by Unknown
Apart from that, there were other subtle changes to that section of the street. They did not date from the last three years, however, the three years I had spent away from Porto Alegre and that house, during which time I had rarely imagined my return and the exhausting list of comparisons that would almost certainly stem from it. For some reason, what I was trying to do was rebuild the street of my adolescence and my difficulty in achieving that made me think about those little books you get in Rome where, by superimposing two images, you can see something that was once grandiose where now there are only remains of columns, marble blocks or a sizeable area of grass.
Then I went back into the garage. I pulled the waterproof cover off the car. It was very clean. A strange, metallic blue body in the midst of all that dusty chaos. The battery, though, or whatever it was, had gone to pot.
Even though the car was unfit to drive right then, I adjusted the back of the seat and stayed sitting there. I very nearly put my hands on the wheel. But cars weren’t my obsession. You ask me what model just went past and I’ll never be able to say. It was their mobility that appealed to me, mobility as an end. And I was thinking how obscure that is when you are first presented with a car, how, at eighteen, with your driving licence in a flawless plastic sheath and that ridiculous photo with the haircut you’ll regret later, all you want to do is cruise along open roads at dawn without ever getting anywhere. Or rather, your anywhere is an album to be heard in full, your anywhere is a river you watch as you smoke, with as many friends as you can fit in the back seat. The curious thing is that keeping these habits beyond their expiry date makes them seem, in the eyes of others, to be nothing more than a sign of eccentricity in someone who never knew how to grow up.
My mother entered the garage as I was reminiscing. In the rearview mirror, I saw her running her fingers over the dust-covered boxes, head bowed, giving the impression that she was reading what might be written there, as if until that moment she had ignored their contents or didn’t even know why they were piled up in her garage. I got out of the car and waited for her to approach. She gave me one of her out-of-context smiles. ‘Won’t it start?’ It was quite common for bad news to come out of my mother’s mouth accompanied by a smile. Not out of spite, quite the opposite; there was some notion of compensation in it.
‘I think it would have been a miracle if it had,’ I said.
We agreed that it probably wasn’t anything serious, nothing a mechanic couldn’t sort with the turn of a spanner. We stayed standing there. I looked around me. Funny I couldn’t remember that tiny bicycle. No one other than me had been a child in this house.
‘Is Julia going with you?’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘I thought you’d fallen out.’
It was a bicycle with stabilizers and there was a bell attached to the handlebar.
‘I thought you weren’t speaking any more. You had a fight once, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. But it’s fine now.’
I asked what was in all those boxes. My mother raised her eyebrows and looked down. They were papers she had collected from the office. She opened a box, as if she needed to illustrate what she was saying. I saw part of a beige folder labelled invoices 2002. The box was probably full of them, right to the bottom. Only the years changed.
‘Do you miss the office?’
She thought about it.
‘I miss having an obligation to leave the house.’
I rang Julia four days later from a petrol station. The sky was blue, it was Saturday, the clouds glided until they scattered into pieces. I asked her to wait for me in front of the hotel. The attendant soon finished filling my tank and I left.
All great ideas seem like bad ones at some point.
Julia was staying in one of those little hotels in the city centre. Not the kind that has decayed to the point of being considered elegant, but something a bit more functional, near the bus station, frequented by executives in suits that are too broad for their shoulders. There were half a dozen of those right at the entrance, laughing loudly as they milled about the red carpet, rather worn in the middle but new-looking at the edges. A cluster of fake palm trees too, whose plastic leaves looked more rigid than Tupperware, gave a tropical welcome to those arriving by car at the main door. Julia was waiting for me next to one of the palms. She was wearing a denim jacket buttoned up to the neck and burgundy skinny jeans. She had radically changed her hair; it fell to her shoulders in a slight wave and a substantial fringe hung over her forehead, almost covering her eyebrows. Never in a million years would you guess that this girl had grown up in the depths of Rio Grande do Sul.
She was biting her cuticles. That hadn’t changed. When Julia saw me, the tip of her finger was released from between her teeth, she nodded, grabbed her bag by the handle and walked towards me. I got out of the car. She was from Soledade, Capital of Precious Stones – all cities in the interior feel the need to proclaim themselves capital of something and naturally the reason for their singularity is a compulsory source of pride for their residents. So there was no one in Soledade who didn’t see in an amethyst coaster or a rose-quartz obelisk the most beautiful, sensitive art.
I received a lengthy embrace and a ‘Paris was good to you’, a subject I thought best to hold at bay with a stock smile. A few metres away, a man wearing the baggy gaucho trousers known as bombachas was watching us with a certain sad interest.
For a few moments, I imagined what it would have been like if she had been there too, in the small apartment on the Rue du Faubourg du Temple, from which you heard a babble of Chinese voices going on about what may well have been their regular business, but which assumed a tense quality due to the fact that I couldn’t make out any variety in their intonation. Julia would certainly have liked the grand boulevards, the gilt detailing on the facade of the opera house and a pastry in six perfect shiny layers sitting in the window of a patisserie just as much as she would a metro station in urgent need of renovation or an argumentative beggar raising his finger to an old lady. She was an adaptable girl, who took the best from whatever she was presented with. Put her in any city in the world and, within three months, she’d be calling it home.
