“Little spy,” she hissed. “Don’t you tell Nena what I said about meeting Rodrigo behind the henhouse.”
“Are you kidding,” another maid said. “Jega wasn’t paying attention to a word you were saying!” And she cupped her bare bosoms in her hands and shook them at me.
I stared at the floorboards. The maids laughed. They were a crude, mean lot, and were hoping I’d run off without delivering Nena’s orders. I took a deep breath and faced the shirtless one again.
“Nena wants you back in kitchen. You didn’t scrub the cutting boards right.”
She smiled. “When’re you going to get a boyfriend, Jega?”
“Never,” I snarled.
The maids laughed.
“You’ll change your mind. Or one of the boys will change it for you.”
“Who can we pay to tame Jega!” another girl screeched. “She’ll bite and kick, but she’ll get ridden!”
I left those girls, cackling and coughing in the changing room, and ran to the orchard. The sun had set, but a cane fire lit the western horizon. The orchard’s trees were furry with fallen ash. I wove around them.
I had no intention of being mounted by a stable boy, or a houseboy, or any boy for that matter. Nena was head cook and had no husband, no children, no desire deeper than to serve the Pimentels. I always believed that would be my fate, until Graça arrived. I wished she was there, in that orchard with me and not in Recife, buying silly dresses. I tried to conjure her, tried to hear her voice convincing me that the housemaids were dimwitted bores, and that larger, grander dreams than being a plantation cook were possible. Sick with loneliness for Graça, I stared at the burning cane along the horizon.
Then I disobeyed the harvest-time rule and went to see the fire.
After what felt like hours of walking, I hid behind a cart the cutters used to carry their gasoline canisters and watched as they started a fire at the edge of a paddock. The fire was timid at first. It lapped at the cane’s stalks and fallen leaves. Then it climbed, steady and determined, gaining confidence, until finally it flooded upward and flared, a fountain of light and heat.
I went back to the Great House covered in soot and so giddy I felt drunk, before I even knew what being drunk was. Nena beat me. She was particularly stern that night, caning my legs and backside until their skin was red and raw.
“Are you soft in the head!” she said, breathless from hitting me. “That fire doesn’t care if you’re a little girl or a bunch of cane; it won’t stop for you. It wants everything it touches.”
All of my brief life I’d felt a perpetual ache, like a rotten tooth I could never cure. Like a broken bone that would never set. Jega was not allowed to want anything beyond the most base desires of the human condition: a meal, a bed, survival. But Dores? She’d been granted a notebook and a pencil, lessons, books, and words. She’d been granted music and an audience. She’d been granted a friend.
Beyond that kitchen and those cane fields was a world of possibilities that I couldn’t fathom, but wanted to. I was awed by the avarice of that cane fire. It was beautiful in its constant need, in its unbridled hunger. I watched it burn, its heat pounding against my skin, and knew that we were alike, that fire and me. We wanted more than we’d been given, and we always would.
ESCAPE
Do you remember, my love,
when you convinced me to escape?
We were like hand and glove,
our future about to take shape.
We hatched our plan,
we flew.
We left everyone behind.
Then you said I didn’t love you.
But I can’t lose my mind, girl, when there’re bills to pay.
My love is washing your clothes.
My love is cooking dinner every day.
My love is sweeping our steps.
My love is putting our children to sleep.
My love is never getting rest.
My love is fathoms deep.
We hatched our plan,
we flew.
We left everyone behind.
Then you said I didn’t love you.
Don’t you know by now, querida,
that other kind of love, that storm,
won’t keep the lamps lit, my vida,
it won’t keep the house warm?
My love is washing our windows.
My love is fixing our doors.
My love is doing our dishes.
My love is scouring our floors.
But you hatched your plan,
you flew.
You left me in our tidy home.
You said I never loved you.
Before she became Sofia Salvador and I became Dores de Oliveira, Graça and I had our records at Riacho Doce. We believed music magically emerged from those albums. Later, when we recorded our own songs onto LPs, we learned the truth: the records’ ridges were a code read by the player’s needle; low notes were thick grooves on the record’s face, high notes were thin ones. The needle, vibrating a thousand times a second, drops into those peaks and valleys and, miraculously, deciphers music.
What is sound but vibration carried over air? An endless and invisible tide that strikes our eardrums throughout our entire lives. It is overwhelming to think of the cacophony around us. Even the womb isn’t quiet; we hear the whoosh of our mother’s blood, the drumming of her heart, the growl of her stomach, and her voice—reverberated by fluid—until it vibrates inside each of our tiny bones.
For our sanity, we train ourselves to distinguish which sounds are important and which we must ignore. We memorize the difference between a whisper and a shout, a purr and a roar. We accumulate within us a great index of sound, until we hear the creak of a step and know, by its depth and tone, how much weight is being placed on the wood and who is coming up the stairs to greet us. An inhale and the soft crackle of paper make us crave a cigarette. And when a lover sighs we learn to distinguish between long and high-pitched and short and huffy, and we know whether they are satisfied or disappointed. So, you see, sound is never simply sound. Sound is memory.
