Projection

by Priscila Uppal

  A white van taxi awaits us. We ride rather comfortably even in the blistering heat—no one would suspect our fraught history as we stare out the window side by side on a cushioned bench to Caesar Park, a luxury hotel with a glass elevator and towering palm trees in what appears to be the middle of nowhere but I learn is northeast of the city centre to cater to travellers who wish to stay near the international airport. My mother’s mouth zips along like a monorail, a stream of questions about the flight mixed with compliments about my appearance. Although I have defrosted enough to offer partial answers, I can’t wave her down; my mother’s train is an express, making few stops. Her voice is muscular but rhythmic, the linguistic equivalent of a tumbler. If she were a singer, she would be a bass soprano. Both her English and her Portuguese are punchy, the nasal quality of the Portuguese accent only minimally dulling the syllables into a hum like that of a roomful of data inputters on keyboards. My mother’s voice is not a good thing I remember about her. I wonder if living back in her homeland all these years has altered her voice. For whatever reason, I can’t place it, my brain makes no connections between it and semblances of motherhood, no flashes of nursery rhymes or afternoon puzzles or admonishments about wasted food or time for sleep. And it occurs to me that while I’ve imagined extensive conversations with my mother over the years, I’ve never given her voice an oral character—staged by me, both voices have reflected my own internal speech patterns and tonal qualities. I’ve never heard my mother’s voice saying, “I’m so proud of you” after winning a scholarship or sports prize; or “That man is all wrong for you” when I’ve suspected it to be true. What did I do with her voice? Did I crumple it up like a piece of paper and swallow it? Did I grind it to a pulp and sprinkle it like pepper on pasta? Inside my body somewhere, but obviously so deeply hidden that this whirlwind of live syllables unearths no twins from the past. If she had been the one to leave a message on my answering machine without declaring Theresa, your mother, I would never have known. Likely, I would have erased the message as a wrong number.

  The hotel staff, dressed in crisp white linen shirts, pants, and skirts, know about me because of the visa delay. My mother had returned a mess of tears. I’m welcomed with warm smiles and exaggerated “Good mornings” and “Welcome to Brazils” as bags are carted to our room, and we’re directed to the lunch buffet.

  You will eat a lot of beans and rice and seafood here. The best beans and rice and seafood in the world is in Brazil. My mother has a wide toothy smile, like I do, and the staff respond to her the way you do to an eccentric aunt. She’s sort of charming, I think, with her compliments and excitable questions and effusions of appreciation as she hands me a cold plate and starts piling food from each steel dish on it, without bothering to ask what I might want. By the end of the line, I’m holding a smorgasbord of white fish and shrimp, multicoloured beans, broccoli, and beef stew.

  I can eat anything at anytime, she declares once we are seated at our wooden table on brown wicker chairs. I like this about myself. I never lose my appetite. Not even chemo touched my appetite. The doctors were so proud of me. Eat, eat, they told me. And I ate, ate. I am such a good patient.

  She is true to her word. Three towering plates. And still, she never stops talking—everything from fashion to politics to health to family gossip. Like a skilled ventriloquist, she can scoop a forkful or spoonful of beans and rice or salmon or lamb into her mouth and let it pool over to one cheek and slide down her throat without missing a syllable. I’m relieved I don’t have to carry the conversation, that I can just listen and enjoy a plate of fresh food. I’m compelled to concentrate on nothing but her voice. Maybe she’s not a ventriloquist but a hypnotist.

  Ten Things I Learn

  She wears only bright clothing and feels naked without earrings on.

  Her father was a pilot in the Brazilian Air Force. Then military attaché (how they ended up in Canada).

  My first cousins are also in the Brazilian Air Force (one is a dentist, one is in public relations), and my Uncle Wilhelm, their father, is head of the Air Force.

  She thinks her mother (my grandmother? I don’t even know her name) is “the bossiest person in the world.”

  She’s had surgery on all ten of her fingers for carpal tunnel syndrome. Excessive typing.

  There is no curfew for liquor here and the shopping centre turns into a nightclub and amusement park after the stores close.

  She has ten different email addresses. (I don’t know why.)

  In Brasilia there are more trees for every person than in any other city in the world.

