Projection

by Priscila Uppal

  I haven’t shared any of this commonplace information with my mother because she hasn’t asked. She informs me she is on a strict diet, but what she is capable of eating, she eats by the pound. I look everywhere among the dozens of coffee pots for “English tea”—caffeinated tea—and can’t find any, so I ask my mother where to find some. She takes it as a personal offence.

  Coffee upsets my stomach, I tell her.

  Many things upset stomachs in this family. Not coffee. Don’t expect tea.

  Though I am curious, I don’t ask about the history of upset stomachs because lack of sleep has rendered me ravenous. In addition to all the fruit and pastries, meat slices and beans, I manage to polish off not one but two omelets. I make a mental note to search for a box of tea in the next shopping mall we visit. I never thought I would be dependent on such a small thing, but I am. Predictable.

  Location shift

  We will now be setting up camp in my mother’s rented flat in the middle of São Paulo, a suite-style hotel geared toward long-term stays for families and business travellers. I know this is cheaper for her, and I don’t betray a hint of disappointment, but I must admit I do prefer boutique hotels to suites and apartments. It’s not the expense, per se, that defines more desirable accommodation. It’s that higher-end hotels are more anonymous; the chandeliers and elevator buttons shimmer in their claimlessness. For me luxury is not defined by the feather comforters and marble sinks and all-night room service menus but by what these items signify: you don’t live here, this is a space of your imagination, do what you will for this limited time. We don’t know you. You don’t know us. Comfort yourself. Whereas my mother’s rented flat will be filled with her. While this is something I’m anticipating, so that I can observe her surroundings and compare them to the statements she has already made about herself—the psychoanalytically informed writer coming out in me who wants her butterfly jars properly labelled—I also fear losing myself in her insistent voice, her routines, her vortex. This will be her set, filled with her lighting, her props, her actors.

  Her cast includes her usual taxi driver, who was off yesterday but picks us up today. His name is Soares: a thin black man of about fifty with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut, a few gold teeth, looking refreshed wearing an ironed blue cotton dress shirt, black slacks, and a large, welcoming smile.

  I will not use anyone but Soares, even if they were cheaper. Soares likes me. I must know that my driver likes me. If someone doesn’t like me, I drop them. I don’t wait for them to like me. No. You either like someone or you don’t. I don’t have a second for people who do not like me. If you don’t like me, I won’t have a second for you either.

  Did she really say that? This makes me nervous. How do I know if I like her after only a day or two? Right now, I just find her overwhelming, as if I’m a kid surrounded by blaring music inside a house of mirrors. I’ve handed over my ticket and am trying to make my way from one end of the hall to the other while visions of myself and my mother grow thin and rubbery then bloated and ballooned, and I’m at a loss as to which are real and which illusions, which are close and which far away. I’m sure there’s one image I will be attracted to more than the others, but I haven’t picked it yet. I’m in the middle of the intersection of reflections, blinded by light and teeth and dark hair, dizzy with the abundance of us. Will she ask me if I like her? Does she know if she likes me? It’s hard to like someone if you don’t know anything about her. Then again, maybe it’s easier if you don’t. Less refraction. If I say no, will she leave me on a precarious street corner and drive away with Soares into the smog?

  One of my mother’s 100 Club movies is The Big Blue. The oceanic and Mediterranean landscapes, the lush cinematography, the unlikely love story; all these elements enrapture her. Once again, as with Blade Runner, I wonder if my mother’s subconscious has latched onto these movies; they seem to speak in interesting, sometimes accusatory ways to our situation. She engages the surface spectacle of each, transporting herself to another dimension, a safe place where one can love movie stars and watch them make love to others, and then one can leave the theatre satisfied, contained, safely alone. Except now I’m leaving the theatre with her.

