I cocked my arm and flung the pouch far into the waves.
* * *
—
The club in Ipanema was small but orderly: bottles were neatly arranged behind the bar; the tables and chairs were new and identical, not a jumble of found items; and the stage (if you can call a wooden platform the size of a twin bed a stage) was freshly painted black. The fumes still lingered, forcing the club’s owner to prop open the front and back doors for air. There were no microphones, no sound systems, and no electrical outlets.
“We’ll have to sing louder than we do in the studio,” Vinicius said as we studied the space. We’d arrived early, to avoid surprises.
“We don’t belt out our songs,” I said. “That’s not how we wrote them. They’re supposed to be quiet.”
“Well, we’re just going to have to figure out how to be quiet and loud at the same time,” he said.
I nodded. A trickle of sweat moved down my side; if I didn’t get a hold of myself, I’d be drenched by show’s end. I found a seat at the empty bar and asked the owner for a drink.
What are you wearing tonight? Graça had asked before Vinicius and I left the hotel. I’d shrugged. I can’t let you onstage looking like an orphan, she said, and riffled through my luggage, picking out a pair of black wide-legged trousers with satin piping along the sides and a blouse in beige silk. She’d dotted lipstick on my mouth and pinned my hair into an elegant twist. There, she said, and smiled. Now you’re a force to be fucking reckoned with.
I’d smiled back and felt truly powerful in her presence, but by the time I’d had my second drink at the Ipanema club’s bar, the lipstick had worn off and the twist in my hair was sagging.
“We should head backstage,” Vinicius said.
People were starting to trickle into the club. Two chairs had been placed on the platform. Vinicius’s guitar sat on a stand beside one chair. On the other was a box of matches and Kitchen’s pandeiro. I wasn’t a great player, but could hold my own. Kitchen had loaned it to me, knowing I’d need to have something to occupy my hands onstage.
Backstage, Vinicius and I sat in the club owner’s cramped office, next to a mop closet. Vinicius rested a hand on my knee; I stopped tapping my foot.
“What matters is the music,” he said. “It’s just like we’re cutting tracks in the studio, okay?”
I nodded. My mouth felt as if it had been wiped dry with cotton balls. Vinicius offered me water but I refused; the thought of liquid sloshing in my stomach made me want to vomit.
Heels clicked against the hall’s floor. I smelled her before she even set foot in the office—rose perfume, as if she’d bathed in it.
“This joint’s sure cozy,” she said, then kissed Vinicius on the mouth and me on the cheek.
“I thought you were resting tonight,” I croaked, rubbing her lipstick from my face.
“You think I’d miss this?” Graça stared at the mops. “They expect you to clean up afterward?”
“We don’t need fancy dressing rooms,” Vinicius replied.
“From the looks of it, you two don’t need any dressing rooms,” Graça replied. “Oh, don’t be so sour! I’m joking, right, Dor?”
I held my head in my hands and stared at my shoes. Graça found a stool and dragged it next to me. There was a swish of silk and the waft of roses as she sat and placed her small hand on my back.
“Think of it like a roda,” she said softly. “You’re at Ciata’s with the boys. I’ve taken a break and you’ve taken over. I’m sitting at the bar, right behind Vinicius. If you look up, you can see me, okay?”
I nodded into my hands. How many times had I imagined Graça watching me from the shadows while I shined onstage? Now I had my wish but couldn’t enjoy it. Perhaps Anaïs was right: I couldn’t withstand the rigors of being alone onstage. I wouldn’t be alone, of course—I’d have Vinicius. But he wasn’t Graça. I’d wanted a double act, just not this one.
I looked up from my hands, prepared to beg Graça to join us, but she’d already left the mop closet.
Out front, there was clapping. Whistles. The club’s owner spoke, saying words like underground, authentic, a new sound, and some other baloney. Then there was the name we’d chosen: Sal e Pimenta! And more claps, more hoots and whistles. Vinicius pulled me to standing and we walked out together, into the stage’s weak light. I don’t recall how I made it into my chair, tilted to face both Vinicius and the audience. He smiled, waved, said some things that made the crowd chuckle. Then took up his guitar and looked at me.
