Flesh and Bone and Water

by Luiza Sauma

  Publicly, though, I was Daniela’s boyfriend. Each week I spent several afternoons at her flat, pretending to study, but really we were just feeling each other up. She taught me how to lick her between the legs. At first it seemed sort of revolting and pointless, but then I found her clitoris and learned how to make her slippery and out of control, clamping my head between her thighs, making me laugh into her. She would pull a pillow over her own face so that her parents wouldn’t hear, and even after I washed my hands and face, her sweet-rotten smell lingered. One evening, when her family was out, she guided my penis inside her, and I rocked over her for five minutes, until I started to feel that electricity.

  She said, “Pull it out, pull it out,” and I squirted onto her stomach.

  I went home and had dinner with my family, who were none the wiser. I felt too guilty to kiss Luana that night, so afterwards I went straight to my bedroom.

  At school, I was back in the gang. Back sitting under our tree, sharing a coconut with Daniela as she lay with her head in my lap. The few weeks I had spent drifting away were quickly forgotten. We were still planning our European dream lives, but also thinking about things within reach: weekends, parties, and the long winter holiday.

  Carlito remembered that it was my birthday soon, on the fourteenth of July—my eighteenth. “You’re not getting away with this. No way.”

  “It’s your fucking birthday, cara!” said Gabriel.

  “I don’t want anything big, guys.”

  “I don’t think you have a say in the matter,” said Daniela, looking up from my lap.

  Her blue eyes and dark blond hair were shining in the afternoon sun.

  “You should have a party!” said Carlito.

  “A big fucking party.”

  “No way.”

  “Come on, it’s your eighteenth,” said Rodrigo.

  “What about a small party?” I said. “Just the gang.”

  They didn’t look convinced. Flicking their eyes at each other, sighing with disappointment at a missed opportunity, waiting for their king, Carlito, to give his response.

  “OK, cara,” he said, “but you won’t get away with it next year.”

  Their gentle threats and friendly promises felt like shackles and ties. Who said we would still be friends in a year? Who said I would be in Rio? School would soon be over. What about Europe? I kissed Dani and thought to myself how funny it was that no one could hear what I was thinking.

  “You’re great,” she said quietly. The sincerity in her face made me feel silly, like an actor in a novela.

  “You are too.”

  She looked thrilled, drugged. I leaned down and kissed her lips and wished I could be back at home, sitting on my balcony and looking at the blue Atlantic coming in and out, in and out, over the pale sand.

  “Want to come over tonight?” she said. “Everyone will be out.”

  “I’m going to the surgery.”

  “What about after that?”

  “I’m staying there till late.”

  “Just get out of it. Tell him that you need to study.” She winked.

  I can’t say it didn’t tempt me. Of course it did. She was laying herself open like a platter, begging me to eat, eat, eat. But I didn’t want to. Not that day.

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you do there, so late at night?”

  “Just admin.”

  She looked suspicious, then smiled. “How boring.”

  Once we got off the bus, Dani insisted on walking me to the door of the clinic. I complied, of course. The sky was overcast and the humidity was unbearable, like a steam room. It was hard to breathe. All I wanted to do was go home, have a shower, and waste the rest of the day, lying in bed or on the sofa, watching novelas with Thiago. (What I would give now to waste a little bit of time.) It looked as if it was going to rain. I hoped it would. Dani talked too much, that was her problem. She wanted to know everything about me. She wanted to know about Mamãe: what she was like, how I felt about her being dead, how much I thought about her.

  It feels pretty bad, I wanted to say.

  Pretty bad, you patricinha.

  Have you ever had a day of suffering in your entire life? An hour? A second?

  Her perfect little freckles said, No, we have never.

  As we arrived at the entrance to the clinic, a fat drop of rain fell on my cheek. She leaned in and kissed me. Her mouth felt dry and uninviting.

  “Start thinking about your party.”

  “Don’t call it a party.”

