Away from Home (21 page)

A few policemen, dressed in tan uniforms and helmets, were trying to keep the people from rushing forward to help themselves to articles of furniture which might belong to someone else. No one appeared bad-humored about this. Some were souvenir hunters, but they could come back another night. Without a word Mort darted through the straggling line of police and disappeared among the piles of concrete and wood.

“Oh, my God,” Margie said. “What’s the matter with him?”

She and Neil walked cautiously through the crowd, trying to find where he had gone. Now that the excitement was over the crowd was beginning to disperse. The corner café was again becoming crowded, and the little boy who had spilled his ice cream had begun to cry. Then they saw Mort sprinting over the fallen articles of plumbing, coming toward them, waving and looking very happy.

“Hey!” he cried. “Guess what? I found my statue! It’s okay. Just a few chips I can fix up in the morning. You know, it looks great lying there in all that grass. I may donate it for a park monument after they clear this piece of land.”

“If they know what it is,” Neil said.

“Never mind,” said Mort. “Culture. They’ll learn to love it. Kids can play house on it. Dogs can stay cool lying in the shadow of it. And one thing you can be sure of—no matter how much graft there is, no one can ever steal
that
statue.”

They all laughed and went off to find the car.

CHAPTER 9

How many amnesia victims start their new lives doing exactly the same thing they were doing before they lost their memory? Do we remain in a pattern of life year after year because of enthusiasm or habit, happiness or convention? The ghosts of the past rise up wherever we turn and pluck at our sleeves, blue-coated street-corner monitors for schoolchildren, holding our grown-up bodies to the white safety line. If we live in the town or city where we grew up, how can we escape passing landmarks of memory every day? The woman shopping for her child’s clothing passes the bus stop where she waited every week for the bus that took her downtown to the dentist to have her braces tightened when she was a child herself. She might smile to herself, thinking that life goes on. Or she might be walking quickly to meet her lover, and she might then stop, looking at the houses that look so much shabbier now, and the bus stop where she dreamed her adolescent dreams, and her step might become reluctant as she realizes how much she has changed. It is one thing to emerge from the apartment of her lover at twilight and hurry to her husband: she has already told herself that her husband is unkind, does not love her, is a beast. Perhaps she is right. But how can she pass all the places of memory and of habit, the little restaurant where she used to go with her husband when they loved each other and were delirious with love, the park where she walked with her father on Sundays when she was a child and he had such hopes for her happiness? They are too much, these memories; they color her life; they spoil everything. Why can’t anyone start out fresh? she thinks in desperation.

But for the uprooted expatriates, the homeless in new homes that they still feel ill at ease in, a twilight street is just a street. A tree with sun in its leaves is only a beautiful tree, more poignant now if looked at after an experience of love. A woman running to her lover thinks only of him. A woman emerging from an apartment that had been darkened against the afternoon sun stands for a moment on the sidewalk blinking, shading her eyes. She sees the street; it is any street, a little noisier, a little brighter perhaps, because she is emerging from a total, intense experience into a fragmented one. She adjusts to the light, to the sounds, and hurries on, looking back just once at the shaded window of her lover. How beautiful this afternoon is! she thinks. I will always remember this day, and this street, and that tree. But all her memories of this day will go forward, not back. It is a great eraser of guilt.

Helen Sinclair thought all this as she sat in the rooftop restaurant of a hotel on Copacabana Beach waiting for Sergio. She had waited for him on the beach that first day, sure he would not come, and he had come, late in the afternoon, with Carlos Monteiro for protective coloration. Carlos Monteiro looked like the perfect businessman; even in bathing shorts he seemed about to give dictation to an imaginary secretary or pick up an invisible telephone receiver to make a deal. The two men walked at the edge of the sea, talking with their heads together, like two partners who had decided to leave the office early because of the heat and continue their discussion on the beach.

