Carmelita’s Alley was where the snobby French girls lived and worked. (In those days anything French was considered high-class.) Joaquim Silva Street was where you found the Poles—blonde and pale with a dour look to them. (I suppose I’d be dour, too, if I was always considered second-rate to a French girl.) Morais e Vale Street was where local good-time girls worked. The borders of Lapa near the Senate, Catete Palace, and the House of Representatives had wide streets, smooth sidewalks, and better shops. Lapa’s best cabarets were around there, too. They had marquees with real electric lights, and ticket booths out front where snooty-looking girls sat behind glass and collected money. Inside were second-string vaudeville acts shipped in from the USA and foreign bands, because anything from outside Brazil was considered chic. If you wanted to find real music, you had to risk going deeper inside Lapa.
Of course, Graça and I didn’t know what samba was until Lapa. At the time, tango was so popular that Brazilian singers were putting out their own versions in badly accented Spanish. But Lapa’s music was different—it had none of tango’s toughness or sharp tones. From our boardinghouse window we heard guitars, the metallic clang of agogô bells, the cry of cuícas. There were homemade instruments, too: beans in a tin can, hollow gourds, forks moving back and forth across the sharp teeth of coconut scrapers, the shaking of matches in a box. These were what people called the batucada—sounds that were common by themselves but that, together, became distinct. The batucada moved like a school of fish, always keeping pace with one another whether they were diving forward or pulling back.
Doormen, bellhops, waiters, sweet-flour pushers, street toughs, barbers, and others came together at the end of each day and played for one another, and everyone in Lapa listened. These were not the lighthearted, silly marchinhas that Odeon and Victor later recorded and sold each year during Carnaval. Samba was never truly about happiness.
“I sing to find you.
Hoping my voice will carry
through your window
to your bed
and my words will touch you where I can’t.”
In our boardinghouse room each night I lay bone-tired beside Graça, her breath on my neck, and listened to those men’s laments. Hearing them, I felt slippery inside, as if something had spilled within me.
Those first months in Lapa were, for me, a kind of paradise. Every night Graça and I curled side by side in our sagging bed, holding hands and laughing about our day’s adventures. We learned how to use the little money we made, how to bargain, how to wash properly without having a bathtub full of water at our disposal. We learned how to swear. Porra, asshole, boceta, creep, piroca, and many other, more colorful words became things we said with relish. We’d also learned Lapa’s language: a “hoofer” was a dancer, and we did not wear shoes but “ground grippers.” If something or someone was batatas, they were the best around. We did not say good-bye but “Gotta fly!” We called friends and workmates “nêgo” or “nêga.” We addressed the shopkeeper on the corner, the butcher, the trolley driver all as “querido” and we giggled each time we did this, thrilled to be calling perfect strangers the endearment that a wife would use for her husband. And I wrote all of it down in my little notebook—the one the Senhora had gifted me long ago—making lists of new words and scenes and smells, until the book’s pages began to fill.
During these weeks, Graça and I were together like nail and finger, as we say in Portuguese. In Lapa, we weren’t Little Miss and Jega. We weren’t Sion Student and Helper. We were, finally, just Graça and Dores.
Years later, Graça told people that this was the worst time in her life. I was surprised every time she said this. Sure, we were dirt poor and learning to navigate a new city, but we were together and surrounded by music. It was foolish to believe that this was enough to make Graça content.
* * *
—
One evening, after Graça and I had finished sweeping the hair from a barbershop floor, she refused the coins the owner offered us.
“We’ll get paid in cuts,” Graça said, plopping into his chair and holding up her braid. “Lop it off. I’ll take one of those Marlene Dietrich bobs. And she will, too.”
We couldn’t afford tickets to the cinema, but we admired Marlene Dietrich in movie posters plastered around Lapa. Other girls in the neighborhood had taken to wearing Dietrich’s risqué hairstyle, cut just below the chin and leaving their necks exposed. Graça, of course, wouldn’t be outdone. The bobbed style made her look older and, at the same time, mischievous, like a little girl about to make trouble.
