Little by little, the newsreels at the Odeon theater began to portray the USA as “Uncle Sam”—a rich, jaunty uncle that would help Brazil in its fight against communists. Years later, I learned that those newsreels were actually produced with the USA’s help, as part of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. In my middle age, after I sobered up, I received calls from academics writing papers about Sofia Salvador and her part in the Good Neighbor Policy’s propaganda machine: Was she a victim or an agent? You see, Uncle Sam could not afford to have hostile neighbors in the same hemisphere. So, while Sofia Salvador and the Blue Moon Band sang on Urca’s stage, blissfully clueless of the workings of the world around us, a young Nelson Rockefeller persuaded the American president, Roosevelt, to get friendly with his South American neighbors, Brazil especially. But how could the U.S. president reach out to such countries—places considered dangerous and dirty by most American citizens—without risking his credibility? How could U.S. voters suddenly see former enemies as good neighbors? Through the movies, of course! This was how powerful movies were back then: by 1940, Washington, D.C., ordered Hollywood studios to find more Latin characters for their pictures, and to make them likable. So began a feverish search for South American talent.
All of this was happening while Vinicius and I sat in the Odeon, dumbly believing that our greatest enemies were other samba bands and Senhor Pimentel.
In life there are countless firsts and even more lasts. The firsts are easy to recognize; when you’ve never experienced something before—a kiss, a new style of music, a place, a drink, a food—you know exactly when you are encountering it for the first time. But lasts? Lasts nearly always surprise us. It’s only after they’ve disappeared that we realize we’ll never again have that particular moment or person or experience.
When Vinicius was sick, there were countless lasts: the last time he could drive a car; the last time we could travel; the last time he picked up his guitar and could actually play it; the last time he spoke English before reverting completely to Portuguese; the last time we went to the movies together.
It was in that Miami Beach theater near our house. Vinicius and I sat, side by side, watching the screen, where a cartoon for children played. I felt him draw his arm away from mine, and shrink back into his chair.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“At the movies,” I said, turning to him. He stared at me, his eyes as wide as a child’s. The screen’s light flickered across his wrinkled face, making plain the transformation of his expression from confusion to fear. Vinicius put his forearm up over his eyes, as if dodging a blow.
“I’ll play! I promise I’ll play!” he yelped.
“Vinicius?”
I reached for him. He flinched, backing farther into the armrest on the other side of his chair.
“I’ll play! I’ll play! I was only watching for a little bit!”
“It’s Dor. I’m not your auntie.”
Vinicius whimpered and crossed his arms over his face.
The movie continued on the screen before us but neither of us watched. I told myself that it was dark and therefore easy to mistake me for someone else, someone frightening. Even when the film ended and the lights rose, Vinicius remained paralyzed in his chair. Panic sliced through me. Our memories are labyrinths and it’s easy to assume that Vinicius’s illness made him lost inside his, but that’s not true. His maze wasn’t becoming more complex, it was simplifying. Superfluous routes were closing off, unimportant paths disappearing. He didn’t know he was “the Father of Samba,” couldn’t recognize neighbors, couldn’t fathom how to operate a blender, didn’t recall a word of English. But his Portuguese was perfect; he recalled every note and every word of our songs; and he asked for Graça and the boys dozens of times each day. Everything essential to Vinicius had remained. But this fear of me—was this his essential memory of who I was? He knew all of my misdeeds and forgave me for them, but had he erased them from his memory? Or had they returned in that dark theater to haunt us both?
Vinicius curled more tightly into his chair. The usher entered with his dustpan and broom, and I shook off my previous concerns for more practical ones: How would I get Vinicius to leave the theater? How could I convince him to go back home?
When every rational thing we know is wiped away, what are we left with? The rational mind forces us to define, to categorize, to separate: you are this, I am that; your love is this kind of love, mine is another; you are real, while you are a memory. Music is never rational. It works in wholes, not in pieces. I remember well when a scholar showed Vinicius sheet music to our songs, he laughed and handed the pages back. That’s just a transcript, man, Vinicius said. That’s not the real conversation.