  The rain started to fall hard; a sound like dry rice shaking in a can. I stood on the porch of the clinic, under cover, waving at Daniela as she walked off. A woman came out of the clinic, her face bandaged like a mummy, wearing sunglasses. The security guard followed her, holding a giant umbrella, as they walked towards a waiting car. I waited a few minutes longer, just to make sure that Dani was gone, before going home.

  I started taking my clothes off in the kitchen as soon as I walked through the door. Threw down my soaked-through rucksack, removed my rain-speckled glasses, and peeled off my jeans, socks, and T-shirt in a wet heap on the floor. Rita and Luana, hearing me, came out of the living room, which they’d been cleaning, to have a look. Thankfully my underwear was black; otherwise it would have been see-through.

  “Meu Deus, you’re totally soaked.” Rita bounded over, fussing under her breath. Standing next to me, she came to my shoulder. I remember when I used to look up at her. When I would cling to her legs and make her laugh. Back then, Luana was usually somewhere else—being cared for by family in Vidigal. Rita was mine, all mine. She bent over and picked up my clothes. Luana was in the doorway, watching us.

  “Let me take these clothes,” said Rita. “Now go and dress before you get ill again.”

  “OK.” I enjoyed being ordered around by Rita—like old times. “Before I forget, I was thinking of having some friends over for my birthday, the weekend after next. Just for some salgadinhos and drinks.”

  “Sounds good. We’ll arrange it all. Won’t we, Lua—”

  But when we looked at the doorway, Luana wasn’t there.

  EIGHTEEN

  I turned eighteen on the fourteenth of July 1986, a Monday. Nothing much happened on that day. Papai didn’t work late that evening. Rita made her special fish-and-prawn moqueca, and the three of us—Papai, Thiago, and me—ate it in a chattier mood than usual. My father allowed me to have a glass of Chilean sauvignon blanc and encouraged me to smell it and swill it around, pretend I could taste the hint of citrus and wood. I liked the feeling it gave me as the alcohol swam into my bloodstream, making my head feel soft and unbothered. We toasted to my future.

  “Almost a man,” said Papai. “Almost.”

  What was he talking about? I was a man. I was in love—what could be more grown-up than that? A year earlier, when I turned seventeen, it would have seemed unimaginable—Luana and me. Luanazinha, Rita’s daughter.

  “André, you’re so old!” said Thiago.

  Seventeen was my first birthday without Mamãe. In previous years, she would have spent the day advising Rita about dinner, even venturing into the kitchen to make a nut cake with sweet baba de moça in the middle. And she would have masterminded a Sunday get-together for our extended family—really they were just her family, because the Cabrals were hidden away up north. Second and third cousins running around the flat, playing games, trying to be friends, but failing to ignite the spark. The spark of blood—it’s often weak, but rarely indifferent. Uncles crowded round the coffee table on those green sofas, smoking cigarettes and talking about business. Aunts in a corner, talking about other people.

  None of that had happened on my seventeenth. Papai was not Mamãe. We had eaten a semi-silent dinner at a local rodízio, filling ourselves with barbecued meat and salads, and talking of little apart from how good the food was. Mamãe’s presence had been everywhere: in the taste of the restaurant’s food, which I hadn’t eaten since before her death; in the third caip
irinha Papai drank, which she would have tutted at; in the empty chair at our four-person table. Back home, my father gave me an excellent gift—a new bicycle, green and shining chrome. I had pointed it out to Mamãe ages ago—how did he know? I didn’t bring it up. Anyway, I didn’t own it for long. Three weeks later the bike was stolen from me at gunpoint on the corner of Rua Farme de Amoedo and Visconde de Pirajá, by two black boys with anxious eyes. I’ve already mentioned this before, haven’t I? The smaller one was holding the gun, and it looked too heavy for his skinny arms.

  “Give us the bicycle, playboy,” he said.

  They were around my age, perhaps younger. Their bodies thin from malnutrition.

  “What are you waiting for?” said the taller one, though he wasn’t even as tall as me. His voice still had the high pitch of a boy. “Give him the fucking bicycle or we’ll blow your brains out.”

