Hair Side, Flesh Side

by Helen Marshall

  Somehow their gaze had survived all that mopping entirely.

  She’ll have to blink now, Simon thought, she’ll blink and then I’ll just look away.

  She didn’t blink. He didn’t avert his eyes. He couldn’t stop staring.

  The moment stretched out until Simon could feel his eyes tearing up. Just blink, he thought, blink, goddamn you. Blink!

  Just as he thought his eyeballs would dry out and crack, the stewardess fortuitously drove her cart over the toe of the tobacco-smoked man in the aisle seat, who let fly a meaty elbow into Simon’s midsection. Simon gasped, but the pain and the whoosh of air from his lungs were worth it. He blinked and blinked until hot tears ran down his face, and the man beside him looked at the weepy-faced American and snorted, “Bicha,” with a tone of utter contempt.

  Simon wiped his grateful eyes, and swore to keep them locked on the tray table in front of him.

  Bicha.

  He didn’t know what it meant. By morning he would remember it only as “bitch” and that’s how it would stay lodged in his memory. He had been called a little bitch, and the child next to him had definitely been a criminal, rifling through his belongings whenever he got up to stretch.

  Jeremy, why didn’t you come with me? You should have come with me. It would have been manageable here, with you.

  But even as he wrote this, Simon remembered that Jeremy was dead, and the grief seized him all over again like a hard rock in his chest.

  In that moment, as they began to circle for landing, the illuminated city below a perfect shadow of the plane with its wide, angled wings and narrow body, Simon was happy for even the contemptuous glare of the man next to him, even the too-eager gaze of the little girl. He was happy for anything that let him know that someone, a stranger even, was beside him.

  On her third birthday, Soledad’s father left to build the great city of Brasilia. Soledad did not remember a tearful farewell, only her mother’s sadness the next day and her own not-quite-sadness. Her mother afterward told her that she was too young, and that was why she did not remember. But the older Soledad knew that this was not quite the case. She remembered her father. She remembered loving her father, but she also remembered, very keenly, not loving her father.

  They received a letter several weeks later. Soledad’s mother clutched her tight, and made her sit close while she read. Back then, they lived in Ceará, in the northwest of the country. It had taken Soledad’s father eighteen days to reach Cidade Libre, they read, where he began work as a labourer, a candango.

  Soledad’s mother wept then, but her face was very proud and she clutched the letter close to her heart. “Your father,” Soledad’s mother said, “he is a good man. It is as I have always said, a good man.”

  Her mother had said no such thing. Soledad remembered her saying many other things, but not that.

  “He loves you very much,” her mother said. “He is building a wondrous city for you to live in, and so you must be very brave and you must never cry that he is gone.”

  Soledad nodded. She had not cried at all since her father left, though her mother had cried a great deal.

  But outside the parakeets were beginning to sing. Soledad wanted to listen. She did not want this fierce woman gripping her wrists. She did not want to sit still while her mother read the letter one more time, and so, she began to cry after all, for she was only a little girl.

  Her mother, with her own tears running down her face, looked down at Soledad with approval even though she had said they must be tearless in their love: as if this had been a thing lacking from her strange, stone-eyed daughter. She hugged her very quickly and said, “You will see. It will be a beautiful city, and when we live there we shall be very happy.”

  Upon landing, Simon was met at the airport by a translator sent by the Cultura Inglesa, Beatriz—a grim, unblinking woman who could have been the mother of the girl on the plane. She had a silver-grey jacket slung over her shoulder and a sign reading SIMMON in large blocky letters. When Simon hurried up to her, sticky with travel sweat, she offered him a cool greeting and, having confirmed that he was the expected guest, motioned for him to follow her. When Simon pointed out that it was one “m” and not two, she merely shrugged and flicked him a glance.

  They rode in relative silence through the city’s Monumental Axis, past the Plaza of Three Powers, the Planalto Palace, and the twin skyscrapers of the Congress.