So there, in that half-lit movie theater, I sang to him. Quietly at first, like when we wrote in cafés, or later, on film sets. I’m not sure why I didn’t sing one of our more recent songs; instead, I sang “Without Regret or Virtue,” a tune we’d written in 1940, during our year of movies and escapes, our year of lasts and firsts.
And Vinicius? He did exactly what I’d hoped he’d do: he took his hands away from his face, opened his eyes, and listened.
WITHOUT REGRET OR VIRTUE
Happiness is not an end point. It is not a long-hidden treasure marked with an X on a map. It is not a reward, handed to you after years of diligent service. Happiness is like being in your mother’s womb—warm, safe, buoyant—with no inkling of when it will end and why. During those whirlwind months of success after the Mayrink Showcase, we floated through our days in awe of our good fortune. We believed we’d made it. We believed that we’d transformed ourselves into successful performers, yet remained the same little samba band. We believed that we could shut ourselves away from thieving sambistas, overzealous fans, and opportunistic musicians and simply have one another, and our music. Then things began to change.
I’m the only living member of the Blue Moon Band. Being the last of my kind is lonesome, but it has its privileges: I’m the one who tells our story now. And in my version, our naive happiness began to drain away as soon as Senhor Pimentel found us.
“What does he want?” I asked Graça after her father had been in Rio a few days, sharing a room with Vinicius because men were not allowed in our boardinghouse.
She shrugged. “Who cares.”
“You should. He could call the police and drag you back to Riacho Doce any minute to marry you off. He sure looks like he needs a rich son-in-law.”
“There’s no more Riacho Doce,” Graça replied without emotion. “The bankers took it. The workers left him. Even if he wanted to drag me back, there’s nowhere to go back to.”
I felt Graça’s words as sharply as I would a slap against my cheek. Riacho Doce—its vast fields, its cutters’ shacks where I was born and where my mother had died, its Great House where I’d labored and spied and listened to music, the schoolroom where I’d learned about words and rhyme, the narrow hallway where Graça had pinched me and I’d slapped her on our first meeting—all of it gone. I didn’t know if the mill and the buildings would be razed, but in my imagination they were destroyed, and this inflicted a terrible sadness on me, one that made me ashamed. What a fool I was, to love what was never mine! And to feel betrayed by it—by a place!—for being sold and for sending us the worst of itself: Senhor Pimentel. He’d invaded Lapa, our new home where we’d managed to remake ourselves, and served only to remind us of the trapped girls we once were.
“So he’s staying for good?” I asked.
Graça released a satisfied sigh, as if she’d just eaten a ten-course meal. “He didn’t think he needed me around, but now I’m all he’s got. Now he’ll see that I never needed a husband to make me respectable. He’ll see I’m really worth something.”
* * *
—
During Urca shows he lurked backstage, introducing himself to every waiter, lighting technician
, and stage manager as “Sofia Salvador’s father,” until the casino workers began greeting him as “Senhor Salvador.” After shows he swept into Graça’s dressing room, ignoring everyone else, and complimented her beauty, her brilliance, her poise. When he was sober enough to sit in on our middle-of-the-night rodas, he broke all of our unspoken rules: talking during songs, interrupting to support Graça’s opinions on a new tune, applauding enthusiastically after Graça sang.
Caught in the barrage of his praise, Graça softened to him, but not completely. Try as he might, Senhor Pimentel wasn’t used to our bohemian life, and carried with him at all times the weight of his disappointment. His face darkened each time he had to eat a plate of rice and beans. He grew gloomy and petulant when he had to stay backstage because he didn’t have a tuxedo and therefore wasn’t allowed to socialize in the casino. And when he saw our boardinghouse for the first time, he couldn’t disguise his disgust.
