I have upset you, I offer.
Your perception and experience are important, Priscila, she replies, without meeting my gaze. I guess I need to learn how to communicate with you. I can still learn.
This small admittance gives me hope. Communication is a skill; it requires updating and upgrading, focus and commitment.
You know, in Brazil, people all talk at the same time . . .
I too need to learn how to communicate with her. Learning has been my lifelong occupation. My mother’s too. If we can’t make an effort to adjust our methods, what kind of students are we? We both might be hyper-literate, but words are never uncomplicated. We are like warring countries that through colonization mixed long ago and no matter how separate our identity claims we are linked by history, blood, shame. And here is a confession I am loath to admit: I am ashamed she is my mother. She is ashamed I am her daughter. It’s understandable to want to play along in an idealistic fantasy of pretend, at least to break the ice. At least not to take up more weapons between us.
As we re-emerge outside, I skip, perhaps like the little girl I once was, over to an amusing swing set sculpture, the seats upside-down busts of men’s heads. I love my name, she coos as I plop myself onto the middle bust, kicking out my legs. Theresa Catharina de Góes Campos. My name has benefited my life, my career. That’s the truth. She presents me her business card, the way children share a loved toy. Once again I note the startling title—Head of Ethics, Union of Journalists. But now a profounder irony intrudes: my mother’s academic title—Professor of Comunicação. Communications is her field of specialty.
Like a disappointed child at the end of recess, I slump off the swing set and wander aimlessly about the grounds until I find a more suitable sculpture for our predicament. An austere minimalist geometric sculpture in white marble, two identical rectangular shapes each with one rounded side, one upright the other upside down (upside-down things speak to me here), like two figures, touching but essentially opposite. I locate the title: Encontro e Desencontro. Meeting and Unmeeting. By Arcângelo Ianelli, 2002. A recent acquisition. Potentially constructed on the day I discovered my mother by accident on the internet. Perhaps the day I left my first phone message or the day she responded by email to tell me how happy she was to know I like swimming. Meeting and Unmeeting. Encontro e Desencontro. A curse or a simple reality of mothers and daughters the world over? I can’t unmeet her now.
In the “Making Of” segment on the God Is Brazilian DVD, writer and director Carlos Diegues discusses his love of road movies and how he utilizes the journey structure as the foundation of all of his films, even if specific characters are not literally rumbling down a road. When we choose a genre or a format, he argues, we’re sectioning life, remodelling it into a structure we can follow and understand. I don’t know what genre my mother and I are participating in. We too are definitely on the road, but whether this is comedy or tragedy, farce or satire, inspirational vehicle or warning exposé, I’m not yet sure. (This might be related to whether we are meeting or unmeeting.) I don’t even know who’s the good guy and who’s the villain. I could easily be cast as my mother’s worst nightmare. Could I also be her salvation? While I know it would please her to no end if I just wrapped my arms around her and begged, Mommy, let’s start over, let’s cry until everything is healed between us and Jit and my father, and then let’s hold hands and go shopping and to church, I just . . . can’t. Such a gesture would negate who I am. In life, unlike in art, I am a realist. My mother, an escapist. Can these two visions of life ever meet (does meeting equal escapism, unmeeting realism)? Even on the road in a once-in-a-lifetime miracle reunion? It’s cost us both enough to live through tragedy. What would it cost us to pull together for a happy ending?
I don’t sleep for long, but I sleep without interruption when I do. And I can fall asleep anywhere if I will it. At the doctor’s office, or on a bus, waiting for my mother to dress, anywhere. For this, God has made me tireless.
People think I am tireless too. This is an illusion. I need a great deal of sleep: eight to nine hours per night. I don’t sleep soundly though. I suffer from vivid nightmares (violent chase scenes with guns and knives, rapes, animal attacks, natural disasters) and I wake dozens of times per night. Nonetheless, I’m blessed with intense focus when I’m awake. And I love to work, love the chronology of work, and having a lot to show at the end of the day, like a pile of presents. If I don’t have much to show, that’s when frustration and depression descends in the form of self-doubt and self-chastisement; but if I’m working well, just humming along (Chris tells me when I’m typing without self-consciousness I am literally smiling and usually humming a tune), I’m giddy as I count pages (reading or writing), count miles I’ve run, count items I can check off my to-do list.
