A Sister of Mercy

by

Pit Martin


"Who hath no wyf, he is no cokewold."— Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales.

"People who are 'unfaithful' do not necessarily desert one person for another, but are simply driven home to themselves.— Lou Andreas-Salomé


José


I expected the coming year to be a bad one. It was only Christmas, but there were fewer tourists in Rio because of the terrorist attack in New York City only a few months earlier. You always hope that business will pick up later at Carnival, the busiest time of the year for us, but there was a certain disquiet because of the economy as well as because of the attack in New York. We often have car bombings somewhere in Brazil, but unemployment was about twenty-five per cent here. People like me, trying to run small businesses, faced ruin. With inflation about four hundred percent a month, the cruzeiro was almost worthless, so I accepted American dollars. I take American dollars so that my clients won't have to pay thousands of cruzeiros, made worthless because of the inflation. Brazil was expected to default on its loan from the International Monetary Fund because of the building of the Itaupu Dam on the Paraná River, so the government was printing more money to cover its debt. There was the fear of another military coup. President Mellor de Collor was increasingly unpopular because of corruption, and the Senate eventually impeached him.
I am a taxi driver. My clients are mostly foreign tourists. I can take the tourists where they don't usually go and get them back to their hotels safely, because few people know the city like I do. My rates are reasonable, I think, but I don't accept credit cards. Driving a taxi in Rio is a dangerous job. I shot a little kid trying to rob me once, near Corcovado. Since the gun was illegal, I didn't go to the police but left the body lying in the street. Nobody registers a gun here in Rio, but you could go to prison if you were arrested with an illegal weapon. You don't want go to prison in Brazil— trust me. I am not permitted to carry a gun because I have been to prison. I am not involved in criminal activities anymore, but I still have connections with the underworld. I am still a member of the Primer Comando do Capital, the conglomerate of gangs in Brazil. Once you're a member, you're always a member.
I could work for one of the Cooperatives, but I prefer to be my own boss. I drive a dark green 1969 Volkswagen Beetle that my father gave to me before he left for Pittsburgh. That was ten years ago, when I was sixteen. My father was sending money by post when I started driving his taxi, but the money stopped coming. We don't know what happened to him; he could be dead for all we know. The motor has been rebuilt several times. It runs on an ethanol-gasoline mix now because I adjusted the valves. I have a meter, since it's required by city ordnance, and a cell phone, but I mostly wait at the airport for clients. I drive my taxi while my mother operates a sewing machine, sewing the elaborate fantasias for the dancers at Carnival. My woman is a parteira, who delivers babies and does abortions on the side.
About eleven in the morning, I pick up a man and a woman with two children at the airport and drive them to the Copacabana Palace Hotel on the beach. The man is tall and solid, about forty-five years old, with a full flaxen beard and flaxen hair, and a white Panama hat on his head. He has a beefy face, with puffy cheeks, a short nose, and round brown eyes. With his sunglasses, black sandals and black socks, and a multi-coloured Hawaiian shirt tucked out of his khaki shorts, he looks like a tourist; all he needs is a piña colada in his hand.
His wife is just gorgeous! I swear, I'm strongly attracted to her— it's the lightning bolt. She could be a movie star! Possessed of a beauty not easily forgotten, she has the classic French look: a finely chiselled, rectangular face with thin lips and a straight nose, a long and elegant neck. She is a brunette, between thirty and thirty-five years old, of average size for a woman, with oval-shaped brown eyes and arched eyebrows. She has her hair in a ponytail, touched up with of henna. Her body is supple, with strong shoulders and strong thighs. Maybe her skin is a little pale, but her body is proportional: slender, but not too thin, all the flesh of her body evenly distributed. Like her husband, she looks like a tourist: sunglasses, with a wide-brimmed straw sun hat and a sleeveless turquoise cotton blouse neatly tucked into her beige shorts. Her white sandals expose toenails polished red, and she has a large black handbag over her right shoulder— not a good thing in Rio. It could easily be stolen.
They have a daughter and a son. The daughter is about ten years old, with flaxen hair and round light brown eyes like her father, but not especially pretty. Her brother, about five years old, resembles his mother— a very handsome little boy with dark hair and melancholy brown eyes. While waiting for a taxi by the curb, his mother holds out her hand, but he refuses to take it until his mother insists that he take it. Then he releases his mother's hand again. Some little perverse game on the boy's part, I think.
The man sits down next to me in the passenger seat while his wife sits between the kids in the back. "What do you do for a living, senhor?" I ask the man casually, to make conversation. "I'm sorry, but I didn't catch your name."
Robert Rousseau," he says. "I'm a university professor in Montréal. Just published a paper in an academic journal about Shakespeare's use of French in Act III, Scene III of King Henry V. Shakespeare wrote a few scenes of that play in French, you know. I thought he had some understanding of French, but I doubt that he spoke it well."
Then Dr. Rousseau informs me, "French was the language of the upper and middle classes in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; the nobles and their ladies all spoke French, no matter what country they came from. Latin was only the language of the Catholic Church and the scientific scholars, while the peasants spoke their native languages, of course."
That's interesting, senhor," I reply.
Hey, I was just writing a paper," he replies, with good humour. "You have to publish the damned things from time to time, you know. But I've just become a full professor, so we're celebrating. My wife and I have always wanted to go to Rio. The university is paying for everything, since I am also doing some research. My next paper will be on Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis, a Brazilian author of the nineteenth century. Maybe you have ever heard of him?"
I shake my head, because I don't haven't read much literature.
Dr. Rousseau is relaxed, not at all arrogant. He explains things well enough without talking condescendingly to you. Though English isn't my native language, I can understand him for the most part. It isn't the Rousseaus' native language, either; they speak French among themselves. You can hear Mrs. Rousseau scold the children quietly a couple of times, "Arrêtez donc, vous autres."
Then I ask Mrs. Rousseau, smiling at her as I look at her through the rearview mirror, "You are also a professor, senhora?"
Mrs. Rousseau laughs agreeably and replies, "No, I'm just a nurse. I help deliver babies, that's it. I drive across the border every day to New York State because we live in Canada and I work at a hospital in Champlain, New York. But I love my job— it's the most beautiful job in the world."
Just a nurse? Professors work hard to get their degrees, I'm sure, but Dr. Rousseau's wife delivers babies, like my woman— that's important. You don't need a Shakespeare as much as doctors and nurses, the way I see it. Canada's entire health-care system would collapse completely without people like Mrs. Rousseau, though she works in the United States now. Probably no one will ever read Dr. Rousseau's paper, except someone else in the field. But Canada has been closing hospitals due to budget cuts, or so Canadians have told me. If there's anything that Canadians really care about, I have found, it's health care. Mrs. Rousseau has a certain charm, but I like both her and her husband well enough; they're nice.
When we arrive at the Copacabana Palace, the Rousseaus check in while I take their luggage upstairs to their suite. (Normally, a hotel employee would bring their luggage up, but Marta, the concierge, knows me, so she lets me do it.) Once in their suite, the daughter asks her mother, very politely, "Maman, peut-on aller à la plage asteur?" She wants to go to the beach, I think.
The son cries, with all the patience of someone five or six years old,"Hé, maman, allons à la plage!" Must be, he really wants to go the beach.
The children are behaving well, but they are getting restless. Mrs. Rousseau picks up a valise and puts it on the bed in the master bedroom. Then she calls in English to her husband, who's inspecting the bathroom and has just turned on the coffee maker, "Robert..."
Yes, my love?"
"Please be a dear and take the kids to the beach while I go unpack."
With a booming voice, Dr. Rousseau shouts to the children, "Hé vous autres, allons à la plage!"
The children don't have to be told a second time; they quickly change into their swimsuits, the boy in the bathroom, the girl in the bedroom. Then they come running to the door, overtaking their father. The girl opens the door wide enough to let her younger brother go out first before passing through it too. Their father follows. I don't understand everything that they have said, because they speak French, but I can understand a little bit because Portuguese is similar to French. We speak Portuguese in Brazil, not Spanish.
After I finish bringing up the bags, Mrs. Rousseau gives me a tip. She even offers me a cup of coffee from the coffee maker in the bathroom, since her husband has left without drinking his cup. I accept. We sit for a while on the sofa together, just talking. I look into her soft brown eyes for the first time— what playful, mischievous eyes! I tell her that she is very beautiful. She merely flashes a smile that shows the dimples in her cheeks and says, bowing her head slightly, "Merci beaucoup, monsieur."
I bow my head as well, smile, and say, "Não há de quê, senhora. The pleasure is mine, senhora."
I am flustered in her presence, almost unable to speak. Oh, I know that she's attracted to me, but I do nothing inappropriate, out of respect for her and her family. Still, I want her very much; she is truly one of the most beautiful women in the world. I have never seen a woman so beautiful.
After I leave the hotel suite, I look out at the ocean from the parking lot at the beach through my binoculars. I am a people-watcher, but the ocean always has fascinated me. I want to take a boat and sail across the Atlantic to Africa one day with a special woman— that's my dream, anyway.
I'm saving my money, because I want to get far away from Rio.

Robert

I would have liked to have seen more of Brazil: you know, hike through the rain forest, or visit Bahia in the northeast. But Brazil is a very large country and we were only in Rio for fifteen days. Visitors in Rio often go there only for the beaches and the nightlife. My wife, Chantal, and I easily could have gone dancing at a different club on Lagoa de Rodrigo Freitas each night without ever leaving Copacabana. But Chantal didn't want to fly to Rio at first because of the bombing in New York City just a few months earlier, on September 11, 2001. Then Chantal wanted to go at Christmas, and she insisted on bringing the kids. We almost didn't go.
Of course, I love my children, but I was hoping for a second honeymoon with my wife. We needed the time to be alone, I thought, because we were having marital troubles. My mother and her father had both died within the past year. My mother battled cancer for a more than a year before she succumbed to it. Therefore, my sister and I were able to prepare psychologically for my mother's demise and settle her affairs. However, Chantal's father had died suddenly of cardiac arrest; she was still in a state of shock. She was very close to her father. Then she lost her wedding ring. When she despaired of ever finding it again, she sat down on the kitchen floor at home and sobbed without constraint in front of the children and me. The children were terrified, and I was afraid that Chantal was having a nervous breakdown. Too much was happening at the same time, and I don't think she had been taking her medication like she should have been. Yes, we needed a second honeymoon, I thought.
Chantal and I almost separated; she even wanted to take the kids and go back to her mother's. So I offered to let her have the good car. At the time, the other car was at a garage, being repaired. However, Chantal didn't want the good car. "I can always buy another one," she said, "and you still need it."
Chantal was trying to be noble and self-sacrificing, I thought, but I didn't think that she was very reasonable. I pointed out that I could always rent some apartments near the campus and walk to the university where I taught, whereas she worked in the US and we probably would have to sell the house anyway. (We lived in Châteauguay, Québec, at the time, southwest of the Mercier Bridge; it was closer to her job in New York State, where she was a nurse, yet not too far from Montréal, where I was a university professor.) However, Chantal was adamant: she insisted that I take the car and drive her and the kids to her mother's. "If we divorce," she said, "I will have to work in Canada anyway, to be near the kids."
So I shrugged my shoulders and gave in. I loved her with all my heart, but I wasn't going to try to stop her from leaving me, if that was what she wanted. It is said that a Zulu will never chase a woman once she has left him, no matter how much he loves her. When it comes to women, I have always been a Zulu. I didn't plead with my first wife, Katrina, to come back either— I was glad to be rid of Katrina, in fact. So I said nothing to Chantal during the entire drive to her mother's house. Chantal's family lived in western Québec, in a little town on the Ottawa River, about a hundred kilometres west of Montréal and the same distance southeast of Ottawa. We said almost nothing during the entire drive. At one point, I wanted to stop the car, turn around, and take her back home. I wanted to tell her that I only loved her and that I was sorry for everything that I had ever done to hurt her. But I couldn't say the words: I had my tongue in my pocket.
When we arrived at her mother's, the children ran ahead of us to say hello to their grandmother while Chantal and I remained in the car. "I didn't have a chance to say good-bye to my father," she suddenly sobbed.
I put my right arm around her as she rested her head on my shoulder. "I know that," I murmured, "I know that. But I'm sure he understood."
Then Chantal looked up at me and said bitterly, "You weren't there for me, Robert. You were more concerned about your translation of Rilke than you were about me."
Of course, I denied her accusation, because an accusation almost always invites a denial, then an explanation, rather than a full admission of guilt. "That's not true," I replied. "I tried to be supportive, but I didn't know what to do or what to say. I loved your father too, you know. He wasn't a bad old devil."
Chantal's accusation was just. I had thrown myself into Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus in order to deal with my mother's death. It's always frightening to watch a parent die slowly of a disease like cancer. You think you'll be prepared for it when your mother dies, but you're always shocked when it happens. You can't prepare for the death of a loved one, no matter how you try.
Unlike Chantal and her family, my family was never close. My sister lived in Toronto, and I seldom saw her or talked to her at all, whereas I saw my mother only on holidays, even though she lived in Montréal. As for my brother, well, he was a park ranger at Banff National Park; nobody ever saw him, except when he felt like visiting civilization. When I was about four years old, I walked into the bathroom while my mother was taking a bath. Her face was contorted with such rage as she screamed at me that I am sure that she would have drowned me if she could have gotten away with it and I hadn't been out of reach. But that's why my mother's death was painful for me, because our relationship was always difficult. My mother was difficult, and she only had a few friends. I never even knew my father because my parents were divorced when I was very young. My earliest memory of my father was of helping him paint a house when I was about five years old. He once promised to send me a hockey stick when he was working at a factory that made them somewhere near Sherbrooke, but I never got it. Then my father drowned in a few inches of water in the Gulf of Mexico off of Florida after suffering a massive heart attack; he was about forty-five years old. I have a half-brother in Florida that I have never seen. His name is Donald, I think.
As I held Chantal in my arms, I realized that I was crying too. Then I said to her, "If you want, you can come back home, but I won't beg you to stay. I only love you, but I can always find another woman, and you can always find another man. You're attractive enough."
Chantal nodded her head. Then we wiped our eyes and blew our noses before going inside to say hello to her mother. We stayed for about an hour or two, talking about the weather, and then drove all the way back home, hardly saying a word to each other. Chantal decided to stay with me that time, but it was evident then that our marriage was already in trouble.
I wanted for us to go to Rio to try to work it out, because I thought we still loved each other. By the time we left for Rio, Chantal seemed to be in form. She had lost some weight over the last six months because, she said, she didn't feel like eating. She looked good in a bikini again, and she actually seemed to look forward to this vacation.
She had even started swimming again after having not swum for more than a year.

*****

When we arrived in Rio, we got a ride from a taxi driver who was definitely interested in Chantal, the gigolo! He and Chantal definitely had hooked atoms. I could swear that Chantal was even blushing. Why I left them alone, I still don't know, but I took the kids down to the beach while my wife unpacked and paid the driver. You could say that the kids distracted me.
It was beautiful our first day in Rio, the sun high on the horizon. It was hot, about thirty degrees Celsius: no snow and no cold, though it was almost Christmas. The beach at Copacabana is about five kilometres of white sand, bordered by palm trees. There were kiosks under umbrellas and a mosaic of black and white ceramic tiles on the sidewalk in a swirling pattern suggestive of the sea. The beach really was alive that day, with people of all ages and nationalities: Canadians, Americans, Germans, Australians, Japanese, and French, as well as native Brazilians. There were lots of women in string bikinis; some of them were just magnifique! There were people swimming, sunbathing, playing beach volleyball and beach soccer, skimboarding, and surfing. Some young men were doing what looked like a combination of break dancing and karate— capoeira, they call it— to the accompaniment of drums and a single-stringed instrument that looked like an archer's bow with a gourd attached to it, called a berimbau. There were food vendors and taxis waiting at the edge of the beach and in front of the hotels by the beach. Some musicians were playing their guitars and percussion instruments under the shade of some palm trees by the sidewalk. One of them had a drum with a small hole in the centre that made a squeaky sound when you rubbed a little bamboo stick inside it, while another had a small guitar that resembled a ukulele— a carvalcão, they call it.
Though it was only Christmas, Rio already was getting ready for Carnival. About a week or two before the start of Lent, people in Rio wear elaborate— or minuscule— costumes with their tall headdresses and partake in a five-day orgy of excess. They say these festivities makes New Orleans look like the poor US soccer team up against the mighty Brazilian one for the World Cup. By all accounts, New Orleans has never competed very well with Rio for the World Cup of Decadence when it comes to Carnival, which is just the same as Mardi Gras, but only by a different name. In comparison, the New Orleans celebration has a Protestant austerity, particularly since Hurricane Katrina, though I have been to New Orleans for Mardi Gras before the hurricane, when I was a student. (There was a bar on St. Charles Street that I now call "The St. Charles Street Infirmary," because I was hungover the next morning. The road of excess leads to moderation, you hope.)
But let's get back to our sheep, eh? While I stood in a queue at a stand in Copacabana, getting some pizza for the kids, a slender, statuesque young woman about twenty years old was standing next to me. She was wearing a tan string bikini that made her look naked at first glance. My God, she was beautiful! I had to marvel at her brown, tropical beauty. Her dark hair was long and wavy, a little darker than her skin, which was the colour of cinnamon. She had a pretty oval face with high cheekbones, thin dark eyes, and a pretty smile exposing perfect, white teeth. Her breasts were somewhat small but young and firm. Her arms and legs were long and thin, but with good muscle tone, probably from swimming in the ocean, I imagine. The kids played in the ocean while we talked. I tipped my hat and introduced myself: "Hello, mademoiselle, how are you today? I'm Robert Rousseau."
She smiled as well, seemingly amused, and replied, "Bom dia, senhor. I am Maria da Conceição, muito prazer."
The people are very friendly in Rio, I have found. Muito prazer means "pleased to meet you." Her voice was a warm mezzo soprano, nasal, but incredibly sexy.
"What a beautiful name!" I replied ebulliently. "Yes, a magnificent name: Maria da Conceição, Mary of the Conception! Yes, you're very beautiful, my dear. I'm charmed, very charmed. Muito prazer!"
She said "obrigada," which means "thank you," and then I extended my hand. With some hesitation, she put hers in mine, laughing, but shyly now.
All of sudden, I held my hat to my chest and recited these lines:

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate..."

Smiling like a Mona Lisa of the Copacabana, Maria da Conceição asked, "What is it, senhor?"
"It's a sonnet from William Shakespeare," I replied. "Would you like to hear the rest? It's only a short one, fourteen lines."
She thought about it a moment, then replied, laughing, "Okay, senhor."
So I recited the whole poem from memory, all fourteen lines. When I finished, Maria laughed and applauded. "Bravo!" she cried.
There were others who applauded after my performance as well. Maybe they were her friends, I don't know, but I tipped my hat, bowed, and said, "Thank you, thank you! But no applause— just throw money!"
Then I remembered the kids and glanced over at the ocean. I hurriedly tipped my hat again, took my pizza from the concession stand, and said, "Hey, I have to go, ma p'tite good day. Thank you for indulging an old man."
Oh, that one might be young again!
I found the kids and gave them their slices of pizza. We were returning to our place on the beach when I saw Chantal standing next to our towels and our cooler, with her arms across her chest. We had to put down a deposit on our chairs at the hotel. I couldn't see Chantal's face at a distance because of her sunglasses, but I asked myself, with a little apprehension, "Oh, no! What's wrong now!"
When I approached her, Chantal only said angrily, in the presence of the kids: "Why weren't you watching the kids while they were swimming? One of them could have been drowning! And why wasn't somebody watching our things? Something could have been stolen."
Of course, Chantal was angry about something else besides our things on the beach and the kids being unsupervised, I thought. She normally didn't worry about our things being stolen; we even forgot to lock our house before leaving. When we remembered on the plane, she just called her friend, Alice, on her cell phone before we switched planes in Miami and asked her to lock it for us. As for the kids, I looked over at them from time to time. But I didn't want to fight about it: I merely tipped my hat, bowed, and replied, "Forgive me, my dear, I was careless."
Yes, I was very careless.

Chantal

What an awful flight! On landing, the children both complain of pain in their ears, Patrick in particular. There's lots of turbulence, and the air is stale. This is my first time on an airplane; only my husband has ever been on one before. He flew to Europe as a university student during summer vacation, and then did some backpacking all the way to Istanbul. He was deported from Cyprus because he ran out of money and tried to find work in an olive grove without having a work visa. His experience probably was a lot of fun, but he doesn't talk about it much, except to say that the Algarve in Portugal was his favourite place. That was where he met his first wife, Katrina, who is from Belgium but is a Canadian citizen now. Katrina speaks several languages— French, Dutch, German, and English— and teaches Latin at a university. She's an intellectual like him, but they couldn't get along, so they divorced. I don't ever want to fly again, but my husband reassures me, "Not all flights are like this one, mon amour."
I only glare at him. He laughs, kisses me, and says to me in English, "You're beautiful when you're mad."
" Must be, I'm always beautiful then," I reply, in French.
He laughs again and says, "But you are always beautiful, Chantal, even when you're not mad. But you're not always mad, eh?"
I relent and we kiss and reconcile.
After we transfer to another plane in Caracas, Venezuela, we fly over hundreds of kilometres of jungle, not very high above the trees. There's nothing but trees all around us. Then, seated next to my husband, who's next to the window, I look to the west and see a massive cloud of black smoke hundreds of kilometres away. I don't believe it! I think to myself in horror, "Wow, that's the rain forest burning!" When I point out the blaze to my husband, he replies morosely, "That's a whole forest of brazil nut down there."
I don't say anything, but I doubt that there's any more brazil nut to burn down there.
The issue of global warming is very complicated. It could be that the owners of a sugar plantation are clearing the underbrush, because Brazil grows lots of cane sugar. Or it could be the ranchers are clearing land for their cattle. Besides, automobiles and factories in North America make more air pollution than the agriculturalists slashing and burning their land. But you feel a certain dread, like you're witnessing the destruction of Eden. You fear that the trees underneath you will soon be gone and the animals destroyed. It's like the life that you know is about to pass away forever. At that moment that you feel like giving up all hope for the human race. You think, "You'd better enjoy it now while you can." But how can you enjoy it if you think it's going to be gone? You enjoy it because you think it's always going to be there and you can come back to it again.
We arrive at Rio and take a taxi to our hotel. I think that the driver is checking me out through his rearview mirror, but he's discrete about it. There's something about this man, a je ne sais quoi. His skin and his hair are brown, like a campesino who picks coffee for a living. He has an old Panama hat like mine, but his is grey. He's very handsome, but he has a faraway look in his eyes. I have since seen soldiers back from Afghanistan with a similar look. I ask myself now, some time later, of what war is he a veteran. I'm sure that he has had an interesting life.
At the hotel, my husband takes the children to the beach while I pay the taxi driver and unpack. I don't know why my husband left me alone with him; he could have been a rapist. But we have a cup of coffee together in the living room. The driver flirts with me a little bit, something about driving me around the block, but nothing very serious; he's always a gentleman— he's even a little shy, I think.
Then I go down to the beach as well, after the taxi driver has left. I sweep the beach with my eyes, but there are so many people there that I can't find my family. I'm beginning to worry. Then I see my husband openly flirting with a girl on the beach. He's holding her hand, really singing the apple! I don't believe it! The pedophile! She's about eighteen years old, if that old. She's young enough to be one of the students in his classes— young enough to be his daughter! She's around the same age as I was when my husband and I first met, and she's really beautiful. When I look at her, I almost gasp. I'm still attractive, I think, being thirty-four years old, but that girl is much younger than I am.
I feel betrayed by my husband. I thought that he loved me. I thought that we had a good marriage, though we started having problems after my father died. I thought that my husband wanted me because I was attractive to him, that he loved me for myself. I don't know why he would even look at somebody else like that; he could have been more discrete. Oh, he wants me, but that's out of habit, I think. I'm available to him; we sleep in the same bed, you know. Maybe he wants his students more than me, I think to myself now. I don't know, maybe he even has sex with his students.
Eventually, I find our chairs, our beach towels, and our cooler. I am angry because there's nobody watching our things. When I see the children playing in the ocean without any supervision, I'm furious, because he isn't watching them either— he's busy with her. I wait until he and the children come back from the hot dog stand, and then I let him have it. I ask, really angry, "Why weren't you watching the kids while they were swimming? One of them could have been drowning. And our things: why wasn't somebody watching our things? Something could have been stolen."
In that charming manner of his, he tips his hat and replies, "I'm sorry, my dear, I was very careless."
Oh, I want to kill him!
While sitting in our chairs, I calm down a little and ask him, "Who's that girl you were talking to, eh? She's very pretty."
Still reading his book, he replies, "Just a girl."
I hit him on the arm with my hand and say with a derisive laugh, "You were flirting with her! You were almost ready to steal away with her to a magic castle in the sky! But don't worry: I'll serve you guys breakfast in the morning."
He's really defensive now. "You're wrong, my dear," he replies angrily. "You're wrong!"
Then he lowers his voice and says quietly, "It's you that I love, Chantal— I only love you. She's nothing to me, just a pretty girl. I see them every day in class— you know that."
"No, I don't know that," I reply, angry as well. "I don't think I know anything anymore. I'm just your little fool, that's all."
He looks at me, perplexed, not knowing quite what to say. I don't say anything more, either, but I have a lot of resentment now— a whole lot of resentment. He doesn't even say that he's sorry for having flirted with her; he doesn't admit that he was wrong.
I have a white night; I don't sleep well at all. He tells me that he loves me and wants to make love, but I don't have the feeling of being loved. I only feel cheapened— I still resent him. After we're done, I ask him if he was thinking of that girl. "No, my dear," he replies. "I was only thinking of you. You looked so beautiful, like a marble statue in the moonlight. You have always moved me."
"I was thinking of her," I admit. "I was imagining her with you."
"And..."
"I was imagining her with you. She's very beautiful, you know."
We do it again— oh, he's a carnal gourmet! He might have been trying to reassure me, trying to make me feel desirable again, I don't know. I only know that he hurt me. There's nothing in the world worse than wanting to cry after making love— nothing.
I can't stop thinking of that girl. That's why I can't sleep, because he wants her— I know it!

José

I'm lying in bed with my woman, Lourdes, on a Sunday morning while she's asleep. She might as well be on the dark side of the moon rather than the other side of the bed, because we don't talk much anymore. We live our children in the old section of Rio. Lourdes is of mixed race, tall and full-figured. She is about twenty-five years old, with small, deep brown eyes, medium-brown frizzy hair cut short, and light-brown skin. She wears a turban and a long flowing skirt in the manner of the baianas. Lourdes is slow moving, like a cow grazing quietly in a pasture. She seldom makes a scene, but she always has a serious expression on her face, often frowning, always concentrating on something. When I ask her what she wants, she tells me, but I have to ask or she won't tell me. She's usually willing to do what I want, but I wish that she would tell me what she wanted without me having to ask. It's frustrating. Sometimes she says that she's tired, but she's usually willing. Then she will smile slyly and ask, "Can you make me come three times, Jecu?"
No problem. I can make her come several times, if there's time, but I sometimes have to ask her what she wants. Fortunately, I have learned from past experience— I don't always have to ask. But she's shy. We don't want any more children, so we use condoms. But condoms don't always do the trick: the baby, Minha, was an accident. Really, all babies are accidents, some happy, some not so happy.
Lourdes is secretive about what she does for money. Women often come over to discuss business. Then they suddenly speak in low voices or clam up when I enter the kitchen. Lourdes delivers babies as a parteira, something that she learned from her mother, but I'm sure that she does abortions as well. Lots of women in the favelas have abortions, but people just don't talk about it. Lourdes has probably had an abortion or two herself, maybe has even done it to herself. However, she could go to prison if she was arrested, because abortions are illegal in Brazil.
Our apartments are very crowded, with Lourdes' mother living with us, the old piranha! We have no running water, because the landlord stopped paying the water bill and the city shut off the water to all of the buildings in the complex. So we have to drag water in big plastic buckets from a single pump in the courtyard. Hundreds of other people in the same complex share this pump. Lourdes and I sleep on the mattress of her mother's brass bed while her mother sleeps on the box spring in the other bedroom. The children found the bed at the dump and dragged all the way home as a present for their old avó, with help from some of their friends. Lourdes' mother says that she prefers to sleep on the box spring because of her back, so Lourdes and I sleep on the mattress. The baby, Minha, sleeps on the box spring with her grandmother, while Manoel and Zina sleep in the living room. We take the cushions off the living room couch at night and put them on the floor to make an extra bed, so that either Manoel or Zina will have something to sleep on besides the floor. Manoel usually sleeps on the cushions while Zina sleeps on the couch, without the cushions.
We could be doing worse, but we could be doing better as well. Then Lourdes and I have our heated discussions, and everything comes out. While some women are open, expressing whatever comes to their minds as it comes to their minds, Lourdes swallows her resentment like an anaconda with its prey, digesting it slowly. Only she can't always digest her resentment. Lourdes has accused me of infidelity a few times. "I know you've been unfaithful, Jecu," she says one time. "You don't come home at night, and I see other women smile at you on the beach like something has happened between you."
Of course, I always deny her accusations, but her accusations are just. With all of the tourists in Rio, particularly at Carnival, the opportunity is always there. You check into a honeymoon motel for an hour or two; sometimes the woman is even willing to pay. It was a woman from abroad who bought me the pair of Nike tennis shoes from a vendor at the open market. There are men ready to pay as well, but I don't need money that badly; I already do better than most of my neighbours. But it can be dangerous, going on honeymoons: I used to rob honeymoon motels when I was younger. Somebody could rob and kill you, so I always have my gun ready.
Then, as if to soften the blow of her accusation, Lourdes says, "You've been good to the children, Jecu. Manoel and Zina have had no other father." Then she asks plaintively, "What's wrong with me, Jecu? Why am I not good enough? What have I done wrong?"
"Nothing," I tell her. "The problem isn't you, Lourdes, it's me."
I know that there's a better life outside of Rio. When I am not driving, I read the newspaper, because there isn't much else to do when you're waiting for clients at the airport or at the beach. As well, I talk to my clients as I drive them. I feel useless here, even while driving for the tourists. I love my children— I even love Lourdes— but I want to get away from here. I want to do better in life, for myself and for my family. If I can drive a taxi here in Rio, why couldn't I do the same in Pittsburgh or Toronto, where there are other Brazilians? Then I could send the money back home. Of course, I would take Lourdes and the children with me, or send for them once I got the money, but Lourdes doesn't want to go. "I don't know English," she objects.
"But you could learn," I reply, with my arms around her in the kitchen, rubbing the nape of her neck with both the dry and wet parts of my lips. "I didn't know English either at one time," I tell her.
Lourdes says nothing; she just sighs in my arms, all content. She just doesn't want to leave Rio, the way I see it. I don't understand why she's content with so little in life, delivering babies for poor women in the favelas and lighting little candles to Jesus and Yemanjá at the end of the day. To me, that's living in darkness. I don't want to live in darkness. Therefore, I am neither a Christian nor a worshipper of the candomblé, but an atheist. There is no God— I am God. This world is all that we have, and we must be open to whatever it offers us. What it doesn't give us, we must take. What we can't take, we must make from whatever is available. Some people are even willing to share what they have, and I try to give back as well. We were meant to reach out for the sun like the climbing plants of the rain forest or the flowers that bloom in your garden in the morning. Light attracts light and darkness attracts darkness.
Lourdes and I have been raising three children together. We are successful, in part, because Lourdes is the peacemaker. The two oldest, Manoel and Zina, are Lourdes' from a previous relationship, but they never see their father. When I come home from work, Manoel wants to practise his kicks with me, if it isn't too late in the evening; he's really into o futebol and wants to play on the national team with the great Ronaldo some day. Zina, on the other hand, is a little library rat who thinks that she knows everything; she reads lots of books. The littlest one, Minha, soon will be two years old. Minha is still nursing at the breast, since Lourdes was recently pregnant but miscarried.
I'm teaching Manoel and Zina how to read and write, like my father taught me when I was a child. I read to them from the classificados in O Globo, pretending that we're looking for a car or some apartments. I'm also teaching them to do simple mathematics, but I have only a few years worth of education myself and Lourdes can't read at all. Lourdes wants the kids to go to Catholic school, but the tuition is expensive. The public schools here are very crowded and there's not enough space; many children in the favelas have never been to school at all.
Like a big lantern to little moths, the streets are a lure to the children. Often, there are no adults at home to supervise them. That's why I tolerate Lourdes' mother, the old piranha. We don't like each other, but she watches the kids. Lourdes' mother is from the state of Bahia in the north, like my mother. Like most baianas, Lourdes' mother is black. Lourdes' father was undoubtedly white, but Lourdes has no relationship with her father. Her father left home to find his fortune in the gold mines in the state of Minas Gerais when she was young and he never came back.
"You can do better than him," Lourdes's mother will say to her in my presence. "He's just a malandro."
I get fed up with hearing how worthless I am. Maybe I wouldn't be so worthless if I wasn't told how worthless I was all the time.
"Numbers are infinite," I say to Manoel and Zina in the living room. "If I was a magician, I could always pull numbers out of my hat without ever stopping. You can never count them all."
"Never?" Zina asks, sceptically.
"Never. But if you don't believe me, a minha filha, go ahead and try. You'll never count them all."
I tweak Zina on the nose, the little smarty, and then she tries to count to infinity. She gives up after counting to three or four hundred. However, I tell her that I am very impressed, because many kids in the favela can't even count their fingers and toes; somebody has to teach children how to count, you know.
"He who masters numbers," I say to Zina and Manoel, "masters the universe. The rich know their numbers."
Manoel and Zina are both very intelligent. They could be mathematicians or accountants, if we could only get them into a proper school. In the end, I can probably only teach Manoel my trade, which is to drive taxis and work on them; he already works on the car with me. The way I see it, the father who doesn't teach his son a trade teaches him to be thief, or worse. My father taught me his trade.
If you could build even a modest house on top of Corcovado, or on any one of the many hills surrounding Rio, and look out to the wide expanse over Guanabara Bay every day, you would be like a king. There's no better site for a city in all the world, I think, than Rio. But the hills are made of granite. It would be difficult to sink a foundation into one of them, not to mention digging the water pipes and the gas lines. There isn't much room for the city to grow because of the favelas to the north; there's over fifty of them— all mounds of granite covered with little shanties like ants on a mound. Most of the expansion in Rio has been towards the western suburbs along the beaches. Rio is one great big mess now and getting worse. It's dangerous to live here; there's more poverty and more crime now than ever before. The criminals have no fear of the police, except when police vigilantes assassinate people at night. The city outgrew its water supply in the 1950s or 1960s, so there's a severe water shortage now as well; the hotels draw much of the water. The favelas of the poor and the bairros of the working-class, like Santa Tereza, are overcrowded. Even the beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana are always crowded with people, most of them foreign tourists or adolescents. Lourdes and I only bring the kids there when they want to go to the beach. And then, Zina only wants to read a book, like she's afraid of the water.
Rio was the home of the bossa nova, but that was in the 1950s. Whatever romance Rio may have had for North Americans then, it's gone for people like me now. Though I still love Rio, it really isn't a cidade maravilhosa for me anymore, because I have seen the worst of it. However, Rio has a new subway system now, O Metrô, that is due to be completed by the end of 2002. There will be two main lines, intersecting at the Estáção downtown. When it's completed, there will be lines out to the eastern suburbs of Niterói and São Gonzalo as well. You will be able to go anywhere you want in the city, but it will be harder for independent taxi drivers like me to compete. The Cooperatives will probably take over completely one day. Then, the only taxis you will see will be the yellow ones with the blue stripes and Radio written on the door. As well, Brazilian cars will all drive on ethanol one day. I converted mine to a gasoline and ethanol mixture by adjusting the valves in the motor, but it was very costly. However, Rio will be a great city with a new subway system.
You always could do worse. The homeless people living in the parks and the people in the favelas to the north of Corcovado are much worse off than us, and there are more of them than ever before. Every day, hundreds of people come from the backwoods to find work, only there isn't any work for them. That's why you find so many of them sleeping on park benches or in the alleys. Then there's the AIDS epidemic: many people in Rio have AIDS or HIV. Their families often kick them out, because they don't want to catch AIDS from them.
Lourdes is already heading out the door when she says to me, "Rosa Moraes is going to have her baby soon, Jecu. I won't be home much over the next few days, because I'll be over at Rosa's."
"Okay," I reply. But I'm busy playing with the children, so I'm not really listening.
Then, the littlest one, Minha, who is sitting on the floor in front of me, almost hits me in the nose when she suddenly throws her head back. She would have broken my nose if I hadn't put my hand in front of my face just in time. But she's just a baby, so I don't scold her. Instead, I wrap my arms around her and go "BAH-BAH-BAH-BAH-BAH" quickly against her cheek a few times; Minha responds by laughing out loud deep from the belly. She's such a beautiful little baby!
Seize the day, I say. Life doesn't give you a free pass for nothing.
Then Lourdes' mother scowls at me and says, "Don't you have a taxi to drive, Jecu?"
I soon head out the door in order to seize another day.


