The Senhor laughed again, louder this time.
“You think I’m some brute?” he asked. “Punishing kitchen girls is Nena’s job, and I’m sure she will fulfill her duties. She always does. You know, your mother was a hanger-on, too.”
I wobbled. Nena held me straight.
“She worked in the kitchen; didn’t Nena ever tell you? I’d spend summers here, with my cousins, and she’d try to be a part of our games. A gangly thing she was, like you—always following us. When we were older, we used to trade little trinkets—gloves, a marble, a lost charm on a necklace; trash really—to go behind the chicken hutch with her. Then Nena kicked her out; she didn’t belong in a decent house. I warned my wife a dozen times that the fruit never falls far from the tree. And I was right.”
I could withstand a thousand blows from any fist, but words? Words would always undo me.
The tiniest, most treacherous sob began to bubble up in the back of my throat and tried very hard to push itself out. Graça watched me. She uncurled from her blanket and stood. Then, behind her father’s back, like the pluckiest heroine in a great caper, she winked at me. As if this was all part of our plan. As if she and I were playing our roles to their fullest, and this was not the end of our story but the very beginning.
* * *
—
We were separated—me hidden in Nena’s little room in the bowels of the kitchen, and Graça upstairs, in her massive bedroom, her door locked from the outside to avoid any more escapes.
After we left the parlor, my eyes felt dry in their sockets. My legs and arms and neck pounded in time to my heartbeat, as if my body was one large, quivering organ. “River fever,” Nena said, and forced tea between my cracked lips.
When the Pimentels’ doctor finally arrived to examine Graça, he popped downstairs to check on me. I pretended to sleep and, in this way, I was privy to the gossip between the doctor and Nena. This was how I discovered that Graça would be shipped to a convent school in Petrópolis, some two thousand kilometers south.
“Thank the good Lord the Senhora wasn’t here to see her in that river,” Nena said.
“Her mother had a nervous disposition,” Dr. Aurélio said, lowering his voice. “I’m sad to say they are cut from the same cloth.”
“The Little Miss wants to be onstage,” Nena whispered. “A singer.”
The doctor sighed. “Mental unsteadiness. I’ve told the Senhor she needs guidance. The nuns will sort her out.”
My pillow felt strangely wet beneath my face. I did not know if it was sweat or tears that had soaked it. I shivered.
“Well, look who’s awake,” Nena said.
Dr. Aurélio patted my head. “Jega, my girl. Welcome back.”
* * *
—
The Petrópolis Sion School was the place where the wealthy sent wayward daughters to be forgotten—if not forever, then at least until their tarnished reputations had been sufficiently mended. Even the fanciest boarding schools in those days required students to supply everything but food. Senhor Pimentel grumbled about the cost of fabrics to make Graça’s bedsheets, towels, uniforms, and underclothes. Each student at the prestigious school was also required to bring one servant to wash her clothes and prepare her food. These servants were called “helpers” and they lived in the school, under the watchful eyes of the nuns, and received food, lodging, and religious instruction. Most helpers went on to become nuns themselves. Everyone believed Senhor Pimentel would send a housemaid to Petrópolis with Graça, and the girls whispered nervously at the back of the house, fretting over who might have to go. I was on my feet by then, limping around the kitchen, forbidden by Nena from going anywhere near the front of the house or even outside for fear that the Senhor might see me and cast me out for good. The maids, who had always teased me, now shot me icy stares, as if I had caused all of their troubles. Even the girls who ached to leave Riacho Doce wanted no part in convent life, at the mercy of nuns, who, in those days, were known to be particularly vicious.
Three days after the doctor’s visit, Senhor Pimentel called Nena and me back to the parlor. I could not look at his face, and instead stared at his shoes, so polished that they seemed to glow in the morning light. I suppose Senhor Pimentel understood my reticence as obedience, but Nena knew better. She kept her massive hand around my arm like a vise, making certain I didn’t move any closer to the Senhor as he spoke.
