But it was what it was.
Soon, there was greater poverty. Greater concentration of wealth. Greater unemployment. Greater violence. Greater deterioration of city life. A greater number of armored cars among the upper-middle class as they drove through the streets, where more and more unemployed families were forced to live. Greater corruption that became the currency of the daily newspapers, which she never read to avoid filling her head with such dark news.
Ah, this country!
She would speak at length with her father about her perplexity and ask him to explain why nothing seemed to go right here. But how was he to explain a thing like that? Of course, Chico had his theories, but, strictly speaking, no one could account for the predatory and perverse behavior of the Brazilian upper classes.
But now isn’t the time for such thoughts.
She looks at herself through the rear-view mirror, retouches the striking red lipstick on her thick lips, and smiles to herself: she’s pregnant! She’s going to have a child! Isn’t it a wonderful thing?
She gets a kick out of herself.
She gets a kick out of the way she would blow challenges out of proportion just a few years earlier. Her favorite response to a problem was always to create a mini-drama out of almost everything, as though by exaggerating her problems she could create enough distance to laugh at them and, who knows, reduce her burden. She would spend hours on the telephone with her father in the Northeast, or with her grandmother in Brasília; or with her uncles, one in Brasília, two others in São Paulo, giving them a report of her daily theatrics. Her telephone bill was always sky-high, it was her Achilles’ heel when it came to budgeting.
She can remember how complex and tortured her choice of a profession was. Her grandmother had been the first woman in the family to have what they call a profession—that of an educator; Maria Flor, on the other hand, found herself facing myriad decisions: what did she wish to be? What sort of work would she like to do?
Her Uncle Lauro had given her a single bit of advice: whatever you decide to do, let it be something you truly like, that you can dedicate yourself to with all your heart. This is the most important thing and it will make all the difference throughout your life: to enjoy your work.
But she enjoyed doing so many things!
First, she had thought about film. No doubt influenced by her two filmmaker uncles, she had considered becoming an actress. She could try her luck in the theater or in soap operas. The problem was that, in order to be eligible for roles other than the chubby girl, she would have to diet constantly, and this did away with just about any desire to become an actress. Next, she thought about becoming a ballerina: she’d studied ballet from a young age and he’d always been told her pointe position was the most graceful at the academies where she’d danced. To become a professional dancer, however, she also needed to be thin, and would have had to make her decision earlier to have sufficient time to build her technique—or was she mistaken? Whatever the case, it was out of the question.
After that, she thought about becoming a singer. Though she had an interesting voice, it wasn’t as good as Gal Costa’s, for example. Maria Flor had Gal’s bow-shaped mouth, and she was always wearing bright red lipstick, but her voice, though pretty, was nothing extraordinary. Never good enough.
When it came to science, she lacked all interest. She hadn’t exactly been an enthusiastic student and had no desire to enter the research field, spend years and years bent over one invention to discover another. That wasn’t who she was.
When it came to the humanities, she thought it was all a tad boring and a bit useless. She shared her generation’s cynicism and didn’t even think it was possible to better understand how societies functioned, much less change them. She thought that humanity’s stupidity, cruelty, and selfishness were indecipherable and she maintained a distance from politics. Just look at what had happened to her mother . . . ! There was, understandably, no solution to her incompatibility with that field . . .
Architecture, law, journalism, economics—no, no, no, and . . . no.
Medicine, odontology, and other such professions—no way; she couldn’t stand the sight of blood and had a strong tendency toward hypochondria, she had often found herself suffering the symptoms of any disease she’d learned the least bit about. In her head, she’d contracted practically all the illnesses that had sprouted up in recent years: extreme stress, depression, anxiety. She had developed a habit of self-medicating and had racked up reward points at the corner pharmacy, where she was a guaranteed client. There could be no doubt, she didn’t have the objective distance to work in that field.
Business administration—NO WAY. She was horrified at the thought of business administration. She believed herself to have truly undergone a traumatic experience thanks to the field: the most disgusting guy she ever met had earned his degree in business administration. The third-generation heir was a poor imbecile who had thought that he could buy everything with his family’s money and had tried to take Maria Flor by force in an episode that, however incredible a story it might make, she still prefers not to discuss. He was the whitest guy she’d ever seen, you could almost see right through him he was so white, a watery blond, with red eyes and white eyelashes: if you come across men with white eyelashes, her subconscious had told her, run the other way. Such men were ugly and repulsive—they likely had tiny dicks and were premature ejaculators. Actually, she was so disgusted by guys like that at the time that she imagined some obscure motive for her feelings, something she wasn’t aware of, but which, in some form or another, was there, deep inside her mind, always ready to appear at any moment.
One day, as she was telling her grandmother about her disgust for men with such white skin, reddish eyes and white eyelashes, Rosa Alfonsina recalled a detail from the time she would make desperate trips to military offices in an attempt to have some news of Lígia. She had no desire to expose her Maria Flor to this frequent torture and had never taken the girl of three or four with her to such places. One day, however, there had been a sliver of a chance she would be admitted. Along the way, she was going to leave Maria Flor with a friend, but there was misunderstanding and her friend was not at home. Already late and without anyone to leave the girl with, Rosa was forced to take her granddaughter with her.
