The only other person I’d shared secrets with was Graça. If she wondered where I spent my afternoons and nights during those weeks, she pretended not to care. And I pretended that this didn’t sting terribly. I told myself that Graça had her knuckle draggers and her lessons with Anaïs, which she’d refused to give up. It was only fair for me to have something of my own, too. And it was thrilling to have such independence; each morning just before sunrise when I left Ciata’s, I felt buoyed, as if a balloon had been inflated inside me. And yet, as I stumbled home I realized that I couldn’t joke with Graça about Tiny’s flirting or Kitchen’s sternness, because she didn’t know them. I couldn’t tell her all of the new curse words I’d learned, or about the herbal cigarettes I’d smoked. I certainly couldn’t describe our new music to her, because words would never do it justice. This inability to share the sound with Graça made the music itself seem a little less alive, and this left me infuriated—that Graça could dampen my music’s life just by her absence. So, by the time I pushed open the door to our room each morning, I was exhausted and yet wide awake. I lay down beside Graça and listened to her little snores, and I imagined leading her to Ciata’s and offering her a chair, not so she could be in the roda, but so she could see me in it, and bring it all back to life.
* * *
—
One night, just as we’d started the roda, Auntie Ciata’s gate creaked. I looked up from my place in the circle and there was Graça, smiling and breathless, balancing a package in the palm of her hand as if she was a waitress. She wore a red dress. She’d done a shabby job of wiping away her Nymphette makeup; there was still a scattering of penciled freckles across her nose.
She dropped the package—wrapped in waxed paper spotted with oil—on the table in front of us and untied its twine. Inside were three steaks, brown and glistening and still warm.
“The grude’s arrived, queridos!” Graça announced, as if we’d been waiting all night for this delivery, and for her.
“What are you doing here?” I whispered.
“Bringing you food,” Graça replied loudly. “You’re skinny as a rail and now I know why. These handsome bucks are working you too hard every night. Shame on you, Vinicius, for not giving her dinner after our shows! Dor’s a growing girl. She deserves a gentleman taking care of her.”
“Dor doesn’t need anybody to take care of her,” Vinicius replied.
Graça flashed her teeth at Vinicius, her smile achingly wide. “You don’t get to tell me about Dor. Dor and me have been a team since we were kids.”
“What’re you now? Wise old women?” Vinicius interrupted. The other boys laughed.
“If we’re old women, then you’re a dinosaur,” Graça replied.
“Owwwww,” the Blue Moon boys moaned.
“The Dinosaur!” Kitchen said. “I think I like that name better than ‘Professor.’ It’s got a ring to it.”
Tiny fixed his gaze on Graça. “You fry up those steaks all by yourself, sweetheart?”
“I haven’t touched a stove in my life and don’t plan to,” Graça replied. “I swiped them from Little Tony’s. I couldn’t swipe knives, though.”
“We wouldn’t want you to, querida,” Tiny said. “A girl like you’s dangerous enough. You put a knife in my heart as soon as you walked in.”
Graça laughed. Tiny heaved himself up and offered Graça his chair, right next to mine inside the circle.
“I couldn’t,” she said.
“Sure you can,” Tiny said. “It’d be a crime to let those legs of yours get tired.”
“Graça’s got a date,” I said, my mouth very dry. “She can’t stay.”
Graça eyed me. “Sure I can.”
The Blue Moon boys watched intently as Graça sat and crossed her legs. Tiny scrambled inside Auntie Ciata’s house to get forks and knives.
“You think I could get one of those cigarettes, querido?” Graça turned to Little Noel, who fumbled for the pack in his shirt pocket. Tiny returned, dropping utensils with a clatter onto the metal table.
“Good. Let’s eat them while they’re hot,” Graça said, facing me. “I got them bloody, just like you like them.”
