The Air You Breathe

by Frances De Pontes Peebles

  I looked Vinicius in the eyes. “All you have to do is play our songs. They’ve never heard good samba before, and we’re going to knock all their blocks off. When we’re done out here we’ll be the most famous samba band there ever was. We’ll show everybody.”

  “Show them what?” he asked.

  “That we’re not some fad. That we can’t be cast aside like we don’t matter.”

  Vinicius put his callused hand over mine. “I didn’t plan on this happening with Graça.”

  I pulled away. “But you always wanted it to. Did you invite me to those first rodas at Ciata’s because you hoped she might come along, too? Was that your idea?”

  “No,” Vinicius replied, and looked away. “Maybe? Shit, Dor, I don’t know. Does it matter now? I’ve never been able to write on my own the way we write together. You got me away from all those old songs. You and me, we’re making something brand-new.”

  “We aren’t making anything,” I said. “You act like Graça’s the only person that exists in this world.”

  “And you don’t?” Vinicius asked. He grabbed my hand, tighter this time. “Cut me some slack, Dor. You know how I feel. You’re the only one who knows.”

  I stared at his pompadour, his thick sideburns, his eyes so dark and shining they looked like pools of liquid, and remembered the first time I’d held his stare as he played at Little Tony’s club. This time we were not separated by a stage and a crowd; he was not the performer and I was not a dumb kid in the audience. We were on the same side, together.

  Neither of us noticed that the club had grown quiet, the band had stopped, and Graça stood at the edge of our table with her arms crossed. Vinicius’s hand flew from mine. The club’s lights brightened.

  “Party’s over, kids,” Graça said, and took Vinicius away.

  * * *

  —

  The sun was barely rising the next morning when we reached Twentieth Century-Fox. Upon entering the studio gates, we spent another half hour trying to find our film set. Fox was a city in itself—it had an air-conditioned administration building before air conditioning was common; a massive warehouse where furniture, costumes, and props were stored; a security force with fifty officers; a dentist’s office, a clinic, an electrical plant, a beauty parlor, a research department, a cafeteria, a school. Anything you needed could be found on the studio lot, which was what Fox wanted; time away from the studio was considered time lost.

  Our film was Bye, Bye, Buenos Aires, and would be made in Technicolor, a novelty back then. The plot was the same one used in most of Sofia Salvador’s films over the years: a buxom North American gal heads to a foreign land, meets the man of her dreams, quarrels with him, and then, by the end of the film, they are in each other’s arms. The action takes place in cruise ships, racetracks, hotel lobbies, and glamorous nightclubs. It’s in these clubs that Sofia Salvador and the Blue Moon Band appear.

  Although set in Argentina’s capital, Bye, Bye, Buenos Aires was actually filmed on sound stages in California. The real Buenos Aires had automobiles, glamorous men in Savile Row suits, wide sidewalks and tidy parks. But in Fox’s film, Buenos Aires was a backwater town resembling a hacienda and, in it, the Club Argentina. Fox had built an entire nightclub, painting it white, adding enormous Greek columns, and hanging a blue backdrop with stars painted across it. Tiny crosses of black tape were stuck to the set’s fake stage, pinpointing where Graça and the Blue Moon boys were required to stand and perform two of our most popular songs: “That Girl from Bahia,” and “What’s She Got (That I Don’t)?” We believed that our first film shoot would be no different from a show at Urca, except, of course, for the cameras.

  At six-thirty a.m., Graça, the boys, and I were on set drinking coffee like it was water. The set was a closed hangar and airless. Two dozen stationary fans ran at full speed, but the room still felt muggy. Three large black cameras on metal bases were arranged around the stage—one in the center, two on each side. Ladder-like pillars held large spotlights that flooded the stage, making the white backdrop blinding. Just before filming, production people ran about, shouting and turning off every fan in the room.