  I’d never heard of The Big Blue before my mother raved about it, and so rented it upon my return to Toronto, as I rented all the movies in my mother’s 100 Club. Released in 1988, it is an epic 168 minutes directed by Luc Besson, and features Rosanna Arquette as Johana, Jean-Marc Barr as Jacques, and Jean Reno as Enzo. Two of the main characters of the film, childhood rivals Jacques and Enzo, are extreme divers, meaning that they dive competitively in the ocean without the aid of breathing apparatus. By the end of the film, each has managed to crack four hundred feet below the surface and hold their breath for over five minutes. In actuality what they are searching for are not world records, but the fairy-tale eternal love of mermaids. For the protagonist Jacques, this quest begins in childhood with the death of his sea-exploring father and the disappearance of his mother. Just before his father dies, in the midst of Jacques and his Uncle Louis adjusting the breathing apparatus, Uncle Louis berates Jacques for never asking questions:

  Uncle Louis: Ask me something, goddammit.

  Jacques: Why did mother leave?

  Uncle Louis: Pump. Your mother didn’t leave. She went back to America, that’s all. It’s her home. Women are like that, unpredictable like the sea.

  Jacques spends his life in the ocean, literally swimming with dolphins, searching for a mermaid who will accept his pure love and invite him to live with her in the sea. He falls in love with a real woman, Johana, an insurance agent who gives up everything—job, home, security—for him, but it isn’t enough to dissuade him from the mysterious depths of the ocean. The void created by a missing mother’s love is deeper than the earth, deeper than any mortal lover can fill, and while Jacques can be loved, he cannot experience love in a satisfying way. He is left with two choices: surrender to fantasy or die. He chooses both. Diving into the blue after a love that has passed him by, as irrecoverable as my mother’s treasures in my watery dream.

  The Big Blue is a unique, tragic, and funny film that introduced me to a competitive world I had no clue existed. But more than that, it’s a film that asks the question How deep are you willing to go to find out the truth about yourself? How many more feet?

  Penetrating the city limits, we are smack in the middle of the ear-splitting chaos of São Paulo, population eleven million plus, the largest city in Brazil, as well as one of the most diverse, infiltrated by masses of European immigrants following the abolition of slavery in 1888, and one that managed a fairly successful switch from an industrial to a service and finance economy, now housing the highest number of billionaires in Latin America. More skyscrapers than stars; more vehicles than flowers; more graffiti than street signs; more poison than air; boasting the largest fleet of helicopters in the world. I pop an imaginary kernel in my mouth: let the show begin. We lurch forward then halt, then crawl, then stop, then lurch forward again. As my mother yells over the racket of São Paulo downtown traffic, I decide, in an effort to make the trip as pleasant and reconciling as possible, to prepare a mental list of things I’ve learned my mother and I have in common.

  Ten Things My Mother and I Share

  We both reapply lipstick after each course of a meal. (Predominantly red.)

  We both possess zero sense of direction.

  We are both workaholics and resent the physiological demands of sleep.

  We are both blessed with healthy appetites and are free of food allergies.

  We both love books, movies, music, visual art, and theatre.

  We both gesture with our hands a lot when we talk.

  We both apologize for little things, not big things.

  We both sport a no-teeth smile when we’re concentrating.

  We are both charming to strangers.

  We may both have a thing for Rutger Hauer.

  Listing helps momentarily calm my nerves, but
the pollution in São Paulo is thick as maple syrup and makes Toronto look like a quaint lakeside town. As someone who doesn’t drive and ordinarily doesn’t spend much time in cars, I turn into a yawner when a vehicular passenger. More than usual, in this heat and filth and sleep deprived, my yawns are endless.

  Did you not sleep well? my mother finally asks. The hotel was the best available. How could you not sleep well? Clean sheets, warm comforter, big bed. Is it your stomach? Are you sick? Should we see a doctor?

  No, no, I’ll be fine. I’m sorry.

  I don’t know how you’re going to sleep better at the flat if you couldn’t sleep well in the luxury hotel. We should see a doctor.

