The Caregiver

by Samuel Park

  Janete looked puzzled.

  My mother began to push past Janete, who wasn’t going to be left behind without more of an explanation.

  “Where’re you going? This isn’t our stop,” said Janete, loudly, a touch of irritation in her voice.

  “I have to go,” my mother repeated, trying to squeeze past the people around us. They were forming a solid wall, not a centimeter to be spared. I kept asking where we were going and what was wrong, but she wouldn’t answer me. The people around us, unsure of why we were moving to the back of the bus, were unwilling to make way. Somebody actually cursed at my mother. I could feel my mother’s palm getting clammy in my hand. She looked back, right past me, and I mimicked her, shadowlike, and saw that the man, who hadn’t noticed us before, was now looking in our direction. The expression on his face changed, and if before he looked merely tired, now he looked alert and angry, as though my mother had picked his pockets when I wasn’t looking. In that bus, in that moment, my mother and I no longer seemed anonymous, and I was surprised to realize how much of a friend anonymity was, how much of a comfort.

  “Out of my way, out of my way, please,” my mother kept saying, as she fought against the current. She was openly panicking by now, squeezing herself by force through the crowd. Several people gave her dirty looks, and some others let out short expressions of complaint. But my mother was a pit bull. When I looked back, I saw that the man was coming after us. I had never before felt such a gallop in my heart. My mother’s body was the barometer that allowed me to measure the amount of joy or pleasure to be had, or, in this instance, fear.

  When we reached the turnstile, the fare collector shook his finger No, but my mother ignored him and crouched on the floor, squeezing under the metal bar with her skinny body. I did the same. Once we got up, we were greeted by what felt like a thousand stares, from passengers both sitting and standing. Their big, round, accusing eyes, locked on to us, reminded me of owls in the night, perched at ease in their own element.

  “Next time you must exit through the front,” I could hear the fare collector fuming.

  Finally, after what felt like an impossibly long time, the bus stopped. The doors opened in front of us with a loud, yanking noise, and before the new trove of passengers could board, my mother and I rushed down the steps. As we did so, our linked fingers felt like too-tight knots.

  As we stepped away from the bus, my mother seemed to dip into enough safety to allow us to look back. We saw, through the window, the man stopped by the turnstile. He was taller and heavier than I realized, with deep-set eyes and thin lips. The fare collector was standing now, physically restraining him. They looked like they were having an argument. The man pointed to my mother. He kept pointing, more angrily each time, in the direction that we’d gone, and the fare collector kept shaking his head.

  The bus started moving again. The last thing I saw, though, was Janete, in another window, looking out at us, her eyes forlorn, misbegotten. Left by herself, under the lights of the bus, she still looked grand and glamorous, but there was a sadness about her that I’d never noticed before. It was so clear now, seeing her among strangers, with the rectangular frame of the window flattening her, telling me what to pay attention to. It wasn’t the sadness of my mother and me leaving her, I was stubbornly sure. I sensed something generous about her sadness, an outward trajectory. As though it came with a need to provide solace to us.

  “Why did we have to leave?” I asked my mother, as we watched the bus drive away. “Who was that man?”

  My mother took a deep breath, still recovering.

  “I hate Carnaval,” she said, simply. “It washes off all the scum onto the beach.”

  We took the 219 bus back to Copa, and the entire time my mother kept glancing over her shoulder. But back in our apartment, she seemed at ease as we sat in front of the glowing television, waiting to see who’d won Carnaval that year.

  “It’s all corrupt,” my mother said, the most loquacious she’d been since we got home, her legs on top of each other on the couch. She had pretty much clammed up after we’d left Janete, answering my queries with monosyllables or non sequiturs. I left her alone, because when you grow up with a moody mother, you learn and relearn the futility of wanting things to make sense.

  “What do you mean?” I wasn’t asking for the meaning of the word corrupt, which greeted me from every newsstand from the time I was able to read. But I was happy to hear her voice, and I wanted more of it.

