by Luiza Sauma
She laughed and patted his head. “How are you, Thi-thi? Did you miss Rita?”
“Yes,” he said, muffled by her uniform.
Rita was in her thirties, but to me she was as old as the earth. Not that she looked it. Her dark face was unlined, but she carried herself with weight, literal and metaphorical, as though she knew something you didn’t know. At seventeen, I was too old and timid to merit a hug, but I still remembered the feel of her hands, roughened by two decades of cleaning. The hands that had bathed and fed me for so many years. I hid my jealousy with a grin.
“How are you, Rita?” said Papai.
“I’m well, and you?” She kept her eyes on Papai, Thiago, and me, saving Luana’s greeting for later. “Did you enjoy your city, doutor?”
“Very much so. Did you have a nice Christmas?”
“Yes, doutor, it was good.”
“Well, I’m going to unpack.”
Papai left the kitchen, then so did Thiago and I. Luana stayed with her mother.
As I walked to my bedroom, I heard Luana say, “Oi, Mãe.”
“Oi, querida.”
There was a silence. They were probably hugging. The silence went on for a long time, then I shut it out with my bedroom door. Fifi was lying on my bed, staring at me with paranoid blue eyes, her shoulder bones jutting out under her skin. My sheets were covered with her molted silver fur. I sat next to her and she emitted a small, deranged yowl.
“Hi, Fifi. Still crazy?”
She darted off the bed and out of the room.
Like most pets in Ipanema, Fifi lived indoors. That’s the price they pay for living in high-rise luxury—no adventure or sufficient exercise. She slept all day, pooed in a box, and liked to sit on the balcony, gazing at the people on the beach, probably wishing that she could walk among them. Sometimes Thiago took her to our building’s playground and she would chase a lizard for a few minutes, before meowing for him to take her back. But she hadn’t done that in a long time.
Later we found her on an armchair in the living room, looking like a haunted gray statue of a cat.
“What’s wrong with her?” said Thiago.
Outside, the traffic on Avenida Vieira Souto was screeching, and waves were rolling and crashing onto Ipanema beach. I glanced at the windows, took in the view—the rough blue ocean, the sand clogged with sunbathers—and remembered what Luana had said about the importance of noticing things.
“She’s old. That’s all.” I looked at the cat and tried not to laugh at her ennui.
My brother was taking it seriously. “She missed us. She thinks we stopped loving her.”
“She doesn’t think, Thi. She’s a cat.”
“She does think!” He tried to put his arms around her.
She meowed and smacked him on the face.
“Aiee!”
“Are you all right?”
“You hurt me!” he said to the cat.
Fifi narrowed her eyes and gave him a “So what?” glare. Then she settled down and turned her head. Thiago rubbed his cheek.
It was thirty-six degrees in Rio, but at least we had air-conditioning. We shivered in our cramped, small TV room—it had a sofa, a wooden chair, a TV, and nothing else—sometimes opening the window a notch just to check that, yes, it was still like a sauna outside, then closing it before the precious arctic air could escape. Back to his old ways, Papai was working in his study, and Luana had gone back to her usual TV-watching perch, the stiff-backed wooden chair by the door. I could smell her perfume.
In the days following our return, she had taken to wearing a starched white dress, like her mother’s. The uniform overwhelmed her figure—it must have been two sizes too big—and it was terrible to see her wearing it. It erased her. Once, when we passed each other in the street, I didn’t notice her until she said hello; she was just another empregada dressed in white. Who had made her wear it? I couldn’t imagine Papai caring either way. It must have been Rita, wanting Luana to look more professional. I didn’t ask. I was too shy to talk to her. Her eyes were as cold and empty as Fifi’s, fixed on the TV screen. Maybe Marajó was just a one-off, and the heat had made her drunk. Not me. I would have kissed her again in a second. And more.