  The air-conditioning hummed a ragged staccato. Behind the windows Brasilia seemed noiseless and barren. It made Simon nervous, he didn’t like silence.

  Simon gazed out at the city, at its almost irritatingly insistent architecture. Words. Words he understood. Words had a kind of power to them: they were electric, moving, open, liberating. You moved through words. Words were something you could live in. But not these. Not these . . . symbols. There was no life to them. What were buildings like these? How did they speak?

  Simon tried to write in his notebook, but Beatriz kept looking at him with the same unblinking stare the little girl had.

  He tried looking out again. Gave up. Stared at the reflection of himself into the dark, tinted windows.

  He wondered if the tinting might be because of who he was, as a gesture of respect for such a prestigious author.

  When he voiced this opinion, Beatriz shook her head, and explained that there were many carjackings in Brazil, that the windows hid the people in the car from those on the street.

  “Yes,” Simon said, “but does it help much?”

  Beatriz shrugged again.

  “They just use axes to break the glass.”

  Simon didn’t speak for the rest of the journey.

  When the car pulled round the Sonesta Hotel, Beatriz got out first and opened the door for Simon. She spoke in sharply fluent Portuguese to the hotel clerk, settled Simon’s bags, and handed him a folder with his itinerary.

  “You will speak tomorrow, yes? They are all very excited. They like your books very much.”

  “Oh yes?” Simon fidgeted with the folder.

  “The reviews, they are very good.” Her eyes flicked up and down. “They say you are a voice for your generation. They say you capture the spirit of America. Your writing, it is . . . exuberant. They say it . . .” She stumbled. “Como se diz? In English?” She shook her head. “Ah yes, they say it takes you over. It is fresh. It inspires.”

  “Well,” Simon said. “That’s very kind. Thank you.”

  “They say we need the Americans. That it will be good for our culture.”

  A longer pause this time.

  “They will not have read your books. They are in English, sim? Do not embarrass them by asking. It is Brazil they want to know about, this great country of ours. Keep your remarks on the book short.”

  There were many letters in the intervening years from Soledad’s father that spoke of the great hardship: long hours worked clearing the forest to carve out the city’s wide-paved central axis, jokes told to keep themselves from dying of boredom or homesickness. Soledad never laughed at these jokes. She did not understand them.

  But eventually, after many tear-filled farewells in Ceará, after a long ride in the back of a truck, huddled together with a shared blanket and their belongings piled around them with her mother whispering how happy they would be, on Soledad’s sixth birthday they arrived in the city of Brasilia, which her father had built for them to live in.

  They were lucky, Soledad learned. Many of the candangos could not afford to live in the city itself and had to take up residence in the satellite towns where the housing was cheaper. But Soledad’s father had been particularly good with his hands, and had a loud, booming voice. He had done well for himself, and they were allowed to move into one of the shining new superblocks in the wings of the giant bird.

  That first reunion involved a great deal of weeping, and Soledad’s mother told her this time that she must cry to show her father she had missed him and that she apprecia
ted the sacrifices he had made on her behalf, to build for her this bright, beautiful city.

  When they met, Soledad’s father crouched down to meet her gaze, to wish her happy birthday. She smiled as she had been told and she pinched her palm until the tears flowed. Her father smiled too, and embraced her. The smoky scent of him muffled her crying as the blanket had done for her mother’s.

  “Happy birthday,” she whispered into his ear. “Happy birthday to the city.”

  “You are a good child,” he said. “Now go play so that I may be alone with your mother.”

  Soledad was very happy then. She spent many hours exploring her new home, but much to her disappointment she discovered that each block, as beautiful as it was, was exactly the same as the others. Each very empty of people.

  Later, her father would tell her that the blocks had yet to be filled, and they would have new neighbours very soon, but as it was Soledad began to feel quite scared. There had been many people in Ceará, more once her father left, once her mother took to inviting cousins and aunts and uncles for company. Soledad wondered where the people were, and why no one had come to live in this beautiful new city her father had built.

