Any deviance from this role has the potential for disaster: shun the part and you are trying to be a man; you are a bitch; you are angry; you are pitiful; you are a dyke or, as they used to call us in my day, a “Big Foot.” Embrace the role with too much gusto and you are a puta, like my mother. Either extreme can get you beaten, or defiled, or simply killed and dumped in a ditch. If you think I am exaggerating, or that I am trapped in a harsh past and times have changed, then listen carefully to what I am telling you now: when you have no power in this world you must create your own, you must adapt to your environment and try to foil the many dangers around you, so a woman’s pleasantness—her smile, her grace, her cheer, her sweetness, her perfumed body, her carefully made-up face—isn’t some silly by-product of fashions or tastes; it is a means of survival. The performance may cripple us, but it keeps us alive.
When I think of our first months in Rio’s Lapa neighborhood, it’s a wonder Graça and I didn’t end up dead and floating in Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon. You could say we had luck on our side, but I prefer to think of it as the economies of scale. When cicadas leave the safety of the earth every seventeen years and crawl into the light, they have no stingers or barbs or poisons to protect them from their predators. Their only defense is their sheer number. So it was in Lapa in 1935—there were girls everywhere. Shopgirls, good-time girls, cleaning girls, cigarette girls, errand girls, candy girls, showgirls, butterfly girls, and girls like Graça and me, who refused to be anything but ourselves. This is, of course, the most dangerous thing any girl can be.
It was easy to disappear. In those days, a regular phone line was a great luxury. Even automobiles were rare. For the police to be notified of a disappearance, someone had to physically run to a station and tell them. It must have taken the Sion Sisters the better part of the afternoon to realize Graça and I were gone, and then to lumber down from Corcovado on the train and fetch the authorities. Senhor Pimentel would have been informed of Graça’s disappearance the next day, by telegram.
Riacho Doce was twenty-three hundred kilometers north, in what may as well have been a different country. And what could a northeastern sugar planter know about Rio and its convoluted workings, its dozens of neighborhoods, its lazy police always sniffing for bribes? Plus, President Getúlio wasn’t loved by all Brazilians; in São Paulo there’d been a bloody revolt against him, and then the communists tried to lead uprisings in four major cities. With so many threats, Getúlio’s police didn’t have the manpower or the desire to find a piddly sugar planter’s daughter. And if no one could look for Graça, they certainly wouldn’t look for me. I was no one’s daughter. I was no one’s heir. You can’t disappear if you’ve never existed.
We were found eventually, but by then Graça and I had already transformed ourselves. Or, I should say, Lapa transformed us. Sweet, decadent, rotten Lapa! A neighborhood of musicians and thugs, of tourists and pickpockets, and girls—heaps of girls—most of them like Graça and me: so full of hope and naive illusions that we ached inside. Lapa either ruined girls like us or saved them; there were no in-betweens.
Tour company brochures billed Rio de Janeiro as “The City of Splendor.” These advertisements never mentioned Lapa, but plenty of visitors—men especially—found the neighborhood. In Lapa’s maze of cabarets and juke joints you could find senators listening to foreign jazz bands; handsome young bucks flashing vials of cocaine inside their suit jackets and whispering “Sweet flour!” to any passerby; rebellious debutantes from Rio’s best families holding fast to their boyfriends’ arms and laughing wildly, masking their fear with giddiness. In Lapa there were rooms you could rent by the hour, and hotels with brass doors as shiny as mirrors opened by white-gloved doormen; restaurants that served Beef Wellington next door to dives with sticky tables and bloodstained floors; boardinghouses with so many residents their hallways were as crowded as cabarets, and apartment buildings with electric lighting and gated elevators where an army of “kept girls” lived in stylish prison, locked inside their rooms until their rich patrons—men and women alike—visited bearing food and department store gifts.
