by Todd Grimson
Tavinho was in the other car, which had gone on ahead. At breakfast they had acted like nothing had happened. She knew, though, that he was in love with her, he would call her in Rio. Now Jorge and the black man were parting on friendly terms, no damage, no dents. The black man looked at Lisa again and made a little wave as they drove past him, Lisa turned and watched as they went around a curve and he was lost from her gaze.
In the midst of an explanation to Solange, Jorge said the word Africa, and so Lisa concluded that the black man was just over here from Kenya or Zimbabwe, or Johanesburg, but she liked Kenya somehow. She was disturbed by the force of the sexual attraction she had felt for him. It was scary, how promiscuous this spell might make her become. She wondered whether she had gone insane. In many ways that was an easier answer, and she seriously, painfully considered it, whether she might have hallucinated, suffered memory lapses, imagined things with Boro … she tried to give this alternative a fair shake. She pretended it was true, she was just crazy: OK, then what should she do? Psychotherapy didn’t seem fast enough by a long shot—maybe electroshock treatments were the answer, run some volts through her head and see what seemed real then. Sure, right.
What had Boro said? Something about how Zaqui, the white jaguar, had ended up as a couch. But when, and where? It might have been four or five hundred years ago. Well, no, sometime after the conquest: As far as she knew, the Incas and Mayas hadn’t had jaguar-skin couches. And an albino jaguar … that must be rare; she had never heard of it before. What good would it do her, even if it still existed and could be found? She didn’t know. It was the only possibility for magic other than the ordinary selections down here, macumba and candomble, which seemed to be awfully well trodden paths.
She said goodbye to Jorge and Solange and carried her bag into the house. Celina greeted her, asked her if she would like some lunch. Lisa said yes, and asked if Caitlin was here.
“No, she’s out again, visiting the cemeteries.”
Lisa looked puzzled; the black cook shrugged and smiled. It was a mystery, then. Halfway through lunch, Caitlin came in and was served a plate of spicy black beans over rice, with a small salad.
“You’ve been at the cemetery?” Lisa asked. She felt more poised with Caitlin now, seeing her as someone who worked for her father. An employee. The perhaps basically vicious distinctions of class and household were beginning to sink in.
“Yes. Did you have a good time at the beach? You look like you got some sun.”
“I had a good time,” Lisa said, looking at her, waiting for her question to be more fully answered.
“Good.” Caitlin took a bite of food. “I’m checking for a special vine that grows in certain cemeteries. So far no one has found one in a modern city … but I’m looking anyway. There are three or four cemeteries I should be able to see this afternoon.”
“Can I come with you?” Lisa asked, after a moment of thought.
“It’s pretty boring.”
“I don’t mind.”
“OK, then, if you want to, sure.”
If Lisa felt like she was including herself where she was not wanted, it didn’t trouble her too much. She wanted to find out more about what Caitlin was doing, and she didn’t want, at the moment, to ask a lot of questions. When she knew more, she’d know better what to ask.
Lisa yawned without covering her mouth. She hadn’t slept much the night before. She wore jeans, sandals, a black-on-shiny-gold Alfred Jarry T-shirt she’d bought in New York.
Another Mercedes, with a younger Brazilian driver. He hadn’t come in for lunch. Caitlin and Lisa got in the backseat, and Caitlin spoke to him in Portuguese. They were off.
Caitlin wore a white dress with flowers on it. There was a funny tension between them. After a few minutes Caitlin asked Lisa about film school, what was that like, perfunctorily, and Lisa gave her a perfunctory if rambling answer, telling about how you could get equipment easier in L.A.—Panavision, for instance, would let you use all kinds of stuff—while in New York you had to hustle for everything….
The scenery on the drive, up past Ipanema, was wonderful. The driver, who with his high cheekbones looked very Indian, remained silent. They arrived at the first graveyard and walked through it, past flowers strewn on graves, past white crosses and burned-out candles, Andreas, the driver, waiting by the car, drinking from an already opened bottle of guarana.