He played the soft, repetitive introduction to “Between Us.” Those first notes were supposed to be like waves, lapping the sand. We’d had that idea in the studio, Vinicius and I. The rhythm would be soft but insistent, a tide of sound.
He played the intro again. Gently, his foot tapped mine. I had to sing; yes. That was my job up there.
“Everything was a lark
between us.
Everything was child’s play
between us.
Everything was
a silly bet,
a give and a get,
a laugh, a touch, a shared cigarette
between us.”
My voice was soft. Too soft. Vinicius’s guitar, the pandeiro in my hands, the patrons shifting in the club’s small space, the clink of glasses from the bar—they drowned me out. Sweat prickled my forehead, as if a dozen mosquitoes were feasting on me. I wiped them away. Vinicius looked at me, his eyes wide. He kept playing. There were whispers in the crowd.
“Everything was a talk
when all others were sleeping.
Everything was a walk
when the beach was dark.
Everything was
your voice,
your smell,
your mouth closing around the secrets
between us.”
I blinked sweat from my eyes, looking past Vinicius. Graça sat at the bar, her arms crossed, her mouth pinched in annoyance. She moved her thumb up, and mouthed the word “LOUDER.” I nodded. Louder. Yes. I closed my eyes and placed a hand on my belly, as if I was once again in Anaïs’s hat shop, practicing my singing. My voice rose, scratchy but full, and heavy with loss. I imagined it covering the space and everyone inside like a wool blanket. The noises around me hushed except for the notes Vinicius plucked from his guitar, notes I knew well, as well as my own heartbeat.
“Everything was a song
between us.
Everything was all wrong
between us.
Everything was
a poem,
a prayer,
a plea
between us.”
The crowd was quiet but I felt their anticipation and their voracious need, as if each note, each word, each chord was vital to them. And I know exactly how they felt because I’d felt that way when I was twelve years old, sitting beside Graça and Senhora Pimentel in the Saint Isabel Theater listening to that fado singer. She’d made me forget myself, my mistakes, my poverty, my loneliness, my name. Listening to her, I was not Jega anymore. And after hearing her, I could never go without music again. It was not an addiction—addictions can be overcome—it was a necessity. I depended on it. And that was, I realized, what I’d always wanted to be: not memorable, but necessary. For a moment, in that club, I was.
There was quiet. Then clapping. Then cheers. Vinicius smiled and nodded, not approving, but asking: Another? I nodded back.
We played for two hours without stopping, and then we played two encores. At the show’s end, Vinicius and I stood. He took my hand and kissed it, and I looked past him once again, to Graça. She was not smiling or clapping. She sat on her stool, legs crossed, looking intent, as if she was working out a math problem in her head. Basking in the glow of that show, and in the thrill of our songs made real by having listeners, I believed that Gra
ça was seeing me for the first time as I saw myself in that brief moment: as someone who had arrived nervous and cowering, and had, by way of music, left transformed.
* * *
—
The Copa show was a crossroads, though we all saw our paths differently. The boys were leaving and we, of course, wanted our last show as a band to be a great one, not a failure. But I think all of us secretly hoped that the show would be such a success that the band wouldn’t have to break up. That Sofia Salvador would be vindicated and Blue Moon reunited, and we would, all of us, return to how we were before, in the early days. There was another part of me that hoped for their failure, for a fresh start, for an excuse to stay behind with Vinicius (though he hadn’t invited me to do this) and become Sal e Pimenta. And Graça? Where was she in these crossroads? Did she want to remain Sofia Salvador, or fail and make a new start as someone else? I realize now that her choices were not so cut-and-dried. In every success there is loss, and in every failure, a gain. Graça knew this better than anyone.