It was all for nothing, as it always had been; on that day, as well, she was unable to discover anything about Lígia’s whereabouts.
Her hopes had been raised by the fact that the person who answered her phone call was a general she had known from the early days of Brasília, Antonio Camargo Garcia. He had been very friendly on the telephone, telling her that he did indeed remember the little Lígia who played with his children amid the gigantic machines carving out what would become Lago Paranoá. And, of course, he remembered Rosa Alfonsina quite well, the exuberant wife of Doctor Túlio. He would see what could be done.
The busy general wasn’t certain what it was that, against his principles, compelled him to look with certain deference at the case of the young disappeared woman. He sat thinking about how he’d remembered Rosa Alfonsina because she had been a pretty woman toward whom, at one time, he’d looked with the hungry gaze of a starving dog.
He couldn’t know—and would never know—that it was something in his blood that caused him to remember her and her daughter, the little girl with her short little bangs and extraordinary dark eyes, who he’d seen laughing and playing with his children one day. Something in his blood that had the same origin as the blood of Rosa and Lígia: he was a descendent of Gregório Antonio Garcia, brother to Clara Joaquina.
But the vestige of such an old and, in the end, distant relation was incapable of swaying a general of the military government for longer than a few moments. When he learned that the young girl suspected by her grandmother to have been disappeared had in fact died under torture at the hands of police in Rio, General Garcia preferred to avoid a meeting. He asked his assistant to inform the kind lady in his waiting room
that there was nothing he’d been able to find out and that he was too busy to receive her personally. If she wanted, she could reschedule for another day, perhaps she’d have more luck then.
As she’d left the ministry, Rosa had been unable to contain her tears, and Maria Flor, standing at her side, noticed. There was more: they had been followed by the assistant to the general, the strong, tall, and blonde fellow who had been watching them in the waiting room.
He was the type of guy with a loud and grating voice that, as he told Rosa that the general could not see her, repeated, after each of his clumsy justifications, “You understand, don’t you, ma’am?” as though he suffered from some nervous tic. “The general is a very busy man. You understand, don’t you, ma’am? He needs to dedicate his time to his priorities. You understand, don’t you, ma’am?” The fellow had followed them quite some way and surely the girl had noticed her grandmother’s jitters and tears. Well, as it so happened, this guy met her granddaughter’s exact description of the abject man: a tall, strong man who almost glowed he was so white, with watery blond hair and horrifying white eyelashes! Yes, her granddaughter was right: there was no doubt he had a tiny dick and was a premature ejaculator.
Maria Flor had spent almost all of her early childhood with her grandmother and uncles.
The house where they lived was always filled with the sound of boys, Lígia’s brothers: Leandro, Lauro, and Laércio. All of them were studying at university, and though they all supported the Left and participated in student protests and marches, none of them took up arms as their older sister Lígia had. Leandro and Lauro loved movies and wanted to change the world and the Brazilian people through their films and their art. Laércio, the youngest, was a bit more suspicious and cynical than his brothers, and though he agreed that everything was wrong, he saw no solutions on the horizon, whether near or far. He kept to himself, looking on, without committing to anything. He was studying economics.
Maria was the apple of their eye, the little girl who they stuffed full of candies, lollipops, and chocolates.
Rosa Alfonsina had become a widow in the most unexpected and premature way. Túlio had barely reached fifty when he died in a single-propeller airplane crash during a tropical storm, one of those downpours that darken the sky without warning and seem to signal the end of the world. A doctor, he had been summoned to an emerald mine a few hours outside of Brasília, where a malaria epidemic had taken hold. He had gone to have a look at the situation, spent a week there, horrified by the conditions in which those men, women, and children lived, digging trenches in the earth gray with schist in search of the glimmering green stones. He saved many lives that week, including that of the son of one of the big mining bosses, who insisted on giving him a pure emerald in return, nearly the size of a quail’s egg, a stone later discovered inside his clenched hand and which Rosa wore around her neck to that day, dangling from a gold chain she never removed, not even when she took a bath.
Following Túlio’s death, Rosa’s life changed in several ways. The most important, perhaps, was that she began to work. As luck would have it, Brasília was a city that created jobs in those years of growth, when the transfer of the nation’s capital gave rise to all sorts of tall tales that caused the government workers in Rio to sell their souls and anything else they did not have to move to a city without the sea and—what was even stranger—no street corners! The city with no corners was the terrible nickname that stigmatized Brasília during its first decades of life, scared off many people, and left many posts across government organs vacant, given the requirement that government workers move from Rio to the new capital. The utopic vision that had given birth to the city was so unreal and disconnected from modern life that for many, it became incomprehensible and unbearable. Meanwhile, for others, like Rosa, it was exactly for this same reason that the city wielded fascination and seduction.
It wasn’t difficult for her, wife to one of the pioneers of Brasília, to find a job in the Education Ministry, despite the fact she’d never worked before. There she could stay without being bothered, as though the job were merely a way to pass the time, as though she were a prop, or a furniture support, one among the countless employees who find in government work the means toward an easy life. Rosa, however, was not a woman to sit still.
