Bridge Retakes

by Angela Lopes

  Phila left São Paulo and returned to Winnipeg at the end of April. It’s hard to keep track of times and dates. She wants to talk to Zé, but he is ignoring her. Phila often imagines she is in São Paulo. She gets delusional, thinking she’s still there. Friends notice this about her. Two close friends advise her, “You need to know when to say goodbye.” But Phila thinks Zé is testing her. Maybe he is insecure about his economic status because he cannot provide for her in the way she is used to in Canada. His family thinks she has a husband in Canada, thus lying to him about being single. This certainly influences Zé tremendously. He can’t fully see the value in waiting for Phila. Life is short and survival means staying close to those you love. Proof of a woman’s love is abandoning all to be with her man.

  Ever since Zé met Phila, he has wanted to impregnate her. Ever since Phila met Zé, she has wanted to have children with him. This subconscious decision is what keeps them going. Despite the fact that Zé hates how Phila comes and goes to São Paulo, there is the very basic desire to procreate together. And it is this very basic desire that is in unison with so many higher virtues to practice and extend upon: humility, compassion, love.

  Phila refuses to give up and sends messages every day. She suffers in silence, only telling two friends – her cousin and her sister, Camila. After ignoring her for a month and a week, Zé found out from her WhatsApp status that she would be going to Ceará with her cousin on September 7th. Then he came running back to her with a fountain of messages.

  Crossing that bridge

  Phila, September 2015, Ceará and São Paulo

  With a fountain of messages, you know you want me, Zé. Why were you away for so long? Do you know what you did to my heart, do you? You know you could never miss the chance to not ever see me again. I am moving on. You heard I would be away for a while. You sent me a text saying, “You’re not gonna cheat on me, right?” So when I’m at the beach all I can think about is you. Now you got what you wanted. Everything here in Ceará is unessential. The only being essential is you. Shouldn’t a man at your age know what you want by now? Every woman wants stability. Not knowing what is to come is even more thrilling. I adore everything I don’t understand.

  Today is the day we attention our future children. Look, if we have many, our children will care for each other, care for us. Look how your love savours good. Everyone at home is asleep and here we are. I’d rather these words not signify something, rather bring you somewhere you really wanna go. You say you’d come to Canada for me, but I fear for some of your boredom. We had to leave our presence for all the bold things to happen. In your WhatsApp message you said, “It’s all gonna work out, I miss you.” You and I never use condoms. Why would we? I will marry you one day and we will have between three and six children. Your heart is soft, yet your body is strong. I can never tell you you did wrong, though, you would get really mad. Telling you what to do would mean setting myself up for a big fight. You are fiery, how I like my men. You never want me to be critical of you. You never want me to be close to any man other than you. But what the heart doesn’t see, the mind doesn’t know. You wanna mark me as yours. The beautiful primal necessity to deposit one’s sperm into the woman of a man’s dreams. Where blood pumps life, never giving up until worn.

  Whether a new event is greeted with hope or cursed as a dark fate may depend not entirely on whether it is good or bad but also partly on the inner attitude of the person to whom it happens. Love is like that, too; every lover comes first as an unknown stranger and promises a woman both great joy and great danger. I only want to get to know people who live long and full lives. And all the people that also suffer from a lack of life, I want to know as well. I see, closing my eyes, a vision of what will be my reality, and this is it. I want my children travelling with me.

  I wonder about this intense feeling to reproduce, this very primal and crucial push. I love everyone, but the feeling to want to have a child with someone one loves is the best feeling ever. I am sure if I get pregnant, I can secure anything in life. But to necessarily secure a man, I am not craving. Securing my body and my babies’ futures, their education, their health and well-being, is always my mission. I don’t want reality. It robs innocence. A selfish mother doesn’t let her children be with any other woman. She fears they may like the other woman. I will die from so much love, my blood radiating through my body ascending floors.