Robert

"We're going out to see the statue of Christ on Corcovado," Chantal said. "Then we're going to ride the lift to Sugar Loaf Mountain. Would you like to come?"
"Is that the one with the arms stretched out?" I asked. "The statue on Corcovado?"
I held out my arms like the statue that I was talking about. She smiled and replied, "Yes, that's the one. What do you say?"
I was about to say yes when I felt a dull throb to my head, what I call "the axe blow." I get migraines from time to time, when I haven't slept much, when I have been up all night correcting papers, for example. I had been up all night, reading a collection of short stories by Machado, on whom I was writing a paper.
"What's wrong?" Chantal asked. "Headache?"
I winced and replied, "I didn't sleep well, but it's nothing serious."
"Anything unusual?" Chantal asked. "Are you having any double vision? Have you been feeling dizzy?"
"No, not at all," I replied. "It's nothing serious. Just a little headache, that's all."
Chantal gently touched me on the forehead and on the cheeks, checking for fever. Then she massaged my temples and took my temperature as I sat at the dining room table with a digital thermometer in my ear. "You need sleep," Chantal admonished after reading the thermometer. "But maybe you should see a doctor when we get back. It's probably just the migraines, but it could be something more serious: a tumour, or the beginning of a stroke, for example."
"It's no big deal," I replied, a little irritated. Then I said, "Hey, I would like to go too, for the kids."
"You need sleep," Chantal repeated, smiling. "Besides, you're unbearable when you haven't slept."
I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Okay, I'll try to sleep. For you, I'll try to sleep. But you're the remedy."
I was standing in the dining room with my arms around her now.
"Behave yourself," Chantal admonished, smiling again. "I'll only be gone a little while."
We nuzzled each other with our noses and kissed in the middle of the living room of our little hotel suite. "Okay, mon amour," I replied. "For you, I'll behave myself."
Before Chantal left with the kids, she said, "I love you."
"I love you too."
I tried to take a nap after they were gone, but I couldn't fall back asleep. I had daydreams, but of nothing specific. The images weren't clear, though there was lots of green in the background, like I was in the jungle of the Mato Grosso, or maybe somewhere in the mountains. I gave up trying to sleep and got up. Though the air conditioning was on high, I was still sweating because the air conditioning wasn't working right. I informed the concierge of the problem, and then I went down to the beach.
Again, I saw Maria da Conceição on the beach. Like before, when we first met, she was drinking guava juice under the umbrella of a stand. I gazed at Maria a moment, and then I approached her as if in a trance. When she saw me, she smiled and greeted me rather flirtatiously, "Tudo bem, senhor?"
"Hey, not worse," I replied.
"That's good," Maria replied, still smiling. "You could always do worse."
We made some small talk about the weather and things like that. Maria was friendly, like before. I'm sure that somebody remarked that there were lots of people on the beach. Then she told me a little about herself: twenty-three years old, she said, still living with her parents in Copacabana. Maria was a senior at the Federal University of Rio, about to graduate soon with a degree in international marketing. "How do you like Rio?" she asked. I thought it was charming the way she said "Rio"; she pronounced it "hee-yew."
"What's there to not like about it?" I replied. "The weather's fine and the people are always friendly."
"That's good."
I told her a little about myself as well. "I grew up in Montréal," I said, "the only kid on my block who spoke English as well as French, since my mother was from Wales. My mother died about six months ago."
"Oh, I'm sorry about your mother," Maria said sympathetically.
"Hey, it was cancer," I replied. "She wasn't the same person when she died, you know. In situations like these, you almost want your mother to die, so that she won't suffer anymore. But you feel guilty about wanting your mother to die, because she's your mother. Sometimes, it's for the best, I suppose."
Maria didn't reply; maybe she didn't understand. Maybe she was horrified by what I had said because both of her parents were still living, I don't know. So I changed the subject. Then I quoted the words to a Beatles song, "Dear Prudence":
"The sun is up,
the sky is blue.
It's beautiful,
and so are you..." 1

Maria didn't know the song, so I told her what it was, and by whom. She still didn't know it. "I guess it was before your time," I said, smiling. "This was back in the 1960s, a confusing time of long hair on boys and a world gone mad. I once had hair on top of my head, you know."
Maria only nodded her head in agreement. Then, at some point in our conversation, she said that she was engaged to be married. Maria and her fiancé wanted to go live in São Paulo after they graduated and got married. Then she sighed and said, "I will miss Rio, but his family lives in São Paulo. So we will go live in São Paulo with his family after we will get married."
"That's too bad," I replied, "but they have beaches in São Paulo, eh?"
"Yes," she replied, nostalgically, "they have beaches."
We gazed into each other's eyes for a moment. She had such gorgeous chocolate brown eyes! "You're very beautiful, ma p'tite," I murmured, "very pretty."
I was about to kiss her when she turned her head away slightly. She saw that I had the demon. "Hey," I said, smiling, "the only difference between the young and the old is experience— that's all."
She looked at me and smiled, evidently amused. "Okay, o meu vovô."
"Vovô?" I asked, confused.
"Yes, it means 'grandfather.'"
I laughed and replied, "Hey, don't let the bald head fool you, eh? I've had a hard life!"
"It's whatever you say, senhor," she replied, also laughing.
Then Maria smiled mysteriously and said in her sexy mezzo soprano voice, "I'm sure that you have made a lot of women happy."
"Yes, and I could make you happy."
She laughed again, but then turned around and started to walk away slowly, saying over her shoulder flirtatiously, "Adeus, o meu vovozinho."
Oh, parting was such sweet sorrow, but I think that she was still calling me "grandpa" as she slowly walked away.
"I guess I'll have to dream the rest," I murmured to myself.
I soon forgot about Maria da Conceição. About twenty minutes after she left, another woman sat down a few metres to the left of me in a lounge chair that she had brought from her hotel. I was sure that she was Brazilian. She was almost six feet tall and slender, with an athletic build. She had long, straight blond hair in a braid down to the middle of her back. She had beautiful hair, I thought, and beautiful skin, golden brown like French fries. She was wearing a royal blue bikini, with an orange sarong with a white floral pattern wrapped around her hips. She wasn't really beautiful in the classical sense, like my wife, but she was certainly attractive. It was her angular features with the narrow eyes and the aquiline nose that attracted me. She was about thirty-five years old, I thought, around the same age as Chantal. When the woman saw me checking her out, she smiled at me and said in English, "Hello, how are you?"
I smiled back and replied, "Not worse, mademoiselle, and you?"
She laughed and replied, "Ah, je vais bien, monsieur, mais je suis mariée. Je ne suis plus une mademoiselle."
She was telling me that she was married, basically.
"Ah c'est de valeur," I replied. "I was hoping that you were still single. What a disappointment!"
But she only laughed and asked, "But why, monsieur? It's no big thing to be married. Nearly everyone makes that mistake. I have the wedding pictures at home to prove it."
Oh, her eyes! She had such beautiful amber eyes, like a cat. She was devouring me with those eyes! We introduced ourselves. Her name was Flora, and she was on vacation with her family like I was. She was married to a German man with whom she had been living in San Francisco, California, until recently. They now lived in Curitiba in the southern state of Paraná in Brazil with their two children, ages ten and four. Flora said that she had learned to speak French while living in the South of France for the summer as a student; she spoke it well, I thought, though she said that she had a trouble understanding my Canadian French accent. She also spoke Italian, because her father was from Florence, Italy, while her mother was from Brazil. Therefore, I thought, she could have gotten her angular features from either her father or her mother, that is, if her mother was part aboriginal.
I talked about myself as well: what I did for a living, where I grew up, and the dissertation that I had written for my full professorship. I also told her about the translation of Rilke that I was working on. I didn't conceal anything. In fact, I even told her that I was married with children and that I had been married twice. My first wife was Katrina, my love like a hurricane, but that's another pair of sleeves.
Then Flora smiled and said, "What do you say we go back to my hotel, monsieur? I would like to welcome you to Brazil."
I walked back to her hotel with her as if in a trance. I don't remember much of what we said, though our conversation was quite animated. It was the fact that I was a foreign tourist in Rio while Flora was a native Brazilian from another city on vacation too. Though we were strangers, we were soon stripping naked together while kissing. Flora was quite original, a student of the classics or something, because she said in Italian, while entering her bedroom with me, "Lasciate ogni speranza, ogni ch'entrate!"
She spoke beautiful Italian, I thought, but she was quoting Dante's Inferno like we were entering hell: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter."
A strange thing to say, I thought, but Flora told me afterwards that she didn't remember having said anything— a non sequitur, perhaps. She also liked the size of my penis, apparently. "Oh, you're so big!" she said. Definitely not a non sequitur, what she said about my penis.
Then Flora asked afterward, after we were finished, "Who's Maria?"
"Did I call you Maria?" I asked, a little embarrassed.
Flora nodded as we got dressed. "But that's okay," she said, amused. "You can call me whatever you want. I will be your Calypso while you will be my brave Ulysses who will return to his Penelope. I will gladly change into your Maria like a new set of clothes."
Then Flora told me about her husband. "The problem with Kurt is that he's very efficient. If he has twenty minutes, and he can fit me into his busy schedule, we might do it. But we could never mate like eagles in flight because he's an ox: he would crash against the rocks and fall to the earth or something. Me, I'm more spontaneous. It just happened; that's what was so good about it. That's why I used to ride the cable cars in San Francisco. You can meet interesting people that way, you know."
The only other thing that I remember is taking her from behind, en lèvrette. I wanted to have her ass bronzed! I wanted to bite into it like a sandwich! But everything else was just white or black— depending on how you look at the world. It was like a dream, or a white night in the Arctic, where the sun never sets in the summer until early August. You can never sleep there anyway, until fatigue takes over. I know, because I have been to the Arctic with my brother, Phil. (Yes, it's cold up there, even in the summer months. It's nine months of snow and three months of bad skating.)
The sex was good, because anonymous encounters have never been hateful to me. The way Flora cried out in Portuguese a few times, things like "sim" and "O Deus!" That was the best part, hearing her cry out in a language that I had never heard before while having sex. I had been to the Algarve in Portugal, but I wasn't very lucky with the Portuguese girls there; I met my first wife instead. Apparently, they lock up their daughters when the foreign tourists are about in the Algarve.
Then Flora said, "I think I've seen you with your wife. She's very beautiful."
When she described the woman whom she had seen, I was sure that it was Chantal. Then Flora smiled and added, "I've had sex with the taxi driver who dropped you off at your hotel as well. He's almost as good as you."
After she related that piece of information, it felt like I was eating leftovers at the taxi driver's banquet table, like Lazarus underneath the table of the rich man in the Bible.
That was the first time that I ever had been unfaithful to Chantal, I swear it! I felt bad about it later, because I loved Chantal, really loved her— I only loved her. At first, I justified it with Chantal's accusations of infidelity in the past, but I don't know why I did it, except to say that Flora was just available. There's a difference between love and sex, but Chantal couldn't separate the two while Flora apparently could. Chantal didn't understand that she was my friend as well as my wife and my lover— that I only loved her. It's easy to blame an exotic location in a foreign country, I know, but I doubt that Flora and I would have committed adultery either in Montréal or in Curitiba— somewhere closer to home— at least not with each other. It was just an anonymous encounter, that's it, no love between Flora and me. It must be that I really had the demon, because I loved Chantal. I would have never hurt Chantal for anything, but Flora was fantastic in bed!
Then Flora's cell phone rang. After she hung up, she told me that it was her husband. She smiled and said, "Your Penelope is waiting for you. The gods have decreed that I must let you go."
We got dressed, and then she kissed me as I headed out the door; she almost pushed me out the door, really. But she smiled and waved to me as I left, like I was a sailor heading back out to sea. I returned to the beach with the smell of Flora's sex still on my body and in my beard— you can never get rid of it completely. I swam in the ocean, hoping that the salt water would conceal it, at least somewhat. However, the taste of a woman can be even more briny than the sea.
We're talking about the Delta of Venus here.

*****

That night, I still had the demon— worse than the night before. As Chantal stripped to put on a nightie, I wanted to throw her down on the bed and plough her like a field. Fortunately, Chantal was in the mood as well. Just when the sex was starting to get predictable, Chantal would unleash the tigress inside herself. She still liked to slide down bannisters at home, à la Mary Poppins— just like a child. While we were doing it, I had to put my mouth over hers to muffle the cries, because of the kids. If she tasted Flora on my lips or smelled Flora in my beard, she didn't say anything about it. Maybe she only tasted and smelled the sea. After we were done, Chantal snuggled up to me and purred, "Oh, you're an animal."
"You, too, ma chérie."
I kissed her twice on the lips. "My headache's gone," I said.
Chantal turned around in my arms, her back to me, but I was still drunk on her body, nibbling the nape of her neck while she moaned softly. We did it again, nice and slow this time. Oh, God, how I wanted her, spread out like Eve before me, the tattoo of the butterfly just above the mons puberis! I felt that I was imploding, that I was disappearing into her, both physically and spiritually, and that I didn't want to come back. It was beautiful! Must be, it was the Viagra. Or maybe I had found God. She sniffled after we were done. Chantal is the only woman I ever had who sniffled right after having sex. That's how I can tell that she has enjoyed it. Then she fell asleep in my arms.
Afterwards, I was thinking of Maria da Conceição. I loved Chantal, but I realized that it was Maria whom I had wanted, even though Flora had sent me off in the afternoon, and then Chantal in the evening. It was those deep brown eyes, that brown body, those small conical brown breasts like towers. It was Maria's bare back as she was walking away from me that I wanted to cover with kisses. Above all, it was her voice, the kind with which a market woman could have persuaded a man to buy something completely useless to him, like lingerie a couple of sizes too big or too small for his wife. It was her voice that I wanted to hear bidding me to come, her voice. We always want what we can't have: Maria was the fantasy that I couldn't possess but possessed me— the one that was walking away on the beach. Flora was the encounter that was already receding into memory, beyond memory, and forever into the subconscious, along with all the other women in my past, including my ex-wife, Katrina.
That night, when Chantal tasted my pine, I was sure that she knew. But she only looked up at me without stopping.


Chantal's Inner Voice

You have seen the taxi driver twice today. The first time was outside the old fortress in Copacabana, the second time by the statue of Christ on Corcovado. Is it coincidence, or has he been following you? You're a little disconcerted at first, but then you find his presence reassuring, like he would help you if there was any trouble— if someone was trying to steal your handbag, for example. Maybe you should feel threatened, but you don't feel threatened at all.
Right away, you're struck by how good-looking he is: thin, of average size, with wavy medium-dark hair, skin the colour of caramel, and narrow dark-green eyes. He reminds you of Kurt Cobain, but with dark features. You think he's a Pisces. There's a faraway look in his melancholic eyes— that's what really gets you. You like his smile and his brilliant white teeth. He's wearing broken-down blue jeans with a big hole in the right knee, and old white Nike tennis shoes— definitely casual. He has the grey Panama hat on his head and a yellow Brazilian national soccer team sweater with Brasil written in green letters across the chest, to which he has clipped his aviator sunglasses. He could be an Arab or a Moor, since his features are Iberian while his skin is dark. He's young in years without really being young; you doubt that he has ever been young. He has the look of someone who has known suffering, who thinks that you can't escape it. Yet there's a joie de vivre, a certain fatalism without the despair, a ready laugh. When he picked you and your family up at the airport, he was polite but friendly; he knows how to treat a lady, and he seems to like children.
Another taxi picks you and the children up at the old fortress in Copacabana and drops you off at Corcovado. There, you see him pull up a few cars behind you with another client in his dark-green Volkswagen Beetle. You pretend not to notice. After settling with the first driver, you begin your ascent to the top of Corcovado, a climb of about a kilometre. You have to climb over a thousand steps. You let the children run ahead of you, but you keep a steady pace, stopping only when the children stop and you catch up to them. You're in good shape from many years of swimming, but it's good exercise. By the time you reach the top, the children are tired and so are you.
The climb is worth the trouble. From Corcovado, you can see Guanabara Bay perfectly. What a splendid view, the vastness of it all! It all looks new to you. In the morning mist, you can see Sugar Loaf Mountain, Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas (which is a lake), and the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema. You have a strong urge to fly. You would like to spread your wings and soar over the bay. If you could, you would fly to Sugar Loaf Mountain and beyond, like a tern or a sea gull. Then there's O Cristo Redentor, the statue of Christ, facing the bay and the city. This is not a religious statue of Christ, you think, since he isn't being crucified, but a secular one embodying liberté, égalité, and fraternité, the ideals of the French Revolution before the Reign of Terror. Nevertheless, it's very moving for you. Everybody has his or her own Jesus, you know. With arms spread wide, this Jesus wants to take the whole world in a loving embrace, it seems. For you, it's magical.
Then your facial muscles relax and you feel yourself blushing and your eyes tearing up. You smile blissfully, and you're ready to weep for joy. You feel a love for everybody now; you want to take the whole world in an embrace. Everything is right in the world, which you feel is inside rather than outside you. The world is like a baby growing inside your womb. Then you look up at the clear blue sky and see three white clouds in the shape of a triangle floating in front of the sun. Overcome with ecstasy, you forget the taxi driver completely, until he comes up from behind you and says casually, "Bom dia, senhora."
Still in a trance, you turn around slowly. Then you smile serenely at him and say good morning in return. The taxi driver seems transfigured now, with the sun at his back to the southeast— different than what he was when you first saw him at the airport. Different than he was just a few minutes ago. Everything is different now, transfigured.

"I'm sorry, senhora," he says, smiling, "but I don't remember your name, though I remember you very well."
"Chantal," you remind him in a mellifluous voice. "My name is Chantal."
The taxi driver smiles and makes reverence like a genie. "I am José. At your service, senhora."
His voice is calm, self-assured. He speaks English well enough, but in measured tones; you like the way he speaks. The Brazilians speak Portuguese, which is softer, less emphatic, than Spanish— more like French. You think that Portuguese is a beautiful language, a language of love. He can pronounce your name correctly, since those who speak Portuguese pronounce the ch-sound like the French. He pronounces his own name like the French as well: zho-say. You're amused by the way he sometimes aspirates the letter r like the English letter h in words that begin with r. Then José reminds you that he drives a taxi and offers to take you anywhere you want to go. "I've been around the block a few times," he says, smiling again.
You accept his offer. You talk about yourselves as you walk down to his car. When José asks you how you like Rio, you tell him that you have enjoyed your stay very much. You tell him about yourself; he tells you about himself. He relates that his paternal grandmother was a full-blooded Guaraní from Paraguay while his paternal grandfather was a Protestant missionary from the Austro-Hungarian Empire who came to Brazil after the First World War. "Maybe it was the Guaraní who built the Itaupu dam," José says, "since they live on both sides of the Paraná River."
Both of José's paternal grandparents were refugees, he relates further. His grandfather fled Transylvania to escape religious and ethnic persecution there (they were Protestant Hungarians living among Greek Orthodox Romanians) while his grandmother fled a terrible war between Paraguay and Bolivia in the Gran Chaco during the 1930s. You react with horror when he tells you that most of the men in the Gran Chaco were killed in that war. His father, on the other hand, was born in the Panatel valley of the Mato Grosso, where his grandparents met and presumably got married. "My father inherited land from his father," he says, "who was a rancher with a herd of cattle on fifteen hundred acres, hacked from the jungle by a machete. Then my grandfather was forced from his land at gunpoint by a richer and more powerful fazendeiro."
Again, you react with horror, but there's no bitterness in Jose's voice: no sense of injustice or any haste to tell his story. That's life, he seems to say: the bigger fish will devour the smaller fish, no matter what you do. The price for pressing your claim could be death. He who has a gun and some bodyguards can always expropriate the land of smaller landowners, no matter what. It happens all the time in Brazil. Eventually, José's father came to Rio, where he drove a taxi and met his mother. His mother, José says, was a beautiful black woman from the state of Bahia to the north of Rio. Tall, with skin deep brown like chocolate, his mother had lots of children before his parents separated. "My father went to North America to find work," José says, "but the money stopped coming after a while, and we never heard from him again. Maybe he was killed by a robber, I don't know."
You touch his hand and say with some sympathy, "That's too bad about your father, José."
José replies casually, "It happens, senhora. I might have to leave home too, someday. A casimento in Brazil is not the same as a marriage in North America, because people here don't usually get married legally. That's to say, it's a middle class thing, something that people who want to be respectable might do— people with lots of money. If you ran across an itinerant preacher, you might get married. Otherwise, people just live together. I am only a taxi driver while my woman is only a parteira."
"A parteira?"?" you ask, interested. "I'm sorry, but I don't understand."

Again, there's no haste to tell his story, because José doesn't seem comfortable talking about parteiras. "It's not a bad thing, senhora," he says slowly, "but we don't talk about what parteiras do, because it concerns women. It has something to do with babies."
While still at the top of Corcovado, José asks, "Where would senhora like to go now?"
"The children want to ride the lift up Sugar Loaf Mountain," you reply.
José smiles and asks, "And what does senhora want to do?"
You tilt your head back and laugh, with your arms on the railing, facing him. "Senhora wants to ride the lift with the children," you reply.
He laughs as well and says, "It's whatever you say, senhora."
On the way back to his car, you tell José a little bit about your children. Your daughter is timid, you say, while your son is outgoing and confident. You smile and say ironically, "Patrick was a rocket in a previous life, I think— he has so much energy!"
It's a little joke, your son being a rocket in a previous life, but the taxi driver doesn't seem to understand; he might not know what reincarnation is. He only replies, "You have a pretty smile, senhora. You could be a movie star."
You thank José for the compliment, but he doesn't talk much after that, perhaps because of the children. You squeeze his hand furtively one time on the way down to the bottom of Corcovado, but you sit between the children in the back seat of his Volkswagen while chatting amiably with him as he drives. When he looks at you in his rearview mirror, José notices that you are wearing a purple dress and your husband's white Panama hat. He thinks you look cute in the white hat, which is too big for your head, but purple is a colour of mourning in Brazil, along with black. People wear those colours on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, or when someone has died. You never give a woman violets in Brazil, because purple flowers are considered a harbinger of death. However, purple is your favourite colour. And you are in mourning, since you father has recently died.
At Sugar Loaf Mountain, José waits for you while you ride the lift with the children, and then he takes you back to your hotel. Since you husband has already gone down to the beach, you call him on your cell phone and send the children down as well. After the children are gone, the taxi driver murmurs, "I like you, senhora. You are simpática."
José takes your hands and kisses your fingers lightly. When he admires your hands with their long and elegant fingers, you tell him that you have played the piano since you were a child. "I can play the Appassionata by Ludwig van Beethoven," you say with some pride. "It's very fast, but maybe I could have been a concert pianist."
Then José notices that you aren't wearing a wedding ring. He sees no mark from any ring at all. He asks, surprised, "You don't have a wedding ring, senhora?"
You shrug your shoulders and shake your head. "I lost it," you reply vaguely. "I was heartbroken for a long time."
You kiss him and rest your head on his shoulder for several moments with his arms around you. You have tears in your eyes. Then you kiss José again and go prepare some coffee in the coffee maker in the bathroom as if in a trance. In the bedroom, you surrender to him completely— you and the taxi driver are simpáticos. Then you raise a cry to the ceiling of the bedroom. You cry out in a voice that you don't even recognize as your own as you dig your fingernails into his back. Some men are invasive, but this one encourages you to open up like a flower, little by little, until you bloom. Then he involuntarily jerks his penis hard the moment that he ejaculates. It hurts a little, but you don't seem to mind it. Your face is flush with spent pleasure afterwards. You tell him "thank you" when you're done. He replies, as he starts to get dressed again, "Não há de quê, senhora."
You stretch out lazily on the bed with the sun coming in through the window, like a model in a painting by Modigliani or Riopelle, your index finger on your praline. You don't feel like getting up and getting dressed right now, but reality intrudes: your husband and your children will soon be back from the beach. But your face and the upper part of your body are still flush; you have a glow.
You extend your hand and squeeze his before you get up. Then you put on a robe and have a cup of coffee with him afterwards. José kisses you tenderly on the hands and on the lips one more time before he leaves. "You are simpática, senhora, he murmurs again.
It has been a pleasant afternoon, but you have trouble making sense of it now. His hand in your hair and on your breast, his mouth to yours... You can still taste him; you can taste yourself on his lips from when he kissed you just before he left. You still feel José inside you even after he's gone. It shouldn't have been beautiful because he isn't your husband, but it was beautiful for you— that's why it doesn't make sense. You had never imagined that adultery could be so easy.
Then you feel your heart heave with despair. You think briefly of throwing yourself off the balcony outside of your hotel suite, but there isn't one, so the thought passes. The time isn't right, you think. Is it that you are supposed to want to commit suicide out of shame and guilt? Would it satisfy the world if you suddenly threw yourself under a train in the Mêtro to expiate your sin, if everybody else knew? But you don't feel ashamed or guilty, only content. Some kind of transformation is taking place, you think, but you don't know what it is yet.
You stroke your praline absent-mindedly after he's gone. Then, with your hand on your heart, you become aware of your own heartbeat, of your own body. You had a heart murmur as a child, but your heartbeat is slow and regular now. You sing to yourself while you take a shower. Then you suddenly scratch yourself across the breasts with your fingernails.
Your husband and your children come back from the beach and find you downstairs in the hotel lobby in a white terry cloth bathrobe, playing a nocturne by Chopin on the grand piano. You will play the piano every day the rest of the time that you're in Rio. You will even play the Appassionata by Beethoven. Your husband thinks that something isn't right, but he says nothing about it. He only says, "You could have been a professional musician, you know. You can play Für Elise by memory."
He meant it as a compliment, but you take it as an affront; he should have known long ago that you were good enough to be a professional musician. So you don't say anything but continue playing.
Some kind of transformation is taking place, but you don't know what it is yet.

Robert

It was a full moon that night. I came up behind her, kissed her on the nape of her neck, and cupped her breasts with my hands as she stood at the window of the bedroom with the curtains wide open, taking in the moonlight. She looked so beautiful, her body naked and white, the tattoo of the butterfly just above her pubic hairs. She moaned "yes" a few times as I kissed her bare shoulders and her long and elegant neck and squeezed her breasts gently. There were scratch marks on her breasts, like she had been mutilating herself. With her eyes closed, transported by desire, she moaned softly, half pleading, "Please take me now..."
We made love in silence, except for the sound of our breathing, because of the kids in the next room. She would open her mouth from time to time, but nothing came out. There was only the sight of her chest gasping for air, of her face, neck, and breasts the colour of the moon that shone into our room. Then, there was some rapid eye movement, her eyelids fluttering wildly. I thought that she was about to cry out when she opened her mouth and arched her back, but she was silent. When she took her foot, there was nothing but the sound of a little gasp, of a little whimper, that's it. Then there was that tell-tale smell. After we were done, I held her in my arms, still drunk on her body, drunk on the smell of her body, its taste. I was kissing her on the nape of her neck again when she asked drowsily, still intoxicated herself, "Who's Maria?"
I replied, still kissing her, not really listening, "I don't know anybody named Maria."
I didn't remember calling her anything. If I had ever called her Maria, it must have been a different time, like the night that I was thinking of Maria da Conceição while making love with her. I wasn't thinking consciously of Maria or anything else this time— only of Chantal and her pale skin in the moonlight, remembering how it was bathed by its rays. Her whole body looked fuller laid out like the Eve in the moonlight, like a marble statue. But maybe I had called her Maria a different time, I didn't know.
"You called me Maria," she said, no longer aroused. She was facing me now, angry.
"Me?"
"Yes, you. There's nobody else in this room."
"When? When did I call you that?" I asked.
"A few nights ago," she replied, "the day we first checked in."
"Well, Maria is part of your name," I offered weakly, "isn't it?"
Her first name is Marie-Thérèse, not Chantal, because she was born between the feast days of St. Theresa of Lisieux and St. Theresa of Avila, early in October. Her parents were religious Catholics, particularly her mother, but she has always called herself Chantal.
"Nobody calls me Maria and you know it," she replied curtly, turning her back to me in anger.
I kissed her on the cheek, because I still wanted her, because I loved her. "Hey, maybe I was thinking of Maria de Chapdelaine," I offered. "I don't know."
She turned her head toward at me and asked sceptically, "You have fantasies of making love to a character in a bad movie?"
"Hey, I have lots of fantasies," I replied, "only I don't talk about them. You do too, don't you?"
"Say my name," she said angrily, "or don't say anything. I'm not Maria de Chapdelaine or anybody else."
She turned her back on me again. I smiled, though she obviously thought that this was no joke, and whispered in her ear, "Chantal..."
She almost hit me in the mouth when she turned around. She was livid while I was perplexed. "I love you," I ventured cautiously.
"Then why do you hurt me?"
"Hey, I'm sorry if I hurt you," I replied. "I don't mean to hurt you. I only love you. I've never loved anybody like I have loved you— never!"
"Omnia vincet amor, eh?" she said sardonically.
I was taken aback. I knew what it meant, but I had never said that to her for fear of belittling her because she didn't know Latin like I did. But she apparently thought that I didn't know what it meant and said sarcastically, "It's Latin, it means 'love conquers all.' But you're supposed to be the intellectual, not me."
Then she wept bitterly. "You're cheating on me," she sobbed.
I denied it vehemently, but we both knew the truth: I was compulsively drawn to Maria da Conceição. Right now, our marriage was like a hockey puck trapped in the neutral zone, going nowhere; this was why I had wanted to go to Rio. I still loved her and I wanted to save our marriage. I tried to console her, but she was inconsolable. "I only love you," I repeated. "There's nobody else. There's never been anybody else!"
But she only sobbed like she didn't hear me.
"Hey," I cried, "you hate me, you despise me?"
She didn't answer me but only continued to sob. When I tried to put my arms around her from behind, to console her, to show how much I loved her, she elbowed me right in the mouth, breaking the skin on my lower lip. She apologized the next morning and said that it was all an accident, but right now, she was still sobbing.
The next morning, down at the beach, I was confronted by two very sad and very frightened children. "Why was maman crying?" Avril asked.
"She was sad," I replied evasively. "Your mother always cries when she's sad."
"What does 'despise' mean?" Avril asked.
"Don't worry about it," I muttered. "Your mother was just sad."
Patrick had said nothing, but in my son's sad little eyes, I saw his mother accusing me of betrayal, because he looked so much like his mother.
I felt like a goblet of shit.


José

The Brazilian economy was almost always bad, with inflation sometimes over four hundred percent a month. The Brazilian government was constantly devaluing the currency so that the cruzeiro soon become as worthless as the real and the cruzado before it. Even the rich were getting anxious, putting their money into foreign banks. Then there were the pitched battles between the police and the gangs. Sometimes gangs of malandros even attacked a police station. It has happened in both in Rio and São Paulo. My mother had lots of babies: the ones who survived as well as the stillbirths and newborns who died soon after birth. After my father left home, my mother bought a sewing machine and started sewing some of the beautiful fantasias for the dancers at the samba school in our bairro for Carnival. Several of our neighbours were less fortunate than we were, but we sometimes had trouble making ends meet as well. When my parents fought, it was usually over money. My father liked to put money into the Animal Bank, the lottery here in Rio, but he seldom won any money and never won a lot. Then he won five or ten million reais and went to North America to find his fortune; we never saw him again.
The bankers at the Animal Bank are the malandros who run it. The Animal Bank gets its name from the lottery tickets sold by the government, each of which has the face of a zoo animal: a lion, giraffe, or elephant— whatever. If you buy a hundred or more tickets from a store legally, you can then sell them illegally and make money that way. If you buy enough, you can have other people working under you. Somewhere in this vast chain, you have children working under adults, and smaller children working under older children. But it all starts with the legal lottery tickets sold by the government. In the end, the lottery is a government program that supports criminal activity on all levels.
By the time I was six years old, I was roaming the streets, sleeping on park benches, under viaducts, and in the entrances of churches. Sometimes, it was to get away from my parents' fighting. I was soon involved in criminal activity. It all started when I was talking numbers with my friends, Rodrigo and Gilberto. Gilberto said to Rodrigo and me, "Numbers are infinite. No matter how high you count, you will never run out of numbers. He who masters numbers masters the universe. The whites control everything because they know numbers."
In a childish attempt to master numbers and, therefore, be a master of the universe, Rodrigo, and I tried to count to infinity. Rodrigo only counted to about fifteen before he concluded that he had reached infinity. I counted up to about six hundred before I realized that numbers were indeed infinite.
"Wow, Jecu!" Gilberto exclaimed, impressed. "Most kids who don't go to school can barely count their fingers and toes!"
Gilberto was surprised that I could count up to six hundred because I never went to school, but my father had taught me to read and count. I still don't know how to write very well because I have never had much practise writing. Gilberto was smarter than I was and actually went to school for a while; we met while he was playing hooky. His father found out about it and beat him. Even at the age of eight, Gilberto already understood the numbers game, because his skin was black. The rich and the middle class deny that racism exists in Brazil. However, opportunities are limited for people of colour like Gilberto and for mixed race people like me and Rodrigo. Gilberto had two older brothers by different fathers, one whose father was black, the other whose was father white. Both brothers had gone to school, and they applied for a government position after finishing secondary school. Only one position had been open, but the government hired both brothers anyway. However, the position that they sought goes to a white person. The lighter-skinned brother is given a different clerical position at a lower salary while the black one is hired as a messenger. The black one is hired only because he has a bicycle, which he only received from his family because he was the oldest. It happens all the time in Brazil.
Gilberto, who is eight years old, reiterates his position: "He who masters numbers masters the world."
Of course, Gilberto is only repeating what he heard from an adult, so I challenge him, the smarty: "We can get some money, filho."
"How, Jecu?"
"We can rob Meném."
"But how? We don't have guns."
"Leave it to me. I can get a gun."
Gilberto's eyes open wide with astonishment, and he says, "Where can you get a gun? How?"
"Anybody can get a gun," I reply, astonished at his naïveté.
"Then how are you going to get one?"
"Leave that to me, filho."
Rodrigo is enthusiastic about the plan; he's in right away. However, Gilberto is hesitant. "You're not serious, are you?" he asks, with some dread.
"Yes, I'm serious," I reply, staring hard into his eyes. "Are you in or not, filho?"
Gilberto is afraid to back down and lose respect with both me and Rodrigo. So he says, very reluctantly, "Sure, I'm in."
I get the gun by stealing it from my father's dresser while he's asleep; it was easy. When my father realizes that it's missing, he suspects me of having stolen it, though I never admit it. Now, Meném is an Arab, a Christian from Lebanon or Iraq who owns a grocery store just south of Corcovado; he has a shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima behind the counter. There's lots of crime around Corcovado, and businesses there are robbed frequently. Meném once shot and killed a kid while he was running away; the kid was about ten years old. As a warning to the other malandros, Meném just left the body lying there in the alley behind the store. He didn't even call the police. We know it's dangerous to rob Meném, but we think that it's the best way to get some money without having to master numbers like the rich or the Animal Bankers.
Gilberto and I walk into Meném's store, with Rodrigo as lookout, because I'm afraid that Gilberto will run away if he's lookout. However, the robbery doesn't go as planned. Meném reaches for his pistol, but I shoot him in the chest at close range. He stumbles back against the wall behind him, knocking over the shrine to Our Lady of Fatima, and then he falls to the floor, dead. There isn't much blood, but the bullet must have pierced his heart. I take the little bit of money in the till while Gilberto stands there, looking at the body with horror. Together, we flee with Rodrigo and divide up the money three ways. There was about forty cruzados in the till, that was it.
I didn't want to kill Menem but I didn't want Gilberto, Rodrigo, or me to die either. It was either us or him.
At the age of six, I was a murderer.

*****

Our lives as malandros really began when an older kid we called "Broadway Joe" bought us bicycles. He had just bought a brand-new bicycle for himself, but he gave it to Rodrigo when Rodrigo admired it. Then he bought one for me and Gilberto. Broadway Joe is tall and thin, pale, with russet hair, about twelve years old. He avoids the sun because his skin burns easily. He has a ready smile but a cruel look in his steady grey-blue eyes, and I don't like him. I don't trust him at all, because there must be a reason for his generosity. But we are afraid to refuse his generosity, because then he will be insulted. I didn't want to insult him.
After a few days of letting us break in our new bikes, we find out what Broadway Joe really wants from us. "I need you guys to deliver something to some friends of mine," he says. "They owe me some money. I'd do it myself, but I'm a busy man."
He pulls out a brown paper bag with some slips of paper from his black leather vest. He counts out the slips, attaches some under the front wheel guards of our new bicycles with a rubber band, and then tells each of us where to go. I deliver some slips to an old woman who lives on top of a hill, an old baiana in her sixties. Since this is a business transaction, she doesn't smile or offer me sweets like an avó, but merely counts the slips. Then she gives me about ten thousand cruzados, not a lot of money. She looks at me hard and says, "Give this money to Jecu. Tell him that I want my receipts."
Of course, I understand what's transpiring: the old woman is buying betting slips. I put the money under the front wheel guard of my bicycle and then I ride back to Broadway Joe's. You might be tempted to skim some money off the top, but I immediately understand that Broadway Joe must know how much money he is supposed to receive— of that I am sure. When I come back, Broadway Joe counts the money, and then gives some of it to me as a stipend. Then he gives me more "receipts" to deliver to somebody else. Gilberto and Rodrigo come back from their deliveries without incident as well. It's official: we are now working for Broadway Joe as couriers.
It seems like an easy way to make money, right? One day, a couple of weeks or a couple of months later, Rodrigo comes back from his run without the money. Of course, Broadway Joe suspects right away that Rodrigo is hiding it somewhere, but he can't find any on Rodrigo, who vehemently protests his innocence. "I must have lost it," Rodrigo claims, frightened now. "I put it above the wheel like you told me."
Both Gilberto and I are scared as well. With two bigger kids standing behind him like shadows, Broadway Joe searches Rodrigo again, but doesn't find any money on him. Maybe Rodrigo did lose the money, I think. Broadway Joe sighs deeply with regret and says, "Ah, bem, you send a boy to do a man's job, and this is what happens."
For a moment, Gilberto and I think that Broadway Joe is going to forgive Rodrigo for his carelessness, but that's not what happens. Instead, he hands me a loaded pistol and says calmly, "Take care of him, Jecu. He has to learn his lesson. You all have to learn your lesson."
I don't believe it! I'm so horrified that, for a moment, I don't understand what Broadway Joe is telling me to do. When I look at Gilberto, I see the same panic in his face that he must see in mine; he doesn't believe what's happening either. But Broadway Joe gently puts the gun in my hand and points me towards Rodrigo, who's now sobbing and pleading for his life: "Please, Jecu, I'm your friend!
"You know what you have to do," Broadway Joe says to me softly. "You know what you have to do..."
Yes, I have to do it. One of Broadway Joe's friends has a knife to Gilberto's throat while another has a pistol pointed at my chest, in case I decide to shoot at them instead of at Rodrigo. If I don't shoot Rodrigo now, Broadway Joe will have his friends kill both me and Gilberto as well as Rodrigo— I know that.
Then, as Rodrigo pleads for his life, my pity turns to contempt, because he's grovelling. I say to my friend as I pull the trigger, "I have to do it, o meu irmão, I have to do it..."
I close my eyes as I pull the trigger. Then, after I have shot someone who was like my own brother, Broadway Joe and his friends put their arms around me and hug me, congratulating me like I have just scored the winning goal in a football match. I don't believe it!
Later, Rodrigo's body is found at a dump or in an alley somewhere. Nobody but Gilberto knows that I killed him. They have a funeral for Rodrigo, with lots of neighbours present, but, strange to say, I feel nothing at the time. I cannot grieve, because then I will have to face my own culpability. But everybody misinterprets my behaviour: they think that I am too stunned to mourn for my friend; they think that I am in shock. Of course, I am in shock, but nobody understands the reason why.
I have since committed other crimes: running numbers, robbing stores, selling drugs, pimping prostitutes, even hijacking trucks. But I lost my soul the day that I shot my friend. I live now as though nothing matters. I am soon a sicário, Broadway Joe's hired assassin. Whenever I have a job to do, Broadway Joe always says, "I'd do it myself, Jecu, but I'm a busy man."
The first time that I assassinate somebody, I ride up to him on my bicycle and shoot him in the chest at close range, and then I ride off. It was easy. Since he's with two of his friends, I shoot them too, killing them each with just one shot each. They were a little older than me, about ten or eleven years old. I don't know why Broadway Joe wanted the first boy dead, but when he tells me to do it and how he wants it done, I do it without question. He's pleased when he learns that I have done it successfully.
I am soon a busy man like Broadway Joe.

