I was proud of myself for understanding. In the weeks before our departure, I’d taken an English-language course in part to prepare for our time in the United States, and in part as a distraction. Instead of waiting in vain for Vinicius to show up to our songwriting sessions, I shifted the focus of my afternoons to relearning the language Senhora Pimentel had taught me long ago. Aboard the Uruguay, I believed my hard work had paid off.
“We are great artists,” I said, in English, to the pale woman beside me.
“Painters?” she asked.
I shook my head and explained that we were sambistas, sent north to conquer Hollywood! We would sing and dance in a real movie for Twentieth Century-Fox studios! My voice, in English, became high-pitched and unfamiliar. My tongue grew tired after just a few minutes of conversation. How startled I was to see the look of confusion and sympathy on that American woman’s face! She nodded and quickly darted away. I felt graceless and dim-witted. Above us, the ship’s horn blared. Below us, the crowd cheered even louder.
It was not a massive group, but large enough to merit attention. Some waved Brazilian flags. Some held signs that read “We love you, Sofia!”
We would be the first Brazilian act to be in a major motion picture, a fact that the Lion’s national newspapers and Gegê’s Department of Propaganda touted for weeks before our departure. If before Sofia Salvador was simply a well-known Rio samba star, after the announcement of our U.S. trip, she became a national symbol, a valuable export. All of Brazil was counting on her to succeed.
* * *
—
I remember standing alone on the deck and watching Brazil disappear from view. The sun set. The ship chugged forward, as if moving through syrup. There was no moon, making it hard to distinguish the ocean from the sky. Looking out onto that immense blackness I felt a dizzy euphoria, as if I had been fasting and had forgotten any symptoms of hunger. Graça and Vinicius’s little tryst seemed to bother me less. Rio, with its jutting hills, its gaudy cabaret lights, its mansions and slums, its casinos and fancy theaters, its grubby assortment of Madame Lucifers and Lions and Senhor Pimentels, was behind us. Now there was only our band and our music.
The ocean bucked and swayed, making the giant ship rise and fall beneath me. I held stubbornly to the rail, intent on keeping my excitement alive, but the same seasickness that plagued me on my first boat ride years before, on our way to Sion School, found me again. I huddled in my cabin and did not leave until Graça found me, days later.
As soon as I unbolted the door she darted inside, swift as a cat.
“You look like hell,” she said.
I crawled back into my berth. “I didn’t ask you to look at me.”
She placed a tin of crackers and a water pitcher on the table, already strewn with cigarette butts and empty glasses. Thankfully the porter had replaced my sick bucket, which sat empty beside my berth. Graça nudged it aside with the toe of her shoe, then gave my leg a hard push.
“Shove over,” she said, and squeezed beside me on the tiny mattress. I turned my back to her. She curled into me, her knees fitting into the backs of mine, her chest against my back, her arm nudging under my own and wrapping around my waist. I smelled rose perfume and the powdery residue of her cold cream. I shut my eyes tight.
“Did you and Vinicius fight?” I asked. “Is that why you’re crawling in here?”
Graça stiffened. She unwound her arm from my waist.
“You both think you’re so smart,” she said. “Always using fancy words and asking questions, but not to me. He never asks me anything. We don’t do much talking.”
How many times had I pictured the two of them together, behind that locked dressing room door? What a treacherous gift the imagination can be—one minute a blessing that grants you escape, the next an enemy you must fight off for your own survival.
I turned to face her. “What do you want him to ask you?”
“If I’m scared,” she whispered. “About leaving. About Hollywood.”
“Are you?”
“No one knows me on this boat. In the dining room the gringos look at me and the boys like we’re not supposed to be there. Like we should be cleaning their cabins, not sitting next to them at dinner. The captain hasn’t even visited our table to say hello to me.”
I smiled. “He’s probably busy steering the ship.”
“Stop it,” Graça snapped. “You’re acting like Vinicius, making fun of me. Sometimes I wish . . .” She shook her head and turned her body to face the ceiling, squeezing me harder against the berth’s wall.