  Today I’m going to a party. You, Zé, always stay with family, how you like it. Why are sesame seeds so sexy scattered on this table. My lover’s seeds are in need. Men walk firm here in Ceará, caress my face, pinch my cheeks the coats of crime. Levi’s jeans clenching me or a man’s hand ravenous, I believe. There are games that men play to hold secure. Remember the night you took me to that motel? All night silence as dengue mounts populous. I know too much this time. I am persisting with nothing, anything knows so much is squirting. I can only lie for so much. My body is too good for me. Pardon me for taking so much of a span, just making sure you will not run out on me and our future children. What about the games men play to see if she’s sincere. We can never ever juggle silence here. Too much static. If you call me tomorrow, I will go out with you, if you ask me, do these things take so long. Everyone has a care in the world for a moment in time. Which makes us crave our real friends. A city of people in heat. Of workaholics that work the labyrinth metro like a third job. Where children seem to only play indoors. Where we make love hard for moments, and then fight the next moments. Where the group and the mother are bigger than any skyscraper here. Where almost everyone is cheating and egoism is high, yet everyone is determined to make their lives work for themselves, for their families. However, the modern woman is hitting hard here. The men in this country are the flyest I’ve ever known. Eyes and hands. What a party. My sister, she needs me so I pick up my cell and dance to her.

  This morning’s smog is a sultry disposition. I am thirty years old and time works under the table. To make something from what my heart knows. To know what’s right, what’s wrong, outside the system. The avó said being separate from you will not work for longer than two years. After the Umbanda ceremony we had fevers of a hundred. Guys sometimes want what they feel is too far out there for them. But when they do have it, they still pine for more. You haven’t called me in over a week. I play it like a pro. We ruminate about problems and people and how to tell if a woman is really good. Our tablecloth is a consummate union of our bodies. I was told to just move on. Why is that painting exhibiting a faucet with drops of water and people holding umbrellas? So I walk this decision, or read all shop signs. The protests are taking over. And I don’t miss my returns to Winnipeg. To decide comes from Latin dêcîsio, a cutting off. I am not a fan. Derrida meets decision with loveance, “passive,” delivered over to the other, suspended over the other’s heartbeat. Where I am helpless, where I decide what I cannot fail to decide, freely, necessarily receiving my very life from the heartbeat of the other. We will have a baby one day soon enough. This will be the most stunning day.

  The protests continued every day after 4 p.m. Change will be where I work, and it’s no surprise I do where ends meet. Most of my friends are either artists or not born in North America. They are my blood. I miss the parties with them. Yesterday night I put 60 reals into my bra before I met you. Today I will put in 40. Not sure why you forgot. As a storyteller there is that feeling you don’t know what you’re doing with your life. Like everything takes forever. Why we neglect things that are sorta essential is something I occupy time with. Scattered among the superfluous I enriched a body like none other. Logic obnubilates my heart, then I feel I can no longer live. Sometimes the right time to go is never-ending as you secrete behind your cell only messages you receptive to obtain. Some things take so long to happen.

  People will always talk about us because we’re too beautiful. After you closed up the photo lab with your co-workers, I met you outside your work. We walked avenida Paulista. A change is n
eeded here, as it is with us. We don’t know what this means. Don’t be fooled by my the short shorts and belly tops; I don’t put out easy here. We watched the protestors, we walked on our own.

  Everyone is ready for a change. Everyone is tired of the corruption. The disgust that the upper class is. Tired of how the possession of nature is the aim for the sneaky ones. The obsession with security and the disgust with anything that is against it takes life away. A need to be together that only makes sense being far apart. Where will Phila’s family find the sense in her relationship with Zé? Society may never accept them, not that they care, but their families’ acceptance is important, especially for Zé.

