The Air You Breathe

by Frances De Pontes Peebles

  During his visits Vinicius brought records: bossa from Brazil; a few Motown albums; Aretha Franklin; Patsy Cline; and later Dolly Parton and James Brown. We’d listen together at first, starting off with a song or two and eventually building up to listening to an entire album together. We’d talk afterward about the tracks, the voices, the songs’ merits and flaws. Vinicius started leaving those records at my place until they sat in a stack beside the player and I couldn’t help but put them on the turntable when he wasn’t around. One night he asked me to leave my squalid apartment and go with him to a club—a hole-in-the-wall off the Vegas Strip—to hear some blues. We sat in back so I could make a quick escape. The place was dark and nearly empty, which was a relief. The kid that played was good but not a revelation. But, Vinicius liked to point out, for the hour we were there listening, I didn’t touch the drink I’d ordered. After this, we went to music clubs regularly and on those days I drank a little less, so I could enjoy the shows.

  One day, Vinicius picked me up and took me to a studio.

  “I’ve got some songs to record,” he said. “A couple young cats from Rio are staying with us. I thought you could help us pick our set list.”

  He was always trying to make me feel like a help and not a burden. It was a little game of his during my drinking years, before we were married. That day, I played along. It was 1972. Graça had been dead for twenty-seven years by then—nearly as long as she’d been alive. Brazil was in the grips of another, much more brutal military dictatorship. When musicians from Brazil came to visit, it meant they’d been exiled for their music. Vinicius gave them places to stay, food to eat, and a network of musicians to call upon in the States. In exchange, Vinicius recorded albums with those young, long-haired bucks who didn’t look like men or women but something in between. They called their sound Tropicália.

  That day, the young man in the studio with Vinicius was a kinder-looking version of an old bandmate of ours named Kitchen, who was now long dead. The boy was twenty-five with an Afro and bell-bottomed pants and high-heeled boots. I was fifty-two years old and felt ancient beside him. I hid in the back of the studio, behind the glass, but the boy found me.

  “You’re Dores Pimentel,” he said. “It’s a real honor to meet you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You’re . . . well, you’re the other half of Sal e Pimenta. Yours and Vinicius’s songs are classics. My mother used to listen to ‘Without Regret or Virtue’ so much she wore out the record. She saw you two play your first show in Ipanema.”

  “Our only show.”

  “I’d love to record a track with you and the Professor. It’d be the privilege of my life.”

  “Did Vinicius put you up to this?” I asked.

  The boy shook his head.

  This was how the three of us—Vinicius, the boy, and me—ended up in the dark recording studio together, on the other side of the glass. I hadn’t sung in decades, since our first and last show in Ipanema, the night before Graça died. Both Vinicius and the boy promised that it was just a practice session, just for fun. So they played their guitars, and the boy and I alternated verses. We sang “We Are from Samba.” My voice had become deep and husky from years of smoking and alcohol. It was like a shadow voice to the boy’s bright and crisp one. The song returned to me easily. I felt, for that moment, that we were in Lapa again.

  Vinicius liked the sound of the boy and me together, so we spent the afternoon recording one old song after another. I didn’t need a drink until we’d finished. The next day, we recorded more.

  I realize now that his visits, the radio, the record player, and the clubs were all bread crumbs Vinicius put in my path to help lead me out of the void, to where he was waiting.

  That boy is a great star now. He comes to Miami to play shows and visits me each time. His hair is short and gray. He wears glasses and tailored suits, but he is still a boy to me. Our record together still sells well and is considered a classic fusion of samba and Tropicália. Each time I listen to it I do not hear the genres or the words or the songs themselves as much as I hear myself, calling out from the darkness, emerging from my nothingness with a song.

