Away from Home (14 page)

The water was cool and refreshing, but not too cold. It felt very sensual on her skin. She wanted, crazily, to swim with no bathing suit on at all. She had never felt this freedom. She smiled at a stranger and he smiled back, floating on his back and kicking his feet. Most of the people were swimming or floating, but a few couples were trying to dance in the water to the lively music of the orchestra.

“Dancing in the water is like a dream,” she said. “When you try to walk fast and something holds you back.”

“
O que?
” he said apologetically.

She translated, and noticed from the corner of her eye an attractive woman who could only be the wife of this stranger looking at her with a steely glance. For a moment Helen wondered what she had done, and then she realized that it was not what she had done, or was doing, but what she might do. Of course! she thought. This man and I might become lovers! The thought was so outlandish and amusing that she began to laugh out of sheer high spirits, and the stranger, after a momentary look of bewilderment, began to laugh too. If he knew what I was just thinking
he
wouldn’t think it was so silly, Helen thought. She looked at him really, now, for the first time. He was an attractive man, lean, brown haired, perhaps thirty-two or -three. He had a kind of wolfine look to his face, partly shyness and reserve, partly a natural sex appeal, and partly the aloofness that comes from a certain kind of breeding. She tried to look at his wife more closely, but his wife had turned half away, momentarily in conversation with a friend.

He swam a little closer to Helen then and said in a low voice in almost unaccented English, “I apologize for playing a trick on you.”

“You
do
speak English!”

He nodded, a barely perceptible nod, with a very small, careful smile. “I wanted to hear you translate,” he said very quietly. “I love your American accent; it’s so amusing. Forgive me.”

“Of course.”

He glanced at her, and she realized that standing this way in the shallow part of the pool it would appear to anyone looking at her as if she were not wearing the bottom part of a bathing suit at all. The water lapped just above the cloth. He glanced at her only for an instant, and then he smiled very slightly again and turned and swam away.

Helen felt strange then, as if she had been discreetly and very personally complimented, although what he had said to her had been impersonal enough. For no reason she suddenly felt rather frightened to be in the water so close to his wife, and she smiled at the woman and then climbed out of the pool. She went into the bathhouse to find a towel.

When she had dressed she paused in front of the mirror, repairing her make-up. She always carried a little vial of perfume in her purse, which she seldom bothered to use at parties, but now she searched for it and, finding it, put some on her neck and hair. It wasn’t that there was any reason why she wanted to be particularly attractive tonight. Everybody had already seen her. It was just that … she felt like wearing perfume tonight. It made her feel that she was all of a piece—the look and the smell and the sensation inside, all one, all whole together.

CHAPTER 6

“I wouldn’t be so sure she’d show up,” Bert said. “Brazilians have a habit of saying yes and then forgetting all about it. Or something important comes up, like their car breaks down.” He looked more amused than regretful for her, and even a little smug, Helen thought with annoyance.

They were finishing breakfast, and the room was filled with yellow sunshine. Their living room was so huge that Helen had made one end of it into the dining room. She remembered often that their entire apartment in Riverdale, when she and Bert were first married, was the size of just this Rio living room alone.

“I’m sure she’ll come,” Helen said. She had had difficulty falling asleep after the party, but this morning instead of being tired she felt refreshed. She tried not to think of what would happen if Leila did not appear to take her to the
favellas
. The day stretched ahead of her, unbearably hot and dull.

“They have a word for it here,” Bert said. “
Sumiu
. It means ‘disappear.’ It was the first word I learned in Brazil. You should learn it too.” He stood up and dropped his napkin on the table. “It’s an especially useful word in business,” he added wryly. “See you tonight.” He kissed Helen coolly on the lips, a gesture as casual as a handshake, and went to the door. She trailed after him.

“Goodbye …” Somehow she felt for the first time in Brazil as if she were not being left behind but as if her day were just beginning, as it had all those mornings in Westport. She felt like a child who has been driven in an automobile past a tantalizing locked gate every morning for years on his way to a dull day in school, and suddenly has been let out, the car has driven away, the locked gate has opened, and beyond it is revealed a vast, marvelous playground full of other children.