Reunion with Mother: checkmark.
Ten Things I Can
Check Off My Trip to Brazil List So Far
Meet Runaway Mother for the first time in twenty years.
Buy Brazilian poetry books and attempt crude translations.
Go to a movie with Mother.
See a Brazilian musical.
Swim on a São Paulo rooftop.
Spark first fight with Mother.
Visit Brazilian art museums and exhibitions.
Encounter an elaborate display of giant rabbits in human costumes amid a field of chocolate eggs.
Discuss divergent religious views with Mother.
Try cashew juice.
Not bad for just a handful of days. I squeeze my mother’s arm. I am having a wonderful time, I tell her, in part to convince myself and in part to thank her for all the bustling about she’s been doing on my behalf. It’s my version of an apology and she seems placated.
To Paulista shopping centre, she announces like a black-and-white film diva to Soares, who is reliably waiting for us, contentedly eating hot dogs grilled at the back of an old woman’s car trunk. Soares explains she has served her famous hot dogs to presidents and movie stars.
But that is second-class shopping, Soares argues.
Maybe we can afford it then, I banter back.
Mr. Soares no understand why you no live here, the hot-dog lady admonishes, waving a bony finger at my nose. If you like country, you stay. He try make you like country.
That’s sweet, I reply, and smile at Soares as he caresses his full stomach.
My mother tilts her face toward me and whispers: Don’t eat the hot dogs.
As we drive along Paulista Avenue, a street Soares states is “paved with money,” he points out that all the intersecting streets are named after countries, including a rue Canada. Brazil is the second biggest country in the world, not Canada. Your mother has a big heart, bigger than Brazil, he says.
My mother explains it is very common for Brazilians to claim Brazil is the second biggest country because in Canada we have too much land that people don’t actually live on but in Brazil people live everywhere.
It’s not that we can’t live there, we don’t want to, I counter, and Soares finds this incredibly amusing, chuckling to himself about it for the rest of the ride.
In Brazil, if you find a hole in the road, and throw a seed in it, by morning you’ll have glorious fruit. That is Brazil.
I look at my mother, who beams from Soares’s declaration. I thought if there was a hole in the road, Brazilians built another road. I suppose this is another option. Good. I sincerely hope he is right.
At the shopping centre (another plaza where she’s already seen every movie currently playing) my mother buys me several items of clothing: a playful leopard-print sheer blouse, a sci-fi-inspired turquoise off-the-shoulder evening dress, and elegant black dress pants with a sheer black sash. (I will end up wearing all three for years to come.) My mother likes colourful, artistic prints, designs of flowers or circles or wavy lines. She does not wear black and does not like to see anyone in black, in honour of her father who hated the colour. But she buys me the black pants nonetheless, because, she c
oncedes, I am Canadian and Canadians mistakenly think black is a colour. I am constantly offering to pay, but she won’t hear of it. This is all I get to do for you, she sighs, and since she is somewhat right about this, I accept the gifts. I cannot hide the fact that I do love clothes and Brazil is one of the centres of world fashion. Here clothes are central to the personality of the country. It’s one of my only complaints about Canada; with the exception of the French in Montreal, Canadians dress without imagination, thinking only of shelter from the elements and comfort, like postal workers.
I also tell her how I will miss Soares once we are in Brasilia. I have grown so fond of him, I would like him to come with us. One of the other themes consistent in Diegues’s road movies is the exploration of how strangers become attached to each other through the act of travel. Soares is part of our search for understanding, even if our lives are irrefutably distant in enumerable ways.
He is a good family man, she agrees. You cannot pay for what Soares is. His kindness. And he is very fond of you too. He thinks you are beautiful.