I’d never gotten a haircut in my life. When it was my turn to sit in the barber’s chair, I held tightly to my long, heavy braid and thought of Senhora Pimentel—how, years before, she’d brushed and styled my “Indian’s hair,” as if it was something to be cared for and admired. I rose from the chair.
“I’m not cutting mine,” I announced.
“Why not?” Graça asked.
“I don’t want to.”
Graça’s eyes narrowed. “You look like a goddamn milkmaid. It’s embarrassing. If we want to move up, we need new looks.”
“Move up where?”
“I’m not working these piddly jobs forever. We’re getting our hair cut, and then we’re getting a regular gig at one of the tourist shops, where they really pay. First chance we get, we’re buying new dresses—no more of these god-awful potato sacks—and we’re going back to Mayrink. I didn’t come here to sweep, I came here to sing. What about you?”
I returned to the chair. The barber, a quiet old man, wasn’t used to cutting women’s hair. He held my braid gingerly, then took his largest scissors, the blades cool against my neck, and sliced hard. The braid fell to the floor and lay there, a dark, limp snake at Graça’s feet. I looked into the mirror and saw eyes that startled me with their blackness; the sharp line of a jaw; jutting cheekbones made more severe from a diet of coffee and bread; a neck, long and almost beautiful in its nakedness.
* * *
—
The most popular tourist trinkets were tea trays, bonbon boxes, and pencil cups covered with iridescent scenes of Rio and Sugarloaf Mountain. These scenes weren’t made with paint. They were made with butterfly wings—detached from their bodies and glued strategically onto any surface to resemble Rio’s skyline. Yellow and orange wings for sunsets, blue wings for the sky, black for Sugarloaf, brown for beach sand. Girls like Graça and me did the gluing. A few days after debuting our new haircuts, we were hired to work in a souvenir shop blocks from the Senate.
There were twenty girls in Mr. Souza’s shop, each of us paid by the piece. Some girls were better at gluing the wings; their pieces sold for more money. The pay was much better than at our previous odd jobs, but it was tedious work. The glue made me dizzy. The shop’s workroom was humid and cramped. The butterfly wings tore easily in my hands. (We had to pay one vintém for every wing we broke!) Graça was worse than I was at our new job. The butterfly wings were very pretty and Graça liked to hold them up in the room’s weak light.
“Will you look at this color, Dor?” she asked. “I didn’t even know these colors existed.”
Graça worked slowly, which made Mr. Souza, the shop’s owner, impatient. He often hunched over us while we glued, pretending to look at our work but really letting his hands wander. The first time I felt his fingers brush the side of my breast I nearly knocked my glue pot over. After a few of these brushings, Mr. Souza realized, I think, that there was nothing much on me to feel and moved his attentions to the better-endowed girls. Graça liked to sing while she worked, and, hearing her voice, the other girls encouraged her. Mr. Souza didn’t complain on our first day, but by day three whenever Mr. Souza came close to Graça and his fat little hands tried to cup her bosom, she stopped singing. The silence made us raise our heads in her direction and Mr. Souza backed away.
“No more singing,” he announced. “I wan
t work, not chirping!”
At the end of each workday, Graça and I left our table in a great rush, hoping to get to Mayrink before six p.m., when the evening’s radio announcers arrived. Graça and I sang for them as they walked into the station’s doors, often until our voices were hoarse. There were other street performers—comedians, singers, a ventriloquist—also hoping to land a radio gig, so Graça and I had to rush to Mayrink to beat the pack and grab our corner. But before we could leave the butterfly shop, we had to wait for Mr. Souza to pay us our day’s wages, counting our finished pieces and then dropping coins into our hands.
Mr. Souza never had a particular order in which he paid us, but no one ever wanted to be last. Sometimes the last girl was paid like everyone else and allowed to leave the butterfly shop. But every few weeks, when the mood struck Souza, he called the last girl for her payment and made a great show of searching his pockets for more change, quickly declaring that they were empty. The last girl had to receive her payment in his office. He never chose the prettiest girls, but the quietest ones. At the time, I didn’t let myself speculate why Mr. Souza took a girl into his office and closed the door in order to pay her. I believed that those girls were no concern of mine or of Graça’s. They weren’t us, and we weren’t them.