  Sofia and the boys were bit players, not yet worthy of Fox’s many resources, which meant that they did their own hair and makeup and wore their own outfits: the boys in tuxedos, and Graça in her red Baiana-inspired gown with shoulders exposed and a slit up the front of the wide skirt, revealing her legs. Her hair was still black and in its pixie cut, her lipstick bloodred, her earrings massive and dangling.

  At the director’s cue, Graça walked to her taped mark onstage, her enormous platform heels knocking against the wooden floor.

  “Stop!” the director growled. “Leo! Glue some felt to the soles of her shoes. I can’t have her clopping around like a fucking horse.”

  After wardrobe took her shoes and returned them, Graça and the boys were once again ordered to their marks. Everything went quiet. The cameras began to click.

  Apart from the movie’s crew, the club was empty. There were no waiters milling about. There was no clinking of drink glasses, no velvety haze of cigarette smoke. There was no laughter, no chatter, no applause. Graça had to pretend there was, though. She had to smile and sing as if hundreds were watching her. She had to wag her finger at an imaginary man in the front row, then wink at his lady friend. Near the end of her first song Graça stood at the stage’s edge, her chest swelling up and down, beads of sweat shining on her upper lip.

  “Cut!” the director interrupted. “Get some goddamn powder on her.”

  A makeup woman appeared, forced Graça to lift her arms, and powdered her face, chest, and armpits.

  “Miss . . . uh . . . Salvador, try it again,” the director shouted. “Without walking past your marks on either side of the stage. And don’t wave your fingers in front of your face. We need to see your face. Jesus! Does she even understand what I’m saying?”

  Movies—we quickly learned—weren’t live shows. Every drop of sweat had to be wiped away, every loose thread cut, every outside sound muffled. Graça could not dance as she normally did, sweeping back and forth across the stage. She had to stay on her marks, then twist herself toward the camera. The Blue Moon boys had to smile, but only with their lips closed. A hairdresser had to trim Vinicius’s hair so it would not fall into his face while he strummed his guitar. Three of the boys stood on either side of Graça, stiffly playing their instruments, making sure not to move too far apart or too close together.

  After five hours, only one of our songs had been filmed all the way through. Graça had worked longer stints before, but always with an audience to cheer her. Without a crowd’s applause, there was no way for Graça to gauge how well she was doing. On that silent set, each song felt as if it had fallen flat. And just as Graça would hit her stride and begin to feel confident and comfortable, the director would cut her off: the lights were too bright, her earring was crooked, a set piece was smudged. At first, I believed the director’s name was Zanuck. Everyone on the set whispered this name, and always in a fearful way.

  “Mr. Zanuck won’t like that.”

  “Zanuck will be mad as hell when he sees this.”

  “Mr. Zanuck wants to make sure Miss Salvador’s jewelry isn’t too shiny for the camera.”

  In the afternoon, the director balled up a telegram and growled Zanuck’s name, and I realized he was not Zanuck after all. Mr. Darryl F. Zanuck, we’d soon learn, was the head of Fox studios.

  At four o’clock that afternoon, we took our second, precious break. The boys and I ordered sandwiches. Graça ate a pickle and drank more coffee; she could not sing and dance on a full stomach. Her feet hurt terribly.

  We sat in folding chairs just off set. I held Graça’s feet in my lap and undid the buckles of her gold platforms. The shoes dropped to the floor with a thud. The strands of gold necklaces and costume pearls around Graça’s neck made it burden
some for her to move; the jewelry was heavy, and she had to conserve her energy. She was nearly asleep, her feet heavy in my lap, when a production assistant yelled to us that the director was ready.

  Graça looked solemn when she found her mark onstage. But as soon as the room quieted and the camera started filming, she beamed. Her teeth, framed by the freshly reapplied red lipstick, looked shockingly white. Her eyes were wide. Her hands twirled near her face but never obstructed it. Her hips jutted from side to side, making her skirt flutter. Her voice soared. For the first time, I looked away from Graça and at the cameramen, the production assistants, the set designers and prop crew. They smiled and stared at the stage, their eyes glossy as if they’d been drinking during their breaks. One man bobbed his head. Another patted his leg in time to the music and mouthed the chorus, which we’d all heard a dozen times that day. At the end of the song, Graça held her pose and her smile. Then the director yelled “Cut!” and the room once again buzzed with conversation and movement.