Lisa looked at the names on the markers. A swarm of yellow butterflies danced around just overhead. There was a smell of smoke, a wood fire, or perhaps marijuana. One could look down and see the blue of the ocean. Nearby was a church. Apparently there was no sign of the corpsevine here. None of the characteristic little white flowers were anywhere to be seen.
FIVE
The next day, Lisa insisted she wanted to go to Copacabana, so she called up Solange and said, “I know it’s crowded and all that, but I want to try it for an hour or so.” Solange agreed, saying that you could see most of Rio on that beach sooner or later.
Tavinho had called Lisa the night before. Tonight she was supposed to go to a movie with him. She wanted a Brazilian film, in Portuguese, with a Brazilian audience. They had talked for an hour. He had spoken of the “metaphysical strangeness of existence,” saying that people were always trying to break through, to feel at home in their own lives, at home in life. Lisa listened to him, feeling like she was fulfilling the typical passive role of a Brazilian girl.
Jorge and Solange drove over, and the three of them went down to the supercrowded beach. There was a lot of music, blasters putting out sambas, hiphop, reggae … there were thousands of people here. Jorge was in a good mood, looking at all the women’s buttocks displayed by the tanga. Solange applied sunscreen to Lisa’s belly and shoulders and thighs, they were on a big violet and crimson beach towel depicting some complicated, more or less psychedelic scene. Jorge was really very tan. Machao. Proud of his body, happy in it. The dreadlocked hustler beach bums assessed him and didn’t bother him at all. Solange was restless, or excited for some reason, she couldn’t keep still.
Lisa was animated, smiling, talking about her role in The L.A. Ripper, they were interested in hearing about how things worked in L.A. She described the knife with the retractable blade, the little bags of fake blood. It felt innocent, refreshing, to be talking so unguardedly, she didn’t care if she seemed a little foolish or young. The crowd around them, the huge milling crowd, all the golden brown bodies, this atmosphere was exhilarating, there was always something to attract one’s attention, the satisfaction of fitting in here, of having local friends of some sort, however skin-deep it all was….
At some point Jorge went to get beer. Solange inclined her head to the right and said, “There are the businessmen, with their cell
phones, they come to the beach and do their deals … over there are the gays, we have a lot of them here, some of them in drag are unbelievable. Best in the whole world. The kids from the favelas all come here, why not? Maybe they can steal something, get something to eat, or buy some crack. You like this song?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Gilberto Gil.”
Jorge returned with the beer. He seemed to feel he’d done them quite a favor. The beer was cold, the first couple of sips tasted very good. Solange asked him a question; they got into a conversation, she sounded peevish, he barely answered…. During a lull, Lisa stood up and said politely, “I’m going to go for a little walk. Just down to those kites and back.” She smiled, but whether they were disarmed or not, she left them. This was what, she realized now, she had wanted all along. To be alone, walking by all these people. Certainly no one would imagine she wasn’t Brazilian, she pretended that she was, trying it on, to see how it would feel. She saw what there was to be seen, she was alert; at the same time she was quite self-absorbed. She drew stares, but it was all comparatively anonymous, she might even vaguely smile back at someone, it meant nothing; she had her mission, which was to walk down to the big kites, red or blue or green dep
ictions of birds on white, shaped to demonstrate the birds’ outflung wings. The sand was hot on her bare feet, she dug them in a bit, burrowing her toes some, taking her time.
It felt different from American beaches she’d known, all the near-naked bodies so terrifically vulnerable yet without more than very slight flickerings of fear in this social situation, the different bodies functioning as variations on a theme. All the cultural impediments of parents’ lives, bank balance, employment, vocabulary … all seemed to waver and recede in the crucial physicality of these many bodies on the beach—and she felt a sheen, a glow, a radiance of the reflected collective gaze on her, in the warmth, the smell of suntan oil, as she existed in a movie, in the random moviegoing that fit together to compose the fractionated, brightly lit scene.