The beach was always the most active place in Rio, strangely enough. People might be consumed by good-natured apathy everywhere else, but on the beach they suddenly came to life. There was always a soccer game, sometimes in uniform. There were always couples playing an animated game that looked like a cross between ping-pong and handball, with little paddles and no net, leaping about on the hard sand. Helen sat under a beach umbrella, her two children digging sand castles beside her, looking like a model American mother, trying to pretend behind her dark glasses that she had not seen Sergio Leite Braga approach, and that, in any case, he was nothing to her.

“Helen,” he said gravely. He leaned down to take her hand. He introduced her to Carlos Monteiro, whom she remembered. He smiled at her children, who glanced at him curiously.

“Say how-do-you-do to Mr. Leite Braga and Mr. Monteiro,” Helen said to Roger and Julie, feeling so strange as she did so. They were polite children; she was proud of them. Roger stood up and shook hands with Sergio. I wonder what his children look like, she thought suddenly.

Sergio crossed his legs and swooped down beside her like an Indian. He was lean, and golden tan from the sun, his shoulders and neck and upper arms hairless, the skin so smooth she wanted to touch it. She wondered what Sergio had told his friend. What could he have told him? There was nothing to tell.

That was the first day. When she was with Sergio she resented him—his sureness, his spirits, his air of knowing what happiness was and of being able to grasp it whenever he wanted to. What makes him think he’s a good person? she thought resentfully. What makes him … And when she was away from him she felt somehow glowing, beautiful, because he thought being with her was happiness. With
her
, who no longer knew what happiness was!

The second day he telephoned her. Had she ever seen the Iate Clube? He would take her there.

Oh, yes, she said; she had been to the Iate Clube. Her feeling of resentment arose against him again. The yacht club was where married men met ladies for lunch, Leila had told her, and now Sergio thought he could go there with her. No, Helen said abruptly. She did not want to go to the Iate Clube.

Where would she like to go, then? He did not ask her
if
, he asked her
where
. He never gave her the choice of refusing. And Helen felt guiltily grateful for that, because if he had asked her,
Would
she have lunch with him, she would have been obliged to say no. Had she ever been to the Floresta de Tijuca? he asked. It was so beautiful. “Thank you,” Helen said, more coldly. “I was there one Sunday with Bert and the children.”

“I love it,” Sergio said. “I take my children there very often. It’s so cool there and peaceful.”

By telling her so calmly that he had taken his children there too (and perhaps his wife as well?) Sergio made her feel so helpless in her conflict that she wanted to lash out and hurt him; and then suddenly for the first time she felt the first real tenderness toward him.

“I’d rather go … somewhere new,” Helen said.

Then he told her about the restaurant on top of the hotel, with a view, with air conditioning, and they met. She had the feeling as they talked and picked at their food that he was waiting for something, that he knew her better than she knew herself. She felt herself falling into his control as one falls into weakness from too much wine, a feeling that is safe because it is imperceptible to the other person and easy to disguise. As long as Sergio did not know, she thought, she was safe; and so she smiled, and acted calm, and looked at his curved mouth instead of his eyes, feeling giddy with pleasure and smug with the secret of her deception. She had never been to this restaurant before, and from this height the view of the beach and tiny bathers seemed new. All the people dining in the room were Brazilians, and she had never seen any of them before. It was only a few hours out of her life, harmless, without past or future either if she wished. And because it was so unimportant it became very important.

After lunch she said she had to rush home to take Julie to a birthday party: it was a lie. Sergio accepted the lie and took her home in an ancient taxi, keeping the taxi to go on to his office. She was so pleased with herself at having deceived both Sergio and herself, at having ended this secret luncheon with no incident, that when he kissed her hand and told her he would meet her the next day she accepted before she realized what she had done.

I am a fool, she thought, a fool. But she lay on her bed and got up to close her door and lay there again in a semi-stupor, afraid that if she had left the door to her room open one of her children might wander in and see her secret happiness revealed upon her face.

