by Ellen Levy
My boyfriend that summer—a handsome Brazilian named Paulinho—had proposed to teach me Portuguese, but I was a lousy student; it was not that I lacked facility, but I was afraid to care. Or rather, I could care deeply about distant matters—as later I would care about saving the forest—but I was reticent to want something for myself, having seen how caring had undone my mom, whose devotion to my philandering dad had trapped her in a marriage and motherhood she openly regretted.
Paulinho had the eagling Mediterranean beauty I’d expected of Brazilians but which I’d later learn was untypical in the southern part of the country, which had been settled—like the northern United States—largely by immigrants from Europe. His skin was the color of hazelnuts, his eyes dark as wet river stones; he looked East Indian, maybe Spanish; he had jet-black hair cut a military length, glossy as an animal’s pelt, and the body of a tennis champion, which he was.
We’d met at a soccer banquet at the family’s church, one early evening in mid-June, approaching the winter solstice, when the evening sky was a Prussian blue and radiant, as if there were a light on the other side of evening, behind that scrim of sky. I had been to church before in Minnesota, where the Christians I knew were Protestants and most of those were Lutheran; Catholicism was utterly foreign, glamorous, a thing I associated dimly with JFK and Ireland, Renaissance art, Saint Augustine and martyrs.
After the service, my host sister Luciene had led me toward the front of the church and through a door to the right of the chancel into a fluorescentlit back room, where it appeared a dinner was to be held. Folding tables filled the room, covered in red-and-white checked tablecloths, surrounded by folding chairs. It had the feel of a rec hall, the bright bars of the overhead lights, the cement floor, the pale tint of the walls. (This was how I would think of Catholicism after that—as a series of hidden rooms that you were led to by initiates; it seemed a secretive religion to me then and lovelier for this.)
I had been asked to present Paulinho with a medal that evening, and standing close to him, I could smell his cologne, faint and tart. I didn’t know boys who wore perfume then and it surprised me. He was my height or an inch shorter, five nine or eight. His lashes were so thick it looked as if he wore eyeliner.
I raised my arms over his neck and hung the ribbon on his chest. My face was hot.
—Obrigado, he said, gently.
—De nada, I said, It’s nothing.
I had turned away to head back to my table, relieved to have my duty discharged, when the others began to shout what sounded like the name of a movie theater, Bijou, Bijou, which later I would learn had been beijo, meaning, “a kiss.”
I turned back in confusion to the dark-eyed guy I’d given the medal to and saw that he had resumed his seat. He held up a hand, palm forward, to silence the others. He shook his head no, his face canted toward the table, away from me. But the blue-eyed guy next to him mimed a loud smacking kiss and pushed his dark-eyed teammate up out of his seat and so, seeing that I was still there, he stood, reluctantly. He set a hand on each of my arms and said, in clear, accented, very good English,
—They want you to kiss me.
He looked strained, as if he were delivering sad news—your fly is open—something as embarrassing for him to explain as for me to hear. It was a relief to hear English, though his smile was stiff; he seemed as mortified as I to be the focus of this spectacle. I could see his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed.
—Como assim, he said, Like this.
He leaned toward me, stiffly, and kissed my right cheek, then my left, then kissed my right cheek once more.
—Tres, he said, pra casar.
I must’ve looked confused.
—Three, he translated, for marriage. Then he released a smile perfect as caps, pure as pheromones.
Later that night, Paulinho told me that he ran each day and asked if I would like to join him some morning. He could draw up a series of calisthenics for us and we could run a few miles. I was not an athlete, and had been dead last and nauseated at the conclusion of every cross-country meet my senior year of high school (though this may have had something to do with our math-teacher coach, who insisted on driving his sedan slowly alongside us as we ran our route, shouting instructions and encouragement through his open car window, demoralizing for all concerned).
I did not need to train, as Paulinho did, in preparation for competition. But I liked the idea of training. It sounded purposeful. We sought out rules and regimens in those days, Paulinho and I. We believed that they would bring us all we wanted.