She gathered up all the clothes that Julie and Roger had outgrown, some of her own things, and a few shirts of Bert’s that could no longer be mended, making a neat package. When the telephone rang she ran to it before waiting for the maid to answer it and then was almost afraid to lift the receiver.

“Helen?” Leila’s voice said. “Do you still want to go with me today?”

“Yes, of course!”

Leila went on, arranging the few details of their meeting, and Helen noticed how differently she spoke on the telephone, as if the telephone intimidated her. She seemed to have more difficulty with her English, and the words came slower.

When Leila arrived, Helen was standing outside on the curb with her bundle. I look like an immigrant, she thought, amused. And I am one. Leila was dressed beautifully, in slacks and a shirt that looked as if her dressmaker had created them for her, her black hair loose, her face perfectly made up. She wore no jewelry, not even a wedding ring. She gave the impression not of a local Lady Bountiful going to gloat over her generosity among the poor but rather of a young girl ready for an adventure. Helen could not help liking her; and the feeling surprised her because usually she was not conscious of actively liking or disliking a new friend until she had known the person for some time. And another strange feeling—she was self-conscious. For a while she sat in the car and listened to Leila talking and could not think of anything to say.

“Have you been anywhere but Rio?” Leila asked. “Have you been to Petropolis? Have you been to Bahia?”

“No. My husband has been to Bahia, or at least to the State of Bahia, not the city. He travels a lot for business.”

“You must go to Bahia,” Leila said. “It’s different, very old. Rio isn’t Brazil. I like Rio the best, but it isn’t Brazil.”

“I feel as though I’ll never know anything about this place,” Helen said.

“I’ll show you,” Leila said. She sounded delighted. “I’ll introduce you to my friends. Some of them are very intelligent; they know about books, they like to talk about Plato. Do you like Plato?”

“I … read him a long time ago,” Helen said. “In high school.”

“I have just discovered it,” Leila said. “I have a very good friend, Carlos Monteiro. Do you remember him? He was at the party last night.”

“No …”

“He is
very
intelligent. The first time I met him he said to me, ‘What do you think of Plato?’ I was so happy.”

Helen looked at her. Leila was smiling admiringly, as if this Carlos had said to her, “How unique you are!” And perhaps in a way he had.

“I like very much to talk to him,” Leila went on. “He’s like a philosopher. He says …” She went on, elaborately trying to speak only of Carlos’ brilliant mind, as if he were merely a friend one shows off, and Helen realized Leila must be in love with him. He was probably the man Leila had run to speak to near the hedge at the party. She was so elaborately intellectual about him, and yet she kept talking about him, as though merely to keep the discussion on him gave her the pleasure she missed when he was not actually with her. Helen wondered if he were Leila’s lover. It was odd; a day ago she had not thought about anyone in this way, as lovers or not lovers, but today it was the first thing that came to mind.

“Do the women really have as many affairs as you said last night?” Helen interrupted.

“It’s very different here than in America,” Leila said. “My friend I spoke to you about—Carlos Monteiro—has been to America many times. He told me that American women have lovers before they are married, and then when they marry they remain faithful, as if marriage were the end. With us, marriage is the beginning of our lives. A woman is never free in Brazil until she leaves her parents and governess and goes to live with her husband.”

“How strange,” Helen said. “It seems so cynical.”

“Cynical? Why?”

“So unemotional. Unsentimental. I suppose our ways seem strange to you.”

“But your wives can talk to their husbands about business,” Leila said. “A girl never works in Brazil unless she needs the money badly to live, and even then, she always lives at home with her parents. Some of them take lovers before they marry, but those are very poor girls who find a rich man. It’s a different kind of love affair. My husband used to come home and speak to me of the office sometimes, but he really thought I was much too ignorant to know anything. I used to tell him what I thought he should do, and he hardly paid attention. But then he would do it, and I always turned out to be a help to him. I think he really never knew that it was I who told him, after all.”