After a pleasant month of work, Graça and I were able to pay rent, buy decent food, even put down payment on two new dresses with belted waists and fluttering sleeves, the latest style. Every day after work, on our way to Rádio Mayrink, we walked by the seamstress’s shop and admired the dresses in her window, knowing that, soon, we’d be wearing them.
One evening, Mr. Souza paid girl after girl, weaving between the worktables to inspect their pieces. Graça and I waited, shifting impatiently behind our table. After a few minutes, only she and I were left. The other girls lingered around us, pretending to count their money or tie their shoes. Really, they were waiting to see which of us would be last.
Mr. Souza counted our finished butterfly pieces, then turned around and dropped several coins into Graça’s hands. My eyes burned from the glue’s fumes. I felt dizzy as Mr. Souza shoved his thick hands into his pockets.
“Let’s see here,” he said to me, then shook his head. “What’s your name again?”
“Dores.”
Mr. Souza cocked his head in the direction of his office. I glanced at Graça. She pursed her lips and bugged her eyes, trying to warn me. But I’d had a particularly productive day—I’d finished nearly twenty pieces—and if we didn’t get my wages, we wouldn’t be able to pay our landlady in full for the week, or buy our dresses.
I felt Mr. Souza’s hand on my shoulder, guiding me to his office door. I felt the other girls’ eyes on my back, watching me just as I had watched some of them follow Mr. Souza into that dark little room with the warped wooden door.
Before we reached the threshold, there was a loud clang. I turned around. So did Mr. Souza. Graça ran from worktable to worktable, collecting jars of glue and tins of wings and throwing them all into the air. The glue jars shattered on the workroom floor. Some of the tins opened before they reached the floor, releasing a cloud of blue and orange and red and black wings. The remaining girls squealed and hooted and held out their hands to catch the floating wings.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mr. Souza yelled, knocking me aside and rushing toward Graça. There were whispers, then the click-clack of heels. The other butterfly girls—who’d lived in Lapa long enough to know when to make a quick exit—pushed through the front door. Souza caught Graça’s arm. She threw a tin at his face. He twisted her wrist until Graça staggered toward him, her back against his chest. She yelped.
I felt as if I had been pushed underwater. Sounds seemed faraway and distorted. My vision was a blur. I seemed to move slowly—as if the air had thickened to liquid—taking one stride, then another, using my arms to propel me forward, toward Souza, then leaning, picking up a wooden work stool, and lifting it high over my head.
When the stool came down, sound returned. There was a satisfying crack. Souza slumped to his knees, then fell, face-first, pinning Graça underneath him. She screamed. I dropped the stool, then dragged her out.
Souza stayed quiet on the floor in front of us, a knot the size of a plum on the back of his head. I held on to the rickety worktable so I would not fall, but my body shook so violently that the table wobbled under my grip.
Graça slipped her hand into Souza’s back pocket, removed a wad of bills, then stood and grabbed my arm, dragging me across that sticky floor and out the back door.
We ran so fast, everything around us blurred. We ducked into alleyways and wove around fruit hawkers and sweet-flour boys. The butterfly wings were how I kept Graça in my sights as we ran—her curls were dotted with iridescent blues and yellows.
After what seemed like an eternity of running, we ducked into the dark doorway of a shoe repair shop. Graça rested her hands on her knees and leaned over, catching her breath. My lungs felt too big for my chest. My sides cramped. I felt a terrible heat rising in my stomach and worried I was going to be sick. Graça stared at me. I expected her to boast about how fast we’d gotten away, or to congratulate herself for her quick thinking about the money. Instead, Graça took a long breath and asked: “Are you dumb or something?”
“No.”
“Well you sure act like it. Don’t you know what he does in that office?”
“I wasn’t going to let him do it to me.”
