It was just a square of land that my mother inherited from one of her brothers. No I don’t know why or how he had a little square of land there. Perhaps he had meant to live there or grow things or sell it but he never did. He was not rich. But it was not worth a lot of money. It still is not worth a lot of money. More now though but anyway
It was a square bit of land, and like the bit of land that you can see next door no one looked after it so it was covered in plants. The rainforest plants came back to grow there. Like the trees that have the car-sized troncos and the dangling skinny bendy brown tails, and what your father calls buttress roots, and low to the ground big leaf creepers, but then also the hibiscus and the banana trees and all the other plants from gardens nearby.
But it was not as overgrown as all that because when Vovó inherited it there was already a little house there. Maybe it was more of a shed in fact. It was the colour yellow. Bright bright amarelo in the sun.
We did not go there much when I was growing up. No it was not comfortable like it is now. Vovô put the pool in when you were little—he said that you should learn to swim when you learnt to walk, and you did. There was not the house like it is now with shade under the big palm tree and the white tiles and the white plastic chairs and the air conditioning.
We did not go there when I was growing up—it was not a fashionable place. It was just a little fishing village with no shops and the same dirt road but what was different was the paved road that comes off the motorway, you know the one that leads to the dirt road, that road was also a dirt road then, I don’t know if there was even a bus service. We went with friends to other apartments on other beaches, Guarujá, you know where Denise has the apartment
But I did come here when I was a bit older. After Tia Ana Paula was born. Older than you are now. I was a young woman. I drank beer sometimes with my friends that sort of age, I could drive already, which is how we got here. We used to fill up the car and drive down the estrada through the forest and tunnels and waterfalls down the dirt roads to the beach.
And it would be me and my friends, sometimes I would take boyfriends, yes I confess I had some boyfriends before your father—but they were not as handsome as he is. Look at him! It would not be possible. But some of them were very nice really. Although some less nice. Anyway, we used to camp on the beach or by the yellow house and swim in the sea during the day, some people would surf, and one time we were camping on the beach and in the night the tide rose and it started invading our tents. That was terrible everything became ruined and sandy
And to eat we could buy fish from the fishermen and fry them on fires that we made ourselves. And drink beer from the can. Yes, there were many many mosquitoes.
But it was very different then. When the roads improved Vovô decided to rebuild the little yellow house although of course it is still yellow. And there was the little ice cream sorveteria, with all the different fruit flavours and the tree that grew through the floor of the deck. Tia Ana Paula? I don’t know if she came with her friends like I did. I was already living in England then. I do not know if she camped on the beach with her friends. You will have to ask her.
And you used to call it the casa amarela and then you would say—ama-yellow? To make sure that whoever you were talking to understood. You used to mix up the words in both languages to make sure you were always understood.
Oh it was adorable. You used to call it a casa amarela uh-mah-yell-oh? Not because you were confused but because you were making a joke. A lot of baby experts at the time back then used to say oh you shouldn’t teach your child to speak in more than one language at once because it will confuse them blabla bla, but that is bullshit of course.
You were very adorable. It was a little joke. Maybe it was your first joke. Ama-yellow.
People used to bend down and ask the baby—aunts and uncles from her English family or sometimes English people who worked at the hospital—if she dreamt in Portuguese, which was a confusing question
amerelo
ama
amado
amarela
amar
amer
america
It was like asking if she ever dreamt about her vovó or Ana Paula or swimming in the sea or were they saying her name correctly
casa
casada
pedro árvores
casal
2010
The Goldilocks Zone
You are eighteen nearly nineteen years old and you make a friend with long and shiny biscuit yellow hair.
Hi.
Hi!
She big eyes smiles at you.
Everyone calls me Goldilocks.
She wasn’t your usual type of girl friend, what with her tree-plotted generations of English English family and her pleasant pastures green upbringing. But she had liked you, handpicked you from the crowd on your very first day when you had stood quiet and unsure and a little bit aloof. You know, she studied languages and was so envious of people who spoke them at home, it is such a gift, isn’t it, and she was definitely without a doubt going to raise her own children bilingual!
And on the second day she lifted you out of the crowd again and she insisted on taking you out for a drink—just the two of us, no I insist let me get this one!—for what was maybe the first time that a friend had ever bought you a drink.
You had sat in the pub like grown ups in the corner under the dark wood walls, and you ended up drinking a pint of ale without bubbles in it because she was drinking one and it seemed like the thing to do to say, I’ll have whatever you’re having! And she asked you about your mum and your vovó and your tia with her head on her hand and you stayed until past last orders and she really did listen to what you said and who wouldn’t have been touched by that.