My memory is long-playing, but like that very first generation of LPs, there are kinks: sustained notes that waver slightly; sometimes a warp, or a dull sound; and the pre-echo, when a part of the music made a faint and untimely appearance ahead of the beat. It’s not supposed to be there. It’s not supposed to reveal what comes later, much later, if it comes at all. You’re never sure if the pre-echo is real or imagined.
Here’s one for you:
We sit at the Desert Inn’s bar—Vinicius and I—sipping whiskeys and waiting for the blast. The Desert Inn has a vast picture window that looks out on the Strip and the desert. Sixty-five miles outside Vegas, in the Mohave, the government is going to detonate an A-bomb. Some hotels hired limousines to take special guests near the blast site, to have a better view. But at the Desert Inn there is an Atomic Party.
Graça is onstage. She wears an electric-green dress and a white fur stole. Her hair is freshly dyed black and so short it is like a pelt. She sings “Escape,” an old favorite of mine, at a slower pace than the song allows. The lyrics are supposed to be sung quickly, so the audience understands the frantic nature of the words and their lament. But Graça drags the tempo, pausing after each word. She smiles and makes sweeping gestures with her arms, but her legs stay planted in the middle of the stage. Her eyes are glassy. The audience, like Vinicius and me, divide their attention between Sofia Salvador and the picture window, waiting for the blast.
The Strip is a carnival of neon. I doubt if we’ll be able to see the blast from so far away and with so much illumination already around us, but before I can say this, Vinicius nods at the picture window.
“There she goes,” he says.
On the horizon is a small flash. Then there is a rumble, like thunder. Only instead of traveling above us,
the sound moves beneath us. The Desert Inn’s picture window shakes. Our drinks tremble on the bar. Night turns into day. The Strip disappears in a blaze of white light that moves toward us, brighter than any spotlight. Vinicius grabs my hand. I turn away from the picture window and stare at Graça. She’s stopped her song but her mouth is open. Her eyes have lost their foggy look. She stares at the horizon—so bright and dazzling—and smiles as if she’s facing a great, clapping crowd. Then the light finally reaches us and Graça, the stage, Vinicius, the bar and all of its patrons, including myself, are awash in light, and then obliterated by it.
I remember this. I remember the ice clinking against my whiskey glass as the bar shook. I remember the look of vague panic on Vinicius’s face, the color of Graça’s dress, the bright light—and yet none of it can be true. The Desert Inn never scheduled performers during its atomic viewing parties; the bomb itself was enough entertainment. Most detonations were at four a.m., so we would have been asleep at that time, after a long night of shows on the Strip. During those shows, Vinicius played alongside other exiled musicians, so he would’ve been onstage and not beside me at the bar. I would have been drunk—too drunk to be allowed in the audience. And Graça? She never set foot in Vegas. She was long dead by then, and yet here she is in my mind, in my memory, stubbornly inserting herself where she shouldn’t.
Can something be called a memory if it is untrue?
It’s my fault Graça’s here; I spent so many years conjuring her that now she appears of her own accord, and in places where her physical presence is an impossibility.
In the years after Graça died, anytime Vinicius and I ate an incredible meal, or saw a terrible show, or listened to an up-and-coming musician’s album, we’d ask each other: Can you imagine what Graça would say about this? And then we re-created her for each other in a kind of competition.
“Graça would’ve despised that little tart of a singer,” I’d say.
And Vinicius would shake his head and counter: “She would’ve loved her.”
Sometimes these little disagreements turned into genuine arguments, depending on our moods. “You didn’t know her like I did” was the cruelest insult Vinicius and I could inflict on each other.
Did we know her? Who was this Graça we created between the two of us? She was always young, always beautiful, always cussing and laughing with her head tossed back. Our Graça never had to endure the indignities of age: the aching bones, the sagging flesh, the fading memory.
A lifetime later, when Vinicius’s Alzheimer’s progressed, it became harder for him to conjure her concretely, yet Graça persisted. The days when his face was a mask—the Lion Face, the nurses called it—impassive and emotionless, as if Vinicius had disappeared inside himself, he would sometimes return for a few moments, his eyes brightening, his mouth open in a tiny gasp, as if he’d just swum back to the surface of himself.
“What beat are you?” he asked.
“Beat?”
“Are you bim bim bim, or barrum pum pum, or dum dum dum?”
I laughed. “I’m dum dum dum.”
Vinicius nodded very seriously. “What beat am I?”
“You? Well, let me see. You’re a complicated one: ba para para ba ba ba ba ba parum pa!”
He smiled. “The boys are gone, but she knows where to find them.”
“She does?” I asked, knowing exactly who he meant.
Vinicius nodded.
“What beat is she?” I asked.
He flinched as if in pain. Then his face went slack and he disappeared again beneath the surface.
What is it like, to feel yourself slipping away?
I close my eyes and see Graça again on that Las Vegas stage, staring wide-eyed at the atomic blast. Am I losing my grip? Or am I simply doing what I’ve always done: holding on too tightly?
ESCAPE
In the weeks after the cane fires died and the stalks were harvested to make sugar and Graça returned from Recife, I lay on my cot and dreamed of cruel kitchen maids, with their dusty feet and chapped hands, their perfect bodies and sharp tongues, until I felt a painful burning on my arm. Graça pinched me awake.
