I’m the towel that dries your skin, wet from the sea.
I’m the handkerchief that drinks your tears.
I’m the pillow that collects your pleas.
I’m the mosquito, drunk with your blood.
Tell me I’m not necessary! Tell me I’m a fool! Tell me you can do
without me, even for a day. And this is what I’ll say:
You’re the seed, I’m the hands that plant you.
You’re the roots, I’m the dirt that surrounds you.
You’re the bullet, I’m the barrel that propels you.
You’re the fruit, I’m the knife that parts you.
Tell me I am not necessary! Tell me I am a fool! Tell me you can do
without me, even for a day. And this is what I’ll say:
You are not you
without me.
And everything we are,
together,
is what we’re meant to be.
There are very educated people who insist that samba came from the hills, from the poorest, most unfortunate neighborhoods in Rio. This is true. But it is also true that it came from lucky orphans like Vinicius, from street toughs like Kitchen, and from gentle souls like Noel. It came from romancers like Tiny and shy men like Banana and Bonito. It came from spoiled Little Misses like Graça, and from nobodies like me.
Try to trace samba back and you will find no one origin. Try to inventory its key players, and you will never have enough room on your list. Samba came from masters and slaves, from parlors and slums, from cities and plantations, from men and women. You cannot trace its origins so why try? Why not just sit back and listen to the music?
Samba does not abide simplification and neither should people. In Lapa, no one dared insist they were one thing or another. If, heaven forbid, someone went around proclaiming, “I am a woman,” or “I am an Indian,” or “I am a man who likes men,” they would be considered either crazy or untrustworthy. To place such a definition upon oneself meant you had simplified yourself to the point of absurdity.
In Lapa, people did what they did in bed and didn’t talk about it afterward. As long as murder or children weren’t involved, no one much cared. Nearly every Carnaval, our own Kitchen would sneak off with some handsome buck to celebrate, and no one dared make him feel like less of a man for it. The fact that my adventures went beyond Carnaval’s four wild days was different but not unforgivable. They were, however, still considered adventures—risky, out of the ordinary, and temporary—even by me.
Those of us who grew up in Lapa’s bohemian streets and hated definitions were nevertheless required, over the course of our lives, to create some kind of explanation for ourselves. From the very beginning of our lives we must define ourselves as girls or boys. Later, we become good students or bad, artists or businesspeople, pretty or homely. We call ourselves lawyers or shop clerks or musicians or singers. We turn into husbands or wives. Each new definition stacks itself on top of all of the previous ones. And suddenly, you are smothered under the weight of them. At the end of your life, you can be described in one tame little sentence placed at the opening of an obituary: former kitchen girl, former singer, former songwriter, former lover, former wife, former friend.
Then there are the definitions others created for you, or perhaps you inflicted upon yourself but didn’t mean to. These aren’t in any obituary, but are whispered at the service. I have read some of what biographers, so-called intellectuals, and mean-spirited reporters have written about me. (Their works were never really about me, of course. To them, I was a bit player in Sofia Salvador and Vinicius de Oliveira’s story.) I was the slave-driving manager, the ambitious friend, the failed singer, the other woman, the copycat who stole Sofia Salvador’s revolutionary samba style to use as her own, the suspect, the wrench in the gears of the Blue Moon Band, the Sapphically inclined hanger-on, the Big Foot, the Gillette razor, the confused girl who couldn’t decide what she wanted or with whom she wanted to do it.
Anaïs made me an eager student, ready to test my skills. To my surprise, there were several wives of Victor record producers who secretly enjoyed my company. There were others, too: butterfly girls, barmaids, tanned beach bunnies, prim little store clerks. They were all Lapa girls, so they weren’t afraid of me; and if they were afraid it was a good fear, an excitement they couldn’t resist, an experience that made them feel daring and safe at the same time. With me, there could be no morning nausea, no secret trips to the doctor, no claims of “appendicitis.” I gave them every satisfaction that a man could (if not more), without any of the dangers.