It was a beginning again. A place that was new and hallowed where everyone would be as smart as you and have read as many books as you and wasn’t Vovô proud of you, did you see how he kept the photograph of you outside the library on the wall. This would be your taller adult life where you make your real adult life friends.
And you were new in that tiny city that you could walk across in an afternoon. Where people became confused when they heard your London accent and your foreign name and where you could go for weeks at a time and only hear English spoken on the street and where none of the other girls wore heels out dancing and the shops shut at five and you couldn’t pay by card and shopkeepers asked you how you were doing and you couldn’t even really go proper dancing and everywhere you looked it was the same people again and again and again.
Mum, I’m having the best time!
No no of course it’s great, I love it! Of course I don’t miss London I am really sick of London. Really fucking sick of—
You said it—to your mum and then yourself and then to everybody else—at first because it was true and secondly because you didn’t want people to think you were a snob with your bob cut hair and your dark lipstick.
But look, Goldilocks was from the middle of nowhere and you loved her. Yes.
She even learnt to correct people when they said your name wrong. She intervened before you even flinched. And if that isn’t friendship, what is?
People said that uni was all about sleeping around and getting really fucked and meeting boys or, if you really had your shit in order, finding a husband but for you it wasn’t. Okay?
In the first and crowning summer of your friendship, which was hot and extra long because of global warming, she took you to a big midsummer party at her house, which was not only detached but surrounded by fields at the end of a narrow road with no street lamps. (But what happens if you want to order pizza?) To get there, you had to take a train and then another smaller train and then walk for half an hour.
She met you at the station—I can’t believe you’re here! You are here! I could have brought the car but it’s so sunny, I thought, let’s walk through the fields.
Her parents were very nice.
We’ve heard
so much about you!
Yes welcome, welcome!
Hello
Please, there’s cake and biscuits, but if you fancy something savoury or more substantial
Yes
And the weather is looking so promising
Yes
I am glad about the weather!
Yes.
There were siblings and siblings’ friends helping to set up and wandering around the garden and the house. And her school friends and their parents and then some of the people they knew from university.
Would you like a cup of tea, a glass of water you didn’t have to wait too long for the train did you?
Later, there would be punch and beers in ice and red and white wine and a barbecue that fed two hundred people. People came all in fancy dress and parked in the garden all three generations of everyone her family knew. Heels that got swapped for wellies. Wellies at a party! But the music went on late and was very loud—you could do that if you had no neighbours.
An old man with a moustache spun you around until he was sweating. And when the music changed two of her brother’s friends began to talk very close very very close but she found you and emerged and holding a plate of food, she found you.
It was how you imagined the village parties in Thomas Hardy novels except with a pool.
At the end of the party, when the sun had risen and everyone was gone or asleep on the ground with their feet crossed by the bonfire, the two of you slept in her clean childhood bed, her elbows curling into your back.
And then.
You’d read all her Virgil (okay) and Dante (decent) and Donna Tartt (enjoyable) and she’d read the Zadie book that you gave her, and you’d both already read Margaret Atwood.
So it was time.
Let’s do it!
Let’s fucking do it!
I have the money, do you?
Yes!
Wait—
Yeah?
I’ve never been to South America before.
I know. That’s okay.
Well . . .
Well?
I’m just going to call my parents.
Of course!
Okay!
It’s an early summer evening, the sky ribbed white at ten p.m. You reach across the desk.
She looks up.
I can’t wait to get out of here.
She smiles.
She slides her hand over and presses her fingers on yours. Her shining yellow hair fans across the desk, reaching for you too.
Before you go, you have a conversation with Jade, who you haven’t seen in a while. It’s getting warm and you’re sitting in your garden.
So you think it will be fine.
I’ve known her for a while now.
That’s true.
Jade pauses.
Don’t you like her?
Jade pauses. No no!
Jade puts her hand on her other hand—I do. She’s sweet.
She’ll be polite with my family, that’s her kind of thing.
Yeah. She is sweet.
And they’ll love her cos she’s a tall blonde European right?
Jade laughs.
Right!
So where did it go wrong?
Was it on the second day in the bar round the corner from your aunt’s apartment when you’re drinking beer for you and a caipirinha for her, and she repeats how well your aunt and her husband speak English, and if only her French could be as good! And you say, a little too quick, well they met at LSE.
Or is it when, after two days of driving up the coast, she looks pouting sad because nowhere is cheap enough. The feather bead necklace in the market wasn’t cheap enough and the silver that couldn’t possibly actually be silver wasn’t cheap enough by half. You don’t know what to say to her—We’ve arrived five years too late! There are no more dirt roads and the prices are almost like London and you say to her but this is Brazil. The São Paulo—Rio coast isn’t cheap, it’s where the middle classes go on holiday, it’s the Hamptons.
