The father is nothing. It is only the mother who is important, Soares offers as he draws my attention to revolutionary monuments on the ride back. He likes my mother very much and wants me to stay longer, or else to come back very soon to visit her again. My mother translates all this to me. You are very loved. Your mother wants the best for you. I do not contradict him. My own Mouse, I smile at him and say obrigada. The man thinks I am a princess—don’t princesses exist to be adored? Don’t they exist for eternal love and happy endings?
Romantic gibberish, or is there some truth of love in my mother’s heart? I haven’t figured out how to talk with her yet. I am all ears, taking notes, jotting down observations, making judgments, but right now, I can’t be sure I’m fully listening. I don’t know what to focus on: pitch, tone, rhythm, notes, chords? My mother is a symphony without a score. And the soundtrack to this road movie, whether I press mute or not.
I love when you say my name, Soares coos as I thank him for the ride. You say it with a perfect Brazilian accent, yet very soft, very soft.
My mother writes the next day’s pickup time on a free postcard—her purse stuffed with dozens from restaurants and cultural centres: advertisements for restaurants or perfumes, cellphone companies or swimsuit shops.
Soares hesitates before accepting the card. Priscila is in command. I answer to her now.
I would like to see the Treasures from Shanghai exhibit, 11 a.m.
It does not open until noon.
Noon then, Soares. Obrigada. Bon noite, Soares.
He closes his taxi door and we wave, laughing because it is impossible not to laugh when Soares is around. I suspect he is the one really in charge.
Museum of Precious Stones
5
god is brazilian
(dues é brasileiro)
God: A human being is not a refrigerator which you can return if it doesn’t work properly.
Today we are the only ones at breakfast, and over stacks of pineapple, my mother tells me about some of the rural areas she has visited in Brazil, partings in the green where there are few people and no cars. Unlike São Paulo, where it can take up to twelve hours to get to the airport and where the government has been forced to implement a system whereby cars with specific licence plate numbers drive on specific days and some households circumvent this restriction by buying multiple cars, my mother visited one town with only two registered automobiles: a jeep and a truck. One summer day, on the only road in the town, they collided in a very serious accident, totalling both vehicles. We laugh, but it doesn’t surprise me. People are born to crash into each other.
My mother also warns me not to talk about my religious beliefs, or lack thereof, with the rest of the family. I was baptized, given first Communion, and confirmed in the Catholic Church, as was my brother, and although my first novel is set in a nunnery, and I remember after my mother left that as an eight-year-old child I seriously considered becoming a nun—I was desperate to help children worse off than myself—I have since developed very little patience, even a repulsion, toward all religions, but, like any lapsed Catholic, especially Catholicism. (Although I confess—pun intended—that I possess a fetishistic fascination for a priest’s long black cassock. Thank you, Alfred Hitchcock.) My mother and the rest of the family (except for her brother, who, my mother mutters, is also an atheist and refuses to go to church) are ardent Catholics, my mother and grandmother attending their respective churches daily, while the rest congregate at my grandmother’s church on Sundays. Brasilia boasts some of the most beautiful churches in Brazil and I will experience church service there, she informs me. Ironically, I am not averse to the proposition—church architecture is fascinating (what people will build for gods or royalty has always amazed me)—but I am not given a choice in the matter. I have a friend who has stopped believing in God since reading a book about how all living things were composed from a mass of jelly, my mother offers, slathering the mango variety onto her toast, but who created the jelly? I ask her. God, of course.
Adamant in her beliefs, I’m sure my mother agrees with this line from God Is Brazilian: God is like the wheel, the steamboat, and the airplane. He was invented by man, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist. She is convinced God knows the truth of everything and will reward her someday for her suffering. I don’t ask her to define her suffering or why she thinks her suffering deserves reward, as I’m sure questioning her on this matter will only elicit bafflement at best, defensiveness at worst. Isn’t it the reward system that draws people into religion in the first place? Do this, and you will get that. Maybe not now, maybe not in this life, but at some point, we promise, just believe . . .
As is mentioned in Carlos Diegues’s brilliant film of a god desperate to take a vacation from the headaches of humankind, Brazilian miracles have been oddly overlooked by the Catholic Church, regardless of Brazilian religious fanaticism. Only very recently, in 2007, has Brazil succeeded in obtaining official recognition for a saint: Friar Galvão, who wrote Latin prayers on tiny balls of paper that, when swallowed, apparently cured a variety of ailments including infertility; he also healed a toddler considered incurable by doctors. I’m positive my mother would like to put her own name forward as a candidate.
In the movie, Taoca, a blundering but lovable young ne’er-do-well (played by the jubilant Wagner Moura) who owes money to loan sharks, accompanies God (played by the magnificent Antônio Fagundes) on his search for a saint to watch over the earth while he goes back to doing what he used to do before the earth and humankind were created: floating blissfully in the ether without a care. Taoca is skeptical, believing God created humans in the first place because he must have been desperately lonely. Although God insists, I never needed company, Taoca pities His fatherless, motherless, companion-less existence: Poor fellow. Always so alone!
