Away from Home (25 page)

“I’m going to have a key made for you tomorrow,” she said, enunciating to keep the words clear. “I want you to feel free to stay out all night if you want to, and have lots of ‘honeymoons’ and be happy. I want only good things for you. I want you to be happy.”

“All right,” he said. He sounded distressed and he was looking at her in a strange way. “So I’ll be happy.”

“Aren’t you going to get dressed for your girl?”

“She’s not
my
girl; she’s a girl I met on the beach.”

“Where are you going to take her?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I just told her I’d take her to dinner. I didn’t even think about where we’d go.”

“Don’t you like her?” Margie asked.

“I don’t know yet.”

“Yet …” she said. She sighed. “What a magic word that is. I don’t know,
yet
.”

“There’s your freedom that you envy so much,” he said. “A whole long series of ‘I don’t know yet.’” He stood up. “I’d better get dressed or I’ll never know, because she’ll go away.”

“Yes,” Margie said. “Hurry.” She tried to think of something to say to keep him a moment longer, or even half an hour longer, with her. “Yes, hurry,” she said again, as if that were a word that really meant “stay.” It meant “stay” to her; she said it so frantically and with such feeling that she could not understand how he could not know. “Hurry!”

She stood up and followed him to the hallway that led to the bedrooms. He went into the bathroom that he shared with Neil, and in a moment Margie heard him turn on the shower. She went into her bedroom and sat down on the bed. She was suddenly weak and very tired. The maid had removed the bedspread and turned down the corner of the sheet. Margie pushed her pillow upright against the headboard and leaned against it, lighting another cigarette. It was the loneliest thing in the world to have gotten deliberately drunk because you needed to be free, to be yourself with someone, and then to find you were all alone with your own released feelings. She closed her eyes, feeling her heart pounding heavily from fatigue. She felt at this moment that she could say anything, do anything. She lay on her bed with her eyes closed, holding the cigarette, not smoking it, not moving, until she felt the smoke hot against her fingers, and then she sat up with a great effort and stubbed it out in the ashtray. She heard Mort open the bathroom door and walk to his bedroom.

It was easier this time to move. She stood up, smoothed her hair, and went into the hall. The door to his room was open and she saw him sitting on the studio couch tying his sneaker. He was wearing a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and dark-green chino cloth trousers. With his hair combed and his face newly shaved he looked different again. He looked special. It was that same look that women only achieved after an hour of applying make-up and eyelash curlers and fussing over themselves, and he seemed to have it only because of the expression on his face and his cleanliness. She stood at the doorway.

“You look terribly nice,” she said.

He seemed surprised. “Thank you.”

She watched him as he tied the laces of his other sneaker and she felt stupid. She was rooted to the floor and she could not say a word. He was even wearing socks. He walked to the dresser, scooped a handful of paper money from the top of the dresser, and put the money into his trouser pocket. He picked up a package of cigarettes, squeezed it tentatively to see if it had enough cigarettes in it for the time being, and put that into the pocket of his shirt. He strapped his watch on his wrist and walked to the doorway where she was standing.

“Goodbye,” he said pleasantly. “See you later.”

She felt dizzy. “Goodbye,” she said.

He was gone.

CHAPTER 12

In January of that year the
Brazil Herald
reported that São Paulo police had arrested a voodoo witch who was allowing her satisfied clients to pay her for murders on the installment plan. The witch explained: “The system worked beautifully because I did business only with strictly honest people.”

A citizen of Nova Iguaçu complained to police that he had been accosted at night on the street by a hold-up man. The authorities explained to him that they knew the dark streets were full of hold-up men, and that was why they had prudently stopped street patrols—so the policemen would not be attacked.

In Rio, a judge complained that a girl of minor age had been unlawfully arrested by police, and dismissed the policeman’s charges that the girl had insulted him and behaved in a disorderly way in the jail. “If the detained did not behave well in jail,” the judge ruled, “the police could send her away.”

The fat, jolly, newly elected King of Carnival, Rei Momo, had his crown stolen from his head by a prankster. A week later there was a minor revolution held by reporters and the city touring department, who decided to dethrone the king because he “behaved indecently at Carnival fetes and got drunk too easily and too frequently.” Since they felt that this behavior would reflect poorly on the Carnival events, they elected another Rei Momo, and the dethroned king went back to his year-round occupation as owner of a small shop called The Pastry King.