  Graça limped offstage, unclipping the enormous earrings that swung nearly to her shoulders and shoving them into my hands.

  “Thank Christ that’s over,” she said. “Let’s get drinks.”

  But before we could return to our tiny trailer, the director stopped us. Beside him was a man we did not recognize—his dark hair was mussed and his eyes bleary, as if he’d been woken from a deep sleep. He spoke to us in Spanish, which was much closer to our language than English was, but still foreign. I had to ask the tired man to slow down.

  He was an extra on another film set. The director had found him and ordered him to translate. I looked at the director, who smiled and spoke quickly in English. I caught some of his words, and the tired man translated the rest into Spanish, which I converted to Portuguese for Graça.

  “What if,” the director proposed, “Sofia Salvador not only sings and dances, but has a few lines?”

  Graça wrung her hands. “He wants me to speak in English?” she asked.

  The extra and I played our game of translation. The director shook his head. Sofia Salvador would speak her lines in Portuguese and her scene partner, the hero’s buddy, would reply in English, giving the audience context. Slowly, the director spelled out the scene for us: Sofia Salvador’s nameless nightclub character meets the hero’s buddy backstage and argues with him. Sofia was a jilted lover, arguing with her unfaithful gringo beau. It would be a five-minute interlude, tops.

  “What’s the script?” Graça asked. “What are my lines?”

  The director laughed when we translated for him. “No script,” he said. “This is just an idea I have—a hunch. Just let her talk. No one’s going to understand her anyway.”

  In our trailer, Graça gulped two mugs of black coffee to pep herself up; we’d been shooting for twelve hours straight by then. While we waited for her costar to arrive, Graça practiced different versions of the five-minute scene over and over.

  For the first time ever, she would perform on her own, without me beside her or the Blue Moon boys backing her up, and she would do this in front of the harshest audience imaginable—Fox’s exhausted crew.

  “How’d that sound?” she asked me after rehearsing for the hundredth time. “Do you think a hurt girl would say this without crying? I think she might cry.”

  That was how Graça interpreted the character—as a girl who was betrayed and angry.

  The Blue Moon boys waited outside while a makeup assistant touched up Graça’s powder and lipstick. Her platform heels were so tall that she stood at eye level with me.

  “If I don’t do this right, I’ll die right there, on that set,” she said.

  “It’s only a few lines,” I replied. “You’ll be fine.”

  “You always do this,” Graça hissed.

  “Do what?”

  “Make everything seem like it’s so fucking easy. But it’s not,” she said, clipping on her enormous earrings. “Singing’s easy, but other things? They aren’t easy for me like they are for you.”

  Graça blinked away tears. Before I could reply, a set assistant opened the trailer door and whisked Graça away.

  As soon as the camera rolled, Sofia Salvador improvised her lines perfectly.

  “You dog!” she said in Portuguese. “You’ve ruined my life. How could you do this to me?”

  Each time she spoke, her male costar interrupted, trying to appease her, saying he was sorry while, at the same time, backing away. The farther away he moved, the closer Sofia Salvador inched toward him—the scene looked like a song and dance. Graça had drunk too much coffee, making her nervous, almost frantic. Near the scene’s end their argument became so heated, with Graça shaking her head so fiercely, that one of her giant earrings began to slip, tugging at her lobe until it fell, sliding down her chest and disappearing into the shadow of her cleavage. Graça clapped her hands to her bosom, her eyes wide.

  A cameraman chuckled. Another—his face red and his eyes closed—tried to stifle a laugh but could not. Then the script girl broke out in giggles and, in an instant, the entire set vibrated with laughter. Only the Blue Moon boys and I were quiet.

  “Cut!” the director yelled. “Come on, people. Let’s keep it together.”

  Some stared at their shoes to suppress their giggles but their shoulders shook. Others looked at one another and smiled like naughty kids disciplined by a headmaster.