“Nena has been here since I was a boy, and I have the greatest respect for her,” he announced. “She is a part of this house, just like the front door or the columns. It wouldn’t function without her. Because of her, and her attachment to you, I am giving you a great opportunity, Jega. The Sisters at Sion will cure you of your disobedience better than I ever could. You will find your place there. And when Graça has finished her studies and returns to be married, you will stay on.”
Nena gave my arm a rough squeeze. I remembered Senhor Pimentel and how Sion was supposed to be a punishment, not a prize. I kept my eyes cast down and mumbled thanks. Back in our room, Nena finally let me go.
“I should’ve stopped you going to those circles,” she said.
“You knew we went?”
“Everybody knew. Except the Senhor. I didn’t think it’d do you harm, to sing a little. The Little Miss can think she’s meant to be a radio star, but I thought you had the good sense to know better, not to get caught up in fantasy.”
“It’s not a fantasy,” I said. “I can sing, too.”
“Did you hit your head, Jega? Because your brain’s as scrambled as an egg. If Euclides weren’t such a snoop, you’d have gotten yourself drowned. And for what? For that Little Miss?”
“I wasn’t going to drown. I was going to save her. Those cutters interrupted.”
“Oh, they interrupted?” Nena said. “Well, excuse me, Your Highness.” She crossed her muscled arms. “You’re too old to be holding hands with that girl.”
My skin tingled, as if the fever was returning.
Nena smoothed her apron. “I didn’t raise you to be a daydreamer like the Senhora—God rest her soul—or some loose woman like your mother. Bruxa said you have a quick mind. It’d be a shame to waste it. So I told the Senhor you had to go to that nuns’ school, or else I’d leave this house. I’d walk right out the front gate and let him run this place into the ground. That scared him enough to give you a chance in Petrópolis. Those nuns down there, they eat. They have kitchens. You’ve been watching me, you can cook better than most. Show them what you can do, Jega. Forget that Little Miss. Don’t carry her troubles on your back. You keep saving that one, and you’ll be saving her all your life.”
“I don’t want to be a cook,” I said. “Or a nun.”
“Who told you we get to choose what we are?”
“I told myself.”
Before I could raise my arms to protect myself, Nena swept across the room and clapped my face between her massive hands, yanking me toward her. It was the closest thing to a hug she’d ever given me.
“You think you know the world, Jega?” Nena asked, shaking her head. “The world will eat you up.”
* * *
—
The next day, I sneaked into the Great House library and looked up Petrópolis in an atlas; it was in the south near Rio de Janeiro. We would get there by boat—one of the massive passenger liners that left each day from Recife’s port. All of it seemed so strange and exciting to me, I might as well have been going to Jupiter on a rocket ship. Graça was also excited, but not about the voyage.
The day before our trip, I bribed a maid to give me the key to Graça’s room.
She sat atop her bed, the sheets kicked aside and tangled as if she’d spent the night wrestling them. Her face was pale. When she saw me at the door, she scrambled from bed and kissed me on the cheek.
“They lock you in here all day?” I asked. My cheek throbbed
where Graça had kissed it.
Graça nodded. “I’m so bored I even picked up a book. I don’t know how you like those things,” she said, and pressed a hand to my face. “I’ll give you all my books if you want.”
I shook my head. “Someone’ll say I stole them.”
“You mean Papai will,” Graça said, pursing her lips. “We’re going to show him.”
“Show him what?”
“We’re running away as soon as we dock in Rio,” she whispered, as if we weren’t alone in the room. “I’m going to be on the radio.”