*****

The gangs of Cabeludo and Zaca united and started attacking police stations in Rio. For a time, it was them who ruled Cidade de Deus, the worst of the favelas. Then the gangs started fighting each other and the army was called in. Hundreds, if not thousands, were killed, including my brother Tom, who was shot several times outside our own house. While holding my baby sister, Zazu, my mother was almost hit by a stream of bullets as well. It was me that they were trying to kill, I think, but they mistook Tom for me. It could have been police or a rival gang— who knows?
Later on, some puta shoots me in the stomach. Gilberto and I shoot him dead, but I'm seriously wounded. I need to go to hospital, but I would rather die in an alley somewhere than wait for the police to come and arrest me in a hospital bed. (The police are arresting kids in hospital who have been shot on the suspicion of them being gang members.) However, I am too weak to resist both Gilberto and my mother. I am losing consciousness and, despite my protests, they take me to the hospital anyway. Always the realist, Gilberto knows that the gangs aren't going to win. "You don't have to die like this, Jecu," he says. "You can be more than just a malandro."
Before I recover completely from the wound in my stomach, the police arrest me and transport me to prison in an ambulance with someone holding an intravenous bag. I spend some time in the prison hospital before being transferred to a cell. You don't want to be in a Brazilian prison; I was kept in a dungeon, basically. From the outside, the building may look like a beautiful old fortress from the Colonial Era, built of solid granite. However, my small and narrow cell is filthy. The toilet doesn't flush and the tap to the sink doesn't work. It's musty and humid inside, particularly in the summer months. I have to share my cell with several other inmates, because the prison is overcrowded. There's no electricity and no sunlight, except for a sunbeam coming in through a top window at certain times of the day. You lose track of the time at first, because they don't have clocks in jail cells, though I eventually realize that the sun enters my cell just before dusk.
Then they put me in isolation in a narrow cell with black mould at the base of the walls. Sometimes, I think that they are feeding me every hour just to confuse me. They feed me mouldy bread and give me stagnant water. The police will interrogate me and beat me several times over what seems like many weeks; the beatings seem endless. They manacle me for long periods of time, and I receive shocks from electrodes hooked up to a car battery. One time, the interrogators hang me from the ceiling by the wrists and the ankles and spin me around like the propeller of a helicopter. Another time, they subject me to water-boarding, where they put a burlap bag over your head and pour water over it to make you think that you're drowning. I am naked for long periods of time, but the guards always hit me whenever I cover my testicles with my hands. One guard likes to snap a wet washcloth at the naked prisoners in the shower, like he's swatting at flies. Another one lines up a group of prisoners and makes each one stomp the foot of the kid next to him. I always will remember the look of sadistic glee on his face.
However, it's the gang leaders who really control the prison; they even have cell phones. By bribing the prison guards, the gang leaders can get anything they want, including girls from outside. They sell drugs to the other prisoners and to people outside while the guards look the other way. They control the underworld from inside the prison; they even can hire a sicário to assassinate somebody on the outside. If the guards beat and torture certain prisoners, it is because the gang leaders allow it. If the beatings are too severe, you can make the guards stop by going to one of the leaders of the Primer Comando do Capital, which controls all the criminal activity in Brazil. However, these malandros will own you for the rest of your life.
The guards take care not to leave any bruises or scars on the face or any broken bones— any physical evidence. They always hit prisoners only on the fleshy parts of the body. They hit you on the ass until you can't sit or on the soles of the feet until you can't stand. Then they force you to sit or stand afterwards. They play loud samba music at all hours of the day to prevent you from sleeping and to drive you crazy. I have flashbacks even now when I hear samba music, particularly at Carnival.
The guards know that what they are doing is illegal; we have habeas corpus even in Brazil. But what good is the law if the judges and the politicians are unable or unwilling to enforce it? Brazil doesn't have the death penalty, and probably has never had it since independence. Therefore, the courts can't sentence a man or a woman to death. However, there's little to prevent the police from shooting somebody in the head once they make an arrest; it happens all the time. When they are off duty, the police officers come out at night like bats and assassinate people as vigilantes. They only enter the favelas in riot formation in the daytime because they're afraid. They don't walk beats in Cidade de Deus like they do downtown or on the beach. But there must be honour even among police officers, because they never give each other away.
Ironically, the first question that the police ask during my interrogation is whether I would like to make a complaint about the way that I have been treated. But what's the use? I might make things worse for myself by making a complaint, so I don't make one. One police inspector, Porfirio, who is short and blond, says to me, with apparent sincerity, "We want to save your soul, o meu filho, while you still have a conscience."
I am so moved by his apparent concern that I would talk, if he was only asking the right questions. Thinking like a child willing to obey, I only tell him what I think he wants to know. He seems to have no idea that he's interrogating a gang member who has killed several people. To him, I'm just a kid, arrested only because I had presented myself to emergency with a stomach wound. Porfirio only wants to know why I was shot, but I can't tell him because I don't know why I was shot. I didn't know the kid who did it. I tell Porfirio only one lie: when he first asks me what happened to the kid who shot me, I tell him that he ran away. He doesn't challenge my answer at first, but I later contradict myself and have to confess. Porfirio sternly warns me, "Don't lie to me again, José, or you will only make it worse for yourself."
Porfirio makes me look through the bodies in the morgue to identify the kid that I shot, but I can't identify any of the bodies. Because I can't make a positive identification, there isn't any evidence and the police have to release me.
Then I tell Porfirio about robbing Meném's store. I don't know why, but I tell him. Porfirio asks me for details, but I have forgotten important details, much to my surprise. For example, I can't tell Porfirio whether the robbery and the murder took place during the day or at night. I can't say what I said to Meném or what Meném said to me. I don't even remember if there were others inside the store besides me and Gilberto. I only remember that Meném reached for his gun and I shot him.
"Were there any witnesses?" Porfirio asks.
I nod my head. "There were two," I reply. "Gilberto and Rodrigo. But Rodrigo is dead."
I take Porfirio to Gilberto, who's willing to cooperate, but Gilberto can't tell him much because he has trouble remembering things, too. Porfirio takes Gilberto and me to the crime scene, but Meném's store is no longer there: it's a different store with new owners now; we don't recognize it. The counter is even in a different part of the store, up against the south wall by the door, whereas Meném's counter was up against the east wall facing the door. The place is completely different now; Gilberto and I are no longer sure if this was the store that we robbed.
"Are you sure that you want to make a confession?" Porfirio asks. "You can still withdraw your confession."
Gilberto shakes his head. "I'm sorry, inspector," he says, "but I don't recognize this place."
I withdraw my confession as well, because of Gilberto. "I don't think this is the place," I say to the inspector.
Porfirio understands that we killed a store owner in a robbery somewhere, but we can't make a confession; too much time has elapsed, and Gilberto and I were both small then. As well, I think we were both high from smoking bazeado, drinking pinga or sniffing glue. My memory is not what it should be.
The first principle of habeas corpus: there has to be a body before there's a case. There has to be evidence, and the evidence is gone now. The police don't want to investigate, probably because there are more current crimes for them to investigate. The majority of crimes in Rio de Janeiro go unsolved, because there are too many crimes and not enough police. Rio is one of the most dangerous cities in the world; it's each man for himself in the favelas.
Porfirio says to me and Gilberto sternly, "It looks like you have gotten away with murder, but let me warn you: if you don't change your ways, you will end up either in prison or dead— killed by another malandro or by members of a police death squad. It's up to you. Remember the bodies that you have seen in the morgue today."
Before they release me, the police send me back to the prison hospital with an upper respiratory infection; I am allergic to the black mould in my cell. They also want me to recover from the beatings, probably.
After I am released, a man and a woman from North America or Europe— I don't know what country— interview me through an interpreter. I tell them that I am innocent of any wrongdoing. I even cry for the camera; it's all on video. However, I am really crying because I feel victimized when I realize what has been done to me. It was the journalists for O Globo here in Rio who broke the story; the international human rights organizations and the journalists in other countries merely picked up on it.
Today, the name Cidade de Deus is synonymous with the war that the police and the army made on the homeless street children of Rio. But what can children do when they have to run away from abusive or drunk parents at home, or their parents throw them out on the streets? Even when they are in school, they don't want to be in school; they would rather be outside, running around with their friends. By nature, children do not like to be confined in small places but prefer to run free. The streets have a very powerful allure for the children of Cidade de Deus.
Though I was about twelve years old, I looked younger. I realize now that the children in Latin America are often smaller than those the same age in North America— something a certain tourist told me. I had considered myself a man, but I don't always act like one while in prison isolation, because I'm not a man. I sometimes cry like a child, and I'm ashamed of myself for it, but I was only a child at the time. Porfirio, the young police inspector, understood that, I think, but most of the other police only saw me as the enemy— somebody who might try to kill them. The kids think the same of the police, because the police assassinate gang members here and there. The gang leaders, Cabeludo and Zaca, both died very violently in the end, shot down by police assassins.
I have become radicalized from my experiences. As well, the people who reached out to me were those suspected of being urban guerrillas. The leaders of the Primer Comando do Capital have a leftist ideology, in part, because they are exposed mostly to Marxist ideology while in prison. I learned English from an English teacher who was jailed on the suspicion of being an urban guerrilla, and he tried to convert me to his ideology. He was surprised that I could already read and write, because I had never been to school.
I understand better than most of the leftists from the middle class the poverty and the injustice that my people face every day in the favelas, having faced it myself. However, I have been forced to become a businessman because I drive my father's taxi. People who live in Copacabana and Ipanema drive around in Mercedes Benzes and BMWs while those in Cidade de Deus live in miserable little shacks without gas, running water, and electricity and go hungry. There are single individuals in Rio who make more money than all the people in the favelas combined. Yet nobody even notices the disparity in wealth anymore. But, if I can never be part of the white bourgeoisie who live in the suburbs by the beaches, I am not really a favelado either. Rather, I am a sertanejo from the backwoods that are rapidly disappearing through deforestation; the world from which I came, the sertão, will be gone one day, burned by the fazendeiros there. The fazendeiros mostly grow sugar and soya or raise beef cattle for markets abroad while my people are herded into shantytowns where they can't find work. Everybody's a hustler, including the taxi drivers, in Rio de Janeiro.
The leftists gave me a new identity: I leave the jail with a birth certificate for the first time in my life and a clean criminal record. With the birth certificate, I am able to obtain a driver's license. However, as a price for my new identity, they expect me to give back to the community once I start working. I give money for school lunches, for example, and money for the samba school at O Palácio do Samba as well. My family never turns away anybody in need of food or a place to stay until their next pay cheque. We have always tried to be good neighbours, even before the leftists reached out to us, but we sometimes have to hide somebody who is wanted by the police.
I still see Broadway Joe in my mind, kneeling before an altar that he had consecrated to Xango, one of the candomblé, but he is no longer among the living. The malandros often invoke the candomblé for blessings and power, but where did it get Broadway Joe? Gilberto and I shot him several times, along with his two bodyguards. I didn't always kill with one shot.
The last person I shot was a little kid about seven or eight years old. He tried to rob me near Corcovado when I was driving my taxi late at night. Without a word, this kid approaches me and pulls his gun, but I have mine ready and I shoot him first. Then I drive off rather than report the crime to the police, because I have been to prison and the gun that I have is illegal. (Most of the guns in Rio are illegal, you know.) As well, I don't want to deal with the police; they won't do anything but make a report anyway.
I didn't think about killing Meném and Rodrigo for many years, until after 9/11, when I started having nightmares as a man. Only then did I feel remorse, after having killed many others besides Meném and Rodrigo— besides Broadway Joe. I now see the people that I have killed in my sleep. I don't always remember their names when I wake up, but I always remember the places where I killed them. I remember the prison where the police interrogated and tortured me.
In a sense, I am haunted by the ghosts of the people that I have killed. I always expect to be shot one day, like all the people that I have shot, because it's dangerous to drive a taxi in Rio. It's the most dangerous job in the world, after those of being a police officer, fire fighter, and miner. My father once told me that any man who didn't teach his son a trade taught him to be a criminal. He taught me to drive and repair cars. Despite his efforts, however, I learned to be a numbers runner and a murderer.
In a sense, I had two fathers: my real father and Broadway Joe, who was my mentor, my conselheiro. It's an exciting life, running the streets with your friends— never a dull moment. But you never see any old malandros in Rio de Janeiro: Broadway Joe was only about fifteen or sixteen years old when Gilberto and I shot him to death.
My life as a malandro ended when my father gave me the keys to his taxi before he left Rio. "You don't have to be a criminal anymore, Jecu," he said. "Maybe you can never be a millionaire like the people who live down by the beach, but you can do better in life, even if you put only a few cruzeiros in the bank every week."
My father was right: I could do better in life than end up dead before I was fifteen.

*****

I first lied down with a girl on New Year's Eve, under the southern stars on the wet grass of a soccer pitch outside one of the favelas after a summer's rain. There were no clouds in the sky. You could see the moon and all the constellations: Canis Major and Canis Minor, Capricorn and the Southern Cross, as well as several other constellations. The hills looked so beautiful. In the distance, even our favela looked beautiful, almost like Bethlehem on a Christmas card. The girl was about the same age as I was, fourteen years old. I was a virgin, she was a virgin; we didn't even know how to kiss properly. It was supposed to be romantic, but the girl was scared, and she complained bitterly about the wet grass underneath her. It wasn't a lot of fun for me, either. There was only a little squirt of semen rather than a torrent of liquid fire. I felt neither the buildup of sexual tension before the release nor the feeling of euphoria afterwards, only a little twitch in my pinto— that's it. It was an orgasm without really being an orgasm, reduced to a bodily function like urinating. A beautiful night wasted! It might be amusing now, but the girl was really angry afterwards. "If you ever try to touch me again, Jecu," she warned, "I'll castrate you!"
I don't even remember her name now, and it's probably just as well. It was one of the few times that I have ever apologized for ineptitude. After I apologized, she only hit me on the arm with her hand and stalked off. What a disappointment! If I had impregnated her, I would have become a priest. At least that would have been the wise thing to do. However, a certain lady saved me from the priesthood: Dona Linda.
Dona Linda was a small black woman or mulata, about twenty-five years or thirty old, with light brown skin and long medium-brown hair in braids. She was cute, with laughing, slightly slanted eyes that were almost black, and thick, sensuous lips set in an oval face. The muscles of her right upper arm had withered, because she broke her arm as a child and they didn't set it properly. But her most outstanding feature was her ass: she had a prominent, round little ass in the manner of the sambistas at Carnival. Because of her small size, I am easily able to carry her in my arms to the bed in her little room. I will carry her many times.
"I can't change you into a man overnight, Jecu," Linda says, "because it's a question of time and maturity. But if you will listen to me, you will know how to please me. You'll be a better lover, even a Don Juan. But you must listen: you must know how to communicate."
I learn how to communicate. To do the trick, I have to learn what pleases her— sometimes, I have to ask. The first time, we spend a lot of time just kissing. I thought I knew how to kiss, but not with Linda, because each woman is different. Linda wants to kiss a long time at first, without removing any clothes. She wants to laugh and play; she wants fun without a lot of passion, at least in the beginning. She flirts, laughing through her nose as we kiss, a light touch here and there. Ever the paqueradora, she gives me little pecks like a bird: on the lips, on the cheek, on the chin; her kisses fall everywhere like the gentle rain just before a mudslide. Then Linda takes my upper lip in hers and chews on it while I do the same with her lower lip. Then she kisses me hard on the mouth and slides her tongue inside my mouth. When I place my hand on her small breast, I do it without even thinking about it, kissing her the whole time without her responding verbally to my touch. Then she stands up to remove her simple dress; it's only a slight interruption as she slides back onto the bed. Her breasts are bare but she is still in her panties. Then, after some more kissing, when I am all excited, she stands up again and asks me to remove her panties. Then she laughs and says, "Take off your clothes, Jecu— you have to be naked!"
Grinning bashfully, I stand up quickly to remove my clothes while she waits, smiling and shaking her head. Then we start again at zero.
It was only the second time in my life that I had had sex. It was awkward like the first time, but much better the second time. Linda even said that she enjoyed it. Eventually, I knew that she wasn't lying just to spare my feelings. But, eventually, we didn't waste a lot of time on preliminaries. You don't want to be surprised by somebody, like her man.
Linda and I always met in the morning, when her man was at work. I never approached her house by the same way, nor did I leave it by the same way that I came. That's because I had to be discrete. The adulterer must be sneaky because he is always vulnerable, like the agouti that must beware of the boa constrictor in the jungle, or of dogs, cats, and people in the city. If the agouti forgets about the boa, it could cost him his life, because the agouti is a prey animal, sniffing the jungle floor or garbage cans for fruits that trees or people might discard, rather than a predator. And if he tries to swim across a river to his beloved, he could be eaten by piranhas.
His flesh is a delicacy here, but in the end, the agouti is only a big rat.

*****

My father is changing the oil in his car when he notices the little marks on my neck. "Hey, are those rope burns you have there?" he asks.
When I grin, he teases, "Hey, the boy's becoming a man!"
"I'm already a man."
My father laughs and replies, "And I will be the next President of Brazil. So who's the lucky woman, eh?"
I smile bashfully and tell him. My father stops laughing. "She has a man, you know," he says with disapproval. "If he catches you guys together, he'll kill you both."
Then he raises his eyes towards heaven and mutters, "Oi bem, it's a good thing I have more than one son!"
Linda and her man, Oswaldo, weren't legally married, but they had been together a long time; they had children. I didn't know Oswaldo well. We might have said hello to each other or nodded when we saw each other, but that was it. I hardly ever saw him because he took a bus to work early in the morning and came back in the evening; he was a longshoreman at the docks in the South Zone, making money like water. Oswaldo, a Caucasian who was in his forties, was much older than Linda was. He was tall and muscular, like a circus weightlifter, bald on top of his head with a handlebar mustache. He kept weights in a little shed in their little backyard.
I understood that my father was probably right: it was dangerous to see Dona Linda again because of Oswaldo. Like in the Middle East, we have honour killings in Brazil. Jealousy is something sacred in marriage, the murder of the unfaithful one and her lover a rite, despite civilization and its laws. If a man flirts with a married woman, her man might get jealous and kill her. Men in Brazil have even been known to murder their women after somebody else has raped her. Not every man in Brazil does this, of course, but there was a story in all the newspapers about a university professor who set fire to his wife because she wanted to join a health club. He didn't suspect her of being unfaithful, only of wanting to be unfaithful; that was sufficient for him. There has been a great wave of these killings everywhere in Brazil. They took place among the rich, the poor, and the middle class, and among all races. Understandably, the feminists demanded stricter penalties, but the rest of the country was perplexed. Whenever there's a horrendous crime, like a murder, people are horrified, and when the murderer is somebody we thought we knew well... Therefore, men convicted of such "honour killings" usually received only a few years in prison. The magistrates, almost all men, perhaps could see in those whom they sentenced someone like themselves: normal people, not at all criminal or insane. As married men themselves, these magistrates might have thought, "There but for the grace of God go I."
However, I continued to see Dona Linda anyway. During one of our rendezvous, she admitted, "I've been waiting for you to grow up, Jecu. You were a nice little boy."
I wasn't a nice little boy, but a malandro who smuggled drugs and rode up to people on a bicycle and shot them. I had been engaged in criminal activities from the time that I was very small. I was a dreaded sicário who killed with one shot. I wasn't a nice little boy.
Like my father, my mother warned me about Dona Linda. "She's just a whore, José," she said, "and Oswaldo's a bastard. He'll kill you both if he catches you guys together."
However, I soon thought that my mother was a whore too. After my father left home for North America, she was soon sleeping with other guys. My father wasn't always faithful either, I'm sure, but my brothers and I condemned our mother while my sisters defended her. At the time, I still was sure that my father would come back home, or send for us to come live with him in North America. Since he always used to tell us about it, we dreamed of him showing us the Hollywood sign in Hollywood, California. So I ignored my mother's wise advice and continued to see Dona Linda.
We are in the middle of a morning rendezvous— it was always in the morning— when Dona Linda's daughter rushes home to warn us that Oswaldo is coming. Someone has given us away, it seems, and he has left work early to catch us by surprise. Or maybe one of their children had told him about their mother's "friend." The little girl probably saved our lives, because Linda and I had time to decide what to do. If the little one had done nothing and let events take their course, Oswaldo probably would have surprised us and killed us both, because he was armed. However, even as Oswaldo approached, only a few houses away, we were arguing. With her dress in hand, Dona Linda pleaded, "Please go away, José— he'll only kill you!"
"He'll kill you, too, Linda," I protested, whispering hoarsely. "He already knows!"
It was probably every man for himself. However, I preferred to do battle with Oswaldo, a jealous husband much bigger than I was, rather than abandon Linda even to save myself. Maybe I should have listened to Linda, but I couldn't abandon her now because I was in love with her and I thought of myself as a man.
All enraged, Oswaldo bursts into the little cinder block house that he's sharing with Linda and their children. Linda has already put on her dress, but I'm standing in front of Oswaldo in my underwear, that's it. However, Oswaldo makes one fatal mistake: he aims at me with his pistol when Linda is much closer, no more than a few steps away. As Oswaldo takes aim, Linda stabs him in the throat with a long knife from the kitchen table, killing him instantly. With only a bloody gurgle, Oswaldo falls to the floor dead. There's blood everywhere in the little kitchen— what a mess! If you didn't know what had happened, you might have expected to find several bodies upon entering the kitchen.
Their daughter, who's about eight years old, has seen the whole thing and is rendered temporarily unable to speak. The image of Linda stroking her daughter's face with bloodstained hands will be with me always. "You mustn't tell nobody, Olivia," Linda says soothingly to her daughter. "You didn't see nothing, okay?" Then she kisses her daughter and holds her close, still covered with her man's blood.
I put on my clothes, and then we think of what to do with the body. You can't call the police, because they probably won't come anyway. If they came out, there would be a whole phalanx of them in riot gear, ready to do battle. If some little smarty throws a rock, there could be a riot and a lot of people killed. Therefore, we have to think of how to dispose of the body ourselves while we clean up.
Since Oswaldo was a big man, the body is very heavy, well over a hundred kilos. So I get my friend Gilberto. In the meantime, Linda has cleaned up the place, which takes a long time, and burned her bloody clothes outside in a steel drum in the little backyard. Some of the blood in the kitchen already has dried up before she is even finished. Together, after dark, we all try to lift the body into the trunk of my father's Beetle, which is in the front, but the body is much too heavy to lift, and much too big to fit into the little trunk. We don't have a bone saw either, so we tie Oswaldo's legs to the rear bumper of the car and drag him to a dump. If you had seen us, you might have thought that we had lynched somebody, dragging him until he was dead, except that nobody is celebrating. People here prefer "the microwave," where they put a couple of tyres around you, pour gasoline, and set them on fire. Dragging somebody until he is dead might be a favourite method of lynching people, if somebody had a car, but few people drive cars in the favelas.
Somebody eventually finds the body at the dump and calls the police, but the police never question any suspects. When word of Oswaldo's death gets around, Linda's neighbours immediately suspect her of murder and shun her. Even though Oswaldo was trying to kill her, people have sympathy for Oswaldo, because they know that Linda was cheating on him and think that she's only a whore. I doubt that she was more of a whore than any other woman; her man just caught her. Sure, Linda was a little tease, but I didn't think that she was seeing anybody else but me at the time. But my mother summed up what lots of people thought: "She'll get what she deserves, the puta!"
However, I thought that my mother was just a hypocrite, since she had been seeing Bruno while my father was working in North America. I was waiting for her to get what she deserved too, because I expected my father to come back home and surprise her and Bruno, just like Oswaldo had surprised me and Linda.
After the police found Oswaldo's body, his brother and his sister publicly accused Linda of murder. Everyone is sure that Linda had something to do with it, so there's a trial with three malandros sitting as judges. Under cross-examination, Linda admits to nothing. "I was a little worried when he didn't come home that night," she says calmly, "but I thought that he would come home the next morning. I thought that maybe he had gotten drunk and had to sleep it off somewhere, in a park or under a viaduct."
There are several people ready to testify against Linda. The last time that Oswaldo was seen alive, somebody had seen him coming home late in the morning or early in the afternoon. However, Linda vehemently denies that he came home that day. "Something must have happened before he came home," she says, "because I never saw him."
At that point, I'm sure that nobody believes her. So I ask permission of the judges to question the witness; permission is granted.
"What kind of man was Oswaldo?" I ask. "Was he violent? Did he often get drunk?"
Linda answers that Oswaldo was often violent and did get drunk, and that there were neighbours who could testify to this. "He has threatened the neighbours a few times as well," she says. "He had a gun, you know."
A few of the neighbours concur: he was a violent man, prone to outbursts— "a tyrant," someone says. And, yes, he had a gun.
Then I ask, "Has Oswaldo ever hit you or the kids?"
Sullenly, Linda admits that Oswaldo had hit her several times, and that the children were terrified of him. Oswaldo's sister interrupts and accuses her of lying; her man and her brother have to restrain her. Then Linda shows everybody some marks on her neck. Clearly, they aren't love bites but bruises. I had seen them myself during our last rendezvous, but I didn't think anything of it. "He strangled me until I almost passed out," she says. "He was enraged because I didn't have dinner ready when he came home late from work."
Some malandro jumps up from the crowd to examine the marks. "She's telling the truth," he shouts. "Look! Somebody was strangling her!"
Everybody is shocked. With the crowd now on my side, I have but one more question. "Did you kill Oswaldo?" I ask.
I look into her eyes, hoping that she will understand how I want her to respond. If she admits it, she will weaken her case, I think, because up to that point, she had denied killing him. I only want to establish what kind of man Oswaldo was and draw some sympathy from the crowd, not get Linda to confess. However, if she does confess, I can at least plead for mercy, because Oswaldo was a big man who used to beat a little woman and their children. I am trying to protect myself as well. If Linda admits that I was her lover, I may be put to death; they might give me the microwave. But Linda glares at me, and then at the crowd, and says defiantly, "I didn't kill him. I only wish that I had killed him."
There's a hush in the crowd. I argue that her accusers have presented no evidence. So they think they see somebody coming home from work: it doesn't mean that he actually came home. And if anybody heard a quarrel, these witnesses have been very conspicuously silent. As well, there are mitigating circumstances: her man was abusive, and both the children and the neighbours were afraid of him. The panel of judges agrees and votes unanimously to acquit Linda of murder.
Dona Linda and I broke up after Oswaldo's death, because I couldn't go back to that place after what had happened; I just stopped coming. We remained friendly, but she eventually found another man and moved with him to another bairro.
I was soon driving my father's taxi and seeing other women, but I learned about more than just sex from Dona Linda: I learned about jealousy, that there's a fine line between love and hate, between bliss and despair, between making love and rape. Above all, rape is psychological while sexual assault is merely physical; the two aren't always the same. A woman knows when she has been raped, but a man can't always tell the difference. It is clear to me now that Linda had been psychologically raped by her man for a long time, even if the sex was once consensual. But we never talked about Oswaldo; Linda wanted to forget about him when she was with me.
Love and hate are like two islands in a stream that rest side by side, like two hands put out in front of you. When you quarrel with a lover, there may be no other person in the world that you hate more than that lover. When that lover is unfaithful, you may be driven to commit murder, like Oswaldo— like me later on. Or you may have to defend yourself when that lover is about to kill you, like Linda. I regret now that I wasn't the one who stabbed Oswaldo. It's better that a man do such things; it's a question of honour, of self-respect. I was in love with Linda, and I would have done anything to protect her. As I see it, the man was put here to defend the woman, and I failed to do that.
Olivia, the little girl rendered mute by her father's murder, talked again eventually, but she was never the same. She is always quiet— a morose little sentinel waiting for something dreadful to happen.

*****

When I was in my early twenties, I met a waitress named Cristina at a diner in downtown Rio during a lunch break. Cristina was a year or two older than I was, petite, with black hair, olive skin, and round, dark eyes. Her face was shaped like the moon, and she had a short, slightly upturned nose, large breasts, and the ass of a sambista. Maybe Cristina wasn't very pretty, but she was quite the tease, quite adventurous in bed. Eventually, I started taking her to my place whenever nobody was home. I liked Cristina because I thought she was independent like me, willing to work to support a family if necessary. However, she was just looking for somebody to steal her away from the bairro where she lived, Santa Tereza, so that she could sit on her ass all day and get fat while her man worked. She was only interested in me, I think, because I was now a taxi driver making good money rather than a struggling restaurateur from Albania like her uncle. Most of the people in Albania are Muslims, but Cristina's family was Catholic. They had a large, framed photograph of Mother Theresa, who was born in Albania, behind the counter in the restaurant.
Cristina and I were fighting a lot in the end. We quarrelled, in part, because I gave money or table scraps to the beggars outside of the diner where she worked. Waiters and waitresses don't like beggars because the homeless drive away customers, and waiters and waitresses rely on tips, like taxi drivers. People who wait on tables for a living don't make lots of money. If they lost their jobs and couldn't find another, they could become beggars or prostitutes themselves. The beggars are a reminder to the working poor that they could end up out on the street as well. However, Cristina and her family tolerated my generosity, because I had friends come to provide security in return for a free meal. They would sit down at the counter or at a booth for a few hours while armed. Cristina met a few of my friends that way; that was how she met Gilberto.
I walk in unannounced at Gilberto's without even thinking about it. I'm shocked by what I see next: my best friend and my girlfriend together, fucking like two dogs! It's like one of them had ripped out my heart bare-handed while the other held me down.
I shout, pull out my revolver, and aim first at Gilberto, and then at Cristina. It's a question of honour: I can't spare either of them or nobody will ever respect me again. Any woman will think that she can cheat on me without anything happening to her if she gets caught, while any man will think that he can steal my woman. So they both have to die.
Cristina covers her breasts with the sheet and pleads for mercy. The tears are streaming down her face, the puta, because she knows that she's about to die. "Don't shoot, Jecu," she bawls. "Please don't shoot— I'm sorry!"
Gilberto could have jumped out the window to save himself, the idiot, but he stands to face me, trying to reason with me. He even takes a couple of steps closer to me and says calmly, though very much afraid, "I know I deserve to be shot, Jecu, but this is your fault, too. You accuse a woman of cheating and, before you know it, she cheats on you. You accuse a woman of being a whore, she becomes a whore."
I can't believe it! He's now saying that I turned Cristina into a whore when we both know that she was a whore all along.
Then Gilberto confesses, "I love her, Jecu— I love her."
Instead of shooting Gilberto, I take my pistol by the barrel and strike him across the face with the handle. I'm sure that I broke his jaw, knocking out some teeth with the first blow; there are teeth and blood on the floor. I'm about to hit Gilberto again when Cristina grabs a heavy object and knocks me out with it. I regain consciousness at my mother's with my head still ringing from the blow. They have dragged me home, put me on my bed, and left me there, taking my gun. I know that they have taken my gun because I never find it again. It was my father's gun.
For a few days, I lie in bed, not wanting to eat, not wanting to do anything. Sometimes, I want revenge, not only because Cristina and Gilberto have betrayed me, but also because they have tricked me and avoided their just desserts. Other times, I'm just depressed and humiliated— sure that I can never face the world again. I have lost both my girlfriend and my best friend at the same time, and I have nothing to show for it but a big headache. But I can't get out of bed for a while, because I have a concussion, and Gilberto and Cristina have taken my gun away.
Finally, my mother says, "You have to start working again, Jecu. Otherwise, the kids in the neighbourhood will steal that car piece by piece and sell the parts; then we'll really be in trouble. You have to forget about her— you have to forget about them. Your brothers and your sisters can't always watch that car."
So I start driving my taxi again. After the incident with Gilberto and Cristina, I'm not home much anymore but always working. I avoid women from my bairro now, because they are all just whores. For several months, I'm always in a bad mood, unless I get laid. I find solace mostly in my work, in the fact that I'm making some change and helping my family. I'm not making money like water, but I'm useful to my family. The women I see now are either foreign tourists or girls from other bairros that I meet on the beach. Sometimes, if I am willing to spend money, I will have a rendezvous with some topless dancer downtown.
For a while, I was seeing a pretty little patricinha from a Ipanema named Maria da Conceição, who danced downtown. Then she told me that she had become engaged to somebody else and broke it off. I don't worry very much about AIDS with girls from places like Ipanema and Copacabana because they are cleaner than the girls from the favelas, and I always use condoms.
It's after 9/11 that I begin to have bad dreams and wake up sweating. I think the terrorist bombing in New York City or, rather, the magnitude of it, was the trigger.. I start to see the faces of those whom I have killed, people whose faces I no longer remember while awake but see again while asleep. Night after night, I play out the robbery of Meném's store in my dreams, but sometimes Meném shoots Gilberto or Rodrigo or has his gun pointed at me before I can draw mine. Then I see Rodrigo, sobbing and pleading for his life, before Broadway Joe orders me to shoot him. Then there are the walls of my prison cell, the prison hospital, and the room where I was tortured. I remember the inspector, Porfirio, saying that he wanted to save my soul. But I can't remember most of the others that I have killed, though the places where I killed them are always familiar.
Sometimes, I have flashbacks when I hear samba music, since the interrogators often played samba on the radio. I have begun to dread Carnival because of the flashbacks that its music sometimes evokes. Loud noises, particularly anything that resembles gunfire, like the backfire of a car or a motorcycle, make me jump. A few times, I have fallen to the floor to take cover with my gun drawn; I always have a gun with me. I'm always embarrassed afterwards when I do it in front of other people, but sicários have tried to kill me a few times in my life; you don't want to give anybody a second chance to kill you.
The last time that I killed somebody, I was driving my taxi. A kid tried to rob me at night, near Corcovado, but I shot him first. I didn't report the crime to the police because the gun was illegal. You could go to prison for having an illegal firearm, so I drive off like a criminal after shooting the kid. That's probably the reason why I have survived rather than ended up dead like Meném— killed by a six-year-old— or the kid who tried to rob me while I was driving my taxi. I was thinking like a criminal when the kid tried to rob me or kill me— like a malandro. I'm still a criminal, still a malandro, though I drive a taxi rather than run numbers, sell drugs, or seize delivery trucks.
Getting drugs has never been a problem for me, because I still have connections in the bairro, and the tourists will pay while I buy for them. My mother nags me about it, but I keep a bottle of vodka beside my bed in case I can't sleep at night. My mother is aware that I use marihuana and cocaine, but I only smoke bazeado with my friends and do cocaine with the tourists. I don't go to bars very much because I work a lot and I have to drive; I don't like to drive while drunk. I drink alcohol only when I'm home alone.
I want to leave Rio and head towards o norte, but you need money for that. However, I'm now in my middle twenties, with a woman and children. I will have to leave Rio soon or I will never leave.
But how am I supposed to get the money?

*****

About six months after I caught them together, Gilberto and Cristina showed up. Cristina was visibly pregnant. I'm living with another woman, Lourdes, who is already pregnant with our first child, Minha. She has a son and a daughter from a previous relationship, Manoel and Zina.
I feel a cold fury against Gilberto and Cristina, but I decide to listen to them anyway, though I don't know why I just don't shoot them.
"We're sorry, Jecu," Gilberto begins. "We hurt you, and we ask forgiveness."
Cristina shouts, "Hey!"
It's mostly Gilberto who speaks. Cristina mostly listens, but interrupts from time to time by shouting, "Hey!" Each time that Cristina shouts, Gilberto waits until the moment passes. Then he continues with what he has to say. Finally, I ask, "Why do you need my forgiveness? What good will it do?"
"We would like to make amends with everybody we have wronged," Gilberto replies simply, "though it's not always possible to do that. For example, you can't bring back the people you have murdered, Jecu. Only Christ can do that at the resurrection."
Again, Cristina shouts, "Hey!"
Nobody says anything for a moment. There's obviously a purpose to their visit; they aren't here just to say they that they are sorry. I soon ascertain that they want to bear witness that a change has come over them. At one point, I interrupt them and ask, "Do you love each other?"
"Yes, we love each other," Gilberto replies firmly.
"Then you haven't done anything wrong."
Again, Cristina interrupts by shouting, "Hey!" Then she speaks for the first time: "We know that we have hurt you, Jecu, and we're sorry. We want to get married. We're asking for your blessing so that everybody can move on."
"My blessing?" I shout. "You want my blessing? Hey, I'm not a priest!"
"We're all priests," Cristina replies quietly, "if we serve him."
Then she quotes some Holy Scripture: "'For God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten son, so that all who believe in Him should not perish but have eternal life.'"
"I won't serve him," I shout. "If it means going to heaven with either of you, I'd rather go to hell!"
Cristina touches my arm gently and says, "You're already in hell, Jecu. You're just not aware of it yet."
I draw my gun and point it at them— I'm going to shoot them, I swear it! I don't feel in control of myself right now, but Gilberto and Cristina just stand there mute, like a pair of oxen yoked together. It's like they don't understand the danger. Even now, I don't know if they were brave or extremely foolish— driven crazy by religious fanaticism— but it's evident that they aren't very attached to their lives anymore. If I killed them now, they would probably think that I have given them a pass to heaven; it's like I would be doing them a favour.
I realize now that Gilberto and Cristina understood very well what they were doing. On some level, they understood that, if they showed fear again, if they begged for their lives, they would look cowardly in my eyes and goad me to commit murder. Gilberto still understood the code of the bairro, part of which is to never show weakness or you will lose respect and die. Yes, he who loves his life may indeed lose it; it's all the same to them now if I kill them or not.
"We want your blessing, Jecu," Gilberto says, "because we want to get married with each other and make peace with you. It says in the Bible that Cristina and I can't make our offering at the altar until we try to make peace with you, because we have done you wrong. We realize that we have hurt you and we are sorry."
"You don't need my blessing," I tell them malevolently. "I am a devil, and a devil can only curse, even when he blesses."
In the bairro, people shack up rather than get married, because few people can afford the marriage license, the blood tests, or the marriage ceremony. As for the wedding rings, they are out of the question— too expensive for people like Gilberto and Cristina. So people live together until they break up; then they move on. I don't think that my parents were ever married. Lourdes and I aren't married now. So I ask Gilberto and Cristina why they are going to the trouble of getting married. Cristina says simply that they love each other and that they don't want to live in sin but continually praise God by how they live— in righteousness.
They have been going to a Pentecostalist church, where both of them have done a religious conversion, first Cristina, and then Gilberto— uma epifania, they call it. Cristina now speaks in tongues, babbling like an idiot during Sunday services. She will shout "Hey!" for no apparent reason, like she has Tourette's syndrome. Cristina is aware of this eccentricity and is self-conscious about it. She knows that people think it strange. Even she thinks it strange, but she can't help it. She has been doing it since she "received the Holy Spirit," so she might shout at any time.
The Pentacostalists are no different from the practitioners of candomblé, as I see it. They believe in "spirit possession" just like the practitioners of candomblé. However, the Pentacostalists believe candomblé to be Satanic— that their adherents seek to be mounted by evil spirits. But it's all the same to me: religion and the occult are both the same, because both the Pentacostalists and the occultists are seeking something that is not of this world. And they want something for the price of nothing, except submission. So neither Gilberto nor Cristina are really stranger than before, just different— just trying to appear respectable.
Then I ask Cristina, "Whose baby are you carrying?"
Cristina shouts, "Hey!"
Then she looks up at Gilberto, who replies, "Mine, Jecu. She's carrying mine now."
Apparently, they are dedicated to a life together serving Christ. Gilberto explains that their church is taking up a collection and paying for nearly everything: the marriage license, the blood tests, the wedding. They only have to pay for the wedding rings, which they aren't buying, at least not now. Cristina no longer has her job at the diner because she's showing and her family has disowned her. They are scandalized, not only because she's pregnant, but because Gilberto is a black man. They might even kill her if they found out where she lived, I think. It is now evident that Gilberto loves Cristina because of the concern that he shows her, very solicitous. "Tudo bem?" he asks from time to time. "Are you all right? Would you like to sit down?"
Therefore, I give them my blessing— what else can you do? There's no point in withholding it now because they love each other, and I am with Lourdes.
Gilberto has found a full-time job at a supermarket downtown as a stock boy. Who knows? Maybe he will be manager one day. Gilberto also preaches in the favelas. Though he is unarmed, he often approaches armed gangs of kids with their marihuana cigarettes, jars of homemade pinga, and plastic garbage bags filled with gasoline to inhale. Gilberto is a big man, but it seems that he has become gentle as a lamb, posing no threat to anybody. He's putting himself at risk because he no longer carries a gun, but a bullet to the head or to the heart would be a pass to heaven for him anyway, as he sees it. Gilberto has overcome his fear of death, unlike me, who still has the normal fear of death.
Since the time that Cristina and Gilberto asked for my blessing, Cristina has had a son. I suspect now that the baby is mine, light like me and Cristina, because he doesn't look at all like Gilberto. However, he is raising the baby as his own son. But maybe Cristina has been faithful to Gilberto because they have had two or three more children, all of them lighter than him but darker than her. Maybe people can change— maybe a leopard can change its spots. Maybe all things are possible in Christ.
The day that I caught them together, I lost everything: my best friend, my girlfriend— everything. More than any girlfriend that I have ever had, Gilberto has understood my weaknesses and forgiven me for them. He even forgave me when I gave him up to Porfirio. Gilberto and Cristina found each other, and then Christ; they might even go to heaven when they die.
They were either very foolish or very brave, showing up at my place like that, because they gave me another chance to kill them. Why didn't I kill them when I had the chance— why? Maybe there are angels to watch over fools, because I don't know why I didn't shoot them even today— I don't know what stopped me. Maybe life would have made sense for me again if I had killed them both, but Cristina even cheated me out of my revenge by knocking me out with a frying pan when I was about to shoot them the first time. By admitting that they had done wrong, by asking forgiveness, Cristina and Gilberto became more virtuous— at least in their own minds— but what good was it to me? Must be, they weren't meant to die by my hand.
The last time that I saw them together, they looked happy, so maybe it was for the best. Maybe it's better that Cristina run off with Gilberto than with someone else. I realize now that Gilberto didn't mean to betray me; he was in love with her. But Cristina was a piranha, available for him, but not for me. With the passage of time, I have probably forgiven them to the extent that I am able. I don't hate them like I used to; I'm just not over it yet.
It was then that I was lost to the bairro, because I showed them mercy instead of bairro justice. But the killing has to stop with me, if it is to stop, so I gave them my blessing in the end. What's more, Lourdes and I were about to start a family.
I'm no longer Broadway Joe's little hired assassin. I am no longer a child who needs two hands to hold a pistol. I am now haunted by the ghosts of the people whom I have murdered, because what are those that we see in our dreams if not the ghosts that have come back to haunt us?
Sex is a dark and mysterious force, potentially deadly, with the power to unleash jealousy and violence, even rape and murder. It also can come between friends. Then there's the risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. You can use condoms to minimize the risk of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, but condoms come off during sex. There's nothing safe about sex— I know better now.
I am still a malandro, because of my past.

Robert

I was sitting in my chair at the beach, reading a book and checking out the girls as they promenaded before me in their string bikinis across the white sand. There were lots of them here— everywhere. I already had seen hundreds that day, strolling at the edge of the water, playing volleyball, or lying in the sun. Since their bikinis were nearly always tan in colour, the girls looked naked at first glance. But, in the end, my thoughts returned to Maria da Conceição: I waxed over her poetically like King Solomon in The Song of Songs. I felt young again. I thought of her whenever I was at the beach with the kids, which was nearly every day. I would make love with my wife but see Maria's bronzed body: the slender form, the bare shoulders, and the small breasts like towers. Mostly, though, it was her frizzy hair and brown skin. I was obsessed, struck by the lightning bolt, which is different than love. I loved Chantal with all my heart— I would have never hurt her for the world— but I was strongly attracted to Maria. It wasn't love but the demon of middle age— the desire to hold onto youth and get out of life what you can while you still can, no matter what the cost.
I would forget about Maria, but I always remembered her whenever I saw someone else who vaguely resembled her: someone with the same hair, the same skin colour, and the same body type. Once I was sure that I had seen her standing under an umbrella at a hot dog stand. She was tall and slender, with a tan bikini like Maria's. She had the same basic features and was about the same size as Maria, but it wasn't her. She was attractive enough, worth a second glance, but she wasn't as beautiful as Maria da Conceição— nowhere near it. What's more, she was Japanese or Chinese. There are Asians living in Brazil, you know, just like in Canada.
I had fantasies of giving Maria da Conceição the benefit of my experience, but I despaired of ever seeing her again because she seemed to have stopped coming to the beach. She might have been attracted to me, but I understood: she didn't want to ruin the prospects of a good marriage with a young man from a good family. But Maria would have done well to find a lover like me, one about my age and with my experience. In Latin America, I'm sure that beautiful girls like Maria find rich souteneurs all the time. I was sure that I could have loved her if I knew her better, if I didn't have a wife. Or if I was rich enough to afford a mistress and a wife at the same time.
You have to win a woman's love over and over again, it seems. I only loved Chantal, but her jealousy was too much for me. She was emotionally needy. I didn't mind having sex when she wanted it, but having to reassure her all of the time wore me down in the end. Chantal could attest that I was a better lover now than when I was younger, but it gets harder to keep up with a woman like her. She was still young and beautiful, and she wanted it as much as ever, too. Stamina wasn't a problem for her. If she wanted to work for it, if she wasn't feeling lazy, Chantal could outlast any man in bed. In the end, no man can keep up with a woman, or no man can keep up with a woman like Chantal. I know from experience. Instead of stamina, I had experience— lots of experience. But sometimes I wanted to say, "I love you, but, if you want to leave me, I'll understand."
But women don't understand. What they mistake for not caring is often just weariness; the spirit is willing while the flesh is weak.
Then Chantal called me from her cell phone early in the afternoon while I was at the beach with the kids. She had been gone since morning, before the kids and I woke up. She had left a note on the night table saying that she had gone shopping, but I thought it very strange, her calling like that. Chantal said, "I've come across a midwife about to deliver a baby. She needs my help because the mother's in bad shape. The hospitals are far away— near the centre-ville. We're in a shantytown."
"A shantytown!"
"Yes. You wouldn't know this was Rio."
"How did you end up there?"
"Later, I'll explain later, okay?"
"Okay," I said, still perplexed. Then I said, "I love you, ma chérie."
"I love you, too," she stammered. Then she said again, "I love you, but I have to go, eh? Bye-bye."
"This is curious," I muttered to myself after she hung up.
Something about this whole thing wasn't right. She was behaving very strangely.