  Graça looked dangerously pale. She kept her hands over her heart.

  “You okay?” her costar asked. “Hey, George,” he said to the director, “I think we need a break.”

  “Five minutes,” the director yelled. “Break!”

  “Break!”

  “Break!”

  “Break!”

  Production assistants repeated the word across the set like an echo. I ran to Graça. She fell into me and gripped my hand so tightly I nearly cried out. Even in the safety of her tiny trailer, with the Blue Moon boys guarding the door, Graça would not let go of my fingers.

  Vinicius circled us, wringing his hands as if he was waiting for Graça to give birth. I could not think of words of comfort. It was the first time she’d ever been laughed off a stage.

  Graça let go of my hand, grabbed the trash bin, and vomited.

  As she slumped on the floor, still heaving over the metal bin, Vinicius knelt on one side of Graça and rubbed her back. I knelt on the other.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. “I ruined everything. They made fun of me.” Graça’s face crumpled. “How can we go back home now? After this? What’ll the papers print?”

  I glanced at Vinicius, then ran my fingers through Graça’s sweaty hair. “We can fix it. We’ll shoot it again, without the earrings. I’ll tell the director we want everybody off set.”

  Graça’s breath caught in her throat. Her eyes were smeared with mascara. “Don’t make me go back outside,” she whispered.

  We pulled Graça up from her knees and moved her to the couch. There, the three of us sat side by side with Graça at the center, one of her hands very cold inside mine.

  “Let’s leave,” Graça said. “Please?”

  “I’ll call us cabs,” I replied. “We’ll rest tonight and start fresh tomorrow.”

  Graça shook her head. “No, leave L.A. I want to go home.”

  “Take it easy,” Vinicius said, his voice hushed as if he was soothing a child. “Let’s talk with the boys first . . .”

  Graça tugged her hand from his. “All you worry about are the goddamn boys.”

  She turned her back to Vinicius and faced me. She smelled of sweat and vomit and the powder they’d dusted under her arms.

  “I want to go home, Dor.”

  “We can’t,” I replied. “We signed a contract.”

  “Fuck the contract!” Graça yelled, then wrapped me in a hug so tight it was difficult to breathe.

 
“We can make it like it was before,” she said. “Just the two of us. Shit, we can go home and buy our own club! We’ll work whatever hours we please, and I’ll sing whatever I want. And you’ll sing, too, Dor. We can be the Nymphettes again, only better. No cruddy costumes. No bad makeup. We’ll sing your songs! It’ll be a dream. It’ll be like our very first night onstage together. Remember?”

  She’d chosen me to escape with, even if her plan was a fantasy. If we burned bridges with the Blue Moon Band, and Fox studios, and our American talent agent, Chuck Lindsay, and we sailed back home, we wouldn’t have the money to buy our own club. Few in Rio would hire us. We’d be right back where we’d started, but we’d be together.

  “I’ll tell the boys we’re leaving,” I announced. Graça smiled, easing her grip on me.

  I felt light-headed. I stood and, in one long stride, I was at the trailer door. Vinicius moved behind me. Gently he placed a hand on my wrist.

  “Dor,” he whispered, so Graça could not hear him. “It’s been a real long day. You know she says things when she’s tired. Things she doesn’t mean. We should get some rest and talk again tomorrow.” He spoke in a fatherly tone, as if he was the adult among us and understood things I did not.

  I shook my wrist from his grip, angry now.

  “You don’t know her,” I said. “You don’t know me.”

  Vinicius winced. I took pleasure in his reaction. I’d stung him, just as he and Graça had stung me with their inside jokes, their language of touches and stares.

  There was a knock on the trailer door. When I opened it, the film’s director stared back at me.

  “How is our girl doing?” he shouted, smiling. He peeked at Graça, making sure she was still dressed, then forced his way inside. Behind him was the extra who’d translated for us earlier, his eyes fixed on the trailer’s floor.

  Graça grabbed a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. Her nose was red, her lipstick smeared. The trailer smelled of vomit.