At the time, it was widely believed that at forty years of age, women started down an irreversible path toward old age. But Rosa didn’t think so. With all of her forty years, she felt alive, more world-weary, much wiser and more beautiful than on the day she’d paraded around as a beauty contestant with her cloak, her scepter, and her crown. She had four precious children to raise and was not about to allow their lives to be filled with sadness just because fate had robbed them of a paternal shoulder. Túlio had been the most incredible and beloved person she had known, but, if she had been given more time to live, live she would.
Rosa began to work with remarkable diligence and creativity for someone who had never worked before. She unearthed from deep within her memory what she had learned in her teaching courses and sought out the latest books on education, found intensive courses and conferences at the university, went back to school, to get informed, to figure out what needed to be done. Over time, she gained prestige in the education field. Her purpose was to combat the easy optimism that reasoned that every underdeveloped country would naturally develop, as though it were following its own necessarily unique path toward progress. To Rosa’s mind, a country—any country—confronts problems, conflicts, and obstacles that it may or may not manage to overcome and take a step forward. It was imperative that people worked toward that goal, and she sought to be one of those people.
She became a bit meatier, the wide hips that were a family trait grew wider, but her exuberance and joy remained the same. She had several suitors, but she had a habit of repeating that she would only marry again if she fell in love one day, otherwise, she would remain as she was, she was fine just as she was.
During the years of military repression, when her house was constantly monitored by the police and she was followed on the streets, Rosa had just begun working at the Education Ministry. As she’d always had many friends, ever since the time when Brasília was just one big construction site, she knew absolutely everyone, including several colonels and a few generals.
At the beginning, when things were still very much a student movement, she had obtained, through her personal contacts, permission to visit a friend of Lígia’s who had been imprisoned and of whom no one had received any news, or learned where another jailed student was to send him clothes, food, and other such things. As the situation worsened, though, this crack in the door became increasingly less accessible. People she had known from when the city was scattered with tents stopped greeting her. Wives to military men, women who just a short time earlier had made frequent visits to her house to ask her to share the recipes for which she had become known, suddenly pretended not to notice her.
When Lígia disappeared in Rio, Rosa’s trips from military precinct to military precinct in search of news of her daughter, where she was and what condition she was in, rendered no information. At times she would spend entire afternoons day after day waiting to be seen in the waiting rooms of some colonel or other she knew, only to be sent away with a thinly veiled rudeness. She was eventually prohibited from entering any of the military ministries or other precincts throughout the city.
Those were dark days, hellish days.
Arriving home, after one more day in the useless pursuit of news, Rosa would sit Maria Flor on her lap and tell the girl everything she knew about her mother. She would show the girl some of Lígia’s photo albums, would speak in detail of even the most insignificant events of Lígia’s childhood, what she was like as a teenager, how she had dressed, what she liked, her favorite foods and colors, everything one could say to the daughter about the mother she would never know.
Maria Flor remembers well these hours spent on her grandmother’s lap listening to sto
ries of Lígia, those were her favorite stories, much more than any tale of fairies or princesses. Later there came the stories her father told her, of the country that he and her mother had fought to change, why they had engaged in the struggle, what had happened, why Lígia died the way she did.
Maria Flor has only two photos in which she appears with her mother: one from the hospital from the day she was born, and the other in her parents’ arms, taken on the day they left Brasília.
In the photos, Lígia is thin, petite, with long hair and hypnotic eyes like headlights that light up her face.
There was a time when Maria Flor often compared herself to her mother. The two women are rather different: for one, Maria Flor is tall, likes to cut her hair short, and the only thing she inherited from her mother is the dark color and the long, dark eyelashes. She’s nowhere near as beautiful as Lígia was, she’s sure of that. Her grandmother used to tell her she was wrong, that she was every bit as beautiful as Lígia, but her grandmother was the queen of saying such things, and the fact that the old woman thought so didn’t make it true. And anyway, she actually wanted her mother to be more beautiful, it gave Maria Flor one more reason to admire her.
There was one other aspect, at that time, in which Maria Flor felt she was different from her mother: her mother was thin, the line of her collarbone well defined. At the time, Maria Flor still cared about such things, she had just returned from France and was heavier than she had ever been.
Today, Maria Flor has mixed feelings about the years she lived in France with her father.
She had liked being at her father’s side, but she sorely missed her grandmother and her uncles and hated the dark European winter. She hated the dull, wet cold, which had caused her to curl up in a ball and chatter her teeth. She also didn’t like the kids at the school she would attend during the day, boys and girls who entertained themselves by pulling her hair, calling her “latina,” as though it were an insult, and stealing the chocolate bars that she had a habit of carrying in her pocket as a form of consolation. Her only friends were, like herself, children of exiles, children who, for the most part, formed a group that, despite the best efforts of the adults, felt weighed down by the heavy cloud of their past, of denunciations, of suffering, of sadness. These elements were a constant, in the adults’ conversations, in the news coming from Brazil, in their plans to return, in the stories they told, in the vague darkness that clouds the future of any exile.
Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters Page 31