José

I can say without pride that I always have had a lot of success with the other sex. It's just a fact. I'm still young and good-looking, and sometimes the women like me. I always try to be nice.
Donna is from Toronto, about thirty years old. She's in Rio on business, she says, but obviously looking for a good time as well. Donna isn't very pretty, but I like her anyway— she's nice, with an infectious laugh. She's short and dark, a little jar of tobacco. She has a big ass. She even makes a joke about having to stand on the airplane because her ass is too big to fit into a seat, though I think she exaggerates somewhat. She has a small and square face, with a low forehead and thick eyebrows. Her family is from the state of Kerala in southern India, therefore the dark features: black hair and skin the colour of mahogany. However, she was raised a Catholic in Canada and has a Portuguese family name, Ferreira. The Portuguese, she told me, were the first to send missionaries to convert the Indians to Christianity. Therefore, many Christians in southern India have Portuguese family names even today.
Donna and I spend the night together a few times while she's in Rio. We even see a movie in a darkened cinema, an American film with Portuguese subtitles called Casablanca, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. I had told Donna that I had never seen a movie in a cinema before, so we went. Then we book a room at a honeymoon motel for an hour but end up staying the whole night. Normally, I don't play my guitar for the tourists, but, the next time we meet, I sing and play my guitar for her in our motel room. I play some bossa nova while she dances; we both like the old stuff. We had some good times together.
"Maybe you should come to Canada," Donna suggests while we're in bed together.
"Why?"
"Then I wouldn't have to fly down to Rio," she replies, "but also because you'd make more money in Canada. I'm from a small town in Ontario called Woodstock, but Toronto wasn't at all threatening for me— I fell in love with Toronto. There's so much happening on Yonge Street, for example; they say it's the longest street in the world. It's so long that you could drive up to Hudson Bay in the north, and it's got so many people that you could drive your taxi up and down and never have to leave it; you'd always find clients. You'd fit right in, José, I know you would."
I shrug and tell her, "If I came to Toronto, I would only be living like I do here in Rio. I would just be paid in Canadian dollars, that's all. I don't see myself living in a big apartment off the beach like you."
"You can't start in the executive suite," Donna replies. "Everybody has to start at the bottom, even you. But where do you live, if you don't mind my asking?"
I frown as I tell her, "I live almost at the bottom. I live in the Old City in two very crowded apartments with my mother and lots of brothers and sisters. I'm the oldest one, so I help support the family, like a good son."
Of course, I'm lying about living with my mother and my brothers and sisters. I'm really living with Lourdes and our children, and Lourdes' mother, rather than my own mother, but I don't want to tell Donna about Lourdes.
"It's none of my business," Donna says, "but, with the money you'd make in Toronto, you could still support your family without having to live with all those people. You could turn your cab over to one of your brothers here and drive a cab there— like your father turned his cab over to you. You could make it in Toronto, José, I know you could. You speak English well enough, and you already know how to drive."
Then she makes an offer: "If you want to come to Canada, I'll sponsor you as a permanent resident until you get your citizenship— that is, if you want to be a citizen, of course."
"What do you want out of this?"
"Sex, lots of sex!"
But she relents a little and replies to my question again, while laying her head on my chest: "I don't know, José, but I think it could work. If it doesn't work out, we'll cry, hug each other, and say good-bye. I don't like messy breakups."
Donna listens, surprised, I think, as I tell her the truth about Lourdes, the children, and me. I tell her everything. Even though Lourdes and I aren't married, I tell her that I feel trapped. I know that there's a better life for me somewhere outside of Rio, but I don't want to abandon my family.
"Immigrants always have had to leave their families, José," Donna replies. "But you could bring your children and Lourdes to Canada later, once you became a permanent resident. Once you were settled."
"What about you?"
"I won't wait the rest of my life for you, but if you want to come to Canada, I'll be waiting. But it's for a limited time only."
Then she adds, "I don't think Lourdes and the children are the reason why you haven't left Rio, José. The reason is you. When you're ready to leave, you'll leave— with or without Lourdes and the children."
Initially, I am interested in Donna's offer, but I am hesitant because we don't know each other very well. Besides, Canada has a complicated point system, where applicants for a permanent resident visa have to score at least sixty-seven out of a possible one hundred points to qualify. Then you have to get a sponsor and a work visa. Because I only drive a taxi and have never been to school, I doubt that I would qualify. They want professionals, not people like me; they have doctors and civic engineers driving taxis in Canada. So I tell her that I will have to think about it. Then I smile and ask, "Would you like to do it again?"
She kisses me, and we do it again. Oh, I have a good time with her— we're compatible.
When I take Donna to the airport the next morning, we trade business cards. I give her mine with the English side up, in case she's in Rio again; she gives me hers, with the Portuguese side up, in case I want to try my luck in Toronto. Then we kiss like Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in that movie we saw together. She's a romantic, you know, but that's what I like about her.
About a month later, I receive a post card of the CN Tower with a kiss in red lipstick on the back. Luckily, Lourdes didn't get the post that day. I still keep the post card in an old cigar box marked "Rio," along with some old photos, a peace sign, and a pendant that I received from another tourist. Women sometimes give me things as mementos, you know.
After I drop off Donna at the airport, I park at the edge of the Copacabana beach, get out of my car, and buy a cup of coffee and a newspaper at a kiosk. I never finish reading the newspaper. While looking out at the beach through some binoculars, I see a woman at a distance of about a hundred metres. I watch as she walks across the beach from her hotel, a plastic lounge chair under her right arm and a handbag over her left shoulder. It's the hat that I notice first: a straw sun hat, like a gardener's hat.
Of course I recognize her immediately from when I picked her up at the airport. My God, she's beautiful— the most beautiful woman that I have ever seen! She's beautiful in the classic sense, with a beauty that you find only on the statues in the museums or in the movies. She's a little older than I am, about thirty years old, but her face is magnificent— so perfect. I never will forget her face. If I only had a camera! If I could only paint her portrait! The dimples on the woman's cheeks give her face a placid appearance, like a cat that has just feasted on a copper fish. She's of medium size, with firm, slender arms and legs and a lean but strong body. She has a little bit of a belly, but I don't care— I'm in love with her anyway. I don't like the supermodel types, who are all anorexic, anyway. I like the contours of a woman's body, and she has the contours. Her skin is lightly tanned from having been out in the sun while in Rio, but she's obviously is from a northern climate, still pale for Rio.
I watch as she strips down to a black bikini, putting her shorts in the bag and the blouse on the back of her chair. Then she rubs some suntan oil on her skin before sitting down to read. I remember her from before as being somewhat timid but very nice. I remember the lilt of her voice, how she tended to leave phrases up in the air. She has a very soft and low voice.
It's the lightning bolt— I'm in love with her all over again. Oh, if I could only charm her with a flute, like a snake charmer! I have sex with the tourists, in part, to enjoy the comfort of a big, beautiful bed in a luxurious hotel suite by the beach, or the more modest bed of a honeymoon motel, and to forget about life for a while. But that one there, I would do it with her on a bed of nails, if that was what she wanted.
When I approach a woman of a certain age, she's often grateful for the attention, if she thinks that it's sincere. But that one there: why would she be grateful? She's still young and beautiful. Why would she be interested in a man like me, who has nothing to offer but his beautiful soul? But she's magnificent— she's the pearl.
I was lucky the first time, when we met at Corcovado. I might be lucky again. So I approach her as she sits down to read.

Robert

Rio de Janeiro is the only major city in the world that has a national park inside its environs: the Tijuca Forest in the São João Mountains. Chantal was out shopping, so she didn't make the trip with the kids and me. However, rather than spend another day at the beach, I persuaded Avril and Patrick to go hiking with me through a part of the Tijuca Forest, though I think they probably preferred the beach.
With some of the trees well over two or three hundred metres tall, you never would have believed that this park was once a coffee plantation of about fifty square kilometres, completely stripped of trees. The owner, Manoel Gomes Archer, was practising good soil conservation by planting some trees in order to help protect the water table. Think of how this forest will look in a thousand years, if this planet is around that long! The New Forest outside of London was once the estate of William the Conqueror, but he planted some trees almost a thousand years ago and made it a forest. To plant even one tree is to have some hope for the future, but a whole forest? It is to say to the logging companies, "You can't chop down these trees— not yet!" But, more importantly, you're giving back what you took from nature.
I wish I knew plants and flowers like my wife did. There were hammocks of wild orchids everywhere along the footpaths. They were everywhere. There are dozens of species of plants here in Tijuca Forest and several species of monkeys and birds. There are waterfalls as well, most notably, the Cascatinha Falls. Then there are the natural rock formations like the Mesa do Emperador, which is flat like a table, and the Pedra de Gávea, which is a huge granite bluff overlooking the park and the city. The Pedra de Gávea looks almost like a human face, though the elements have been eroding it little by little, since there's no vegetation on top, and people climb it. People like to go hang-gliding there. Chances are that the Pedra de Gávea will be the first thing you see when your airplane makes its approach to Rio from the Atlantic Ocean. Since Corcovado is inside the park and is accessible by several footpaths, you can see it from several places in the park.
It's better to start your hike in the morning, before the sun is very high on the horizon, than in the afternoon. The children and I started our hike late, so we didn't do much hiking; we didn't see very many exotic birds or monkeys. As far as I could tell, there weren't a lot of large animals here either— no jaguars or giant tapirs, for example. Not one boa constrictor or anaconda crossed our path. I saw a sparrow of a species that I had never seen before throw itself down in the dirt and give itself a dirt bath before flying away. However, it was good to get away from the city. It even took my mind off Chantal for a while— and Maria da Conceição.
Chantal was the missing element; she should have been there with us. In my mind, I saw her spinning around like a whirling dervish, with her arms spread out and her head tilted slightly to one side, something that she did to entertain the kids. Long ago, Chantal insisted that you could reach a state of ecstasy and a higher state of consciousness by spinning around and making yourself dizzy. "If nothing else," Chantal said, "the dizziness and disorientation make you aware of what the dead go through when they are dying."
Then she looked at me and said, all serious, "I know what it's like to be dying. My father saved me from drowning when I was a child."
I felt like a divorced father with custody of the kids for the weekend. I thought of Chantal as we toured the Mayrink Chapel and saw the murals of Cândido Portinari, because she liked to tour art museums and look at paintings and sculptures. The subjects in Portinari's murals were mostly Brazilian peasants, dressed in white, with enormous hands and feet all out of proportion to their bodies.
Avril even mentioned her mother nostalgically when we were at the Chinese pagoda, and once or twice afterwards. Patrick, on the other hand, seemed not to have noticed her absence; he wanted to go rock climbing on the Pedra de Grávea. He had dreams of conquering Mount Everest one day, and this rock was a good place for him to start, I think.
The mother is the soul of the family. Or rather, Chantal was the soul of our family. We all gravitated towards Chantal like the planets orbiting a star in the galaxy. Only I sensed now that that star was about to collapse like a black hole: one brilliant flash of light, and then nothing, with everything around it getting sucked into the vortex.
As we looked from afar at the statue of Christ on top of Corcovado, Avril casually mentioned that they had met the taxi driver from the airport when they were out there earlier in the week. "He gave me the creeps," she said. "I didn't like him."
"Me neither," Patrick concurred.
I didn't know for sure, but I suddenly thought that our marriage was in trouble.

Chantal's Inner Voice

When you have anxiety, you can't sleep. Then you're depressed, and you hate yourself and want to die. It's all a vicious circle, like a Chinese dragon trying to swallow its tail. Your husband has told you that there are no perfect circles in nature, only vicious ones. "Vicious circles," he says, "seem to have a mathematical precision. Unless the circle is broken, you can accurately predict what will happen beforehand nearly every time. However, you must make allowances for some unknown variables."
Your husband has a tendency to lecture, like he's speaking before a classroom full of students, or talking to a child. You feel the urge to blow the paper from a straw at him while he's speaking while seated at a restaurant table.
You get up about nine o'clock in the morning, brush your teeth, and get dressed. Before you go down to the beach, you leave a note on top of the night table for your husband, and a message with the concierge in case your husband hasn't seen the note. He doubt that your husband will see the note or ask the concierge for any messages. He's wrapped up in his research for his next paper, or so he says.
It's still early and not very hot yet. However, it's very humid and you've already begun to sweat. There are only a few people at the beach, some mosquitos, and some hungry seagulls scrounging for something to eat. You stand on the sand for a moment, looking out at the ocean. With the waves rolling in with the tide, it's very peaceful. Then you close your eyes and spread your arms out like a cross. You can feel the salty ocean mist against your face before you smile and open your eyes again. You stand there for some minutes and watch the surf creep up to your toes before retreating back to the sea. You think briefly of swimming far from the shore and letting the tide carry you out to sea, but the thought soon passes. Instead, you rub some suntan oil on your skin and sit down in your chair. You try to read, but you have your eyes in the grease of the bins; you barely can keep awake.
Then, while you're about to fall asleep with your book on your knees, somebody says something to you in Portuguese. You quickly raise your eyes, momentarily flustered and unable to speak, and see him standing there in front of you. It's the taxi driver who had picked you and your family up at the airport on Christmas and then took you and the kids to Sugar Loaf Mountain a few days later. When you realize that he's merely saying "Good morning," you greet him in return and ask him please to sit down.
You reintroduce yourselves and talk for a while. He's friendly and relaxed. You know what he wants; he's soon singing the apple, without losing that reserve, for the most part. He reminds you that he drives a taxi, and then says, "I can take you down to the corner, senhora. I've been around the block a few times."
You soon feel comfortable with each other as you talk about yourselves. He even tells you about catching his girlfriend in bed with his best friend; he says that he never has told anyone about it before. You're sure that there's a lot that he never has told other people about himself. "I'm sorry," you say sympathetically, "it must have hurt you very much."
"Yes, senhora," he replies vehemently. "I was going to shoot them, but Gilberto said to me, 'Go ahead, Jecu, I deserve it. But I love her.' So I didn't shoot them. Instead, I hit him across the face with my pistol and broke his jaw. Then Cristina hit me over the head with a pan, or something, and knocked me unconscious."
You know that you ought to be afraid of him, because he almost killed his best friend and his girlfriend, but you're not afraid. You know that he's capable of violence, but all men are capable of violence— that's why you're afraid of men. But you doubt that this man would be very violent if he had grown up in a less hostile environment than a shantytown in Rio. You know that he has seen people murdered from a very early age. You think that maybe he even has committed murder himself, but you feel some sympathy for him. He carries a gun, he says, because everybody carries a gun in Rio, but you don't think that he's a bad devil. You touch his arm gently and say, "I don't think you really wanted to kill them, José, or you would have shot them. You had a gun, you know."
You tell him about your best friend, Alice, about what a flirt she is. Alice always had light thighs when she was younger, you tell him confidentially. Like you, Alice is married. You suspect that husband is attracted to Alice. He has even said, while drunk, that he would like to do both of you at the same time, if it was okay with you. Of course, it wasn't okay with you. Besides, what would Alice's husband have said about it? What your husband really wants, you think, is to see you and Alice in bed together. Men! They read too much pornography!
The taxi driver asks, "Do you think your husband has ever been unfaithful with Alice, senhora?"
You think that your husband has been unfaithful several times, though not necessarily with Alice. However, you shrug and say, "I don't know, José, but if they wanted to do it, I'm sure they could find a way."
Strange to say, you almost wish that Alice had cheated with your husband so that you and José might have something more in common. José understands that anybody could have an unfaithful spouse or an unfaithful lover, because it happened to him. Anybody can be unfaithful— it happened to you.
You flirt a little bit. No, you flirt a lot. You talk about everything, no matter what. Then the taxi driver smiles, stares into your eyes, and says in a low voice, "I want to fuck you like an animal."2
Your eyes open wide with astonishment and you laugh— you don't believe it! Surely, he could be more original than to quote from Nine Inch Nails! You're shocked that a stranger would talk to you like that, but you laugh because you don't know what else to do. When you see his face, how perplexed he is, you laugh even harder, because he's really embarrassed now. You laugh until you almost cry. Those around you at the beach must think that you're crazy. They are all looking at you, but you don't care. While you laugh, you manage to say to him, "You need a better line, José, or you will always be lonely!"
You now think that he has always been alone, even if he has had lots of success with the other sex— even if he's living with a woman and has children with her. There's something about him that separates him from other people, because his solitude is existential, not just from actually being alone.
In this way, you and the taxi driver are alike, because your solitude is existential as well.

José

If you think that I'm a suave gigolo, then think again. The way that she's laughing at me, what I have just said was definitely a mistake. So I stand up to excuse myself, thinking that maybe I should leave, but she stops laughing and says, "Oh, please sit down— you're a lot of fun!"
Before I sit down again, I apologize, "Pardon me, senhora, I don't know why I said that."
"Oh, I know why," she replies, laughing again. Then she says, "You need a better line, José, or you will always be alone."
"What shall I say, senhora?" I ask, smiling.
"I can't tell you," she replies, "but if you want to say something risqué, then maybe you should say it in Portuguese."
So I smile and say softly, almost in a whisper, "Quero tomar a senhora como animal."
"Oh, I would like to be that animal," she replies, looking at me. Then she laughs again.
This time, her laugh is agreeable, not crazy. It starts in her nose and spreads across her whole face and her upper body like a handheld fan opening up little by little. Her upper body has a glow; her face and her chest are soon flushed from laughing. After what I have just said, I have to laugh at myself. I don't know, maybe I have offended her, but we talk some more. Then I ask her what book she's reading. She shows me the title, which is in French, and replies, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. I've seen the movie several times, read the book a few times. It's my best book— that, and The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. I also like Khalil Gibran and Rilke. My husband has been translating Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus from German into French. He does translations."
She says that she's from Canada, from the province of Québec. "Our parish is west of Montréal," she relates. "There isn't another one for some kilometres, but much of Canada is still isolated. Québec is very big, with lots of mountains, forests, and streams. All kinds of animals live there, but not a lot of people. I think you'd like it there, unless you're frilieux."
She's smiling now, arching an eyebrow.
"Frilieux?" I ask, smiling back at her, because now she's flirting with me.
"Yes," she replies, still gazing at me. "The winters are long and hard in Québec, you know. But, don't worry, I will keep you warm..."
But I have misunderstood. "Are you saying I'm repressed?" I ask, shocked. I had never thought that anybody would call me repressed, unless she was really strange, or did things that even I wouldn't do.
"No, not at all," she replies, laughing again. "Frilieux just means 'cold' or 'chilly.' The French word for 'repressed' is renfoulé or frustré, but I doubt that you're very frustré."
I gaze back into her soft brown eyes and say, "There are no frilieux people in Rio, senhora, and no, I'm not frustré."
"Yes, but I like winters," she replies, meeting my gaze. "I like variety."
Then she looks out at the ocean like someone in a daydream. "The world looks pretty when it first snows," she says, "but we get it en masse. Summers aren't usually very hot in Canada, and it gets cooler at night. It's good for lying down, for sleeping. But I like all of the seasons: the spring with its flowers and the autumn with its dead leaves, as well as winter and summer. In the spring and summer, you can hear the loon in the lakes and the marshes. It's a diving bird, with a black neck and black head, and black feathers spotted with white on its back. It has a white ring around its neck. Its cry is very beautiful and haunting, but sometimes difficult to locate, because of the way that sound travels on water."
Then she turns around in her chair and removes a pin with a flag of Canada in the centre of a leaf from her blouse, which is sitting on the back of the chair. "The terrorists might think I was American if I didn't wear it," she explains. "I'm truly sorry about what happened to all those people that day, but I hope they don't attack Canadians."
When I ask her about the gold pendant around her neck, she says that it's a fleur-de-lis, the provincial symbol of Quebec. It's supposed to be a flower, but it looks more like the tip of a spear. I am aware of a separatist movement in Québec, but she only says of the pendant, "I like flowers. I have four fleurs-de-lis growing in my backyard, one for each member of my family, including myself."
I glance once more at the fleur-de-lis around her neck as well as at the top part of her body: at her arms, her shoulders, and her neck. It seems that she's offering me her breasts; she has beautiful round breasts, the right size for my hands. I want to feel her arms and her shoulders as I hold her in my arms. I want to feel her breasts up against me as I kiss her neck and nibble at her lips and ears. She's making beautiful eyes at me. I always will remember those playful brown eyes! And, when we speak, we speak in low voices, like lovers. But I like her personality as well as her beauty: she's nice, not at all conceited, though she's very beautiful. I like her for herself.
Then she suddenly says, "I'm not a woman who's neglected by her husband, you know. We made love last night and it was fantastic. I've always had a good sexual life."
"Then why are you interested in me, senhora?" I ask, taken aback.
She retreats a little. "I didn't say that I was interested in you, tiguidou?" she replied, still smiling. "I only said that I've always had good sex. Besides, a man should be able to make a woman come at least three times. I expect it."
"Tiguidou," I reply.
I back off a little, because I'm not sure about this one now. She's attracted to me, I think, but I'm not sure if she will act on her feelings yet. Women don't always act on their feelings, you know. As well, I don't want to say something else risqué, either, because she might be offended.
The moment that she stands up, I stand up, too, thinking that she's about to return to her hotel. But she suddenly runs to the ocean and jumps in head first, swimming around until the bottom of her bikini slips off. She sits down in the water to put it back on, smiling at me slyly the whole time. Then she swims around again while I sit at the edge of the water on the dry sand, watching her. When her bikini bottom slides off again, she shouts as she put it back on, "Don't be shy! The water's beautiful!"
I hesitate a moment, looking around in every direction. Then I stand up and take off my shoes, my socks, and my shirt. I remove my wallet from my pants before jumping in with my pants on. She's a good swimmer, with powerful strokes and a powerful kick. However, whenever I come close to her, she always splashes me and swims away. She does this a couple of times, so I splash her back. She only lets me catch her when the bottom of her swimsuit comes off again. We hold each other in our arms a few moments, up to our chests in the water, just looking at each other. Then she closes her eyes and kisses me, the bottom of her swimsuit in her hand, her arms around my neck. But she breaks away and starts swimming again the moment that she feels a wandering hand on her bare ass. Then, away from me, she puts on the bottom of her swimsuit again. What a tease!
After a few minutes, we get out and walk back together to her spot on the beach. She has a satisfied look on her face. After she dries herself off and puts on her blouse, she places her left hand on my shoulder to steady herself as she pulls her shorts over her legs with her other hand. "I have weak ankles," she says flirtatiously.
Then I put my arms around her body again. I'm about to kiss her, but she touches my lips with her index finger and says in a low voice, "I would like to go shopping, if you please. But I have need of a taxi."
Then she kisses me lightly on the lips and touches the tip of my nose with the tip of her tongue. I kiss her in return before I release her.
She smiles seductively as we walk slowly back to her hotel while talking— me, carrying her chair like she was my girlfriend at school.

Chantal

Back at the hotel, I change into a white print dress with a pattern of little blue flowers on it. My husband is still asleep, so I leave him a note on the night table next to the bed. I also leave a message with the concierge, in case my husband doesn't see the note. I take his Panama hat and leave the straw one, since it's the only other hat that I have. The Panama was mine anyway: I gave it to him before we got married, and the straw hat is old and dirty.
The taxi driver takes me to the old quarter near the centre-ville. The Old City is quite beautiful, with side streets so narrow that cars can't enter them. Some of the buildings, most of them solid granite, are two or three hundred years old. They give me the impression of southern France: they wouldn't look out of place in the Côte d'Azure in the nineteenth century, except for the pretty mosaic sidewalks of red, white, and black tiles along Atlantic Avenue. These sidewalks give the Old City a unique Portuguese air. According to my husband, city streets in the old part of town in Portuguese cities have sidewalks of mosaic tiles, but I wouldn't know because I have never been to Portugal.
We come to an open-air market, the entrance to which looks like a dirty alley. You think that you might be entering it, never to leave again. A crowd has already formed, since the people here shop mostly in the morning. Everybody takes their time. By noon, a native indolence will have set in; it's already too hot and humid to do much of anything. The vendors and the shoppers, mostly women, negotiate prices; the children look suitably grave while the men try to look menacing. Many of the women here are quite tall— Amazons, really. They have a certain self-confidence, while the men seem to shrink into the background. Even José is wary, never completely at ease. There's an air of danger: he has his gun ready at all times, and I'm a little afraid that there will be a gunfight. I like people but not crowds, so I put my arm around his so that we aren't separated. Since many people in the market place speak only Portuguese, I have need of José as an interpreter.
What an experience: the foreign voices, the exotic foods for sale, the animals everywhere! There are live chickens, pigs, and crabs, and lots of salted fish. There are fruits and vegetables of all kinds— apples and oranges, cucumbers and bananas, pineapples and coconuts, as well as several exotic fruits and vegetables that I have never seen before: cajás, graviolas, and mangabas, for example. While the cajá is very small, the graviola is enormous. The cajá looks like a little orange or a yellow plum, but is more acidic in taste than the orange; inside there's a nut— a cashew. If you cut into the mangaba it squirts a white, milky liquid. As well, there are several fruit juices that I have never tasted before, guava juice in particular. They say that guava juice is almost as popular as Coca-Cola here in Brazil. Lots of vendors have dried cashews for sale in large flat baskets. The bakers sell cassava bread— very poisonous unless squeezed properly of its juice— and wheat bread. There are meats for sale, but the butchers don't have Frigidaires. Legs of beef hang from large hooks, and the flies are free to walk across the beef without interference. Though other animal parts are hidden from view, livers and other internal organs are stacked neatly on the counters for the customers— and the flies. Baskets hold dried shrimp and dried fish, especially the morning's catch of peixe do cobre, or "copper fish," which look like carp to me. There are some live crabs with their legs still covered with mud and some live chickens as well. I feel bad for the crabs and the chickens, you know, because I'm a vegetarian.
When we see a chicken about to be slaughtered, José quickly leads me away. You still can hear the chicken flapping her wings and squawking her protestations loudly before the butcher kills her— it's hideous! Animals suffer in captivity when being slaughtered, you know. That's why I'm a vegetarian. I believe in compassion towards all living things. I even try not to swat at flies and mosquitoes.
There's more than just foodstuffs for sale here in the market place. For example, there are clothes being sold off the racks, large strings of tobacco that look like dried intestines, and a variety of herbs and spices. There are so many herbs for sale here that a pharmacist from abroad could probably never identify all of them. Some are garnishes for food, but others are used as herbal medicines. It's impossible for me to know for sure which herbs have any medicinal value. Therefore, the buyer must beware or risk being cheated.
As a whole, the Brazilians are very religious, it seems, though not all are Christians. Some of them practise candomblé, a combination of Catholicism and some pagan rites from Africa and the Amazon. Outsiders might call it voodoo. There are several religious items for sale: crosses and rosary beads, votive candles and icons, like a little painting of a black man that José identifies as Xango, or "Black Anthony." You see lots of icons to St. Sebastian, the patron saint of Rio, as well. Then I see the name São Francisco de Assis framed in a little tableau under a prayer in Portuguese. The prayer:
"O Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace:
Where there is hate, let me sow love;
where there is injury, forgiveness;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope."

I don't speak Portuguese, but I understand the prayer anyway. I'm so moved by this simple little prayer that I buy the tableau.
We meet José's mother, a large black woman of a certain age with a red turban and a bright red dress, a flowing skirt in the style of Bahia in northern Brazil. Her name is Jurema. She has a certain beauty, with handsome features and a pleasant smile; her face is kind and gentle. She doesn't speak English but she's nice to me. When Jurema offers me some of her feijoada, a stew of black beans, rice, and pork that she is cooking over an open flame. I try some without any meat. Then I buy a plate and eat it with some guava juice that I had bought earlier. Before we leave her, Jurema kisses José twice on the lips and gives him a hug before we leave. "Tem cuidade, o meu filho," she says lovingly. "Take care, my son."
Then Jurema and I kiss each other on the cheeks. "Tenha senhora cuidade," she says. "Take care, senhora."
Because of all the black women and their style of dress, it's like we're in Africa. The baianas come from the state of Bahia north of Rio, where women wear turbans and long and beautiful, flowing skirts. Those in white turbans and white dresses with the turquoise hem are worshippers of the goddess Yemanjá, José says. You see lots of women in white dresses and white turbans in Rio.
We make a brief stop at the hippy market, where I buy José a pendant with a peace sign; he puts it on. Downtown, he stops to kiss me in doorways a few times— very romantic— but up close, this place isn't all that romantic. There are homeless people everywhere. They wait in the parks underneath the jacaranda trees, and in the narrow alleys behind the restaurants and cafés, begging for change or table scraps. Then I see a little boy, about six or seven years old, squatting by the curb while brushing his teeth; I take a picture of him with my cell phone. Though the child is black, his skin and his hair are reddish-brown, symptoms of kwashkior, which is due to a protein deficiency. I have seen many people here with those symptoms, particularly children. Many of the apartment buildings are abandoned, José says, and are now inhabited by squatters. He tells me that the landlords have stopped paying the hydro and the water in many that haven't been abandoned.
I understand now that there is racial segregation in Brazil; most of the people that you see in the market place are blacks or mulattos from the poorer neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro. Blacks and whites may have equality before the law, but socially and economically, the blacks are inferior to the whites and live separate lives. However, I see few signs of racial hostility. Mixed marriages are not unknown here. What's more, the inhabitants of Rio are assumed to be a mixture of many races. Nobody in the market place seems to have a problem of me being with José.
José is really up on his history. "It was illegal to kill runaway slaves while Dom Pedro II was emperor during the nineteenth century," he says. "Dom Pedro was emperor for nearly sixty years, until he was overthrown by a military coup in 1889. It was illegal to execute both slaves and masters even for murder, but lynching was very common. When they caught a runaway slave, they often dunked him in blue dye and then hung him or shot him. The law apparently never said anything about killing people who were blue. Those dance moves that you see when boys and young men do capoeira developed because masters used to severely punish slaves who fought."
How horrible! I always will love the people of Rio, but I'm always amazed by how cruel people can be to one another. I know now that racism probably exists everywhere in the world, including Canada. The people in the market are very poor in comparison to North Americans and Europeans, but everyone knows that; nobody is completely unaware. A lot of the children, those before the ages of ten or eleven, are physically stunted because of malnutrition; they look small for their ages and must be aware of their poverty. Having seen the poverty up close here has made me more aware of the world besides my hometown, my province, or my country. I still love Canada, but I also love Rio, especially beyond the beaches and the nightclubs. Walking around with José, I want to take the world here in the market place in a loving embrace, like the statue of Christ on Corcovado. I want to give each stranger in the market place a hug, but I doubt that they would understand.
Homeless people everywhere are remarkably alike, it seems. As in Montréal, you see homeless people in Rio carry their meagre possessions in shopping bags, in baskets, or in anything with wheels. Though the temperature seldom is below twenty degrees Celsius here in Rio, the homeless dress as warmly as possible because they are more frilieux, more sensitive to the cold than other people; they will wear coats if they can find them. Homeless people wait outside of restaurants or cafés. If you don't have any change to give to them, they will ask for leftovers from the diners as they leave the restaurant. You will see them pick through garbage cans or beg passersby for change in parks or at traffic lights. They will sleep on park benches, in alleys, and under viaducts— anywhere. It isn't safe to sleep outside in the open like that, but not all people who sleep outside are homeless, according to José. People who get off of work after the buses have stopped running will sleep where the homeless sleep because it isn't safe to travel on foot alone, either. "Rio is a dangerous city at night," José tells me.
For me, the real Rio de Janeiro is the favelas, and the working-class bairros, and the shaded shopping stalls and stands under umbrellas in the market place where people from the poorer neighbourhoods go. Then there are the homeless ones. When they aren't looking at me, I take pictures of some of them with my cell phone. This is the Third World, the real world for most of our planet. The hotels near the beaches and the nightclubs of Copacabana are not the real Brazil; they are only for the tourists. But the tourists are only on vacation from real life anyway.
I feel comfortable with José. We could both be robbed and killed, but I don't care now. I'm not worried about anything anymore, walking arm in arm with him in the old quarter of Rio. I am with the angels. Then, in one of the plazas, we come upon a gaunt, haggard woman with a small child. She's extremely thin, with meagre arms and a large head out of proportion to her body; the corners of her mouth are chalky. She looks like a grandmother with her grandchild. The woman can barely talk. Then she utters the terrible word "SIDA," which is Portuguese for "AIDS." She says that she got it from her boyfriend, who was a drug addict. Since then, her family has ostracized her. Many people, both adults and children, have AIDS or HIV here in Rio, José says. Rio is in the midst of a horrible plague right now, with no end in sight— like much of the Third World.
José silently gives the woman a handful of cruzeiros while I empty my purse and give her and her child the little Brazilian money that I have left. What else can you do? It isn't much money, so I offer her the fruits that I have bought as well, but she can't eat them because they will give her diarrhea. I hold the child on my knees while I talk to her through José as interpreter. Then I give her and her child a hug. The woman clings to me a moment before she lets me go. Then she says, "We will all suffer from AIDS one day, senhora, even you— even if you never actually have the disease."
"What good is giving money or food to the homeless?" you might ask. They soon will be hungry again, tomorrow or the day after, and they will die on the street unwanted by everybody. But that's why you give a homeless person money or food, isn't it? At least they will live until tomorrow, when maybe they can find a more permanent shelter and a more dignified place to die than on the street. No one deserves to die on the street.
"The inflation has hurt everybody," José says simply, after we have left the mother and her child. "Some more than others."

Chantal's Inner Voice

He takes you to a Benedictine monastery near the Avenida Rio Branco, a white baroque structure from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The exterior, with its twin towers of green pyramid-shaped roofs, is impressive enough in its austerity, but it doesn't prepare you for the riches inside. There's an oriental splendour here; you almost expect to see a golden statue of a woman with six arms, like the Hindu goddess Kali. There are the statues of St. Scholastica and St. Benedict, all gilded with gold, and other equally beautiful and impressive statues as well: the statue of the Virgin Mary in the Chapel of the Conception, for example, and the one of Our Lady of Montserrat. No matter where you go, there's always something gilded in gold, even if only the picture frames in the sacristy. You don't believe it! But despite the poverty of Latin America, of Brazil, there many beautiful churches like this, built for the greater glory of God.
Once outside the monastery again, José asks knowingly, "How do you like our São Bento?"
You shrug your shoulders and reply, "The beauty of the baroque cathedral is different than that of the gothic, José. The purpose of the gothic cathedral, with its arched spires and stained glass windows, is to make the soul want to fly up to heaven like an angel. The baroque cathedral, with its gold and its marble statues, and purple drapes plastered to the walls, wants to give the soul a taste of what she will find in paradise once she gets there— if she gets there. You can't compare the two, José, because each is beautiful in its own way, like two women completely different than each other. Built, I hope, with the appropriate love of God in mind."
"That's interesting," José replies thoughtfully. "I thought that architects and builders only thought of building materials and angles."
"I have taken classes in art and architecture at university," you reply, shrugging your shoulders again, "but I'm not an expert. I don't know much of anything."
"Oh, you know lots of things, senhora," José says, "but you must be careful of what you know. You are aberta— open to new things. I could fly you to the moon, if we had the time, and you would experience it fully. That's what I like about you. Above all, you have an open heart. We cariocas admire those who have an open heart."
You thank him for the compliment, but if you have an open heart now, it's because you're with him. You trust him with your life. You sense that he would lay down his life for you— that he would like to lay down his life for you more than anything else. Then you look at him and say quietly, "I would like to go to the Candelaria Cathedral, if you please."
"Is there any particular reason why, senhora? he asks.
"I want to lay a wreath there."
"It could be dangerous," he warns. "There have been shootings there. Twice, the police have murdered children sleeping in the entrance. Who knows? They could drive by again."
"I know that. But I want to lay a wreath there."
He isn't comfortable about it, because he was sleeping under a nearby viaduct the night the first murders took place; he saw everything. Two men drove by in a car. One man opened fire on the children, who were sleeping on the steps of the entrance outside, while the other drove the getaway car. Miraculously, one of the victims survived, despite the fact that he was shot in the head twice; it was he who identified the police officers as the assaillants. Two police officers were later arrested, and tried and convicted of the murders of eight children with premeditation.
You buy a wreath at a florist's somewhere downtown. Then José takes you to the Cathedral of Our Lady of Candelaria on the Avenida Rio Branco. It is a domed structure in the neoclassical style, with a light-brown brick façade interspersed with off-white ones here and there, except that the roofs of the bell towers are shaped like onions in the baroque style, which gives it an Oriental flare. The cathedral is spacious on the inside, with a high ceiling and high vaulted arches in the Gothic style to the side of the pews. It's a magnificent church, but this hallowed ground has been defiled by human blood. You can't imagine how anybody could pray there now. You can't imagine how anybody could call himself a Christian while murdering children on the grounds of this cathedral.
When José shows you the entrance where the murders took place, you walk up the steps as if in a trance. Since it's daytime, any homeless people who might sleep here at night are gone. You are aware of your own pulse, loud and throbbing in your temples, but your perception is heightened: the normal volume of the sound of the summer breeze blowing faintly through the trees seems amplified by many times. You can hear some birds twittering in the branches of the trees, whose calls you can identify positively as belonging to some species of sparrow. You hear a car pass by down the street, but it sounds very distant to you, though the church isn't very far from the street. But José eyes the street warily: he has his gun ready in case anybody might try to commit murder again in broad daylight.
You kneel and lay the wreath in the left-hand corner, and then stand before it and say a little prayer. When you are finished, you cross yourself and walk back to the car with José in silence. When he sees the look on your face, he thinks that he understands the French now. He sees in you the grim determination of a female urban guerrilla, all militant, though you consider yourself a pacifist. For you, the pendant with the fleur-de-lis on your chest is a symbol of peace. To José, however, you are the Marianne, without the bared breast, of course, without an automatic rifle or a banner à la marseillaise.
When you get into José's care, you sit down next to him in the front seat without thinking about it. He asks, "Tudo bem, senhora?"
He's asking if everything's all right, but everything is not all right. Your heart is racing at all speed— you can barely speak. José knows that something is happening inside you, and he asks again, "Tudo bem, senhora? Are you all right?"
You nod your head slowly and answer yes.
"Where would senhora like to go now?" he asks.
Your heart bursting against the inside of your chest, you reply, "Your place."
You kiss in the front seat of his taxi before he starts the motor. "Okay, senhora," he replies. "My place it is."