“You live here?” he asked, staring at our building.
“What’d you expect?” Graça replied. “Catete Palace?”
Senhor Pimentel flushed. In the past, he might have punished his daughter for speaking to him this way, and Graça knew it. She squared her shoulders but her father’s harsh words never came. Senhor Pimentel was smart enough not to anger the sole person who could butter his bread.
“I was expecting something a bit more . . . private,” he said. “One that doesn’t have you sharing space with factory workers.”
“We’ve got our own bathroom,” Graça replied, her cheeks pink.
“Of course you do,” he said, placing a hand on Graça’s shoulder. “But you deserve a palace for all of your hard work! Every weekend you play that fancy casino. You’re making that Rolla fellow a rich man! You’re lining the record company’s pockets. But what are you getting in return?”
Graça tilted her head, considering his question.
“We buy all of her costumes,” I said. “She has a new one every week. And we split everything with the band, fair and square.”
“And with Madame L.,” Graça said bitterly.
“Who’s she?” Senhor Pimentel asked.
“Our partner,” I replied.
“She’s getting a hell of a deal! What does she give you in return?” he asked.
“Help, when we need it,” I replied.
Senhor Pimentel looked again at our building. “Well, it sure looks like you need it.”
That morning, as we lay down to sleep after a long night of shows, Graça turned her back to me and wept. When I placed a hand on her shoulder, she elbowed me away.
“They’re tearing down all the houses in Copacabana and making apartment buildings with elevators and hot-water plumbing,” she cried. “Why can’t we live in one of those?”
“One day we will,” I said.
“One day I’ll be dead.”
“You’re singing every night. You’re on the radio every day. Every girl in the city copies you. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Graça turned to face me, her knees hitting mine. “I’m barely twenty and I’m already one of the oldest samba girls out there. Sure, I’ve got Urca and the records we’ve cut, but all those younger bitches—Aracy and the rest of them—they’re catching up fast. Every time I change my hair or my outfit, they change theirs to match. I try to stay a step ahead, all the time, and it wears me out. I can sing circles around those girls, but that doesn’t matter. People will get bored with me after a while. They always do. And when that happens, what’ll I have? A rented room and some old costumes?”
“You’ll have me,” I whispered. “And the band.”
Graça stared at the ceiling. “Those boys will leave me as soon as something better rolls around. Vinicius, too. He lies and says he doesn’t care about the shows. He says it’s all about the music. But he only says that because a samba man is supposed to say that. A samba man can’t have ambition. But I know he loves playing for those big crowds. I can feel it, when we’re up onstage, it’s electric. You know, when Vinicius and me are onstage together, it’s like a dream. I wish we never had to wake up.”
“So that’s what you want?” I whispered. “To be onstage with him, forever.”
Graça sighed. “I want to stop fighting for the same damn scraps as every other band: a few casinos, a few piddly radio slots. There’s got to be more out there, Dor.”
The bedsheet felt as coarse as sandpaper against my skin. I kicked it off, leaving Graça and me uncovered. Surely the entire time we’d lived in Lapa, we’d been observed and judged by those around us. But the trick was, we hadn’t felt it. Not until Senhor Pimentel reappeared, and then it seemed as if our successes were constantly being weighed against our failures. Graça and I had thought our lives were magical and bright, but seeing them through Senhor Pimentel’s eyes made them seem shabby and smudged, as if we hadn’t actually arrived at the promised land but were peering at it through glass covered in fingerprints.
* * *
—
It’s said that necessity is the mother of invention. I’d argue that spite is its father. How many songs, poems, palaces, paintings, books, and enterprises have been made as retribution for a slight, a heartbreak, a careless word? Creation is a form of vengeance against a disbelieving world.
