by Luiza Sauma
“Meu Deus,” said Papai over breakfast on our first morning in Belém. He took a bite out of a bread roll as sweat trickled down the sides of his face. “I just had a shower, and look at me. André, where’s your brother?”
“Still in bed.”
The sun flickered through the closed shutters. I could barely see the food on my plate. My glasses were slipping down my sweaty nose. Papai’s were slipping too.
“Can’t we turn the lights on?” I said.
“No. It’s too hot for lights!”
Luana came in holding a plate of sliced fruit. Her curly hair was scraped into a bun and she was dressed casually, in knee-length shorts and T-shirt. Not like Rita, who always wore a starched white uniform. Even in the gloom, I could see a light sweat on Luana’s forehead. I had started to notice her, after many years of not noticing. The new curve of her waist, her green eyes, her doce-de-leite skin—suddenly there was a beautiful girl living with us, as though Rita’s skinny, quiet child had been replaced. Between infancy and adolescence we had sometimes played together, like friends. I still have a photograph of Rita holding us on our balcony in Rio, one toddler on each knee, with Fifi—a kitten—on the floor. On the back, in my mother’s curled handwriting: André, Luana, Rita e Filha, abril 1971. Since then, a distance had grown between us. A silent acknowledgment that we were not the same. She had left school to work for us full-time, even though she was a good student.
“What do you think, Luana?” I said. “Is it too hot to turn the lights on?”
She put the plate down in the middle of the table, smiled in that mysterious, closed-mouth way she’d recently taken to, and said, “Whatever Doutor Matheus prefers.”
Papai gave me a smug look and mopped the sweat from his forehead with a napkin. She walked out of the dining room, back to the kitchen.
My relationship with Rita was less complicated: I loved her completely. She was dark and stocky, strong as a tree, with a northeastern accent that had faded over the years. Embarrassingly, I can’t remember which state she was from, because she never talked about it. Rita smiled rarely, but her face, in repose, had more kindness and warmth in it than any other I’ve encountered. She had wiped my bum, bathed me, and made my meals seven days a week, with two Sundays off per month. She was my black mother, my babá. If anything, I was jealous of Luana because Rita would always be her mother, not mine.
But back to Belém, and the hot house.
“Why didn’t we stay in a hotel?” I said to Papai.
“Stop this nonsense. Trying to make me feel bad.” He stood up and shook his shirt to let the air in. “I’m going to walk around the bairro. Do you want to come?” I shook my head. “What are you going to do, then?”
“Start studying for the vestibular,” I lied.
Those were the university entrance exams, which I would take in a year’s time. I was planning to go to medical school in Rio. Papai had decided I was going to be a doctor before I was born. His father was a doctor, one of his grandfathers was a doctor (the other had a sugarcane fortune), and so was one of his great-grandfathers, who was born in Beirut and qualified in Belém.
“Good idea,” he said. “Want to watch the football later?”
“Who’s playing?”
“Who’s playing?” he said, in mock exasperation. “Jesus Cristo! Are you another man’s son?”
It was too hot to go outside and explore Belém. I spent the day fanning myself in the house, sticking to furniture and opening windows to let the thick air inside, which made things worse. I read the first few pages of Jorge Amado’s Gabriela, Cravo e Canela, which I found on a shelf, but every time I focused on the print, my head throbbed and my eyes shut. I gave up and lay with Thiago on the sofa, in a stupor, watching TV. An old episode of Tom and Jerry was on. Tom was cleaning his house with a mop and bucket, while Jerry was doing everything to disrupt him: emptying ashtrays onto the floor, juggling eggs, and throwing pies around.
“Isn’t it funny, how you never see the humans?” I said.
“You see the legs of Tom’s owner sometimes,” said Thiago.
“She’s not his owner. She’s the empregada.”
“How do you know?”
“She’s black.”
We watched the rest in silence. By the time the maid came home, Jerry had filled the house, floor to ceiling, with coal. But the maid blamed Tom and pelted him with coal.