Soon I would be back at school. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay at home with Luana. Watch her cooking with those slim brown arms, which would one day be as strong as Rita’s and her hands as rough. Get her alone, hear her say my name again. Remove that ugly white dress, to see what lay beneath. Doce-de-leite, dark hair, womanhood. Fuck her, obviously. My mind was locked in a film about Luana—part-porno, part-romance. My eyes were on the TV, but I didn’t even know what was on. I was playing my seedy little film, rewriting the script as I went along. Luana and I, our limbs entangled. My hands kneading her small breasts like dough (I had the sexual technique of a moron), then grabbing her perfect, round bum-bum. That word is pronounced like a drumbeat—boom-boom. I was fucking Luana in my head and she was just sitting there, laughing at the TV. For one horrible minute I wondered whether she could read my mind and know that I was a pervert. After all, she was the child of Rita, the all-seeing eye.
Right on cue, Rita interrupted my little reverie by poking her head into the room, looking spooked. Her head darted like a bird’s. My penis instantly shriveled. Nothing like a babá to stoke your guilt.
“You OK?” I said.
“Yes, it’s nothing.” Rita moved away from the door and could be heard walking around the flat, moving furniture about and making kissing sounds. Luana and I shared a curious look—our first look in days—and laughed. In that laugh, I felt a jolt of terror, as if our happiness were the worst thing that could ever happen to me. A premonition. I stopped laughing and told myself to calm down.
Luana was oblivious to any of this. Well, that’s how she looked. “Mãe.” She put her head out the door. “What are you doing?”
Rita came back. Her face was shining with panic. “It’s Fifi. I haven’t seen her for hours. I think she’s escaped.”
“What?” said Thiago, shocked out of his TV stupor.
“How did she get out?” I said.
All of us looked at the window, which overlooked the back of the building, but didn’t say anything.
“She’s not in the playground,” said Rita, and we breathed a sigh of relief, because that’s where her body would have landed had she jumped from the TV room.
“She’ll come back,” said Luana.
Thiago didn’t look convinced. His lips were trembling, threatening to break into a howl.
“Yes, Thiago, don’t worry,” I said, not fully convinced myself.
I’d heard that cats went into hiding just before death, but it would have been almost impossible for Fifi to escape from our fifth-floor flat. Our building, like most in Zona Sul, was a fortress: spiked walls, CCTV, and porteiros—caretakers—in the lobby twenty-four hours a day, making sure that no undesirables got inside.
We joined Rita in her search, running in and out of rooms, shouting, “Fifizinha, where are you?” We looked inside cupboards and chests of drawers, underneath beds and sofas, inside the shower, in the laundry basket, and in every room. Finally the four of us came to the closed door of Papai’s study, under which a dim light peeked through. I knocked on the door.
He opened it, saw us standing there, and laughed. “What are you all doing?”
“Fifi’s gone missing,” I said. “Is she in here?”
“I doubt it.” He looked unperturbed.
“Can we look?”
He held the door open and we walked into his study: a small room with mostly bare walls, a couple of shelves stuffed with boring textbooks, and a desk spilling over with files. The four of us looked around, moving things, clucking and saying Fifi’s name.
Papai sat on his chair. He never cared much for Fifi. “I’m sure she’ll come back.”
It took seconds to search the room. She wasn’t there. Thiago started to cry.
“Don’t worry, Thi,” I said. “
Let’s wait a few days.”
“She’s just a cat,” said Papai.
“You’re horrible!” said Thiago, and ran out of the room. Papai’s jokey smile looked strained.
“Probably got blown off the balcony,” said Rita.
“Then where’s her body?” I said.
“Only Deus knows.”
“Go to the church and ask him, then,” said Papai. “We can get another cat.”
“With all due respect, doutor,” said Rita, “Thiago wants Fifi back, not another cat.”
The days passed, with no sign of Fifi. I made up stories to make Thiago feel better. Fifi had become the leader of a band of stray cats. They scurried around the streets of Ipanema, weaving between people’s legs, catching shiny black cockroaches with their paws.
“She eats cockroaches? That’s disgusting.”
“No, she just kills them. It’s a public service.”
After eating a dinner of empadinhas de camarão and coxinhas pinched from local restaurants, the band of cats returned to their home on top of the Arpoador rock between Copacabana and Ipanema. As the sun came down over the Atlantic, they howled like wolves.
“You’re just making it up.”
“It’s all true, Thi, I promise.”