  I felt oddly empty, almost on the verge of saying, “Go ahead.” But I gave them the bike, and they rode off on it—both of them—calling me a filho da puta. My mother isn’t a puta, I wanted to say, she’s dead. But I didn’t say anything. Just stood there like an idiot.

  I didn’t have a party with my friends that year. Why bother? I had drifted away to my little world of grief. But grief ebbs away. It has to, there’s no other choice.

  On Saturday, Rita and Luana spent hours preparing food and tidying the flat—not that my friends would have noticed. They would mostly be impressed that Papai had taken Thiago to Teresópolis for the weekend; he didn’t expressly say he was going away because of the party, but that’s what I assumed. I loved him for that. Later, I would end up wishing he had stayed.

  I had invited my gang and they brought a few others—people I had seen around at school, spoken to a handful of times, maybe I even knew their names (now forgotten). I suppose I wasn’t forthcoming when it came to making friends. I preferred to let friendships happen to me, rather than make them happen. That party—it happened to me. I told everyone to come at eight, and they mostly came at nine or ten. They arrived at the flat in twos and threes and fours, shiny-eyed with excitement for the night to come. I felt awkward, welcoming all these semi-strangers into my home. Rita served assorted snacks, including her pastéis de carne, which I can still taste when I close my eyes; crisp on the outside, hot inside. Luana served beer and I mixed some too-sweet caipirinhas, but with vodka instead of cachaça. That was the new fashion—vodka was imported, expensive, and, most important, European.

  I’m getting ahead of myself. Daniela was the first to arrive. She came alone, at quarter to nine. I let her in through the guests’ door, into the living room, even though she had rung the kitchen buzzer.

  “Hello, André.”

  She was wearing a short red dress, high heels, and lipstick; a girl trying to look like a woman, and almost succeeding. But she looked good. Even her frizzy hairdo was OK, or maybe I was just getting used to it. We hadn’t had sex for a few weeks, but that was more because of circumstance than anything else. She gave me a wrapped present, and I encouraged her to sit.

  “No, I’ll stand for a bit. I didn’t get the chance to look around before.”

  She wandered around the living room, looking at the folk art on the walls, the Bahian pots and ceramic ladies’ busts. One of them was a black woman with pouting red lips.

  “You have a lot of stuff.”

  “My mother had a shop. She sold this sort of stuff, mostly to gringos.”

  “Is it still open?”

  “Yes, someone bought it from us.”

  Dani’s flat was bare and minimalist—just some family photos here and there—but there was a wooden cross over her bed, which I often focused on when we were fucking. Her family wasn’t religious; it was an heirloom from Italy.

  “Are you going to open your present?”

  I looked down at the parcel, wrapped in blue paper with white hearts. A flat rectangle. I started carefully taking the parcel apart, separating the tape from the paper.

  “Just rip it!”

  I ripped the paper off melodramatically and chucked it on the floor, which had the desired effect—it made her laugh. I laughed too, but I stopped when I saw what she had given me. A photograph of the gang, on one of our many afternoons on Copacabana beach. Arms around each other, smiling like the kids we were. Dani and I were in the foreground, and I was planting a kiss on her cheek. (I don’t have this picture anymore, but I remember it well.)

  “Thank you. I’ll put it in my room.”

  “Something to remember us by.”

  “What do you mean? We’re all still here.”

  “Yes, but … school is ending soon.”

  “Oh, come here.”

  We kissed. At that moment Luana came into the room, her face devoid of emotion. My pulse quickened.

  “Would you like a drink?” she said.

  “Can I have a beer?” said Dani.

  Faster and faster and faster.

  “And you, André?”

  Boom boom boom boom. “A beer would be great. Thanks, Luana.”

  She walked away and Dani raised her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything. She’s beautiful, she was thinking. More beautiful than me. Luana came back with our beers on a tray. I hadn’t seen her use a tray since my mother’s parties. I took the drinks and smiled at her. Luana rolled her green eyes and left the room. I wondered if Dani had seen it, but when I turned round, she was occupied elsewhere—looking at the collection of family photos on a sideboard.

