by Samuel Park
Visitors came bearing flowers for Kathryn for many days. Being ill turned the sick person into a celebrity of sorts. Those around her wanted news, gave her attention. The sick inspire devotion, curiosity. She drew people’s thoughts like a magnet, in a manner and a fashion she never could’ve while healthy. There was a dyad: the sick person awakened the healthy person’s desire to care, in the same way that a famous person awakened a regular person’s longing for fantasy. Something primal. They came for a few minutes, or sometimes they stayed for hours, and I listened as Kathryn received them all in her bedroom, drinking hibiscus tea with them, exchanging pleasantries, Kathryn subtly apologizing for reminding them of their own mortality.
In the downtime between making and serving meals, I sat by myself in the kitchen, or took a walk in the backyard. I had never known such stillness in my body. I felt as though the house had swallowed me in its vastness. Would she really be insane enough to leave it to me after she died? Yes, I took care of her and ran the occasional errand for her and had grown fond of her, genuinely concerned about her well-being. I had committed. But I was not a relative, nor an old friend, nor a lover. When I wandered through the house, my body didn’t radiate possession the way Kathryn, or even Nelson, did.
And why was it a given that I’d be happy in that house? Even now, I thought I would enjoy being the de facto owner of a big house in Bel Air, but instead I just felt the echoes of a giant vat of loneliness. I didn’t welcome it, this loneliness. I didn’t want to surrender to its potent oxidation. I wished I could bring Renata and Bruno over. I wished I could hear familiar voices having muffled conversations in the room next door, bells ringing far away, squeals of soccer-playing children, gossipy neighbors exchanging greetings across the street, the plaintive sounds of plumbing and flooring that old houses made, that even my cheap rent-controlled apartment in Hollywood made. But Kathryn. How could she stand to live in such gated and guarded silence? Why were Americans so accepting of aloneness, with its ever-tightening knots and vises?
Sometimes when I looked at her, I would see traces of my mother’s face. In the slant of her nose; in the way she half closed her eyes when laughing.
If only I hadn’t ruined things, hadn’t gotten involved in the mess. I wouldn’t have had to flee, and I’d be next to Ana right at that moment. She’d hug me and kiss me. Instead, I had Kathryn.
Kathryn wasn’t dying; she was most likely dying, and therein was the difference. Some days I looked at her with sorrow and some days I wondered why all the fuss, she was going to be fine after all. This liminality, this in-between-ness, sometimes made me feel I was taking care of two Kathryns, one that was dying and one that seemed well. Why am I in this house, awaiting an epiphany from her illness? I noticed how her sweaty hair lingered on her forehead just like my mother’s, and felt a similar compassion for them.
Was life a train with tracks already built, or a bird that flew this way and that way into a friendly horizon?
Ana, too, had suffered, but I still felt an unwanted tinge of bitterness laced with poison in the love I felt for her.
I just couldn’t forgive her for what she’d done to me.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The early 1980s
Mara, age sixteen
chapter eight
PEOPLE ALWAYS WANT TO HEAR what they believe to be true. Whenever a tourist asked me what it was like to live in Copacabana, I knew they wanted to hear some exotic, accented tale, flavored with tropical colors. A map of the New World’s spices, a star next to the treasures of the undiscovered land. They wanted to hear of beaches where the sand was so fine, it glistened like the shavings off diamonds. Of water so cool, the sun felt like a friend. Bubbly and brown, like an ocean of milkshake. A place where you could hear the squeals of children nearby, and you knew it was the happiest they’d ever been. Where couples traded intimacies, and everyone was in a good mood. Where everyone was kind to one another. No one wept. Where you plucked giant avocados and papayas the size of fists off the groves. Paradise. Where red-tailed carps swam in dark green ponds and dusky-legged guans sliced through the sky while slaty-breasted rails sang. Where the moss-covered hills sparkled with the sun’s lazy peach-colored glow. Where the lake water shone brightly rippled, carved into perfectly symmetrical servings. Where the beaches turned the city into a dream, like a magic trick.