Then she saw him. At first she wasn’t sure. It was the black man from the traffic accident. He smiled. It was obvious he recognized her. Or did he? She hardly knew what she was doing; she walked up to him and said hi.
“Como e seu nome?” he said, what is your name, and when she struggled to answer, fumbling the language, “Meu nome …” he smiled and said, with a slight British accent, “Are you American? I’m over here from Nairobi. Sit down for a moment. My friends left me alone.”
His name was Errol Mwangi. She told him she was Lisa. She thought he was dazzlingly handsome; she’d never been so attracted to a black man before.
“Are you here long?” he asked.
“In Rio? I don’t know. My father works here—I’m staying with him.”
“Do you want to have a drink sometime? I’m sort of at loose ends these days, just waiting, hanging around.”
“Sure. When do you want to?”
“Tonight?”
“I can’t.”
“Well, I have something tomorrow—Friday, then?”
“Yeah, OK.”
“Maybe we can see the inside of a couple of clubs. Do you want to meet somewhere?”
“Yeah, that sounds good,” she said, helplessly.
“Well, then, Lisa, I’ll be at the Ya Ya Club Friday at ten. There’s a cover charge, but it’s not much. I’ll look for you at the bar. We can have more of a talk then. I’ll see you, yeah?”
“OK.”
Lisa stood up, sand on her haunches, brushing it off, thinking she didn’t have to meet him, he’d made it an easy date to break, but she looked back at him, saw his eyes, his pensive expression breaking again into a smile, his blue trunks … she glanced back once more, and he was no longer there, or rather, he was standing up, shading his eyes, talking with two women in tangas and a man with a beard, the man holding a bottle of beer at chest level, then up to his lips.
The women were both tanned, nice bodies, one with her black hair in a single long braid down her back, the other wearing sunglasses, short hair, lanky and relaxed, also putting a beer to her lips. Lisa didn’t look back again.
Jorge and Solange seemed not to be speaking to each other now; the change in their mood was obvious. In a few minutes Lisa suggested they leave. Jorge asked why. But then, five minutes later, he said, “Let’s go.” Lisa put on a tie-dyed, mostly purple T-shirt. She felt naked now, her buttocks exposed, walking back across all the expanse of sand, the boulevards, toward the car. All those white crosses in the graveyards, all those dead bodies, those skeletons, dissolving into the earth. She shivered.
Was his name really Errol? She sensed he’d lie to her without a twinge of guilt. He seemed intelligent, too, which only made it worse.
Tavinho, she suddenly thought, was too much like her. He was too knowable. She liked him, she could like him a lot, but his sensitivity, his way of thinking … she wasn’t sure. Sometimes it was better to play dumb, even to oneself—especially to oneself!
She shivered again, from head to toe. How could she test the power of the jaguar? Maybe she could do more than kill someone with an X on their photograph. Yes, she rather thought she could. But no one had told her what, or how.
SIX
It had made a big impression on Alfred Nova (now most often called Alfredo) when Sandra, his first wife, told him he was inhuman. He had been shocked and hurt; he didn’t think it was true. A cruel, unfair slur, but it stuck with him and troubled him, for there were certainly many times when other people’s actions and motives were inscrutably mysterious to him.
Like now. He had known that there was some difficulty, yet it was vague to him, he had no conception—it was painful seeing the tattoos, to begin with, because he knew how his present wife, Isabel, however sophisticated and liberal she was, would react. Lisa was his favorite child, and the other siblings had sensed this, however fair he sought to be, but it was still difficult for him to show affection … with women there was sex, and they accepted this as evidence of affection, even if otherwise he seemed detached. Lisa, Lisa … it very nearly made him weep, the assumption was obvious: She was self-destructive, punishing herself…. In his study, he asked her, directly, “What’s the story on the tattoos?” and she told him, with what seemed naive enthusiasm, a story he had difficulty following. He would remember and analyze every word, but while she told him about her dispute with Lou, her resort to Boro, this spell that got out of control—Nova, as he heard it all, was simultaneously conscious of all that was unsaid, the parts she’d glossed over, plus the parallel
notion that the whole business was invention or hallucination— none of the extant possibilities was good.