As we shop, I admit I am nervous about committing all the family names to memory, and ask my mother if she would mind creating a list for me of everyone I will meet in Brasilia. All the family members have been christened with Catholic names and names from the royal family, exclusively. My mother’s name, Theresa, is typically Catholic, a saint name, but derives from the Greek and means “harvester.” My own name also derives from Biblical origin: Priscila, or Prisca, was one of the founding members of the Christian Church. I have also been led to believe that the Samaritan woman who gives Jesus water at the well is sometimes referred to as Priscila. The name means “ancient, venerable.” My brother’s name, Amerjit, is Sikh meaning “forever victorious,” and my father’s, Avtar, “holy incarnation.” Uppal means “stone.” I am an ancient stone—difficult to move. Difficult, I imagine, to harvest.
You do not need to know anyone’s name. Everyone is there to see you. But I will write you a list, like you’ve asked. Do you think I could buy a gift for Amerjit too? The most common question people ask me is if your father knows you are here. I say no, I don’t think so.
Yes, he knows, I tell her. And he’s been good about it. Which is true, although I could hear the disappointment and fear in his voice when I told him I’d found her and wanted to visit her, in Brazil no less. To my father this reconnection is an indictment of his parenting. I can’t pretend to have no complaints on that score, or I should say I can’t pretend that I didn’t used to have complaints on that score—there are good reasons I left home at fifteen—but I find it embarrassing when grown adults complain about how their parents raised them, unless they were seriously abused. In fact, I gave a talk recently where, to encourage the English-as-a-second-language students to participate, they were instructed to write their questions anonymously on pieces of paper that would be drawn out of a box by the host. One audience member asked: How do you know when you’ve become an adult? Without batting an eye, I responded: When you stop blaming your parents. I didn’t prepare my answer—it was the first thing that came to mind. Of course, this event took place several years after my trip to Brazil, and perhaps in 2003 I was still blaming my mother for some things, even if I didn’t want to. I might still have been blaming my father for some things too, but I didn’t come to Brazil to hurt my father. I thought about keeping the trip a secret from him, but eventually decided dishonesty would be even more cruel. My father raised me to be truthful, to confront hard facts and ugly conditions. He didn’t ask me why I wanted to go, he just nodded the way he does when he receives bad medical reports—disappointing, but expected.
I wouldn’t send the gift to the house—he still lives with our father. But I can give it to him directly next time he visits me in Toronto.
My mother’s eyes widen with hope. Do you really think he’d accept a gift from me?
I hear God again—as an atheist it’s contradictory how much I enjoy representations of God in film (as well as priests and nuns and monks)—telling the young orphan girl, Madá: Everything a human can imagine can exist, Madá. It’s only a matter of training.
I think he will, I offer, which obviously comforts her as she nods her head in agreement, a woman who can’t fathom calling her son anything but Amerjit, even though I’ve told her several times that he legally changed his name to Jit. And I believe this to be true, even though when I took my brother out to inform him I was going on this trip he wished me luck but expressed no interest in hearing about the outcome and much more interest in whether or not the sausage on his pizza would be mild or hot and spicy. My brother has never refused a gift in his life—“free sample” is one of his favourite phrases, and we’ve both learned to accept kindnesses and aid from the strangest of places. Besides, it’s hard for children to refuse gifts from their parents. A matter of training.
He likes sports, I tell her. The entire Erinbrook Crescent bungalow décor is an odd mix of deteriorated 1960s furniture, medical equipment, piles of files, and hockey and baseball trophies and posters; a testament to the twining of my father’s and brother’s lives. It is a combination that has scared off many a potential serious girlfriend for my brother, as within seconds of entering the premises and shaking my father’s trembling hand these naive ladies soon realize that my brother’s love comes with an extra-heavy burden.
Soccer! In Brazil we are the very best at soccer! We have soccer shirts, soccer hats, soccer shoes, soccer flags, soccer towels, soccer telephones, soccer placemats, soccer chairs. . . . Does he like soccer?