Ordem e Progresso is the motto on the Brazilian flag—Order and Progress. Someone presented me with a flag that first summer in Porto Alegre, and I have it somewhere, folded, the way flags are folded and given to the widow of a soldier. The motto of the nation was our motto on the cusp of adulthood—as we stood on those rickety untried porch planks. We believed in this simple credo: Order and Progress.
And so it was that we began to run. Paulinho pulled out a map and traced a route for us, clocking the precise distance in his car. He made up a list of calisthenics for me, based on those of the Air Force, and these I did each morning before I went to see him. I did jumping jacks, sit-ups, wimpy pushups, bent in half.
In the mornings, around 8, I would walk to his apartment building, which was four or five blocks from that of the Simões, just beyond the church, and find him suited up in nylon sweat pants and a jacket, color coordinated, with some sort of racing stripe. Dapper even to sweat.
We would start out slow, jogging through the neighborhood streets, past the corner grocery, past the rec center with its cracked cement basketball court, out to the river that was channeled through town by cement walls between highways. We ran on sidewalks, among cars, exhaust in our nostrils, the water beside us glinting brown, the sky white. I usually felt light-headed, faint, as we ran, a slight buzzing in my forehead and sinuses from what I assumed was monoxide poisoning. My face grew red, and my body’s temperature showed through my skin as I sought to release heat, but I liked the exertion.
Discipline was our watchword. Order and progress. I didn’t grasp the irony of the slogan then: Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship at the time, as it would be for twenty-one years after a 1964 CIA-backed coup overthrew the democratically elected President João Goulart in order to stabilize the country for economic development; I didn’t yet see how costly such logic could be. When I arrived at Paulinho’s house for our morning run, I often found him at the dining table memorizing a list of vocabulary words. I admired this. His regimens. His constant efforts at self-improvement. I didn’t yet know that there were lovelier ways to live.
But Paulinho did not seem rigid then. He radiated sensuality, the athlete’s ease. His body gave him pleasure; he delighted in it. With him, I began to take delight in my own.
It is odd to think of him now—now that I know him well—and to remember when I did not yet know him at all, when I did not yet know the soft sandy texture of his tongue in my mouth, the feel of his teeth against mine, the way he looked surprised when he laughed, startled by happiness, his eyes crinkling at the corners with delight.
It’s odd now to think there was a time when I did not know the hard planes of his chest, the swell beneath his jeans that he knew to draw against the ridge of my pubic bone as we stood nights fully clothed, oblivious of our clothing, in the kitchen of the Simões’ around midnight, the house seemingly asleep except for us, my back against the counter beside the kitchen sink, our hands tangled in one another’s hair and clothes, as Paulinho drew his hips up into mine, over and over, till we were both breathing fast and a little faint and one or the other of us, usually him, said, I have to go, It’s time to go. I would walk him to the door then and open it and trail him into the hall and down the five steps to the foyer, our hands clasped, kissing his neck as I trailed him, kissing his mouth, till we reached the outer door which I’d unlock and he’d pass through, stepping into the drive, and I’d watch him walk to his c
ar, watch him turn back to wave to me, blow me a kiss, and then I’d go back in and close and lock the doors and slip into the kitchen and stand in front of the fridge, tug on the metal door handle, hoping to keep its hinges quiet, and feel its cool refrigerated breath pour over me, as I stared into the anemic glow, finding there on the metal grates that served as racks nothing to satisfy this hunger.
Somewhere, in a box in a closet in my childhood home, there is a photo of Paulinho; probably the Brazilian flag is there as well. I have just one photo of him, taken on the last day of that first summer together. He leans against his red VW bug, his left elbow propped on its roof, his head tilted fetchingly against his left fist. His right arm bends to clasp his slender waist. The outline of his pecs is visible beneath the cream tennis shirt he wears.