  She voted for the current president, Luiz Inácio da Silva, otherwise known as Lula, even though her taxes will go up. “It’s better than all these people without jobs.”

  She lives for the movies. Likes to sit right in front so she can “live inside the movie.” Some movies she’s seen over a hundred times in the theatre. She calls this pinnacle her 100 Club: Blade Runner, The Big Blue, Ladyhawke, The Mirror Has Two Faces, The Last of the Mohicans. Theatres are second and third and fourth homes. She views at least one movie per day at an actual movie house. Usually more. Her father and mother went to the movies every day. It’s a family habit, but no one goes more than my mother. “We must go to the movies to laugh too, not only to cry.”

  Is it possible for me to take a quick nap? I ask. Do I need permission? I’m an adult after all, but I suppose a part of me wants to test out the dialogue of parent and child, see how it feels on my lips.

  Of course, of course, angel, I was going to recommend it. You see, I knew you would be hungry and then tired. Me, I do not sleep. Too much to do. No sleep. Time to sleep when you’re dead. But you should nap, yes, so you do not get sick. You are allowed to do whatever you like here. Whatever you like. Except run away! That you are not allowed to do!

  Run away! I am taken aback by the reference then realize her words contain no intended irony. I file this away under “disconcerting.” Nevertheless, genuinely tired, I decide to postpone semiotic analysis to surrender to an air-conditioned room and hotel bed. I have always loved hotels, and none more than luxury hotel beds with big fluffy pillows and comforters, as if sleep itself were your destination. As my mother sits making notes at the mahogany desk and I pull the cozy white comforter over my exhausted body, I can’t believe I’m actually here, in Brazil, with my mother, and at first I think disbelief will keep me up as I try to adjust my old memories to the new reality, the bulges of her frame, the white powder on her cheeks—has chemo ruined her skin?—but, hugging the queen-sized feather pillow, my thoughts dissolve like salt in water and I sink into the serenity pool of sleep.

  After my nap, which my mother has used to crank out a glowing review of the film The Quiet American—I must get my prolificness from her—I put on the same clothes I wore to the airport (I haven’t yet unpacked) and we head out in a taxi to the Internacional Guarulhos shopping plaza. Though Guarulhos is designated a suburb of São Paulo, with its litany of skyscrapers cramped like fistfuls of straws, its tyranny of grey and blue among a smidgen of green and orange, its population of over one million people, it reeks of bustling city life rather than tranquil suburbia. I read in my tourist book that Guarulhos means “eaters, big-bellied people.” What food courts they must have!

  At the mall, we take our first photograph together—a young couple aimlessly window-shopping offer to do the honours—outside the bookstore, after my mother has helped me pick out Portuguese poetry books, plucking them naturally off the shelf like papayas off a tree and placing them in my plastic shopping basket without a query as to how I will read them when I have no knowledge of Portuguese let alone the sophistication necessary for Portuguese poetry. We don’t tell the couple we are mother and daughter. They don’t ask. Taking photographs is more common than taking a bus. Because we’re speaking English together, I’m sure they assume we’re on vacation, and people on vacation take photographs of everything, even bookstores. But as I thank the couple for the trouble,
I’m aware of how monumental this innocuous photograph actually is. The first irrefutable document of our reunion. Evidence of its reality. Not a filmic projection, a revisable fantasy, repeating on a loop in our minds. My mother’s colourful outfit and my bright scarf blend in with the crammed storefront, rows and rows of books against glass. My mother’s arm lightly touches my back, either proudly or protectively; it’s difficult to ascertain which. We look like we’ve known each other for some time, and in some ways I suppose we have, but our limbs are stiff, like colleagues unused to body contact. As if the photograph has alerted my mother to the potential of an audience for our reunion story, she now tells every person we encounter on our stroll to the Cineplex, from store managers to clerks to janitors, that I am her Canadian daughter and she is very happy I am visiting Brazil. “It is so nice her husband let her come.” With such little, yet such charged, information (why wouldn’t your daughter be permitted to visit?), god knows what these people think our story is. Likely our complicated situation has flitted in front of their eyes, a brief interlude, like a commercial for a product you will never buy. The clerks keep tapping on their cash registers and ripping paper receipts, the janitors keep sweeping dirt and soda pop off the floor. But I register that this is a public display of pride. Even if she doesn’t know me, she’s proud I’m here.