We carried Julia’s bag to the back of the car and positioned it in the boot, at which point there was time to exchange a few banal questions and answers about how our lives were going. Paris is lovely, Montreal is freezing, the course is great. Then we got into the car. The previous day, I had bought a road map of Rio Grande do Sul. I hadn’t taken a GPS with me because receiving any kind of instruction would go against the idea of the trip. I wanted a map on which we could circle the names of towns with a red pen, a map that starts tearing at the folds on long journeys. Julia looked at it with a faint smile and shut the door.
‘Where are we off to first?’
I replied that we were going to Antônio Prado, up in the hills. Julia began to unfold the map.
‘But you’ve never been there, right?’
‘Neither of us has been there.’
My attempt to say something of consequence ended with the click of my seat belt, which only made it sound more ridiculous. To prevent any echo, I added, almost without breathing: ‘And your parents?’
She laughed.
‘Oh, they’re quite furious. Hurt, actually.’ Julia looked at the map, like someone flicking uninterestedly through a magazine in a white waiting room. ‘But I don’t care about that as much as I used to, you know? They went to live by the beach.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s nice there, but there’s nothing to –’
We were interrupted by three successive knocks on my window. I looked round and recognized the guy in bombachas. He was the only person left after all the initial hubbub, other than two employees in kepis, the kind chauffeurs wear, but which definitely seemed to suggest something else, perhaps two boys dressed up for a carnival dance at the Friends of Tramandaí Society. I lowered the window.
‘Those boots you’re wearing are
for men,’ he said, pointing into the car, his finger withdrawing and returning twice. From his expression, my boots seemed to have ruined his day.
Slightly shocked, I looked at my feet to check what I was actually wearing, and saw it was my Doc Martens, for which I had paid a small fortune in one of the brand’s shops in Paris. Those boots were iconic in almost all counterculture movements, but it was too much to expect that such a symbolic connotation would penetrate the weary carcass of someone who, at best, had seen boots like this protecting the feet of the military police as they shot rubber bullets into the tents of the Landless Workers’ Movement. That’s the problem with fashion: you depend on others. If they don’t get the message, all your efforts go down the drain.
I let out a short, resigned laugh.
‘I hardly think you’re a fashion expert.’
So I was sitting there confronting his prematurely wrinkled face, when I felt Julia place a hand on my leg and heard her say quietly that we should get out of there. A few minutes later we were leaving the city on the BR-116, a noisy grey line following the train tracks, cutting the suburbs down the middle, which, like any exit route from any big Brazilian city, makes apparent the country’s determination to emulate the United States, although what becomes even more apparent is the failure of that mission.
I was still in shock over the incident with the man in bombachas, even though I had the strongest convictions about fashion and style, about gender and the rule book of life. But reading The Second Sex or whatever doesn’t make you immune to idiotic opinions. To be honest, the thing I found most discomfiting was not knowing exactly what Julia thought about it all. It’s true that she had unleashed her anger once we moved off in the car (‘I can’t believe he knocked on the window just to give his opinion on your boots!’). It’s true that she had made it clear I shouldn’t pay any attention to the words of a stranger (‘What an accent he had, my God!’) and, on top of that, she thought very differently (‘I love your boots’). But that effusiveness ended up producing the opposite effect: it increased my distrust.
Meanwhile, outside, the buildings by the edge of the road seemed as though they were being consumed by soot, broken down by a kind of urban erosion, in which two seconds were equivalent to hundreds of years. Some of them held advertising boards showing amateur models in rather grotesque positions, desperately striving to look attractive. If someone appears at one of those windows, I thought, I won’t be able to help feeling a twinge of commiseration.
‘You’ll never guess what was going on in that hotel,’ said Julia, and I was prepared to continue with the subject, whatever it was, until we recovered our Reserves of Intimacy, frozen some years earlier. ‘No idea.’
‘A meeting of chinchilla breeders.’
She started laughing like one of those people who chuckle alone as they walk, and you’re never quite sure whether it’s because they have earphones in (what could they be listening to that’s so funny?).
‘They were negotiating pelts with a Serbian. Actually, it was two Serbians, father and son. And the teenager was the expert.’ Julia picked up my iPod. ‘How do you plug this in?’
‘With that cord there,’ I pointed. ‘But carry on, please.’
‘It only gets better.’
‘I can imagine.’
The unnuanced joy of an indie band dribbled through the speakers like a viscous liquid. I thought: glad we kept the good tunes for when we’re leaving the city limits. Then she continued her story about the chinchillas, which was particularly long and juicy. She had followed almost the entire transaction from a distance, leaning against the entrance to the convention room as the breeders took turns in front of the Serbians. They were carrying suitcases, which they opened on a large table, and they were overflowing with pelts, kind of like chinchillas in plan, chinchillas in 2D, get it? said Julia, to which I replied, yes, unfortunately I could picture it. ‘So the boy picked up the pelts one by one and smacked them. Sometimes he blew. I think that was how he worked out whether it was a good or a bad pelt. Then each one was given a label with a value. They were separated into piles. So many dollars for this pile, so many dollars for the other, and in the midst of it all there was a red-haired interpreter, trying to make them understood, but occasionally someone would get carried away and bang on the table, and she seemed completely lost.’