  My mother is adamant that I must be sick. I’ve seen such mothers on television—who turn a fever into malaria and headaches into brain tumours—but I’ve never experienced one. I learned to take care of my illnesses—from colds to flus to sinus infections—on my own. In high school, I was allowed to sign my own sick notes. I remember once, during a particularly angst-ridden time after leaving home at age fifteen for rented rooms, calling the principal and informing him that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and needed a week off to collect myself. As I had a near 100 percent average, the principal allowed it. By day four of lying in bed despairing at being alone in the universe, without a proper protector, without someone to fight for and care for me, I woke up in the sweat of a revelation I have adhered to since that singular morning: breakdowns are a luxury I cannot afford. Who would pay my bills if I were incapacitated? No one, that’s who. So, I slipped on my skull skirt and skeleton rings and packed my calculus and physics homework, and went right back to homeroom as if I’d never left. The teachers said nothing. I think I unnerved them: a straight A+ student and jock who wrote dark poetry and stories about suicide for the school newspaper and worked full-time as a pharmaceutical assistant in addition to her classes. I was like a science experiment set to explode. The teachers stood back to avoid the fallout, but took interest in observing the anomalous results.

  As I don’t want to spend the day in a doctor’s office, particularly a foreign doctor’s office, when all I have is jet lag mixed with sleeplessness, I feel cornered into the truth. It’s just . . . just . . . I whisper . . . you were snoring . . . all night . . . it was pretty loud. I’m sure everything will be fine tonight.

  Complete standstill. Fifteen minutes. Stuck between a convenience store and a rundown pharmacy. Soares apologizes as if he is responsible. In São Paulo, rush hour lasts a good eight hours, he informs me, my mother translating between us. That’s just traffic then, I reply, and he laughs.

  Beautiful kid, I am very happy you are here, but you should know better at your age not to lie. Don’t be a liar. I do not snore.

  Is don’t be a liar in Brazilian Portuguese equivalent to don’t be silly in English? Nevertheless, I’m stunned by her accusation, so contrary to my preference for calming the choppy waters, I attempt to speak my piece. I’m sorry, but you did snore. You snored loudly all night. I’m not saying this to hurt you, just to explain why I’m tired.

  As if someone has just placed a package with an unpleasant odour in the car, she scrunches her nose and lowers her voice. This is the first flash—unfortunately, not the last—of inexplicable anger my mother lashes at me.

  Don’t you lie, or I will have no time for you. Do you think you can lie to your mother? Your father never complained about any snoring. Everyone in the hospital could sleep fine with me. Chemo patients, okay? No one ever complained about snoring.

  It’s the first time she’s mentioned my father, and I am taken aback by how quickly she invokes him then sweeps us both aside to keep chattering with Soares about our day’s schedule—if we make it through the maze of dense traffic, that is. I’ve read before that snoring in animals can be traced back to hibernating, a survival strategy to signal life is nearby if one of the family wakes too early. Living alone for so long now, throughout her forties and fifties, I wonder if my mother’s developed a louder snore since her immediate family is a continent away. My father is also a grand snorer, and I do think as children it comforted us to hear him, evidence he was alive, that there was a parent, even an injured parent, down the hallway, looking out for us. My brother fell from his bed a lot—a guardrail remained fixed to its side until he was about twelve. And apparently, I was a bit of a sleepwalker, and am still an active sleep-talker—I would have all manner of conversations with my father down the hallway, between walls and our bedroom doors, where I would ask for pets (I desperately wanted a dog), chatter on about the antics of my friends, and frequently exclaim that I thought our house was on fire. My father would talk me down until I went back to sleep, to mostly silent nightmares. Again, I don’t share any of this with my mother. I keep stumbling upon what she doesn’t want to hear or talk about. Her psyche a minefield, snoring, I note, sets off a charge.

  Jacques: The hardest thing is when you’re at the bottom.

  Johana: Why?

  Jacques: ’Cause you have to find a good reason to come back up and I have a hard time finding one.

