“Pants?” the old man asked. “Those are for the spiky-haired Big Foots. Not for girls like you.”
“Big Foots”—that’s what Lapans called women with short hair who liked to wear men’s shoes and suits, and who liked to keep the company of good-time girls as much as men did.
“Look here, sonny,” Graça said, “slacks are the latest. You’d better get ready to make them for all the girls.”
We plucked our eyebrows until they were nearly gone, then bought a makeup pencil and darkened them into dramatic arches, just like Marlene Dietrich’s. We went to the cinema once a week, and our favorite picture was still Dietrich’s Shanghai Express. I didn’t think I’d be impressed by movies—especially the silent ones—but when Dietrich strutted and laughed and pouted her dark lips on that enormous screen, I felt short of breath.
“Look at her, Dor,” Graça whispered. Then she turned in her seat to stare at the other patrons in the smoky movie hall. “Look how everyone looks at her!”
Instead of staying in bed most nights and reading together (Graça with her copies of Shimmy! magazine and me with my dime-store novels, which I bought by the dozen), we began to go out on the town. We saw several vaudeville shows that featured jugglers or ugly little dogs balancing plates on their snouts. We went to jazz clubs, which thrilled me. But the music was always cut short by Graça’s flirting. There was always a boy in the crowd—either a dapper university student, or a broad-shouldered rower, or a tubercular-looking artist—that caught Graça’s eye and offered to buy her drinks. These boys inevitably had friends who were stuck with me each night. While Graça and her boys laughed and nuzzled each other, me and my boys ended up talking. Some could hold decent conversations; others were as dull as rocks. On our walks home, Graça and I made fun of the boys—hers and mine—and called them “knuckle draggers.”
“You think we’ll ever have real boyfriends?” Graça asked late one night as we lay side by side in bed, trying, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep.
“I don’t want one,” I replied.
“Every girl wants one.”
“Not me,” I said, turning away from her.
“Poor Dor. You haven’t kissed any boys yet.”
“No,” I replied, annoyed. I’d seen kissing in the movies, and it looked like a violent smashing together of faces.
“Well, you’d better learn,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because! Around here, you have to be able to handle yourself. You have to know how you want to be kissed and how you don’t.”
“I don’t,” I replied.
Graça rolled her eyes. “Everyone wants to be kissed, Dor.”
“Do you?”
“Sure,” she said. “But I don’t want bad kisses, like the kind these knuckle draggers we’re stuck with around here dole out. Yuck!”
“They’re bad?” I asked, happy that Graça disliked all of them.
“They’re terrible!” Graça replied. “You could tell they never practiced a day in their lives.”
“Practiced?”
Graça sighed at my ignorance. “Even movie actors have to practice, to make their kisses just right. I read it in Shimmy! They don’t just walk onto a set and slobber all over each other.”
“Disgusting.”
“Yeah. But not if you do it right. You have to practice, Dor. So you don’t embarrass yourself.”
“All right,” I said.
Graça sat up in bed. My stomach did a somersault.
“First, you have to look into each other’s eyes,” she said. Graça stared at me, tilting her head. A soft smile spread across her face. My heart pounded as if it would split the skin and bones of my chest. Graça’s smile quickly turned into a frown.
“No,” she said, frustrated. “This isn’t right.”
“No?” I croaked.
“First,” she said, “you have to have a horrible fight. You have to hate each other.”
“But then why would you want to kiss each other?”
“God, Dor! Keep up! You don’t really hate each other. Here, I’ll be the man.” Graça straightened her shoulders and crossed her arms. She glared at me. “You’re a silly girl!” she said, and then in a whisper, “Come on, Dor. Tell me you hate me.”
“I hate you?”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“All right,” I said, trying to channel the film actresses Graça admired. “I hate you!”
Graça flew toward me. She became a blur. I smelled the rose soap she used on her hair, the slight sourness of her breath. Her mouth pressed hard against mine. I kept my lips closed tight, holding my breath until my chest burned and my eyes grew watery. Graça pulled away.