What? She says. Where?
Or when you oil up on the beach and she tells you that you are causing irreparable damage to your skin.
My dad told me, and he’s a doctor.
You lower your sunglasses.
You remind her that your mum is also a doctor. You ask her whether she thinks the guy renting out beach chairs has skin cancer, or the woman selling hats has skin cancer or the kids over there grilling cheese or the man surfing.
Or is it once you’re driving, moving inland, and you get lost, and it’s dark, and you ask her to wait in the car while you ask for directions and she runs out after you slamming the door and you know it’s because she’s too scared to stay there alone.
And when you turn around to tell her to relax you realise she’s locked the keys in the car.
You shout—For fuck’s sake!
For fuck’s sake!
A man walking past stares at you.
God I’m a bitch, you think.
She looks like she’s going to cry.
Or is it when she’s flirting with that guy with the Che Guevara hair and when he goes to get her another drink she turns to you and says—He says I’m the blondest person he’s ever met!
And you say—Yeah that makes sense.
But I thought you said Brazilians can look like anything?
They can. You point behind her—There’s a blonde woman standing by the bar.
She shakes her hair, her head—But her hair is clearly dyed!
Um
There must not be many natural blondes in Brazil.
You put your drink down.
It’s interesting actually because the word for blonde in Portuguese is loiro or loira, which I sometimes get called—
No no! But I would say you’re brunette or olive or something
Yeah. So I guess what I’m saying is that “blonde” is a relative—
He says—she lowers her voice—he says that he thinks that Brazilian woman aren’t as good-looking as everyone says either
Later as she curls her willow back into him you feel so irritated that you almost shake her and say—You are a fucking novelty to him, you know that?
Or is it when, at the end of the long silence after you ask her to wait in the car while you pee at a petrol station, she says—Well if Brazil is so safe then why do Ana Paula and Marcos live in a wire walled complex with guards?
Or maybe after that time on the penultimate day when you lock her in the car and she starts crying.
Or maybe it is fifteen minutes after your plane lands, when she emerges from the bathroom of the baggage claim hall in Guarulhos Airport looking all Nigel Thornberry in thin beige three-quarter lengths, birkenstocks, a loose white blouse and a khaki-coloured explorer hat that looks like it should have corks hanging off it.
You stare at her
You stare at the birkenstocks
You stare at her
I need long sleeves otherwise I’ll get sunburnt.
Okay yes
And I need the birkenstocks for ankle support.
No no of course
But in your head, you baptise this look colonial chic.
A R—– By Any Other Name
The door opens, and he comes in only a minute or two late. Even after all these years, he finds her immediately, catches her eye immediately. He puts his arm around her body and shoulder in greeting, his nose in the damp hair behind her ear that still smells of shampoo—Hello darling—and, leaving his scarf on the table, he walks to the bar. After a minute he returns across the room holding a glass.
He sits down, makes eye contact with her. She takes her hands from her lap and big white teeth smiles at him.
Cheers.
Cheers!
Thanks for coming.
No not at all.
She smiles at him.
He smiles.
I can’t believe it. I can’t believe you’re here.
I know.
I can’t believe I’m seeing you.
She nods. Me neither.
You look great. You look different.
Thank you.
He smiles. How are you?
Good. She opens her mouth. Great. I’m living here again. I have a job. Everything is—
She shrugs and nods and looks at him.
I’m happy for you.
But—she looks at him—But how are you doing?
I’m great. I’m working hard. Really hard. But it’s what I’ve always wanted.
Great.
He smiles, bringing his hands together.
She looks at him.
He drinks.
Then she says—I think about you sometimes. In a white coat, holding a stethoscope
They both begin to speak.
Sorry—
No, go ahead, go ahead.
No—
She says—Go ahead.
He looks at her. How are your parents?
Good.
And how are all your friends? How is
Jade
Jade.
Yes, she’s good too.
He puts his glass on the table.
She looks at him without speaking.
He pauses.
And—
She pauses.
He looks at her. Are you seeing anyone?
No. No. She shakes her head. No.
Are you?
No.
She nods.
I was. I did. For a while. But not anymore.
I’m sorry.
No—he shrugs—it was for the best.
Right.
She shifts in her seat.
It’s different in here nowadays, isn’t it?
Yeah.
So many people. A different type of people.
I know. It’s nothing like when we used to come here.
I know.
It’s nothing like what it used to be then.
She holds the edge of her chair under the table.
She looks at him.
But coming here, there’s a lot to think about—I mean to remember
He moves his hands and looks at her.
Do you get that too?
He nods.
She nods.
She watches his hands on the table, thin fingers on the edge of the beermat.
Stubborn Archivist Page 7