  “They never give it to the school that did the best job,” my mother explained, as the winners were about to be announced. “They always give it to the school that provides the most money to the association. It’s not really fair to the dancers. Or the artists and designers, who work so hard all year. The government wants to put on a good show for the rest of the world, and they meddle in Carnaval the way they do everything else.”

  My mother rarely spoke of the military regime, and I found it strange that she would bring it up so suddenly. “Do the dancers get paid? How do they get chosen to work on the floats?” I asked, changing the subject, watching as a middle-aged man in a tan suit—who looked nothing like Carnaval—stood at the podium, accepting the prize.

  “I don’t know. But it’s time to go to bed,” said my mother, as though we’d been up just to find out the winner, and not because the bus ride with Janete had taken the wind out of our sails and we needed time to recover. She turned the knob to shut the TV off, and the man on the podium shrank down to a single line and then disappeared.

  It was understood that on nights like this, when it was likely to be noisy outside, with fights breaking out and drunks hollering, that my mother would let me share her bed instead of me sleeping on my own twin on the other side of the room. I climbed under the blue mosquito netting hanging over her bed, being very careful not to lift the netting too high, just in case there was an insect nearby waiting for a chance to sneak in. Years later, I would take for granted that if I were awakened in the middle of the night by hysterical laughter outside the window, or the sound of sirens, or a woman screaming, I’d be able to bury my ear into her shoulder and fall back asleep.

  chapter two

  I THINK THE MOMENT THAT changed my mother’s life—though she did not know this at the time—began when Raul explained the laws of subtraction.

  We were standing in his sound booth once again. I stared at the tape, which usually moved clockwise, then counterclockwise, and was now dormant.

  My mother wanted what was her due.

  “There must be a mistake,” she said, counting the cash. “This is not what we agreed to.”

  Raul took off his headphones and sat back in his chair. It was the first time I noticed that his chair had wheels, and it was hard not to ask him if I could take a turn.

  “We agreed on thirteen hundred cruzeiros,” my mother continued. “There’s only four hundred here.”

  Raul then explained to her something I had learned and mastered a year earlier in math class: the laws of subtraction.

  “You’ve been taking cash advances at pretty much every single session,” he said patiently.

  “Of course. I have to eat, and my daughter does, too,” she said fiercely, gesticulating an arm in my direction.

  Raul sighed and pulled out from a drawer a receipt book with alternating white and pink pages. He flipped through the front and began subtracting the amounts noted on each page. The numbers added up. I knew because I did the math in my head. It was easy to, because she always cashed out pretty even amounts. Fifty here, ten there, five on a day when she felt disciplined. I just had to ignore the last two zeros and hop two houses to the left and subtract.

  “Understood?” Raul asked.

  “How am I supposed to live on this?” my mother asked. “I mean, could you?”

  Raul looked out at the black sea in front of him. He took all the levers in one corner, and, with a single stroke of his hand, pushed them all down to 0. I thought it must be fun to have a job that
gave such power to your fingers.

  “I don’t make much more than you, Ana. The difference is, I pack my lunch,” he said, pointing to the tin container sitting on the spare chair; some of the leftover beans still swam in their own juice.

  I suddenly felt guilty about all the Guaraná sodas I had ordered at the counters during our lunches.

  I really wanted to leave, but, to my surprise, my mother took the chair next to Raul. He had to rush to move his leftovers or she would’ve sat on them. She stared at him directly.

  “I want my salary. The full thirteen hundred,” she said, crossing her arms and legs, as though locking herself into place.

  Raul looked at her, bewildered. The sound room was so cramped and their chairs were so close to each other that their knees were almost touching. I wondered if Raul was trying to figure out how to get rid of my mother without losing her forever.

  “You’re turning your problem into my problem,” said Raul, a touch of anger creeping into his voice.

  “That’s right. And you know what goes really well with a problem? A solution.”

  My mother started to impatiently shake her right leg, which sat propped on top of her left knee. Her face turned to steel, and no look from Raul could chip it. I crouched on the floor, my bum on my ankle, like a frog, making myself small, and almost disappeared into the wall.