There were men for me, too. At first, my being with a man was driven by curiosity. What was it like? How was it different? What made Graça so damn enamored of them? My first was not a skilled teacher like Anaïs, but a nervous and gangly bartender. Our time together was quick and relatively unpleasant. Afterward, I felt disappointed and annoyed, but not enough to completely disregard an entire sex! I have always been stubborn; I certainly did not ignore men after that, I simply chose more wisely.
There is a myth that men want to dominate and women want to submit. This is what we see in films and read in books, and though it may be true for some, it is not true for everyone, and certainly not all of the time. I detest generalizations, but I have found that men have a refreshingly simple physicality about them. Sex with a man is about arriving at a set destination. If you are lucky, or skilled, you arrive together. With women there are incremental shifts of desire—some subtle, some intense—that rise and fall and don’t depend on reaching an endpoint. Women are circles, men are arrows.
“Dor’s a Gillette,” Tiny liked to joke. “She cuts both ways!”
Despite their wisecracks, my bandmates understood me more than others did because they understood samba. In the roda, some nights we craved simplicity. Other nights, we wanted to lose ourselves in that pulsing circle of music. The songs we played depended on our moods, and on the people we chose to play with. What did not change, for me at least, was the maddening rush of excitement and need that came before each roda. Each song was a conquest. Each note an act of love.
MEANT TO BE
There was a moment in Lapa, just before sunrise, after the cabarets closed and visitors returned to the safety of their neighborhoods, when the only sounds you heard as you walked through dark alleys were the night’s last rodas—their voices gravelly, their melodies slow and sad. These were the secret songs, the rough cuts not meant for the light of day. These were the songs you played when all other tunes had already been sung, and the night came down to this: no more drinks, no more friends, no more laughing girls, no more cigarettes, no more food in your belly or water in your cup, just you and a guitar player, alone in the darkness, forgetting everything but your voices and the words to a song inside yourself that you’d always known but could not share, until that moment. Sometimes there are unsuspecting listeners: a new mother awake at her window; a couple tangled in bedsheets; or a young girl in a beret and trousers, her hands in her pockets, her mouth raw from kisses, her body deliciously sore in places she was always told never to touch. She stops and listens to the roda’s lament as if her life hangs in the balance. As if everything she has experienced so far in her brief existence—every beating, every lie, every shame, every rush of love, and every triumph (though there have been few of these)—has conspired to bring her there, to hear a song no one else is supposed to hear. It enfolds her. Music—like a green field or a warm bed—is a place where she can always retreat. It is a home like no other.
I remember that walk after my first night with Anaïs. I listened to that music and felt each lovely ache within me, and I wanted to always feel this close to myself. But I knew that such closeness couldn’t last. The song ended. The roda finished. Daytime Lapa woke.
I ran inside a bakery, paid for coffee, and sat by the window with my little notebook and pencil. I tried to write what I felt. There was a
rush of words and rhymes that felt paltry and hollow. Nothing did justice to what I’d felt that night—how I’d been consumed by another person and, in that consumption, I’d had my own desires met and accepted. Was this what Graça meant, that morning on the beach, when she’d said she wanted to feel real? Had those knuckle draggers given her this feeling? Is that why she returned to them each night?
I put down my pencil, angry now. Graça had this sensation for months now and hadn’t shared it. She was always ahead of me. And why had those stupid fools given Graça such feelings? Why had she chosen them and not me? My time with Anaïs faded and Graça came, as always, to the forefront. I wanted to tell her about my night, in part to brag and show her that we were equals now, but also to better comprehend what had happened. Graça would listen. She would understand. Like that moment after our first concert, when she’d told her mother why I was upset: the song was trapped inside me. Graça had known because she’d felt it herself.