A week later, Rita and Luana heard a scratch at the kitchen door. Scratch, scratch, meow. This is how Rita told it to me. I was out playing tennis with my friend Carlito on the last day of our summer break.
The meow was so weak it barely sounded like a cat. More like the squeak of a dying mouse, caught in a trap. Rita and Luana ran to the door, taking deep breaths to prepare themselves for whatever lay on the other side. They opened the door. It was Fifi, but if they had seen that poor creature in the street, they would barely have recognized her. Her silver fur was gray like the dust you find under a sofa. She was even thinner than before, a furry gray skeleton covered in dirt and scratches.
“Meu Deus!” said Rita. “Poor little thing.”
“What happened to you, Fifizinha?” said Luana.
“Meow,” said Fifi. “Meow.”
Which could have been interpreted in a number of ways.
Meanwhile, I was dropping Carlito off in a taxi at his flat on Rua Farme de Amoedo. He was my best friend: a skinny, olive-skinned kid who always wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans—a James Dean look ruined by his messy curly black hair and angry red spots. He had worn a slightly different outfit on the tennis court at the Paissandu Atlético Clube in Leblon by swapping the jeans for some black shorts. On the way back, he stunk up the taxi with BO. Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” was playing on the radio. The driver drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.
Carlito told me about Christmas in Paris, which was “soooo boring, cara. I spent most of the time walking in the rain, looking at old buildings with my parents. The city seemed nice, but you can’t make the most of it with your goddamn parents, right?”
“Right.”
“But there was this French girl I met at my hotel. The receptionist.”
“Oh, yeah?”
I was used to Carlito’s shtick. He was a grand, irrepressible liar. I knew he was a virgin, and he knew that I knew.
“We did it all night, cara!”
In the rearview mirror, the driver—a middle-aged guy with a stubbly, tired face—was looking straight ahead, not even listening.
“What was her name?”
“We were too horny to exchange names, know what I mean? Did you meet any girls in the Amazon? A sexy Indian?”
“Not exactly, but—” I opened my mouth, ready to tell him everything, knowing how much pleasure he would get from my story about Luana. Carlito had been slyly flirting with her for years, whenever he came round to our flat. We knew a couple of boys who’d had sex with their maids, but I didn’t want to become like them—the subject of school gossip. “No, I didn’t meet anyone. I was with my family the whole time.”
“Boring. So, are you going to fuck Daniela this year or what?”
“Cara …”
Daniela Hickmann was a girl at school, one of our group. Originally from São Paulo, she had lived in Rio for a few years. I had been interested in her before Mamãe’s accident. And then—nothing.
“Come on.” Carlito shrugged off his joking tone. “I know you’ve had a tough year, but she likes you. She’s a nice girl.”
We pulled up outside his block.
“Thank you,” he said to the driver. “Bye, André, see you at school tomorrow!”
He got out and slammed the door hard.
“Mind the car, moleque!” said the driver.
When the lift arrived at the fifth floor, I saw Rita and Luana standing at our open door, looking down at a pile of fluff.
Luana had stopped ignoring me—her eyes were full of worry. “It’s Fifi.”
“Meu Deus, where did you find her?”
As I approached, the fluff moved and emitted a squeak. I bent down and put my tennis racket on the floor. She purred a little in recognition.
“We found her lying right outside the door,” said Rita.
“Outside the building?”
“No,” said Luana. “Outside the kitchen door.”
“She knew her way back to the fifth floor?”
“We don’t understand it either.”
I looked down at the cat. “Where the hell have you been, Fifi?”
The three of us worked together. Using an old towel as a stretcher, we carried Fifi onto the balcony, overlooking the beach. The same balcony where that photograph was taken of Rita, Luana, Fifi, and me, when we were so young—Rita too. But Fifi’s time was up. The cat’s belly was rising and falling with shallow breaths, and in the afternoon sun you could still see specks of silver in her gray fur. Her body had stopped moving by the time Thiago came home from his football club, and the sun had gone down. The Atlantic swished darkly in front of us, and the Vidigal favela lit up the hills at the end of the strip.