Chantal

Oh, I know it's very impulsive to have said what I have said, but we're really attracted to each other— we really click. I never have been so attracted to anyone before, not even my husband, though I would crawl for my husband. But we have to do it— it's meant to be. The words "your place" will change my life forever. Right now, though, we're in a hurry to get to his place. However, we have to fight the traffic to get there.
The traffic is the worst that I have ever seen, nothing like what we have in Montréal. They're still building the subway in Rio, so there's some roadwork. When we get on the Avenida Presidente Vargas, there are cars everywhere, but they are going nowhere; José drives at less than twenty kilometres an hour at times. There's a police officer directing traffic on the Avenida Presidente Vargas with its ten lanes. There's has been an accident on the west side of the street near the Sambadrome that they haven't cleared up yet. But José says with some dread, "Maybe there's been a bombing."
But where's the explosion? We didn't hear one.
Rio is larger than Montréal in population, about 6.5 million people, but without the infrastructure of Montréal. The city's main mode of transportation is by bus; the ones that you see are always packed with people at rush hour. There also are lots of yellow taxis with the blue stripe on the doors— they're everywhere. José tells me that the new cars in Brazil run on both ethanol and gasoline; he has recently converted his car to an ethanol-gasoline mixture. José is an independent operator, driving a green Volkswagen Beetle from the 1960s. Maybe he isn't a legally licensed driver, but he has a meter up front.
Like cities everywhere, Rio has had problems with urban sprawl. The isolated towns and villages of a century ago are now the bairros and suburbs of metropolitan Rio de Janeiro today. The favelas that are redefining Rio because of their miserable poverty lie in hills to the north that were once wilderness— shantytowns haphazardly thrown up on the hillsides since the 1950s and 1960s. In other Latin American cities, the upper and middle classes live in the hills, whereas the poor live in the older sections of town in what was once a fertile valley. However, in Rio, the more affluent people live in the suburbs by the beaches or are clustered around Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, which is a lake.
Most of the expansion has been to the west, along the beaches. Those who live in the favelas are the farthest away from the beaches, with the working-class people living in the bairros somewhere in between the southern beaches and the northern favelas. With the mountains to the north, there's little room for the city to grow. It's difficult to sink foundations in the hills to the north because of the granite under the soil, José tells me. Consequently, the hills have never been developed. However, the shantytowns cling to the hillsides like creeping vines overrunning an untended vineyard; you can see some of them from far away in the distance— Rocinho, for instance, and Dona Marta. You can even see them from some of the hotels.
The heat and the humidity are unbearable. It gets really hot and humid around Christmas, when summer is just beginning here. I'm sweating so much that the top of my dress is soon clinging to me; I want to take it off. José's car has no air conditioning because the old Volkswagen Beetles don't have it, he says. Maybe that's why people here prefer the yellow taxis; they probably have air conditioning. Taxi drivers prefer the newer cars, for the most part, because ethanol is much cheaper than gasoline. Brazil is a leader in the production of ethanol because it can be made from sugar cane, and Brazil grows much of the world's sugar cane.
Eventually, we arrive at José's place. I have no idea where we are, because José has taken so many detours because of the traffic and the roadwork. I think I would be lost if I had to drive in this city by myself. Before we enter his apartments, José removes his revolver from the glove compartment. Then he leads me by the hand up a dark and dank stairway to the fourth floor. The bannister is made of solid granite, but there's no light in the hallways; the electricity has been turned off. José never once looks back at me as he leads me up the stairs by the hand. It's like I'm Eurydice and he's Orpheus, afraid that I will disappear and fall back to the underworld if he turns around even one time to look at me. Then the heel of my sandal gets caught on a step and I stumble. Only then does José turn around.
"Shit!" I curse.
"Are you all right, senhora?" he asks in a low voice.
"Yes," I reply, "but the heel of my sandal is broken."
He holds out his hand again, and I take it after I remove my sandals. Then we enter his apartments. José lives in apartments, in the art deco style, probably built in the 1960s or 1970s, that would be in the worst part of Montréal. He says that many of the buildings here are abandoned, and that many of the tenants are squatters. The water has been shut off to the whole building because the landlord hasn't paid it. Because the electricity has been shut off as well, the sun shining through the windows of the sliding door to the balcony provides the only light.
Certainly, José is working class rather than indigent, but I never would have slept with my husband at his place when we first met, if he had lived in apartments as miserable as these are. The ceiling has some water spots and the walls have holes in them. José has some beat up old furnishings: an armchair with tears in the imitation leather, a beat-up coffee table with notches in the legs, and a sofa with cushions still on the floor and covered with blankets. In the kitchen and dining room, there's a sink full of dirty dishes and white plastic patio chairs around a table with cigarette burns in the top. The tabletop needs to be cleared of dirty dishes and wiped off, as do the kitchen counters. Jose's bedroom has a dresser and a dirty mattress that he must have retrieved from a garbage dump. On the wall to the right side of the bed is a painting of a nude black woman, young and petite, leaning forward on a bed like a panther about to strike. You can see her reflection in the mirrors on the closet doors on the other side of the bed.
I don't want to be mean, but I'm sure there must be cockroaches here. I decide then that I don't want to do it— at least not here. This is not my idea of a love nest, but a very miserable baisodrome. These are the apartments of people who live in poverty, who have need of a housekeeper. I'm about to tell José to take me back to my hotel when I think to myself, "If I say no and he says yes..."
Oh, he's been very nice to me, always the gentleman, but I'm in his lair now— I could be in danger. I'm a little afraid of being raped. I'm also afraid of getting pregnant because I have just remembered that I have no protection against pregnancy— no condoms. I hadn't planned on doing anything, at least when I left the hotel; I was undecided then. In case of rape, would the police believe me— me, a foreign tourist? I doubt it. The police would ask what I was doing in his apartments, if they came out at all. I'd have to tell them the truth— I'd have to tell everybody the truth. Then I remember what I said to myself in the market place: "This is the Third World."
This is how people live, where people come together in many parts of the world. Besides, this is the second time, not the first. So we kiss, all drenched in sweat. In these miserable apartments, on an old mattress in a filthy bedroom, we do it, and it's fantastic despite everything— effrayant! I feel my spirit flying up to heaven like an angel. Despite the poverty of his dismal surroundings, I forget where I am at the moment. Then he makes me come again, several times— I take my foot over and over again.
Oh, it's fantastic! I'm blinded by the sunlight coming through his window at the moment of ecstasy. That's the reason why it's so beautiful for me. I see my reflection in the mirrors and that of the nude black woman in the painting watching over us. I remember the sunlight shining through the window of his bedroom, and a white-crowned sparrow landing on the window ledge with a twig in its beak, like it's an omen, like he's a messenger from the gods. There are crowned sparrows in Canada as well as in Rio, where they apparently migrate for the winter.
I sniffle as I watch the bird, before he flies away.


José



I probably should have taken Mrs. Rousseau to a motel, because of Lourdes and the children, but for her, it was worth the risk. However, it will take a long time to get to my place because of the traffic and the roadwork. They are building new stations to the Metro; there's roadwork all over Rio. Whenever traffic is at a standstill, I will stroke her thigh from time to time— all to keep her excited. While chatting amiably, she lets me slide my hand slowly up the inside of her thigh. Then, after a certain point, she shuts her legs tight and turns them away. She does it a few times; it's a little game. One time, I'm sure that she will let my hand find her sex, but she closes her legs at the last moment and traps my hand. "I can't let you do that," she laughs naughtily.
I laugh, too. Then I kiss her and ask, "Why not?"
She pretends to be surprised and replies, "You know why! There are cars all around us!"
"But nobody will notice," I reply.
Mrs. Rousseau smiles slyly and says, "Somebody always notices, José. That's why God made children: they are his eyes."
I remove my hand but I kiss her. She's making beautiful eyes at me again. I will kiss her or stroke her thigh whenever the traffic stops because I don't want the traffic to kill the mood. Eventually, we arrive at my place; fortunately, there's no one at home. You can tell that Mrs. Rousseau is not very impressed with my apartments, because they are a mess, but since I have brought her this far...
We sit on the couch, do some cocaine, and smoke some bazeado. After a few touches, she presses her lips up to mine, blows some smoke into my mouth, and giggles. Mrs. Rousseau is very relaxed now, very cuddly. When she sees my drum in the corner by the sofa, she asks me to play it for her. So I play my drum and sing some bossa nova while she dances; I've always liked the old stuff. When I tell her that she has to shake her hips while keeping her upper body stationary, she catches on very quickly. Then, after a while, I stand up and tell her to strip.
She looks at me for a moment and smiles seductively. Then she stands in the middle of the living room, throws off her hat, and lets her brown hair fall to her shoulders; her hair had been in a queue until then. We kiss— oh, how she kisses! She wipes a few strands of hair away from her face, and then steps back to take off her dress, leaving just the black bikini. You can see part of a faded blue, red, and yellow tattoo partially covered by her bikini bottom. Then Mrs. Rousseau closes her eyes and spreads her arms out wide like a cross. "Won't you do the rest, senhor?" she asks, eyes still closed and arms spread out.
First, I strip. Then I silently approach her, reach behind her, and untie the top of her bikini while kissing her, letting the top fall to the floor. She giggles, but her eyes are still closed. I come up behind her, cup both of her breasts with my hands, and run my lips up and down her neck and shoulders as she moans softly with contentment. Then I slide in front of her and kiss her on the mouth while gently squeezing her right breast with my left hand. Mrs. Rousseau's eyes are still closed, so I fall to my knees and untie the bottom, her hands now on my shoulders, her breathing now slow and even. When the bottom falls to the floor, I can see the tattoo more clearly: it's a butterfly in blue, red, and yellow ink. She cries out with surprise as I touch her one time with my tongue. Then I pick her up in my arms and carry her over to the bed in my bedroom.
We do it three times. The first time, I take her from behind. She seems a little timid, like she isn't completely satisfied. But she smiles afterwards and says, "Encore, monsieur!"
So we do it again, starting with little kisses like gentle breezes, and then the preliminaries. The second time, she really lets go. Mrs. Rousseau likes to be on top, I soon discover. By the way that she grinds herself hard into me and squeezes hard with her sex, I'm able to judge for myself that she has had a very intense orgasm. I'm looking at her face the moment she opens her mouth and cries out; it's beautiful for me— sublime! Then I cry out as well and explode into her. I will never forget it.
That afternoon, it's like a dream. Her brown hair, how it sticks to her face, because it's hot and humid even for Rio. I remember the sweat from her body, the taste of sweat over and under her magnificent breasts, which I lap up with my tongue like dew. There's a light film of sweat on her face, like a mask. As well, I remember the gold pendant around her neck, the one with the fleur-de-lis.
After we're done for the second time, she kisses me full on the mouth, falls on top of me, and lays down next to me. Her face and her upper body are still flush. "Obrigada, senhor," she says, with her head in the curve of my arm, her hand to my heart. "Thank you."
"Não há de quê," I reply, kissing her hair. That means, "You're welcome."
While we hold each other in our arms, we speak in low voices, like there are children in the next room— our children. Then, while walking her first two fingers up my arm like a spider, Mrs. Rousseau looks up, smiles, and says, "Surely, you must have a little friend..."
I tell her that Lourdes is my "little friend," but she smiles slyly and says, "Surely you must have other women à la carte."
"I don't have the time," I reply, laughing. "I'm always working!"
"Oh, that's too bad!"
"How is that?"
She's slowly caressing my chest now. You can tell that she's still high, the way her pupils are all dilated. She looks up at me with those beautiful brown eyes, almost black now, and her hair all messed up, all sweaty. "It's good to have somebody to come home to at night, José," she replies.
"Then why are you with me?" I ask.
She stops rubbing my chest and says gently but firmly, "Don't judge me, eh? You don't have the right. All I'm saying is that you have Lourdes and who knows how many others every day, but you're all alone. If I wasn't here with you, you'd be all alone in these apartments— without a woman, without your children. When you come home at night or in the morning, who's there for you, eh? Sometimes nobody— am I not right? And it's the same for Lourdes, except that she has to take care of the children. I know, because I'm the one who mostly takes care of the kids at home."
"We have to face our demons alone, Chantal," I reply. "One of those demons is loneliness."
"I face two little demons every day," she jokes. "They're called 'children.'"
Then she puts her ear to my chest and says quietly, "I love my husband and I think he loves me, but he plays me like a toy. Who knows what he does when I'm not there? I don't know— I never know." Then she looks up, smiles, and says, "Besides, I'm on vacation too!"
She starts with kisses up and down my torso again, but stops when she sees the scar on my stomach. She gently puts her index finger on it and looks up at me. "I was shot," I explain. "I almost died."
"My Lord and my God," she whispers.
Mrs. Rousseau listens as I tell her about being tortured by the police. I also confess to having committed murder as well. When I tell her about shooting my friend Rodrigo, she listens without condemning me. Mrs. Rousseau wraps her arms around me, holds my head against her breasts, and comforts me as we sit on the mattress. It's very emotional for me— I feel that my head is about to explode. When I tell her about the nightmares, she holds my head in her hands, looks me in the eyes, and says, "You probably have post-traumatic stress, José. Rape victims and soldiers who have been to war often suffer from it. Maybe the children who have been gang members will suffer from it as well. Maybe even the police officers who tortured you will suffer from it. War does that to people, you know."
Then she confesses her own psychiatric problems. "I have anxiety and depression," she said. "They say that I have disassociative personality disorder as well. Fifty years ago, I probably would have been in and out of psychiatric hospitals my whole life. If I didn't take any medication, I might jump off a balcony or drown myself, because I have impulse disorder as well. My husband has stopped me from killing myself a few times; it hasn't been easy for him either. But we don't have to suffer, José: you can't always avoid the physical pain of life or its problems, but you can decide not to suffer emotional and spiritual anguish from it. If we suffer, mon amour, it's because we choose to suffer— because we think we deserve it. And, yes, José, I have been raped: I was passed around à la casserole at a party against my will while at university, only I was drunk at the time."
She squeezes my pau with her hand. Then she looks up at me, smiles slyly, and says in a low voice, "We don't have to suffer, José, so let's not suffer..."
We kiss again— my God, the way she kisses! She has a whole repertoire of kisses. She will gently rub my cheeks with her eyelashes— "butterflies," she calls them— or flick my nipples or my navel with her tongue— patines, she calls them. She sucks on my nipples— I even like it. Her kisses fall like rain, ranging from short, affectionate little kisses on the lips to hard, passionate ones on the mouth. She leaves little patines with her tongue up and down my torso. She knows how to kiss a child, a lover, or a friend. And once I'm inside her… Physically, we're a good fit. Some women are too deep or too shallow, you know, but we fit together just right. If we were animals, I would say that we were either horses or deer, or maybe zebras. I want to spend the rest of the day with her, maybe even the rest of my life, because I am in love with her.
When we are finished, I hold Chantal in my arms in the spoon position and plant a little kiss on the back of her long, elegant neck, then a little patine between two of her vertebrae with my tongue. She puts my left hand on her heart and holds it there with both hands. I can still feel the beating of her heart underneath my hand to this day; it's very moving for me. But when I tell her that I love her, she replies, in a far away voice, "That may be true, José, but you could never be faithful to me for very long. You would treat me like all the others."
I respond by burying my face in her hair and kissing her neck. "I would always be faithful to you," I vow. "Always!"
I want to be alone with her on that boat to Africa. I can see myself living in a grass hut with her and lots of children. Every morning, I will slap her on the ass when she isn't looking, and then I will wrap my arms around her and say that I'm sorry. We will do all of these things, at least that's the dream. We will be happy and always in love. That's in the dream, too. I would always be faithful to her— that's not a dream. Or is that a dream too?
This is real: together, we have found true love forever for at least an hour.

Chantal's Inner Voice


You and José are both high from the cocaine and the marihuana, so you don't know what's happening at first when a large woman suddenly barges into the bedroom like a circus performer flying through a hoop covered with paper. At first, you ask yourself if the police aren't raiding the place. Then you ask yourself if she isn't José's friend or his mother. A little boy, about the same age as your son, is watching the whole thing, laughing his ass off. A woman old enough to be José's mother is there too, scowling. The rest of his family is there as well, all three of their children. You're really embarrassed about it, because both of you are naked and there are no covers on the bed.
José and his friend are really arguing— you're almost hit with a flying shoe as you get dressed. Evidently, José is defending you, though you don't understand what they're saying, for the most part. He has said something about you being uma turista. You can understand the venom, the contempt, in his woman's voice; you don't need an interpreter. You know that she's calling you a whore because the Portuguese puta means the same thing as the French putain. Then his woman starts sobbing. You feel really bad about it, because you and José have hurt her. She's a black woman, about twenty-five years old, with light skin the colour of caramel. She would freeze in the winter in Montréal, you think, because she has so little clothing, only a simple dress without sleeves and some broken-down sandals. She has a turban on her head like the baianas that you saw earlier today. Her shins and her feet are muddy, because it rains a lot this time of year, and it was raining nails only a few minutes ago. You can tell that she has lived a hard life but, if she wasn't so angry right now, her square face with the dimples in her cheeks might be pleasant to look at.
Embarrassed, José tells you that the woman lives with him; she's the mother of his children. You and José dress quickly while the woman continues to shout at him, still throwing things at him. Then she says something to him in an urgent voice. With some embarrassment, José tells you, "I can't take you back to your hotel right now, senhora, because she has to deliver a baby. I will have to drive her there first, but I don't know how long it will take."
You glare at him, and then you slap him in the face. The woman starts to laugh her ass off. Suddenly, you understand what José had meant when he said that his friend was uma parteira: she's a midwife. She delivers babies as well as does abortions, José says later. You can't help but see the irony: a wise woman and a maker of angels at the same time. But you suspect now that many midwives in the Third World do abortions on the side. Abortions are illegal in most of the Third World, but many women there still have them. Lots of women in the favelas have had abortions, José says.
All of a sudden, you offer to help José's friend. He can't believe it! He's embarrassed. He's astonished that you would volunteer to help like that, but he translates for you. The woman looks surprised as well, then sceptical. She doesn't say anything at first, but you tell her through José, "I don't doubt your ability, senhora, but I would want some help if someone offered it. I'm a nurse— I deliver babies."
Then you promise to do whatever she tells you, saying, "You're the doctor, senhora."
She accepts your help reluctantly. Then she introduces herself. "Chamo-me Lourdes," she says.
You introduce yourself as well, in Portuguese, but she's already rushing out the door to José's car.
Throughout this entire episode, Lourdes' mother has said nothing, scowling the whole time. You can tell that José and his mother-in-law don't like each other very much, but Lourdes leaves her children with their grandmother. They're cute, you think, but they don't say very much in your presence; apparently, they're shy with strangers. The littlest one, a daughter about two years old, is so adorable that you almost want to kidnap her and take her back to Canada.
You will have to explain to your husband how you were in a shantytown in Rio, helping a midwife deliver a baby while you were high. What can you say— that you were with your lover, the taxi driver, beforehand? Yes, you had gone shopping, but how do you meet a midwife in one of the worst neighbourhoods in Rio de Janeiro? You will have to answer that question; it will take lots of explanations. You may even have to tell your husband the truth, and you really dread it.
Of course, you could ask José to drive you back to your hotel while Lourdes delivers the baby herself so that your husband might never find out, but delivering babies is part of your life as well as being a wife and a mother. Though you may be an adulteress, you're also a nurse. You don't want your husband to find out about you and José, but the way you see it, it's your mission in life to help women give birth— to help people. How could you justify yourself if you didn't do it? What if the mother and the baby died when you could have helped prevent their deaths: Do you think that you could justify yourself then? There are some things for which we are willing to suffer even eternal damnation, if necessary. But the Seventh Sacrament of the Catholic Church is to help others— to be the Good Samaritan— isn't it? You know that helping to deliver the baby is reckless, but you have to do it, even at the cost of your reputation, even at the cost of your marriage. You will help José's friend deliver the baby and suffer the consequences later. It's that simple. You will help a midwife deliver a baby in one of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and you never will be the same again.
We all need help from time to time, you know.

Chantal

José parks at the bottom of a steep hill, and then we all follow little Vladimir, the expectant mother's son, up to the little shack where they live. Vladimir, who is about six years old, is cross-eyed; his left eye crosses towards his nose. My daughter had the same problem, but she had corrective surgery. Though it's still daylight, José has hired some kids to watch the car so that it isn't vandalized or stolen, because he has to stand by and interpret for me and Lourdes. However, he goes outside from time to time to smoke a cigarette and check on the kids watching his car, to make sure that they haven't abandoned his car. Some of the people here seem to be afraid of him.
One who lives in a country like Canada can never be prepared for what I have seen here. I feel really out of place, all alone and frightened. You can hear the sounds of people arguing and fighting, people shouting their threats; you can hear gunshots. The street children are threatening to me, because they aren't like school children in Canada. José says that the children outside all speak their own language; you couldn't understand them even if you spoke Portuguese. Some of these kids are involved in adult crimes; some are even hired assassins. I'm sure now that José was one of those kids at one time, but I doubt that you could have a normal childhood in a place like this. I hate guns, but I'm glad that José has a gun now, because the kids outside all have guns. Lourdes has only a knife to cut the umbilical cord. Me, I have nothing but a handbag with my passport, my visa, and a major credit card, but little else.
Vladimir, the little boy, leads us through a maze of shacks and clotheslines, alleys and walls covered with graffiti from gangs to mark their territory. The shacks are built in a haphazard manner of whatever materials are on hand: pieces of plywood for the walls, and aluminium or sheet metal for the roofs. The shacks are on the inclines of steep hills on stilts, the entrances facing in all directions: north, south, east, and west. There are little plazas here and there where gangs of children gather and smoke marihuana or inhale ethanol from plastic bags. People sell drugs out in the open. Prostitutes, some of them very young, boldly offer themselves from doorways and from windows. The girls are everywhere: in the little plazas and in the dirt alleys, or on the dirt roads. All kinds of animals wander about: dogs, cats, chickens, pigs. There are agoutis everywhere— rodents the size of rabbits or cats. People eat them here, according to José; their flesh is considered a delicacy. There is an odour of urine and excrement everywhere, particularly after it rains. The incessant beat of the samba is everywhere, with batteries of drummers and loud music from radios, because everybody is getting ready for Carnival.
Outside the expectant mother's house, a pig puts his head through a gaping hole in the wall of the shack next door. He has a smile on his face, it seems. All he needs is sunglasses. The pig only makes this place seem even more bizarre— surreal. I take a picture of the pig with my cell phone, but if I painted him myself, you might think I was a cheap imitator of Salvador Dali. Pregnant women in the favelas like to chew on pig fat, Lourdes later says through José. It's probably for the salt.
The expectant mother lives in a little wooden shack on stilts with a metal roof and without hydro, water, or gas. You have to approach the entrance of her shack through a rotting wooden stairway. There are three small children— two boys and a girl— bathing in an old rusty washtub on the porch. Then I get a big sliver in my heel from one of the steps going up to the shack, and I have to sit down on one of the steps to remove it. (I have no shoes because, if you recall, I broke the heel of one of my sandals when climbing the stairs to José's apartments.) Somebody actually offers me an old pair of black sandals that look like they were made from a rubber tyre. I'm reluctant to take them, but I don't want to insult the family by refusing them either, so I accept the sandals with gratitude. They aren't very comfortable, but I accept them as if somebody had given me a pair of the finest shoes from Saks Fifth Avenue.
When you enter the shack, you are immediately overcome by the stench— I am soon nauseous. The people here smell putrid, though there are a couple of children taking a bath outside in the washtub, with towels over the rails for privacy. There's just one apartment: no bedrooms, no toilet, no kitchen. Everybody sleeps around a fire in the middle of the hut, which has a hole in the roof. Inside, there's no door, only a few furnishings: no beds, no tables, no sofas, no armchairs. Just a few crude benches, some stools, and a footstool. There's a cradle for the baby about to be born. The cradle is about ten centimetres high, like a doll's cradle that my father had made for me when I was a little girl. There are several unpacked boxes of clothes and dishes up against the walls, because the people who live here have nowhere else to put them. Boxes of foodstuffs are hung from the ceiling in wicker baskets, probably to keep them away from the rodents. The woman and her neighbours live on what was once a garbage dump. The city of Rio used to dump its garbage here, according to José. There's trash everywhere; people dig through it to find something to sell, or to use themselves. The people here get their fuel from digging through garbage. Their water comes from a communal tap. One tap serves thousands of people, I am told, since the people here don't have running water in their homes.
Against the wall to the right of the entrance is a little altar with several votive candles that have been lit. I remember that altar today as if it's still right in front of me; I even dream of it from time to time. It's always beautiful, with the candles always lit, but it looks occultic to me now. At the centre of the altar is a picture of Jesus with a face sweet and kind. To the right of Jesus is a white plastic figurine of Our Lady with open arms, probably made in China. To the left is an icon of a saint that José identifies as Oxósso or St. Sebastian, the patron saint of Rio. The religion that these people practise is probably some combination of Christianity and voodoo rather than the Catholicism that I learned as a child. But it's a beautiful little altar, with a certain dignity: I am moved by its simple piety. Lourdes kneels down to say a little prayer and so do I— I get dirt on my knees.
While Lourdes and I deliver the baby, José stands by as interpreter. You'd think that the expectant mother, Rosa, would be uncomfortable with José there, but she doesn't seem to care. Rosa is in the middle of labour under the most difficult conditions, I am about to find out. She has been lying in a fœtal position on top of some old blankets. She will give birth in this position, gradually rolling on her stomach in order to push out the baby. But this is how they do it in many countries of the Third World, particularly in Africa. Maybe they do it this way because the baby is often dead before it's born, I don't know. As an obstetric nurse, I have never seen a baby born in this manner until now.
The conditions here are very primitive, unsanitary. The mother is in danger of infection because of our surroundings. You can't wash your hands because there's no water. So I ask Vladimir to go get some water from the tap. Lourdes looks at me inscrutably, though she must know that doctors and nurses wash their hands. I'm worried about sanitation, because if Rosa contracted sepsis, she could face a slow and agonizing death unless we got her to hospital right away. But how could we get her there? We're far from a hospital, and we would have to fight the evening traffic in José's car to get her there. (People in the favelas have to commute a long way to get to work. The jobs are in the southern suburbs of the city, what the people there call the "South Zone," while the favelas are in the "North Zone," farthest away from the beach.)
When little Vladimir comes back with the water, we put it over the fire to boil it. We have no sheets either, clean or dirty; Rosa is lying on some blankets. But Lourdes has some string to tie off the umbilical cord before she cuts it. Night is falling, and we will eventually need the candles that Lourdes has inside her bag for lighting, as well as the candles on the altar. Even in the daylight, the lighting is always bad, though there's an open window facing the west to catch the sun briefly at dusk. Rosa has probably been in second-stage labour since the afternoon; her water had already broken when we arrived.
Lourdes is an expert, like a good obstetrician. She knows what to do; I only have to obey her. However, I don't know what we would do if there were any serious complications, like a breach birth. In a breach birth, Lourdes would have to put her arm inside Rosa's uterus to turn the baby around, like farmers do with calves, so that it came out head first like it's supposed to. As I see it, there's no other way. But it's a complicated manœuvre, because the uterus is pushing hard to expel the baby at the same time. The contractions could actually break the baby's neck and cause the mother to hemorrhage. In hospital, the doctor would just do a caesarean, but we're far away from a hospital. If Rosa needed a caesarean, does Lourdes know how to perform one without killing the mother and child? Without a doubt, the caesarian would kill Rosa, because we don't have anæsthesia with which to do one. Lourdes tells me afterwards that she has done several caesareans, but always after the mother was dead, in order to save the baby. The infant mortality rate and maternal mortality rate are very high here. Lourdes says that she has lost the mother or the child, sometimes both, several times. "Too many times to count," she says without emotion.
After dusk, the air is so hot, so sultry, that I have trouble breathing at first, like I'm suffering an asthma attack. I'm about to panic, but Lourdes needs me: I can't be a burden to her now that she's trying to deliver a baby. So I calm down and start to breathe more slowly. Instead of fighting the sultriness, I surrender to it: I let the heat and the humidity push the air out of my lungs at their own pace. In the end, I can breathe fine— I forget about it after a while. I don't think Lourdes ever notices my distress. At one point, I hold Rosa's hand and tell her in English, "Don't worry, senhora, it's going to be okay."
Having never participated in a live birth in a shack in Brazil, I'm a little nervous. I'm trying to reassure myself as well as Rosa, I think, but Rosa doesn't seem very worried. In fact, she seems bored most of the time, except when she has contractions; then she's in a lot of pain. There are always three or four children hanging about her dwelling, so it's evident that Rosa isn't a new mother. There's no man anywhere, except José. Still, I ask her from time to time, looking for signs of distress, "Tudo bem, senhora? Is everything all right?"
Rosa always nods her head and replies, "Tudo bem." But she lets out a loud wail from time to time, during a contraction. Gradually, she shifts her body to a prone position as she tries to expel the baby. It's a long and difficult process for the mother— several hours. Eventually, Rosa stops wailing and cursing during the contractions. She's resigned to the pain, though it isn't any less painful. You just realize that there's no way out of this, except the birth of the child— or death. Lourdes and I have no idea how long it will take to deliver the baby, because no one here has a watch or a clock; time is meaningless here. My cell phone has a clock, but I have to shut it off because the battery is weak.
Finally, Lourdes gives Rosa an injection of oxytocin to speed up the delivery and slow postpartum bleeding. The baby's head begins to appear only after dark. Then the baby shoots its way through the birth canal like a rocket as Lourdes catches it. The moment that Rosa hears the baby crying on its own, you can see her face light up with joy. Then Lourdes cuts the umbilical cord, cleans off the baby, and hands it to Rosa, who starts feeding it. The baby is a son.
It's true what the Bible says: women forget the pain of childbirth right after the baby is born, though they might remember it later in bits and pieces. Must be the endorphins. Given the horrible conditions, the family's poverty, and the sense of danger in the air outside because of people firing their guns, delivering this baby is relatively easy for the midwife and me. There are few complications— a routine birth, it seems. However, there are no routine births if you're the mother, except in comparison to previous ones. This birth will haunt me, for several reasons. It is one that I will always remember.
After the baby is born, I'm not sure if either the mother or the child will survive. But I check for vital signs— heartbeat, pulse rate, and respirations— with the stethoscope that I have in my bag. I palpate the baby's abdomen as well. The baby's colour looks normal and the pupils react normally to light; all vital signs are normal. The mother and the child seem fine. Since the lighting is poor, however, you can't check easily for signs of infection to the ears, nose, and throat. The only light that we have is by candle, the votive candles on the altar and the tapers from Lourdes' bag. The baby is small, possibly a little premature. His cry is somewhat weak, but when Lourdes cuts the umbilical cord, the mother and the child seem to be doing well.
You can only hope, and, of course, you want them to survive very much, but it seems that everything is against them, whether or not they survive. A shantytown is no place to raise a child. What kind of life could he expect in a shantytown here in Rio?
I want to adopt this baby, if it's possible— if his mother will give him up.

Chantal's Inner Voice

You insist that José drive Rosa and her baby to a clinic, just to be safe. When you arrive at the clinic, the sun has only just started to appear over the horizon. There's already a long queue of people waiting to see the doctor, though the clinic hasn't even opened yet. You would prefer a hospital, but Rosa only will go to a clinic. Lots of people are afraid of hospitals, because they think that people only go there to die. You call your husband on your cell phone again to tell him what has happened. He's furious, because he has been trying to get a hold of you, but to no avail, because you turned off your cell phone. "We're going to be here a long time," you tell him. "The queue is really long."
You wait several hours before it's your turn to see the doctor. You even sleep for a while once you sit down in some chairs. When you wake up, you lift your head from José's shoulder to see that he's having a bad dream. He wakes up with a start, unaware of where he is, and you say to him in a low voice, "Shhh, it's okay, I'm here."
You put your arm around his neck and your ear to his heart. His heart is racing at all speed, but he calms down, puts his arm around your shoulder, and falls back asleep. You now remember the look in his eyes when you first met him, how faraway it was. This time, there's a look of terror on his face. Lourdes wakes you up when the receptionist calls and she gives you a dirty look. Then you understand why: you and José had your arms around each other while you both were asleep. You tell the receptionist beforehand that you can pay on your credit card, if necessary, but the receptionist says, "That's okay, senhora. The government will pay."
Brazil has national health insurance like Canada, but there's a severe shortage of doctors, nurses and health professionals, particularly in the rural areas. In isolated regions like the rain forest, people even have to be evacuated by helicopter in cases of severe illness. The facilities at this clinic are very primitive in comparison to what you have seen in Canada. The equipment is old, and they are short on supplies. Only the most serious cases are treated with drugs. You wonder now if they don't reuse their syringes. Built probably in the 1960s or 1970s, when this area still was part of the countryside, the clinic doesn't have ultrasound or amniocentesis, for example, though the staff can do x-rays. However, the clinic is clean and the staff seems competent, given what they have. As well, the walls have recently been painted white— you can still smell the paint. But there are lots of patients at this clinic and only one doctor, one nurse, and the receptionist. The doctor examines Rosa and the baby and concludes that they're well enough to go home; he only stitches her up and prescribes an antibiotic, which you can buy at the pharmacy at the clinic. Lourdes had used oxytocin and warm compresses to slow the bleeding after the baby was born.
Through José, Lourdes thanks you; she tells you that you have done well. José takes Rosa and her baby home and drops off Lourdes there. You are amazed that Rosa can even walk after having just given birth. You don't usually smoke, but you and Lourdes share a cigarette inJosé's taxi to help relax. You also drink a bottle or two of warm Brazilian beer at Rosa's before José takes you back to your hotel. Though Lourdes had caught you with her man in flagrante dilecto, she isn't very hostile in the end. Before departing with José, you and Lourdes hug and kiss each other on both cheeks. "Adeus, senhora," she says warmly. You say tchau in return.
You arrive at your hotel late in the morning, more than twenty-four hours after you and José met at the beach. He helps you bring your packages up to your hotel suite. Then you remove your gold pendant, the one with the fleur-de-lis, and give it to him; he puts it around his neck and kisses you. Before he leaves, you kiss him one last time outside your suite. Your back against the wall. You touch the tip of his nose with the tip of your tongue, like you did at the beach, and say to him in a low voice, "Adieu, mon amour, adieu."
You had thought that a lover could never be of importance to you if you had met him only one or two times and never saw him again. You were wrong— you were naïve. That afternoon with José had so much meaning for you; the times that you were together, he was all the world to you, though you might not love him like your husband. It's just that you clicked. You were comfortable with each other, like you could say anything about yourselves. José might make a good priest, you think, except that the vow of chastity would probably be a problem for him. As well, you understand why there are problems between him and Lourdes: he has a bad case of wandering hands. However, the times with José were fantastic— épouvantable. Those times were some of the best sex of your life, and you will always remember him. As well, you will remember the samba music— it's everywhere in Rio, from the first of September until Carnival. You loved being surrounded by the music.
What you will really remember, however, is the poverty that you have seen in the favela, as well as the woman and child with AIDS in the centre-ville. You don't forget something like that. Delivering Rosa's baby and seeing the conditions under which the people live there has changed you. Somebody once said that life was a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. But you have seen and experienced tragedy, not just felt it. If one were the chorus of a Greek play, and had but one line, it might be this: "The world is becoming one big favela, and civilization— what took thousands of years to build— is in danger because of it."
You're not the same. How could you be?

Robert

Chantal came back late in the morning of the next day with a rank odour that you couldn't identify; I had never smelled anything like it before in my life. Her white print dress and her knees were dirty, and the soles of her feet were black. I wondered if she hadn't been doing it en lèvrette in the mud, with her knees dirty like that. She was wearing a pair of sandals that I hadn't seen before. The sandals looked like they were made from the vulcanized rubber of an automobile tyre.
Oh, I knew right away, the way she was beaming when she came back! She had love bites on her throat! As well, it was her voice when she talked with me on her cell phone, how ill at ease she seemed the first time, how mellow she was the second time, when she said that she was at a clinic. Okay then, maybe she was really helping a midwife to deliver a baby: as an obstetric nurse, she helped doctors in hospital every day. But in the slums of Rio? How does a tourist end up in a place like that? I may be an idiot, but I'm not stupid. She wasn't just shopping!
The taxi driver helped her carry a few packages up to our suite: some clothes, some souvenirs, and some exotic fruits that I had never seen before. She explained to me what the fruits were, but I don't remember now— I wasn't listening. I remembered the taxi driver from when he picked us up at the airport, but it was impossible to tell from his blank expression if anything had happened between them; he was a bloody sphinx. Okay, she was shopping, but something wasn't right. I wanted to ask some questions then, but not in front of the taxi driver and the kids. She looked exhausted, but you could hear her singing to herself in the shower, evidently in form. She went to bed and fell asleep right away. However, she said that she only wanted to sleep a couple of hours, not all day. She later had some diarrhea. It must have been the water, or something that she ate.
After I woke her up, we had a late lunch together with the children at the hotel restaurant. I wanted to confront her then, but we were in public. Instead, I only asked, with a certain coldness in my voice, "Did you sleep well, ma chérie?"
She seemed not to have noticed the nuance in my voice, or didn't care, but only answered affirmatively. She was unfamiliar to me now, opaque. I no longer knew this woman, if I had ever known her at all.
After lunch, we all went down to the beach. The children played in the ocean while she sat down to read that damned book by Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Maybe Chantal couldn't read either, but I couldn't concentrate on my book; my research on the paper on Machado didn't seem important to me now. I really wanted to talk about it, but I was afraid that I would start shouting in front of all those people at the beach. So again I said nothing.
After we returned to our hotel, I turned the TV on high and ordered the kids to watch it. (They were watching Televisão Globo, the Brazilian channel, though the hotel had cable stations in English.) Then I pulled her into the bedroom by the arm, shut the door behind me, and ordered her to sit down. As she sat on the bed, I stood glaring at her by the door and asked, "What happened yesterday? You were gone all day."
She merely shrugged. "I was out shopping," Chantal replied. "What do you think?"
I thought she was being evasive. Clearly, she was nervous; it was her voice, her eyes. I think she knew that we would have this talk.
"What were you doing besides shopping, eh?" I asked.
"I was helping a midwife, Robert," Chantal replied as she looked up, "but I already told you that on my cell phone yesterday. We even took the mother and the baby to a clinic. Don't you remember? I called twice."
"Okay," I said, "you were shopping and you were helping a midwife. What else, Chantal?"
She shrugged her shoulders in an attempt to appear nonchalant and said, "I didn't do anything else, Robert. Delivering a baby can take a long time, you know."
I lost patience with her and shouted, "You're lying! What were you doing?"
"Why are you shouting at me?" she asked imperiously. "What am I supposed to have done, Robert? Tell me."
"I think you were unfaithful, okay?" I replied coldly. "If not, then what were you doing yesterday?"
Chantal didn't deny it but became silent. You'd think that she'd have denied it vehemently if she wasn't unfaithful. If I were accusing her unjustly, you'd think that she'd be very indignant, but she only acted guilty instead of indignant. When she didn't answer right away, I said to her, more calmly, "Look, Chantal, something isn't right. When we first talked on the phone yesterday, you were nervous. I thought that you were hiding something even then. What is it? What were you doing yesterday?"
When she repeated what she said before about going shopping and helping a midwife, I implored, my voice rising in exasperation, "Please tell me, I have the right to know! Just look at your neck!"
She stood up slowly, walked over to the mirror, and looked at her neck in the mirror. She touched her neck absent-mindedly and fidgeted with a lock of her hair for a little bit. Then she looked at me, a look of dread on her face, and confessed in a low voice, barely audible, "I was helping a midwife, Robert, and I was shopping yesterday. But I've been unfaithful to you, okay? I had sex with another man."
Then she pleaded in a louder voice, "Oh, please forgive me— please! I don't know why I did it— I don't know why! Please forgive me?"
I felt like a buck that had just been shot by a hunter. I couldn't believe it, what she had just said! Though you suspect, though you're trying to extract a confession, you're still shocked that she would confess to something like that. She tried to explain herself, but it didn't register in my mind. I think she was trying to tell me that it was one of those things— that it just happened. When it became evident that she was telling the truth, my heartbeat became faster and my throat tightened. If I had been eating, I'd have choked on my food. I was breathing heavily; my knees were trembling. I wanted to shout, I wanted to cry— I wanted to either hit or strangle her— anything! At that moment, I thought of killing her; I even made a fist. You could see that she was very frightened.
Finally, I asked, with difficulty in speaking, "Why, Chantal, why? What have I done to deserve this?"
She shouted, "You hurt me, too!" Then she started to sob and repeated her accusation, "You hurt me!"
"How did I hurt you?" I shouted. "What did I do?"
"You were unfaithful, too!" she shouted. "I saw you flirting with that girl on the beach, and you called me by someone else's name! I know you had sex with her, I know it!"
Chantal started hitting me on the arms. She didn't really hurt me because she was smaller than I was, but I tried to grab her wrists to keep her from hitting me again. However, she broke away from me. When she tried to punch me in the face, I covered myself, but she kicked me hard in the shin— that hurt! As I rubbed my shin, she shouted, "You bastard! You pedophile! And I've had your children! What's wrong with me, eh? I'm too old— you'd rather have one of your students?"
"No, no, a thousand times no," I shouted.
Then I lowered my voice because of the children in the living room. "She was nothing to me," I pleaded. "Besides, a little flirtation and adultery are not the same thing— not at all!"
"Flirtation?" she shouted. "Flirtation? 'If a man looks upon a woman with lust, he has committed adultery with her in his heart.' It's in the Bible!"
"I don't care what the Bible says," I shouted back. "No matter what the Bible says, flirtation and adultery are not the same— not at all! Besides, the devil can quote Scripture."
"I'm not the devil," she said coldly, "but I can become one."
Then she said, with a ruthless logic, "If you haven't had sex with her, it's because you haven't had the chance. I was there, the children were there, and everybody else at the beach was there— and you had pieces of pizza in your hands. But if you two had been alone together..."
She didn't finish what she was saying; she didn't think that she had to. She sat back down on the bed and folded her arms across her chest before turning away. I sat down next to her and started to touch her shoulder. Then I withdrew my hand as if I was about to touch something hot and then reconsidered. After a few moments to collect my thoughts, I said, "But we weren't alone, Chantal. If we had been alone, I wouldn't have done anything with her. I wouldn't do that to you because I love you and I thought you loved me."
I was still breathing heavily, afraid that I might have a heart attack. I was trying hard to control myself but, oh, God, I wanted to kill her! Killing her would have been sweet! Then I said to her, more calmly, "Okay then, I was wrong to have flirted with her— I'm really sorry. But you were wrong, too. You were wrong, Chantal— you've never done anything like this since we've been married. At least as far as I know."
Then Chantal turned around. Still sitting on the bed, face to face with me, she said, "Well, haven't you been unfaithful before? The opportunities are endless for you on campus, you know. How do I know what you're doing when I'm not there— how do I know?"
She buried her face in her hands and sobbed convulsively. Of course, I was shocked that she would say something like this— completely shocked. I moved away from her like she had a contagious disease. After a moment, I could only say, "What did you say?"
"Yes," she shouted, standing up again. "Your ex-wife has told me that you were quite the Don Juan when you guys were married! Though you were separated, you were doing it with me; you were still married when we met, you know! Maybe you've been unfaithful since we've been married. Maybe you even have one of your students or some secretary as your mistress. And who's Maria anyway?"
I couldn't believe it— me, accused of being unfaithful with one of my students! I shouted, my voice trembling, "When have I ever done that? When have I ever been unfaithful to you, Chantal— when? With what women have I been unfaithful to you? Who is this mistress you seem to think I have? Both times that you were pregnant, I took sabbaticals to be with you— remember?"
"You did it with Maria," she said coldly. Then she sniffled.
Oh, I was in such a rage then! And her manner was defiant. Then she shrank back as I quickly moved towards her, cowering against the wall at the head of the bed. I grabbed her by the arms and pulled her to her feet. "When have I been unfaithful to you?" I shouted again. "When?"
"You did it with Maria," she repeated, "or you did it with someone else here in Rio."
Then she spit in my face. Suddenly, I pushed her up against the wall with my right hand around her throat. I was about to push the heel of my left palm into her nose when I stopped myself. In horror, I realized what I had done and let go of her arms. If I had done it with enough force, I would have killed her instantly.
Chantal shrank back down on the bed and started to sob again. "You forgot about me," she sobbed, "and you forgot about the kids. You were only thinking about that girl on the beach! I know you had sex with her— I tasted her!"
She wept bitterly. Then suddenly, the moment of truth: she realized what she had done and cried out, "Oh, my God!"
She buried her face in her hands again and wept, this time from shame, I think. "You forgot about the children, too, Chantal," I said coldly.
She said nothing but continued to sob. I saw that she was ashamed, but why— because I had found out what she had done? Did the bitch even have a conscience, or was her shame merely from getting caught? I no longer thought that I knew this woman; she was a stranger to me now. These words from Othello were running through my mind: "Her honour is an essence that's not seen."
Yes, I thought of putting my hands around her pretty throat! But I asked a question of a more practical nature: "Did you use any protection, Chantal— any condoms?"
My voice was full of dread— even I could detect it. She shook her head and sniffled. "I didn't think anything would happen," she replied in a low voice. "Really, I only wanted to go shopping, that's it. Oh, please forgive me! I'm sorry— really sorry! I love you and I'm sorry!"
She was crying again. Then she stopped crying, hesitated a moment, and said quietly, "I could be pregnant, you know, though I can't know for sure right now. It's too soon to tell."
"Then you'll have the abortion," I insisted. "It's that simple. Or I'll throw you out on the street like the whore you are!"
I knew very well how Chantal felt about abortion— that it was wrong— but the way I saw it right now, I'd have done the abortion myself if necessary. I didn't give a damn about her Catholic upbringing anymore— the Church be damned! These words from Othello were also running through my mind: "First to be hanged and then to confess— I tremble at it!"
Yes, my knees felt weak, and I was trembling. I wanted to kill her so much! Although I already suspected who her lover was, I wanted to know for sure who to murder in case I ever saw him again. So I asked, "Your lover, who is he?"
"The taxi driver..."
At that moment, Avril opened the door timorously and stuck her head into the room. "You guys, me and Patrick are hungry," she complained. "We haven't eaten supper."

