Neither will my brother. He pretends she is dead. That fantasy suits his own dream life. My brother is practical, and confronting an unchangeable past is simply impractical. It interferes with his enjoyment and quality of life. The lie places my mother not on the other side of the world eating and sleeping but on another plane of existence without movement or substance, no possibility of interaction. He’s thrown his fistful of dirt on the coffin. His memories have run like hell, no intention of returning. I wish I were able to believe she were dead.
Tell me about your mother.
Tell me about your mother.
Tell me about your mother.
Writers’ psyches are a tad perverse. Ever since I was eighteen and had started writing seriously at university, I entertained the idea of embarking on a trip to find my runaway mother, and to write a book about the journey even if I didn’t find her (and for some reason I actually believed I wouldn’t—as if she were an elusive fairy-tale villain who lived under a mystic bridge or a sci-fi monster hibernating in a cave on another planet, and not a flesh-and-blood human being who predictably ran back to the land of her birth and to the nest of her immediate family). I’ve always been fascinated by how we mourn people and places that still exist, are still very much alive but are dead or unattainable to us. When someone disappears, we create and re-create that person in our imaginations, shaping them to suit what we think of ourselves at this particular stage in our lives, a specific time and place in our personal history. To come up face to face against the real person—whose face will never appear to you as you envisioned it—is to come up against and interrogate your own imagination and discover through cross-examination how true or how false you’ve been to this person, to the past, and to yourself. The ramifications are serious, no matter how elusive. Perhaps, more truthfully, I hoped I wouldn’t actually find her and force her to become real once again. Who you imagine others to be reflects on who you imagine yourself to be.
Exposed as inhuman because he has no mother, the replicant in Blade Runner resorts to brutal violence. That uncomfortable opening scene always makes me laugh. And I laugh even harder since I’ve discovered Blade Runner is my mother’s all-time favourite movie. She’s seen it over a hundred times. In the theatre. I’m pleased that her favourite movie is, I think, a great movie, a cinematic classic, the epitome of sci-fi, which I know is snobbish on my part, but I can’t help it. At least in this, my mother has good taste.
Directed by Ridley Scott in 1982 and set in future Los Angeles, in the year 2019, the film is a dizzying spectrum of industrial waste, neon strip clubs, smoke-filled interrogation rooms, eerie toy-filled hotel suites, and advanced biological labs. Through a tough-talking, alcoholic hit man, Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), and a tragically beautiful disillusioned android, Rachael (played by Sean Young), the film exposes a dirty, greedy, racist, and irresponsible civilization imploding. (Sound familiar?) It is also a movie about exile and homelessness, suffering and survival, and the horror and vitality of dreams. It doesn’t escape me any longer that the seductive porcelain replicant, who wants to rewrite her fate and that of her lover Roy (played by Rutger Hauer) as doomed machines programmed to live only a few years, the role that star-rocketed Daryl Hannah’s career, is named Priscilla. Secretly, I’ve imagined, it’s one of the reasons my mother watches that movie over and over again. Does my mother envision her daughter as a weary traveller wandering through alleyways and Dumpsters masquerading as a mannequin, hoping for a longer lease on life, hoping for a future? I certainly must not live in this world to her. I must be jumping from one devastated planet to another.
What I find most interesting about Blade Runner’s human-machine-mixed society is how fake memories serve the androids to convince them they’re human. The pain of discovering that the memories are false is too much for some of the disillusioned to bear. Probably the most heartbreaking scene in an otherwise thrilling disaster movie occurs when the impeccably groomed and controlled Rachael, off-kilter at the suggestion that she is a replicant, thrusts forward a photograph of a dark-haired woman she believes to be her mother as irrefutable evidence of her human biology. Deckard proves the photograph is a fake. Rachael has no mother, no family, no human blood. The most pressing question at the end of the film is: Does Deckard know that he too is likely inhuman? Yet being inhuman doesn’t stop them from suffering, loving, hating, caring, running, or dreaming.