* * *
—
Our trip to Sion School is, in my memory, like an album with many forgettable tracks but a few persistent ones. I recall seeing our mammoth passenger liner at Recife’s docks and being mystified that such a ship didn’t sink. I recall holding tightly to my little notebook of words—the only possession I’d taken from Riacho Doce, aside from my helper’s uniforms—as I followed Graça and Senhor Pimentel up the gangplank. I remember my throat being raw from vomiting into a bucket because of seasickness. I recall holding very tightly to Graça’s hand as Rio de Janeiro first came into view. We saw mountains rising out of the water, with a city tucked into the land’s curves as if held firmly in its bosom. (There is a reason why so many love songs are dedicated to Rio.) I recall those strange trees on the road to Petrópolis—they were shaped like triangles with millions of green branches instead of leaves. I’d eventually learn that these were pine trees and were common in cooler places, but on that day the sight of those trees worried me very much. If the trees in Petrópolis were this strange, certainly everything else would be, too. But the sharpest memory from that trip—the one that has remained clear even in the fog of age—happened before we ever set foot in Rio. Our ship made a stop in Salvador, Bahia, and Graça strode into my third-class cabin and dragged me from bed, almost knocking over my vomit bucket.
“You have to see this,” she said, and pulled me outside and off the boat.
On Salvador’s docks first-class passengers bypassed the crowded, foul-smelling areas by walking across a private bridge. At the end of the bridge was a tidy little square with benches, potted palms, a ticket office, and a line of porters ready to receive passengers’ bags. Behind the porters were the Baianas.
White turbans hid their hair. Ruffled white blouses fell off their shoulders. Full white hoop skirts puffed around them, covering their feet and concealing the stools on which they sat, making it seem as if the skirts themselves held those women up. The fabric of their clothes was covered with webs of white lace so detailed and stiff, it seemed as if the dresses had been iced like wedding cakes. Around their necks and wrists were dozens of strands of colored beads and gold chains.
Most of the women were as dark-skinned as Old Euclides. They sold food—in front of each woman was a table covered with ingredients and, on one side, a pot of bubbling palm oil atop a small fire. As the women fried dumplings for the ship’s curious passengers, their bracelets clinked and chimed. Graça and I stood slack-jawed, jostled by the crowd but unable to move.
“Holy moly,” I breathed.
Graça reached for my hand.
We’d heard about Baianas but had never actually seen them. To wealthy and lighter-skinned Brazilians, the Baiana was a figure associated with the past, with the end of slavery, with the streets, with voodoo and mystery, much like samba itself. At Riacho Doce, the most prized sugar was mill-white, as was the Camellia Rice Powder Girl, the smiling boys in ads for vitamin powder, the saints’ statues on every church pedestal. Most Brazilians didn’t fit such strict criteria—even magnates of industry, politicians, plantation owners like Senhor Pimentel and Little Misses like Graça. There were shades of acceptance: if you wore fine clothes or had a good family name, then you’d be forgiven your darker skin or your thicker hair. Or, if you were mill-white but had a northeastern accent in Brazil’s south, then you were considered riffraff. Only one standard was certain: If you were as dark as Nena, Old Euclides, or those Baianas, you wouldn’t be barred from fine shops, theaters, or first-class cabins if you could afford them, but you’d never be allowed to reach that point in the first place.
To understand the extent of my and Graça’s amazement at seeing those Baianas, you must understand the limits that had been imposed on our imaginations. Color photographs did not yet exist. We had never seen a moving image on a screen. Fashion magazines like Shimmy! were considered vulgar among Graça’s class, and impossibly expensive among mine. We religiously flipped through old sewing catalogues abandoned in Senhora Pimentel’s room, but the women pictured in those yellowed pages were illustrations: line drawings in black and white. And the women we saw in real life? At Riacho Doce they were maids, cooks, and the drab Bruxa. During my single trip to Recife, I’d seen women in the Saint Isabel Theater, yes, but their ideas of elegance were tightly bound by rules of propriety. Even in Recife’s heat, women wore gloves, stockings, and undergarments that pinched waists and bound breasts. If there was lace, it was on a wedding gown or reserved to a tiny scrap of collar. If there were jewels, they were worn sparingly: ears were not pierced; bracelets were nuisances; necklaces had crosses on them; pendants were reserved for balls and the theater. For those women, elegance meant blending in. These were not the women Graça and I pictured when we listened to our radio plays. These were not the heroines we hoped to emulate. But we hadn’t yet been given an idea of who to picture. We had no living example of the kind of women we hoped to be. We knew only one thing: we wanted nothing to do with blending in—we wanted to stand out.