  She climbed to the very top of her superblock to see if she could spot someone. But no. There were merely row on row of superblocks, each identical, each empty.

  She leaned out farther until there was barely a bit of concrete between her and the wide chasm of space. She strained her eyes but it seemed as if there was not a single person in the entire city.

  “It is a city of ghosts,” she said to herself, and then she wondered if she too were a ghost, if perhaps she had never been born at all. The idea of this was both frightening and comforting.

  Just then the wind began to pick up and a particularly strong gust tugged at her dress, and shoved her quite suddenly off the edge of the roof. There was only a moment of fear as her heart thudded in her chest, and the shock of the roof’s absence registered. Only a moment. Then Soledad knew that she truly was a ghost, for she spread her arms and the wind caught underneath them and it lifted her up, up into the sky.

  “Happy birthday, city,” she whispered as she rose higher and higher, the air soft as down on her skin. “Happy birthday, Soledad,” the city whispered back.

  Simon was relieved to find the Sonesta Hotel luxuriously American. Plush pillows. A suite in which he could have held dinner parties. A view of the skyline, but not quite the skylines he knew: New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta. It looked like the view from a thousand hotel rooms he’d stayed in, but the oppressive heat smudged the city lights, making them indistinct. Strange.

  He flipped through the package Beatriz had left him: programs written in English, schedules with worrying Portuguese marginalia he couldn’t decipher.

  Rather than worrying at his dictionary, Simon opened up his notebook.

  Jeremy, he began to write. You would like Brazil very much. The people here are beautiful. He thought of Beatriz, the almost mannish curve of her jaw. Those unblinking eyes. Most of them, anyway.

  He wanted to write more, but when he reached for the words, they drifted away from him, as they always did now.

  Six months and not a chapter finished.

  Six months and the advance on the next novel already burned on medical bills for a treatment that hadn’t worked.

  He’d have to take more speaking engagements if he wanted to keep the house.

  Simon felt the early signs of a panic attack, the tightness in his chest. He put down the pen. Went to raid the minibar. Why not? The Cultura Inglesa was buying.

  He settled on a tiny but perfectly sculpted bottle of vodka when a loud noise like the sound of a baseball on a brick wall almost startled him into dropping it.

  Simon’s eyes snapped to the window. A flurry of silver-grey movement. Something against the glass.

  His seat retained a sticky impression of his body as he got up, went to the window. There was only the ghost of an image, a snow angel amalgam of cracks where the bird had impacted. He would have to call down to the front desk to let them know. The glass would be weaker now. If someone leaned up against it, put too much pressure in the wrong place . . .

  The vodka cooled his anxiety, and loosened the ache in his chest. He took a breath, and stared out at the foreign skyline. Relief, or the beginnings of it.

  Something caught his eye. On the building next to him, there were black graffiti strokes on the cool grey façade of the Hotel Minerva. They had a jagged look. Unnerving. Angry. A shape almost like the imprint of the bird on glass with a word nestled inside the toothed strokes of the wings. A word he couldn’t read. Portuguese?

  God, it was high up, impossibly high. It was a mystery how it had got there.

  He took another gulp of the vodka. Felt his mind muddy-ing like the skyline. And so it was he wondered, only briefly, what might be worth risking a thirty-storey fall to write.

  In the year after the inauguration, Soledad would press her face against the window to count the brown-haired heads of the candangos as they came from the coast to live in the new city of Brasilia. Sometimes, her mother would shoo her away. She would mutter about fingerprints on the glass, how long it would take to clean, but she never cleaned them. Soledad could see all the marks accumulating on the glass like pebbles rolled smooth by the ocean.

  Soledad saw more than that: the whites of her mother’s eyes, the fear. She wasn’t used to heights, was always worried the glass wouldn’t hold. She always kept a broom’s width between herself and the edges of room.