What does it mean to have a mother? Is it the necessary condition of humanity? If you don’t have a mother (or have no contact with her), what is the value of your invented memories or projections of this person over the years? Does this change how you suffer, love, hate, care, run, or dream? Does it change how the humans with mothers interact with you? Like Rachael, I have sometimes insisted to skeptics my story is a human one after all. Like Rachael, I have sometimes gone home with tears in my eyes and a hopelessly ineffectual photograph shoved in my pocket.
I found my mother by accident on the internet on a sunny September afternoon in 2002. I wasn’t looking for her. I was searching for online reviews of my first novel to print out and catalogue for my professorial tenure file. Scrolling down the hits that popped up after typing in my name, I halted at a link that included my brother’s name alongside my own. Amerjit Uppal. That’s what caught my eye. My partner, Chris, was sitting beside me in our cramped home office.
“What do you think this is?” I gestured.
“Probably a genealogical site,” he quickly replied. “The internet is full of them.”
Never know when you might need a family tree, I thought rather innocently and clicked.
My story, my dreams, my sense of who I am as a daughter: permanently altered. There, in front of my stunned eyes, in full colour, as if by a magician’s wand, appeared the personal website of my runaway mother, a person I hadn’t seen or heard from and whose name I hadn’t spoken aloud in twenty years: Theresa Catharina de Góes Campos. Alarmed by both familiarity and strangeness, my eyes flitted all over the site, a jigsaw puzzle of my buried past and an unknown present. I immediately recognized her large dark eyes and jet-black hair, her first name, but not her short afro-like curls, her pudgy, powdered-white face with startling red lipstick, the words jornalista, conferencista, escritora, professora, universitária e productora cultural underneath her headshot. When I was a child, she’d always worn her hair straight, parted in the middle, a uniform inward curl at the ends; and she was thin, not bone thin, but a slim woman with an angular face with a hint of tan. Then my eyes centred underneath the banner heading Sobre minha família e meus amigos: where I discovered my childhood self, and my brother—two and three years old. She’d posted a photograph of us in clothes I recognized as ones she had made—my brother in a red-and-white-checkered cowboy-style shirt and navy blue pants, me in a pink dress covered up with a white poncho-style jacket and a pink bonnet, our choppily cut short hair sticking out—nestled in front of my mother with her signature 70s-style wide orange hairband setting her black shoulder-length hair in place, orange-and-white-striped cardigan open over a white shirt. A fake fall landscape backdrop. All smiles, Sears portrait. I recognized the photograph immediately, uncannily, because my father keeps one from the same studio session; us in the same clothes, my father in his best navy blue suit and tie perched on the same sitting block, film tinted with the same slight pink hue. I know there must be a photograph somewhere of all four of us from this same day, before my father’s accident, but I’ve never seen it. Maybe at some point it too rested on the mantel, but those days are long gone. My mother does not appear in my father’s photograph. My father does not appear in hers. But there we are on her website.
I believe my first words were: “What the fuck is this? What the fuck is this?” And then, for clarification: “That’s me. That’s me and Jit!”
Accustomed to few words and fewer certainties on the subject of my mother, Chris immediately adopted the role of detective and protector, as well as curious spectator. “Is that you
r mother? Is this your mother’s website? Yes, this is your mother’s website. Why are you on her website? It’s all in Portuguese. We’ll need to use the translation function. Go back. Go back.”
Go back. Go back. I didn’t want to go back. Our basement apartment in Toronto’s Annex, crammed to the rafters with books and racks of clothing, now seemed even smaller to me. An unwanted, unwelcome intruder had just entered the premises, dropped her luggage, and taken up residence without so much as an alarm bell or a knock at the door as I flipped back to the search engine to click that seemingly innocuous phrase: “Translate this page.”