In Lapa you heard the heart-bracing rhythms of samba and the slow, thunderous drums of candomblé rituals, and if you wanted to keep breathing you didn’t dare interrupt, either, because both were a religion. At night there were always nervous foreigners alongside Rio’s well-dressed elite traipsing through Lapa’s alleys, attempting with all their might to escape their privileged lives by doing whatever they pleased with whomever they pleased, and always for a price. Nothing was free in Lapa except for music, and even that changed, eventually.
Graça and I changed, too. I suppose you could say we lost our innocence in Lapa. By innocence I do not mean some silly notion of purity; depending on your definition of virtue, that kind of innocence could end as swiftly as a peck on the cheek. What is more difficult to lose—and terrible when it is lost—is the belief that the dreams you’d nourished as a child are attainable, the idea that hard work can make up for lack of talent, the silly conviction that life doles out her rewards and challenges fairly among us. What is fairness, after all, but an illusion?
Illusions, Vinicius sings in one of our songs, aren’t terrible. They are what make exile, and love, bearable.
THE AIR YOU BREATHE
Our first night in Lapa, Graça and I ended up at a rooming house run by a square-jawed matron who looked like one of our stern Sion nuns, only without a habit. This was probably why we chose her place; it seemed the safest.
“Pay on time or I give away your room,” she barked. “And no male visitors. This isn’t that kind of establishment.”
Graça nodded and I took the brass room key. I had no idea how we would pay our new landlady at the end of the week, but I kept quiet and followed Graça upstairs. Our room had a sagging bed, a rusted sink, and a dark, unfortunate stain on the floor. Graça sat gingerly on the bed, as if afraid the frame would collapse. She sniffed the air, then leaned and smelled the bedcover. She immediately stood.
“These sheets smell like other people,” she said.
“At least they don’t smell like dogs,” I said, trying to cheer her. Graça covered her face in her hands.
I kept quiet, knowing better than to console. We were exhausted. After taking a tourist taxi from Corcovado to Mayrink—the only radio station in the city—we’d spent the rest of the day on our feet, in front of the station’s doors. Graça and I sang for every person who moved in and out of Mayrink. The station’s employees laughed at us. They patted our heads. One man gave us a coin, which Graça threw furiously into the gutter. Later, at the boardinghouse, I wished she hadn’t done that. With our braided hair and plain white blouses and Sion skirts—mine brown, Graça’s blue—we looked like what we were, or what we had been until we escaped: simple schoolgirls. No one took us seriously, but, I later realized, the men were careful not to proposition us because it seemed like we had homes and families. By evening Graça and I were ravenous. Our throats were sore and our feet ached. I was secretly thankful when a security guard at the radio station finally shooed us away.
I took the last of our money (the tourist taxi, we’d later find out, had greatly overcharged us) and bought us a bottle of Coca-Cola and a fried meat pie, food we were never allowed to eat at Sion or Riacho Doce. The soda was warm and terribly sweet. The pie leaked oil.
“Should we go back to school?” I asked, dreaming of our tidy Sion beds.
Graça’s lip curled. “Never.”
So we found our way into Lapa.
The next morning I woke to find Graça in her camisole, hunched over the edge of the bed. I thought she was sick or possibly crying until I heard ripping. Her school skirt sat on her lap. Using the metal tip of her crucifix, Graça ripped away the threads of her skirt’s school patch, the Sion crest.
“They’ll be looking for us,” she said. “The sooner we get rid of these uniforms the better.”
When she finished she admired her work, then lit a match and burned the detached patch, throwing the blackened remnants out the window and into the alley below, along with her crucifix. At the sink, Graça splashed water onto her face and wove her shiny brown hair into a braid. Then she dressed.
“I’m going down the hall to use the toilet,” she announced. “Then I’m heading back to Mayrink.”
My eyes were crusted with sleep. My stomach ached. Even Sion’s breakfast of watery oats and a hard-boiled egg sounded lovely to me. Graça shut the door loudly behind her. I heard her short, purposeful steps to the hall toilet and realized she would not wait for me. She would head to Mayrink alone if I wasn’t ready to go. I scrambled from bed and washed my face, using the front of my Sion skirt as a towel.