He grins hugely, as if he were about to break into a laugh. His eyes fold at the corners in delight. His hips sway to right, like Praxiteles’ famous sculpture of Hermes; his left leg crosses in front of his right, balancing on the toe of a tennis shoe. His short black hair has grown out a little from its military cut and is maybe half an inch long, lustrous and glossy.
Paulinho is smiling out at me, giving me his lopsided smile. And why not? He is young, beautiful, promising, happy; he is a state champion and his life is before him and he is—we both are—so hopeful. He looks like he is advertising something: youth or promise.
In the three and a half years since I’d seen Paulinho last, I’d lost track of my desires, eating and bedding indiscriminately. I’d grown accustomed to sleeping with boys I felt nothing for. My eating had become pointlessly regimented, then at times indiscriminate. In desire’s absence, I swam and starved and studied with a numb rigor.
Desire and the body’s pleasures were foreign ground. I never considered that I might live there, call it home. Perhaps that’s why I always needed a destination—like the language school I was walking toward.
Whatever else I’d come back to Brazil to do, I’d come hoping to see Paulinho. I had come back to Brazil to revive desire. I had returned to save myself as much as the forest, though I didn’t know that then.
The English language school in Salvador was brown and blockish, four stories tall, with smoked-glass walls enclosing its ground-floor. I entered through glass doors and stepped into a chill, dim, air-conditioned lobby.
It was shadowy and hard to see inside after the bright light of the day. There seemed to be no one there. As my eyes adjusted, I could see glass-enclosed classrooms and a broad flight of stairs that led up to another floor. To my right was a reception area, a reception desk, a few chairs, and a table covered in Brazilian magazines—Veja, Manchete.
The receptionist seated behind the desk seemed shadowy and insubstantial, like a figure from Greek myth, gatekeeper to some chthonic world. She looked bored.
I told her in my pidgin Portuguese that I wanted to take lessons. She told me that I couldn’t. It was a holiday. The staff—if I understood her correctly—were on vacation. She was the only one there. I wanted to ask about a private tutor, but I didn’t know how to ask. I didn’t speak enough Portuguese for that.
It was clear that I would have to seek my teachers elsewhere.
Or learn the hard way—by error and by trial.
Prufrock in Paradise
In the space of my first five days in Brazil, I would be robbed; I would be poisoned.
But that day in Salvador, I knew none of this. None of it had happened yet because I had not left my room. Since arriving in Brazil three days before, I had hidden there (except for my brief trip to the language school the previous day), afraid to venture forth, dining on candies in the minibar as if waiting for someone to invite me out, a girl waiting for permission to enter the world.
But the morning after I visited the language school, I woke fortified by a good night’s sleep with the courage to go down to breakfast: I dared to eat a mango. I rose a little after seven and pulled open the curtains, letting in a watery white light. At this hour, the air outside in the street was still cool. The sun was a soft angled glow, not the hard brightness it would gain as it rose in the sky toward noon. The sky, above the buildings that faced my hotel, was a robin’s egg blue, delicate, almost friendly.
I showered quickly and dressed in khaki mid-thigh-length shorts and a gauzy shirt. I put on my tennis shoes and cinched around my hips a money belt, in which I tucked my passport, my driver’s license, and $150 cash (the remainder of my money—$250 in traveler’s cheques—I stowed at the very bottom of my suitcase beneath the orange sweater I had worn so proudly two days before). I planned to carry this pouch of cash and documents with me whenever I went out, in case someone should break into my room. I carried my camera too, just to play it safe.
The travel guides I had skimmed warned of the danger of theft, and just before I’d flown down here there had been a much-publicized murder in Rio, in which a German tourist was killed after he was found to have no money to give the thieves who had held him up at gunpoint. They were children, as I recall. They had shot the man for spite.
The Times had run the story on the front page. In Salvador, where poverty was among the most severe in this impoverished nation, I had been warned to carry a small amount of pocket change wherever I went so that, should I be held up, I’d have something to offer. If you had nothing, you could get hurt: thieves had been known to cut faces with a razor blade, enraged to find their mark without money. Like the mad money young women of my mother’s generation kept on them in case they got angry at their dates, this money had a nickname too, in English: mugger money.