Nova was tallish, slender, and ascetic-looking, balding in a distinguished way: the very picture of rectitude and intellect. Now that he lived in Brazil he had a tan; it was an irrationality, an example of vanity and a risk of skin cancer, but most of his life he had never been tan, and he still associated it with wealth and good looks. Isabel was naturally golden-skinned, she had to do very little to become beautifully bronzed. She too had been married once before, to an executive in the Brazilian recording industry who had died in a car accident when he drove off a cliff on the way back from his mistress’s beach house late one night. Isabel had one child, Ricky, who was now in Paris, continuing his studies. He would be an economist, for the government or some big firm. His special concern, though, was the environment, and in this regard he was highly critical of the United States. His facts were incontrovertible. Ricky was pleased that he had raised Dr. Nova’s consciousness in this regard. There was little tension between them, less by far than there was between Nova and Track, or between Lisa and Andrea for that matter. He had hardly known her at all.
Lisa had been the easiest for him to love. He considered himself a failure as a parent, but that disappointment was qualified by the conviction that children are basically resilient, their own animals, and that they seldom turn out how they are intended, if you send them one way they most often somehow rebel.
For many years (and still) Sandra considered Lisa to be imperfect. She was a good-tempered, imaginative child, full of curiosity, but Sandra was appalled by her impulsiveness, stubbornness, and for a long time, in contradistinction to Andrea, her tendency to roundness—Sandra was constantly telling Lisa she was too fat. Nova himself didn’t see the problem. If Lisa was a little plump, he only found it more enjoyable to hug her than stiff, bony Andrea, but he had allowed Sandra to rule in this, as in so many other matters of daily life, for he certainly could claim no expertise in girls’ dresses and bodies and first bras. He let Sandra enroll Lisa in dance classes she hated, let her restrict Lisa to celery and carrot sticks for days on end … but when Lisa bloomed, joined the swim team on her own, and absolutely refused to continue dance, Nova was on her side, and as time passed and she found her own way, he felt more pleasure in her accomplishments than in anything he’d done himself, he felt like he daren’t let anyone see the true measure of his delight.
The things she thought of … he had no idea where they came from, what people she must have observed, how she processed the raw data to come forth with an artifact as assured and intriguing as her independent film. And now—a further repr
oof to Sandra, even if Sandra rarely saw her—she was so lovely, far lovelier than Sandra herself had ever been.
That’s why the tattoos really disturbed him. How would others perceive them, what signal would be received?
“So you see, Daddy—I didn’t do it!” she said, suddenly overcome, and began to cry. She didn’t sob or contort her face for more than a moment… just a few tears rolled down her cheeks. Nova found this very hard to deal with, very hard. He was far from unmoved.
“It seems to me,” he said, “there are two possibilities here. It’s a complex story … an extraordinary story, as you must know.”
“I know. It’s unbelievable.”
Nova resisted an urge to ask for more about her relationship with Lou, which was unclear. But maybe he could guess, or maybe he didn’t really want to know.
“The first possibility, as far as taking any action goes … is that you’re mistaken, and something else has happened—hold on—and maybe you need a psychiatrist.
“The second is that it’s true, that is, you’ve told me the truth as far as you know, and you’re a reasonably reliable observer … in which case … well, it’s a long shot. But if there’s any trace of this white jaguar…”
“Boro said she ended up being made into a couch.”
“Yes. Well, we’ll hire a detective, see if such a thing still exists. Antique dealers, museums … it’s at least worth a try, don’t you think? Because it may have been, on this Boro’s part, a clue.”
“Yes. And I thank you … if you want to send me to a psychiatrist, just to be on the safe side, I’ll cooperate. I mean, if I’m crazy, I wouldn’t know it, would I? Like, um, objectively?”