“That was terrible,” she said. “You’ve got to put some action into it, Dor. Otherwise it’s like kissing a lamppost.”
“You weren’t so great, either,” I said, rubbing my top lip. “I felt like you were swooping in to eat my tongue.”
Graça rolled her eyes. “That’s called emotion, Dor.”
“Well, can there be a little less emotion? I don’t want a split lip.”
“Fine,” Graça said. “We’ll do it your way.”
“Fine,” I replied. I quickly replayed movie scenes in my head, but none satisfied me; we’d look ridiculous acting out such scenes. Surely life was not like those movies. I thought of my dime-store novels. I thought of Capitu—a heroine in one of those books—and her long, thick hair, and how her boyfriend, Bentinho, must have felt the first time he touched it.
“Close your eyes,” I said, worried Graça would laugh at me. She obeyed.
I moved my hand to Graça’s hair, stroking it carefully, so my fingers didn’t get caught in the curls. I let my fingers run around her ear, then down her neck. Before she could open her eyes, I let my mouth rest on hers. Things came naturally then—more naturally than I could have guessed. Our mouths moved softly. A bit of saliva escaped our lips, making them glide easily across each other. Then, without my realizing it, my tongue moved ever so slightly. Its tip grazed the tip of Graça’s. I felt a jolt, as if I’d touched a live wire. Graça must have felt it, too, because she jerked back. Her eyes were wide. She looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. Then she looked away.
“That was all right,” she said. “Now you be the girl.”
We practiced this way, on and off, for months. After work and before our forays into Lapa’s cabarets, I tried to rush us back to our little boardinghouse room. But often Graça wanted to go shopping, or she’d dillydally at the magazine stand while I paced and sighed.
“You need a bathroom or something?” she’d say, and shoot me a withering look.
So I learned to hide my eagerness for our practice sessions, believing Graça was also hiding hers, because once we started she was never reluctant. I realize now that Graça had always been, and would always be, undaunted by her body’s needs. Satisfying them was the same as eating a meal when she was hungry, or gulping water when she was thirsty. Once satiated, Graça plowed through the rest of her day without a thought to what had happened before. After our kissing practices, Graça fell dead asleep beside me but I could not shut my eyes. She’d uncovered in me a depth and an urgency of feeling that I never knew existed. I stared at my feet, my rough hands, my flat stomach and even flatter chest as if seeing them for the first time. Before, they’d been tools. They functioned as servants to my mind, allowing me to stir a pot, or to curl up tightly when fists fell on me, or to run through a maze of alleys. It took Graça’s hands and teeth and tongue to bring me into myself, to show me that my body was not a shell built to withstand beatings, or a device made to follow my mind’s orders. It was not an “it”—it was me.
I wanted more: to explore further, to move deeper. Graça would not have it. We could kiss until our lips were numb but I had to constantly remind myself not to ho
ld her too tightly or let my hands stray below her stomach. If I did, Graça pushed away and the session was over. Each night was a gift and a struggle.
One morning as we sipped coffee at the corner bakery, Graça said something funny and, before I could stop myself, my hand shot out and stroked hers. She pulled away as if I’d burned her.
“Stop,” she whispered. “You want people to think we’re Big Foots?”
It’s said that Adam and Eve felt no shame in the Garden. Only when they were exiled did they look at themselves, at their nakedness, and feel the need to cover up. Many young girls do this sort of “practicing,” as we called it. But back then I was foolish. I felt no shame because I was convinced that Graça and I were our own invention. I believed that we were different—that no two before us and no two after would do as we did together, during our practices. We were different, certainly, from those kept girls with their wealthy patronesses. We were different from Lapa’s rumored spiky-haired “Big Foots.” No girl dreamed of becoming either of those kinds of women, and neither did I.