The Copacabana Palace had been renovated after we’d left Brazil. The main stage was round and exposed on all sides. There were no curtains to hide behind, no wings where an act could retreat. To get onto the stage, bands and singers entered through the ballroom’s enormous mirrored doors and wound their way past the crowd. This was a performance in itself. The audience sat at silver two-top and four-top tables littered with ashtrays and drinks. Once the performers were finally on that massive circular platform, bathed in lights and surrounded by audience on all sides, there was no way they could be whisked easily offstage. The only way to exit was to wade back into the crowd.
The night of Sofia Salvador’s homecoming show, the Copa was filled to capacity—more than seven hundred people sat around the stage and crammed the balconies. There were smiling Aerovias executives and stern-looking government men and their wives. There were newspaper reporters, critics, and samba stars who had stayed in Brazil and were considered patriots. Aracy Araújo sat beside a general at a table nearest the stage. There were entrepreneurs made wealthy by the war, along with representatives of some of the most traditional and aristocratic families in Rio. The Lion sat in the front row. In the far upper balconies were fans from Lapa, Glória, and the city’s center; Rádio Mayrink and Aerovias had offered tickets in a raffle to fifty lucky listeners. President Dutra was not in the audience—his wife, affectionately known as the Little Saint, had taken ill. A photographer positioned himself near the stage, alongside several men holding microphones for Mayrink. The show would be broadcast live across Brazil.
There was no “backstage” at the Copa; there was only an unmarked door outside the main stage that led to a white, windowless hallway smelling of bleach and cigarette smoke. The corridor wound into the bowels of the hotel, past exposed pipes, doors marked “Do not enter!” and painted signs leading waiters and staff to the kitchen and bar. One of the doors in this hall opened to a dressing room for performers. In the minutes before the show, the Blue Moon boys looked solemn in their best black tuxedos while I paced and smoked. Graça was nowhere to be found.
When she finally appeared, the beads of her skirt dragged across the floor, making her sound as if she was on rollers.
She wore the costume custom-made by Aerovias for the event—a cropped red satin top; a massive skirt weighing fourteen kilos and hand-beaded in the Aerovias colors of red and blue; red lipstick; her pixie cut, freshly dyed black for the show; and the fist-sized earrings in the shape of roses that she’d brought from L.A. (She’d refused to rewear the airplane earrings Aerovias had made for her.)
“Fucking skirt,” Graça said, when her hem caught on a nail sticking from one of the dressing room’s stools. Graça tugged and the skirt ripped. Beads scattered across the floor.
“Let me run upstairs and get your extra skirt,” I said. “These beads will keep falling off when you’re onstage.”
“Let them,” Graça said, and shrugged.
“But you’ll slip when you’re dancing,” I said. “You’ll fall.”
Graça touched my cheek. “I used to hate your gloom and doom. But I’m glad you’re around to worry about me. I couldn’t do this without you.”
Later, during the show, I’d learn that Graça didn’t plan on doing much dancing. But in the moment, I was so jarred by her affection that I didn’t hear the knock on the dressing room door. A stagehand announced that it was time. Then the boys and Graça held one another’s hands, forming a circle, with me on the outside.
* * *
—
Being part of an audience is like wading into a pool filled with strangers—you share the same waters, and when someone moves, even slightly, you feel the ripple. Without realizing, you also begin to move, and your movement sends its own signal. During any live performance there is always an exchange—not only from performer to the audience, but also within the audience itself.
As soon as Sofia Salvador and Blue Moon walked through the seated crowd and onto the stage, I could feel the audience’s grim determination. There were a few scattered claps from the Aerovias executives that quickly stopped, as if they’d clapped out of turn and then realized their error. Sofia Salvador smiled.
“Hello, friends!” she called out.
The audience was mute. Graça glanced back at the Blue Moon boys and growled: “Give them ‘Turned into a Gringa.’” The boys obeyed.