“What?”
“That Papai was still here.”
I felt very warm, as if I might need my sick pail.
“If he was still here we wouldn’t be together,” I said, “on this boat. He wouldn’t let you go to Hollywood. He’d have you singing opera at a tea party for some rich bitches in Santa Teresa.”
“At least they’d know me,” she said.
“Sure they’d know you—some ex–samba singer trying hard to be respectable. Some little planter’s daughter trying to win them over with her pretty voice. You’d be a novelty. Worse—you’d be a joke. You know what rich people hate the most? People trying to copy their own game. And you know what scares them? Someone with real talent doing something unexpected—doing something they didn’t even think existed. You know why? Because suddenly they see this whole world of music and people and talent that’s not there because of them. They didn’t make it or pay for it, and they can’t buy it or control it. And this scares the shit out of them.”
Graça blinked, startled.
“But I don’t want to scare people, Dor,” she said. “I want them to want me. Not in a going-to-bed kind of way. I want them to hear me sing and, for a little while, forget everything else. They don’t have wives or husbands or kids or jobs. They just have me. I’m everything to them, but they can’t ever have me. So they’ll never get bored with me, they’ll never make fun of me, they’ll never think I’m plain or useless or stupid. I’ll always be perfect to them because I’m stuck in their memories, and every time they think of me, they make me all over again. You can’t help but love something you made yourself.”
“That’s not love,” I whispered.
“Oh yeah? How would you know?”
Her arm pressed against mine and my skin felt painfully tender, as if I’d been sunburned. “I wouldn’t.”
“Well, I think it’s love,” Graça replied. “That’s what counts.”
“And Vinicius?” I asked. “What does he think?”
Graça shrugged. “He loves his music. He talks about it like it’s some kind of religion. If I wasn’t a singer—if I didn’t sing his songs—he wouldn’t even give me the time of day.”
“They’re my songs, too.”
“You and him are two peas in a fucking pod,” Graça said, frowning.
I found her hand and wove my fingers through hers. “After we cut ‘My Mutt’ you told me to stop moping and be happy, be excited. And you were right. I turned what should’ve been a great day into a pity party. I was only thinking about what I’d lost, not all the things we’d get. So I’m telling you the same thing about Hollywood: be happy, be excited. We’re going to make a movie! You’re going to be twenty feet tall on screens all over the world! There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Graça stared at the cabin’s metal ceiling. “If the movies don’t work out, it won’t matter to you or Vinicius because you’ll have your writing and your rodas. But what about me? If those Hollywood gringos hate me, I won’t be some great export, I’ll be a dud. Aracy took over my show at Urca. If I don’t nail this movie gig, I won’t get that show back. I won’t get any shows. Seems like the higher up we get, the worse the fall. For me at least. What net have I got?”
“You don’t need one,” I whispered. “I’ll catch you.”
Graça laughed. “You and Vinicius’ll be so busy with your songs, you won’t even see me hit the pavement.”
* * *
—
When the Uruguay slid into New York Harbor, my trousers were baggy and my belt sagged on its first notch. As I stared into the cabin’s mirror and applied a coat of lipstick, I saw my sharp cheekbones and the angular lines of my face, and realized that I, too, had a kind of beauty, though it was severe. As I made my way to the ship’s deck where we’d all agreed to meet, Tiny whistled upon seeing me. The other Blue Moon boys laughed and slapped my back, teasing me about my seasickness. Vinicius smiled so widely it was difficult to ignore him as I’d done the past few weeks.
“The Sphinx finally rises!” he said, holding his arms out to hug me. Graça, dressed all in white with an ivory turban covering her vulture hair, swept between us.
“You made it,” she said, as if our arrival was an appointment I could have easily missed. She wrapped her arm around mine and did not release me until we were walking, single file, down the ship’s gangplank.
Seeing the great city of New York, I felt as if a brown film coated my eyes, making everything sullied and dim. The city’s gray buildings were clumped close together. Wind blew easily through my cotton coat. It was November and I had never before felt such cold. Our travels, I realized, were just beginning.