Lonely or not, like God in the film my mother has become accustomed to living by herself, on her own terms, answerable to no one. She too is fed up with the stupidity and ignorance of humankind—her martyrdom, like that of most mothers, unappreciated by her ungrateful children—and while she might preach forgiveness, her real desire is for escape. Regardless of her relentless voice-over to our day-to-day activities, she is unpenetratingly alone. She speaks her version of the truth; however, perhaps like God, she doesn’t really believe anyone is listening. We’re too busy being selfish and demanding and accusatory. I’m beginning to suspect she talks to keep herself company.
God Is Brazilian is one of her favourite films, and it’s a masterpiece that touches even an atheist’s heart like mine. There is a wonderful scene between God and his chosen saint, an honest and compassionate and hard-working man named Quinca with a severe stutter, which God cures for the duration of his attempt to convince him to step into God’s shoes for an indefinite period of time and continue his good works. No matter what God does, including shortening day and night and inducing instantaneous seasons, then resorting to torturing the poor sop by dunking him repeatedly in the river and calling him a jerk, God’s chosen one refuses to acknowledge his existence: You’re not going to convince me! . . . I’m an atheist! By showing God in all his solitary vulnerability, along with brief moments where he displays the depth of his magic and mercy, Diegues does a masterful job of convincing his audience how much humans need and disappoint God with their actions, even if they must work against him or vehemently deny him in order to live more humanely. It is better to cease to believe in God than to cease to do God’s work.
I am reminded of something very important: I didn’t come here because I believe in my mother; I came here because I believe in myself.
Talking. Talking. The emptiness of words. I tell her Chris’s sister died five years ago. She talks about the quality of Brazilian papaya. I tell her my brother was saved from drowning by a trucker. She talks about her favourite internet café. Talking. Talking. Her talking is a form of torture. If I endure, can I too claim martyrdom?
She continues insulting people by ca
lling them “illiterate.” I know I am lucky that both sides of my family have received post-secondary educations, but, as Quinca the unsanctioned saint points out, No one needs a college diploma to care for others, and it sometimes seems like all my mother’s education, instead of making her more humane, has enabled her to disassociate from real people. Her millions of words joining other millions of words in the sky like unreachable stars. The entity called my mother floating about alone in the ether.
Outside the window I see Hasidic Jewish couples and families, with their black suits and hats, headscarves and curly locks. Does Brazil have a large Jewish population? I have no idea. In my tourist brochure I added a question mark to the heading “Museum of Japanese Immigration.” I’ve already noted that at least two or three of Brazil’s major modernist abstract artists are of Japanese origin, but I still know very little about why or how the Japanese got here. (Since the trip, I’ve learned there are approximately one hundred thousand Jewish people living in Brazil, the majority in São Paolo, where many Jewish families settled during or after World War I. Jewish immigration was officially restricted during the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas under his Estado Novo, or New State, in the 1930s, but individuals still managed to immigrate through case-by-case negotiations. I’ve also learned that there are more people of Japanese descent in Brazil than in any other foreign country—around 1.5 million—starting with 165 families arriving by boat on June 18, 1908, to work in Brazil’s coffee plantations, thereby escaping poverty and unemployment in Japan. Now there are so many Japanese-Brazilian citizens that Liberdade, a district in São Paulo, looks more like Tokyo than a South-American neighbourhood, and many claim that some 40 percent of Japanese-Brazilian descendants are now mixed race.)
The Treasures from Shanghai: 5,000 Years of Chinese Art and Culture exhibit—on loan from the Shanghai Museum, and portraying the evolution of Chinese technology, art, and culture through objects from the Neolithic period (circa 3000 BC) to the Qing Dynasty (AD 1644–1911)—is jam-packed and we are not permitted to carry anything inside with us, not a purse, not a pen. My mother complains that she is a journalist and an exception for a pen should be made for her but the security guards shake their heads in the negative. Before we store our purses, she insists on applying her red lipstick one last time, forcing the coat-check girl to wait for her to complete the ritual, regardless of the hundreds of visitors in line behind us. Considering how anti-intellectual most of the world has become, how blissfully ignorant of world history, it’s incredible to see the insatiable appetite we still possess for old objects. It’s as if people no longer wish to understand the past, but still ache to touch it or own it. I suspect I’m the opposite. I’d rather understand the past than touch it, if this trip is any indication.
My mother translates the placards for me but I let her know that it’s fine if she wants to look at other display cases; she needn’t follow me about like a personal guide. I only want to see what you want to see, she replies. I don’t care for myself. Unless, of course, I am bothering you? Not at all, I say. I feel guilty because I’m here to get to know her, not to see Chinese cultural artifacts, no matter how rare and valuable. I should be grateful, thankful, and I am. Sort of. But I am also resentful, suffocated, overloaded. Mistrusting. As if my mother has rewritten all the placards of the past to suit her version of her history—doctored photographs, fraudulent documents, reassigned dates—and placed them safely behind glass. As an archive, my mother is unreliable, compromised, her methods of selection and preservation seriously suspect.