*****

We ate lunch in silence in the hotel restaurant, the whole family. Then we went down to the beach. This time, anger came over me in a torrent— I was barely in control of myself. While the children swam in the ocean, I asked her, with great malice, "Was it good, Chantal?"
She didn't seem to hear, so I asked again, a little louder, "Was it good with him?"
I was seething inside, about to explode. I saw the shame in her face and smiled at her discomfort. She was not at ease— oh, no, not at all!— and I enjoyed her discomfort. She blushed, her eyes cast down. Then she replied evenly, while avoiding my eyes, "I prefer not to answer that question, okay?"
"Well, you will answer it," I insisted. "You will answer it! Was the sex good, Chantal— was it?"
Oh, I was really angry! I wanted to shout— maybe I was already shouting— but I stopped myself. I asked once more, quietly, "Was it good, Chantal? Was it worth possibly destroying our marriage— our entire family?"
She glared at me a few seconds with an air of defiance, then replied with quiet rage, her voice trembling, "Yes, Robert, it was good— fantastic! I came several times— several times! We even woke up some of the neighbours. Otherwise, I have not enjoyed this vacation, except with the kids. Now please leave me alone!"
She started to read again. I thought then that she was like a tigress that had just acquired the taste for human flesh— certain, entirely certain, that she would do it again if given the opportunity. Yes, I wanted to kill her. I thought that I ought to kill her, that it was my right. But I calmed down after a few moments and merely said quietly, "I hope you're satisfied, Chantal. You've really hurt me. I hope you're satisfied, because I never wanted to hurt you like that."
She looked at me in anger, her nostrils flaring like those of a wild mare, but she stopped herself from saying whatever it was that she wanted to say. It seemed then that she didn't want to fight about it anymore, that she wanted to make peace. She calmed down and said in a low voice, "I'm sorry, Robert. I didn't want to tell you because I don't want to hurt you either, but you wouldn't leave me alone. I'm flighty sometimes, impulsive— I was in over my head. A thousand times, I'm really sorry— I didn't want to hurt you, either."
"That's no excuse," I replied. "Not all flighty people are unfaithful to their spouses, Chantal."
"Well, haven't you been unfaithful, too?" she asked, all indignant. "I saw you flirting with her, and I tasted her on you!"
"It was salt from the sea," I lied. "I went swimming."
She smiled ironically and said, "You don't like to swim, Robert— you're afraid of the water."
"I've jumped into the water a few times," I replied evasively.
Of course, I was lying about the salt from the sea, but I did it out of weakness while she did it out of spite, as I saw it.
Chantal looked down, blushing again. I thought that she wanted to cry, but instead she looked up at me and said in a low voice, "Please forgive me, Robert. I was wrong, okay? I won't do it again— ever!"
She excused herself, stood up, and practically ran back to our hotel; she was having diarrhea. She ended up having to see a doctor because she had dysentery or something. She must have eaten or drunk something when she was with her lover.
I let her go, because I was ready to let her walk out of my life forever, if that was what she wanted. I would have deserved it.
It wasn't the salt from the sea that she tasted— she knew that. Chantal wasn't stupid.


Chantal's Inner Voice

The kids don't know what has happened between you and your lover, only that their father is angry at you. But you think that you have to protect your son when his father chases him from the living room into the master bedroom. You don't remember now why your husband was so angry at your son, but you throw your arms around the little boy, who's all frightened, and hold him close. Your daughter, who has seen everything, is terrified as well. "No, Papa, no!" she cries.
"He hasn't done anything," you shout. "If you're mad at me, yell at me, but don't take it out on him!"
Your husband just glares at you, a look of hatred on his face, while you hold your son close to you, frantically kissing the boy several times on the face. You're sure that your husband wants to kill you, but you're even more afraid that he wants to hurt your son. You don't understand why he hates his own son so much right now. Maybe he suspects that Patrick isn't even his son— who knows?— since Patrick looks like you, not him.
Your husband looks like he wants to cry. With your right arm still around your son, you hold out your left hand to your husband and tell him again that you're sorry, but he just walks away. A few minutes later, you follow him into the little living room of your hotel suite, where he's sitting on the sofa. You kneel down in front of him, wrap your arms around his legs, and rest your cheek on his knees. "I'm sorry," you murmur, "but please don't hurt him. He's your son and he loves you."
Your husband calms down, but he doesn't respond to your touch. Tired from his outburst, he asks you please to leave him alone, so you stand up. But you tell him that you love him before you leave the room.
"I love you too," he says slowly, "but I need to be alone right now."
"Do you mean it?" you ask. "Do you really love me, or are you only saying it out of habit?"
He doesn't answer. Maybe he can't answer, but as you knelt before him with your arms around his knees, weeping, maybe he thought of Jesus and Mary Magdalene together in the Garden of Gethsemane. He feels certain that Mary was Jesus' wife, married to him when they both were young. Now he asks himself if Mary was ever unfaithful to Jesus. He asks himself if she wasn't weeping out of shame for what she had done to him as she washed his feet. And was Jesus ever unfaithful to her, for example, with the Samaritan woman by the well? Your husband can ask these questions because he's agnostic, but even he has his Jesus— we all have our own Jesus. Maybe his Jesus was a cuckold who brought his wife's infidelities upon himself by being unfaithful. Yes, Jesus was wise, your husband concedes, but maybe it was wisdom from experience. But your husband has a greater sense of pathos for Jesus now: he can empathize better with the man on the cross. Maybe he even loves him more than he did before.
Your Jesus, on the other hand, is O Redentor on Corcovado, the one with his arms spread out to embrace the world. Your Mary Magdalene also has her arms wrapped around Jesus' legs, weeping, bathing his legs with her tears. She would do anything for him. She followed him all over the Galilee, didn't she?
"I love you," you murmur, "I love you..."
But your husband doesn't understand— how could he? He only understands that you had your arms around another man, that you may even be carrying another man's child.

Chantal

I haven't slept much. I'm having white nights again. I fall asleep almost at dawn and wake up early in the morning feeling exhausted. So I get up and brush my teeth. When I see myself in the mirror, I look terrible. "I need sleep," I moan.
I take a chair and a book and go down to the beach with the children. I see José standing up against his car at the edge of the beach. Maybe he's waiting for someone? We wave to each other. Then I strip down to my swimsuit and rub suntan oil on the children and myself before the children run down to the ocean. Then I watch him approach me. When we are face to face, he takes my hands, smiles, and says, "Tudo bem, senhora?"
I force myself to smile and say quietly in return, "Good morning, José."
I put my arms around his neck and kiss him on both cheeks. We hold each other close for a while. Then he asks, still smiling, "Would senhora like to go shopping today?"
"He knows all about us," I reply, looking down. "I had to tell him."
When I warn José that my husband knows who he is, his smile disappears. But he seems more concerned about me than about himself. "That's a pity, senhora," he says with feeling. "What did he do— has he hurt you?"
I don't want to show my feelings, because I prefer to suffer in private. But there's no pain without an audience, as my husband has said. I shrug my shoulders in an attempt to appear nonchalant, so that José won't think that I'm worried. "He shouted," I reply, "and I shouted, but he didn't hurt me."
"Take off your sunglasses," he orders brusquely.
There's a certain resolve in his voice. I'm a little afraid of him now, but I take off my sunglasses. I let him inspect my face, looking for signs that I have been hit. I don't know why, but I shut my eyes tightly, like he's about to strike me. When José indicates that he's satisfied, I put on my sunglasses again. "I would have killed him if he had hurt you," he says quietly.
I believe him— that's why I'm terrified now. The way he says it, he could be going to the dépanneur for a pack of cigarettes; killing my husband would be no problem for him. I can see him killing someone now— he has a gun in his car, you know.
Then I remember the mother and the baby. Because I would rather talk about something else, no matter what, I ask him, "The mother and the baby, are they doing well?"
He doesn't answer right away. Then he replies quietly, "I think the mother's doing okay, senhora, but the baby has died. It's unfortunate, but it happens sometimes."
I don't believe it! After a few moments, I ask, still stunned, "Good God, what happened, José? They were fine when we left them— what happened?"
I ask him some questions to try to understand better how the baby died, but he can't tell me anything. He merely shrugs, more agitated now, and replies, "I don't know anything, senhora, I wasn't there. Lourdes saw the woman again, not me."
I put my hands to my face and start to cry. "I lied to that woman," I sob. "I told her everything was going to be okay!"
This has never happened to me before, perhaps because I have only been a full-time nurse a short time. Except for one baby, all of the babies that I have helped to deliver in hospital have survived. The one exception, a woman from Haiti gave birth to an anencephalic baby. I didn't cry then, because the baby had no chance; he was already dead because he had no brain. The doctor just did a caesarean, that's it. But the one that I helped the midwife to deliver would have survived with decent medical care— I believe that. That baby's death could have been prevented, and I'm still outraged about it!
When I was pregnant with my son, there was the problem of Rhesus incompatibility, because my blood type is O negative while my husband's is O positive. I was given injections of Rhogam, since Patrick was my second child. Without the Rhogam, the Rhesus antibodies in my blood would have attacked the Rhesus antigens in Patrick's blood, killing him or causing him severe mental retardation. Although I don't know for certain, the baby that Lourdes and I delivered could have died from erythroblastosis fœtalis, fœtal anemia due to Rhesus incompatibility. Symptoms of this condition include an unusually high-pitched wail, jaundice, bruise-like rashes called petechiae, and swelling of the organs.
I'm not a doctor, that's true, but I saw none of these symptoms when I examined the baby. With a stethoscope and a thermometer, I checked vital signs: pulse, heartbeat, respirations, temperature, and level of consciousness. I tapped his liver for signs that it was enlarged, another symptom of erythroblastosis fœtalis. I can't tell for sure if the baby has jaundice because the only light in the shack is provided by the midwife's candles and by the votive candles on the altar, but I see no other symptoms. His cry sounds normal, though he's a little smaller than normal; low birth weight is another sign of erythroblastosis fœtalis. The baby might have developed complications later, but I rule out fœtal anemia due to Rhesus incompatibility as the cause of death.
Not being a doctor, I could be wrong. But why didn't the doctor at the clinic find anything wrong with the baby? I feel terrible thinking this about anyone without proof, but I ask myself if the baby hasn't been murdered. But who did it? It could have only been Rosa Moraes, Lourdes, José— or me. I understand why Rosa, the mother, might not want a baby: the baby is just another child for a woman in poverty to take care of. As for Lourdes, José has told me that she performed illegal abortions as well as delivered babies. But does she practise infanticide as well? I doubt it. As for José, I don't doubt that he's capable of murder, but would he murder a baby? He would have to be a monster to do something like that! But I don't see anything unusual: José and Lourdes would have had to go back to finish the job after dropping me off at my hotel. Why would they bother?
Then, when I remember the look of joy on Rosa's face after her baby was born, I realize that she wanted that baby very much, despite her poverty. I'm ashamed of myself for even thinking that she could possibly want to kill her baby. Whatever happened, therefore, I will never know— it just happened. Could be, the doctor sent Rosa and her baby home because he knew that the baby would die and could do nothing for him anyway. Maybe it was the oxytocin that Lourdes injected into Rosa that killed the baby. The oxytocin could have been fatal to Rosa as well, if she had received too much of it.
As I sob, José puts his arms around me and says soothingly, "It's a pity, senhora, but it happens here all the time. Brazil is not a rich country like Canada. There's a lot of poor people here."
"This wouldn't have happened in Canada," I cry angrily.
He suddenly grabs me forcibly by the arms and shakes me. His grip is so tight that he's hurting me. "There's nothing you could have done, Chantal— nothing!" he shouts. "You did everything you could. Nobody could blame you. You have no reason to cry!"
Then José lets go of me and runs his hand through his hair while mumbling an apology. He tries to put his arms around me again, but I excuse myself with haste because I'm afraid of him now. I have to get away from him, no matter what, because I see him now as someone who is capable of violence— he might hurt me. As I run away, José calls my name because I have forgotten my things, but I don't stop to turn around. I hurry back to my hotel, forgetting my chair, my book, even my clothes— everything. I'm wearing only my swimsuit. I stop running only when I realize that the children are still in the water.
José catches up to me and puts his arms around me from behind. In a panic, I try to break away from him, striking blindly, but he holds me tightly until I stop struggling. "I'm sorry I shouted at you," he says quietly into my ear. "I'm sorry, but there's nothing you could have done. This is Brazil, not Canada— those people can't afford a doctor."
I fall to the sand, José falling down next to me. I nod my head in agreement, and then cry in his arms. Maybe he thinks I'm just a silly tourist, but I'm not crying just because of the baby. It's everything else: the girl with my husband, being unfaithful and getting caught, the possibility that I might be pregnant, and seeing the worst poverty that I have ever seen in my life. The baby's death was just the drop that overfilled the vase. I realize now that I was trying to make amends for what I had done by helping the midwife deliver the baby. I had hoped that maybe some good might come of it if I helped Lourdes deliver that baby successfully. I thought that maybe I was even meant to be there at that moment. But I feel now as if everything that I had done was all for nothing.
I look up and see a police constable standing over us. "Is everything okay, senhora?" he politely asks in English.
I look at José, and then at the constable, and reply, "Yes, he's a friend."
The constable glares at José. He mutters something in Portuguese before he leaves us. Then I see my daughter and my son staring at José and me as well, and we stand up and knock the sand off ourselves.
When I arrive back to the hotel with the kids, I take the elevator up to our suite. Then I open the door, slam it hard, and weep bitterly. Despite the pain of childbirth, giving birth to my children had been beautiful for me, but it couldn't have been beautiful for Rosa because she lost her baby.
I am so devastated!

José

I wanted to see her one last time before she returned to Canada, so I drove down to the beach where we had met. I soon see her walking across the beach from her hotel with her children, dressed the same as before: the same straw sun hat, the same sunglasses, a white cotton blouse, and beige shorts. But her steps seem heavier. When we see each other, she waves, but something isn't right. However, I approach her as she strips to her swimsuit and sits down. She's wearing the same black bikini underneath her clothes. In Brazil, black is a colour of mourning, along with purple; people only wear those colours during Lent or when somebody has died. But the foreign tourists wear those colours all the time.
Face to face with her, I smile and greet her with: "Tudo bem, senhora?"
"Not bad, José," she replies. "How's it going?"
She kisses me on both cheeks and gives me a hug. I kiss her on the hands and lips. Then I smile and ask, "Would senhora like to go shopping? We can take the kids..."
She looks down, slowly pulls her hands back, and says quietly, "He already knows, José. I had to tell him." Then she looks up and says, "He knows who you are."
It's really a blow to me, her husband knowing. I kneel down in the sand in front of her in the sand as she sits back down in her chair. "What a pity, senhora!" I say sincerely. "What did he do— did he hurt you?"
She shrugs her shoulders listlessly. "No," she replies. "I shouted, he shouted, but he didn't hit me."
I ask her to remove her sunglasses, to prove that her husband didn't hit her. We stand up again so that I can look at her face more closely. When I'm satisfied that her husband didn't hit her, I signal to her to put the sunglasses back on. "I would have killed him if he had hurt you," I mutter.
She turns pale, but I'm serious: I would have killed anybody who hurt her. The act of possessing her had made her mine, if only briefly. I feel responsible for her safety, so I'm ready to kill him. I have my gun in the car, but I wouldn't need a gun to kill him, I don't think. I know capoeira. Though capoeira is a dance rather than a martial art, I could kick her husband in the chest or in the head with no problem. When you're ready to kill a woman's husband in a jealous rage, you realize how evil jealousy is, because Chantal wasn't really mine. But jealousy wasn't new to me: I had known men who beat their women— my father, for instance, when my parents were fighting. I was about to kill one time myself, but I have already told you about catching Cristina and Gilberto in bed together.
Chantal is chastened, full of regret. Of course, our little affair is over, but I had known that she would go back to Canada anyway. I couldn't see her abandoning her family to stay with me here in Rio, though I still have fantasies of sailing away with her on a boat to Africa or the Azores, or living in a grass hut with her and having lots of children.
Then Chantal asks, "The mother and the baby, how are they doing?"
I didn't expect that question. I shrug my shoulders, ill at ease, and reply, "The baby died, senhora. I don't know, it happens sometimes."
Lourdes had told me about the baby dying the morning after it was born. Lots of babies die in the favelas— lots of babies. I have brothers and sisters who died when they were small, friends as well. My brother was shot to death by a sicário who was trying to kill me. Death was nothing new to me, but Chantal was really dumbstruck. She asks a lot of questions at first, like a health professional, in order to understand better how the baby had died. Then she puts her hands to her face and starts to cry. "I can't believe it," she sobs, "I can't believe it!"
We stand up again and I put my arms around her, but her reaction really surprised me. In the favelas, it was only another baby that would have lived and died in poverty anyway, or grown up to be a malandro like me. She'd seen more of Brazil than any other foreign tourists that I had ever met, but she was still naïve; she didn't understand. The lives of the favelados of Rio were beyond her understanding— unreal to a middle-class woman from Montréal like her, though she obviously cared deeply. But I lose patience with her. "There's nothing you could have done, Chantal," I shout. "Nothing. You did everything you could for that baby. You have no reason to cry!"
I don't remember everything that I did or said, but I remember that I wanted to hit her because she was crying. She looks at me with a look accusing me of betrayal. I ask forgiveness immediately, but she breaks away and stalks off before I can say anything else. I take her by the arm because she has forgotten her chair, her book, and her clothes— because I want to say that I'm sorry, and that I'm not really angry with her. She just swings her fists at me and breaks away, but I run after her, seizing her by the waist from behind when I catch up to her. "Let me go," she screams in a panic, kicking and trying to hit me. "Let me go!"
She hits me in the mouth, but I hold onto her. "You did nothing wrong, Chantal," I say softly in her ear, holding her tightly in my arms from behind. "You didn't kill the baby, okay?"
"Let me go," she sobs, pleading now, but I hold her tightly until she stops struggling.
"You did nothing wrong, okay?" I repeat in a low voice. "It wasn't your fault. That baby had no chance— you saw how those people live. Please believe me: there's nothing that you could have done to save him. Babies die there all the time."
She falls to the sand, and I fall down next to her. "I know that," she sobs. "I know that..."
I put my arms around her and let her cry on my shoulder. People are staring at us now as we sit on the sand with our arms around each other, but I don't care anymore; we are on our own little island. I usually don't cry over women, because a man always can find another woman, but I'm crying, too. She's right: babies aren't supposed to die in their first days of life, not when they can be saved. She has reason to cry, because all her efforts have come to nothing. Her husband never would have found out about us if she hadn't stopped to deliver a baby. All I had to do was take her back to her hotel right after our rendezvous and nobody would have known anything.
I feel helpless again, like the time when Cristina ran off with Gilberto— like when Broadway Joe ordered me to shoot Rodrigo while Gilberto watched. I have a profound sense of despair: that God doesn't exist, that God lives neither in the favelas nor anywhere else on earth. The monastery of São Bento is just a worthless storehouse for somebody's gold— gold that could be used to feed the hungry and house the poor. I feel helpless in the face of injustice, that life itself isn't just. The world is eating its children and I can do nothing but watch. What's more, I have always thought that life was worthless anyway. That hurts worse than anything else, because I have never believed in God or the candomblé anyway.
As we cry in each other's arms, a young man approaches us. He has a ring in his nose, and he's wearing a Toronto Blue Jays cap, with his hair dyed black with bleached blond streaks underneath it. He says to Chantal, "Are you all right?"
She sniffles and replies, "Yes, everything's fine, thank you."
Then we see a police constable staring down at us. I explain to the constable as briefly as possible, in Portuguese, what happened at Rosa's, but he doesn't leave us until Chantal tells him that I'm a friend.
We kiss and hug each other, and then pick ourselves up off the sand. We say that we love each other because it seems like the thing to say. I think that she needs to hear it from me, because I feel that I love her, and that maybe she loves me too, at least for the moment. I just want to take away the pain. Then we see her two children staring at us, all frightened. I wonder how long they have been watching us. Chantal assures them that everything is all right while I help her gather her things and carry them back to the hotel. She gives me a hug one more time at the entrance to the hotel. Before we part, she says, "Please give Rosa my condolences."
I regret the harsh words now because I wasn't really angry at her but at everything else: the world and its poverty, the rich, my country, her husband, God— anyone but her. I'm astonished that a tourist would help my woman deliver a baby in one of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. I hadn't thought that some people might be different. I thought that those who had lots of money— the rich and the tourists— didn't give a damn about the poor. Chantal's act of compassion that night at Rosa's has changed me. Chantal realized that she was naïve, but I now realized that I was naïve as well. Having lived among the favelados my entire life, I hadn't thought that there were people in the world who cared, who thought that babies weren't supposed to die when they could be saved, and that poverty and crime didn't have to be the way of the world. Everybody, including the leftists, only wanted power, I thought.
After I tell Lourdes what happened at the beach, she says, "That woman is crazy, Jecu. If her husband was like your father— like any man in Brazil— he'd have killed her. You should forget about her."
I only nod my head in agreement because I know what it's like to be in a jealous rage and want to kill somebody. I am afraid that Chantal's husband might kill her because a man in Brazil will kill a woman who has been unfaithful, no matter what. I am responsible for what is happening to her, but I could only watch her walk out of my life that day. There's nothing I can do to save her now— nothing.
I feel like I lost my world at the beach that day, because I don't think I can live in Rio anymore.


Robert


I woke up in the morning to the sound of the door slamming and Chantal weeping without constraint. I was afraid that she was having a nervous breakdown, having remembered her attempts at suicide in the past; you don't forget something like that. Now she was crying about a baby. After she calmed down, she told me that the baby that she had helped to deliver had died. She found out from her lover, the taxi driver, she said, when she ran into him on the beach by chance. Or so she said: maybe they had planned another rendezvous.
I held her close against my heart and reassured her that I loved her, even though I was no longer sure at the moment that I could ever love her again after what she had done to me. The children hugged her too, Patrick, wrapping his arms around his mother's waist. At least the children loved her. I had doubted the baby's existence, thinking that it was all an elaborate hoax. What had happened was this: any good that she might have done in that shantytown had been cancelled by the death of the child, at least in her mind. What remained now was just her shame.
I can't believe she did that— I'm shocked! Suppose the taxi driver had taken her to a motel somewhere and then abandoned her: what would she have done then— call me on her cell phone to ask me to come bring her some clothes? She could have been raped and murdered, her body dumped in a garbage dump somewhere or on the beach. It happens all the time, you know. She could have HIV, the unborn child as well, if she's pregnant. Why should a child suffer a horrible death from AIDS? And if she's pregnant with another man's child, how could I suffer the indignity of that? How could I love a child that isn't even mine, especially one conceived under such circumstances? Everybody would know, because her lover wasn't even white, as far as I could tell.
What about the children? We have done things as a family, going to sugar shacks early in the spring, for example, where people drink coffee and eat doughnuts and little candies made from maple sugar. We go on camping trips every summer. A complicated divorce would only hurt the children. I know that, because my parents were divorced when I was young. I only have the memory of helping my father paint a house when I was about five years old, because my mother did everything to prevent my sister, my brother, and me from seeing him; he just gave up in the end, I think. Before he left Canada for good, my father was making hockey sticks in a factory near Sherbrooke; he promised to send me one, but I never got it. Then he had a heart attack and drowned in a few centimetres of water in the Gulf of Mexico off of Florida, a Lost Canadian in the US wilderness.
As well, I know the pain of divorce from the dissolution of my first marriage with Katrina, my love like a hurricane. Katrina once held our baby son, Alex, over a balcony and threatened to drop him if I left her. I only called her bluff and told her to go ahead and do it. I didn't leave her until later, but now she tells everybody that it was I who held our son over the balcony! Then, when Chantal was a few months pregnant, Katrina accosted her at a faculty party, all drunk and deranged; it was very upsetting for Chantal. Even with Chantal there, it was a complicated divorce. Trust me, Katrina was crazier than Chantal ever was, though Katrina eventually started seeing a psychiatrist. She's remarried now. I have but one son with Katrina, Alex. I didn't see much of Alex when he was growing up because his mother took him when she moved out to Manitoba when he was small; he's twenty-one years old now. When I last saw Alex, about a year ago, he was getting married; Chantal and I attended the wedding. I could be a grandfather now— who knows? Sometimes I wonder if the kid knows how to dial a telephone or write a letter.
I gave Chantal the best years of my life too, but what good was it? Both times that she was pregnant, I took sabbaticals to be with her, and I did it gladly. But now I have started to think of what I had missed. Oh, there have been women— I have always been able to find women! I could have found a woman among the lecturers, if not among the students; no problem. Chantal was a student when we met, you know.
So what do you do, pursue liaisons with the young and pretty university students less than half your age— me, almost fifty years old? Hey, I have already been accused of having a mistress! I won't be spiteful, but if I find somebody else, what's to stop me now? I only did it with Flora because she was available— there's always someone available. If I couldn't maintain an erection in the future, for example, wouldn't Chantal look for another lover anyway? The whore, she has had her revenge!
What's left of our marriage now? How can I forgive her after what she has done? How can I trust her? First, she was unfaithful, and then she tried to deny it. The denial hurt more than the actual infidelity, because she lied to me. I can forgive a moment of weakness easier than dishonesty. Chantal had never lied to me, or so I thought. So what do you do, now that she's sobbing so pitifully? Right now, you comfort her because she's still your wife and she needs you. I loved her once and she used to love me, so I kissed her with great tenderness, like she was something fragile. Chantal was vulnerable at the moment, breaking apart, and she wanted me to put her back together. I told her that I loved her, because, even if I didn't mean it now, I might mean it later because of what I thought we had. I loved Chantal once, you know, really loved her. A part of me still wanted to save our marriage. What I was holding in my arms was our marriage as well as my wife.
Yes, we have to think of the children, because they already have seen too much. They have lost their innocence— you can see it in their eyes. Chantal and I have to heal ourselves, both for ourselves and for the children. If we can't love each other, then we must reassure the children that we still love them, no matter what. They understand, at least intuitively, that, if their parents could stop loving each other, then maybe their parents could stop loving them.
Yes, we must think of the children.

*****


We met late in the autumn of 1989, around Remembrance Day. Chantal was sitting on the sidewalk with her friend, Alice, begging for some beer money outside the tavern at the corner of Maisonneuve Boulevard and Crescent Street. She had the face of Nefertiti. With her hair in dreadlocks, and a white Panama hat that was much too big for her head, she was cute. She was original, with a sense of the absurd, wearing white pyjamas out in the cold with nothing but a red flannel shirt over them. (She often wore her pyjamas to class, she said, particularly when taking an exam; it was for good luck.) Chantal was only twenty-one while I was thirty-three, but she was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen; it was the lightning bolt.
We introduced ourselves. Then Chantal and Alice invited me to share a joint with them out on the street. I suggested afterwards that we go inside the tavern, where I treated them to a meal. Because of the wine, a Lambrusco, Alice soon fell asleep in the corner of the booth. Chantal and I talked until the tavern closed and they kicked us out. When she said that she was studying to be a nurse, I smiled and said to her in English, "You're a sister of mercy then."
She understood the words individually, but not together in a phrase. So I explained to her that sisters of mercy were what the English called nurses, and she smiled. She had a pretty smile, I thought, with dimples in her cheeks. I kissed her lightly on the lips, because she had smiled. When I later learned that she played the piano very well, I was surprised by her choice of career. But she said, with characteristic modesty, "Helping people is more important than playing the piano. Besides, lots of people play Mozart better than I do. And lots of people donate pianos to hospitals, so I could play during lunch."
Then Chantal told me about the time that her cat had kittens underneath her bed when she was a just child. "It was effrayant," she said. "I couldn't believe it! When I realized that I started life like those kittens— as a baby— and then learned that nurses helped doctors deliver babies, I decided to be a nurse. I was about five years old, I think."
After the tavern closed, Chantal and I walked back to the apartments that she shared with Alice, who was practically walking in her sleep behind us. Chantal looked like an orphan, with just her red flannel shirt and her pyjamas underneath. When she hugged her body as she shivered in the cold, I gave her my coat, though it was much too big for her. With the oversized coat and hat, she looked like Harpo Marx. Before she entered her apartments, Chantal shyly caressed the stubble on my cheek and said, "You'd look good in a beard."
Then she placed her hat on my head and stepped back. "It looks better on you than it does on me," she said. "Please take it— I want you to have it."
Reluctantly, I accepted the Panama hat. Then she gave me a hug, and I kissed her fingers. I kissed her twice on the lips before she went inside her apartments with Alice. I started growing my beard after that.
Our first date was at the Redpath Museum a week later, where we walked around all day talking about anything while looking at the exhibits. I remember the enormous skeleton of a beluga whale hanging from the ceiling of one of the exhibit rooms, a skeleton that was three times its normal size. Then we had coffee and doughnuts at a doughnut shop on Maisonneuve Boulevard, where Chantal told me all about her aunt, Marie-Claire, who died before she was born. "She had rheumatic fever when she was four years old," Chantal related, "and never recovered. She wanted to be a nun, but she died on St. Stephen's Day, 1949 or 1950, the day after Christmas, at the age of sixteen. The whole house filled up with white smoke, and everyone ran outside, thinking there was a fire. But there was no fire. Could be, Marie-Claire was trying to communicate with us from the beyond."
Chantal looked at me with her dark brown eyes and said seriously, "She talks to me sometimes, when I look at myself in the mirror in my bedroom. She's done this since I was five years old. She was very pretty, like me. But only I can see her."
With her eyes still fixed on me, Chantal told me about her heart. "I had a heart murmur when I was a child," she said. "My parents were worried about me dying like Marie-Claire, I think, but the doctor said it was just a little bit of syncope. But I think my parents thought I was going to die of syncope. That's medical parlance for feinting spells, you know."
The night we first made love, Chantal played "Two Hearts Beat as One" by U2 on a CD player. I remember her leaning over naked to put the CD on the CD player on the floor of my apartment with a bath towel wrapped around her body. She was all wet from having taken a shower. When she stripped naked, I saw a new tattoo of a butterfly in blue, red, and yellow ink. She smiled slyly and said that she got it just for me. The sound of guitars by the Edge, U2's guitarist, swirled all around us, while the melancholic wailing of Bono, the lead singer, filled the room. Then, as we made love, with her on top of me à la femme supérieure, she closed her eyes, put her tongue to her upper lip, and cried out. It was beautiful for me, with the music from the CD player filling our ears. I came to the sound of the guitars bouncing off the walls in the background. I swear, she and Bono wailed at the same time! Then we cuddled in a spoon position afterwards, with her back to me. "You won't forget me, eh?" she asked as she sniffled.
Then Chantal put my hand to her heart, and I buried my face in her long and luxurious hair, which was without rubber bands or braids this time. I wanted to weep, I was so overcome with emotion. "I won't forget you," I replied, "I'll never forget you."
No, I wouldn't forget her. The next morning, I woke up and saw her sitting at the edge of the window, wrapped in a blanket with the sash up. She seemed to be in a reverie.
First, Chantal moved into my heart, and then into my life, leaving an article of clothing or a CD here or there in case she ever needed a reason to come back. She would cook for me a ratatouille from the contents of my Frigidaire. On weekends, she sometimes slept in my bed for twelve hours a day or more. At least once, I started to make love to her while she was still asleep. After we were done, she fell asleep again; she didn't remember it, she said. Sure, we had our disagreements, but Chantal was the one who proposed marriage. "I'd make a good wife," she said. "Besides, I don't want to be just your concubine."
At our wedding, Chantal invited over three hundred people, friends and family: aunts, uncles, and cousins, second and third cousins as well as first cousins. Alice was the maid of honour. Chantal had met some of them online, and most of them came. But she almost didn't go through with the wedding: she got angry over something, stripped down to her panties and bra in the bathroom, and sat down in the stall and cried. Her sisters, Monique and Joëlle, and Alice, the maid of honour, all tried to persuade her to get dressed again, but to no avail. Finally, it was her mother who talked her into getting dressed again. Chantal was just nervous, I think, but she was too young to get married, frankly.
For our honeymoon, we spent a weekend at the Chateau Frontenac in Québec City. We had wedding pictures taken on Dufferin Terrace overlooking the St. Lawrence River before riding the horse-driven calèche around the Basse-Ville, the lower part of the Old City. However, a condom slipped off on our wedding night; Chantal might have conceived that night. Then we spent a week on the Gaspé Peninsula, camping, hiking, and canoeing.
Around a campfire, I told the story of how St. Boniface converted the Germans after he chopped down a sacred oak without anything bad happening to him. "However," I warned, "while one tree may not make much of a difference, the consequences of chopping down whole forests could be devastating. If the little beaver can turn streams into lakes simply by cutting down a few saplings and building a few dams, think of what man can do! Once Hydro of Québec builds all those dams on the border of Labrador, who knows what will happen?"
But an evangelical Christian couple from New Brunswick didn't agree. I got into a debate with them about global warming; they said that global warming was merely divine retribution because of the gays and lesbians in Montréal. The gist of their argument was that the climate would be more amenable for man if he would only obey God's laws. But Chantal only said, "We have looked at the earth as a mother who takes care of us, no matter what we do, when maybe we should look at her as an elderly parent in a nursing home in need of our care."
I realized then that she was pregnant.
Then, outside our tents, we saw lights flashing in the sky to the north— the Aurora Borealis. We forgot our debate completely as the sky lit up in all the colours of the spectrum: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, from ultraviolet to infrared. If you haven't seen the Northern Lights at least once in your life, there's no way that I could describe them to you; you have to be there. It's enough to say that it was incredible, this dazzling display of lights in the heavens, with streaks like lightning or streamers like flares from a flare gun. If you came back here ten or eleven years later, you would see it again, but you would be no less baffled and no less awed than the previous time. Our friends, the evangelists, said that these lights were some of the "signs in the sky" mentioned in the Bible, but these lights posed only a riddle, not a message, they way I saw it. All the science that we have at our disposal, all the talk of "signs in the sky," could not possibly explain away this mystery. There are some things that we just don't understand. Above all, we do not understand God.
After the birth of our daughter, Avril, Chantal had severe postpartum depression. She complained of being fat. She lost most of the weight, but there were some outfits that she could never wear again, like a sexy black miniskirt that she had, and she got rid of them. The baby cried both night and day because of colic. Then Chantal tried to throw herself off the balcony of our apartments during a heated discussion shortly after Avril was born, but I wrestled her to the floor. It was then that I realized that she had severe psychiatric problems. She admitted afterwards to having been suicidal in the past. For example, she had tried to drown herself at the age of ten by jumping off a dock at the lake after a childhood friend had drowned. "I don't know," she said, shrugging her shoulders. "I'm sad sometimes."
Childbirth involves a profound disturbance of female hormones in the mother, but that disturbance seemed to have corrected itself with the bonding between mother and child. After our son, Patrick, was born, Chantal slept in a rocking chair in his room, waking when he woke up and sleeping when he slept. Avril and I usually saw her only when she was with the baby. She often slept eighteen hours a day, though not all at once. Until Patrick was about three months old, she only left him to go to the bathroom, take a shower, or cook herself something to eat when he slept. Then I took over for a while. Perhaps Chantal wanted Patrick always to be a baby, but the world intrudes. Chantal was happy, sitting in the rocking chair with the baby in her arms: there was no depression that time. In time, after about three months, Patrick started sleeping more normally. In the end, Chantal returned to the bed that she shared with me. They say that women are most fertile shortly after having given birth, but she didn't get pregnant.
Chantal could be lots of fun. We went to sugar shacks together with the kids at the beginning of spring, drinking coffee or hot cocoa and eating candies made from maple sugar. Every winter, at Mid-Lent, we went door to door in costume. On one occasion, with her dressed as Marie-Antoinette and me as Louis XVI, she took a drink from the hand of the startled homeowner, pretended to sip it, and then passed it on to Avril, Marie-Antoinette's "daughter," who also pretended to take a sip.
"What do you think?" Chantal asked.
"Needs more scotch," Avril replied, as she passed it on to Patrick, Marie-Antoinette's "son," who also pretended to sip it.
"Yep, needs more scotch!" Patrick concurred.
Seeing where this farce was headed, I, dressed as Louis XVI, took the drink from my son, finished it in one gulp, and said to the startled homeowner, shrugging my shoulders, "I think they're right, monsieur: it needed more scotch. May I have another?"
The homeowner took Chantal's playful insults and everything else well because they were all in fun; he even gave me another scotch and water. But Chantal could be erratic: she would slide down the bannister like Mary Poppins, or she would start a food fight with the kids during supper. She bought enormous bags of popcorn from the cinema in the afternoon, and then she and the kids would run around the house throwing popcorn at each other. The kids thought that she was a lot of fun, I'm sure, but I thought that she was setting a terrible example; I didn't want to raise feral children. But sometimes, you have to make compromises: no sliding down bannisters or food fights during supper, but popcorn fights were okay, if everybody cleaned up afterwards. In the end, I even joined their popcorn fights.
I thought that Chantal and I had a good marriage, sometimes heavenly, when the times were good. When things were bad, however, they were really bad. Like when she ran out of medication. I swear, there were times when she looked like Medusa the Gorgon! She sometimes kept a bottle of rum underneath the kitchen sink. She insisted it was for Avril, who was about two years old at the time. "You put a little bit in her milk," she said, "and it knocks her right out."
I swear, I wasn't sure if she was serious or not!
Things improved over the years, after the kids were in school and she started to work. Then my mother was stricken with cancer, and her father died suddenly of cardiac arrest while my mother was still dying. My sister and I were able to prepare for our mother's death, but Chantal hadn't expected her father to die so suddenly, because he seemed healthy, running two or three kilometres a day. Chantal and I almost separated because she thought that I wasn't supportive. I admit now that I could have been more supportive, but I had thrown myself into my translations of Rilke as a way of dealing with my own grief over my mother's death. Chantal was still in mourning when we went to Rio, I think.
We were trying to save our marriage when we went to Rio, but we forgot why we were there. For me, the girls in their tan string bikinis were a distraction. The taxi driver was a distraction for her as well, apparently. Of more importance, we forgot why we were married; we forgot that we had loved each other once. I had forgotten that the adulterous wife was the same person as the charming girl with the dreadlocks and the Panama hat, wearing pyjamas outside on a cold night in the autumn.
She still had the dog, and she knew it.