I gulped down the rest of my coffee and closed my notebook, ready to rush home. Then I remembered our fight. We’d fought many times before, said ugly things to each other, been vile and petty. Fights were storms I expected us to weather, but Graça would always extract her revenge for my comments. There would be a price to pay—she might not listen to me or, worse, make my experience with Anaïs feel silly and cheap. Just as Graça had the power to give moments life, she could just as easily crush them.
I considered avoiding our boardinghouse. I could stay in the bakery, or crawl back to Anaïs’s shop. I could find Vinicius, ask him for a pillow and a spot on his floor to sleep. Later, we could write songs. But the thought of telling Vinicius about my night made my cheeks burn. Telling him felt impossible, not because I was ashamed of what I’d done but because of Vinicius himself. He was older. He was no stranger to women; I’d seen them fawning over him as he played guitar. Telling him about my night would be admitting to my inexperience and youth. To him, I’d seem like a dumb kid when I wanted to be seen as an equal.
So I gritted my teeth and walked to our boardinghouse, telling myself all the while that Graça wasn’t the only one allowed to live there. When I put the key in the lock, it did not turn; the door was open.
The shades were drawn. The bed was empty, its sheets rumpled. The room smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke.
“I thought you’d ditched me for good.”
I jumped, then turned to see Graça in a chair in the corner, hugging her legs. Her hair was tangled. The soles of her feet were as black as a street urchin’s. She sounded stuffed up, as if she’d caught a cold.
“How long have you been home?” I asked.
“What the fuck do you care?”
I sat on our bed. How I wanted to rest my head on the pillows and disappear into sleep! I regretted that bakery coffee.
“I drank too much last night,” I said, as a kind of apology. “We all did.”
“That’s what Vinicius said,” Graça replied. “He walked me back after you disappeared.”
The cigarette smell was familiar now. I bunched the bedsheet in my hands. “He came up here, with you?”
Graça smiled. “Yeah, but I kicked him out. I wanted to wait by myself. I wasn’t sure you’d come back.”
“I took a walk.”
“That was a long walk.”
I could have lied at this point, but I felt a desperate need to tell Graça the truth. Not because I felt she deserved it, but because if I didn’t tell her, somehow my experience would feel less real.
“I went to Anaïs’s place. I woke her up.”
Graça’s body relaxed to the chair. “To argue with her about lessons again?”
I shook my head. “We didn’t argue. We didn’t talk much at all.”
Graça squinted, as if trying to work out a difficult calculation in her head. Then her eyes widened, and she smiled. “She kicked you out after. She wouldn’t let you sleep cheek to cheek?”
“She has work in the mornings. It’s not like we’re married. It was just some fun.”
“Was it fun?” Graça asked.
I stared at my palms. “It was like when we first saw the city, when we were on the ship, coming into Guanabara. Remember? It felt like this brand-new place and, at the same time, like we’d known it all along. Like we were always supposed to be here.”
Graça nodded. “And here we are.”
She pushed herself out of the chair and placed herself next to me, weaving her fingers through mine.
“I got into a whopper of a fight after you left,” she said.
“Who with?”
“Vinicius, who do you think?” she replied. “He was looking for you. I told him we had a fight, and he started acting all high-and-mighty, saying I’d run you off and how I had to keep my big mouth shut.” She rolled her eyes.
“But he took you home,” I said. “He came up here to be with you.”
“He wanted to see if you were here, crying your heart out because I’d hurt your feelings. As if you’d do that. As if he even knows you! The big bandleader, trying to make everybody behave. Well, I told him he wasn’t the leader of us.”
I looked at our hands, wrapped together. “Us.”
“You weren’t on that record . . .” Graça began.
“And I probably won’t be on the next one, either,” I interrupted. “I’m not cut out for singing.”
“But I still need you,” Graça said.
“To iron your dresses? To do your hair?”
She squeezed my hand tighter. “I need you to be on my side.”
“Against who?”
“Everybody, the whole world.”
“The world will eat us up. That’s what Nena said.”