The more Senhor Pimentel disapproved of us, the more he complained about our food and lodging and long hours, the more he needled Vinicius (his reluctant new roommate) about Blue Moon taking a cut of Sofia Salvador’s earnings, the more we wrote. Every afternoon, Vinicius and I took in a movie to clear our heads, and then sneaked back to one of our rooms to make music. For a little while at least, we forgot about shows and money and Senhor Pimentel. I suppose Vinicius and I convinced ourselves that we could always find this solace with each other, if we only shut away the outside world. But inevitably, the world crept in.
One afternoon, as Vinicius and I labored in my room over a particularly stubborn song, he stopped strumming his guitar and asked: “What’s wrong?”
“This won’t cut down to three minutes,” I replied.
“So we play it in the roda.”
I shook my head. “It’s good. I don’t want to waste it.”
“The roda’s not a waste.”
“Why are we giving our songs away?” I asked.
“We’re cutting records and people are listening,” Vinicius replied. “That’s what you wanted.”
“And Victor rakes in the dough. How much do you think they make from ‘My Mutt’ every Carnaval?”
“That’s just the way it goes,” Vinicius said, and shrugged.
“What if it doesn’t have to go that way? What if we owned the songs? What if we cut our own records?”
Vinicius laughed. “You can’t own a samba. Samba’s like a bird. It flies around Lapa, heck, maybe it’ll even get around the world one day! And it tells people a story—our story. If it’s real good, it gets inside people’s heads. Inside their memories, Dor! Can you believe that? It’ll remind them of a good time, or a sad time, or somebody they loved, or their home. That’s some magic. You can’t own that.”
“Yeah, and you can’t eat it, either. Or wear it. Or live in it.”
“We’re not starving, Dor. And I’m happy as a clam where I’m living.”
“A clam with a roommate,” I said.
Vinicius shook his head. “At least Graça’s grateful. She hasn’t picked a fight with me since he moved in.”
“And that makes it worthwhile?”
“Give him enough rope, and he’ll hang himself soon enough.”
“Or he’ll hang one of us,” I said.
The door opened. Graça stood at the entrance, wearing a flowered dress and a beret. “Don’t look so thrilled to see me,” she said.
“You skipped your lesson?” I asked.
Graça plucked the beret from her head and tou
sled her white-blond pixie cut. “Papai says I don’t need lessons. He says my voice is perfect the way it is. Why do I need a hat-maker teaching me how to sing? Shove over.”
She bumped Vinicius’s shoulder with her hip. He sat on the edge of our bed, his guitar next to him. He scrambled to move the instrument before Graça sat, her arm pressed against his. “Sorry to interrupt your date.”
Vinicius blinked. “This isn’t a date. We’re not here to enjoy ourselves.”
Graça laughed. “So you two sneak together every day to be miserable!”
Vinicius looked at me, panicked.
“This is serious,” I said. “We’re working.”
“Seems like you’re chitchatting,” Graça said.
“We were taking a break,” Vinicius replied. “But I think we’re done for the day. We hit a wall.”
“Well, I’ll help you bust through!” Graça said. “Let’s hear it.”
Vinicius and I looked at each other. Graça stiffened.
“I’ve got ideas, too,” she said. “You two aren’t God’s gift.” She stretched out a hand and grabbed the notebook from my lap. “You still have this old thing? I remember wanting one, too. But you were always better than I was, at school at least. So let’s hear what you’ve got.”
Graça passed the notebook back to me. Vinicius held his guitar in his lap but did not play. I flipped through my notebook, trying to make sense of the words I’d scribbled earlier that morning.
How many times had I imagined Graça witnessing our writing sessions? I’d pictured Graça sitting quietly beside me, impressed by how well Vinicius and I worked together, and realizing for the first time that not all important moments occurred with her on a stage. My imaginary Graça sat, docile and entranced. But the real Graça drew us into her orbit, making us pay attention to every sigh, every crossing and uncrossing of her legs, every bitten fingernail and faraway stare. She upset a balance we didn’t know existed, until it was gone.
The Air You Breathe Page 25
