by Samuel Park
She began shaking. The mere mention of his name was enough to unsettle her, but to know that her daughter had met him, and that she had taken this from him—the intimacy of the gift—seemed to undo every part of her being. My mother looked at me with the frozen eyes of Lot’s wife. I told her of every choice of mine, from the moment I discovered Lima’s address, to the moment I left his house, omitting Lazarus . . . the motel outside the city. I thought suddenly of my mother’s weak heart.
“You shouldn’t have gone. You should’ve asked me first, so I could say no and keep you chained here,” my mother said.
“I’m sorry, but I had to make him stop calling you,” I replied, with lowered eyes.
She shook her head. “I can’t believe what you did. This doesn’t feel real.” She reached for a handkerchief and tapped it against her brow. She rested her left arm on the sofa’s armrest with her palm up, as if awaiting an injection. “I need—I need to breathe.”
“It’s fine, I’m here. I’m not harmed in any way.”
“You in the same room, with him, I can’t—I just can’t . . .” My mother kept shaking her head and then suddenly froze, as if something had clicked. “Did he say anything to you?”
“About?”
“You should not have gone there.”
“Was it wrong for me to accept the money?”
My mother looked at the bills. “He should’ve given you all his money.”
“There’s a lot here. Why did he— Why did he give me this money?”
“How should I know? This money. This money is nothing. What matters is that you’re safe and sound and here. I worried like a dog all night.”
We embraced. I reached for the nape of her neck, careful not to leave marks. Her skin was so sensitive that if I pressed too hard, her epidermis would often break, turn raw, and take days to heal. I rested my hand there for a while, looking at my mother, our faces mirroring each other’s like two halves of a mariposa’s wings.
“He swore he wouldn’t call again. Isn’t that incredible?” I asked, freeing my mother from the weights in her ankles. I felt something powerful wash over me with this knowledge, a further shift in our precarious balance of power. “He will never, ever call again.”
chapter nine
A WEEK LATER, MY MOTHER and I rode in the cab heading to the Hospital of the Americas, each of us looking out our respective windows, lost in thought. Down the slopes of Rebouças, I stared at the bread loaf–shaped, moss-covered quartz hills. In the horizon, halos of sun created concentric circles. I couldn’t help but look at the view proudly, as if by virtue of being born there, I’d had some part in producing this beautiful land. As if to love something is to own at least a part of it.
My ears plugged up and I opened my mouth wide to pop them. Traffic lights were intermittent and red ones rare, the drive a nearly vertical drop. The city glimmered in the lake, a carpet of lambent dots, a candlelit feast. We kept sliding downward endlessly. It was like diving into an ocean, each fall revealing a new one just underneath.
The driver kept chattering about the hundreds of thousands of dollars the president had been pouring into renovations on his mansion in Lago Norte. He had put motorized waterfalls in the gardens, importing oxygenated and filtered water from Lake Paranoá for his Japanese carp. The president was building himself a garden worthy of a maharaja, a sumptuous Babylonian fantasy home. Normally, I would’ve echoed the cab driver’s outrage—our favorite national sport being bashing corrupt politicians. But I had enough on my mind. The money for the operation sat inside a straw bag with the top covered with wildflowers; I held the straps shut with my knees.
At the Catholic hospital, a long line skated around almost the entire building, patients numbering in the hundreds. Sick bodies leaned against stone pillars; concrete floors echoed with sniffling and coughing. Old and middle-aged faces flashed a mixture of bitterness and resignation. As a clerk led my mother and me toward the second floor, it felt odd to walk past people who’d clearly been waiting forever.
“The end of the line’s back there,” I heard someone behind me snicker, a malicious tinge in his voice, followed by laughter. I turned around, but couldn’t tell who’d said that. A dozen other people seemed to feel the same way, staring with resentment.
