Away from Home (40 page)

Then the road led past what seemed like a housing development, with small private houses surrounded by gardens and wooden fences. There were chickens, and small pigs in pens, and children playing in the front yards and on the road, who looked up to wave respectfully when the jeep drove past.

“These houses are where the workers live.”

“They’re so pretty. I wouldn’t mind living in one myself,” Helen said. “That pink one, for instance.”

“I’ll take you to the liquor factory.”

It was the strangest feeling; she felt like someone out of
Gone with the Wind
. The closer they came to the distillery the more people there were near the road, and every one of them knew Sergio, or at least recognized the jeep, and every one of them greeted him the way a peasant greets a feudal lord. They drove through a small village square with a chapel, a post office, a general store, a bar and a movie theater. There was a horse-drawn wagon standing in front of the post office. Sergio stopped the jeep while a priest came out of the chapel leading a line of children. The priest and the children looked up at him, smiled and called greetings, and walked on across to the other side of the village square.

“What town is this?” Helen asked.

“It’s no town. It’s just part of the farm.”

The chapel bells were ringing when they drove out of the square, and when they approached the distillery Helen could smell the heavy sweetish odor of crushed sugar cane. She had never seen a distillery, but this one looked more like a still from Prohibition days than what she had imagined. Everything was very primitive. There was a large shed made of boards, where great piles of cut sugar cane were stored, and in front of this shed two oxen stood patiently attached to a wagon while flies bit at them and circled greedily, attracted by the sweetness of the sugar juices and the live flesh. Barefoot workers brought armfuls of sugar cane to the wagon, and the wagon brought it to another shed, where it was apparently crushed in some machinery. There was an overhead system of tubes that transferred the juice to a huge vat standing outside another shed. The air was heavy with the sweet-sourish, slightly spoiled smell of fermenting sugar cane juice that would eventually make
cachaça
, the firewater white liquor of the poor.

The vat had been decorated with all sorts of odd pictures cut from magazines and comic books and pasted on, and even with some old whisky bottle labels. Evidently the workers had some affection for it. Inside this last shed there were tables set in rows, where young barefooted girls and a few very young boys, really only children, were pasting labels on sealed bottles of the colorless
cachaça
, and packing them carefully in excelsior-lined crates. The young girls nodded shyly when they saw Sergio, and a few of the older ones stared and then giggled and looked down at their packing, pretending to be very busy. Evidently he bore the status of young lord of the manor even with these adolescent girls, who were at the hero-worship age and seemed to have long-distance crushes on him.

“Did you ever taste
cachaça?
”

“No. Can we try some here?”

Sergio reached to take a bottle from the table and then stopped. “We’ll get some at the house. I forgot, all the bottles are counted. My father will think one of the girls took it.”

“Well, can’t you take it and tell him?”

“You forget, darling, this is a business. There’s plenty at the house.”

Yes, Helen thought; locked up. This was a strange family, stranger the longer she knew them. If not a millionaire, the old man was as close to it as anyone wanted to be. But whisky, which came pouring out of the cane of his fields, was locked up in his own home and doled out as if it were either precious or dangerous. In many ways, ill and old, he was already slightly dotty, but to his grown and mature children his word and will were law. She knew it was only she, the outsider, who remarked on this. His children and grandchildren accepted him. But the outside modern world had already started to come into his ordered, protected life and take things away, just as she the outsider had driven up this morning in a car with his youngest son. The polo ponies stood patiently in their stalls, the tennis courts were rolled every morning and then stood all day in the sun untouched by anything but insects and butterflies. The canoe rested on its side on the shore of the lake. The ducks swam. The servant put out the red and white striped cushions at noon and then took them away again at dark. His children traveled by ship and plane and soon by jet. The priest in his long black coat and flat black hat walked slowly across the square in the village that was only part of the old man’s farm, followed by a line of village children, while the old man’s own children traveled to Europe and America to gape as tourists at the priests and children of other villages.

Roy Rogers stamped in his stall next to Omar Khayyám. Guillerme, who was learning to be a feudal lord of all this land, parroted the slang of love songs that had been written by a people whose unchaperoned dating habits he was probably already beginning to copy. The old man, who was the past, changed only with the unpredictable personal quirks of the old and ill. Whatever odd thing he did, Helen realized she could understand it. But it was Sergio, here with her, the man she loved, who was really the difficult one to understand, even though he seemed so much more simple.

Sergio, who had married wisely and well but not for love, stood here now beside the woman he would love wisely and well but never think of marrying. He spoke of love to Helen in her own language so skillfully that she often forgot that he thought about her in his own language, which contained not only different words but an entirely different meaning for their meaning. He was the one she would have to try hard to understand, because he deceived her by seeming almost every moment to be so much like herself.