In anticipation of Carnival the illegal ether bombs in their aerosol cans were lined up on store shelves, even displayed in the five-and-ten-cent store. “Buy your Lança Perfuma early for Carnival,” the sign said, in the aisle next to the beach mats and phonograph records.

All the newspapers joined in loud protest about this year’s futuristic decorations which the city had put up on the main street of Avenida Rio Branco. One journalist even complained that the “eyesores are apt to frighten away quite some people” and might be responsible for the unprecedented exodus of Rio citizens to the country.

The new Rei Momo returned from a short publicity trip to the United States and said to reporters, “I don’t know if many American tourists will visit Rio during Carnival; all what I know is that I personally produced an excellent impression on the Americans.”

But tourists were flocking to Rio. The cruise ship
Caronia
stopped at Rio for two days, and the local press described all the passengers as “multimillionaires.” This was an index of inflation, since the year before the tourists had only been called “millionaires.” The visiting multimillionaires were being provided with “everything necessary to enjoy peace of mind and relaxation, including complete stock-exchange reports every day.”

In Recife an unfrocked priest who had killed his bishop got a mild sentence “because victim did not actually die from bullets but lack of treatment.”

In Rio the officials of the Federal pawnshop had been working overtime for several days before Carnival due to large public demand.

In the
favellas
, a man named Azevedo, who had confessed to police that he had killed his wife several years before “because I met another woman who could cook much better,” was unable to remember the exact spot where he had buried her remains. The police decided that the search for her bones would have to be suspended until the following week, “for being improper at Carnival.”

Carnival was approaching, wild and laughing, and all normal activities were put away. Officially Carnival lasted three days and four nights, but there were pre-Carnival balls and parties everywhere. Helen Sinclair bought a Carmen Miranda costume—a Bahiana, with a tight orange and black striped blouse, a bare midriff, an orange and black striped skirt slit up the side, and a great froth of white ruffled cotton petticoat underneath. She had strings and strings of bright glass beads, and a turban complete with piled up artificial fruit and earrings like great white doughnuts. Originally she had been going to buy only a mask. She and Margie went into a small shop in Copacabana, where a man sat at a table sewing stuffed hummingbirds and sequins and paillets on to little masks.

“We can wear evening dresses and masks,” Margie said practically. She had been to Carnival before and she was trying to save money. “We’ll find something becoming.”

“That’s right,” Helen said virtuously. “We’re only going to one ball anyway. It’s too expensive to go to everything. We’ll just wear masks to be like everybody else.”

But even as they were talking they were rummaging through the piles of masks on the tray, holding them up and trying them on, discarding each for a larger, more fantastic one. There were brief costumes hanging tantalizingly on the walls—a cancan dancer, a scarecrow, a Greek boy, a woman of the future complete with fright wig and long black mesh stockings. Every costume was based only vaguely on the theme it was meant to portray. The main purpose was to be as brief and attractive as possible. A red velvet Santa Claus costume had a hat with a white tassel and a strapless dress with a pinched-in waist that looked more like a bathing suit than anything for the obese old Father Christmas, and terminated in a pair of clinging white tights.

“
You
could buy a costume,” Margie said. “This is your first Carnival, after all.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t if you didn’t.”

“Well, at least try one on. It wouldn’t hurt just to
look
.”

Half an hour later they each had bought a costume, and they felt guilty and excited and glad. Margie had bought a brief white silk jersey tunic with gold trim, like a Greek boy’s. Her tanned legs were bare and she had a wreath of gilded leaves for her hair.

The costume suited her, Helen thought, as Margie turned and postured in the mirror rather shyly. There was something about Margie so … neat and childish and … unawakened, like the boy-girls of ancient Greece. You didn’t notice it when you saw Margie in a dress with crinolines and delicate high heels. She had a façade that was deceiving. But Carnival seemed to bring out the true personality of everyone, even if the person himself was unaware of it.