At the director’s office, his secretary received us with strained politeness, like something she’d put on that morning along with her lipstick and mascara. She put the cash through a counting machine; the bills made a whooshing noise. They took pretty much everything I had received from the Police Chief, save for a thousand dollars that my mother had set aside. She had decided that after the surgery we’d go to America on a nice vacation. Miami, where all the Brazilians went, and everyone spoke our language. Or Los Angeles, where she would seek not the young stars, but the ones of yesteryear, whose voices she had once dubbed. I had never been outside the country before, and it sounded like we were planning a trip to Mars.
Once the payment was processed, a nurse walked with my mother down the hallway, and I caught the inside of a room here and there: white walls with pictures of Jesus, twin cots with quilted blankets at the bottom. Sick folks, mostly old, lay on their beds, some praying, some talking to family members. The rooms were almost completely bare, with no medical equipment of any kind. The walls had clearly not been repainted in a long time. All the windows had bars on them.
When we reached Ana’s room, I saw that the number—205, was that of our apartment backward, which I took as a good omen. We put our things down and got her settled, a process that took much less time than I thought it would. I waited for the nurse to leave.
“I’ll wait here until the surgery’s done,” I told my mother.
“In that filthy waiting room? By yourself? No, absolutely not. I don’t want some man trying to cop a feel, some middle-aged creep chatting you up.” She coughed violently, a regular occurrence that now peppered every conversation. “You go home, where you’ll be safe. Eat a sandwich, take a nap. Knowing you’re home will help me relax for the surgery. Otherwise, I’m going to be anxious.”
“All right, then. I’ll go once they take you into the operating room,” I said, hugging my mother. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, my pearl,” she replied. I turned as I exited the room, and my mother looked almost regal in the crisp hospital bed, opening a magazine as though she had all day to be waited upon.
On the way back home, I stopped at a mercearia to buy some sterile bandages, as instructed by the sheet of postoperative directions, and some Merthiolate for a cut in my hand I hadn’t noticed. When it was my turn in line, the cashier did not acknowledge me. I hadn’t looked at the price stickers, and when he asked me for ninety cruzeiros, I did a slight double take. The amount seemed much higher than it should be, and while I hadn’t done a survey of recent bandage and Merthiolate prices in the local mercearias, I could sense something amiss. The cashier repeated the amount, as if I were either slow or hard of hearing.
“That doesn’t sound right,” I said. I had imagined that one small benefit of the president’s recent plan to freeze prices would be an end to the rampant inflation. But the mercearia had clearly raised prices on its goods.
“Look at this list,” said the cashier, pulling out a sheet listing the names of different products and cruzeiro amounts next to them. “These are the prices of every item in the store. That’s what they were before the freeze.”
I glanced at the sheet, a Xeroxed page hastily put together, with false prices, much higher than they were supposed to be. The cashier pointed at it self-righteously, with the fury of an overcompensating cheater, daring me to argue with print and paper. I could see how a poor, uneducated person, like so many in my neighborhood, might see that official-looking sheet and be intimidated by it.
I pulled out some cruzeiros from my pocket and paid for the items. We both knew I wasn’t going to denounce the store to the hotlines set up by the government. How useless they were, as busy as those phone l
ines for contests on radio shows. I pictured indignant customers complaining of culprits in every corner, every store. Most businesses would find a more sophisticated way to get over the price freeze than the owner of this mercearia, but either way, prices would keep rising. I felt a little funny as I left, knowing I’d just been lied to, but part of me felt like there was nothing I could do. The president had saddled the merchant with a crazy law, and now he tried to pass on the loss to his customers. The clerk was just following orders.
Without even waiting to get home, I leaned against a wall outside the store and opened the Merthiolate. I pressed the small net attached to the cap against my cut, watching as its red liquid bubbled over, a burning sensation. The edge of it had already scarred, and I knew I should’ve disinfected it much sooner. I kept pressing, as if it could heal me, save me from further harm. Its sting made me grit my teeth.