A Fox man met us at the port, stuffed us and our trunks into three yellow cabs, and sent us to Penn Station, where we boarded a train to Chicago. There, numb with fatigue, we filed onto the famous Super Chief train to Los Angeles.
What I remember most from that train ride was the food. After thirteen lean days at sea, I ate like a starving animal: cottage fried potatoes, Kansas City sirloins, fresh trout, Romanoff caviar, eggs, salads, rye bread rolls. Oh, North America! I thought as I sopped up the last bits of gravy from my plate. Land of luxury! The Pullman porters made sure to always give us the most secluded spot in the dining car. I’d believed they were being gracious—we were a loud bunch, always celebrating—and other diners perhaps wanted peace and quiet. After we’d disembarked in Los Angeles, however, I discovered that it wasn’t our noisiness the other diners objected to, but our looks. The Super Chief was not a segregated train by rule, but there were unspoken customs from which the Pullman porters—so tactful and kind—hoped to shield us.
When I think of the eight of us—Graça, me, Vinicius, Little Noel, Tiny, Kitchen, Banana, and Bonito—on the train, admiring the Super Chief’s linen napkins and silver finger bowls, making toasts to our success, speculating excitedly about which movie stars we might see, I think of a group of children playing games in a narrow and luxurious house, unaware of the larger workings of the outside world.
* * *
—
I remember our arrival in Los Angeles vividly not only because it was a new place, but also because it felt like we were new people there—different people. We were no longer the seasoned crew of famous musicians we’d been in Rio, but unknown kids learning how to make our way into Hollywood’s roda. In the beginning, this didn’t diminish our excitement but added to it.
Twentieth Century-Fox assigned a young blond man to greet us at Los Angeles’s chaotic and enormous Union Station. We’d learn, weeks later, that real movie stars were greeted at the more picturesque Pasadena Station. But on the day of our arrival we were blissfully ignorant, and we followed that young and cheerful Fox assistant through sheets of rain and piled—sopping wet—into two black cars with tinted windows. The blond separated us: Vinicius, Little Noel, and Graça in one car; Tiny, Kitchen, Bonito, and Banana in another. The Fox boy studied me—eyeing my face and my expensive traveling dress with its matching emerald jacket—before guiding me to Graça’s car. The dark automobiles plodded slowly through the storm and into Los Angeles, like a funeral procession on its way to the plot.
Our car had the Fox boy inside it, and he took us to the Plaza Hotel on Hollywood and Vine. The place billed itself as a luxury hotel for “stars in transit.” Its lobby had windows covered by red damask curtains, a ceiling tall enough to comfortably fit a giraffe, and carpets so thick, my heels sank two inches into their pile. Graça’s eyes sparkled. She removed her wet gloves and elbowed me.
“Tell the Fox kid I need a powder room. I can’t face the press looking like a wet rat.”
Before I could formulate how to translate Graça’s request into my stilted English, the Fox boy began to speak loud and slow:
“Fox will cover you for one week—the length of your shoot. After that, you’ll have to find other digs. There’re plenty of rooming houses in the city. The sooner you get a used car, the better. L.A.’s a big town if you have to walk and take the bus everywhere. Here’s a bus schedule,” he said, pressing a brochure into my hand. “Give yourselves ninety minutes to get to the studio. Call time is six a.m. sharp. I’ll go check you in now.”
I stared blankly at the bus schedule in my hand and tried to arrange what I’d understood of the boy’s speech into a coherent thread. Before I could translate it, Graça spoke.
“Where’re the reporters?” she asked.
I shook my head. “There are none.”
“Where’s the other car?” Vinicius asked.
Little Noel nodded. “The boys should be here by now.”
I relayed their question to the Fox boy as best as I could. The blond’s smile wavered. He replied with a long string of words, of which I could only decipher: Another hotel. The Dunbar. Swell place.
“The boys don’t speak a lick of English,” Vinicius said, running a hand through his soaked hair. “They should be here, with us.”
