Chapter 69

Donna met me early Friday evening at O'Hare Airport in Chicago, where she took me to some blues clubs on Michigan Avenue; the place was really jumping. One club was owned by a famous blues guitarist, according to Donna, only I had never heard of him. She also said that the best pizza was made in Chicago. We ate at a place called Barro's; it was the best pizza that I ever ate.

We spent the night in a hotel on Michigan Avenue and had lots of sex, then we took a morning flight to Los Angeles. Donna paid the air fare and everything as a favour to me, because I had said something about wanting to look for my father in Los Angeles.

LA was much larger than Rio, but situated in a valley hemmed in by mountains like Rio, a city of palm trees pointed like needles at the sky, and nameless streets and boulevards so long that some had addresses in six digits and always seem to run out of sidewalk so that you had to walk on the grass or in the street. There were cars everywhere — always cars — no matter where you went. There were a few smog alerts while we were there. Then there were the beaches: always crowded, with thousands of people on weekends, women in their bikinis, like Maria da Conceição. Donna and I spent a few afternoons at Huntington Beach, then ate some pizza. But our favourite pizzeria was at the very tip of Balboa Point. I wondered if there wasn't a lighthouse here at one time.

You could see the Hollywood sign on a hill from far away in the distance. At the corner of Hollywood and Vine, it seemed like every day was Carnival, with people always dressed in their costumes, but no less bizarre than Rio at Carnival. Some of the women, with their sheer fantasias might as well have been naked, but the prostitutes that I saw were the most beautiful that I had ever seen anywhere. "Actresses who can't get a role," Donna said, when she saw me looking.

When we saw how big LA was, I didn't think we could find my father. If he was alive, I thought, he would only be found if he wanted to be found. We tried the telephone directories, the Missing Persons Bureau, the morgues of every county surrounding Los Angeles — everything. We checked death certificates online but found nothing. We even checked the California Department of Corrections, thinking that he might be in prison, but we found nothing. We checked taxi companies as well, showing dispatchers the one photograph that I had of him.

A taxi dispatcher in Santa Ana remembered him: "He was a good driver — never had a problem with him. But he kept apart from the other Mexican drivers. Then he disappeared, like he was abducted by aliens. He didn't come to work, didn't call in sick or nothing — just disappeared. Happens all the time..."

"Do you think something happened to him?" Donna asked.

The dispatcher shrugged his shoulders and replied, "I don't know, miss. He could have been caught in a sweep and sent back to Mexico. Or he could have been robbed and killed, and then his body dumped in a gully somewhere. There's gullies and arroyos all over southern California, you know. His body could have been eaten by coyotes before anybody could make an identification — shit happens. Sorry I can't be more helpful, miss..."

Outside, Donna touched me gently on the arm and said, "I'm sorry, José. If you want, we can hire a private detective who can make a more thorough investigation..."

I shook my head. "Something must have happened to him," I replied. "He wouldn't desert his family like that."

Like Rio, downtown Los Angeles had thousands of homeless people downtown, people really destitute; LA wasn't much different than Rio in that respect. But we didn't find him among the homeless either. My father didn't come up to me, begging me for some change, you know.

Donna hired the private detective anyway, but we never found my father: he had joined the world of missing persons, or maybe run away to Mexico like the dispatcher had said.

*****

We flew back to Toronto, where I saw her apartments for the first time, two of them. They were the most beautiful apartments that I had ever seen, no bigger than mine back home in Rio, but nice and clean. Since we arrived from LA almost five o'clock in the morning, we simply went to bed. It was the first time we actually slept together without having sex, but it was actually very intimate, very reassuring, just having her in bed beside me.

The first week in Toronto, Donna took me to a baseball game at the Skydome, like she had promised. I asked a lot of questions, but I was eventually able to follow the game. It was long — nothing like soccer. I got bored. However, I like to watch an inning or two of baseball on TV, because it's a mental game.

She later took me to a hockey game as well, in the fall. Hockey was easier to follow than baseball, more like soccer, but maybe a little too fast. She said to me, "You have to learn how to see the puck. Just like you have to learn to see the ball in soccer."

People in Toronto were really passionate about the Leafs, though no gangster ever put a hit on the Maple Leafs' goalie for losing the seventh game in a series against the Ottawa Senators, like the Medellin cartel had assassinated that Colombian defender after the 1994 World Cup Finals. It seems that hockey fans were more civilized, I thought. That's why I love Canada — the people are civilized.

I got a work visa and a job with a taxi company in Toronto. However, I always went where a dispatcher sent me, rather than drive up and down Yongh Street like Donna had suggested. I wasn't freelancing yet. It was amazing how clean and how quiet the city was. Toronto was relatively free of crime, only about fifty murders a year. But my car had a silent alarm: if you pressed a button, a blue light on the trunk would flash, warning the people on the street that you were being robbed. They trusted people to call the police here, apparently. You were only aware of being in a bad part of town, Jane and Fitch, for example, when you saw how nervous everybody seemed to be. I actually saw somebody get shot there. However, this part of town was nothing like the worst parts of Rio. Sure, there was crime and beggars on the streets — squeegee boys, for example — but the people were friendly and courteous; the police weren't shooting homeless children like in Rio. Canada was more civilized than Brazil, I thought.