  Phila cannot tell her family. Sometimes remaining silent about one’s story can be the most liberating feeling. That to only talk about one’s story when one knows more about it will lessen the jinx potential. Phila resents that her family in Canada, with parents born in Brazil, never send money to her family in Brazil. Phila’s parents have a fairly good family business. They buy all kinds of gifts for their family in Canada, but have chosen to forget all about their family in Brazil. After all, they feel, what did Brazil do for us? After all, they feel their siblings are not without money. Her parents have lost the group consciousness that Phila pines for. That when one individual in the family is suffering, we all are. Happiness is only real when shared. Phila’s parents think the social custom of kissing on both cheeks is fake.

  According to Zé and Zé’s family’s perception of Phila, she too lacks this group consciousness. They all feel, based on everything Zé has shared with them, that Phila is experiencing the high life in Canada. She is not perceived as some angel saving Zé and Zé’s family from economic strife. She is perceived as selfish and not serious about Zé. She is perceived as not truly loving him. Zé really needs her body and feels that his family can benefit from Phila and her situation. The feeling of freedom Zé gets from Phila is tantalizing. Money can open the door outside of Brazil’s class system.

  Phila, out of adoration for Zé and to show him and his family she is serious about him, starts sending him money when she is back in Canada. She wants to build a life with him, and thinks it is a sacrifice to be at a distance in order for her to save money and send money to him. Yet at the same time as having this feeling that she wants to build a life with him, she has some doubts, and she is profoundly worried that her family will never accept Zé and her pregnancy. According to Phila, this is not the right time to move to Brazil. Zé thinks that even though Phila is sending money to him, Brazil is always having an economic crisis and she should still move to Brazil to be with him, if she truly loves him. Phila has pangs at the thought of how money can confuse love, how it changes subject matter. The notion of security is a muddle for them. Zé thinks Phila does not need him to feel secure in life. He knows Brazil is for the strong.

  Phila thinks from time to time (especially now as she has listened to a few friends tell her “be careful, he may be using you to get to Canada”) that Zé may be using her. But Zé and Phila don’t dwell in these kinds of negative thoughts too long. Phila is pregnant. What good would it do to be under the influence of many people’s negative thoughts? Both Zé and Phila honour the space of the grey. For Zé, Phila is his most preferred woman, no other can compare, others just satisfy spontaneous feeling. For Phila, Zé is the one. Zé refrains from talking about Phila and their relationship to extended family. It is enough that his immediate family knows. When too many know, many will try their hardest to ruin a good thing. Phila entrusts her current life with her friends, her cousin, her sister Camila, and listens to some people at the Umbanda. Her family will not be able to handle all the new changes coming their way. Phila cannot tell Camila everything, just some details. All she can say is that the English school she works at in São Paulo is great, their family is great, and she loves the beaches.

  The bridge opens to ideal as real

  Phila, September and October 2015, São Paulo

  After reading Paulina Chiziane, I saw women. The women in Northern Mozambique are the best women. They have many children, and they are the most beautiful mothers ever. They are so confident. What’s stopping me from being this kinda woman? I knew we were pregnant the day after we conceived. Our lovemaking that night was over the top. Sometimes I wonder how the body knows, like I could feel this tiny ball moving along a small pathway in my uterus. I couldn’t think of anything more stunning than having a child. Let’s just say we are entering a new epoch. The day I thought I was pregnant was the day I received a call from the university saying that they needed to cancel my future contract with them. That contract was to start nine months from now. Sometimes I enrapture myself secretly, believing I am better than the modern woman. I never feel competitors; what would they look like? Fuzzy, lint-ridden, then disposable. You, Zé, are all I need from a distance and sometimes too close when we are together. I remember when you grabbed me from behind on the escalators in the subway system and said you’re all I need. Everything about having a child right now simultaneously terrifies and thrills me. I am trying to remain calm, trying to remain calm. That you, Zé, are far, is not a concern for us right now. I let the source of my intuition weave abstractions, because as we know, the heart is truant from no fragment of the sky, just as it is truant from no vein in ourselves.