I had been up into the hills many times, when I was a child and my parents still had a bit of energy. In those days, money came in without them having to make much of an effort and turned into articulated Ninja Turtle figures and five-star hotels. I never asked for a sibling. My father was an ENT doctor, an otorrinolaringologista, twenty-two letters long, five fewer than inconstitucionalissimamente, although he insisted his profession was the longest word in the Portuguese language.
‘Cora, listen. Inconstitucionalissimamente is an adverb.’
‘So?’
‘So, it’s not even in the dictionary.’
‘But it exists.’
‘It exists, yes, but it’s a word whose only use is to be long, understand?’
I really liked having that conversation over and over again.
It was funny the way that my father’s professional success gave me the false impression that otorhinolaryngology was booming during that period of my childhood, like pet shops and private security firms today. Not that the whole city was suffering from tonsillitis, sinusitis and tumours of the ear canal, but everyone who woke up one day coughing or half deaf seemed to have my father’s number on their fridge door. Because of this, whenever someone mentions the difficult days of frozen savings, the dollar through the roof, all I can think about is how we had it easy in my house at the start of the nineties. This contributed to a curious feeling that I always lived my life upside down; the decline of the majority was my most prosperous period and, when things started to improve around me, I was already in free fall.
When I say the three of us went to the hills frequently, I’m of course talking about the resorts of Canela and Gramado. Few families attempt anything more than that. On those trips, my father was the guy who drove with his arm hanging outside the car, and my mother was the woman who thought that that posture wasn’t correct or safe. My father was the guy who saw a stall and wanted to drink sugar-cane juice and eat cake, and my mother was the woman who reminded him that my aunt and uncle were expecting us for lunch.
Julia and I stopped to eat at a place by the roadside. It was begging to be visited, a pastiche of German architecture, the front of which was overcrowded with flowerpots and garden gnomes and rugs made of squares of hide. We got out of the car and inhaled the fresh mountain air, as if we had spent the last six months in an airless cave. Two signposts fixed in the gravel (‘Give us a try!’) left no doubt that they also served lunch and snacks as well as offering cheese, salami, honey, phonecards and batteries to take away. I took a few steps forward and looked at the valley below us, speckled with wooden houses. Chimneys were smoking, dogs were barking, children were running around, a girl whose outstretched arms, open palms and short steps gave the impression that she was wearing a blindfold. Julia came up to me, dragging her feet over the gravel.
‘Perhaps we should look for something outside the town. When we get to Antônio Prado,’ I said.
‘Like cabins?’
I nodded.
‘I second that.’
Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, I think we must have planned the famous Unplanned Journey a hundred times. And when something like that is repeated so often, with minimal variations, it’s natural that everything compacts into a single powerful memory, the setting for which is determined at random – it only needs to have happened once in the place in question – while its dramatic charge comes from the sum of all the nights that eventually led us to the idea of the journey, plus the number of years separating us from those nights. In my case, the memory is this: Julia and me lying on the rug in her spartan room on the third floor of the exclusive Maria Imaculada all-girls
residence, where she lived the whole time she was at university. We’re looking at the ceiling. To my left, there’s a record player that Julia’s family was thinking of throwing away, and the vinyl that’s spinning once belonged to her brother and brought great delight to the small parties where her parents served Coca-Cola and a boy who was more devious than the rest adulterated his friends’ plastic cups with palm cachaça. Houses of the Holy, Led Zeppelin’s 1973 album, lived in between Pink Floyd and Metallica in a typical teenager’s bedroom in Soledade, often smelling of the sweat of forgotten football shirts under the furniture. But then Julia’s brother supposedly stopped listening to music after he got married.
The day we listened to Houses of the Holy lying on the floor, we got carried away again over the Unplanned Journey. There was an infinite number of uninteresting cities to be discovered, and that album seemed like fuel for our plans for freedom. But, yet again, we didn’t leave the room, we didn’t run downstairs, we didn’t reach the car before the spark went out. To tell the truth, we stayed staring at the ceiling, even though the volume and tone of our voices betrayed a good deal of excitement.
It was as if you’d spent months thinking about whether to dye your hair blue, and suddenly you realize that all that time spent deliberating, analysing, imagining, has ended up completely satisfying your desire to rebel. And so the trip was left for another time, a safe distance away from disappointment; after all, having blue hair was perhaps not such a great way to break from the status quo and uninteresting places were perhaps just uninteresting places, nothing more. I breathed deeply. It was mountain air, and we were there, five or six years late, but there, finally. We had survived a fight that was still hanging over us, Paris, Montreal, the madness of our families. That journey was another irresistible failure.
GRANTA
* * *