Mamãe had bought Fifi when I was almost three years old. I couldn’t remember life before her. I couldn’t remember life before Mamãe because there was no life. Now Mamãe was dead and so was Fifi. This is life, I thought. I understand now. Everything ends, everything continues. I felt so grown-up, thinking this. I didn’t cry, but Thiago sobbed.
“How did she know which button to press in the lift?” he said.
“She just knew.” Luana put her hand on his shoulder. “Isn’t that right, André?”
I nodded quickly. The cat’s death had broken her vow of silence, but I could tell that she wanted to put Marajó behind us. “Yes. She was always so clever.” I can put it behind me too.
Luana put her arms around Thiago as tears dribbled down his face.
Can I?
To this day, I don’t know how Fifi got back home or where she had been. Just one of those things you’ll never know, like what your parents were like before you were born, or what Ipanema looked like in the year 1500. We scattered Fifi’s ashes in the playground. After shaking the last grains out of a plastic bag, Papai made a sign of the cross, just to amuse himself.
ELEVEN
I usually took the bus to school, but one day I decided to walk. I had time to kill because I had been woken up two hours early by my mother shouting, “Wake up, André!”—but when I opened my eyes, I remembered that she was dead.
It was April—autumn. The sun hadn’t completely risen, so the temperature was low: around twenty-three degrees. Here in London, that’s warm enough for men to walk shirtless down the street, but in Rio it’s pleasantly cool. The city stays up late and rises early because everyone wants to escape the heat. Maybe that’s where the city’s mania comes from: sleep deprivation. In the gray morning light, people moved swiftly through the streets. Driving, walking, talking, jangling their keys and opening up shops, rolling up metal shutters. Some subdued and quiet. Others, such as the garbagemen in their orange overalls, laughing and joking.
I bought a coconut from a stall and drank its iced, s
weet water as I walked to Copacabana. As the sun grew whiter and hotter, the pores opened on my forehead. I thought of Luana, starting her workday, then I interrupted that thought and replaced it with Daniela Hickmann. We had been dating for three weeks. Just kisses—nothing more. I was hoping that she would push Luana out of my mind. Quite difficult, since we lived under the same roof.
As I arrived at school, I threw the coconut into a bin. My school was a grand old building, a peach palace surrounded by Copacabana’s modern ugliness—high-rise buildings and overpriced hotels. Cars were honking and kids were running, hugging, and screaming, as though they hadn’t seen each other in years, rather than a day or two. I scanned the crowd, looking for my friends.
“Oi, André!” A nasal São Paulo–accented voice.
I turned to face Daniela. Her skin and hair golden from the weekend sun. Even her blue eyes had a touch of gold. We had been at Ipanema beach on Saturday with our friends, who had watched us keenly, like dogs watching people at the dinner table.
“Olá, Dani.” I moved in for a hug and she moved in for a kiss. I quickly corrected myself and kissed her lips. My eyes open, hers closed and sincere. She was the kind of girl Mamãe would have loved to see me with. Her parents appeared in magazines.
Our school days started at dawn and ended at noon. The afternoons were ours. We congregated with friends on Copacabana beach, hugging each other hello, lingering on the girls so that we could feel their bikini-covered breasts on our bodies. There were Carlito and Daniela, plus Isabel and her boyfriend, Rodrigo, and Gabriel. Everyone dressed either in tight sungas or bikinis. The towering whiteness of Copacabana Palace and its sunburnt gringo guests were at a safe distance. Even so, all around us, European and American tourists were toasting themselves pink while wearing the wrong sorts of swimwear. We were young, nearly naked, and had nothing to hide.
Carlito shouted, “Ei, gringinhos, you look like lobsters!”
The gringos waved back, thinking he was being friendly.
He got bored of this quickly and ran screaming into the ocean, Gabriel close behind him. Daniela sidled up next to me, slim and tanned in her blue bikini, her body at its peak of unself-conscious perfection. (Not that we knew that then.) She squatted down, careful not to put her crotch in the sand. Girls always sat on sarongs or beach chairs, never directly on the sand. I glanced quickly at the soft bulge of her blue crotch, then looked back at the sea.