We were careful to take the same route to Mayrink as we had the evening before, so we wouldn’t get lost. Halfway there, Graça stopped walking.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
“Me too.”
Graça looked impatient. “I need breakfast. I can’t sing all day like this.”
“We used all our mil-réis yesterday, on the cab and dinner,” I said.
Graça stared, confused.
“To buy food we need money,” I said.
People pushed past us on the crooked sidewalk. There were sharp screeches of metal against metal as a barber and a café owner lifted the gates from the fronts of their businesses. Near us, an old woman washed vomit from her front steps. She eyed us and upturned a bucket. Water slapped the stone and splashed against our legs, soaking our shoes. Graça jumped toward me and grabbed my hands, as if she was afraid she might be swept away.
“But I’m starving, Dor,” she said again, as if this might change things, as if I controlled whether we ate or not.
“We have to get jobs,” I said.
“At the radio station?”
I shook my head. “Maybe one day, soon. But in the meantime we’ll have to look for something else. To get us by.”
“Get us by,” Graça repeated. “And once we’re by, I can start singing.”
“We can,” I corrected.
* * *
—
During those first miserable days when Graça and I begged for work, we discovered that our accents alerted people immediately that we were from the northeast, which made us both—even Graça with her lighter skin and her good looks—considered inferior. We also discovered that Lapa was not one neighborhood but two, each with its own tribes, customs, and rules. There was daytime Lapa with its profusion of bakeries, pharmacies, barbershops, fruit peddlers, flower vendors, window washers, shoeshine boys, and countless little factories that made tourist trinkets for foreigners to buy at the docks. This was the Lapa of hustlers and enterprise. Everywhere you looked, there were deals and trades and gossip. Everyone you saw lived in the neighborhood. Nighttime was when outsiders arrived. Shoe repair shops turned into bars, cafés into dance parlors. Newspaper boys reappeared on the streets selling cigarettes and hits of ether. Girls with painted lips lingered in doorways. Neighborhood toughs carried knives and staked out street corners.
At dusk on our second, dismal day in the city, just as daytime Lapa and nighttime Lapa were trading places, Graça and I returned to our boardinghouse without work and faint with empty stomachs.
“Oh, baby girl, you’re stoppin’ my heart,” a man shouted to Graça. He wore a tie as thin as a ribbon.
Graça stared intently at the sidewalk. The man’s buddy tipped his fedora and blew kisses. We weren’t at Riacho Doce anymore, where all the men were forced to look away from the Little Miss or lose their jobs.
“Hey, Stretch!” the buddy called. I glanced up at him. “Yeah, you!” he persisted. “Hot damn! Look at those long thighs of yours. What lapas!”
The Sion skirt was the same one I’d had since we first arrived at the convent school the year before and, by the time we ran away, its hem barely covered my knees. On Graça, the skirt accentuated her tiny waist and full hips. Her lace camisole was easily visible under her white blouse and, under that, there was no hiding the fullness of her chest.
“You girls look hungry,” the fedora man said. “How ’bout we get you some grub?”
Graça glanced at me. I threaded my arm through hers and walked faster, nearly dragging her along. Those boys weren’t harmless and we both knew it; if we were unable to pay for our little room we’d be on the street, at their mercy.
Across from our boardinghouse, a man had set up a little fire and grate where he grilled corn and sold it for five tostões. Graça stared at the fire, then closed her eyes, as if the food was too painful to see.
“I’m going back,” she said, her eyes shut tight.
“To Sion?”
Graça shook her head, impatient. “To those malandros. I’m telling them to buy us dinner.”
“But they’ll want things from us.”
“I don’t care,” Graça said, sinking onto the boardinghouse stoop. “I’ll give them anything.”