I’m not sure, I say with reservation, hoping I can guide her to the right gift, one that doesn’t forcefully announce my brother is related to her or to Brazil. Her face drops for a moment, so I quickly add, I’m not sure he has a favourite soccer team, but something soccer-related would be great.
We settle on a silver desk clock in the shape of a soccer ball. (Innocuous enough to my mind that he need never think of my mother if he decides to keep it.) As Soares drives us and our many other packages tucked in the trunk back to the hotel, my mother clutches the tiny ticking box to her heart.
Soares
6
stella dallas
Helen Morrison: I didn’t know anyone could be so unselfish.
After only a few hours of stomach-cramping sleep, I wake to this mantra: Everything must go well for the next few days. We cannot get into an argument. Everything must go well for the next few days. We cannot get into an argument. I am so distraught by how little progress we seem to be making, I put my disposable contacts in twice. The bathroom mirror and sink go blurry—pricks of pain sewing flesh around my head, eyes gushing tears until I manage to flush them out.
Although there is nothing I like to do less when I am travelling than park in front of a television, I ask if we can watch a few minutes of CNN to keep up with some world news. My mother tells me she has three televisions in her apartment that are on all day long. She likes to watch several shows at the same time, especially soccer matches, whereas I don’t even have basic cable. Top headlines: the Union of European Nations is becoming an even stronger economic force, and the escalating casualties in the war in Iraq. Brazilians are very critical of the Iraqi situation. Ads for the Communist Party in Brazil feature posters of President Bush sporting a Hitler mustache.
Today, as Soares escorts us about, my mother instructs me never to engage in any sort of conversation with people on the street. Men and women of all ages, children too, sell random goods at traffic lights: candy, cellphone chargers, plastic blow-up toys of Scooby-Doo and bunny rabbits, lottery tickets, bottled water. Hands thrust bills and coins out car windows. My mother never buys anything off the street. She keeps her hands and body in the safety of the car. Me, I wish we could buy some of the fresh fruit, but know better than to ask. Unless we are in a museum or shopping mall, or people are wearing official badges and name tags, my mother fears strangers. Soares’s car is her protection from the brutal urban reality of the hun
ger, poverty, and violence of São Paulo. It is mine too.
The Museu de Arte de São Paulo is celebrating fifty years of art donors by mounting an exhibition to highlight key philanthropists in the gallery’s history. As I daydream about having millions of dollars to spend on contemporary art, my mother lists her accomplishments as a journalist (she is a “very famous journalist,” an educator “of the highest order,” with “well-respected friends”). I keep advising myself to just nod and say, oh yes, that’s great, and keep walking, but I’m horrified by the tirade of conceit, and I can’t help skepticism from creeping into my daydream, wondering how much of what she says is true. I searched the internet for information about her professional activities before I arrived, and it is evident she is a publishing journalist, has penned numerous articles, and contributed to books; however, without knowledge of the Brazilian publishing and academic scene, it’s difficult to gauge her status in her field. Does she think I am just as successful, completing a PhD in literature, having already landed a tenure-stream professorship at the third-largest Canadian university, two published books of poetry plus a novel that was even written up in a São Paulo newspaper before my arrival (my mother upset that the brief mention of her included in the article without consulting with me was inaccurate)? How is she to gauge my own accomplishments without proper context, without knowledge of the Canadian publishing scene and North American academic standards, and without having watched any of them unfold?
My mother’s soliloquies reek of so much hyperbole that it would be naive of me to take her word for truth. I need to consider that my mother might be a compulsive liar. Delusional people frequently are. Deep down, I’m torn: I’m selfishly attracted to the idea of my mother as a top-tier journalist (for its implications of artistic heredity), yet I’d also welcome the karmic suitability of stripping her down to the realm of charlatan. Something I never would have predicted at the outset of this trip, it’s become incredibly important to me to understand the scope of my mother’s delusions and the uses of them in her life. Which means I’m trapped by her mouth: I need her to keep talking to reveal her uttermost dimensions even while it takes Herculean strength to keep my fingers out of my ears.
Projection Page 12