All that was really true. But also, on the sands I often found trash—empty coconuts and bottles of Brahma beer. Cigarette butts. Perforated blister packs. Foam clamshells with leftover food. An upside-down map of the world. All the vices of the citizenry, catalogued and tabulated.
On the streets of Copacabana: a free-for-all accommodating buses, pedestrians, and poorly parked vehicles jutting out onto the road. There was no space between anything or anyone—if a taxi driver reached his hand out, he could graze a side-view mirror, or the back of a cyclist squeezing by the cars. In one corner, at a construction site, a building stood half finished, surrounded by scaffolding on all sides, unable to stand on its own without it. Workers without helmets stood precariously on top of metal bars, taking equipment from harnessed colleagues in bosuns’ chairs, a kind of baton relay. Everywhere, buildings that had been erected a century earlier, by wealthy coffee barons and governments with bellies full of coffee baron money. There were exquisite churches, cathedrals, and hotels, columned and buttressed and gargoyled, made of soapstone, marble, and crystals imported from Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Along the boulevards, large trees provided bountiful shade, canopied umbrellas relieving the street merchants and beggars from the otherwise unrelenting heat. Boys with surfboards and girls in roller skates whizzed past kiosk attendants, office workers, parents carrying children on their shoulders.
Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, my mother and I moved to Rua Vinícius de Moraes, number 502, a unit that seemed like a bargain at the time. We could walk to the beach or the Copacabana Palace, where the nightly charge for a suite cost the same as our rent for a year. The apartment seemed promising until we realized that the roof above us happened to be the favored escape route for thieves who’d just pillaged the drugstore on the first floor. We often woke to the sound of footsteps, followed by the back-and-forth of policemen caucusing.
Sometimes there was gunfire. Once, a perspiring police officer on the fire escape asked, through the bars of my mother’s bedroom window, if he could come in and use our restroom. My mother said no. The police always lingered, and we began to resent them more than the thieves.
We debated moving, until, that is, my mother’s health began to decline. She could not sleep, her unrelenting coughing jolting her awake. The cause of her disease, a doctor explained to us, was her smoking. A serious heart condition.
My mother had been a heavy smoker all her life, but the cause and effect did not follow. Everyone knew smoking was a benign activity. Not only that, but a glamorous, sophisticated activity. Everyone we knew smoked—neighbors, friends, strangers, characters on television. Every restaurant table and bar countertop included an ashtray. The streets were littered with the familiar sight of cigarette stubs. Smoking made me look forward to becoming an adult. We couldn’t fathom that my mother’s completely normal and unremarkable habit had led to this disease, but it confirmed, in a sad way, the inevitability of my mother’s specialness. Everyone lit up with no consequences to their health, but she, she alone was chosen to suffer for it.
So every day I asked her, “Did you sleep last night?”
I asked this question the same way some daughters asked their mothers if they’d had coffee that morning. I asked this question hoping to hear, “Yes, I did,” but that answer never came. She never slept for more than a few hours. She sat in the living room in the dark, with her unrelenting coughing. The forcible night watch of the sick. She told me that a mad clock sat lodged in her chest, going too fast or skipping beats, and all the things I took for granted—even breathing and lying down—were uncomfortable to her.
I’d always adored my mot
her, but since her illness, my heart grew with the strange love that fills one’s heart when one gives, gives, and receives little in return. I reacted to every grunt or look or sound that came out of my sick charge, looking for signs of either pain or peace, the line so blurry. It was easy to love a person who depended on you for food and drink, a person who’d had all her normal prerogatives removed from her. I began to wonder if love was just a refined form of compassion, the heart’s choice, for whatever reason, to devote itself to another being. There was nothing more pure than the love of a caregiver for a patient. She did not have to earn it, did not have to be charming or alluring. She just had to need. This was the irony, I decided, that though humans were wired toward selfishness in their everyday lives, given the opportunity, a person could give another everything, and that all of us were just waiting for the chance to do that. To love, to give, and to surrender the best parts of ourselves to someone else.