Her voice was soft, her look expectant. Were the steaks a peace offering to me, or simply a way to ingratiate herself with the band? Part of me felt pleased that Graça had made this effort, and that she’d ditched whatever knuckle dragger was hoping to have her company that night. The other part was furious that she’d invaded the roda so easily when it had taken me weeks to be allowed into the circle.
While the boys shoveled meat into their mouths, Graça laughed at Tiny’s crude jokes. She held a whispered conversation with Banana and Bonito, and later egged on Little Noel’s grand ideas of future success. Some, like Kitchen, seemed to tolerate her. Others, like Noel, fell head over heels, blushing each time she touched his hand. I could not pick up my fork and knife; my arms felt as if they were made of concrete. I felt a strange kind of resignation as I watched Graça with the Blue Moon boys: it was no use vying for their attentions; how could a sparrow compete with a peacock? How could a shrub compete with a bloom?
Across from me, Vinicius also stayed quiet and stern, watching Graça as if studying an alien species. Only when the music began did he shift his gaze away from her, to me.
The boys played a few neighborhood songs, fiddling with the tempos and changing a few lines of the choruses. I used my fork to tap the bottle in my lap, but I couldn’t disappear into the music like I had before. Next to me, Graça sighed. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. She studied her nails.
One song flowed into another until it seemed there was no difference between them. We found ourselves playing an old street samba—“Servant to Your Love”—a song everyone in Lapa, young and old, had heard in bakeries or rodas or as they walked down the street. Vinicius sang, as always.
“I’ll wash your windows.
I’ll polish your doors.
I’ll do your dishes.
I’ll scour your floors.
I’ll clean all the bad feelings
out of your heart.
So you can open it to me again
and we’ll have a fresh start.”
Graça eyed me. She wiggled her brows. I ignored her. She elbowed me and leaned in so close, her mouth was nearly pressed to my ear.
“He sounds like a fucking librarian reading a dictionary. What does this band do: put people to sleep? Don’t you ever pipe in?”
I glanced nervously at the boys. “You’re not supposed to talk,” I whispered into Graça’s ear. “They haven’t let me sing yet.”
“What do you mean they haven’t let you?” she whispered back.
“Vinicius sings. He’s the leader. It’s the way the roda works.”
“Your voice is better. They should give you a shot.”
The music stopped. Vinicius, nearly shouting, looked at Graça and asked: “Is there a problem over there?”
I felt annoyed at Graça’s lecturing me about the roda, as if she was an old-time sambista, but I was also buoyed by her support: my voice was better; I deserved a shot. Even after weeks of fighting, she was on my side. Or maybe she was on her own side, fighting for her own shot. It was always hard to tell with Graça.
Graça gave Vinicius a withering look. She put her hands on the arms of her chair and straightened her body, as if she was about to stand and walk out of the roda. Instead, she lifted her head and let her voice pour out.
“I’ll be your maid,
I’ll be your butler,
I’ll be your cook,
your chimney sweep,
if only you’d stay
just one more day.”
The boys stared. I turned in my chair to face her. Who did she think she was? A girl, singing in a roda, interrupting the leader on her first night, and without invitation! Despite
the silence, she kept singing. Then Little Noel began to beat his small hand drum, making it rat-tat-tat, and Graça did the same with her voice, drawing out every percussive syllable and accenting them, so her voice was like an instrument, too. She dove deeper into the song with each verse. Slowly, the boys picked their instruments off their laps and began to play again. With her.
The Blue Moon boys and I didn’t have tin ears. We all knew the truth from the moment Graça opened her mouth to sing: the roda was better with her in it. Our laughter was louder, our joking rowdier, our rhythms more synchronized, our songs more beautiful. It didn’t matter that Graça was a girl, a chatterbox, a terrible card player, a cigarette stealer, a conversation hog. What mattered was that she could sing and, more important, she knew how to make people love her. Eventually, everyone did.
So the Blue Moon boys accepted her singing, and mine, too. We didn’t hog the roda—Vinicius continued to sing, and even the other boys got in on the act. We shared the spotlight and the music, and things continued this way for a few weeks, until, one night, Graça sat back in her chair and asked:
“Why do we sing the same worn-out tunes as everyone else in the neighborhood? It’s like we’re eating beans and rice for three squares every day.”