Chantal's Inner Voice


It's a New Year's Eve tradition in Rio to party at the beach of Copacabana until the sun rises. New Year's Day is the Feast of the Blessed Virgin in the Catholic Church, but also one of the feast days of the Yoruban ocean goddess, Yemanjá, whose cult came to Brazil from Africa with the slaves. Like the Virgin Mary, Yemanjá is dressed in a white gown with a turquoise border; that's why you see black women in Brazil dressed in long white gowns and white turbans. Everybody is dressed in white on New Year's Day. The revellers always meet at Copacabana, because you can see the sunrise perfectly from there. Ipanema, to the west, is better for watching the sunset.
You and your husband take the kids down to the beach because you and the kids want to bring in the New Year Brazilian-style. The revellers are outside the hotels early, singing and dancing the samba around campfires, drinking champagne and Brazilian beer; they're having a good time. There will be a fireworks display and loud music. The whole city is preparing for Carnival, which is less than two months away. You can already hear the samba everywhere: on the radio and in the streets. Women are sewing elaborate fantasias, and people are rehearsing complicated dance routines. There are boys doing capoeira to a battery of drums. They look like Tutsi dancers in Rwanda that you might see in magazines or on public television, or South African gold miners doing their tribal dances. These boys are mostly black, though a white boy might try to show what he can do. Some of them seem to be rapping.
Carnival in Rio has become known for its orgiastic fervor, in contrast to the solemn Catholic observances at Lent. Picture, if you will, women parading in the Sambadrome with tall headdresses and almost nothing underneath but the imagination, almost like the "sky-clad" Jains of India. Women in Rio promenade like that during Carnival, though not the baianas. To the baianas, Carnival is serious business, something sacred: a celebration, but more than just an excuse for an orgy. They don't have time for all that foolishness. Ironically, their spirit seems more in line with Catholic observance at Lent: solemn and respectful, though they are worshippers of the candomblé.
You and your family come upon a group of Yemanjá's devotees down by the shore; all of them are dressed in white. They have placed a lit candle in the middle of a large watermelon, with everyone holding little white and blue flowers. At midnight, the children will launch small boats made of balsa wood as offerings to the goddess. Though Yemanjá is an African goddess, most of the people in this group are middle-class suburbanites from Copacabana or Ipanema, or even further west of Rio, mostly in their forties and fifties. Even white people in Rio pay homage to these gods and goddesses. It's probably a New Age thing.
A tall middle-aged man wearing a white suit smiles at you and offers you a little white orchid. He introduces himself as Wagner da Silva Mendes; he says that he's a composer. You accept the flower, though your husband might get jealous. Wagner da Silva Mendes tells you to say a prayer and throw the flower to the ocean. "If the tide takes it," he says, "that means that Yemanjá is pleased and has accepted your offering. She's supposed to bring you good luck."
"What if the tide doesn't take it?" your daughter, Avril, asks haltingly in English. "It means that you will have bad luck?"
The man smiles and replies, "Yemanjá is good and kind; she doesn't wish bad luck for anyone. You should never do bad things, of course, but you must never murder somebody by drowning, because Yemanjá can make bad things happen. She can cause great tidal waves, for example, because the lakes and the rivers are sacred to her."
You smile, close your eyes, and throw your flower out to sea. You throw it at the right moment, because the tide catches it and takes it away. Then the children each ask for a flower and the man gives each of them an orchid, too. Before they throw their flowers to the waves, he helps them time their throws right, so that the flowers will go out with the flow tide rather than come back with the ebb tide. You make your own luck, you know.
"Whites have always misunderstood black people and African culture," says Wagner da Silva Mendes, who is white himself. "When the slaves en route from Africa tried to throw themselves overboard, the slavers thought that it was merely suicide from despair, when it could have been Yemanjá calling her children to rejoin her in the afterlife. They believed that Yemanjá would send a big fish to swallow the one fortunate enough to free himself from his captors and take him home to a garden paradise under the sea."
Wagner de Silva Mendes is a lecturer in anthropology as well as a composer. He has been to Africa several times, studying the cultures of the Africans and learning their polyrhythms. He is a guitarist as well as a percussionist. His pride and joy, he says, is a tall Yoruban drum that he bought one time while in Nigeria. Then your husband suggests to Mendes, "Maybe you should study the people in the favelas. I'm sure that there are many similarities between the Yorubas in Nigeria and the baianas here in Rio."
Both you and the anthropology lecturer are embarrassed. Apparently, your husband has reminded the lecturer of his ignorance of the people in his own city while reminding you of your infidelities. But the quaint little villages across the ocean in Africa may merely look like wretched shantytowns to the middle-class suburbanites when viewed up close in their own city. Or worse, poor people in faraway places might be considered more worthy of our charity over there, but not when they live closer to home. In our own cities, we might consider the squeegee boys at the traffic lights to be only lazy, especially when they bother us for spare change. Your husband has some awareness of poverty, because his family was often poor when he was a child. He still carries with him the shame of wearing old clothes to school while the other kids wore new ones. But you don't understand: you only glare at him because he has embarrassed you. He knows the look. He's sure that you will make him pay for his transgression somehow.
You and the children are soon dancing with abandon, you, before the man who had given you and the children the flowers while he plays his big African drum; you don't mind his attention. Your husband asks himself where you learned to dance like that. Though you're hardly as skilled as the other women in this group, some who dance with your husband, your dance is enticing for them, the way your hips swivel while your torso seems stationary. Because of the humidity, the sweat should be dripping from your face, but instead it sticks to it like a light mask. You receive compliments from them— they all want to dance with you, it seems. Before you leave, they give you hugs and kisses; they have accepted you as a friend. "It's a pity that you won't be here for Carnival," says a woman who had been dancing with you. Wagner da Silva Mendes gives you a compact disk of his music, which you promise to play when you get home.
As you walk along the beach, a young woman from another group comes up to you and your family, lifts up her top, and exposes her breasts. Then she laughs at everybody's reaction before moving on. You don't believe it, but you clap your hands together and laugh as well. "Oh, I love this place!" you exclaim.
Yes, your husband thinks, maybe you love this place too well, though he didn't mind seeing the young woman's breasts. But maybe your reaction shouldn't have surprised him. Despite what you have done with your lover, you still have retained a certain innocence, though innocence doesn't make you moral. Whereas other people might have been offended by a strange woman exposing her breasts like that in front of children, you reacted with childlike amusement. But sometimes you refuse to see the bad in people. You thought that your lover was an honourable man. When you meet José at Corcovado, you saw him not as a demon but as an angel bearing light.
Out of boredom, Robert soon finds himself looking at other women. He looks for Maria da Conceição, but he doesn't expect to find her here. Maybe she's avoiding the beach, he thinks, but there are lots of people here; she could be anywhere. He thinks of the taxi driver as well, but he doesn't see him either; maybe the taxi driver is with another tourist or working. Then he sees Maria da Conceição and the taxi driver together, their arms around each other, laughing and singing the apple. He can't believe it! Maria had told him that she was engaged to be married. He's sure that the taxi driver isn't her fiancé, definitely not someone of good family like her fiancé— if she has one. When Robert sees them kiss, he's envious of the taxi driver's relative youth and good fortune. Is there any woman in Rio whom he hasn't tried to pick up? Robert both admires and envies the taxi driver's success with the other sex. Given a hundred women, he thinks, the taxi driver could probably persuade half of them to sleep with him— at least here in Rio.
You and the children have found another party of sambistas, so your husband leaves you for a moment and approaches Maria da Conceição and her young lover. He's going to be gracious about it, he says to himself: New Year's is the time to let bygones be bygones. He only wants to wish them Happy New Year and then move on, since everybody is celebrating and having a good time. But the taxi driver sees him first, smiles, and says amiably, "Ah, good evening, senhor, Happy New Year!"
The taxi driver is respectful, so your husband bows his head slightly and says in return, "Yes, Happy New Year to you too."
But then the taxi driver glances at your wife and the kids. "You have a beautiful wife, senhor," he says knowingly.
Your husband is a couple of centimetres taller than the taxi driver and more than a few kilos heavier. He also has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, second degree. Your husband stares back hard into the taxi driver's eyes and replies, "Yes, monsieur, she's a very beautiful woman."
The taxi driver's smile disappears and he says, "Then you should treat her right, senhor."
Your husband recalls that his first impression of the taxi driver had been favourable. When he picked up you and your family from the airport; he didn't seem like a bad devil then. But now your husband is ready to kill and the taxi driver looks ready to do the same. Then they both remember Maria da Conceição, who's looking at them nervously. When your husband sees that Maria is wearing a white gown like you, he smiles at her, tips his hat, and says, "Ah, you look very beautiful tonight, ma p'tite."
"Obrigada, senhor," the girl replies, also smiling. "The senhor looks muito distinto."
They stare into each other's eyes for a moment. Her dark brown eyes look black now, but radiant. When your husband realizes that he's holding her hand, he kisses her fingers lightly and says softly, "Merci beaucoup, ma p'tite."
Then he recites something from Charles Baudelaire:

"Aujourd'hui l'espace est splendide!
Sans mors, sans éperons, sans bride,
Partons à cheval sur le vin
Pour un ciel féerique et divin...

Which, rendered in English, is:

"Today the expanse is splendid!
Without bit, spurs, or bridle,
Let's depart on horseback on the wine
Towards a heaven phantastical and divine..."3

Of course, Maria da Conceição doesn't understand a word of it, but she smiles anyway. "I'm sorry," your husband says, "but I only know it in French. But take my word for it, it's a beautiful poem."
Then everybody is silent. Your husband tips his hat again, smiles, and says, "Well, I'll go rejoin my family, eh? They're off somewhere, probably doing the samba."
Before he leaves, Maria gives him a little peck on both cheeks and wishes him Happy New Year. He gives her a peck on each cheek as well, and then he suddenly gives her a big kiss on the mouth. He looks over at the taxi driver and smiles. Maria smiles as well, shyly, probably blushing. Then your husband says to the taxi driver, "The difference between age and youth, my friend, is experience. That's all."
Then your husband leaves them. When he looks over at them again, they're laughing, doing what they had been doing before he interrupted them. "Youth is wasted on the young," your husband mutters to himself.
The revellers stay up until long after midnight, until the sun slowly begins its ascent over the beach. The campfires gradually die out one by one until they become merely glowing embers. It's a New Year's tradition in Copacabana to party on the beach until the sun comes up, and New Year's Day 2002 will be no different than any other New Year's Day. It would take a horde of wrathful angels at the End of the World to break up this crowd. Your husband is merely bored, not wrathful— not very much fun either, even he must admit. He feels like a third wheel.
As you return to your hotel, you and the kids are still dancing the samba to whatever music is still in your heads. After seeing a few couples risking the conception of a child, you and your husband have given up shielding your children's eyes. But maybe you shouldn't have brought them here: whose idea was it anyway?
Then, while the stars are still out en masse, your daughter, Avril, points to the stars in the southern sky. "Look, maman," she cries, "there's an upside-down cross!"
"Yes, you're right," you agree. "How beautiful! Oh, look, Robert!"
You hardly recognize any of the other constellations, since you see only the boreal sky in Canada, but you can see the Southern Cross quite clearly. It's in the southwest corner of the sky; the last star of the constellation is pointed southwest. This constellation looks like an upside-down cross, or an anchor buried in the sand. The bottom star is pointed to the left of an imaginary vertical axis, about thirty degrees. Then you and your husband are dumbstruck. You have spent more than a week in Rio and nobody has thought to go outside to look at the stars even once. The southern sky looks so beautiful now, and you had almost missed it. Then Avril points to two other constellations and says, "Look, there's Capricorn, and Aquarius over there."
Your husband agrees and murmurs, "Yes, you're right."
For the first time this evening, he's in form— he feels like dancing. He takes you by the hands and you do a little pirouette back into his arms. You are dancing, your children as well. Back at the hotel, once the kids are in bed, you and your husband scatter kisses like the light from the stars on a cloudless night over a field far from the city. Then the sun comes sneaking through the window of your bedroom at dawn, like a drunk after the bars have closed, spilling its crimson rays like wine from a decanter. Some of the morning's rays hit your face just right as you fall asleep with a white orchid still in your hair. You're getting older, your husband thinks, maybe a few lines around the eyes, a few grey hairs. Then he says out loud while you sleep, "You move me, mon amour. You have always moved me."
He can't sleep, worrying about the future once you return to Canada. He feels some resentment while you sleep so peacefully. Then he sighs and puts his arms around you from behind and gently places his hand on your heart. He kisses you lightly on the cheek, but you stir in your sleep without waking up. You look happy now while he has a sense of foreboding.
"What about our marriage?" he asks himself. "Can we ever go back to the way things were?" It's a white night, and he's torturing himself with dread for the future. He's getting older, too, and he worries that he isn't very much fun anymore. He asks himself if maybe you wouldn't prefer the company of Wagner da Silva Mendes.
"You've always preferred us intellectual types," he says, with some irony.

Robert

Rio de Janeiro, dawn of the last day. As the sunlight shone through the window of our room, I gazed at her as she slept, lying on her back with her legs slightly apart. Her body looked like a marble statue in the moonlight, or the cast of a body found at Pompeii after the volcano had erupted and buried the whole city in a river of lava. Only when she moaned in her sleep and stirred slightly, like she was having a dream, did she seem alive. She seemed somehow innocent, pure. I gazed at the tattoo of the butterfly just above her pubic hair, underneath her sheer negligée. Then I kissed her lightly on the lips while she slept, something that I hadn't done in a long time. I don't know why I did it, but those lips looked so tempting. She immediately sat up with a gasp, and then cried, "Shit, Robert, you scared me! Why did you do that?"
"I'm sorry, mon amour," I replied, trying to suppress a laugh. "I didn't mean to scare you, but maybe you were having a bad dream, eh?"
She lay down on her side, her back to me. Anticipating an elbow to the mouth, I slowly put my arms around her, kissed her on the cheek, and murmured, "I'm sorry, Chantal. I shouldn't have done that, okay? Can you forgive me?"
She nodded, but I could see that she still was frightened. Then I placed my hand over her heart, that black heart, the heart that I once loved so much, that heart that I sometimes wanted to tear out with my bare hands and eat. In the past, the act of placing my hand over her heart has calmed me; it was calming for me now. With the crimson sunlight bursting through the window at dawn and the beating of her heart under my hand, I felt a surge of feeling in my own heart and in my face. I wanted to weep for some reason. I buried my face in her hair and kissed her on the right shoulder and the nape of her neck as I gently squeezed her breasts. When I leaned over her, she cradled my head with her arm, moaned, and kissed me back.
Initially, we were timid, even afraid. Then we made love with a desperation that we had never felt before. It was like we were afraid that we were doing it for the last time. While we were doing it, I had to suppress the urge to bite hard into her right breast. If I had done it, I would have drawn blood— I would have hurt her— so I didn't do it. Instead, I sucked on the skin just underneath the nipple with my lips, leaving a large welt. She did the same to my neck and chest, thinking it was all in play. Then I gave her the ultimate kiss until she cried out, jerking her hips hard into my face. She pushed my head away with her hand, and then asked me do it again as she took her foot again and again. Then I drove hard into her sated body like I wanted to rape her, like I wouldn't have stopped even if she had cried out for me to stop. But she never cried out for me to stop: I did it until I exploded into her, and then collapsed on top of her. She cried out, too, at the moment of ecstasy. Then she sniffled as we held each other close. She could have conceived that night because we used no contraceptives, but we were willing to take that risk— I didn't care anymore. If she was carrying a child now, maybe it could have been mine.
She thanked me, but then started to sob. I asked her why she was crying, but she only shook her head. "I can't tell you," she sobbed.
"Why?" I asked, gently squeezing her. "Why, why can't you tell me?"
"I don't know," she replied, shaking her head.
Why did she thank me? She had never done it before after having sex— never. What did she mean by it? Did it mean that she still loved me? Or was it him? I was afraid again that she was having a nervous breakdown, but maybe she was just crying about something that I didn't understand, something that maybe she didn't understand either.
Then we looked up, surprised to see the children staring at us, all frightened. They had seen everything, I was sure. Maybe they were afraid that I was hurting her because of the way that we had been fighting lately, I don't know. I only know that they saw what we were doing. But Chantal only smiled at them and said, "Don't worry, everything's fine. Please go back to sleep, eh?"
They came up to us and kissed us goodnight on the cheek, and then went back to bed. I have never been able to calm the children like her. We laughed our asses off after the kids were gone. Then she cuddled up to me, put her head in the curve of my shoulder, and placed her hand on my heart. I was moved by that gesture, because it felt like she still loved me. "'Woe implores go,'" I said, "'but all joy wants eternity.'"
"That's beautiful," she said, "who wrote it? It wasn't you, I'm sure."
"Nietzsche," I replied. "Thus Spake Zarathustra. Zarathustra was facing the sun, like we are now."
"I don't understood you," she said, with her ear to my chest. "I only know that, if I squeeze too hard with my hands, you'll slip away through my fingers, like mercury."
As she fell asleep in my arms, I felt at peace, a feeling that I still loved her. I made love with her to make her mine, but was she ever mine? I will love you, mon amour, with all that I am capable— I have never loved anyone else more. But will you love me, or will I lose you in the end, long before the end, when one of us dies, through a separation other than death? I only love you, even if you will fly away from me like a butterfly, never to return. I will neither cripple you nor tear off your wings, but I will love you, even if you will fly away. But who are you? Your mother had warned me once that I wouldn't always know. "Chantal is flyée," her mother said, on our wedding night.
I have found that love is something willed. We make ourselves love each other— we whip ourselves into a frenzy. I know that much. You can only master her body briefly but never her heart, mind, or soul. Where she's transported at the moment of ecstasy in her mind, you can never know; maybe she doesn't know, either. So let her think of him: you can't rip him away like a pendant around her neck, anyway.
I kissed her on the head as she slept. I still loved her, I thought, though maybe I was losing her. We had lost everything that we had, but maybe we got a little bit of it back that night in Rio.
Woe implores go, but all joy wants eternity.


Chantal


I dream that I'm in the jungle, with drums in the background. Some angry and cruel men have seized me and stripped me naked to dunk me in a vat of blue dye, laughing as they do it. I cry out for mercy because I know that they're going to kill me, but there's no hope. These men will show no mercy, and nobody can save me.
Then I feel my husband's arms around me from behind. "Shhh," he whispers, "it's all right."
I'm still disoriented, still frightened. I don't know where I am and I can't stop crying. For a minute, I'm still lost in that twilight world between dream and reality, not yet fully awake but no longer asleep.
"It's all right," he whispers again, "it's all right."
He puts his hand to my heart and I start to calm down, but several minutes pass before I stop crying.
Then I sniffle and say, "I'm having a nervous breakdown."
"Then have a nervous breakdown in my arms," my husband says. "It's still morning, and the children aren't up yet."

Chantal's Inner Voice


Maybe adultery is nature's way of telling married people that it's time to reproduce with someone else. You have morning sickness a few weeks after you come back from Rio. You have to take a day off from work because of the severe cramps and the nausea. The menses are so heavy that you think that you must have had a miscarriage. It could have been because of the flight back, it could have been because of the anxiety— lots of things. Time has no meaning for you: the seconds, minutes, and hours all merge in one great torrent of consciousness. It seems like you spend the whole day in bed on your side, not wanting to move. Fortunately, your husband is there to get the kids off to school because you lie in bed all day, mumbling to yourself. Your husband is sure that you're having what he calls a "psychotic pause."
"Maybe you need to talk to your psychiatrist about it," he suggests when he comes home from campus and sees you still on your side, mumbling to yourself. You only nod.
You now realize that you really wanted this baby, if you were pregnant, no matter who the father was. You no longer care what the world thinks. You don't care if the world would be scandalized or if there was a complicated divorce. What you wanted from your lover was a child, since you could never have anything else of permanence from him, anyway.
You think that maybe you could have persuaded your husband to help you raise it; maybe he could have even come to love it. You're sure that the children would have accepted it, the rest of your family as well, in time. You were ready to abandon any preconceived ideas of motherhood, of what it means to be a loyal wife. If your husband would only remember all that you have done for him— how you took care of his mother when she was dying of cancer, for example— then maybe he would understand that you have always been faithful to him. Your lover merely possessed your body for a few hours, with kisses sweet and caressing words. If you offered your lover your heart and your soul to him, it's because you have always believed in giving of yourself completely or not at all.
Then you suddenly get up, push past your husband, and go downstairs and start pounding at the piano. You start with Golliwog's Cake Walk by Debussy. Your husband can tell by the way you play it that there's a great disturbance deep within your soul, because the music is harsh and discordant rather than playful like it's supposed to be. Then you stop about halfway through it and start to sob without constraint. Because your husband knows that you can play it, he suggests, "Then why don't you play something else, Chantal? How about Clair de Lune?"
You don't hear him because you sit crying at the piano, but he pretends that nothing is amiss. He's afraid that if he rushes to comfort you, you will only retreat deeper into psychosis, in order to escape from him and from everything else. Your husband understands that only you can bring yourself back from the abyss, that you must come back willingly or not at all. So he says, "Why don't you play Für Elise, Chantal? I've always liked that song."
You straighten up, but you play something else, a Gnossienne by Erik Satie. This meditative little piece sounds like bouzouki music from Greece, the way you play it; you can almost hear the joyful sound of the smashing of dishes at a Greek wedding. You can almost taste the feta cheese and see the ring of fire on the surface of a glass of ouzo. Your husband is amazed at how talented you are, how you use the pedals of the piano to create the desired effects. How the notes fly here and there as they swirl in a cascade of sound before they blend into each other! Yet it isn't just the pedals. You have nimble fingers as well; the black and white keys seem to obey you.
If anything can exist, like light, in both waves and particles at the same time, it's music. You have always been able to see the colours of the notes as you play them; each note has a different colour for you. For example, G is orange while C is green. However, what really amazes your husband is how quickly your mood has changed, but you have always been changeable— flighty. Then you play Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag. By the end of this piece, with its happy, syncopated melody, you have regained your equilibrium. You are in form again. You have negotiated the difficult passage between the Scylla and the Charibdis.
During a routine eye examination some weeks later, the doctor will test you for glaucoma. You test positive for simple glaucoma, which is treatable. All this time, when you saw the notes flying here and there as you played the piano, could it be that your eyesight was really imploding on itself, like a star that collapses on itself in the form of a brilliant supernova? When you saw the colours flying everywhere, you didn't realize that maybe it was because you were going blind. How ironic then that maybe your art is a manifestation of illness! What else didn't you realize? Yet when you play the piano now, you see still the colours of the notes, perhaps because you have already memorized the colour of each tone. But for a time, after the eye exam, you are colour blind: all you see is black, white, and grey. Of course, it's psychosomatic, right? The colours eventually return like before, only they are not as intense.
At what point then does memory take over and the senses begin to hibernate? Maybe that's why people have difficulty recovering from emotional trauma, because of memory. It's also why people can play the piano.
Memory can be an insidious thing.


Chantal


I'm being treated for anxiety and depression now; the whole family is in counselling. No more illegal drugs for me either. My husband is mercurial, by turns relaxed and then angry. He suddenly gets angry for no apparent reason, and then changes back just as fast. Our daughter has changed as well, being treated for depression like me, while our son withdraws into himself before lashing out at the world. He fights at school, he says, because a bully has been picking on him, but he won't say who or why. I talk to his teacher about it, but she doesn't know either. Then one day, after he comes home from school, my son shouts at me, "I hate you!"
I am dumbstruck! That really hurts, so I ask him why, but he won't tell me. Instead, he calls me a whore and starts hitting me with his fists. My husband has to intervene. "That's your mother, you," he shouts, grabbing him by the arm.
I want to slap Patrick, but I say to my husband, quietly, "It's okay, Robert, I can handle it." Then I ask my son, "Why did you call me that? That was really mean!"
Patrick says nothing at first, but then he stares at me with certain defiance and says, "Martin says that a woman who kisses a man who isn't her husband is a whore."
I feel myself blushing with shame, but I try to explain to him while avoiding his eyes, "Martin must not like you very much, or he wouldn't have said that." Then I ask, "Is he the one who's been picking on you at school?"
Patrick doesn't answer. Instead, he asks, "Why did you kiss that man at the beach, maman? Why?"
I look at Robert, who avoids my glance. Then I say quietly to my son, "He was just a friend, Patrick. It's your father that I love, your father. That man was only a friend."
Then I ask Patrick if he has told anybody else about what he saw at the beach. When he admits that he has, I say to him sternly, "Don't be a gossip, Patrick. The world doesn't have to know about our business. If you tell other people that your mother has been kissing another man, they might make fun of you. Yes, somebody might even call your mother a whore."
He looks down and says nothing. Then I apologize to him, "I'm sorry that I've hurt you and Avril— please forgive me. Please remember that your father and I love you very much, no matter what happens between us."
I kneel down and give Patrick a hug, but his body is limp and unresponsive at first. I ask him to hug me back. I hold him in my arms until he responds. Even with his arms around my neck and his head on my shoulder, Patrick tells me that he's still angry with me. I tell him that I understand. These are only words. Patrick is a child who has been hurt by his parents and their fighting. He may feel that he hates me now, but that's only because he feels betrayed. But we all feel hurt— we all feel betrayed.
After our son has left the room, my husband says, "Children are cruel sometimes. They might even be cannibals, if they could only conceive of eating each other. If they only had the imagination."
"Patrick and Avril are not cannibals," I reply angrily. That comment really bothers me, because I love children— my children anyway.
"I'm not saying that they're cannibals," my husband replies evenly. "I love our children, too, Chantal, but the problem isn't with them, it's with you and me. That's why everybody's fighting right now."
I don't have an answer. I only think that the short physical space between him and me might as well be as wide as the ocean. He's unapproachable now, but I try to approach him anyway. When he sits down in his favourite armchair in the living room, I kneel down in front of him, wrap my arms around his legs, and rest my cheek on his knees. "I love you so much," I murmur, "but you're so far away."
He soon responds by stroking my hair and kissing me on the back of the head, but he's still far away— I feel so estranged from him. I must try to forgive as well, because I get angry, too. Everybody knows what I have done. Him, I don't know for sure, though I have reason to suspect. He hurt me, flirting with her like that at the beach, leering at her— really hurt me. Yet he still denies what he has done: he denies everything and will continue to deny it until I either have proof or accept that he's telling the truth.
I feel guilty about Rio because I hurt my husband— I didn't want to hurt him. But it isn't just the guilt: I have a certain awareness of the world now, having seen the poverty and misery in Rio as well as the fun and the beaches. I love my city, my province, and my country, but we all live in the same world now. Unfortunately, most people don't understand much about the world that we live in today. I didn't know, either, until Rio. I still don't know very much about the world. Most people only know from what they read in the newspapers or watch on TV, but my father used to say, "You don't stop to warm your hands while your neighbour's house is on fire."
The whole world is on fire and we only have been stopping to warm our hands. I have just started to pay the penance that young Father Rose, the associate pastor at our church, demanded of me as a teenager: to help those less fortunate, to feed the hungry, and to provide shelter for the homeless. I'm still trying to love God with all of my heart, might, and soul, and my neighbour as myself. I'm still trying, but it's so hard to obey these commandments! I agree with Anne Frank: I think that people are good at heart. I never have met anybody who was totally evil— I have never met a devil. People won't give you a poisonous snake if you ask for a piece of bread. Everybody wants to do good, but people don't think that they can make a difference. So the world continues to burn.
Patrick doesn't realize it yet: he sighs, all content, his head on my shoulder. He has forgotten that he's supposed to be angry with me for what I have done.

*****

I am taking classes in order to be a nursing teacher. As well, maybe I would like to work for Health Canada, going from door to door, dispensing medical advice among the poor in the city, or among members of the First Nations. I'm learning Portuguese, because maybe I would like to go back to Brazil some day, maybe even teach there. I'm undecided right now. Though I am approaching the middle of life now, there are still things that I want to do. I want to help others because of what I have seen in Rio— because of what I have seen in my own community. But when I relate my desire to go teach in South America to my husband, he says to me, incredulous, "You want to quit your job here to work there in South America?"
"Not now," I reply, "maybe later, when we're older, when we're both retired. For a little while, or maybe permanently— it all depends. But yes, I would like to go back to Brazil, Robert."
The way that I see it, he's suspicious, like I only want to go back to Rio to see him again. "Can't you just help people here in Canada?" he asks.
"I already do," I reply, "you know that. I would like to help anywhere, it doesn't matter where. It could be Canada or Brazil, I don't care."
"Are you really saying that you want to leave me, then?" he asks, suspicious. "Don't be shy, Chantal: you can tell me anything."
I shrug my shoulders. "Do you want me to leave you?" I ask. "If you clap your hands three times and tell me to go away, I'll do it. Banish me to the Four Corners of the Earth, O master! Your wish is my command!"
I smile and make reverence like a genie— if only I were dressed like a dancer before a sultan! I haven't lost my sense of humour, but he only looks at me like I'm crazy, him, always inscrutable. He may be ready to crawl for me, too, like I would for him. He may want to give me the moon and the stars— everything under the heavens. He may be willing to do anything for me, but he will never say it, because he can only communicate ideas but never feelings. He only concedes, "Well, there's a lot to be done in this community."
I suggest that he go volunteer at a restaurant du cœur on weekends and help to feed the hungry. "You're a good man, Robert," I tell him. "I know that you would like to help others."
So now he gives a few hours of his time from time to time; it seems satisfying to him. He isn't a religious man but he doesn't mind ringing a bell for the Salvation Army at Christmas. He wants to help those who are less fortunate— we all do, I think. He will always help to push the car of a stranded motorist, or he will treat a homeless person to a meal at a restaurant, like he treated me and Alice when we first met. He's a good man, and I love him so much! Yes, I would let him shove me back into a bottle like a genie if it would make him happy— if it would solve anything.
My sister, Joëlle, who's also a nurse, works with AIDS patients. Her friend, Brooke, is HIV-positive, but not Joëlle— not yet. Brooke is doing well, though she has had HIV for some time now; you'd never know that she was even sick. Yet HIV patients, particularly children, can thrive once they get the treatment that they need. Some of the children have had HIV all of their lives, yet many of them are almost adults now. If you don't neglect them, people can live with HIV, even thrive. It doesn't have to be a big deal.
We have to wear surgical masks and plastic gloves when working with those infected with AIDS. You could make them sicker, even kill them, by breathing on them. I have to be tested for HIV regularly, since I come into daily contact with blood, having delivered babies born with HIV. I have even pricked yourself by accident with used hypodermic needles— it happens to nurses all the time. Then there's José: who knows how many people he has slept with? But we're in the midst of a terrible plague right now, with no end in sight. I have accepted the fact that I could die from AIDS, even if I don't have it now. I still remember the words of the woman in Rio, who said, "We will all suffer from AIDS, even you." She didn't necessarily mean that I would have the disease.
Then one day, in my presence, a man dying of AIDS asks Joëlle to give him a hug. So she gives him one. What must we do? What can we do? We do what we can. The poor and the sick we have with us always. So I do volunteer work in my community, as do Avril and Patrick. There's so much to be done, and we all have constraints on our time. We give clothes to secondhand stores and give away cans of food. There are lots of poor people even in Montréal, people who are homeless and disabled, drug addicts and alcoholics, former prostitutes trying to rehabilitate themselves. There are women who have been beaten by their husbands or boyfriends, and children who have been sexually abused. But everybody knows that: all you have to do is read the newspapers or watch TV. Sometimes you only have to look around you. You will see homeless people even in the streets and parks of Montréal, like in Rio.
I no longer work in the States, in Champlain, New York, but closer to home, at Royal Victoria Hospital in Montréal, taking classes at McGill to be a nursing teacher. The building is more than a century old with a limestone façade— it's just beautiful! This hospital is special for me, perhaps because I was born there, the children as well. (Robert was born at Notre-Dame in Old Montréal.) It's the most beautiful hospital in the world to me, but like all hospitals, even Royal Victoria is not a happy place to be if you're sick. But my husband and I talk so little now that he's been unaware for some time that I no longer work in the States.
We have been living separate lives.

*****


In a dream, I have become a child again. I am lost, wandering around the favela naked and hungry, crying. José's mother, Jurema, the large black woman who was selling beans and rice in the market place, scoops me up in her arms and sets me down on her knees. "What's wrong, my child?" she asks gently.
I can't tell her because I'm always crying, but Jurema reassures me, "Don't worry, my child: we'll find your mother and your father."
Because this is a dream, I understand her, even though Jurema only speaks Portuguese in real life.
I wake up with the realization that my mother will die soon, and I'm terrified. I'm only now beginning to admit that my father is dead, but my mother will be dead too one day. I am the youngest of six, three brothers and three sisters. My father was a science teacher while my mother was a homemaker. My mother taught my sisters and me how to play the piano, and she taught all of us how to say our prayers. She was the organist in our church, until she became ill. I worry about my mother now because she hasn't been herself since my father died. Finally, I say to her tearfully, "Please don't give up! I need you— we all need you!"
When I tell my mother about the dream, I tell her that I have actually met the woman in the dream. My mother asks, "Has something happened in Rio, Chantal?"
I nod my head slowly. My mother waits for me to tell her what it was, and I tell her everything, including my suspicions of Robert's infidelities. I even tell her about my own infidelities. Of course, my mother is disappointed in me for what I have done. "Are you sure that he actually did anything?" she asks.
"Yes," I say firmly, "but he won't admit it."
"But what if he's telling the truth?"
I explain to her how I know— why I suspect. My mother sighs deeply and says, "Two wrongs won't make amends, Chantal, but one wrong will lead to another unless somebody stops the cycle. 'Return not evil for evil,' it says in the Bible."
I want to argue with my mother, but she's right— she's always right, it seems.
Then my mother adds, "There are only two kinds of marriages in this world, Chantal: those between two people who love each other and those between people who don't. Your father and I weren't always happy together, you know, but we raised six kids. And, yes, he was unfaithful, too: he carried on with the art teacher at your school for some years. He even wanted a divorce at one time, but I wouldn't give it to him."
Of course, I am shocked by what my mother has told me about my father— I hadn't even suspected. Then my mother, who's in bed, asks me to cut her toenails. My mother is dying; she has diabetes and she's obese— she may even lose part of her lower left leg. I wish now that I hadn't told her about my dream, and about what happened in Rio, because I have upset her. Robert was right when he said, "Sometimes, we have to protect our parents from the truth."
Robert can be very selfish, you know, seeing himself as the "enlightened egoist." I had thought that he was only being the "enlightened egoist" then, because he was afraid of embarrassment. But he was right: we have to protect our parents sometimes. We can't always tell them everything, because we have to be adults.
Then Robert adds, "Sometimes, the hardest thing in life is when the child has to become the parent, and we have to take care of our parents as if they were children."
He knows from experience, somewhat. He and his sister, Arlette, tried to take care of their mother when she was dying of cancer. In the end, though, the responsibility fell mainly to Arlette and me. That's why I was hurt when he didn't comfort me very much after my father died. However, his younger brother didn't do anything for their mother. Robert has a brother, Phil, who lives in the Northwest Territories or somewhere, but we never see or hear from him. He's with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or something. I'm not even sure that Phil knows that his mother is deceased.
Robert's mother, Mary, was born in Wales. She was a nurse, like me. She was raised a Methodist rather than as a Catholic. Robert speaks some Welsh because his mother used to take him and his brother and his sister to a Welsh congregation here in Montreal. In the manner of the British, she was always distant and never very warm or affectionate. But she says to Robert, Arlette, and me when she's dying, "Let's be more like a French family: let's show our love for each other."
Wow, what a change! I didn't think that she even liked the French; I never thought that she liked me. But she gives us all a big hug, Robert, Arlette, and me. Their mother tried to be a better mother and grandmother in the little time that she had left, though I never thought that she was a bad mother or a bad grandmother. I know that she loved her children and grandchildren, even if she didn't always like people.
Then my mother says to me, "I found your wedding ring, Chantal."
"Where?" I ask, happily surprised. Of course, I can't believe it!
"It was in the top drawer by the kitchen sink. You must have taken it off when you were washing dishes after your father's funeral or something."
I'm so happy because I thought that I would never find that ring!
I have another dream. In this dream, my mother and father are dancing by the light of the full moon in a cemetery during the autumn. They are young and in love with each other— happy. I'm dreaming in colour, and I see everything clearly: the trees, the dead leaves on the ground, and the graves all illuminated by the light of the moon. I know even while dreaming that it's only a dream, but I feel a greater sense of peace now— I'm happy too.
Death no longer threatens me like it did before. I can release my parents to the next world now because the dead don't belong with us but on the other side. But the trick is to not let go too soon, before your loved ones have died. So I will gladly cut my mother's toenails while she's still alive.