“Let’s go,” she hissed.
Nena was fast asleep on her cot.
“Where?” I whispered, but Graça was already tiptoeing out the door. I tugged a shawl over my nightgown and followed her.
The night was warm, the Great House quiet. Graça led me to the parlor. There, she unlocked one of the glass-paneled doors that led to the porch. Outside, she hiked up her nightgown and climbed over the porch’s railing. I followed her, too confused to speak.
There was a breeze. The smell of charred cane still lingered in the air, mixed now with the scent of burned sugar that bubbled in the mill’s vats each day. The garden’s grass was wet under my bare feet. From the cane cutter’s shacks, I heard the steady and familiar beat of drums.
Graça walked out of the Great House gate and toward the river, toward that drumming. I tugged her arm.
“We can’t,” I said. “Not there.”
“Listen,” Graça whispered. A chorus of voices, male and female, rose above the low thump of the drum. “I want to hear them.”
“We can do that right here.”
Graça shook loose from my grip. “I’m going, Dor.”
“I’ll tell,” I said. “I’ll wake up the whole house.”
Graça froze. “Do it,” she said. “You’re the one they’ll whip for being out at night. For corrupting me.”
“They’ll never let us listen to our records again,” I said.
“So what?”
“Please,” I said, clasping her hand. It was limp between my fingers. “Let’s go back.”
“I’d rather die,” Graça said.
She would often make this threat during our years together, but that night was the first time Graça said such a thing to me. I pictured Graça stuffed in a tiny coffin. My stomach cramped. I winced and Graça grabbed my hands so that we were mirror images of each other in our white nightgowns and shawls.
“You want to stay in that house,” she said. “If you’re not careful you’ll stay there all your life. But I have to see things, Dor. I have to hear them. Real-life things, not just songs on a bunch of records. Don’t you want to know what they’re singing? Don’t you want to feel it? If we’re going to be real performers, real artists, we have to feel!”
Graça had a heroine’s determined breathlessness; she believed she was our savior, and her self-infatuation was enveloping. All her life, she was able to convince others that they were brave heroes in her story—always in her story. That night, she convinced me.
* * *
—
A fire brightened the rows of cane cutters’ shacks. Men and women sat cross-legged on the ground around it. Graça and I squatted in the shadows near the river.
Four cutters sat on stools. Their arms shone with scars. One man hunched over a drum. Two other cutters held empty tin cans and hit them with the tips of their machetes. The fourth man rested a small drum on his lap. Like the other drums, this one had a dried hide stretched across its top, but an open bottom. In the middle of the hide, piercing its center, was a thin bamboo stick. Instead of hitting the little drum, the man took a wet cloth, slipped his hand inside the drum, and massaged the stick up and down until it moaned. Then one of the cutters began to sing:
“Love, I want to tap on your window.
Maybe then you’ll see me?
And I’ll beg a cup of water.
Maybe then you’ll hear my plea?
Fill that cup, quickly.
Bring it to me.
Just so I might brush your hand.
Love, you make me thirsty.
Your touch stings me like a brand.”
The classical songs on our records had been, for many years, my main understanding of mus
ic. I loved those songs the way a child loves an old relative, seeing them as sweet and benign, without any notion of how long they’ve endured and why. The cane cutters’ songs were different. They contained cryptic messages about adult life that I wanted to decode as much as Graça did.
Later, we’d learn that the little moaning drum was called a cuíca. Graça said that its sound made her want to cry.
“But you didn’t cry,” I pointed out.
Graça rolled her eyes. “Well I wanted to, Dor. But I wasn’t going to make noise and get caught. It would’ve ruined the song. We have to go back. We can’t skip a night. Those circles are going to save us.”
“Save us from what?” I asked.
“From everything,” Graça replied.
* * *
—
Each night we listened for the drumbeat. Whenever we heard it, Graça and I sneaked downriver and crouched closer and closer to the cutters’ circles. To my great surprise, I recognized faces I saw each day around the Great House. The kitchen maids I hated and admired stood beside the fire and held hands with stable boys. The thick-necked laundress Clara sang alongside the cutters. Old Euclides sat on an overturned bucket and nodded in time to the music. All of them were fraternizing with cane cutters, and disobeying rules I’d thought were ironclad.
“A house without a Senhora is a house full of trouble,” Nena muttered, though she’d become the Great House’s temporary commander. “Don’t bother me! Ask Nena,” was Senhor Pimentel’s refrain in the year after his wife’s death.
The pantry grew emptier each time I counted supplies. Gone were the fancy spices from Recife, the barrels of cake flour, the crystallized fruits used to decorate puddings. The daily servings of manioc and beans Nena doled to me and the kitchen girls grew smaller and smaller. She began bargaining with the butcher again, buying tiny portions of the finest cuts and saving them for Graça and Senhor Pimentel. When Bruxa complained about her meager portions, Nena ordered the tutor out of her kitchen. When Graça complained about not having a different dessert each day, Nena banged about the kitchen, searching for a stray can of condensed milk.
The Air You Breathe Page 6