I decided to pass the time and distract myself by sitting at a lanchonete near the hospital. In the glass counters, finger foods beamed. I was starving. Neat rows of empada pies filled with hearts of palm, shrimp, and cheese; dark and crunchy kibes filled with ground beef; and bolinhos—little cakes made with yucca and codfish and meat. A single waiter, on the other side of the counter, strolled up and down unhurriedly, serving some and ignoring others.
Once I got my coffee and the plate of coxinha I’d ordered, I went outside to take a seat. From my plastic chair in the open air I could spy the denizens of the morning about to crash into one another like bowling balls on the sidewalk. I distracted myself by watching a suntanned man in his seventies wearing only a watch above his waist. A pearled and blazered woman around the same age rode behind him in a scooter, her face unmoving and wrinkle-free.
I cut open the coxinha, releasing its heat into the air. I took sips from the tiny cup of coffee, trying not to worry about my mother. I played with the large plastic ashtray resting on the laminated tablecloth; it had a row of indentations for cigarettes to rest, and from the side it looked like a mouth’s gum line with half the teeth hammered out.
Across the street, the farmer’s market had found its rhythm, and I watched as the farmers hawked fruits as fresh as if they’d just fallen off trees. Huge papayas turned counters into seas of gold and aquamarine. Peaches preened so juicy red, they looked as if about to burst. Their sweet aroma tickled my nostrils. I watched a woman hold up an avocado, admiring it like a trophy. I knew she would grind it into a puree, mix it with sugar, and serve it as a dessert.
The sun shone with no variation—the same brutal, intense morning one. From my chair—a seat at the edge of the ocean—I could see a doorman washing the street in front of his high-rise building. With a mop and a bucket, he soaped the asphalt, turning bubbly white the cobblestonelike quartz pavement, the pungent smell of Pine-Sol replacing the fragrant smells of fruits.
On the table next to me, two men dipping their small baguettes into their café con leche were discussing which streets to avoid that day—the students from PUC and Federal were planning another protest against the president. Their talk, the same talk about inflation and elections over and over again, made me feel sleepy.
Loud groans came from another group of men at the other end of the bar-restaurant shaking their heads in despair at a TV mounted against the wall. Apparently our soccer team had just lost a game to the Argentinians. Fickle and uncooperative static crowded the top and bottom of the frame. The camera panned as the Argentinians ran across the field, hugging one another, the announcer bellowing their names. I watched as the Argentinians celebrated, one of them reaching across the barricades and putting on his opponent’s uniform over his own.
“This country’s shit,” I overheard a man at the counter say, wiping his thumbs on his sleeveless undershirt. He held a boiled egg in his hand as if using it to prove a point. “I am tired of this merda.”
Back at the hospital, I noticed for the first time how it resembled a church, with high ceilings and glass mosaics as some of the skylights. Statues of saints weeping and praying stood at the windows. I watched through the open balustrade the quiet, near wordless movement below of the nurses pushing sick people in wheelchairs and orderlies delivering patients in gurneys, as if they were on the platform of a subway where all the commuters had suddenly lost power over their bodies.
I had a bag with some books and a teddy bear for my mother, as well as some dahlia piñatas I’d hastily picked up on the way out of the subway station. As I walked through the hospital, I thought about the long week my mother still had ahead of her at the hospital. I hoped that it would go by fast, and that I’d be able to bring her home soon.
When I opened the door to her room, I saw that my mother hadn’t been brought back yet. I set my flowers down on the small counter. On the floor, I saw the plastic shopping bag from Casas Havana that my mother had used to bring her change of clothes. Its creases and tears appeared familiar to me, as well as its size.
I reached down under the bed. I turned the bag upside down but nothing fell out, no piece of lint, no line of thread. It didn’t smell like my mother, only of plastic. I put it back where I’d found it. It looked like a thing left behind on purpose.