  I am not a feminist, she announces outside the theatre. I’m a traditionalist. My friends think I’m a feminist, but I’m not. We are both writers. We are alike.

  “I’m a feminist.” I’m not embarrassed to say this the way a lot of writers now are, as if the term is outdated and identifies not a group of reasonable political activists but angry man-haters. I’m also uncomfortable with the idea that my mother wants, from the beginning of this trip, to see us as alike. I decide I will need to stand my ground, as politely as possible, but allow our differences to emerge like friendly rivalries between sports fans—me in one jersey, my mother in another. But this is Brazil, I remind myself, where rival fans kill each other and where soccer players who make mistakes on the field arrive home in body bags.

  What does that mean? You like being a woman, and you would have come to Brazil even if your husband said no. But isn’t it nice he said yes? Be careful with your purse. Even in the shopping mall. I’ve been mugged four times. That’s why I carry this big purse now. No one wants to run away with such a heavy thing. My purse is a little organized factory. Like yours, I see. We are the same. I only pay for what I can afford. I resent sleep. There is too much to do. There are hundreds of interesting things to do in Brazil. Museums, galleries, concerts, all the highest quality, you’ll see.

  Okay, I agree with that. I don’t say which part I’m agreeing with, but she assumes I’m agreeing with everything. As my father’s bookkeeping helper I, too, learned early on that it’s important to buy only what you can afford. Since debt became a debilitating issue only after my father’s accident, I associate credit with the breaking of my father’s back. I’ve never let a credit card balance go unpaid at the end of the month. Aside from student loans, I have never taken a loan or line of credit from the bank. Offers to “raise my credit limit” turn my stomach. I don’t like the idea of owing. Neither, it seems, does my mother. I just wonder how far this extends beyond money. The conversation is enlightening, in a number of ways. I now know something about what deters a purse snatcher. I also know she has seen the inside of my purse. When—at the airport? While I was sleeping? Was she snooping through my things?

  Here, touch this, my mother orders before entering the line. She is pointing to her chest, and I do what I’m told even though I haven’t touched my mother of my own volition—I’ve let her hug me at the airport and touch my back for the photograph, but I’ve made no motions to touch her—in over twenty years. The flesh is hard, a dense bump. That’s my chemo tube. She lifts her blouse an inch or two to reveal stitches on her white flabby stomach. There’s a skating rink in this mall. Did you know there are skating rinks in Brazil?

  I didn’t know that. I didn’t know it was relevant to chemo tubes. I haven’t experienced her enough yet to track her verbal habits, but it occurs to me that maybe my mother, as a teacher, is of the “happy sandwich” school—those who follow up every negative comment with a positive comment so as to lessen the emotional impact of the negativity. And then I do have a flash of my mother speaking to me as a child: I am drawing a flower of some sort, with red and green crayons, writing the words “I Love You Mommy” underneath. A crude drawing—I’ve never been gifted in sketching or painting—and I know I mean the words as I write them, but my mother is watching me make the card, maybe she even asked me to (Angel, why don’t you make Mommy a Valentine’s card?), and so with the love I feel something else: anxiousness, worry, fear. The childhood memory arrives with discomfort, a familiar feeling: I love making cards and picking perfect presents for friends and loved ones, and I might be one of the last people on the planet to still send out over a hundred holiday cards to friends and colleagues, but each bow or envelope seal includes a tiny dose of fear along with the good wishes. I worry about losing touch, about people drifting away, and all those good feelings no longer having a place to land. When my mother lived with us, I now remember, I used to write her letters, cards, poems, stories, fake postcards from magical lands. After she left, I never wrote to her or about her again, not until I was skilled enough to transform her into an unrecognizable presence in various poems and fictions—mother and daughter characters built on the pain of separation but whose personalities and fates differ starkly from our own. I was not one of those children who kept a special diary dedicated to her or wrote her a birthday card every year, stuffing them unstamped under a pile of T-shirts in my dresser drawers. When she left, I stopped writing to her. I have no clue whether or not she’s been writing to me. If she has, they’ve been returned to sender. Now, I suppose, we are catching up for lost time. Purse snatching to museums and galleries. Chemo surgeries to ice skating rinks. Uncomfortable childhood memories to . . . movies.

