Away from Home (26 page)

It took more than half an hour to get into the hotel. As soon as they were through the front door Helen could feel the rise in temperature. It was swelteringly hot. In the corner of the lobby a group of a dozen cows, complete with huge shiny cows’ heads and sharp horns and round blind eyes, were posing for photographers. Helen held Bert’s hand as they pushed through to the elevator.

Upstairs there was a snake dance going on right in front of the elevator doors, people seemingly welded to one another, running, swaying, perspiring, as if in a trance of ecstasy. Helen, Bert, Margie, Neil and Mort dodged between the snake dancers as if they were on a football field and pushed their way through the crowds to the main ballroom.

There were long tables with white tablecloths on them set around the room. Hanging from the center of the ceiling like a chandelier was a gigantic papier-mâché clown with red electric eyes. He looked like the spirit of Carnival and, somehow, slightly drunken and wicked, swaying and bobbing on his cable. At one end of the room the band played—a blare of horns and beat of drums that was unlike anything Helen had ever heard before. She had heard Carnival songs being played on the radio for several weeks, but it was nothing like the overwhelming noise of this. In the middle of the ballroom, on what must have been the dance floor, was a great colorful mass of costumed humanity, dancing in no space, clamped together and completely alone in abandon at the same time, sometimes bursting out into song.

“Here we go,” Mort Baker said. “Now we’re going to jump like kangaroos for four days and nights. Good luck.” He had already found a drink from somewhere.

Bert looked at the crowd on the center of the floor and then at Helen. “Shall we go in?” he asked, like someone suggesting a dive into a whirlpool.

It wasn’t a question of “going in.” You stood for a moment at the edge of the gyrating, bobbing crowd, and suddenly you were sucked in and you were a part of it. Helen was filled with a wild happiness. She danced with Bert, she danced by herself when she lost him, she danced with strangers. It was so hot in the room that she felt her hair becoming as wet and stringy as if she had just been swimming underwater. She was not tired. She hopped up and down without knowing the steps and without caring. Neil grabbed her and began to try to samba, but she did not like to dance with him because he was too labored and too slow, as if he still thought the Arthur Murray way counted in an orgy. She waved goodbye and danced by herself.

A boy of about eighteen, dressed like a Turk, with billowing white trousers and a little sleeveless jerkin with nothing underneath, began to dance with her, smiling wordlessly. He leaned closer and said something to her in Portuguese but she could neither hear him nor understand him so she smiled and shook her head. He thought she was Brazilian. They broke away from each other and joined a snake dance that was circling the outside of the dance floor. People were standing on tops of tables now to get a better view, their arms around one another, holding drinks and swaying to the music. It was so hot in the room that when Helen tried to dance with any man who did not have a shirt on her hands slipped off his wet, perspiring skin. You had to hold tightly to your partner to keep from being torn away by the mass motion of the crowd, but the wet flesh was as resisting as if it had been greased.
Torero!
the crowd sang happily.
Torero!

With relief she found Bert again and took his hands, smiling, too breathless to speak. His entire face was wet from the unbearable heat; he seemed almost to exude a mist. His eyes were glazed, as if he hardly recognized her. They danced together, and Helen put her hands around his arms, moving her fingers against the muscles under his shirt, feeling weirdly that this was not her husband at all but some stranger whom she must touch to recognize.
Copacabana … tem agua, tem agua, tem agua!
She didn’t even know what it meant, but she sang the words she could make out, feeling a part of the crowd.

“We’re going to eat,” he gasped.

He led her, still dancing, through the pressed, rocking, flailing bodies until they reached the cooler air of their table at the far end of the room. Margie and Neil were seated, eating shrimps and rice, and Mort was nowhere to be seen. On top of the next table were two girls and two men, their arms around one another’s waists, all dressed as harlequins. They were standing on the tablecloth only a few inches away from where other people were unconcernedly eating their dinners. Helen sat down but she could not eat. It was too hot and she was too excited. She found some bottled water and poured it into a glass. The ice was too far away so she gulped the fizzy water lukewarm, glad to have it.