“I guess I’m a pagan,” Helen said, reluctantly folding her costume back into its box. “I’d like to wear that thing right now and every day.”

“The men will have to buy costumes now,” Margie said. “Do you think they’ll be angry?”

“They can wear yachting caps or something.”

“I’m
glad
we bought them,” Margie said. “Aren’t you?” She sounded a little defiant. Helen knew exactly how she felt; she herself felt the same way. Bert would think she was idiotic when he found out how much she had spent for the Bahiana—fifty dollars—but finally he would want some kind of costume too.

“Yes,” Helen said. “I’m glad. It makes me feel not like myself any more. I guess that’s why people wear them.”

“You should see. Nice respectable bankers and businessmen who live exemplary lives all year with their wives and mistresses suddenly take on hidden natures at Carnival.” Margie looked around and lowered her voice to a whisper. “You see some of them dressed as Negro women, with complete face masks and complete body costumes, like black leotards, and lots of junky necklaces and padded bosoms and white Mandy gloves and they go around embracing men and screaming in these falsetto voices. People wear so much greasepaint and such complete masks you really can’t tell who is a man and who’s a woman. And it doesn’t help to say the small ones are the women, because a lot of Brazilian men are very short.”

“My lord!”

“Oh, you’ll see,” Margie said. “You wait.”

The biggest and most famous pre-Carnival ball was the Baile des Artistes at the Hotel Gloria. For weeks now there had been signs in the streets announcing it. The Gloria is an old, distinguished hotel set on a hill near the center of the city. A long veranda runs along the front of it, looking down on the street. The Sinclairs and the Davidows and Mort Baker met for cocktails first at the Davidows’ apartment, and then at eleven o’clock in the evening they started for the ball. The men had been persuaded to wear costumes, to varying degrees. Neil had gone to the store and purchased a white toga and gold sandals so he could pair off with Margie. Bert wore the black trousers from his tuxedo and a white shirt, with a red scarf of Helen’s wrapped around his waist for a cummerbund, and called himself a bullfighter. At the last minute he decided it was not enough, so Margie drew a dramatic curving mustache and long sideburns on his face with her black eyebrow pencil. Mort, who had no money and who said the heat in the hall often went up to a hundred and ten, wore his bathing suit.

“But what are you supposed to
be?
” Margie said.

“I’m a member of the
futebol
team that plays on the beach every day.”

She laughed. “You’ll be thrown out for indecent exposure.”

“Not if you aren’t.”

“No, you have to be somebody else,” Helen said. “You can’t be lazy and just come as yourself and call it a
fantasea
.” She was being caught up in this now, the whole idea of the Carnival metamorphosis, the costumes that were called fantasies, the greasepaint and masks and disguises. It was important to be somebody else for these few days and nights; everyone in Rio had been waiting for a whole year for this chance to be a dream self, a released self, waited all year for this chance to explode into fantasy.

“You could wear one of your white sweatshirts and we could paint the name of a
futebol
team on it,” Margie said. Already she was running into the guestroom, emerging with a shirt, looking excitedly for something to use for the lettering.

He would be a member of the Vasco da Gama team, which was a soccer team of Portuguese players with large black mustaches. Margie drew the letters with laundry ink, and Helen painted a mustache on Mort with the same pencil Margie had used for Bert’s. You had to be somebody else tonight; you couldn’t enjoy it if you weren’t somebody else.

Neil parked his car across the street from the Gloria Hotel and they joined the line filing in. There was a great crowd of people in the street, watching the rich and lucky ones who had been able to buy tickets. From the opened doors upstairs leading to the veranda there was the sound of the incessant Carnival music, the beat that was like a samba but louder and faster and never stopped, not for one minute, until the dawn. There was the sound of voices singing haphazardly, not following the words but bursting out uncontrollably once in a while with a chorus or an exuberant line.
Vai, mas vai mesmo
—go, but just go.… The words didn’t make much sense, really, but no one cared. It was the music that made sense, the music that made you dance with anyone who was close at hand or even by yourself. Already, on the stairs, Helen felt herself beginning to sway and tap her feet, smiling, snapping her fingers and clapping her hands, smiling at strangers who were doing the same thing down there in the middle of the dark street.