  We decide on Maid in Manhattan, or Encontro de Amor in Portuguese, because it will screen in English with Portuguese subtitles and because it is debuting tonight so my mother has not seen it yet. In the last two days, waiting for me to land, she has seen all the other films. And as I scan movie posters for Catch Me If You Can, Two Weeks Notice, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, The Quiet American, and the Brazilian film City of God, I wonder how easy or difficult it was for her to forget her anxiety and disappointment through car chases and unexpected love connections and political bombings and drug lord murders. And then I remember that I too rented movies after returning home from the airport. We watched Spider-Man and Solaris to pass away the time between filling out the visa application and waiting at the consulate. For me, unfortunately, distractions are usually met with mixed success—I can forget for a small stretch of time, ten or twenty minutes at the most, and then my mind wanders back to the trouble at hand and I have to either rewind or simply accept what I’ve missed and move on. It’s the same with reading, except that if I’m trying to distract myself with a novel I will at times need to reread the same page over and over again. But I’m beginning to suspect my mother has more practice escaping her worries through art.

  Falling in love with a movie star is the best thing for you, she spontaneously instructs the young popcorn server, whose perky breasts are peeking out over her T-shirt. You’ll never get hurt. You can have all the romance and romantic feelings you want, and then just leave them in the dark theatre.

  All the young female cinema employees smile warmly at my mother, and the twenty-something female manager sporting tinted sunglasses personally escorts us to our seats.

  As the lights dim, I feel relieved to be given a break from all the incoming information—I too have something of the family movie bug and adore the plush seats and buttery popcorn and ice-cold Cokes of the theatre, rarer for me than renting videos—but I also feel guilty. I can only remember going to three movies with m
y brother: once in high school on an awkward double date, and twice in childhood, Ghostbusters in an Ottawa theatre and E.T. at a Michigan drive-in when we were living with another one of my father’s brothers after my mother left. We rented movies every week growing up: Eddie Murphy, Clint Eastwood, and Bill Murray some of our favourites. But I have never gone to the movies, or to a buffet lunch, or shopping, with my father. I have done all three with my runaway mother within twenty-four hours of landing on her turf. We don’t do what we can’t afford. Financial, or otherwise. My father had the burden of raising us; she has the luxury of leisure time. Why has her mysterious existence accorded her more indulgence? A part of me desperately wants these kinds of mother-daughter experiences, but another part equally wants to reject them as betrayal. What will these surreal excursions, so separate from my actual family life with my father, cost me?

  Normally, I adore Ralph Fiennes. I first fell in love with him in the film based on the Peter Carey novel Oscar and Lucinda. As he burned and drowned in his floating church, I wept on my couch, enraptured by the poetic sensibility. A glass church floating on a river.

  I hated Maid in Manhattan. Absolutely hated it. And Ralph Fiennes as Mr. Christopher Marshall, a smarmy New Yorker running for senator, repulsed me. Any feminist or Marxist analysis of the film would relegate the proofs to a bonfire. The premise: Marisa Ventura, played by Jennifer Lopez, a sexy maid in a five-star Manhattan hotel and a single mother can’t be bought by an upper-class, unethical, and callous politician. Marisa possesses moral integrity and proletarian passions, which will protect her from his onslaught of sexual interest. Predictably, the two end up falling in love, and in the end she becomes his political partner in his successful senatorial race. While the whole rags-to-riches dimension of the movie is forgivable fantastical convention, what is truly horrific about this film is that the screenwriters have made Ralph Fiennes’s character so despicable that his transformation is not Scrooge-scared-to-death-and-of-death-to-correct-the-error-of-his-ways, but a plot twist so unlikely that the only motivation, no matter what the movie’s claims, is lust. The worst part is that Marisa Ventura keeps giving this man access to her time, her thoughts, her son, and later her lips and other body parts, for no other reason than that he is rich and powerful and has condescended to spend a little time with her precocious son. By the end of the film, he has barely revealed a single good quality, but the audience is expected to applaud her for bagging a bank account.