Waiters were pushing their way through the crowd with plates of ice cream, trying to put it on the tables and remove the rest of the food and get the whole thing over with before they were wounded in action. Nobody seemed very interested in food anyway, except Neil, who was devouring automatically as he always did no matter how hot the room was. Margie had withdrawn into a corner and was powdering her face and trying to smooth back her damp hair. For a moment Helen had a pang of conscience, imagining how wet and bedraggled she herself must look, but then she didn’t care. She had never felt this way before—so mindless and happy, like a vessel filled with music and nothing else. She climbed on a chair and stepped on to the table, kicking off her shoes to the floor.

The table was long, rather like a ramp in a musical comedy on which the dancers can go out among the audience. She looked down at the people jumping and rocking below her and she began to sway in time to the music, at first self-consciously because she had never danced on top of a table before and some people were looking at her, and then abandonedly. It was much cooler here on top of the table and she could look down and see everyone in a kaleidoscope of color and movement. She held up her arms and moved her bare feet in her own intricate speeded-up version of the samba, aware only of the music and her own movements. From below, the men who passed by in the snake dance waved at her and called out and some even tried to grab at her ankles, but she laughed at them. Other people were climbing up on tables now, dancing in pairs or alone.

How strange it was! She did not feel like Helen Sinclair, American Housewife—she felt like an anonymous Brazilian dancer, loved by everyone down there on the dance floor, waved at and smiled at and idolized. She waved at them all and smiled at them all. Someone squirted her with ether. It felt icy cold on her bare skin. The sweet, sickly smell of the ether bombs was everywhere in the room, blending with the moist heat. She felt as if she were drowning in flowers, but not bouquet flowers as she had known them; these were strange exotic flowers that grew wildly in the night and intoxicated anyone who breathed their odor.

Behind her a row of men had climbed up on to the table and were dancing too. The table was swaying slightly under their weight and for a moment Helen wondered if it would break, and if it did, where everyone could possibly fall. She kicked aside several empty glasses that had spilled on the tablecloth. The tablecloth was entirely black now, wrinkled, wet, and covered with mud from the pounding shoes. Waiters’ hands were frantically tugging at it to remove it from under the dancing feet. Someone stepped on someone’s plate of strawberry ice cream. The waiters finally pulled off the tablecloth, and Helen and the strangers were dancing on the bare boards.

Directly below her, between two tables, a man put his hand inside another man’s trousers. “Take your hand out of my pants,” the second man shouted. The first did not. The second one grabbed a glass, broke off the top of it on the edge of the table, and cut the first man’s throat. Hands reached out, taking and holding the attacker and the attacked, taking them away. The music blared on and no one else paid any attention.

Across the room a man, very drunk from liquor and ether, fell off a table on to his head. He bounced once and lay still for a moment, while his friends on the table gasped. Then he sat up, looked around, and stood up, oblivious of the blood pouring down his face. He began to dance again. Helen looked at him, shocked, until she remembered that ether is an anesthetic.

The table was rocking dangerously now and she was beginning to tire. She had only a few inches of space left to dance on anyway, so reluctantly she climbed down to the floor. She drank more water ravenously and looked for Bert. He had disappeared. Behind her was an exit and through it she could see the veranda and the black night sky. She searched under the table until she found her shoes and then she went out on to the veranda.

It was cool outside and the sky was filled with large white stars. There were couples resting against the veranda railing, talking inaudibly. Above the edge of the railing Helen could see the outlines of palm fronds. The street below was lighted by strings of lights and filled with people watching the people on the veranda. The music inside the hotel was less noisy now, pleasanter, almost like a heartbeat. She pulled off her turban and gasped with pleasure as the breeze blew through her wet hair. She imagined herself steaming, the way a hot frying pan does when you run cold water on it. She stood leaning against the railing, her back to the street, looking at the people strolling out of the ballroom. There were a great many couples dressed in Alpine shorts and green hats this year; perhaps because it was an easy costume and cool. But there seemed to be more people dressed as fantastic blackamoors than anything else, with the face masks that looked like a black stocking pulled over the head with little holes cut out for the eyes and mouth.