Graça was always a creature of the present—she wanted what she wanted in that moment, without regard to future sacrifices. I slumped beside Graça.
“Someone will give us a break tomorrow,” I said. “And we’ll buy a huge lunch. You can eat a whole steak if you want.”
“Shut up, Dor!” Graça said. “The closest we’re getting to a steak is if we steal one off a table, like two street mutts.” She hid her head between her knees. She sniffled and let out little moans. The smell of corn and butter grew stronger; my stomach knotted. I pressed my palms to my eyes and tried to think of a plan. Someone kicked the toe of my shoe.
A boy stood before us. His clothes were made of sturdy fabric, though they looked like they hadn’t been washed in weeks. His knees were gray, their skin strangely thick. Under one arm he cradled a shoeshine box. In his other hand—its nails rimmed black—he held out a corncob.
“Take it,” he ordered.
I hesitated. Graça looked up, her face blotched pink, and snatched the cob from his hand. She ate quickly, her little teeth gnawing until half the cob was white and empty. Before she could eat it all, I grabbed the cob and finished it off.
Hunger sharpens memory. I still recall the smoky taste of that corn; the way the butter slid across my lips; the way each kernel popped between my teeth! As soon as I’d finished, Graça took the cob from me and sucked the last of its butter off.
“We can’t pay you back,” I said, wiping my mouth with my arm.
“If you could, you would’ve bought dinner yourself,” the boy replied. “I shine shoes on the corner. I saw you gals leaving this morning. Lapa’s not easy for new folks. Especially rich ones.”
“We’re not rich,” I said.
The boy looked us up and down. “Some fancy schoolgirl went missing. She got lost in Tijuca Forest a few days back. Wandered off from her school’s group. People around Corcovado are still looking for her on the mountain.”
Graça forgot the cob in her hands. “Where’d you hear that?” she asked.
“It’s in the papers. I can’t read, but the men whose shoes I shine sure can.”
My chest felt very tight, as if my lungs had been sewn shut and no air could pass in or out of them.
“But you’re two schoolgirls and the papers say only one’s gone missing,” the boy said, then tapped my shoe with his toe again. “Those are real nice. Patent leather. I can sell them—they’ll get you a good price.”
“We can’t go barefoot,” Graça said.
The boy smiled, his teeth yellow. A pack of cigarettes peeked from his shirt pocket. “You can get some sandals, real cheap. You’ve got to pay your landlady, don’t you? She’s as nice as a dog with rabies.”
Graça laughed.
“And listen,” the boy said, lowering his voice. “Those outfits aren’t doing you two any favors. You look lik
e gals whose families will send police to find you, and no one here likes police, if you catch my drift. You can sell those outfits, too. There’s places around here where girls are paid to dress up,” he said, and wiggled his eyebrows. “Rich folks that visit at night like some weird shit, I tell you. I know a house where they might want to buy some schoolgirl threads. I can take you there in the morning.”
“Why?” I asked.
The boy looked surprised. “You’ll give me a cut of whatever you sell. And you’ll pay me back for the corn.”
“You’re a real businessman,” I said.
The boy smiled. “Querida, in Lapa that’s the only way to be. So, we have a deal?”
Graça and I looked at each other. It was the only offer we’d heard all day. She nodded at me and I at her, as if we were doing business with each other. Then we agreed to meet the boy the next morning to sell the clothes off our backs.
Wearing cheap sandals and secondhand dresses, Graça and I blended in with daytime Lapa, and began to learn its ropes. We got odd jobs sweeping front stoops, husking corn for the vendor on our corner, fetching drinking water from the local pump for our landlady, plucking chickens for a little lunch place, washing dishes, scrubbing windows. Or, rather, I did these things and Graça lagged behind, complaining that her broom was too heavy, the chickens too smelly, the dishwater too hot, the buckets too hard to carry. Still, each morning we set out like explorers, learning Lapa’s streets, its alleys, its rhythms.
The Air You Breathe Page 11