  “Your mother?” she said, lifting up a photo.

  It was of Mamãe when she was my age. She was standing on a balcony in Paris, during her year in Europe, before she met Papai. Her hair was bobbed and voluminous, and she wore a pale dress. I couldn’t tell the color because the photo was black-and-white, but I always imagined it was yellow. Behind her, the city, the Eiffel Tower, all those clichés. She’s not smiling, looking into the distance, but her eyes are calm and happy.

  “She looks like an Indian.”

  “Her great-grandmother was, I think.”

  “What a stunning woman. How sad.”

  The doorbell buzzed, which was a relief. It was now 9:00 p.m., and the party began in earnest. Beers were drunk, backs were slapped, cheeks were kissed, and food was devoured. Luana and Rita drifted in and out of the room like benevolent spirits, carrying drinks and snacks, hardly saying a word and just nodding, slowly, when something was requested. People were going through my records, complaining about them.

  “Cara, all you have is classical music.”

  “I just listen to whatever’s around.”

  “And all this sixties stuff.”

  “They belonged to my mother. We could listen to some?”

  “Do you have any Prince?” said Rodrigo.

  “Who’s Prince?” I semi-joked.

  “I’ll play some Beatles, then.”

  He put the White Album on and the chatter died down as we waited for the needle to drop. “Back in the USSR” started playing, a song we didn’t know well, but the booze had got to our heads, and as the guitars ground in, Carlito and Gabriel started jumping around the room, pulling girls up from their seats.

  “Want to dance?” Dani said to me.

  “I’m such a bad dancer.”

  “Come on, we’ve danced before. You weren’t that bad.”

  She winked at me. I took her hand and led her to the space between our round dining table and the green sofas, which had become the dance floor. Luckily there was a girl for everyone, so no one was left out. I stood in front of Daniela and took her in my arms, but it wasn’t possible to dance as a couple to “Back in the USSR,” so we broke away and started shaking our bodies in time to the music, laughing till our faces hurt. We slow-danced to “Dear Prudence,” then sat back on the sofa. People drifted away from the dance floor, to the coffee table, where more food had been laid out, without our even noticing it. Dani went to the bathroom, and the guys started talking.

  “These are so good,” said Rod
rigo, stuffing a pastel de carne into his mouth.

  “You know what else is good?” Carlito cocked his head towards the kitchen.

  They high-fived, and Rodrigo said, “Tell me about it, cara.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Are you a eunuch?” said Carlito. “Do you not have a dick?”

  “Your empregada, man,” said Rodrigo, a little too loudly, but still almost drowned out by the music. “She is a gatinha.”

  “Really?”

  “What a waste,” said Carlito. “She’s too pretty to be an empregada.”

  “I don’t go for black girls,” said Gabriel, sitting on the arm of the sofa and muscling in on the conversation, “but I’d make an exception for her.”

  “Where d’ya think you got your hair from, cara?” said Carlito.

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  “Have you ever tried to … you know?”

  “Fuck her?” said Gabriel.

  I was glad that the lights in the room were dim because I could feel my face was hot, probably red. “Of course not.”

  “OK, in that case, I’m going to give it a go.” Carlito got up and straightened out his T-shirt. “How do I look?”

  “Like a faggot!” said Gabriel.

  “Good, that’s the look I’m going for.”

  “Carlito,” I said, but he didn’t listen, and wandered off towards the kitchen.

  Seconds later, I could hear Carlito in there, talking excitedly, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Sometimes he would pause—that must have been when Luana was speaking—but her voice was too quiet to reach me.

  Dani and Isabel changed the record to Thriller and then came over and sat with us.

  “What are you morons talking about?” said Isabel. She was wearing a short black dress, her dark hair in a high ponytail. Something was different about her—I wasn’t sure what. I hadn’t seen her since the start of the holidays, two weeks earlier.

  “You all look very excited,” said Dani.

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “We were talking about the empregada,” said Rodrigo, looking straight at his girlfriend teasingly.