For me, that day on the docks, the allure of the Baianas wasn’t their clothing but their confidence. They wore rings on every finger! They wore bracelets up to their elbows! They did not cover their mouths when they laughed! They glistened with sweat and wore no makeup! They kept their backs straight and their gazes even straighter! It was as if Graça and I had escaped a country of dowagers and had suddenly found ourselves in a foreign land, surrounded by queens.
Soon enough, we would be surrounded by their opposite.
* * *
—
Nearly every wealthy Brazilian woman my age has a nun story. Nuns were as common as bread back then. Convent schools were prestigious. The church used rich girls’ tuitions to allow less fortunate girls like me to have an education. Most poor pupils became nuns themselves, while the rich pupils became wives. So our story was no different from those of thousands of other girls dropped off by their parents at the gates of a convent school. Graça and I were not special, and this realization was hard for her to bear.
Until then, Graça had been the Little Miss, the sole girl-heir with the best dresses and finest toys. At Sion, owning a struggling sugar mill in northeast Brazil was not considered a noble background. Graça’s Sion classmates were heiresses to fortunes much larger than that of the Pimentels. The girls in Graça’s dormitory had softer sheets, lacier underclothes, sterling-silver hairbrushes, gold rosaries. They had eiderdowns imported from Germany, which made me ashamed for Graça of the thin, scratchy wool blankets Tita had placed in her trunk. What bothered Graça most, however, were the nuns’ constant refrains of humbleness and simplicity. Graça was neither humble nor simple.
As Graça’s helper at Sion, I was responsible for washing and ironing her clothes, sheets, underwear, slips, socks, and school aprons. I didn’t mind. Every time I scrubbed the yellow rings on the armpits of her school shirts, or smelled the sweet sweatiness of Graça’s nightgowns, I felt a thrilling heat rise in me at the thought that Graça’s arms and legs had touched those clothes. Once, one of the snobbish helpers made fun of Graça’s uniform, saying, “Look how rough that cotton is! Your girl must be as poor as you are!” I pummeled her, bruising her eye and thwacking her arms and legs with the strings of my apron. Sister Edwiges, the stocky nun in charge of the helpers, caned me for the fight and stopped feeding me dinner for two nights. But afterward,
no one dared give me lip.
Apart from sleeping in separate areas of the school, the students weren’t very different from the helpers. All girls slept in dormitories separated according to age, so older girls couldn’t corrupt younger ones. Petrópolis was cold and the school was drafty. All of our belongings went into small trunks at the feet of our beds, and, once a week, a nun checked the trunks. If Sister found a poorly folded apron or a set of mismatched underclothes, she turned the trunk over and everything inside it—clothes, pictures, contraband items like gum or lipstick—spilled out. The trunk’s owner was required to clean the mess, and to go without lunch or dinner. On my first week at Sion, Sister Edwiges searched my trunk and found my little notebook tucked in a stack of underwear. The Sister flipped through the book’s pages, moving quickly through my list of Portuguese words and stopping at the English ones. Her pale brows knit together.
“What is this, Maria das Dores?” she asked.
“It is English, Sister,” I said, nervous she might take the book, but also delighted to know something the nun did not. “My mistress spoke it. She gave me lessons.”
The nun set her blue eyes on me and I could not tell if she was suspicious or impressed. “Do you like languages?” Edwiges asked.
“Yes, Sister.”
“We teach the pupils Latin. A few helpers are allowed to learn each term, if you are a quick study and a good candidate to take your vows.”
I nodded. If I looked eager, it was only because I didn’t want her to confiscate my notebook, and because the little Latin I’d heard in my first week at Sion seemed strangely beautiful. The Sister dropped the book back into my trunk and moved on to the next girl.
Every morning, Sister Edwiges blew her whistle and walked up and down the narrow rows of beds.
The Air You Breathe Page 9