  As Soares drops us off at Mont Clair’s black iron gate and green, leafy walkway, with room keys attached to large plastic circles, my mother informs me that she will leave me for a couple of hours while she attends church. It is the only thing I am not flexible about, she insists. I guess she knows a little more about me than I’ve realized, since she hasn’t bothered to ask if I’d like to join her even though it’s because of her we were raised Catholics and attended Catholic schools. (My father, raised a Sikh, approved our Christian upbringing, reasoning that whether Jesus was or was not the son of God was irrelevant: he was “a nice man” and we wouldn’t learn anything bad from him. Regardless, Catholic school was a recipe for atheism.) That, or else she’d like some time alone with her thoughts—thoughts she hasn’t voiced out loud. Perhaps she wants to consider more deeply how my presence is affecting her. Or maybe she wants to ask God why I’m here. Why I can’t digest coffee. Why I’m accusing her of snoring.

  We roll our luggage into my mother’s “regular” suite: tones of orange and brown, beige and yellow, in the fixtures and carpets, the dressers and sofa cushions; a small kitchenette with a counter adjoining the living room; washroom with shower (no bath); TV/living room with a table desk, a long curved couch and matching armchair; and a separate bedroom. My mother opens the bedroom door.

  Since you don’t wish to sleep in the same bed as me due to my snoring, you can have the bedroom and I will sleep on the couch in the living room. Okay?

  Grateful for the arrangement, I nod—it never occurred to me she would expect us to sleep in the same bed and I’m relieved to be spared the mother-daughter experience.

  Since you don’t like to pray, would you like to swim? I’m sure you’ve read enough about Brazil to have packed a bikini?

  She is smiling, so I laugh. I love swimming. And while my mother holds counsel with God, I change into a modest tank top–style two-piece swimsuit with red and yellow tropical flowers. There is a “piscina” on the rooftop, labelled “indoor” for some reason I can’t figure out, and “pool” even though it is whirlpool size, about eight feet by eight feet and four feet deep, ten lawn chairs packed like white teeth surrounding the perimeter. I don’t think ten people could fit inside the pool. Maybe four, if no one is splashing.

  I wade in and then turn on my back into a star. The water cool and refreshing, my body relaxes as I marvel at the fact that I am actually here on this rooftop in São Paulo, alone in a tiny pool, floating in the dirty heat. I feel oddly elated as I try to analyze more purposefully why my mother hasn’t asked me any questions about my childhood in Ottawa or my current life in Toronto. I think it would feel good—like progress, albeit difficult progress—to tell her about my academic and sports achievements in high school, the courses I took in university and the scholarships I earned, how I met Chris and when he confessed he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me, how close I am to fin
ishing my PhD dissertation, my book launches, the book of poetry I’m working on, my favourite films. If she asks about my life, I reason, we won’t have to pretend so much. She will learn about me bit by bit, and properly fill in the gaps she must have been avoiding all these years. I need to find a friendly or at least non-threatening way for her to face the fact that she hasn’t been in my life; I am who I am regardless of her wishes for me. My mother is like an old building with a deteriorating façade and faulty electrical wiring. I want to break down the layers without causing the foundation to crumble into a pile of rubble. I didn’t come here to protect my mother though. I didn’t come here to protect myself. Reunion is the opposite of protection; it’s confrontation. It’s renovation. And we both require helmets and gloves. How to confront my mother so that I can gain some understanding of her and the past without resorting to aggression or direct accusation? This is the challenge.

  After the “swim,” I unpack my clothes, toiletries, and books, then decide to take a stroll to explore the stores in the immediate area—I noticed a high-end lingerie boutique called Fruit de la Passion and some pastry shops as Soares inched us closer to our destination—but am thwarted by Aleshandro, the young desk clerk with cropped dark hair and gangly arms and legs, who speaks a smattering of English.

  “You must not go out.”

  I am practically bouncing out the door. “Excuse me?”

  “You must not go out.”

  “Why?” Extreme pollution alert?

  Aleshandro leaves his post behind the counter to block my way. “Your mother does not wish for you to go out on your own.”

  “Really? My mother told you I’m not to leave the hotel?” I laugh and twirl my purse flirtatiously. Why not?