“So you were going to fight him in there but not out in the open, in front of the other girls?”
My head ached as if I was the one hit by the stool. Why had I let Souza steer me toward that door? Would I have allowed him to touch me for a few measly mil-réis? Why had I stood up for Graça, but not for myself?
“I wanted my money,” I said. “How else were we going to pay for our room?”
Graça shook her head. “Well you didn’t have to crack his skull.”
“You think I cracked his skull?”
“I’m not a fucking doctor! You could’ve just stepped on his foot. Or kicked his shins. Or kneed him in the pinto. But you always take things too far, Dor. One second you’re a little housemaid about to let him drag you into some closet, the next you’re a fucking lunatic.”
“I was never a maid,” I said.
“What were you, then?” Graça asked.
The saliva in my mouth felt too warm; I held my stomach. I wanted Graça to answer her own question: to say that I was her friend. That I was Dor.
“Maybe I’m used to seeing girls get dragged into closets,” I said. “It’s nothing new to us.”
Graça was quiet. Blood leached from her face in patches, leaving a jagged, pale line that ran from her nose to her forehead and disappeared in her hair. “Papai was lonely after Mamãe. He drank too much. He was never like that butterfly pervert.”
“If you miss him so much, you should go back.”
“Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll leave you here to get arrested.”
I pictured Souza on the floor, blood leaking from his head. Then I doubled over and vomited on Graça’s sandaled feet.
She gasped and staggered backward. “Aw, hell, Dor,” she said. Then she moved next to me and tucked my loose hair behind my ears. “It’s okay,” she said, her voice soft. “All the police care about is arresting commies. And anyway, he’s not dead.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s not,” she snapped.
“You can’t just decide he’s alive.”
“Why can’t I? You can groan and moan and worry all you want, but I’m telling you: he’s not dead.”
Graça grabbed my shoulders as if she was about to shake me. Instead, she brought her mouth very close to mine and spoke slowly, as if I was a child. “That’s not possible. That’s not how things are going to turn out for us. We’re here to make it big. And you don’t h
ave to follow anybody’s orders. Not ever again.”
The money she’d swiped was stuffed inside her camisole. Graça patted the bulge under her shirt.
“Now let’s go home and buy ourselves a real bath in the landlady’s tub. With bubbles. I can’t smell like vomit for weeks on end, and we’ve got to get these butterflies off us. Just in case.”
I used to wonder what would’ve happened if I’d had the better voice and Graça the lesser one. Would I have become Sofia Salvador? Would I have been able to withstand the rigors of fame? Would Graça have lived past her twenty-sixth birthday if she hadn’t become Sofia Salvador and I had? I realize now that none of these questions matter. Graça would have been a performer no matter what. And I would never be a star—not a real one. Not because I had the lesser talent, but because I had the lesser imagination. I knew how to work, how to avoid going hungry, how to survive. But I always needed Graça to teach me about possibility.
* * *
—
Souza was not dead, just hurt. Another butterfly girl saw us singing outside Mayrink and told us this news, congratulating us for “knocking his block off.” The girl didn’t mention anything about the money we’d stolen, but this didn’t bring relief. When we returned to our singing on the street corner, I fumbled my lyrics and lost harmony with Graça. She glared at me, but I could not regain my focus. Every time I looked into the little crowd gathered around us, I believed I caught sight of Souza’s beady eyes or, worse, of Senhor Pimentel’s dark hair and arrow nose, and my stomach clenched.
Even before our fight with Souza, Graça and I picked old newspapers out of trash bins and looked for articles about the missing schoolgirl. In the beginning, there was news: police had found Graça’s extra Sion shirt (the one she’d flung off during our train ride) in the trees, and this was seen as a bad sign. A group of hobos camping in the forest nearby were questioned and released. The search was suspended due to lack of funds and manpower. There was an article about Sion School and the bad publicity it endured; a few of the Sisters were transferred to faraway convents. There was a petition to make the Tijuca Forest safer. There was mention of Senhor Pimentel and how he held out hope to find his daughter.
The Air You Breathe Page 12