  WE ARE FROM SAMBA

  At sixteen I believed I was a musician. I believed our act at Little Tony’s made Graça and me important in the world. And what a tiny world ours was! We didn’t see beyond our little corner of Lapa, our boardinghouse room, and our place on Tony’s rickety stage. We were, like many girls that age, blind to history unfolding around us. What did it matter that women had been granted the right to vote when elections were constantly postponed? What did it matter that Old Gegê (as we Lapans called President Getúlio) had ousted every elected governor in the country and replaced them with his own men, calling them “Interventores”? What did it matter that, thanks to Gegê’s new National Security Law, police jailed so many dissenters and suspected communists that old cruise ships were refurbished into floating prisons in Guanabara Bay? What did it matter that these men and women would never see a judge or jury, and their fates would be decided by the Supreme Security Tribunal of Gegê’s military men? These were concerns for university firebrands, or newspaper editors, or wealthy intellectuals in their Santa Teresa mansions—not for us Lapans, who’d always been ignored, who never cared for doctrines (communist or otherwise), and whose only concerns were music and making a buck.

  By 1936—six months into our run at Little Tony’s—the crowd there came to depend on Graça and me, just as they depended on their shots of sugarcane rum. Thanks to the Nymphettes, ticket sales doubled, then tripled. Madame Lucifer was happy. Little Tony placed a new sign outside the club’s door where the Nymphettes got top billing. When Graça and I took the stage each night, the rowdy club fell as silent as church. Even Gegê’s “Tomato Heads”—a special regiment of police who wore red berets and were notorious for strong-arming their way into Lapa cabarets and ruining shows with their rowdiness—sat respectfully during our shows, as quiet and reverential as altar boys.

  Something important was happening in Lapa. No one spoke of it, but there was a charge in the air, a buzz you felt in your bones. Radios became cheaper, so every corner bakery suddenly blasted music. You heard less tango and jazz and a lot more samba—not the real kind, just the idiotic marchinhas people sang during Carnaval: songs about parties and pretty girls. Songs that the clueless listeners outside Lapa—the ones who believed that samba was the music of voodoo and violence and lust—could stomach. Three recording companies—Columbia, Victor, and Odeon—set up studios downtown, just close enough to Lapa to be “authentic.” And, at night, if you wandered Lapa’s alleys, you saw many respectable university boys speaking our slang and looking to hear “real music,” whatever they believed that was.

  Who was I to judge? What on earth did Graça and I know about real music, either? At the time, thanks to our lessons with Anaïs, we thought ourselves experts. Those lessons, like our role as the Nymphettes, consumed us. I’d never seen Graça take any study, before or since, more seriously than our daily appointments with Anaïs, though our young teacher seemed to take little pleasure in hearing us sing. Anaïs sighed. She shook her head in frustration. She often told us that our voices were wild and needed taming. But she continued teaching us, which meant that Graça and I had talent. It meant that Sofia Salvador and Lorena Lapa had great potential together.

  You see, I only thought of us as a duo.

  Our lessons with Anaïs grew longer but my time with her grew shorter. It was Graça’s stomach that Anaïs pushed and prodded. It was Graça’s breathing she complained about, and Graça’s vocal range she chastised. More and more I sat in the back of the parlor, watching Graça and Anaïs work. I chewed my nails in frustration, then tapped my foot against my chair until Anaïs was forced to notice me.

  “This is not a roda, Dores,” our teacher said. “We do not need your improvised instruments.”

  “If I’m not
going to sing I need to do something,” I said. “When will it be my turn to do the breath work? How will I get better if I don’t practice, too?”

  Graça rolled her eyes. Anaïs stared at me, her usual look of frustration replaced by what seemed like concern. She ordered Graça into the empty hat shop to perform one hundred vocal exercises. “And do not try to cheat,” Anaïs warned her. “Dores and I will be here listening.”

  Graça obeyed. Anaïs sat in the chair beside me, her leg touching mine. She was older than me by ten years at least, but because she was not married or burdened with children like most women her age, I saw Anaïs not as a matron but as an ideal. She wore a pencil skirt that clung to her hips and exposed her long, pale calves. My palms were clammy; it took great effort on my part to sit still. Finally! I thought. I am getting the same attention as Graça! I’d spoken my mind, and Anaïs had realized that both of us—Graça and I—deserved equal time! The look of concern she’d shown me minutes before was real.