Our only respite from worry was the movies we watched together at night. My mother had once dubbed a drama directed by François Truffaut and become a fan. After she introduced me to his work, it turned out we both liked the same ones—Jules et Jim, Day for Night—and disliked the exact same ones—La Peau Douce, Baisers Volés. My mother impressed me by singing along with Jeanne Moreau the lyrics to “Le Tourbillon de la Vie.” There was a time she wanted to be Jeanne Moreau. Most girls wanted to be Audrey Hepburn, I noted, or Marilyn Monroe.
“No.” She shook her head. “Only anorexic girls wanted to be Audrey, and only overweight girls wanted to be Marilyn.” I knew she wanted to specifically be the Jeanne Moreau of Jules et Jim, just like the Audrey Hepburn girls wanted to be her in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
“But,” I replied, “they want to be her only in that scene—in the early morning when she’s standing in front of the store wearing Givenchy and dark glasses. Not the scenes where she’s talking to Mickey Rooney doing a yellowface impersonation of a Japanese man.”
“If that is true, then,” my mother retorted, “I want to be the Jeanne Moreau wearing a mustache and boys’ clothes running across the bridge with Oskar Werner and Henri Serre chasing me.”
I agreed. “I think women are at their most beautiful when they’re running, don’t you think?”
The only thing that would help my mother was a heart transplant, and since we couldn’t pay up front, we were on the waiting lists of several hospitals. I called them every month, to check on the status of her application, but apparently there were a lot of other sick people ahead of her, and it felt like her turn would never come. Sometimes her chest pains grew so intense that she could barely stand. She seemed to shrink, and sometimes coming home from school, I’d have to look twice at the couch until I saw her form lying there, napping.
So we waited. We stayed put.
Because of my mother’s condition, I did not believe her at first when she told me about the phone calls.
I thought perhaps her weak heart was affecting her sanity. Perhaps the pain in her body made her read too much into mere prank calls. She claimed they came during the day, when I was at school. By the time I got home, I’d find my mother shaken and enervated. She couldn’t tell me who it was, or what the content of those calls was; only that she was being terrorized.
How so? I asked her, and she couldn’t answer.
Was it a stranger or was it someone who knew her? She would not elaborate.
Unsure of what to do, I told my mother to stop answering the phone altogether. If the call was important, like a cardiologist or a friend, the person would call back during dinner, and I would be home then. But my mother claimed to be incapable of not picking up the phone.
“I didn’t feel like I could,” she said, in an agonized tone, her words shivery and tremulous. “I didn’t feel like I had the right to.”
I mulled over the words. I leaned over her and massaged her bare arms. Her long hair tangled, split ends and middles. My mother the actress, so talented and larger than life—I hated to see her like that.
“You sure you don’t know who it is?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she mumbled toward the window.
She was so hushed these days, a diluted version of my mother. It often felt as though I wasn’t talking to my mother, but rather, to her disease.
“Was it a prank call?”
“I don’t know,” said the plaque in her coronary artery. “It was a man. He wouldn’t say his name.”
The way she wouldn’t meet my eyes told me that my mother could guess who this man was.
“I swear I didn’t ask for this,” the ugly, waxy, yellow substance continued. “I am innocent.” Panic gathered in her charred throat.
“He’s not going to call again, and if he does, just hang up,” I said.
My mother did not say anything. She had a “tell” when she lied or became evasive. Her lips opened slightly, as if she owed the other performer the next line, but couldn’t recall it. The actor’s nightmare. I looked into her eyes and found them oddly masked. She looked up to the ceiling as if there were a door there, waiting for her to open it. I wanted her to, and I wanted to follow her, walking upward.