So today Helen was waiting for Sergio again, and it was the third day since the night they had really met at the Macumba. Bert was coming home that night. She did not feel guilty toward Bert, strangely; she only felt rather sad because she would have to tell Sergio that she could never see him again. She wouldn’t say,
Never
; she would simply say that Bert was coming back. But she knew she would never telephone Sergio to tell him the next time Bert went away again, and she was sure Sergio would forget about her by then. She looked out at the sky and the beach below, white with heat haze. She was cool in the air-conditioned room and she shivered, clasping her hands together on the tablecloth. Because she was here the second day in a row she felt rather as if it were her special place, hers with Sergio, and she knew that she would never come here again with Bert or any of their friends. No, Helen thought then; she would come here eventually, and that was what was making her feel this wistful loneliness. She would come here some night in the not-so-distant future, for dinner with Bert and another couple or two, and they would all laugh and splurge on the fine French food and wine, and perhaps they would sit across from the small table where she was going to sit now with Sergio and where they had eaten yesterday. There would hardly be any ghosts of herself and Sergio sitting at this small table, she told herself; it wouldn’t mean anything at all. She might even look back at these three days and not be quite sure they had ever happened, like a date one had years ago in college. The thought made her sad.

Sergio slid on to the leather banquette beside her before she knew he was there. “You look sad,” he said quietly. “Don’t say anything; wait a moment.” He was holding a fresh rose in his hand and he slipped the stem through the top buttonhole of her dress. She could smell the scent of the rose very faintly, fresh and sweet.

“Thank you,” she said. “I never buy roses; they’re so expensive.”

“One?” he said. “
É
nada
.”

“That’s what a housewife I am,” Helen said. “You give me a rose and instead of saying, ‘Thank you, how romantic,’ I say, ‘Thank you, how expensive.’ As if you should have given me butter or cheese instead. Now what in the world would I do with butter and cheese?”

“We have known each other for three days,” he said unexpectedly. He seemed surprised.

“That’s not very long.”

“No.”

“Bert is coming back tonight,” Helen said.

Sergio nodded.

“Three days,” he said again.

“I told you he would be back soon,” she said. “He only went to see a mine. I …”

“Will you see me when he comes back?”

“I never thought of that.”

“I thought of it,” Sergio said. “I didn’t know whether I ought to ask you. I thought, Perhaps she really loves him and can’t be with anyone else. Or perhaps she doesn’t love him enough to make it be everything, but perhaps she’s afraid to be with me. I was thinking about it this morning. I want to see you if it will make you happy. If it will make you unhappy, then I’ll go away. It’s up to you.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Helen said. “I don’t know what to say.… I
do
, I do know what to say, but I … can’t say it.”

“That’s why I never left anything up to you,” Sergio said gently. He took her hand. “We had so little time. I couldn’t wait for you to argue with yourself. But now it’s more important because it involves more than three days. It means a long time. That’s why I want you to make the choice.”

“The choice?” she asked, frightened.

“I think everyone has a right to have good things happen to him,” Sergio said. “I want things to happen to me and they do. I’m never bored or lonely. You are.”

“Yes. I … was.”

“I’m married too,” he said. “I will always be married to this woman, and you will always be married to this man. You are married. Also you are an American, also you have blond hair. These are all simply facts about you.”

Helen smiled. “When you say it, everything seems so simple.”

“We have an old saying in Brazil,” Sergio said. “According to the law of aerodynamics the bumblebee cannot fly. But the bumblebee does not know the law of aerodynamics and so he flies.”

Helen reached out her hand and touched his lips very lightly and he kissed her fingers. He took hold of her wrist and kissed her palm. He had spoken of love, in terms of what loving someone meant in his life, but neither of them had actually said he loved the other. Even now, Helen could not really think of it. Love, in her terms, meant commitment, promises, responsibilities and serious things. She had loved only one man in her life and she was married to him. But even so, she could not bear to lose this other man who was here beside her. She had never really believed women thought this way until now. She and Sergio had never said they loved each other, even if it were a sort of lie. She could neither bring herself to lie to him about it nor even to ask him about it. There did not seem to be any need. The only need was not to lose him.