Graça balled her wet gloves in her hands. “Dor, tell this Fox kid how big we are in Brazil,” she commanded. “We might be nobodies here, but the least they could do is put us up together. We’ll share rooms if we have to; they can pack us in tight.”
The Fox assistant stared coolly at us, our room keys in his freckled hand. I cleared my throat.
“We stay all together,” I said to him. “The other boys? Here?”
The blond boy raised his eyebrows, as if I’d just asked him to undress in front of me. “Hotels around here don’t let certain kinds stay,” he replied, his voice low.
“Kinds?” I asked, though I already suspected what he was implying.
“Negroes,” he replied.
The word exists in Portuguese. It is not pronounced knee-grow as the Fox boy said in his nasal voice. We say neh-grew, though most times we don’t even pronounce the r. It is usually just neh-goo. And although it can mean the color black it also means other things. Meu nêgo—my friend, my lover, my brother, my sweet one. In our circles this word was said with great affection. But we weren’t blind or stupid; the logic of lighter being better wasn’t alien to us, but how it was expressed and enforced in Hollywood came as a surprise.
As sambistas in Brazil we always rode freight elevators, used service entrances, and lived in neighborhoods like Lapa. The difference was we did these things together, as a band. Movies led us to believe that, while the USA might be strict on such matters, Hollywood itself would be a bohemian town where anything was possible and where everything goes. We’d soon learn that the real Hollywood was a business, with a few mill-white men calling all the shots.
The Fox boy muttered some kind of good-bye and pressed the room keys into my hands. I looked back at Graça, Vinicius, and Little Noel. “There are rules,” I said. “The boys can’t stay here.”
Vinicius slumped onto a nearby settee. Little Noel lit a cigarette. Graça tugged her wet gloves back onto her hands and faced me.
“Get us a taxi,” she ordered.
Twenty minutes later, we were parked in front of the Dunbar Hotel’s arched entranceway. The hotel was, we learned, the home for black performers who entertained white Los Angelinos but could not sleep anywhere near them. Built in a Spanish style we’d come to recognize
as a Los Angeles trademark, the hotel had flagstone floors and an impressive colonnade decorated in an art deco style and topped with an enormous crystal chandelier. The Dunbar had its own restaurant and barbershop, and a nightclub called the Showboat. That was where we found Kitchen, Tiny, Bonito, and Banana, having drinks and listening to a bebop trio onstage.
During our long journey to L.A., we’d all taken turns imagining our first night in Hollywood. We’d believed Hollywood was a magical place with the best bands and the rowdiest clubs. It was the capital of entertainment! We thought we would be able to relive our wildest Lapa nights. But on our actual first night, as we sat in the Showboat Club and attempted to get staggeringly drunk, we learned that moviemaking did not allow for late nights. Every club, including the Dunbar’s, closed by eleven. In Hollywood, the only real parties occurred on Sunday afternoons—when the studios were closed—and even those ended no later than midnight.
By ten-thirty it was last call. The band played a slow number. Tiny, Banana, and Bonito had found girls to flirt with. Kitchen gestured enthusiastically to a fellow musician at the bar, attempting to mime a conversation. Graça and Little Noel swayed across the dance floor. I sat alone, at a little table in the back, until Vinicius found me.
“This place is better than ours,” he said, sitting in the chair next to me, his leg pressing against mine. “It’s sure better than our rooms back in Lapa. If they’re going to keep us separate, at least they do it in style.”
I emptied my drink and banged my glass back onto the table. Vinicius eyed me.
“How long are you going to give me the silent treatment?”
“Until you have something interesting to say.”
“She speaks!”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m surprised you let her out of your grip. I was beginning to think we’d have to peel you two apart before filming tomorrow.”
“She complained I was stepping on her toes and shoved me away,” he said, nodding to the dance floor. “She’s picking fights. It’s because she’s nervous about tomorrow, about filming. She won’t admit it, but I can tell. I’m nervous, too.”
The Air You Breathe Page 30