At school, I couldn’t concentrate. I ignored my teachers and friends, and responded only halfheartedly. I was a machine that shut itself off without warning. In line at the INPS office, to pick up my mother’s disability check, I gave strangers vicious stares, as if the man next to me was the one calling my mother. I found laughter suspicious. Large gestures, too. Any expression of mirth registered as an affront.
I wished Janete were still around to help. She’d moved back to the Northeast a year ago to take care of her sick father. I was old enough to understand the rules of parents and children by then. If a person brings you into the world, the least you can do in return is help them when they’re ready to leave this world. I knew Janete was leaving behind her dreams and desires and joys, but sometimes there are things even bigger than that.
My mother and Janete’s goodbye was awkward and protracted, and took place over the course of several days. Janete gave my mother her phone number and address in the Northeast, but as far as I knew, my mother never called her. I suspected my mother put her in the same compartment as my father, someone who existed only in the iceberg of memory. One night, we were watching the news and heard of a new deadly disease called AIDS. The newscaster informed us that it could be transmitted through kissing and mosquitoes, and it had been developed in a lab in America as a weapon to attack their enemies. My mother said casually, “Janete needs to be careful,” and left it at that.
At home I tried to extract information from my mother. She returned my inquiries with ellipses or monosyllables. If I didn’t know any better, I would think she’d regressed to a stage pre-language. Her eyes kept drilling a hole in the same space in the ceiling.
I’d ask her useless questions: What did he say to you? What did he sound like?
She continued to drill into the ceiling, with mounting sorrow.
After a few months of unrelenting phone calls, my mother finally thought she had unmasked the identity of the mysterious caller. She was half lying, half sitting on the sofa, her body sprawled, as if she’d fainted and had no time to rearrange her limbs. She wore only a bathrobe, and I could see her frail thighs peeking from under the cotton.
“Lima,” she said. “I think it’s Chief Lima,” my mother said, her eyes full of red, her expression darkened and fragile.
Police Chief Lima. For a long time, he’d been the third member of our family. The one who haunted our dreams, colonized our silences.
“It’s him. I know it’s him,” she said, shaking her head in disgust. “He doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t say it’s him, but I know it’s him.”
“Are you sure?” I couldn’t believe that these many years later, almost a full decade, he’d dare contact my mother. His ilk no longer had power. Police Chief Lima himself had retired and disappeared from public life. It turned my insides to know that he might
be directing his attention to my mother.
“I can’t explain, I just know it.” Agony wrenched her eyes shut. “I know this makes me sound crazy, but I recognize his breathing.”
I shook my head, disturbed. “Why would he call you? And how did he get our phone number?” The question sounded stupid the second it came out of my mouth. Our number could be easily found in any phone directory. There were only so many Ana Alencars in Rio de Janeiro.
“I don’t know,” my mother said, shaking her head. “I don’t want to know. But it’s him. It’s really him.”
I didn’t want to press any further as to how she could be so sure. “Don’t answer the phone,” I said, retying and straightening her bathrobe. “Starting tomorrow.”
“If I thought it wasn’t him, I could ignore it. But because I know it’s him, I feel like I have to. I don’t know how to explain.”
I leaned closer and buried my head in her hair, pressing my lips against her scalp. I held her the way I’d hold a baby, soft and lovable. I always thought our lives were good. Hard, but good. We were happy, she and I. I marveled at how inaccurate our lives suddenly seemed. I was grateful that she couldn’t see the tears budding in my eyes. Her ears felt cold against the back of my hand. I squeezed her harder; I wanted so much to protect her.
“Then get out of the house,” I whispered, quickly wiping my own drops away. “Stay downstairs at the lanchonete while I’m at school, or go to a neighbor’s house, have a cup of coffee with someone.”
My mother sighed and shook her head. “I don’t have the energy, Mara. I want to stay home. Please let me stay home and rest.”