* * *
—
What kind of women did we want to become? I had, in my memory, an image of Nena’s authority and Senhora Pimentel’s grace. I recalled the queenly dignity of the Baianas we’d seen in Salvador. I watched Marlene Dietrich’s shimmering, electric energy on-screen. But these were images and recollections, not flesh-and-blood.
In Lapa, girls in the limelight shimmied and danced in skimpy costumes; they stood in line in identical dresses and sang background vocals; they were magician’s assistants, holding scarves and hats; they appeared, kicking their legs into the air, as a distraction before the main act. Women didn’t sing samba or tango or jazz. They didn’t compose songs or play instruments. They weren’t part of the band. Sure, in candomblé terreiros there were priestesses who sang to their gods. And in opera houses there were women sopranos and fado singers, but in Lapa’s nitty-gritty? Women were, at best, muses for composers and, at worst, locked inside places like Madame Lucifer’s until their bodies wore out.
We steered clear of Madame L.’s place in the evenings, but one night the well-dressed boy found us again and told us we’d been called. When we arrived at Lucifer’s there was music playing in the parlor and a gaggle of girls, still in their robes, scattered about playing checkers, reading Shimmy! magazine, and devouring bowls of rice.
“Hey! It’s the daytime gals!” one of them shouted. “You two get a promotion?”
Graça and I heard the others laugh as we trudged upstairs, to Madame L.’s fourth-floor office. The room smelled of citrus cologne. Lucifer sat behind his desk, his suit impeccably pressed, gold cuff links glimmering at his wrists, and a mole carefully drawn above his glossed lips. He did not smile or ask us to sit.
“You little canaries ready to start paying me back?” he asked.
“We’re working for you,” I said. “Haven’t we already started?”
“You’d have to run errands the rest of your lives to pay what you owe,” he replied. “Luckily you didn’t come here to make deliveries and read newspapers. You girls ever been on a stage before?”
“We’ve done plenty of singing,” Graça said.
“That’s not what I asked,” Madame L. said. “I’m not talking about street corners.”
“Not a real stage, no,” I replied.
Madame L. leaned back into his chair. “Near the Grand Hotel, number fifty-two,” he said. “Go there tomorrow after you finish your work for me. Ask for Anaïs. Tell her I sent you.”
* * *
—
The Grand Hotel was in the ritzy part of Lapa. Graça and I spent the night speculating which fancy cabaret had the name “Number 52.” But when we arrived at the street Madame Lucifer had indicated, number 52 was not a name but an address, and it was not a cabaret but a shop. The store’s display windows were shuttered, the glass doors locked. A small brass plate above the door read: “La Femme Chic.”
Graça knocked. A woman poked her head outside. She looked like a heroine from a silent film—long-necked and pale, with enormous black eyes and mauve lipstick so perfectly applied it looked as if it had been stamped onto her mouth.
“What?” she asked.
Madame Lucifer’s instructions came into my mind but I could not make my mouth speak them. Anaïs raised her penciled brows.
“Madame Lucifer sent us,” Graça said, impatient. “I’m a singer.”
“Me too,” I added.
The woman rolled her lovely eyes. “Lu-ci-fer,” she purred in accented Portuguese. “Of course he sends me more singers.”
She opened the door just wide enough for us to squeeze inside. What did I expect to find at La Femme Chic? In Lapa, I’d quickly learned that places and people took various forms—men could look like women and women like men; a shoe repair shop also served as a bar; a piece of bread was a place to stow sweet flour; a bellhop by day was a great musician by night. From the moment we knocked on Anaïs’s door, I held out hope that number 52 was secretly a great cabaret, but also steeled myself for it to be another brothel. Turned out, Lapa could always surprise me. As soon as Graça and I stepped inside, we both gasped.
Propped upon wooden perches like dozens of bright, exotic birds were the most incredible hats we’d ever seen. There were button plate hats with clusters of red satin cherries. There were berets in colors I’d never known existed. There were little Robin Hood–style numbers with sprays of green feathers along their sides. There were veiled styles that had hundreds of tiny, sparkling stones glued to the netting, making it look as if the hat had been brushed with dew.