I took the stairs down to the lobby, where the cafe was separated from the main lobby by folding screens. There were eight or ten small tables there, covered in white linen. Only one was occupied, by a couple speaking a language I could not make out, neither Portuguese nor English. Breakfast came with my room, and I was glad to take advantage of it, but I was embarrassed to eat alone. I stood at the entrance a little uncertainly until a waiter came over and extended his arm toward the room in a gesture that suggested I could choose my place. I took a table by the window, far from the entrance and lobby.
As I took my seat, the waiter gave my chair a little shove toward the table, which, though meant to be a courtesy, felt like what it was—a shove from behind.
—Quer café? he asked, when I was seated.
I nodded, pleased to understand the offer of coffee.
—Por favor, I said. Please.
—Americano or com leite? he asked.
I was not sure what he meant by americano, which translated literally as “one who is American,” but I was sure he couldn’t mean me, so I opted for com leite (with milk).
—Temos também sucos, he said. Suco de laranja, de abacaxí, de manga, de maracujá, e de tomate. O que quer?
I was stumped by his flurry of words. Laranja was orange, tomate was tomato. I could not make out the rest.
—Repete, por favor, I said, embarrassed to have to ask him to repeat himself.
—Pois não, he said. Of course. Temos sucos . . . He spoke slowly and loudly and I felt ashamed to be subject to this speech, but I listened, watching his lips as if that would help me comprehend. I hazarded a guess, like a gameshow contestant.
—Quero laranja, I said.
—Suco de laranja, ‘ta certo?
—Suco de laranja. I nodded, unsure what I was agreeing to. The waiter, apparently satisfied, turned and left me there.
I thought I had secured coffee with milk and orange juice and I waited, braced to weather egg options, when, to my relief, the waiter returned with a lovely cup of milky coffee, fresh-squeezed orange juice, a basket of warm fragrant rolls and a plate of sliced fruit—pineapple, mango, bananas, slices of pale green melon.
—Obrigado, I said, thanking him.
—Número de quarto? he asked.
I looked at him. Clearly this was not an egg option. Número was number. Quarto, room. But why would the guy want my room number? What did he think I w
as?
—Número, he repeated, loudly, as if I were deaf. The people at the other table looked over as if I were causing this commotion. He pointed to the ceiling, poking at it. Quarto, he said, louder still. Pra pagar, he was shouting now. He pulled out the check, showed me the place on it where he must write the room number.
—Preciso. Número. De. Quarto, he said again, slowly, loudly.
I nodded. I knew now what he was asking, but I didn’t know how to say it in Portuguese, or rather, I did, but I had temporarily forgotten how to count. Me, the student of economics. Me, the girl in love with numbers.
—Entendo, I managed. Mas, não sei como dizer. I pointed to the pen in his pocket. Por favor. I couldn’t remember the word for pen.
He handed it to me. I wrote on my napkin three numerals. My room number.
—Obrigado, he said, sighing, with an almost imperceptible wag of his head. And then he went to gather the dishes from the table of the other guests who had left their chairs and me alone here.
I opened my cloth napkin and lay it across my lap, conscious of each move I made and how it might look to others were they to observe me. I felt observed even when I was not. I felt observed even though there was no one there to observe me but me.
I tried to focus on the things before me: the shiny heavy stainless cutlery, the white tablecloth, the thick plain china, the pads of iced butter set out on a plate, the basket of rolls. I reached across the table, careful not to drag my sleeve in my coffee or fruit plate. I clasped a small hard roll. I put it on my bread plate, stabbed a pad of butter with my fork and scraped that onto my bread plate too. I cracked the shell of the crusty roll as if it were an enormous yellow egg. I set half of the roll on the plate; half, I held in my left hand. I lifted my butter knife, cut half a pat of butter, slathered it on the soft white interior of the roll in my hand. I proceeded slowly, carefully, unhurriedly, as if I were conducting a public service announcement on how to butter a roll.