Graça laughed. “I want it to swallow me whole.”
* * *
—
My Mutt” and “Air You Breathe” played every hour on the radio for months on end. Across Rio, girls began to call their boyfriends “mutts.” The Lux soap company ran newspaper ads saying, “Use Lux Shaving Balm to keep your face as smooth as a baby’s, even when you’re her favorite Mutt!” And when people bought record players for their homes, “My Mutt” was the first record everyone put on their turntable.
We played so many gigs after the record’s release that I’m not sure how we survived on so little sleep. The thrill of success—of being admired and wanted—fueled us all, even me. Cabarets, jazz clubs, little show houses—they all wanted us on their stages. Well, they wanted Sofia Salvador and Blue Moon. I stayed backstage, humming along, tapping my feet, noting every shift to every song’s tempo or rhythm when the boys would improvise just for fun. Being backstage, huddled in the dark, surrounded by dusty beams, wires, and props—all of the things the audience was never supposed to see because it would ruin the illusion of the performance—was like being in the kitchen of a Great House. That was where all of the chopping, washing, scraping, bleeding, sweating, and preparation occurred for hours on end, all to create the artifice of ease and luxury for those at the front of the house. Part of me felt at home in the dark and utilitarian world backstage. Another part felt a gnawing desperation at being thrown back into the shadows. But there were consolations I held dear: Graça had rejected me but would not replace me; my voice was not on their records but my words were in Graça’s mouth.
I wrote many songs in the weeks after the release of “My Mutt.” The girls and boys I left behind each morning reappeared in my lyrics. “Peeling the Onion” was so obviously about undressing a girl it was comical, but its double meanings were too hard for Gegê’s dull censors to spot. There were lighthearted sambas about handsome bartenders; party marchinhas for Carnaval about making love to a costumed sweetheart in a dark alley; tearjerkers about summer romances gone too soon; angry ballads about being left behind. Vinicius made the melodies, of course, but the only songs he was capable of writing by hims
elf in those weeks were down-and-out love songs.
Vinicius’s melodies contained a terrible longing. The notes he played began expectantly—clean and crisp—and then slowly became frustrated, moving lethargically and sounding deeper, as if they had no bottom and you might fall right through them, into nothingness. I heard all of this in his playing, but didn’t question the source. I didn’t want to know. Whatever rose from within us and floated to the surface as Vinicius and I worked, we never analyzed or picked apart. We simply followed the music, even if it made us afraid. During our writing sessions, Vinicius and I were braver than in our actual lives, in part because whatever we confronted in the music, we did it together.
Victor wanted our songs so badly, it opened its studio to us anytime. Each night, after Sofia Salvador and Blue Moon played their gigs, we made our way to Ciata’s for our roda, which we never missed, no matter how late it was or how tired we were. We’d refine one of our three-minute sambas in the roda and one of us, usually Graça, would smile and say: “It’s good. Let’s record it.”
“Nah,” Vinicius said.
“Oh, come on, Professor!” Kitchen teased, his words slurring. “Dor, get that producer on the telephone! Let’s go cut a record!”
That’s how easy it was for all of us to agree back then.
A bleary-eyed producer met us at Victor’s recording studio. Despite our drunken antics, as soon as the clock started and the producer turned on the mikes, we were all in service to the music.
When I think of those early mornings when we headed to the recording studio, stumbling arm in arm through Lapa, giggling and tripping over ourselves, I feel so much affection for Graça and the boys that it’s hard to breathe. Sure, I wasn’t a Nymphette. I wasn’t Lorena Lapa. I wasn’t a singer on a record. I wasn’t part of the act, and never would be. But the miracle of our rise—of my rise—wasn’t lost on me. We were a hit. My songs were on people’s lips. And all of us—Graça, Vinicius, the Blue Moon boys, and me—were together, making music simply for the sake of making it, living a rare moment when we could be both successful and genuine sambistas.
The Air You Breathe Page 21