At first, I thought that Donna was really hot for me, but I was soon unable to tell where I stood with her. We went clubbing together, had lots of sex, but she was seeing some guy named Jack, who was a lot older than her, about fifty, maybe sixty years old. She always said it was business. As well, my nightmares disturbed her sleep, and she slept on the couch sometimes. She urged me to see a therapist, but I always put it off. "Not enough time," was my excuse.

I thought that Jack was probably married, but I didn't say anything; she probably knew anyway. I wasn't happy about it, but she was letting me stay with her and sleeping with me; she never brought him home.

Then one day, she said that she was flying to Porto Alegro, Brazil, for about ten days. It was just business, she said. Porto Alegro is on the Atlantic Ocean in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, near the Uruguayan border. South of the equator, its climate is much milder than Rio's, but it has beaches as well. People in Rio with money go there to escape the humidity.

"Are you going with Jack?" I asked.

"Yes," she admitted. "Why, is there a problem with that?"

I wanted to say yes, but I replied slowly, "No, but I would like to go to Brazil too, since I'm not used to the cold. I'm a little frilieux..."

"Frilieux?" she asked.

"It's a French word," I replied, smiling. "I learned it from a woman from Montréal..."

She just nodded and said, "Okay, but don't forget to feed the cats, eh?"

Then she kissed me. "I'll be back," she promised. "It's only business."

She was really attached to those cats — I got to know them very well. One of them was a handsome chocolate brown Siamese with blue eyes called Simon, who hissed at you whenever you came near him — I didn't like him. The other was an alley cat, white with a few large grey spots, called Captain Howdy; he was much friendlier than the Siamese. He purred loudly whenever you held him. Donna called him her "purr baby."

Donna was often away for as long as a fortnight. While she was in Porto Alegro — or wherever she went with Jack — I mostly stayed home at first, reading, watching television or playing my guitar: João Gilberto, Milton Nascimento — bossa nova, since I liked the old stuff. However, I soon got bored with this arrangement. I felt like the house boy after a while, so I started going out when I wasn't working — when Donna was away with Jack. I picked up a Chinese girl of joy on Spadina Avenue in Chinatown who called herself "Candy" — they all called themselves "Candy" or "Brandy," it seemed. There were other Asian comfort girls as well: Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino or Indian, whatever. Most of the prostitutes in Canada are probably brown in skin colour. Of course, I always used a condom.

I like Asian girls, I have found: shy and quiet, the ones that I have met anyway. I liked Donna, who was actually shy and quiet as well. Only she was like the sun and the moon: bright by day, dark by night. She had an infectuous laugh, but she could be very moody. I had to be careful when I teased her, because she might take it the wrong way. But I liked her as a person, always happy to see her.

The sex was always good, but she liked to do it against hard surfaces — a desk or a table. I don't know, maybe it was a Hindu thing. She liked bruises on her hips or on her ass, she said, only it was difficult to tell with her when she had bruises, since her skin was very dark. However, we didn't always do it against something hard: we did it in bed like normal people as well. She was very normal, you know.

While Donna was away, I had lots of time to think of Chantal. I hadn't forgotten that she was married, but it became an obsession — I couldn't stop thinking about her. I mostly imagined us talking, I had imaginary conversations with her while driving my car. I wanted to tell her my feelings, come what may. I didn't think about the sex very much, because I thought that it would come to that eventually, if we talked long enough. I was obsessed.

There would be no point in telling my story if I didn't call her, so I called her. I had to find out from an operator how to call information, since I didn't know how to call information in Canada yet. Then I asked the operator for her telephone number, which was listed under her husband's name. I started to call a couple of times, but I was always nervous, afraid that her husband might answer — afraid that she might answer. The first time, I couldn't even make myself dial the number — I just went to work instead. The second time, I dialed the number, then hung up as soon as it started ringing on the other line. Only the third time did I wait until the answering machine picked up.

It was her voice, asking in French to leave a message. I was about to hang up when somebody picked up the phone. "Hello," she said, somewhat timidly.

"Hello," I replied nervously, "como vai a senhora?"

There was a long silence, then she exclaimed, "Oh, my God — José! Where are you?"

"I'm in Toronto, I drive a taxi here..."

"So you made it to Canada after all, eh?"

I smiled, because I knew she was smiling, and I said, "Yes, I'm in Canada..."

Once I got to the purpose of my call, the words came out in a torrent. "Look, I really want to see you again, okay? Just to talk. We don't have to do anything you don't want to do, okay? I just want to talk..."

"I have to go to work in a few minutes," she said, after some hesitation.

"We can meet tomorrow then, or maybe on your day off?"

There was another silence. Then she said, reluctantly, "Okay, the Ville-Marie Hotel, the corner of Sherbrooke and Peel, Thursday at noon. There's a bar there. Be there or be square..."

Then she hung up.

Before I left for Montréal, I changed the litter and made sure that Donna's cats had enough food and water for two or three days. I was almost out the door when Captain Howdy, the alley cat, meowed in protest. "Hey, I won't be gone very long, amigo," I told him, "maybe a day or two, that's it."

When I was out the door, I said to myself, "Great! Now I'm talking to cats!"

Donna talked to her cats, you know, like they were her children. They acted like they understood, but they were only cats. I found this little eccentricity endearing, this habit of talking to animals. It showed the gentleness in her, I thought. She might be good with children.