Tiny smiled. “You like a little sausage in your stew?”
Bonito chuckled. Graça rolled her eyes. “I like variety. Who doesn’t?”
“These are classics,” Vinicius said. “If you don’t know these tunes, you don’t know shit.”
“We know them inside and out,” Graça replied. “Seems like we need to make some classics of our own.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” Little Noel said. “Other rodas write their own stuff.”
Tiny nodded at Vinicius. “You and Dor wrote something a few weeks back.”
“You were sound asleep!” Vinicius said.
Tiny smiled. “I guess your tune woke me up.”
“These two have a whole bunch of songs they’re keeping to themselves,” Graça said. “Seems selfish not to share them.”
Vinicius looked at me, his eyes wide as if I’d just fingered him for a crime. I glared back at him.
“I told Graça we write in the afternoons,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be a big secret.”
Banana raised his eyebrows. “You’re writing with her?”
“You got a problem with that?” I asked.
Graça smiled and leaned forward in her seat, as if she was at the cinema.
Banana turned to Vinicius. “We got them singing, and now we got them writing?”
Vinicius stayed quiet. My hands balled into fists.
“What’s it to you?” I growled at Banana. “Songs are songs.”
“Let’s hear one!” Tiny said.
“Oh, boy,” Banana muttered, and shook his head. “We’re going down a slippery hole.”
“There’s nothing I like better,” Tiny said. Graça howled with laughter.
“Keep joking,” Banana said. “It won’t be so funny come Carnaval, when the whole neighborhood’s laughing.”
“Fuck the neighborhood,” Vinicius shouted. “If the songs are good, it doesn’t matter who wrote them.”
Samba has a two-four rhythm. I discovered this years later, in New York City, when some cats from the New York Musicians’ Union joked that they could play any samba or rumba or cha-cha; they all sounded the same to North American ears. But when those New York musicians heard Blue Moon play, they realized their ears had been mistaken.
“That’s really a two-four?” one of those swing band musicians asked after our first rehearsal. “It’s the other percussion, with the drum, that makes it seem faster, like eighths?”
Vinicius nodded.
“What did he mean?” I asked after the musician had left.
“Nothing,” Vinicius said. “He’s trying to understand without feeling.”
We never talked about music in quarters or eighths or sixteenths. When Vinicius corrected one of us in the roda, he never spoke of notes or measures.
“Your cuíca, Bonito!” he’d shout. “Listen to your cuíca, man! It’s got to plead, not whine.”
“It’s not slick enough,” Vinicius said when the boys couldn’t find the groove. “It sounds too snappy. This isn’t a goddamn pep rally. It’s got to be greasy. It’s got to get on your fingers and your lips. It’s got to make you feel slippery.”
We all understood what Vinicius meant. We all listened to him. If Tiny was the band’s showman, then Vinicius was its curandeiro, its high priest, its mediator between the known and unknown. So, that night in the roda, after Vinicius made his proclamation about our songs, the boys and Graça grew quiet, giving us the floor.
Vinicius plucked the strings of his guitar. His eyes met mine. I nodded, recognizing the tune we’d created for “Air You Breathe.” I sang the first verse, then the second. We heard the scratch of a reco-reco; Kitchen held it in his lap and played. Little Noel flicked the wand against his tamborim drum. Tiny strummed his cavaquinho. Then Bonito and Banana joined in with their cuíca and guitar, making the song deeper, thicker, and sadder in a way it hadn’t been before. After the last verse I rounded back to the beginning, starting again and looking at Graça, who watched me with such focus, such rapt concentration I almost stumbled over my own words.
* * *
—
One morning in 1937, after only a few hours of sleep, I woke to a barrage of knocks on our rented room’s door. Next to me, the bed was empty. Graça hadn’t come home. She’d left the roda early for a date and Vinicius had argued with her, saying it was disrespectful. Graça had laughed in his face.