It was a function I’d never used before. Translate this page. The promise of understanding. But I didn’t understand. My brother and I were still there, like clones, living an alternative existence in cyberspace, our infant selves kidnapped for an as yet unknown ransom. And there she was again, my mother, my runaway mother, with her white pudgy cheeks, now smiling at me in strange, broken, ungrammatical English as I examined the various columns and messages and images—in our tiny yellow office, a colour I specifically chose to keep me alert during long nights of writing or studying—informing me that she is a journalist, head of the ethics board (“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I cried), a professor, a writer, and a prolific movie reviewer. And a woman riddled with cancer—a special section of her website dedicated to thanking and acknowledging the many doctors who have kept her alive.
“Fuck,” I said again. “Oh, fuck.” I knew what the cancer message meant. What it meant to me. It hit me as hard as the fateful click of that mouse. “I’m being told to go. To go see her. Meet her. If I wait any longer, I might not get the chance.”
Chris was holding my hand like you would that of a shock victim, gently caressing it, and listening to me, but he was also scanning, reading and rereading the website with keen interest and disbelief. He’d never seen a picture of my mother. I’d not even glanced at one in over ten years. For a time after my mother’s disappearance, I used to trudge guiltily down to the basement to sequester myself at the foot of a cardboard box of photo albums, like a pilgrim at the base of some oracle, intensely poring over the collection of esoteric images for clues as to why my family had been singled out by the gods for tragedy. The white album with silver embossing and lettering, Our Wedding Album, held special fascination for me: my father in an imposing dark turban (I’d never seen him in one before; he’d cut his hair when he moved to England and only wore the turban at his wedding for ceremonial purposes) and suit, my mother in a lacy red sari and then white princess wedding gown complete with veil, both exuding strength, confidence, happiness, and if I’d known how to recognize it perhaps something we call “love.” I studied those albums page by unforthcoming page. Sometimes I would cry, without knowing exactly why, my mother and father frozen in a dance or cutting their wedding cake. The black-and-white ones affected me the most, as if the past was being drained of all its colour and would soon be nothing but a grey haze. I know I missed my mother, as any child would regardless of whatever resentments I also carried with me, but I also missed my father, the man I felt was supposed to raise me, a strong man who could command an entire room full of people with his stature alone, a happy man who winked at the camera with anticipation of the joys life had in store for him. When I cried, I would sometimes say softly to myself, reminiscent of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz: There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. I desperately wanted to go home, even though I didn’t know where home was. I just knew I hadn’t found it yet, because home would be a place where pain ends, where one believes again in I do and forever. Then, one day, no further along in discovering the answers I sought than the day my mother left, I dried my tears, put the photo albums away, and washed my hands of them. So whenever Chris’s family would pass family album after family album around on holidays, rehashing ordinary moments from a collective past over cookies and tea, I’d have nothing to show from my side. And this state of affairs pleased me. I found their desire to relive the same memories over and over again pointless. I liked the fact that my past, my family, was off limits to everyone except me. My imaginative territory alone. Able to change if needed, at a moment’s notice.
But now my past was uploaded on a public website. In the collective photograph, my mother’s presence was not so much that of a person of flesh and blood but more architectural, like a cottage where you once spent the summer. I could smell her the way one remembers the smell of campfire smoke. The recent photograph of her with at least forty extra pounds, a wave of dark curls framing a cartoonish, large-lipped smile, I wouldn’t have picked out of a police lineup.
Chris turned to me and then back to the screen, his hand still stroking mine. This was the first time I registered I was shaking involuntarily from my waist down, just like my father. “Do you think you’re ready?”
“I don’t know. But I have to go, don’t I?”
Writers’ psyches are a tad perverse. If a story presents itself, we are sometimes loyal to the story at the expense of ourselves.
It’s a test designed to provoke an emotional response. . . . Describe, in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
Chris and I spent the entire night searching the website for more clues. My name and my brother’s name were not tagged under the photograph but on her c.v. Apparently, in Brazil, you are legally required to list all your known children on your resumé. She’d also listed her phone number and email address. I decided on the phone.
Calendars were consulted. Tickets purchased. Items packed.
This is a story about mothers and daughters, disappearances and reunions, family bonds and family secrets, travel, trauma, grief, art, and the nature of the imagination. And movies. This is the story of how I became a blade runner.