  I can fly, Soledad wanted to tell her mother. I will never fall. I am a bird, a windmill.

  But Soledad never spoke these things. She never opened the window although she longed to hear the singing of the birds outside, to clear the apartment of the floating corona of cigar smoke that trailed after her father. Wanted to wave to the candangos, her neighbours, as they arrived.

  “Put down your hand,” Soledad’s father would snap at her. “They will not be our neighbours. They are lazy, they are rich, they came too late. Did they build this city with their bare hands? No. Did they topple trees and live without the company of their wives and daughters? This city is not for them.”

  Sometimes, if she did not listen, he would yank her away quite suddenly and Soledad would cough at the acrid stench of the smoke.

  Then, she would take to the roof of the building, and she would let the breeze lift her up gently. She did not fly during the day, but sometimes she would leap into the air and hover for just a moment longer than she ought to, letting her lungs balloon with oxygen until the concrete of the roof edge fell away and all she could see was the city itself—her city, her beautiful city.

  “Ah,” she would whisper to herself. “You are so beautiful, Brasilia. Even if there is nothing else, he has built you and you are the loveliest thing in the world.”

  Some nights, she would open the window by her bed and she would welcome in the great dark night, let it settle around her like a blanket and she would let it whisper her to sleep.

  Other nights, when she was restless, when the air in her room was thick and smudged, she would climb up onto the bed, and she would let the wind take her out into the darkness. She would soar over the city high up where the people could not see her, where the world became the unbroken shell of an egg, perfectly smooth, perfectly round. From the air, it could be so beautiful, and her heart would open wide to that glorious bird shape below her.

  That night, Simon dreamed of Jeremy.

  In the dream, Simon stared out the window of his hotel. Stared at the black silhouette on the wall. As he stared, there was a noise. Not the thump of bones hitting glass. Softer than that. Wings. The beating of wings in flight.

  Jeremy’s wings.

  In the dream, Jeremy’s body had slimmed skeletal, bones sharp under his skin, hollowed out by the chemo. An off-green hospital gown fluttered, barely substantial, and from his shoulders were two great, hulking
shapes. Not wings exactly. The bones of wings, blanketed in Jeremy’s thick, dark hair. It came out in soft clumps as the wings moved in the air. Floated gently like flakes of finger-drift snow.

  “I know you hate flying alone, funny face,” Jeremy murmured. The hair-wings beat a slow, lazy rhythm.

  The dream stayed with Simon into his waking hours.

  It stayed with him through breakfast with the head of the Universidade de Brasilia.

  It stayed with him during a signing early in the afternoon.

  It stayed with him as he was ushered into a gallery where earnest television interviewers asked him question after question about the influence of American writing upon Brazil, and what directions he thought they might pursue to achieve international significance.

  He had prepared sound-bite answers as his publicist instructed him, but after he had delivered these, the mic didn’t waver, and the unblinking eyes of the interviewer seemed to demand that he keep talking. “You are the voice of your country,” they said, “tell us how. Tell us how to make them listen.”

  All Simon could hear, though, was the slow beating of wings.

  He stumbled. Caught Beatriz’s eye. Her head was glacier still, tilted, listening. Waiting for him to speak.

  “Art,” he mumbled, “shared art. We need it. It’s an increasingly globalized landscape where art . . .”

  The wings beat, and his chest began to tighten the way it did when he tried to put words on paper. Christ, he pleaded. Not now. Not with the cameras. Please don’t let this go up on YouTube.

  The silence lingered. Stretched. Broke into a murmur.

  Beatriz’s mouth became a thin, angry line.

  The drive back was torturous. Beatriz didn’t even look at him. She went over her papers. She made inscrutable notes in Portuguese on her copy of the next day’s schedule. Simon tried to meet her eye. He wanted her to say something. Anything. When they arrived at the hotel, she opened the door for him as she always did, and waited for him to get out.