Chantal's Inner Voice

You're depressed, so you tell your friend Alice everything about you and José when she's over at your house; you tell her everything. Alice listens sympathetically and puts her hand on top of yours as you sit at the kitchen table crying about it. Then she says, "I'm sorry, Chantal, but if either Luc or I were unfaithful to each other, it would be over between us. As I see it, it's over between you guys now; it's the end of your marriage as it was. You can only start again at zero or divorce, that's it." Then she adds, "I always thought you guys were happy together, but I guess true happiness in marriage is as rare as a bird that shits on our heads."
You both laugh at her little joke. Alice has always known how to come up with the right bon mot. Then Alice looks down, biting her lip hard. "What's wrong, Alice?" you ask, touching her gently on the hand.
"Cancer," Alice replies in a breaking voice. "It has spread to the uterus."
What a blow! You and Alice cry as you hold each other close, because maybe you're about to lose your closest friend. How can she not cry— how can you not cry? It doesn't seem fair. You want to die— you, not her. Right now, life has lost its sweetness for you, but Alice wants to live more than anything, for her children and for her husband as well as for herself. Yet she's the one who might be dying. "Sometimes," Alice says, "the saddest thing in the world is life itself."
As you hug her, you wish that you could take her disease upon yourself so that she might live. You close your eyes and try to take her cancer upon yourself as you hug each other. Maybe you could do it if only you had the faith. But she feels your love— she feels a jolt. Then you feel faint, because of your heart. Alice is aware of the heart murmur that you had as a child, and she sits you back down at the table, fussing over you as though she were your mother. "There, there," she says calmly. "It's going to be okay."
When you were young, you used to sneak out of your bedroom at night to go see Alice, when everyone else was asleep. You quietly raised the sash to your bedroom window upstairs, climbed out onto the roof, and climbed the down spout onto the ground. Then you roamed the deserted streets of the centre-ville or roamed the fields outside your native town. It was all a game. The sudden breaking of a dry twig scared you at first; the hooting of an owl gave you a thrill. You once saw an owl swoop down from behind you, snatch a mouse a few metres in front of you, and then fly away with its prey. But soon you were no longer threatened by the darkness or by the shadows cast by the bare trees in the autumn at dusk. The darkness was your friend, your concealment.
Then, during one of your midnight outings, early in the morning, a band of five or six wolves wander out onto the same road as you. You and the wolves face off, their jaws in lascivious leers. You are terrified. Then, when you shake your head as if to shoo them away, the wolves take off as the leader signals to them with a howl. The leader is the alpha-female, you think, but another wolf— perhaps the alpha-male— is the last to leave. He's the most threatening of all, like a sentinel at the gates of hell. You have a few more rendezvous with the wolves before they leave the area. You're always terrified, but excited as well. Years later, in therapy, a psychoanalyst will give you his interpretation of events: you had the primal fear of being passed around like a casserole by a band of wolves, but a part of you would have welcomed the experience. You start seeing another therapist, because you think that this one is a little strange.
Whenever Alice asked you about your nocturnal wanderings, you were always vague. You once told her that you were meeting an imaginary aboriginal friend. "And what does your aboriginal friend say to you, eh?" Alice asks, smiling knowingly.
"She says that I'm a wild one like her,'" you reply, shrugging your shoulders.
Then you tell Alice about the wolves. "They were probably coyotes," Alice says, blasé. "There are lots of coyotes around here."
"No," you reply firmly, "they were wolves. I know the difference between wolves and coyotes."
Even Alice thought that you were a little strange. For a while, you had a feral smell; you seldom bathed, except when you had a piano recital. You were considered an odd child, a tomboy who played hockey and soccer with the boys, and then did up her hair and put on a long gown to play Mozart at the piano for the adults in the church. You studied ballet for a few years, too. When you and Alice ran around the school yard, trying to kiss all of the boys, everybody thought that you were suddenly "boy crazy." Then, when you and some other girls ran around naked on a dare on a cold winter's night in the snow, all the guys thought you were a nympho. Then the nuns complained to your parents after you started passing out condoms to all of the boys in the school yard, because you thought that they would only do it anyway.
You and Alice nearly got expelled when you pulled an unsuspecting boy into the girls' bathroom and put makeup on his face to make him look like a girl. Strange to say, the boy didn't resist, but the boy's parents wanted you expelled anyway. In the end, you and Alice say that you're sorry, and the boy's parents accept your apology.
Then the boys noticed how pretty you were, and you started to bathe more often. Beauty and cleanliness cover a whole multitude of sins.
There were two priests in your parish: Father Jacques Rose, the old curé with ashen countenance called "Old Father Rose," and Father Paul Rose, the ruddy-faced young priest, or "Young Father Rose." You would have liked to have shocked the septuagenarian Old Father Rose with a ribald confession, but you make your confession with Young Father Rose instead. Face to face with you in confession over several months, Young Father Rose always hears the same confession: "I have not loved God with all my heart, mind, and soul, nor have I loved my neighbour as myself."
You had read the memoirs of an anonymous Russian monk who used to make the same confession with his confessor. Old Father Rose might have thought that you were being coy, if he had heard your confession, but Young Father Rose says that it's the most beautiful confession that he has ever heard. He even preaches a sermon about it.
Perhaps Young Father Rose would like to hear more, because he reveals things about himself as well. For example, he tells you that he was engaged to be married but broke off the engagement to become a priest. He felt guilty about it afterwards, he says. You, on the other hand, tell him about Gilles, the little boy who drowned after he had a big fight with you. You feel responsible for Gilles' death, because you had said that you wished he were dead.
You, Gilles, and Alice were a ménage à trois. You and Alice wanted to take turns being his wife, though you didn't have sex— you were much too young for that. But Gilles put his hand on your heart under your shirt as you sat behind a neighbour's shed and felt your heart beat. He was the first boy you kissed. But you and Gilles had a fight, and you told him that you hated him and wished that he was dead. When he drowned while he and his family were up at Rosseau Lake in Ontario, you were devastated. Then you read the memoirs of the Russian monk. Those memoirs gave you comfort at a bad time in your life.
Young Father Rose falls in love with you; he's ready to break his vows. It is no coincidence that he always hears your confession last. Face to face with you, he casually touches you more and more. You read poetry to each other. Then you place his hand on your heart as you and the young priest swear your love for each other and agree to a rendezvous under the stars in the park down by the left bank of the river. Across the river, on the right bank, is Ontario, where you have family who still speak French.
"The gazebo in the park," you whisper to Young Father Rose seductively. "Be there, or be square." Then you kiss him, touching the tip of his nose with the tip of your tongue.
Maybe the young priest is sincere; maybe he really loves you for yourself. But you are only fourteen years old. You want him to be the first, because you're still a virgin, but he never shows up. You are hurt, and then angry, because you even wanted to run away with him and live among the Inuit, maybe in the Northwest Territories or Hudson Bay, where nobody would ever find you. "Maybe he likes choir boys," you mutter to yourself.
Then you see the Aurora Borealis flashing like crazy in the autumn sky to the north, and you forget about your would-be lover; he no longer exists for you. There's only you and the autumn sky, flashing all around you. At first, it looks like there's going to be a storm, with flashes like lightning behind the clouds, but these flashes are multi-coloured: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. There are streamers like flares from a flare gun, and a meteor shower as the sky lights up in all different colours. Then you see green light coming down from the clouds at ninety-degree angles, like curtains waving in the wind. You almost expect to see an extraterrestrial being come down from the clouds, or even Christ himself. Then you see two streaks of light cross each other diagonally in the shape of St. Andrew's cross. You don't believe it! "Ayoille," you murmur to yourself.
Then, you suddenly feel a strange sensation starting in your pelvis and enveloping your entire body. It's extremely painful at first, then extremely pleasant, and soon you are writhing on the floor of the treated wood gazebo on your back in ecstasy before you raise a cry to the multi-coloured heavens, still flashing like crazy all around you. The experience is beautiful for you— ethereal— but you don't know how to tell anybody about it because you don't understand what has happened to you. All you know is that something strange has happened to you. You have never felt such pleasure, and you don't want it to ever stop, but you wonder afterwards if you haven't become pregnant. You wonder if the young priest wasn't really a loup garou who assumed another form and met you after all. The loup garou can change into anything, animal or human.
Though it's only October, a few days before your birthday, there's already snow on the ground. Still in a trance, you come to a river while on the way home where ice has begun to form and try to walk across it, but you fall in. It's only because you're a strong swimmer that you don't drown, because the current is swift and the water is deep. You save yourself only by seizing the exposed root of a large tree and pulling yourself out of the river. But by the time that you come home, you're delirious and almost frozen. There's ice clinging to your hair and your flannel shirt, like you have just awakened after a sleep of a thousand years under the ice. The other kids at school will laugh at you and call you pucelle à neige—"snow virgin"— after they find out what has happened to you. Kids will laugh about anything.
The moment that you arrive home, your mother and your older sisters, Monique and Joëlle, strip you of your wet clothes at the back door and wrap a blanket around you. Then they lead you to the bathroom and help you to take a warm shower as you babble incoherently about the Aurora Borealis and the loup garou. An old doctor who still makes house calls arrives and tells your parents that you have pneumonia and acute hypothermia. "Bathe her in alcohol if her fever gets too high," he advises.
While still recuperating in bed, you overhear your mother casually say to your father a few days later, "Young Father Rose has left the parish. I wonder why..."
"I don't think this parish was right for him anyway," your father replies. "Some people can't take the North Country."
Young Father Rose was from Belgium, not Canada. Everybody made fun of his accent behind his back.
Alice comes to see you while you recover from pneumonia, and from the experience of almost drowning. She tells you about her new boyfriend, Luc, who's a second or third cousin of yours from another town. It looks like it's serious between them; Alice says that she's in love. You are jealous of Luc, because you're afraid of losing your closest friend. You and Alice had made a vow when you were young: "When we are over thirty, if we are still single or widows, I will lie down with you under the stars. I swear by the Aurora Borealis." A vow half made in jest, like Don Giovanni inviting the statue of the man that he had just killed to a party in that opera by Mozart. You had both thought it stupid to be old and alone when you could have each other after your husbands had died, when no man would want you; that's why you made that vow.
You didn't want to sleep alone, but now, many years later, you're afraid that Alice is going to die and leave you alone. Therefore, you feel abandoned— you both feel cheated. You're a little angry at Alice. In the end, you might one day sleep alone after all, unless Alice recovers, or you die before your husband.
You realize now, many years later, that you and Alice could have had a mariage à la bastonnaise, like your sister, Joëlle, and her friend, Brooke, but you both wanted children. While you and Alice have had boyfriends, you have always told yourself that you could march by sail or by steam. You believed that homosexuality was a choice, neither good nor bad, despite the Church and its teaching about it. What is a question of sexual orientation eventually becomes one of preference, you believe, but you have chosen not to be gay.
Yet Alice was your lover as well as your friend: you had your hand on her heart; she had her hand on yours. You learned to kiss by "experimenting" with each other. If only one of you were a man, you might have been lovers in the flesh, maybe even married. You realize now that Alice was your soul mate, but you were always afraid to do it because you were afraid of losing a friend: lovers quarrel, you know. Your families would not have understood, either. To Alice, the love between two people of the same sex is a parody of the real thing: the love between a man and a woman. On some level, you believe it, too, because you were raised a Catholic. Therefore, nobody in your family— not even you— has ever accepted your sister Joëlle's friend, Brooke, completely, even though they are raising Brooke's daughter together. Somebody has always found a reason to dislike Brooke. But the one time that you and Alice quarrelled violently as adolescents, you tearfully reconciled on her front porch: you didn't think that you could live without each other.
Besides, you wanted ecstasy when you conceived a child, not a test tube for a lover. You wanted your cries to wake up the manitou at the moment of conception because of the pain of childbirth afterwards. And children have need of a father as well as a mother: it's through your husband that your son will learn to be a man, through you that your daughter will learn to be a woman. As well, your son will compare his girlfriends to you, while your daughter will compare her boyfriends to her father. Children have need of both parents— of many parents, in fact— and both you and Alice love your husbands. You have always liked men, both as people and as lovers. You have always liked people, though you have learned to fear men.
Many years later, you and Alice cuddle on the bed in your bedroom under some blankets, before Alice has to go to work, because she has need of you. You place your hand on her heart from behind and hold it there; it's calming for both of you. In her hour of despair, Alice is content for a moment; she sighs. She feels your love from the warmth of your hand on her heart, and you can feel her heart beating. Then you kiss her on the cheek and murmur, "Maman loves you."
It was a game that you used to play as children, with each other and with little Gilles. But Alice starts to cry because her real mother died when she was an adolescent. She was an only child, whereas you were one of several children. Alice was suicidal that night when you were alone together. She and her father had a big fight after her mother's funeral and he ran away to Florida with another woman, a cocaine addict like him, though he later came back. (Her father and his friend used to do lines of cocaine on the kitchen table in front of you and Alice.) So you snuck out of your bedroom at night to be with Alice and you didn't come back home until dawn. You climbed up the drainpipe to your bedroom upstairs and went back to bed before anybody woke up. Only the cat seemed to be aware that you were gone. However, they found out about it at school. All of the kids thought that you and Alice had lied down together.
Well, didn't you lie down together— not once, but several times, from the time you were children? For you, it was no big thing to cuddle in bed with Alice while spending the night at her place or yours like puppies or kittens. Children understand, better than adults, that the soul is neither male nor female but androgynous and without gender. That's why they often form strong attachments to someone of the same sex when they are very young, and even later in life, even if they never have sex.
Before Alice goes to work, you kiss each other twice and say that you love each other— because you really love each other. Then you cry after Alice has gone to work, because she could be dying. Alice is a nurse at a hospital, just like you. You have always had parallel lives, you and Alice.
As with Gilles, after he drowned, you are devastated now.

Chantal

After Alice goes to work, I'm resolved to save my marriage. But I work nights while my husband works days, so we don't even see each other for a couple of days. When I see him again, I tell him, "I love you, but I want the truth, Robert: were you unfaithful in Rio? Have you ever been unfaithful?"
He nods his head slowly and admits it, "Yes, Chantal, in Rio, but her name was Flora. I only wanted to do it with Maria."
I slap him hard in the face and shout, "You hypocrite! You make me crawl when you're the one who should be crawling!"
Then I start to cry.
"I was weak," he shouts, rubbing his face where I slapped him. "You did it out of spite, the way I see it. It was the spite that actually hurt me, not so much the infidelity. You wanted me to find out, or you would have come back to the hotel much sooner after your little rendezvous— without the love bites on your neck. I don't think you would have gone out to deliver a baby afterwards, if you didn't want me to know."
I apologize for having slapped him, and then I say quietly, "I was weak, too, Robert. When I saw him in the sun at the beach, he looked like a god. Like he was an angel— or a devil. We really had hooked atoms."
Then I tell him again, "It's you that I love, Robert. So I want to know: Do we stay together or divorce? Please give me another chance— please give us another chance! Maybe we can start again at zero?"
He looks at me hard and says, "I'll forgive you once, Chantal. As you forgive me, I will forgive you."
Those words are like a blow to the face for me, but all I want is to forgive and be forgiven one time. I would like to forgive like the saints forgive, but it's so hard— that's why saints are saints. I still want to go back to South America, but it's because of the baby, the one that I lost there— the one that Rosa lost there. It isn't José, it never was. Then I plead to Robert, "Will you please say you're sorry? You really hurt me too, you know."
Then I sob without constraint. This is my "dark night of the soul." It isn't just the guilt but everything else: the girl at the beach; José and his woman, the midwife; the little ones with their guns; the smiling pig sticking his head through the hole in the wall of the little shack. It's everything. I am transported back in time to Cidade de Deus, where the children cruelly laugh, smoke their marihuana cigarettes, and brandish big pistols that their little hands can barely hold. All through the night, you hear gunshots in the distance, and people nearby hurling their threats. You always hear the loud music from the radios, dispersed with the barking of wild dogs from time to time. There's José's mother with her red turban selling black beans and rice, and Lourdes, with mud on her shins and feet after a summer deluge. There's the baby and its mother, both of them alive, only the baby is no longer alive. I see José, and then myself, as children, sitting in a large and shiny metal washtub as his mother gives us a bath, pouring water over us. I see my childhood friend, Gilles, then Alice— even Robert— like we're all her children. Then I see the bodies of children lying in a pool of blood at the entrance to the Cathedral of Candelaria. There's St. Benedict's monastery with all of its gold, and Robert arguing about global warming with that Christian couple during our honeymoon on the Gaspé Peninsula. There's St. Boniface, about whom Robert tells about chopping down a giant sacred tree to convert the pagans, and men setting fire to the rain forest. Then I hear the voice of my aunt Marie-Claire, who died young of rheumatic fever before I was born, without understanding what she's saying. Or is it my own voice? I don't know anymore. There's a woman with six arms, but I wonder if it isn't Marie-Claire— very threatening, like a giant spider, but wounded, missing two arms. Then I see Alice, with naked torso, missing her arms like the Venus de Milo, her body ravaged by cancer, and myself without a head, the winged Goddess of Victory at Samothrace, dressed in scarlet.
I am the Scarlet Woman, the Whore of Babylon— the one who wanted to desecrate the altar for the love of a priest as an adolescent. We had agreed to a rendezvous under the stars, but he never showed up; he later transferred to another parish, I think. Now I'm ready to panic— falling into the abyss where, when I hit the bottom, my body will be smashed like a wine glass into a million pieces. When I die, what remains? Nothing. There's only nothingness— the nothingness from which we sprang, the nothingness to which we return. There's nothing, and I suffer from vertigo in realizing that.
I can't get these terrible images out of my mind, but Robert holds me in his arms and says, speaking with difficulty, "I'm sorry, Chantal— can you forgive me?"
Or maybe I can't hear him very well. His apology is difficult for him, but sincere— I know it. I nod my head, unable to speak. I'm not myself— I'm not who I was. I feel so small, insignificant. Can what I have done really compare to what I have seen, to what has happened to me— to everybody? I feel so broken, responsible for everything. It's me who's responsible— for everything. We are all responsible, for everything and everybody. My father was right: we are our brother's keeper. The world is my child and I am its mother, only life is too big for me right now. I'm overwhelmed.
"Are you all right, Chantal?" Robert asks.
"I'm not myself," I repeat in a faraway voice. "I'm not myself."
I continue to sob and he says, "Shhh, everything's all right. I'm the one who loves you."
I nod my head, but I'm not myself anymore. Then I feel his heart beat against my ear, and I believe him. And I forgive him. It doesn't matter now; there's nothing to forgive now. Then I look up to him and say, "I'm sorry— really sorry."
He nods his head and replies, "I know that— it doesn't matter any more. I'm sorry, too."
Then I tell him about Alice, that she has cervical cancer. "Is she going to die?" he asks, concerned.
"I don't know. It's too soon to know."
Robert holds me in his arms again and I listen to his heartbeat. Then I feel my own.
I will follow my heart from now on.

*****

It's spring, I am planting a single fleur-de-lis in the backyard. Then I see my husband standing over me. It's threatening for me, and I stand up quickly, knocking the dirt off my hands and knees. "I bought a few to replace the ones that I already have," I tell him, avoiding his eyes, "since they're probably all going to die soon. But none of the others from the nursery have made it. It could be, the nursery got a batch of flowers with some mould."
I kneel down again and gently rub one of the white bell-shaped flowers, the one that I just have planted, between my fingers. Then I look up at my husband and say, "This one here is already wilted. Too much water. If we get a lot of rain this year, it may not survive, either."
He only looks at me suspiciously, so I tell him quietly, "It isn't for him, Robert; it's for the baby. Somebody has to remember him."
"Well, can't you plant some white chrysanthemums?" Robert asks, still suspicious. "People buy white chrysanthemums when someone has died."
"Chrysanthemums are annuals, Robert," I reply curtly. "You have to replant them in the spring because they die in the fall."
When he sees the wedding ring on my finger, he exclaims, "Ah, I see you've found your wedding ring again! I was beginning to think you were tired of married life."
Then he looks at my chest and asks, "What's happened to your pendant, eh? I bought that for you for your birthday."
I look down at my chest and realize that my pendant is missing. I blush when I remember why. "I must have lost it," I mumble, all flustered, avoiding Robert's eyes again. "I don't know what's happened to it."
I feel guilty because I have lied to him again. But I can't tell him the truth, that I gave it to him, can I?
I buy a whole batch of fleur-de-lis and plant them all over the backyard— one for everybody I love, both family and friends. But there are so many people that I love that the backyard is soon covered with flowers. There's no pattern; I plant them here and there— everywhere in the backyard where there's enough sunlight. Then I plant several other species of flowers that are mentioned in the Bible: white hyacinths, narcissuses, and crocuses. I plant them all over our backyard until it is run wild with flowers. Some I plant early in the spring, others in the autumn. Some I plant in the shade, near-shade, or sun. Some bloom early, others late. This is a religious experience for me: I see the fleur-de-lis all over the hills of Judea, where Jesus walked.
Then I fall to my knees and weep, but for joy this time: I feel that I can let go of the baby that died in Rio, because he no longer belongs to me. Then I realize that my children don't belong to me, either— they belong to God. Nothing is mine, not even my soul. God, as opposed to gods and goddesses, is a void, a nothingness from which we all sprang. Jesus is just an image, a reflection of the divine in a cosmic pool of water, like the Virgin Mary and Yemanjá, the African goddess. All of the gods and all of the saints are reflections of the divine. We are all reflections of the divine— we are all divine. We are all saints, sanctified to the degree that we want to be sanctified, to the degree that we think we deserve.
Then I see a mirror image of Jesus in the pool of water in the backyard. He has his arms open wide, like the statue on Corcovado in Rio. My husband dug that pool when we first bought this house. He has several large goldfish that he keeps in the garage during the winter. If you clap two small Chinese cymbals together before feeding them, the fish come to the edge of the pool because they know that someone will feed them. I think my husband was experimenting with the fish the way Pavlov was experimenting with his dogs.
I take several photographs of the flowers with a digital camera. I take a picture of the pool as well, but I'm the only one who can see Jesus in the photograph— only I can see him, but not very clearly. Maybe I'm hallucinating, but I think that I can see a faint image of Jesus with his arms spread out.
What a beautiful garden! I like to sit down on the bench by the pool and meditate. Sometimes I will do ballet steps, or spin around on the patio like a whirling dervish with the kids, or even by myself. When I am alone, I do some yoga as well. I feel at peace here, sitting on the bench in the lotus position. I also do walking meditation, walking back and forth on the patio while meditating.
I am at peace with myself and with the world. I am at peace.


Robert



The summer after our vacation in Rio, we went camping at Matane Provincial Park in the Notre-Dame Mountains. I really wasn't in the mood for it; I doubted that Chantal was, either. I tried to find excuses not to go, but it was the semester break and the kids really wanted to go camping. Avril was twelve years old while Patrick was seven, so Chantal and I decided to make the most of it now while we could; the kids would soon be a bored ados who didn't want to do anything with their family anymore, so we went camping. It was Chantal's idea, really.
The Notre-Dame Mountains are part of the reason why Québec is la belle province: tall trees and mountains; clear-running streams; and several species of animals, if you're alert and they don't run off before you see them. The mountains are dense and wooded like they were at the Conquest of 1759, but there are lots of trails for the bicyclists and hikers now. We even saw a solitary coyote along the Navigator's Route by the side of the road, near the Trois Pistoles River— the highlight of our trip up there. Chantal took a photo of the coyote with her cell phone, and then she became silent. We drove to the mountains mostly in silence. We made an effort to sing in order to pass the time, but that stopped about halfway through the trip; nobody felt like singing. Chantal and I weren't talking. Oh, we hadn't been fighting lately, but there was still a tension in the air that hung about us like the fumes from a chemical truck that had turned over on the highway and released its noxious cargo into the air. I was afraid of saying the wrong thing, and I think that Chantal was afraid of the same thing. So we weren't talking; it was better this way, we thought.
We arrived at our campsite late in the afternoon, put up our tents and started to unpack. We had two tents, our sleeping bags, and a Coleman gas stove, in case they didn't want you making campfires in the middle of the summer, what with the drought and the danger of forest fires. We had other camping gear, of course, but you don't have to paint a picture: we were a family of four from Montréal, camping in the mountains for one week. Everybody knew the routine: camping gear in the tents and all the foodstuffs in the car with the windows rolled up so that the animals couldn't get to them. There were raccoons and black bears everywhere in the park, as well as opossums and squirrels. The animals had lost their fear of man, for the most part.
The kids were starting to get restless, so Chantal said to me, "Please be a dear and take the kids hiking while I make supper."
The kids and I did some hiking along a trail, and then we returned just before dusk. Supper was ready when we came back, and Chantal was a little angry that we were late.
After supper, we had a sing-along with some of the other campers at our site. That is, people sang songs and told campfire stories. Then a guy named David Poile told us the story of Rose LaTulipe, the young woman who was nearly seduced by the devil into being unfaithful to her betrothed, Gabriel. The adults all knew the story. The setting is an inn, whose owner is Rose's father. As an adolescent, I was always amused by the image of our Rose, laughing in the arms of her demonic lover as he almost tips her upside down, legs high in the air, her petticoats and her skirt almost flying over her head like the petals of a tulip. However, I thought that the storyteller was a little risqué, the way he told the story before a public that included children. It was to be understood that Rose LaTulipe had actually betrayed her beloved in the flesh, though the littlest ones might not have understood his nuances. His wife seemed to be a little uncomfortable as well, though she said nothing. Chantal was uncomfortable— for obvious reasons, I think. I wanted to object, but I thought, somehow, that the storyteller was going somewhere with his story.
The storyteller left his public in suspense just before the denouement, where Gabriel bursts in, catches them in flagrante dilecto, and must decide whether to forgive Rose for her infidelities and continue with the wedding as planned, or let the devil carry her away to hell, where she will be the devil's toy forever. Instead of providing a satisfying ending to the story, Poile posed a few questions to the children. "What do you think Gabriel should do, eh?" he asked his public. "Should he forgive Rose LaTulipe, or should he let the devil carry her away to hell?"
The children were about evenly divided, those that took up the challenge. One boy, who was about twelve, said, "Gabriel can always find another and let the devil take Rose. As I see it, it's one to lose and ten to find."
The storyteller laughed and said, "Aren't we the ladies' man, eh?"
Finally, I objected and asked, "Was that last comment necessary, my friend? Was the entire story— or rather, the way you told it— necessary?"
The man become all serious. "I'm sorry, monsieur, if I have offended you," he said, indignant, "but I think this story has always said much about us Québécois as a nation. We are a devout people, I think, one that tries to be merciful, but one who can see the humour in life as well. As I see it, each generation must find an ending for itself. I myself am a man of religion, a deacon of the Catholic Church."
Then he gestured with a regal arm toward his wife and children and said, "Voilà, my blonde, Yvette, and our three children— the reasons why I'm not a priest."
There was some laughter among the other campers at our fire as he gestured with his right hand towards his wife, who was blonde with pale skin and clear blue eyes, and the children sitting next to him. His wife looked to be pregnant with a fourth child, though not very far along.
"I hope to instill in these little ones the values that we have always held as a nation," Poile said. "As a Christian nation..."
His wife laughed agreeably and said, "Now, now, David! Don't get carried way! You know that the Bloc Québécois no more shares our Christian values than the Liberals."
"Well, I have an ending," I said facetiously. "Why not have Rose LaTulipe spend half the year with the devil in hell and half the year on earth with Gabriel, like Proserpina with the Roman god Pluto and her mother Ceres. That way, both the devil and Gabriel can use her. Then, if she has lived a virtuous and Christian life in her six months here on earth every year, she can go to heaven after she dies."
My daughter, Avril, shook her head and said, "No, papa, I think it's better to forgive, because we all make mistakes. Where would we be if our parents never forgave us after the first time we disobeyed them?"
My son, Patrick, readily concurred. "I'm always bad," he said, "but maman always forgives me."
Chantal rubbed Patrick's shoulders, kissed him on the back of the head, and whispered something into his ear. Then she spoke for the first time. "I think that he should forgive her," Chantal said slowly, "but she must be patient with him. She hurt him very much, you know, and it will take some time for the hurt to heal." Then she looked up at me and said in a low voice, "Healing always takes time, Robert."
Yes, it would take a lot of time. Our marriage was still reeling from our Christmas vacation in Rio, where both of us had committed adultery. We had both asked forgiveness of each other, yet we still had trouble forgiving each other. Our sexual life was different now; there was a certain aggression to it, an animal frenzy. Sometimes, I wanted to tear into her breasts with my teeth while shaking my head like a dog. She, on the other hand, seemed to want to hurt me too. She would squeeze my pine hard with her hand, while looking up at me to see if my faced betrayed any pain. Then she would smile malevolently.
Though Chantal was only of average size, she was incredibly strong, with the supple body of a swimmer from years of swimming laps in a pool. With the muscles of her vagina, she could squeeze very hard— she could hurt you. When I took her from behind, en lèvrette, she would scream long and hard into a pillow when she came, so that she children wouldn't hear. However, I'm sure that the children heard anyway. You could say that we were like Adam and Eve in Milton's Paradise Lost, just after they had eaten of the forbidden fruit and their marital relations had changed from love and intimacy to animal lust.
That night, while the kids were asleep, we sat by a fire, talking about anything, yet talking about nothing at the same time. Chantal was subdued, and I felt the same. We knew what we wanted to say, but we didn't know how to say it. Finally, I just said it. "What do we do now?" I asked.
Chantal shrugged her shoulders and said, "I don't know, Robert. If you don't forgive me now, do you think the devil's going to carry me away to hell like Rose LaTulipe? And what good would that do if he did?"
I didn't reply. A man who has been betrayed by his blonde wants— has the need for— an act of contrition, but when she asks forgiveness, is it good enough? No matter what, you can't change the past, but you have to reinvent it somehow or you can't move on. In order to forgive, you must forget the wrong against you with the ease of the evildoer. "I couldn't have done that," says the evildoer. "You're right," says the one who was wronged. "Must be, I was mistaken."
Chantal and I have always exchanged apologies: the one will ask forgiveness for something, and then the other will ask forgiveness for something else. That way, we have both admitted our wrongs and tried to make amends for them.
As Chantal sat on a log before the dying embers of our little fire— of David and Yvette Poile's fire, actually— I did something that I hadn't done before: I knelt in front her, wrapped my arms around her lower legs, and laid my head upon her knees. Then I said that I was sorry. I was sorry for what I had done in Rio, and all the other things that I had ever done since we had been married; I was sorry that I was a bastard sometimes.
I think Chantal was startled by my gesture, but she only kissed me on my head and covered me with her arms and her torso; I felt the tips of her breasts against the top of my head. "I'll try to forgive you too," she said, "but you must be patient with me."
When I looked up at her, she held my head in both of her hands and kissed me twice on the lips. Then she looked into my eyes, smiled, and said, ironically, "I won't let the devil take you away to hell, Monsieur LaTulipe."
Just then, what looked like multi-coloured lightning started to flash in the sky to the north. Your first reaction is a terrified one: "Oh, shit, what's happening now?" Then you're struck with a sacred awe the moment when you realize what it really is. No matter how many times you have seen it, you can't believe what is happening when you first see it. Is this the way the world ends: with lights of all different colours flashing and zig-zagging across the sky, or with little black and white dots and green beams descending from heaven? No wonder the ancients were afraid!
We were both afraid, yet struck with a terrible sense of beauty as something otherworldly— something that you cannot understand. Somehow, the meteorologists telling us that this phenomenon is caused by a disturbance in the Van Allen radiation belt that surrounds the planet cannot explain away this mystery. Okay then, you can predict the next time there will be sunspot activity, but who understands the relationship between the Aurora Borealis in Canada and a tsunami in Asia on Boxing Day a few years later? Who knows how it will affect a man and a woman watching it? This is Chaos Theory we're talking about. The flapping of a butterfly's wings in China has something to do with hurricanes off the coast of Florida, but we don't know how. We only know that it would take a lot of butterflies, flapping their wings at the same time, to generate enough wind to cause a hurricane in Florida.
For a moment, we forgot the uncomfortable drive to Matane Provincial Park, the boorish storyteller, and our awkward attempt to come to an understanding; we even forgot Rio. We forgot about all that in the sun's baptism with its ultraviolet and infrared rays, in heaven's anointing us with its colours. We forgot everything. Some things are bigger than we are— like the sky and its coat of many colours. Some things are beyond all understanding, like the forces of nature, or a woman who commits adultery and then crawls on her hands and knees to beg forgiveness.
I don't understand that woman any better than I understand the Aurora Borealis. I only know that she has the compulsion to slide down bannisters and throw mashed potatoes at everybody during supper. Having been married twice, I know from experience that you can never know what you're getting into when you first get married. If you knew, you might run out of the church screaming like a madman, or hope that the car will overturn while en route to your honeymoon, crushing you both to death while you are still happy.
There's a logical explanation for everything, but logical explanations aren't always enough. When the parishioners ask the Reverend David Poile why God lets tragedy happen to them, they don't want lots of science, but peace and understanding. They're looking for some kind of sense in something that is inherently senseless. But if everything made sense in life, nothing would happen. If there is a God, then he must be as crazy as we are.
Under the Aurora Borealis, with the sky flashing like crazy, we exchanged our apologies, me, with my head on Chantal's knees, Chantal, with her torso shielding my head as if to protect me. Then I felt a single tear fall on the bald crown of my head. "I'm sorry," she murmured. "I'm sorry that I have ever hurt you."
I was sorry, too, for everything.
There was just the sky above us, with flashes like multi-coloured lightning, and then it stopped. It might have lasted twenty minutes.
When we made love in our little tent, we did it slowly, taking our time, though she gasped as if in pain when I first penetrated her. Then we cuddled after we were done, her, with her head in the curve of my shoulder. "I would like another baby," she said afterwards. "It it's a boy, I want to name him Mathieu. If it's a girl, Lourdes."
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Yes," she replied. 'In fact, I would like lots of babies. Then I want to play the organ in church on Sunday, like my mother. I've been playing Bach on the piano a lot lately."
I didn't think very much about what she had said. Maybe she wanted another baby, but I thought that she probably would change her mind about wanting lots of babies like a good Catholic mother. But you never know with Chantal.
I felt absolved, but so did she, I think. But healing always takes time.

Chantal's Inner Voice

You are swimming in an indoor swimming pool at a YWCA, since it's winter. In your reverie, you have stripped naked and entered the ocean as if in a trance. As you slowly enter the water, little fishes nibble at your ankles. Up to your neck in the water, you stop to let the fishes nibble at your entire body below the water line; the sensation is very pleasant. Then you start swimming from the shore. From time to time, you stop swimming to turn around and look back at the shore. You always smile with satisfaction before swimming out to sea again. You swim and swim, thinking of nothing, feeling only the waves trying to push you back to shore until a great wave will come and take you far out to sea and drown you.
Beyond the shore there are porpoises and whales. They seem happy as they swim around you. You even ride on a dolphin's back for a while. You see little white and black dots before your eyes as the sun reflects off the water. You are Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen. You are Venus, returning to the sea foam from where she came; you are the goddess of love. Then you see St. Theresa in the sun: St. Theresa is you and you are St. Theresa, opening up like a flower when God envelopes you with his light. You want to be God's mistress, like St. Theresa of Avila, if he wants you.
Then, in the middle of your swim, you are suddenly pierced by a million shafts of multi-coloured light, all the colours of the Aurora Borealis: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. What a jolt! The sensation is extremely painful at first, then very pleasant. Your heartbeat seems to stop for a moment, but then starts again, followed by a great wave of emotion, a great love for God and the world. You lose all sense of time and space, and then you weep for joy. You no longer know if you're swimming in the sea or in the swimming pool, but this experience is very real for you, very moving. In your ecstasy, you don't want these lights to ever stop piercing your body, but they stop in the end, leaving you exhausted. You feel that you barely can swim to the other side of the pool; a lifeguard might have to pull you out.
Then you hear the voice of the Virgin Mary, who's the African goddess Yemanjá, whose skin is black, brown or white— any colour you want— Our Lady of Yemanjá. She might be the Hindu goddess Kali, with the six arms, very threatening when wrathful, or maybe your deceased aunt Marie-Claire. You are looking for your aunt: maybe she will send a great fish to swallow you so that you can rejoin her again in paradise. Then you see Life standing on the shore, her right breast bared in the manner of the Marseillaise, weeping. You weep as well. You ask forgiveness because you have always been unfaithful to her, but she smears her lipstick across her face with the back of her hand. She's a brunette, like you. Maybe she is you.
You stop swimming. In your reverie, a great wave pushes you back to shore. Your life isn't over yet; there's still work to be done. It isn't time to rejoin your aunt— it isn't time. The sea doesn't seem ready to take you back, so you swim slowly back to shore, stopping to float on your back from time to time like a sea otter. You're sure that the waves will take you back to shore if you're too tired to swim, your body kept afloat by its natural buoyancy. Then there's a tsunami, and a gigantic wave suddenly pushes you far out to sea. At first, you don't know what has happened. You are momentarily submerged, disoriented, not knowing which way is up or down. You panic, afraid of drowning unless you can swim back to shore, and you swim furiously against the tide— you're afraid of death. But that's life, isn't it, to swim against the tide until a wave submerges us and we drown?
Nevertheless, you choose life, because there's still so much to do. You are love, you are life, you are even divine— all of us are divine. You don't know much Latin, unlike your husband, but this is your heart's prayer, its blessing:
Gloria in excelsis Deo. In terra, pax in hominibus bonæ voluntatis...


José

Lourdes and I have been fighting a lot lately. It starts over a trivial matter and then escalates into something major. I just get tired of her nagging. She complains about me being gone all the time, but who wants to be around a woman who nags and complains? Then there's her old mother. Her mother constantly complains as well, usually about her rheumatism; the old piranha has arthritis of the hips and knees.
Finally, I just blow up. Rather than fight all the time, I prefer to be out making money, driving the tourists to and from the airport— wherever they want to go. It's better this way. At least I'm useful.
Before I leave for the airport, Lourdes comes back from the letter box with an envelope. "I think we're being evicted," she says, worried.
"How do you know?" I ask. "You can't even read."
"I know what an eviction notice looks like, Jecu," Lourdes replies, morosely. "Believe me, we're being evicted. Lots of people here are being evicted."
"Why?" I ask angrily. "Haven't you been paying the rent? I give you the money for the rent each month. What have you been doing with the money if you haven't been paying the rent?"
"I paid the rent," Lourdes replies, indignant. "I always pay the rent."
I snatch the envelope from her hand, tear it open, and read it. Lourdes was right: we're being evicted. The notice says that we are three months behind on our rent. We have until the fifteenth of the month to either pay the rent in full or move out. Lourdes still insists that she has been paying the rent, so tomorrow morning, I will have to go to the rental office to settle this matter myself. Luckily, Lourdes has saved all the receipts; the matter should therefore be easy to resolve. However, I still have a sleepless night, worried that we might face eviction. Finally, I drink some vodka; that always does the trick.
When I go down to the rental office the next morning, the secretary reads the eviction notice and then the receipts. She concedes that an error has been made, but then she tells me, "I'm sorry, senhor, but I have to inform you that we are increasing everybody's rent by five thousand cruzeiros, effective next month. It's the only way we can get the water turned back on."
I don't believe it! How are we going to come up with five thousand cruzeiros in less than a month? Since we have a month-to-month lease now, they can raise our rent whenever they want. If the inflation continues the way it has, they will undoubtedly raise our rent again and again until we will have to move out.
As they say, the writing is on the wall. There are tenements with squatters living in them all over downtown Rio, so we quickly find some abandoned apartments nearby and move into them, with Lourdes' mother complaining the entire time about having to move. But we are fortunate: we have a car with which to transport our belongings; others have to carry everything when they have to move.
Our new lodgings have two bedrooms, just like our old apartments, with a kitchen and dining room, and one bathroom. We have no electricity or running water, but the electricity and water had been shut off to the old apartments anyway. The only difference now is that we are living here rent-free, until the owner calls for the police to evict us and all the other squatters. But who knows when that will happen? The police have other matters to deal with, like the gangs in the streets.
The morning after the move, I drive down to the airport, where I pick up two women at the international terminal. The first one is petite, an Asian, with long dark brown hair down to the middle of her back. She has a rounded forehead, high cheekbones, and slanted eyes. Her breasts are very small, and her hips and waist are narrow. She isn't very pretty, until she smiles. Then she's cute, and she's very friendly. She's wearing a royal blue halter top and beige shorts, definitely a tourist. I would say that she is in her early twenties. She has a big floppy hat and sunglasses, because of the hot sun.
The other one is blonde, at least a head taller than the little Asian, thin, with a rather shapeless body, but also wearing a halter top and shorts, sunglasses, and a hat. She's also in her twenties, like the Asian. She might be attractive if she wasn't scowling all the time, but after one look at me, all she does is scowl. I don't like her, and she evidently doesn't like me, either. She doesn't appeal to me at all.
As they sit in the back seat of my taxi, I check them out discreetly in the rearview mirror. At first, I wonder if they aren't a couple, but after a few minutes of seeing no overt signs of affection between them, I conclude that they are probably just friends. So I introduce myself, and they introduce themselves in return. The little Asian is named Michelle while the tall blonde is Kathy. Michelle tells me about herself while Kathy stares out the window in the passenger's seat on the left side behind the driver's seat. "I'm from Manila, in the Philippines," says Michelle. "I came to the United States after I married some guy in the Marine Corps. We lived on the Marine base in El Toro, California, and then we got divorced. Thank God we didn't have any children— there were rats on that base! I now live in Tustin, a small town where the people are mostly rednecks. But Tustin isn't very far from the beach, and it's a nice place to live. The problem is that I don't know anybody, except the people that I work with, and I have lived in southern California for seven years."
"So what do you do for a living?" I ask.
"I'm a registered nurse at the naval hospital in Long Beach by day and a topless dancer by night," Michelle replies. "But it pays the rent. I swear, I make more money dancing than working in a hospital! That's how I was able to save my pennies for Rio. I sometimes bring home three hundred dollars a night by dancing. It's easy money."
"So you actually dance topless in a bar?" I ask, surprised that she would admit something like that.
"Well, not really," she demurs. "They have a city ordinance against topless and nude dancing in Tustin. Dancers have to cover their breasts, but they can do everything else: squeeze their tits, bump and grind, swing around a pole— whatever. Laws always have loopholes, you know."
She has to explain to me what a loophole is. Then I ask, slyly, "Is your friend there a dancer as well?"
Kathy shoots me an angry look as Michelle replies with haste, "Oh, no! Kathy's going to be an elementary school teacher. She starts her student teaching in September."
Kathy looks over at Michelle, expressionless, and then stares out the window again.
"There are clubs in Rio where you could dance completely naked if you want," I suggest. "You might even make some money."
Through the rearview window, I can see Michelle's eyes light up. "That would be so cool!" she replies.
But Kathy shouts, "Are you out of your fucking mind, Michelle? Rio isn't California, you know! This is the Third World!"
Michelle and I look at each other, and Michelle just shrugs her shoulders. I'm sure Michelle would like to know what has gotten into her friend.
We arrive at their hotel, the Aeroporto Othon, which is on the Avenida Beira-Mar in the business district to the northeast of downtown Rio. Ever the gentleman, I help them with their baggage. The concierge at the Aeroporto Othon knows me, so it's okay.
Today could be my day: Michelle wants to go shopping while Kathy gets a few hours' sleep. "You'll have to excuse my friend," Michelle says to me when Kathy is out of earshot. "She had a bad flight, because her ears were popping on the airplane. She's normally laid back."
While Michelle changes into something more suitable for an afternoon in the hot sun, I stare out at the ocean from the balcony of her room, which is on the eighth floor. The ocean has always fascinated me. If you sailed across the ocean to the east, you could end up in Africa, where some of my ancestors came from. But if you let the tide carry you south along the coast, you may eventually end up in Tierra del Fuego, from where you can see the Aurora Australis, with its colours in all their madness, going bling-bling like those of the Aurora Borealis to the north. The Aurora Australis and the Aurora Borealis are really the same thing. However, most people in South America don't see the Aurora Australis. One rarely, if ever, sees the Aurora Australis in Brazil, unless they live in Porto Alegre, which is in the south.
Then I think of Chantal. I think of her hair, the colour of auburn by day, colour of the shimmering night at dusk. With her back to me, the tips of her breasts are like two stars at night between my fingers, her bare shoulders, like a perch for my lips. Then she turns her heard towards mine and closes her eyes while lancing her tongue into my mouth like a comet. It's frightening!
Ah, Chantal! You are a rainbow that haphazardly spills its colours from time to time, like a painter careless with her easel! Like the Aurora Borealis.

The End



Questions For the Reader:

What is the mood of this work? Comical or tragic? Maybe both?
How does the fact that Chantal and Robert are in Brazil affect their behaviour?
What is Chantal's mental and emotional state before she and her husband go to Brazil?
What do you think is the state of Robert and Chantal's marriage?
What is the significance of Chantal losing her wedding ring? How does she react when her mother finds it?
What signs of resentment do you see in Chantal? Why do you think she calls Robert a pedophile?
What are the indications that Robert had already become disenchanted with his marriage with Chantal before they went to Rio?
Why did Chantal and Robert bring their children to Rio?
In what ways does the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in New York only a few months earlier influence Robert and Chantal's thinking about travelling abroad?
How important was Chantal's childhood friendship with Alice and Gilles? For instance, how did she react when Gilles drowned, and how does she react many years later when she learns that Alice has cancer?
Why does Robert call children "cannibals"? Does that give you any clues to what he feels about his own childhood, as well as about children in general?
What are the past events and past relationships that, you think, have influenced Robert's life the most?
How do you think José and his live-in companion Lourdes feel about each other, and why do you think they're still together?
What are some of the events, both past and present, that have influenced José's behaviour?
What event or series of events make José want to give up a life of crime and drive a taxi like his father?
In what ways are Robert and José similar to each other? In what ways are they different?
In what ways is Chantal similar to other lover's in José's past? While do you think she's special?
Robert claims that he was weak while Chantal did it out of spite. Chantal, on the other hand, denies that she ever wanted to hurt Robert. What do you think?
Why do Chantal and Robert, and José and Lourdes, stay together in the end?
How does their participation in the birth of a child effect Chantal and José, and how do they react when they learn that the baby has died? How are Robert and the children affected?
Can you describe the relationship between Chantal and Lourdes?
How do Chantal and José come to think that they have been naïve?
One could say that Chantal is both mystical and mentally ill. She is also diagnosed with glaucoma later on. Do you think there's a relationship between mysticism and physical, mental and emotional health? What about art?
What do you think is the author's concept of time? Is time linear, or is the future just the past happening all over again? Is there any way of breaking out of the time cycle?
Does time heal all wounds?