Thiago said, “So Rita and Luana, they don’t live with us because they want to?”
“Well, they want to, but we pay them. Who wants to cook and clean for free?”
“I thought they just liked us.”
“They do like us.”
Luana came into the room, but she didn’t seem to have heard us. She was working hard, despite the heat. I suppose she didn’t have a choice. She mopped the TV room around Thiago and me as we lay on the sofa, as still as sloths. A few months before she had been at school. Now she was just an empregada.
“Come on, Lua, watch TV with us,” said Thiago.
He was the only one who called her Lua. Actually, so did Rita, when they were alone—I remember hearing it. I longed to use this nickname, but it was Thiago’s thing, not mine. It means “moon.”
She looked up from her mop. “I’m working. Maybe later.”
“Later we have to go meet our family,” said Thiago.
“That’ll be nice,” she said.
It started to rain outside, hammering down like nails.
“No, I just want to watch TV.”
“You need to get out,” she said, suddenly sounding like her mother, like an adult. “Get some fresh air. Both of you.”
“Look at the rain,” I said. “And the air’s not so fresh here. At least in Rio we have air-conditioning.”
“You’ll get used to it.”
I shifted my position a bit on the sofa and felt my sweat pour. Better to do nothing. Better to remain still.
THREE
In Belém, it barely cooled down at night. Papai looked us up and down, in our shorts and T-shirts, and threatened to make us smarten up. He was wearing beige linen trousers and a white shirt, already sweating.
“OK. If my family thinks you look like favelados, that’s just fine.”
We were going to have dinner at his cousin Camila’s house. Papai hadn’t seen her in eight years. He seemed nervous. Not just sweaty, but twitchy. Parties were Mamãe’s thing—not his. Outside, it had stopped raining, but water still streamed into the gutters. We got into Eduardo’s car, which he had left behind: me in the passenger seat and my brother in the back.
“Turn on the air-conditioning, André,” whispered Thiago, leaning forward.
I looked at Papai and he said, “Fine.”
When the cold air started blowing, all of us sighed with pleasure, even Papai.
“When do we get there?” said Thiago.
“It will take a little while. They moved out of the city a few years ago.”
Driving through Belém, I realized how little of Brazil I actually knew—the state of Rio de Janeiro, and nowhere else. Yet I had been to Disney World in Florida, to New York, and on a tedious cultural tour of Europe that started in Rome and ended in London. (The city gave no indication that it would one day be my home—I would’ve paid more attention if it had.) But there I was in Belém, in the Amazon, for the first time in my life. Papai’s city, before he moved to Rio for all the usual reasons: boredom, hubris, reinvention.
The roads were lined with people selling coconuts, popcorn, sweets, or just lying about on the pavement, begging for change. Papai pointed out landmarks, such as the Ver-o-Peso market and the grand pink Theatro da Paz. What kind of plays did they put on? The people in the streets didn’t look like theatergoers. A few miles outside the city, we entered a gated community, after Papai gave his name to a guard with a gun strapped to his hip. It looked like a holiday resort: neat lawns, the gentle hills of a golf course, horses neighing in the dark. I looked at Papai to see what he thought of this stran
ge place, but he said nothing. I couldn’t see his expression.
After a minute or two, he stuck his head out the window and called out to another guard, who was standing by the side of the road under a streetlight, “Hey, where’s number twenty-one?”
“Just carry on, senhor. It’s right at the end. The big white house.” He had a languid, friendly accent not unlike my father’s, but stronger.
We found the house at the end of a drive: a modern, floodlit mansion that looked like the home of a movie star. The front lawn was pristine. Evenly spaced palm trees reached towards the black sky. We parked in the driveway among several other cars and walked to the front door. Insects were humming all around us. The door was opened by an empregada dressed in black and white, like a French maid, but she was quickly pushed aside by a skinny blonde in a pink dress and white diamonds. Her skin was leathery and burnished. She had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other.
“Matheus!” she screamed.
“Camila!” said Papai, trying to match her excitement.