In those days, if a classy woman left her house without wearing a hat, it was as if she was wandering around barefoot. Even I was a fan of hats, though I could never afford one. La Femme Chic, it turned out, was the most exclusive hat shop in all of Rio, and Anaïs was its creator.
She inspected our little belted dresses and our bare heads. Then, suddenly indignant, she said: “Come with me if you must.”
Anaïs led us out of the showroom and into a cramped and dark parlor. The milliner stood very close to Graça. She pressed a pale hand to Graça’s stomach and, for an instant, I thought of Mr. Souza and his back room. But instead of feeling afraid, I felt jealous.
“Breath is a singer’s fuel!” Anaïs shouted.
Graça and I jumped.
Once again, she pressed her hand to Graça’s stomach.
“Relax here,” she ordered. “Breathe in. No, no! Do not gulp air. It is not the quantity that matters, but where the air travels. Breathe again. Again. Again . . .”
We spent that evening, and many others, learning how to breathe. Long before she was a milliner, Anaïs had been a singer. She’d taken classes in France and had even been onstage at several opera houses, as a part of the chorus.
“Voice—it is a mysterious entity,” Anaïs said during our lessons. “It is invisible, yet all around us. It must envelop. It must fill a theater, a concert hall! It must communicate every emotion ever known. It must expand, never contract! Expand your voices, my dears, and you expand your souls!”
We did very little actual singing during Anaïs’s lessons. She made us practice yawning to relax our throats. She made us stand before a mirror and say “EEEEEE-AHHHHH-EEEEEEE-AHHHHHH” without moving our jaws. She taught us how to expand our rib cages, and what our diaphragms were. She taught us how to walk onto a stage with our chins up and shoulders back, how to smile, how to bow, how to project our voices to reach the farthest listeners, how to keep singing even if we forgot a lyric or botched a note. Outside La Femme Chic, Anaïs required us to drink eight glasses of water a day and prohibited cigarettes. Graça and I obeyed because we respected not only Anaïs’s teaching but also her sense of style. If Anaïs said smoking was gauche, or capped sleeves were childish, or bobbed hair was passé, we submitted as though we’d heard a decree straight f
rom the heavens.
Our daily lessons satisfied—for a short while at least—our dreams of becoming performers. From Anaïs, Graça got uninterrupted attention, which she loved, and I—ever the obedient pupil—got a sense of working hard at something I cherished. Anaïs was the first real singer we had ever known. We assumed (correctly as it turned out) that she gave us those lessons because she, like many in Lapa, owed Madame Lucifer a favor. He’d sent other girls to her in the past but, according to Anaïs, those girls had neither the discipline nor the talent to truly succeed. When we asked her what became of those girls, Anaïs’s expression darkened. “They found other ways to entertain,” she said. “Lucifer, he always puts people to use, one way or another.”
The fact that Anaïs continued teaching us gave us hope that we had what those other girls lacked. We weren’t the first entertainers Madame Lucifer had taken under his wing but, as far as Graça and I were concerned, we would be the best.
* * *
—
One night, Madame L. appeared at La Femme Chic after our lessons and said he was taking us to a cabaret. We expected a fancy place, with a marquee out front and champagne on the menu. When we arrived, we found a small show house on one of Lapa’s side streets. Outside was a wooden sign with the words “Tonight! Miss Lúcia & Her Twin Wonders!”
The club was hazy with smoke. A few men in sagging suspenders watched the stage. A large woman occupied the wooden platform. She wore scuffed heels, purple stockings, and a corset that made her waist unnaturally pinched. Spilling from the top of the corset, covered in a shiny metallic cloth, were the woman’s breasts. They dwarfed her head and neck. As she minced across the stage, singing and waving her arms lethargically, the breasts quivered and shook.
The Air You Breathe Page 14