The knocking persisted. I squinted at my wristwatch; it was seven a.m. I flung open our door, ready to hurl a string of my saltiest curses at Graça for forgetting her keys. But it was the boardinghouse matron in a nightgown and shawl, her face stern. There was a telephone call for me. I stumbled downstairs and picked up the phone’s heavy black receiver. A voice—reedy and weak, but immediately recognizable—called from the other end of the line before breaking off into muffled sobs. “Dor!”
She was on Copacabana Beach. Some bakery had let her use their telephone. I asked for its name and told her to wait right there.
As I rode the trolley, the streets seemed empty. A line of soldiers surrounded the outskirts of Catete Palace. A young man behind me whispered to his seatmate:
“I tried going to the university, but the gates were locked. Gegê’s pulled off another coup.”
When I arrived at Copacabana, the sun made the beach a furnace. The Copacabana Palace Hotel and Casino stood like a white fortress along the strip. With its ivory turrets and enormous balconies, it was the tallest building on the beach, and the grandest in all of Rio. Thick-necked doormen guarded its entrance.
Graça was not waiting in front of the bakery, as we’d agreed. I found her in the sand, staring not at the ocean but at the Palace Hotel. The sleeve of her dress was ripped, her neck scratched. Her right eye was swollen and purple; a red streak slashed the white of its eyeball.
“What the hell happened?” I cried, rushing to Graça’s side.
“Don’t be a Nervous Nellie,” she said, her eyes still locked on the Copacabana Palace. “Please tell me you brought a drink.”
I patted my trousers and produced a flask, still half full with rum. I handed it to Graça. She took a long gulp, then gnashed her teeth together and stared back at the Copa.
“They always show pictures of the Palace in Shimmy!” she said. “Their stage is the biggest in Brazil. Greta Garbo saw a show there. And the president of the USA, too.” She took another swig from my flask. “I should be in there, singing on that stage. Instead I’m stuck with a bunch of drunks at Tony’s every night.”
I was almost as surprised to hear this as I was to see her bruised face. Tony’s still felt like a dream to me
—we were loved and accepted there; the clients depended on us; and no matter how much Graça and I bickered offstage, at Tony’s we forgot our cares, held hands, and sang freely, together.
“We’ll get on a better stage,” I said. “We just have to keep working.”
“Working with who? With that band you ditched me for? If you think they’re our ticket to the moon then you’re not half as smart as everyone thinks you are.”
“I ditched you?” I asked. “You didn’t want my company, you had your dates every night.”
“Who the hell cares about dates?” Graça said. “All those weeks you were playing music with a band—a real band—and you never even told me. You never even invited me to tag along. I had to barge in on my own, and when I did, you and Vinicius looked at me like I had the fucking pox.”
Blood bubbled from the cut on her upper lip. Graça hid her face in her palms.
I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. “What happened to your face?”
Graça looked up at the Palace again. “That knuckle dragger last night, he was a rower for the Flamengo Club. A real hotshot. He told me he was taking me to the Copa. Turns out, he wasn’t taking me to a show, he just wanted to roll around on the beach. So I told him No, sir. I told him I was respectable. I told him I was going to be a real goddamn star, and that one day he’d beg for my autograph. You know what he did, Dor?”
I shook my head.
“He laughed.”
A fat tear wiggled down Graça’s bruised cheek. She wiped it with the back of her hand. “He tried to make me roll around with him anyway. He was so strong! I almost got tired of pushing him off, but then I thought about you. I thought about how you cracked Souza’s skull. I thought: What would Dor do to this blockhead? And it was almost like you were there with me, punching that knuckle dragger until he let me go.”
My ears rang. My voice sounded far away. “I’ll kill him.”
Graça grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight. “Who cares about him? Who cares about any of those idiots? I don’t.”
The Air You Breathe Page 18