  I think of the women in Northern Mozambique in Chiziane’s book Niketche. The women have so many children, yet still maintain stunning figures, gorgeous on-point faces. They run their communities. They live in a matriarchal society. Giving birth is a blessing. Feminine, not feminism. Sometimes I spend all my spare time thinking how such an event can occur. And how it occurs so often. How little we value it, sometimes. The atoms of our pact evacuated some strident I that I could no longer be. Like before I spoke about how this whole selfish thing rocks me. There’s a balance that is needed. Like care for the self, care for others, care for the self, care for others. I care too much for everyone that this births me into everyone. What I wanna be currently is selfness opulent riotously emitting itself. Like the women in Niketche sharing their men. Like the women in Northern Mozambique living matriarchal. The empathy current is a feeling, an undoing what was doing listening for hearing. Whenever I have money, I give it away. Scathing saccharine streets extend wanting another language to grow up in, all senses reconvened with ethics. I really have much to do, but I need my body still. I say body still, but what I mean to say is indwelling of simultaneous dormancy and nascence. There is nothing more radiant than getting up at 4 a.m. with a resurgence to tell a story. There is little work for me to do. Like everything comes when needed and all will be fine.

  Like everything comes when needed. This is good enough. Phila’s present of perception, joy of life and imaginative utopian matriarchal futuristic vision are extraordinary. The boundaries are blurred betwixt languages and creativity and experience. She gets confused sometimes passing through a high degree of love. The role of woman is relative to how Phila wants it, to how she necessitates it, to how she observes her role models.

  Work serves a purpose for Phila to afford travel and buy material wants. But work for Zé is essential. Work in many regards. Zé feels men lose their power when they cannot provide for their women. Why would a woman stick around for long if her man cannot provide for her?

  Phila never wanted to be a career woman. She always wanted to find the right man to follow. Zé always wanted a true housewife. Zé always wanted the perfect woman to obey him. Both live with their families. And Zé wants so badly for his family to meet Phila, but she must commit to him. She must be serious and devoted to only him.

  In my place

  Zé, September and October 2015, São Paulo

  For me to be in my power, you gotta let me work. I read on Facebook someone quoted from their Introductory Physics book: “The beginning of the time of inflation left the stunning universe behind, space today is replete with invisible fields moving rapidly across space, gravity a
nd dust bringing up matter.” I’m Catholic; science can only say so much to me. Inflation knows nothing of well-being. But you, Phila, stirred everything in my being the moment we met. You are too strong, in many regards it terrifies me how some of the freedom you have is so money dependent. And some of the freedom you have is from abandoning fear, so much like you were born in my family in Bahia. With you I feel a rush resplendent right. I’m thrown off my element when I have no work. When you’re in Bahia with me, I tell you where to go. But here in São Paulo, it’s as though the women tell the men where to go. The competition is fierce and women never learn how to cook here. I love women, but when they talk too much I get irritated. But you, Phila, are different. I gotta get you to depend on me for money. You North Americaners are too naive. You all think we want your lifestyle. We want to be like you. Thank God, Phila, you are different. You enjoy your life always, anyway and any means necessary, while I am here in São Paulo. Remember that our love may too be a roof for our heads. You catch my drift. If you move in with me, I can please you. Soon you will deliver lightly the news to your family how touch can act on everyone, or beat the meat to your thoughts. It is hard to transmit my intense feeling for you through these technological devices. Like how to say I love you through this handheld thing. Yesterday you told me you want me more and more each day. The lasting of nothing so far. We are not going to be recovered because we are here, you and I. To retake all that is of our lives with us. I’ve had it. Yet still, you must move here to truly be with me. There is no other way around it. It is in your name, Phila, love. Love is a kinda condition to happiness surpassing all transactions and the system of work. Beyond price, it promises transcendence. But modernity questions absolutes. Like how the man’s role is dominant. Phila, you understand this. Phila, you are different. You don’t try to possess me. But sometimes I wonder, do you really love me? Shouldn’t women wanna be by the one they love like, all the time. But anyways, I love you more than any needy one. I want you by my side. It is certainty with a veil.