I walked back toward the door, searching for a nurse. As I peered out, I noticed a black woman holding a drenched compress against her bleeding head. She stood right outside, in the hallway. She had an angry but resigned expression, as the blood slipped past the space between her fingers and dripped onto the floor. Next to her, a Middle Eastern man looked at her helplessly, his hand gently cupping the back of her head. I couldn’t tell if they were lovers or coworkers or what. I kept looking for a nurse, occasionally glancing back at the couple. Finally, the bleeding woman blinked at me and said, “Car accident.” Then, the man looked at her apologetically.
A few seconds later, I flagged down a nurse in a nun’s habit walking by. The woman gave me a friendly look, and for a second I thought it was the same nurse who’d helped me that morning, but she wasn’t; she just wore the uniform the same way, the cap slightly angled. She had a clipboard in her hand.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Yes. I’m looking for my mother. She just had heart surgery. Are they bringing her back to her room or is she somewhere else?”
“They usually do, yes. We bring the patients back to their rooms. What is her name?”
“Ana Alencar,” I replied.
“Let me see, Ana Alencar.” She squinted her eyes slightly and consulted her clipboard. “Yes, she was in operating room B6. Dr. Nanini. She should’ve been brought back by now. Let me go check.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
I returned to her room while I waited. I walked to the far wall. Through the glass window, I could see the streets of Copacabana. This felt like a luxury to me, the ability to look out at the world waiting for us outside.
A few minutes later, the nurse returned, now joined by a doctor.
“Are you Ana Alencar’s daughter?” the tall, curly-haired doctor asked. He offered me his hand, which I took limply. “Is your father here, too?”
I shook my head nervously. “No. Where is my mother? How is she?”
The nurse gave me a once-over, and avoided my eyes.
The doctor guided me to the bed, made me sit down. Beads of sweat glowed on his forehead. He kept his hands inside the pockets of his white smock.
“I’m very sorry to inform you that there were complications. Per standard procedure, the surgeon made an incision down the center of the patient’s sternum, took a blood vessel from her chest, and redirected it around a coronary artery. During the procedure, we literally stopped her heart for an hour, which is normal in these cases, but when it came time to revive her . . .”
I couldn’t hear him anymore. I felt like a pillow was smothering me. I couldn’t breathe. And then dizziness struck me. Light-headedness. My heart smashing against its cage. My body being drained of blood.
“. . . passed away at ten o’clock, from postsurgery complications,
after several attempts to . . .”
The doctor’s lips moved, but the words were garbled, distorted. The room suddenly felt arctic.
“. . . so sorry to tell you that . . .”
As his words sank in fully, I felt a pit in my stomach and almost doubled over. A sudden black cloud lodged itself in my brain.
“. . . cannot imagine the grief and sorrow that . . .”
I closed my eyes and began to cry openly. That very morning I’d been lifted by the knowledge that the tide had changed for the better. Knowing that our lives would be easier, different. After the surgery, I thought my mother would go back to her normal self again. I wouldn’t have to take care of her so much. We’re going to be free, I had repeated the words in my head over and over again, We’re going to be free. We’re going to be happy.
Suddenly, I thought of Lima. Handing me the cash. Encouraging my mother to have the operation. Knowing the risks. Trying to silence her. It hadn’t been enough that he had almost destroyed her life eight years ago. He had to come back. Why had he come back? Had he come back for this?
“He did it,” I said sharply, interrupting the doctor while he droned on.
The doctor and the nurse looked up, confused.
“Excuse me?” asked the doctor.
“It was the Police Chief,” I said, between hiccups, tears streaming down my face.
“Who’s—”
“He’s the one who caused it. He gave me the money. And then this happened.”
The doctor and the nurse exchanged looks. He asked her to bring me some chamomile tea, but I shook my head. I wanted both of them to hear this, to know this.
“This never would’ve happened if I hadn’t gone to him.” I could barely get the words out and the doctor and the nurse strained to understand me. “So you see, it’s my fault, too. I made this happen. It’s both of our faults.”
The doctor and the nurse remained silent, watching me, unsure of what to say. The doctor started nodding sympathetically. The dejected babblings of the bereaved. He’d probably seen worse. I heard him say something about my “state of shock.”