  “You love music, yes?” Anaïs asked.

  I nodded.

  “So do I,” she said. “When I am at my worst, it is my only comfort. Music, not performing. Music is much more than performing. You must understand this difference, Dores.”

  I snorted. “Of course I know the difference.”

  “A singer is not like a composer or a conductor or even a player in a band,” she continued. “Singers cannot turn their backs on the audience. They cannot hide behind an instrument. They must face us. They must surrender themselves to the song and take that journey of the words. They must be impressive. To the audience, the song and the person are one. I was a singer for a bit, but only in a chorus. I was never alone onstage. My voice could not sustain it. It is dangerous to be onstage, so vulnerable, and not have a voice to protect you. So it is for the best that I did not become a singer. It was quite sad for me, to realize that my talent was not enough. But it was better this way. Graça, she has a talent. Her voice, it can protect her onstage. It can sustain being alone.”

  “She won’t ever have to be alone,” I said. “She has me. We’re an act.”

  “An act is what you find at a circus,” Anaïs spat. “When people hear a true voice, they forget themselves. This is what all of us want, even if it is just for the length of a song.”

  “I can make people forget themselves,” I said, cutting Anaïs off. “I can work harder. I can practice more. But I can’t do anything if you make me sit here and listen to Graça all day. I need to sing, too.”

  Anaïs’s large, liquid eyes met mine. There were the finest wrinkles around her mouth and eyes, like tiny cracks in smooth sand. She was so young, but to me, in that moment, Anaïs seemed ancient and dangerously wise, like one of those goddesses the candomblé worshippers paid tribute to, a flawed deity who could be selfish and vengeful if she wasn’t praised. I felt both angry and afraid of what she would tell me next.

  “All of the practice and intelligence in the world can’t make a singer, my darling,” Anaïs said. “Voice, it is a wild thing. There is no justice to it. Either we are born with it, or we are not. Do not try to force what cannot be. That is the saddest waste of a life.”

  I picked at the tip of one of my fingernails until it loosened. Then, with great purpose, I ripped the tip from the nail, until my finger bled.

  Anaïs rested a hand on my cheek. “I am sorry, my flower,” she whispered.

  At every lesson I’d wanted her hand on my stomach, her fingers lifting my chin. But in that moment I couldn’t bear Anaïs’s touch or her pity. I shook her away.

  Graça had always been the better singer; I’d never denied it. But that didn’t mean my voice wasn’t worth hearing. Singing was something Graça and I had always done together, and until that moment, I’d believed we would always share the spotlight. Anaïs had wounded me. Like an animal, I bit back.

  “You like Graça, not her voice,” I said. “I see you looking at her.”

  “Oh,” Anaïs said, surprised. “No. She is lovely, but she is not my type of beach, as you Brazilians say.”

  We stared at each other. Anaïs was the first to look away.

  “When I came here, to Brazil, oh, how many hopes I had! I was your age—still a child—and gloomy because I had not become a singer in France. I had been studying since I was a tiny girl. My family had pinned many hopes onto me. And so I escaped from them, and from my failure. Some of us love music. Some of us can make music. And some, if we are lucky, can teach others how to make it. You girls are not the first Lucifer has brought to me. But Graça, she is the best. She can be on a real stage one day. Lucifer knows this. So I must focus on Graça now, in our lessons. Lucifer can be a very loyal friend, but he is not a man to anger.”

  “It isn’t my beach,” I said. “That’s how we’d say it. You don’t have to say ‘she.’ I already know what you’re talking about.”

  “Do you, Dores?”

  Warmth crept up my neck, rising to the tips of my ears. “Girls . . . I mean, women, aren’t your beach.”

  Anaïs shook her head. She cupped my chin in her hand. Then, very gently, she moved her thumb across my lips, tracing them again and again, until her finger was wet with my saliva.

  “She’s not my beach,” Anaïs said.

  Graça finished her round of exercises and came bounding into the room, ready for praise. Anaïs stood. I looked down at my hands. My ripped nail was bloody, but it was my mouth that throbbed.