Beyond the entrance, we could hear music and voices. We thought we had only come for dinner, but it sounded like a party.
“Matheus! How many years?”
“Boys, this is my cousin Camila. We grew up on the same street in Belém.”
“So you must be André and Thiago?” She looked at us, from one to the other, obviously unsure who was who. We stepped forward, smiles fixed, and kissed her on both cheeks.
“I’m André and this is Thiago.”
“Of course, I know! Meu Deus, what beautiful boys.”
She held on to my brother and gave his cheeks a squeeze, her cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. I imagined taking it and having a quick puff. The thought of it made me laugh out loud. Camila’s smile froze, as though I were mocking her, but she didn’t drop the happy-family act. She took Papai’s arm and led him inside. Thiago was rubbing his cheeks. The empregada shut the door behind us, like a gentle gust of wind.
We hardly knew anyone who lived in an actual house. In Rio’s wealthy beachside district, Zona Sul, most of the houses had been knocked down before I was born to make way for high-rise buildings. I’d never seen a house like Camila’s. Everything looked shiny, white, and new, apart from the various folksy paintings of fishermen and village women, framed in gold.
“What a nice house,” said Papai.
“So much better than the one in Belém, né?”
Papai nodded. “Yes, there’s a lot more room.”
“And there’s so much outside space, horse riding for the girls, tennis, restaurants—you name it.”
“Do you ever leave the community?”
“Once in a while. And Carlos still goes to work in Belém. Poor thing.”
“Carlos is Camila’s husband,” said Papai in a low voice to Thiago and me.
A few seconds later the man himself showed up: a big guy in length and width, with white hair, a booming voice, and a handshake that could dislocate a shoulder. Thiago and I hung back as the adults caught up. They put on their sad faces when they talked about Mamãe, whom they had never met. She didn’t even want to meet them. Papai told them that we were coping well. Camila moved her sad face onto Thiago and me. I didn’t know what to do.
“Poor little things,” she said with tears in her eyes.
“Fucking truck drivers,” said Carlos. “I always said cariocas couldn’t drive for shit.”
“Carlos!” said Camila, tugging his arm.
“Well, it’s true.”
“You’ve been to Rio?” I said.
Carlos shifted a little, from foot to foot.
“Only for very short trips,” said Camila. Her jaw spasmed. She turned her gaze to Papai. “I think you might have been away?”
“Probably,” said Papai, his eyes on an empregada who was walking past with a tray of drinks. She noticed him, stopped, and he took a caipirinha. “Thank you.”
That was the end of the conversation. Camila took Papai’s arm once more and led him into the dining room.
We were introduced to Papai’s cousins, second cousins, elderly great-aunts and great-uncles—who all looked happy to see us, and whose names I instantly forgot. Over twenty people were there, many more than Papai had expected. Thiago and I were seated at the kids’ table with Camila and Carlos’s daughters, Alice and Regina, who were both wearing blue velvet dresses, knee socks, and shiny black shoes, as if they were going to the ballet. They were eight and nine years old. I had little to say to them. I ate in silence: Lebanese starters, followed by a creamy fish stew that didn’t taste as good as Rita’s. Thiago fared better. He told the girls about our cat, Fifi, who was once beautiful, but was now as decrepit as those Portuguese houses in Belém.
“She’s very old,” he said. “Ancient, in fact. Thirty years old at least.”
“Wow,” said the girls in unison.
Fifi was fourteen.
“I love cats,” said Alice, the eldest. “We have a dog, but I want a cat too. Papai says Pará isn’t good for cats. He says it’ll run off into the jungle and get eaten by a snake.”
“Or a monkey,” said Regina. “I want a monkey.”
“You wanna meet our dog? He’s a poodle.”
The three of them scurried to the kitchen to find the dog, and I hung back, wondering why, at seventeen, I still had to sit with the kids. There was no one my age there. The closest was a beautiful olive-skinned pregnant woman in her twenties, who was married to one of Papai’s cousins. As people stood up from their seats, she quizzed me briefly about my university plans, with a delirious, maternal smile on her face.