  “Look, if you want to make more money, I may have something for you,” said Raul.

  “My daughter’s sitting right there, Raul,” my mother said, waving her arms in my direction. “And her ears may be smaller than yours, but they work just fine.”

  Raul shook his head, staring at the ground. “It’s nothing like that. You know I respect you.” He hesitated for a moment, as if struggling with some decision. “Although, maybe you should have her step outside for a moment.”

  “Leave her outside by herself? I can tell, my friend, that you don’t have children,” said my mother. Though she admonished him, I could hear her voice warming a bit. “If it’s not dirty business, you can say it in front of her. She’s very mature.”

  Raul glanced at me and then back to my mother. He spoke more quietly, as though he’d pushed down one of the levers on his sound board.

  “It’s acting work, but it’s a little dangerous.” Even whispering, he sounded hesitant. “You’d have to pretend to be someone you’re not. But not in a movie. In real life.”

  My mother looked intrigued, a small smile appearing on her face. She stopped shaking her leg and sat forward, almost folding her body into Raul’s.

  “I think of myself as a very good actress.”

  “I think so, too,” said Raul. “And in this situation, the ability to improvise, to stay in character, no matter what happens, would be very important.”

  “I’m interested.”

  Raul leaned back on his chair and shook his head.

  “I said it may be dangerous.” He was warning her, but I couldn’t tell if he was doing that to protect her or to protect himself.

  “Being hungry scares me more.”

  Outside, after being in the darkened booth, it took a while to adjust to the sun. My mother, too, took a moment to compose herself. I realized the self-assurance in front of Raul had been an act, as I saw her rest her hands on her hips and exhale two, three times, slowly, as she did sometimes after scenes. The sun beat down on her, making her translucent—as though I could almost see her insides. I watched her breathe and waited. A steep hill awaited us, a reminder that we cariocas have chosen to lay our asphalt over igneous rock. Below, the street unfurled like a stairway with a thousand steps. Above, the slope stared at us dauntingly, without offering a hand.

  I didn’t know much about my mother’s life before she had me, but I knew she was born in a tiny town in the desert Northeast. In her home, when she lived with her parents and her two brothers, they had no electricity and no running water. They lived in a hut, their property separated from their neighbors’ by long strings nailed to the soil. For windows there were empty square spaces in the walls that allowed in a constant stream of dust and sand. My grandmother apparently spent most of her time with a broom in her hand. My grandfather worked as a cane-cutter in some nearby sugar fields, and because he owned his own machete, and didn’t get a machete rental fee taken out of his paycheck, he brought home more money than his coworkers, enough even to pay for a pound of meat once in a while. My uncles joined him as cane-cutters as soon as they were tall enough to chop the stalks. My grandmother stayed home and cooked corn bread and sweet potatoes.

  My mother was the only child in her family who didn’t work. That was decided when she was six years old, when it became clear that she was unusually beautiful. She took after neither of her parents, though she bore a strong resemblance to her maternal grandmother. My grandparents recognized some potential in my mother’s features, and decided that they would raise her to marry off to a well-to-do man. My mother, therefore, was allowed to go to school instead of going to work. She was not even expected to help my grandmother around the house, for fear that it would make her rough.

  My mother never discussed why she left the Northeast, and though she did so before I was born, I never asked. Around the time I became aware of her origins, the Globo TV network began airing a public drive to help the Northeast, asking for donations. So I understood the Northeast to be troubled and worthy of charity, the kind of place anyone would leave if they had the chance.

  I knew what my grandparents looked like because of some photos that my mother had kept. In one of them, my grandfather sat smiling on a wicker chair, in what must’ve been their home. My grandmother perched on the arm of the chair, looking dour and surprised. Their teenage children wrapped themselves around them, all three of them peering at something beyond the frame. My grandparents did not look like mean or vicious people, but their visages offered no clue as to their relationship with my mother. When I asked her why they never wrote to her, she said that they didn’t know how to write, and that was that. When I asked her why she never went to visit them, she said that it cost too much, and it took too long to take a bus all the way north, which, indeed, required crossing the entire country. When I asked her if they ever wanted to meet me, my mother told me, matter-of-factly, that they didn’t know that I existed.