  * * *

  —

  What was I to do? I was sixteen and an adult had told me a painful truth. Of course I did not accept it gracefully.

  On our walk home from that terrible lesson at Anaïs’s, Graça chatted endlessly about boys and new songs and other nonsense. My head ached. I could not bring myself to tell her what Anaïs had said. A few hours later, when Tony introduced the Nymphettes onto his stage, Graça and I held hands and stared at each other as we always did, but my eyes became blurry with tears. Graça furrowed her brow and kept singing, her voice soaring above mine. I tried to catch up, to be louder, more powerful, more graceful, but was left a wheezing and red-faced mess. After the show, I bought a pack of cigarettes and matches.

  “Who’re those for?” Graça asked.

  “Me.”

  Graça snatched the cigarettes from my hands. “You can’t have these. Anaïs says so. They’ll make you sound like you’ve got gravel in your throat.”

  I twisted the pack from Graça’s grip. “I don’t care what that French snob says.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since she told me I’m not good enough to take lessons with her.” My voice cracked.

  Gently, Graça held my hand. “What the hell does she know?”

  “Everything.”

  “We’ve got our gig at Tony’s, and we’ll have plenty more after that,” Graça said. “So throw those goddamn cigarettes away. Or whatever’s left of them.”

  The pack was a mangled lump in my fist. I laughed and wiped my eyes. Graça laughed, too. I recalled our practice sessions, her mouth warm and wet against mine, the way we pressed together with such urgency it was as if we wanted to inhabit each other. I wanted to feel that right there, in the middle of that Lapa street, with her. Without thinking, I wrapped an arm around her waist and brought her closer. Graça stiffened. She glanced around the dark alley.

  “Stop,” she whispered. “That’s not how I want things.”

  It seemed to me that Graça and I had always wanted similar things—music, escape, being more than anyone thought we could be—and we’d always wanted them voraciously, and with each other. But now I was in front of Anaïs all over again, listening to proclamations I couldn’t bear to hear.

  I backed away from her, my hands up like a criminal. “Don’t be a prude,” I spat. “It’s just a hug. You’re not my beach.”

  She winced as if I’d struck her, and my shame
ebbed.

  We walked to our boardinghouse in silence. Over the next few days, when we did speak to each other, our talk was overly polite, as if we were roommates who had just met the day before. Meanwhile, I broke all of Anaïs’s rules: I drank, I yelled, I smoked so many cigarettes I hardly had enough breath to get from my bed to the bathroom in the mornings. I spoke harshly of Anaïs to anyone who might listen, calling her a snob and a Big Foot. I skipped her afternoon voice lessons even though she’d insisted that I could, at least, learn more about music by listening to Graça sing. Instead, I spent many horrible afternoons in bookstores, huddling in back aisles, pretending to look though novels while crying and wiping my nose on my sleeve. Each time the store’s bell rang, I looked up, hoping to see Graça weaving through the crowded stacks of books in search of me. I imagined us holding hands and begging each other’s forgiveness. I imagined her telling me that she’d quit Anaïs’s classes, too.

  It was only onstage, as the Nymphettes, that we truly came together, and only for the course of our show. During this long and polite fight, Graça went on dates with university knuckle draggers. They took her out until dawn, when she’d return to our boardinghouse trailing sand across the floor and flop into bed next to me without even washing her face. I was always awake, waiting, although I pretended not to be. Graça slept with her back to me, and after her nights out she smelled of smoke and yeast, salt water and wind. Part of me wanted to press my mouth to her bare shoulder, to taste the salt on her skin. Another part wanted to slip my hands around her throat and twist.

  * * *

  —

  After our shows, Graça tugged off her Nymphette costume and ran to meet some knuckle dragger who was always lurking near the bar. I took my time in the dressing room, rubbing off my Nymphette freckles and rouge and steeling myself for my walk home, alone. I often grabbed a drink at the bar before nodding goodnight to Vinicius, who always nodded back. One night, however, he made his way to the bar and stood in front of me, the tip of his battered guitar case brushing my knee.