Today she activates her “angel” reel: I have never had a date since leaving your father (neither has he—surprised?). I am nice to everyone and I go to church regularly (I’m not even sure you’re nice to me). I educate through journalism (you give good reviews to bad art). I live an angel life that everyone says is superior to others (who is everyone?). I want to scream: How could such an angel leave her children and admit to being too fragile to contact them? But I know these stories aren’t meant to counter this sentiment exactly; deep down she is terribly guilty and repentant. It’s all so fucking Catholic, I just want to cry. And I can hear God chastising me, as Antônio Fagundes does his human companions in the film, lamenting human nature: Why do you people only see the value of something after losing it?
We will have lunch “where the rich people go,” my mother tells me, at the MAM restaurant. It’s not the first time that I wonder where my mother’s money comes from: how much she earns from writing (I’m sure the pay in Brazil for freelance journalism is modest, as it is in Canada); translating (a job at the Senate might have been lucrative, but not general translating work, and she’s retired from the Senate); teaching (she might have made a decent salary through university and college courses at one point, but she no longer teaches); inheritance (from her deceased father and through her mother’s living allowances—her mother bought each of the children condominiums in the same building); and where her total income would slot her into the nation’s economic class divisions (lower, mid, or upper-middle class). I wonder how much savings she has accumulated, if she’s had to delve into those funds to pay for her cancer surgeries or her prescriptions.
Even with a generously funded medical system, my father’s accident and subsequent illnesses (it’s difficult to ward off infections when you can’t feel them entering your system) were a constant financial drain. And as conservative governments in Canada and Ontario in the 80s and 90s slashed social and medical services budgets, my father’s financial burdens increased (items such as the metal hoist for lowering him into a weekly bath were, under the new system, non-essential, and so we had to rent them at prohibitively high prices). Furthermore, my father didn’t qualify for single-parent benefits because, at the time, the restrictive terminology indicated “single mother” benefits exclusively. Meaning that my father, paralyzed from the chest down, qualified for absolutely no parenting assistance, regardless of his condition.
Did my mother ever consider my father’s financial burdens? Did she ever wonder if her theatre tickets and buffet breakfasts and hotel rooms were at the expense of school clothes or goalie pads or computers? Did she realize how much of our daily existence depended on social services and local charity? And how ridiculous it seems to me that while she was buying a hundred separate tickets to see this or that “marvellous” film, my father was making phone call after phone call and writing letter upon letter begging for fee waivers, free sports equipment, and discounts on medical supplies? But since I can’t ask my mother about her financial situation or tell her about ours at the risk of it being misconstrued as emotional blackmail, I scan the menu for new Brazilian delicacies.
Cashew juice. I learn that cashews come from the end of a fruit—I honestly had no idea. I taste it sparingly, as it is not uncommon for people to discover they are allergic—American poet Elizabeth Bishop became so ill from it she missed her boat and remained in Brazil where she ended up meeting the love of her life, Lota de Macedo Soares, and settling down in the town of Samambaia for fifteen years.
Then, out of the blue, my mother asks me if Chris is religious.
I think we mean the word religious in different ways.
Oh yes, and when I—
I’m not finished, I say.
You see, you told me it was okay to ask questions, something I don’t like to do and know you are—
If you ask a question, you should let that person answer it.
Oh. Her lips are trembling. I’m shocked as I realize she is going to cry, here, once again in a fancy art restaurant, because I need more than a few words and two seconds to answer her complicated question. This is why I do not like to ask questions. There is no need to ask questions. Her shoulders are shaking now. I live a happy life inside my head and in my heart. There is no need to ask questions and upset people.
God hates questions. Questions imply doubt. Questions imply freedom. God is the ultimate dictator. No wonder my mother identifies with God and treats me like
a misguided sinner. But I want to push the matter because it’s becoming more and more important to me that she’s forced to acknowledge who I am, whether or not she wants to, and whether or not she likes me. (I realize that I don’t care if she likes me or not. Or if I like her. Maybe this is where I diverge from children of happy families. I don’t care about like or love any longer. I didn’t have it when I desperately needed it, so why would I seek it now from such a contaminated source? I just want us to see each other once for who we are. Even if it makes us unhappy.) That’s another obsession with you people, being happy all the time, God cries with exasperation in God Is Brazilian. I know she’s “happy” inside her head, acting the lead role in a formulaic romance film where the martyr mother will be showered with rewards and love in the end. I can sense that she’s frustrated that I have yet to drop to my knees and shower her feet with tears and kisses. That I have yet to ask her for forgiveness. Not the other way around, as I’d first thought. I’m not an innocent bystander of a senseless accident. I’m to blame. I’m to blame for some massive injury my mother has incurred. While I don’t yet understand this train of thinking, I must follow the tracks. I don’t want to crush her happiness, per se, but I do desire to shatter a few of her illusions. The ones to do with me. I can’t stand the person she has constructed inside her mind: a figment of her movie imagination, a stock character actress right out of central casting. I may also have a version of my mother living out her day-to-day tragedy in the film set of my own mind, but at least I’m making an effort to alter my projections along with her production notes. She is making no like concessions with me. I am an audience. And she only wants me around if I’m a doting audience. Like at a movie premier.
I will be quiet then, and let you answer the question. But when I’m about to, she stares longingly out the window.
Projection Page 11
