in the doorway, dizzy with the smell of cheap perfume mixed with smoke from the cane fires, and watched those glorious country girls wiggle out of their starched uniforms. It was a mystery how those girls, once bullies and annoyances to me, suddenly became the most fascinating creatures I’d ever seen. I tried to stay out of sight as long as I could, just to watch them unbutton their uniforms and lift their long arms over their heads, their underarms fluffy with hair, their bellies taut, their breasts hanging round and soft like perfectly ripe fruits.
One of the maids caught me in the doorway.
The Air You Breathe Page 5