At the time, I didn’t know why she’d chosen that song; I thought she’d lost her power to read a room. The audience wasn’t going to make it easy for Sofia Salvador; they would not welcome her back with open arms, but would make her work to earn their praise, and this work would be a kind of apology to them—to all of Brazil, listening on their radios—for having left them. But “Turned into a Gringa” had never been an apologetic song.
Sofia Salvador’s voice carried into the balconies. Her skirt littered beads across the stage and her legs moved like two pistons across them, grinding them to dust under her feet. She twirled her hands. She winked at men and women nearest the stage. She smiled and swiveled and batted her eyes. The Blue Moon boys played their instruments with similar gusto. When no one in the audience returned Sofia Salvador’s smiles, she became more energetic, but without her normal cheer and elation. Instead, her movements became sharp, her voice icy, as if she was caught in a fight she was determined to finish.
At the end of “Gringa,” Sofia Salvador held up her arms, triumphant. Sweat beaded her forehead. Her chest heaved. The gang of Aerovias executives applauded enthusiastically, but quickly stopped when they realized they were the odd men out. Save a few limp claps from the balconies, everyone around Sofia Salvador was quiet. Reporters scribbled in their notebooks. The Lion grinned; failure sold more papers than triumph.
“Anyone have a chair for me?” Graça asked the crowd.
There was icy silence. Finally, one of the Aerovias men gamely lifted his chair up to the stage.
“Thank you, querido,” Graça said, and sat.
I stood in the back of the ballroom, near the large doors where the band entered and exited. As soon as I saw Graça slump into that gold chair, I moved to the stage’s steps; if she was unwell, I’d carry her away. Graça saw me catapulting toward her and she put her hand out, palm facing me, like a guard blocking my path.
“How about another seat, for my guitar player?” she asked. “He’s getting old as the hills and heavy on his feet.”
There were a few chuckles. Vinicius looked startled. Another Aerovias man passed his chair up.
“Sit,” Graça ordered. Vinicius looked at Tiny, who shrugged. Then he obeyed Graça and sat across from her.
“I want to try something new tonight. Would you all like to see something new?”
There were a few hesitant claps.
“You see,” Graça continued, “I get a feeling from this crowd tonight, that you want entertainment. Real entertain
ment. Not just what you have seen one hundred times before. Well, I live to serve you.”
There were whispers. Aracy Araújo wiggled in her chair. The crowd was both intrigued and nervous—myself included. Was Sofia Salvador drunk, or desperate? What would she show us? Would the night be a disaster or a revelation?
Sofia Salvador unclipped one earring, then another, dropping them to the floor beside her chair. She ran a hand through her hair, making it stand oddly on end. With the tips of her nails she peeled off her fake eyelashes and flicked them behind her like bugs. Then she reached into the bosom of her dress and removed a white handkerchief. Instead of blotting the sweat from her face, she placed the white square on her mouth and wiped one way, then the other, again and again, until the cloth was smeared red and her mouth was raw and pink.
She stood, released her mike from its stand, wove the cord away from her feet, and sat. Then, without a nod or a look at Vinicius, she sang in the sweetest of whispers:
“Everything was a lark
between us.
Everything was child’s play
between us.”
Vinicius looked on in disbelief, then quickly composed himself and followed Graça’s lead. Behind them, the boys began to understand the groove and played low and slow, never overpowering the softness of Sofia Salvador’s voice.
She sang every song, in the same order, from my Ipanema set the night before. She sang them the way I had sung them, only better. Her voice was smoother, yes, but there was a terrible loneliness inside it, as if she was singing by herself in an empty nightclub and not in the greatest venue in Brazil. She didn’t miss a word or a beat, as if she had known the songs for ages; as if they were hers all along, never mine; as if the act she’d stolen from me was not an act at all but a genuine plea to her audience. Only Vinicius and I knew the truth.
She was a different Sofia with her small eyes and smeared mouth—gentler and older. She had stripped herself bare before them. In return, their quiet felt different than before: attentive, curious, a little embarrassed for her.
The Air You Breathe Page 39