While I am writing this, there is a good 75 percent chance my mother is ensconced in a plush movie theatre seat, a bag of popcorn tucked in her lap. Right now. She screens anywhere from one to eight movies per day. Her dream world has fully and firmly supplanted itself in the simulacrum of Movieland. Not a rare condition. One of the ways I’ve come to understand my relationship with my mother has been through the lens of movies: movies she loves, movies about Brazil, and many, many movies about mothers and daughters. Projecting thoughts and emotions onto mother and daughter characters in film. I imagine I’m not the only one.
So feel free to grab a warm blanket, heat up some popcorn, and join me in the tragicomic adventure section of your video store. Here’s your ticket. Feel free to project.
Photograph from My Mother’s Website of Herself, Jit, and Me
(circa 1976; this photo has since disappeared from the website.)
1
maid in manhattan
Chris Marshall: Can we start over? Second chance, second date? You as you, me as me. No secrets. What do you think?
Take One
April 8, 2003: Late afternoon. Orange and green Beck taxi pulls in front of our apartment on Brunswick Avenue. I throw two large black suitcases, one full of clothes (even though my mother has insisted she wants me to bring no clothing whatsoever so that she can buy me a brand new Brazilian wardrobe), toiletries, and books to read (including Portuguese phrase books and poetry and prose by Brazilian authors: Moacyr Scliar, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Clarice Lispector), and one empty, in anticipation of the gifts and souvenirs I might bring home, into the trunk. Although Chris is nervous about sending me off on my prodigal journey while he waits anxiously for news at home, he understands why I insist on embarking alone. This is a once-in-a-lifetime reunion, decades in the making, between me and this wide-faced, fuzzy-haired woman on the internet. While this virtual woman did extend an invitation to “my husband” to join me, she expressed no surprise—at least online—at his polite decline. After almost seven years of living and writing together, Chris trusts my gut instincts when it comes to art and people. Yes, I’ll admit I’m a little scared to be alone with a complete stranger on the othe
r side of the planet, but you’d be a barrier between us. Brazil is a machismo culture. I know she’ll alter how she acts, what she says, because you’re a man. And she’ll always be worried about what you actually know of the past, what you think, if you’re influencing me. She’ll assume I brought you for protection. I don’t want her to think I’m afraid of her. I want her to know I come in peace. At least I think I come in peace. I kiss our cats: Professor, my pudgy black-and-white tuxedo, who knows how to open the fridge and kitchen drawers to extract treats and has sat by my computer on a black fold-out chair during the writing of every term paper and book; and Junior, a confident marmalade with a fluffy squirrel tail and “puffy pants” legs, who likes to sprawl out on manuscript pages and bat pens about. Chris tucks a yellow beanbag duck I’ve named Quark into my carry-on to remind me of home, gives me a long, forceful hug, several kisses about my face and neck, and wishes me luck.
And I’m off, looking rather spritely in a stylish black jumpsuit with a jaunty yellow and orange pleated neck scarf. At Toronto’s Pearson airport, I buy a bar of dark chocolate and a pink neck pillow (at nine hours this will be the longest flight I have taken thus far in my life) and file into the check-in line. I flash the Air Canada attendant, a middle-aged woman with brown wavy hair, a huge smile, the same smile I flashed the taxi driver, the confectionery attendant, and the store clerk. I am on a mysterious and exciting adventure after all, and I have the feeling that everyone I encounter is a co-conspirator in the tale about to unfold. At the airline counter, I feel restlessness brewing in every muscle. I tell myself to calm down, yet as I slide over my passport and my ticket, I am nearly giggling with anticipation. I’m about to board a plane and travel nine hours to meet a woman that I haven’t seen or heard from in nearly twenty years who happens to be my mother; I am going stay with her in São Paulo in a hotel and then later on Easter weekend in her condominium in the capital city of Brasilia. Finally, I’m going to come face to face with her, discover what she’s like, what she’s been doing these last twenty years, who we will be now to each other instead of runaway mother and abandoned daughter. I am so brave.
Projection Page 2