A tall, beautiful boy with café-au-lait skin strolled by, dressed as an angel complete with halo and huge golden wings. Helen smiled at him because his costume was so exquisitely made, and murmured, “Ah,
lindo
.” He glared at her and walked on, and she realized then that he was one of the homosexuals, who sometimes had the most imaginative and lovely costumes of all.

Near the doorway was a group of people dressed as rich Colonial Brazilians. They looked a little like the American southern aristocracy of the Civil War. They seemed different from the other revelers at the ball because they were quieter, more observers than participants, and the women especially seemed very conscious of their elaborate costumes. They talked quietly among themselves and fanned themselves and allowed passers-by to glance admiringly at them, as if they had come to the ball only to discover the effects of their
fantaseas
and then would go home. Surely none of them could dance in those huge hoopskirts on the crowded dance floor. The group turned and walked slowly into the hotel now, except for one of the men, who came toward the railing near where Helen was standing. She did not recognize him until he was next to her because he was wearing a mask and a wig.

“Hello, darling,” Sergio said quietly.

“I didn’t recognize you,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d be here.” She held out her hand, rather formally, filled with confusion at seeing him so unexpectedly. He kissed her hand and held it for a minute.

“I wasn’t going to come with them,” Sergio said. “I don’t like Carnival. My wife is on the farm, and I was just going to stay in my apartment and go to bed.” He smiled ruefully and shook his head. “I say that every year.
This
year, I say, I will
not
go to Carnival. I hate it. I drink too much, and I stay up all night, and I sniff too much ether until I feel sick. It’s an orgy; it’s ridiculous. But there’s something in my blood.… I don’t know. I say I won’t go, I lie on my bed, and then I hear the music coming from the
favellas
on the hill behind my apartment house. It happens every year this way. I listen to that music and I start to writhe on my bed like a snake. And then I put on a costume and here I am again.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Helen said.

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“You look beautiful. You have a Bahiana!” He surveyed her affectionately and proudly, as if she were a very clever child; she had noticed that look on other Brazilians when they saw an American who was enjoying himself at Carnival as much as they were. She smiled at him.

“It wasn’t difficult to buy.”

“You should wear it all the time.”

“I’d like to,” she said.

“Would you like champagne?”

“
Is
there any?”

“Come with me.”

He led her adroitly through the crowd in the hot, brilliantly lighted ballroom, through another smaller ballroom, and finally to a room where there was a bar. There were orchestras in every room, playing loudly, pounding out the music that never stopped. In every room people were dancing, bobbing up and down, perspiring, smiling, pushing, until Helen felt as though she were wandering in a labyrinth that had been made to confuse the wanderer because everything everywhere was so exactly the same and so extreme, like a dream.

Sergio bought the entire bottle of champagne from the bartender and took it to a vacant table in the corner. The champagne was cold and on the sweet side, and Helen had two glasses. He drank the rest himself. Helen had never seen him drink so much before. From his pocket he pulled out a gilded aerosol can of the perfumed ether.

“Have you ever tried this?”

“What do they do with it?”

He looked around for an instant to make sure no one was watching. “Don’t make a big display,” he said very quietly. “It offends some people when they see what I’m going to do.” He squirted some of the ether into his handkerchief and quickly held the handkerchief over his nose and mouth, breathing deeply. He was holding his head down so it looked fairly innocent, as if he might be only going to sneeze. “Do you want to try?”

“I … don’t know.”

“I’ll only give you a little. It will make you feel drunker, and happy. You must breathe it in immediately after I give you the handkerchief because it evaporates.” He squirted more ether on the handkerchief and held it to Helen’s nose.

She had a moment of terror, reminded of when she had had her tonsils out as a child and ether on a white piece of gauze had made her unconscious. She breathed in, shallowly and fearfully.