  They didn’t know that she’d kept me, she said, using these exact words. I asked no more questions.

  She had left, I was sure, for the same reason everyone else left and moved to the south: for opportunities. It never occurred to me that my presence in her belly had anything to do with it. It never occurred to me that when my grandfather found out, he kicked her out of the house with only the clothes on her back, and told her never to return.

  When she first got to Rio, my mother worked as a live-in maid, a caretaker of sorts, in a small apartment in Copacabana. Her employer, a woman in her fifties who had no husband and no children of her own, didn’t mind that my mother was raising a child. My mother and I slept together on a twin bed and had our own bathroom, which ran only cold water. On Sundays, we went to the beach and built ambitious sandcastles. For each of my birthdays, my mother treated me to a piece of goiabada, my favorite dessert.

  Then, around the time that I turned four, my mother left her position and found us an apartment of our own. I was considered old enough to stay at home by myself, and that let her take an odd job here and there, answering the phone in a dentist’s office one week, cleaning toilets in a nearby school the next. All her life, she was used to these jobs being elusive and temporary, and I supposed that was what made her open to meeting with the guerrillas when Raul offered, even though most people would’ve said no.

  The three men arrived at our apartment two hours after they were supposed to. They were all roughly the same age, in their early twenties, not that much younger than my mother. Their faces looked unshaven, though no more than the average man in the street. They were light-skinned, and wore white-collar shirts of the cheap kind, the kind bus drivers and
waiters wore.

  I was not supposed to see them. I was not supposed to be awake. But I opened the door to our bedroom a couple of centimeters, and because that corner of our apartment was so poorly lit, no one noticed. My mother had put me to bed earlier, looking slightly nervous, but once she’d seen me close my eyes, she’d probably thought she could put me out of her mind.

  I watched them as they came in, catching glimpses of my mother, who was sitting down, and the men, who weren’t, chose to stand in three separate corners of our small living room, surrounding my mother. I wondered if they didn’t sit because of the tears in the fabric of our sofa, and I suddenly became self-conscious of the dust on our floor.

  The bedroom door was cracked just enough to see a bit and hear them fairly well. I wasn’t observing out of idle curiosity; men never came into our home.

  “This is Pacifier, that is Single L, and I’m Octopus,” said one of the men, who had his back to me. His authority clearly showed he was their leader.

  “You really expect me to use those names?” my mother asked.

  “You don’t need to know our real names. The less you know, the better,” Octopus retorted.

  My mother scoffed. “So you’re doing it for my benefit? How thoughtful. You know my name and you know where I live,” said my mother, in that sardonic manner of hers. “You want some coffee?”

  “No,” said Octopus. “Is there anyone else home?”

  “No, there’s no one home,” my mother said, glancing slightly toward my door. But she said it so convincingly I believed her myself.

  They either believed her or didn’t really care.

  “What did Raul tell you?” asked Octopus. He shifted and I could see part of his face, and I silently edged down to the foot of the bed, where I could look out at a better angle. His eyelids were slightly droopy, making him look tired. The corners of his mouth dug in slightly, suggesting a perpetual bemusement. He had longish hair and a beard. He reminded me of Jesus Christ if Jesus had been the lead singer of one of those rock bands on TV. His eyes were a deep shade of cobalt blue, a bit of a shock amidst the pitch darkness of his hair. He had a hooked nose and a square jaw, and I sensed that if he cut his hair and shaved, he would be beautiful and boyish, but he’d chosen a look of dark mystery instead. It wasn’t his looks that drew attention, though, but the intensity of his manner. The expression on his face suggested he was always thinking; he came across as not wasting words, as not wasting anything, for that matter. As though he alone knew what lay beyond the ravine, what remained behind once the fog cleared off. He was the kind of man whose approval you desired, almost by instinct.