They were speeding down the highway now, away from the suburb of Copacabana and toward the city of Rio itself. They passed through a tunnel, and ahead of them Helen could see a mountain covered with so many flimsy little shacks that the grass between them was hardly visible. They turned off the road and began to leave this civilized, asphalt-paved place, and climbed into a world that was leafy, damp, hot, and filled with strange smells and sounds. Below them there were the homes of the rich, and the bay, bright blue in the sun, and the mountains across it; the Sugar Loaf, black and humped like the back of a buffalo, with the thin thread stretching between it and the next mountain, the thread that was the cable that held the traveling car of sightseers who went daily to the top of the Sugar Loaf to gape at the view below. There was the Corcovado: the great white statue of Christ standing on top of the highest mountain with arms outstretched to bless and protect the harbor and the city. The sky was sapphire blue, but today because of the humidity there were clouds ringing the top of the mountain where the Corcovado stood, so it seemed as if the Christ were supernaturally perched on top of the clouds instead of on earth. It looked like a great white peaceful bird in the sky, motionless, wings outspread, hovering and yet permanent.

A black sow walked across the road in front of their car, udders swaying from side to side, her hide caked with mud. She was followed by what seemed like a herd of little shoats, plump and hairy and lively, and the one tiny runt, the extra baby for whom there was no teat to feed, so skinny it did not look like a pig at all, but rather like a large tailless rat. The mother sow was ugliness itself: obese, wrinkled, waddling, worn out, grunting; an elephant of a sow, a monster. The little shoats were rather cute; you could almost imagine one as some child’s pet. It was hard to believe that they would soon grow to be as gross and ugly as their mother, and sad to believe that she had once been as pleasant to look at as they. Leila stopped the car to let them pass.

“Look at them,” Helen said. “She produces, and feeds, and produces, and feeds, and then she dies. You’re supposed to think it’s noble, but it makes you think life’s grotesque to see something grown that ugly.”

“Wait until you see some of the people here,” Leila said.

The shacks were hidden behind the trees and foliage, so that traveling along the rutted path in Leila’s big American car Helen had the feeling someone might jump out of nowhere and menace them. Despite Leila’s casual look, Helen was afraid. Her throat was dry. She did not trust people who were as desperately poor as these; not because they were any worse than anyone else, but because they lived with feelings she could only imagine: hunger, hopelessness, bitterness, envy, desperation. Knowing someone has basic feelings much stronger than your own always makes you fear him, especially if he is a stranger.

Leila drove through an opening between the trees. Now shacks could be seen, made of rough gray boards and corrugated metal and sheets of heavy paper. Leila stopped the car. “We have to walk from now on.”

Helen’s first instinct was to protest: But won’t someone steal the car? But she said nothing, and got out of the car carrying her package, thinking, What a way to do charity, not with an open heart but with the suspicion you’re going to be murdered for coming here at all!

“There is one girl I always visit here,” Leila said. “I like her.”

There was a small clearing with shacks all around it. In the center of the clearing there was a sort of barbecue erection made of stones, with a flat piece of tin laid across the top of it. Smoke was coming out and there were two pots on this makeshift stove with food cooking in them. A middle-aged colored woman dressed in a shapeless white cotton shift that showed traces of once having been blue was standing over the pots, stirring first one and then the other. Several brown chickens scratched and pecked in the dirt around where she stood, and nearby on the ground there was a baby about five months old lying on a soiled towel, kicking its feet in the sunshine. The baby had a dirty pacifier in its mouth. In front of the
favellas
were ropes of clothesline attached to trees, holding a vast amount of clean washing—white sheets and shirts and rich-looking Turkish towels. There were some children’s dresses that looked nearly new. Helen remembered the story Mil Burns had told her about what the washerwoman did with the rich people’s clothing here in the
favellas
and she wondered if it were true.

“Good morning,” Leila called in Portuguese. “Where is Maria?”

“Maria,” the woman called out hoarsely. “Maria! Your friend is here.” When she opened her mouth Helen saw that she had only four teeth, and these did not meet.