The adults moved to a separate living room. I went along with them and sat on the corner of a sofa, drinking my Coke, failing at small talk. Luckily enough people were there, and enough alcohol, for no one to notice. They listened to music from their youth—Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Chico Buarque, and a bunch of northern stuff I’d never before heard—laughed loudly, and drank copiously. They ranted about the new president, that filho da puta, who wasn’t even properly elected. “Democracia brasileira!” someone shouted, over and over. The three maids refilled the guests’ cups, their faces blank. Everyone complimented Camila on the food she hadn’t cooked.
“She’s been planning it for weeks,” said Carlos.
“It’s very kind,” said Papai.
“Anything for my darling cousin,” said Camila.
Darling? She hadn’t even called him when she visited Rio.
I went back to the dining room, in search of alcohol. The empregadas hadn’t yet cleared the table. I spotted a glass of beer, half-full and tempting.
“You want some?” said an empregada, standing behind me. A middle-aged woman with a hard, dark face and the same soft, stretched accent as the guard. “You’re a big boy—surely you can.”
“OK, maybe just a glass.”
She went to the kitchen and came back a minute later with a fresh, frosted glass of beer. “Here you go.”
“Thank you.”
I could hear the children giggling in the kitchen with the other maids, and the adults singing and laughing in the living room. What is it with adults? I thought. During the day they’re so grumpy and rushed, and at night they become the happiest people on earth. My mother was like that too, when she held her dinner parties. By 11:00 p.m. you’d think it was Christmas, not just another Friday night. Alcohol helped, but it was something else.
I wondered what Luana was doing, alone in the house in Belém. Probably watching TV, her bare brown legs stretched out across the sofa. Enjoying a few hours of peace.
My arms and legs were feeling numb, so the beer was doing its job. I walked through the back doors into the garden and retreated to a dark corner. Sat down on the preened, spiky grass. Leaned my head back on the wooden fencing, listening to the loud, buzzing cicadas. Drained the beer and wanted another. Thought about Mamãe. If I closed my eyes, I could almost hear her among the guests. Her throaty cackle. Heh heh heh.
/> “What are you doing, André—hiding?” she’d say, as she walked into the garden, flicking her long dark hair, lighting a secret cigarette. “Don’t tell your father that I’m smoking.”
“Can I have one too?”
“Fine. Oh, I’m a terrible mother!”
She would smell of heavy, flowery French perfume. I hated that smell, but now I sniffed the air hopefully. At seventeen, you still believe in a sort of magic. But when I opened my eyes, I could smell nothing more than grass and air and hear a dozen unfamiliar laughs, echoing in the night.
FOUR
After Camila’s party, Papai’s wrinkles seemed to have deepened. Maybe he was remembering why he had left Belém. Or maybe he was just sick of the heat. That’s what he told us, a few days later—that it was too hot to stay in the city. He announced that we would spend Christmas on Marajó island, at the mouth of the Amazon River, where he’d holidayed as a child.
“My grandmother was from Marajó—did you know that?”
“Yeah, Pai, you’ve only told us a hundred times,” I said. “Where are we staying?”
“It’ll be a surprise.”
We set off for the dawn boat: Papai, Thiago, Luana, and me. It was cooler in the morning, but hot enough to make us sweat. The air felt dense, pregnant, as if it was about to rain. As the sun rose, pale pink and smoky, we caught a cab to the harbor. A long queue for tickets had already formed, even though we were early. Bedraggled men clucked up and down the queue, selling manioc pancakes and cups of coffee.
“Want some?” said Papai, looking giddy.
“What is it?” said Thiago.
Papai called one of the men over with a slight nod of the head. A skinny, short seller sidled over, carrying a plastic container of coffee and a bag of food. He looked smarter than the rest, in his loose white shirt and beige trousers. He poured coffee from the container’s tap into a paper cup, which he handed over to Papai. Then he took a paper-wrapped pancake out of his bag and gave that too.