They walked out of the packing shed to the jeep. Sergio nodded to some workers who were outside loading crates on to a truck. They greeted him respectfully and looked at Helen curiously but with their respect for him carried over to his companion, whoever she was. She pretended to herself, in this fairy-tale setting, that she was his wife. What would it be like to be the lady of this great feudal settlement? She could live here all year round, she told herself, and only go into Rio for occasional shopping trips or visits with friends. She would ride about the miles and miles of property on horseback, under the vast blue sky, and vegetate, and love every minute of it. They could have ten children, to fill all the empty rooms of that great house, to laugh and run about in the silent gardens, swim in the pool, fight over whose turn it was to take the canoe out on the lake. And Roger and Julie would be beside themselves with ecstasy in a place like this … it was all a dream. She would never marry Sergio, she would probably never even allow herself to think about it again. It was a momentary fantasy. And yet, how lovely it would be! A strange place like this, different from anything she had ever seen, made Helen feel that anything might be possible for her now; she could even change her life. She pictured herself learning about crops and trees, becoming gracious and lazy like a rich Brazilian housewife, making a tour of the estate her entire daily diversion. She even pictured herself in some anachronistic long-skirted dress, riding sidesaddle; it was an amusing thought. If she was ever lonely she could invite Margie to come for a week or two. Look how my life has changed, she would say to Margie, still not quite able to believe it herself. Look, Margie! Would either of us have imagined all this?

“I have to make a telephone call,” Sergio said. He headed the jeep back toward the square where the post office was.

“Here?”

“There are no phones at the house. My father won’t allow it. For a long time we couldn’t get one—you know how hard it is to get a phone in Brazil. And then one of my cousins got a job with the government, and he said we could have all the telephones we wanted. But by then my father was used to it this way and he refused. In a way, I like it. It’s peaceful.”

The one telephone at the back of the post office, which was actually the one telephone on the entire
fazenda
, was an old-fashioned wooden boxlike affair with a crank and a black outside bell. It looked like the kind of thing Helen’s Westport friends had used for candy dishes or rewired lamps. It took ten minutes of cranking and shouting to get the operator. Then they waited fifteen minutes, and finally the operator called back and said there would be a delay of an hour and a half to get the call through to Rio.

“Peaceful?” Helen said. “It would make me nervous to have to scream into that thing.”

“I don’t want to make you wait here,” Sergio said. “I don’t even want to wait myself. But this call is important; it’s to my father’s specialist.” He paced about the small back room, looking tense and angry. “I have an idea. Maybe I can get São Paulo. I know somebody who is going to Rio tonight. He can call the doctor when he gets there.” He cranked for the operator again, looking nervous but no longer angry.

Helen lighted a cigarette. How dreadful it would be if there was ever an emergency, she was thinking. You could die here before you would ever get word to the outside world. For the first time she realized how isolated, actually, they were here.

There was a great deal of shouting and repeating in Portuguese from Sergio to the operator, and finally he seemed to be talking to someone at an office. He lowered his voice to its normal tone. He was one of those people who smile and react facially when they speak on a telephone, even though they know the person at the other end cannot see them. She watched him and felt a sudden tenderness. He was so handsome when he smiled—that wolfine grin, a combination of charm and sexuality and a sheer lucky formation of features. And he never seemed to be aware of how handsome he actually was. She had always instinctively disliked people who smile at you while they are talking because they know they look attractive that way and want to bewitch you. Sergio’s face was always a reflection of his reactions to the other person; it was the most perceptively responsive face she had ever seen.

“There was a great deal of flooding because of the rains in São Paulo,” he told her. “I was afraid the lines would be down. It’s all right. We can go now.”

She passed him going to the door and they both stopped at the same instant and stood still, looking at each other. Sergio glanced at the closed door that led to the main room of the post office and then he took hold of her shoulders and drew her to him very slowly, looking into her face.

“You look lovely now,” he said. “You should see yourself.”

“I was thinking that about you. When you were talking on the telephone.”

He smiled. “We’re two beautiful people—to each other, anyway.”

“That’s all I need. I don’t want to take a poll.”

“If we took a poll you wouldn’t have to be afraid. You’d win. I’m not so sure about me.”

“
I’m
sure about you.”

“Kiss me.”

She kissed him, feeling a momentary instant of shyness at having to be the one to move forward first, as if it were the first time she had ever kissed anyone. But Sergio’s response was so instantaneous and urgent that she felt as though whatever she could give him, he would return it a hundredfold, so that no matter if she hinted or initiated any gesture of love-making she would always be the recipient and the one who gained the most.

The feeling of having been humiliated that had stayed with her since that terrible night with Bert two days ago began to slip away. It was something that had happened to someone else, years and years ago.

“We go to the house,” Sergio said softly, his arms still around her, his lips on her neck. “We lie down for a little while.”

He made it sound so companionable, so full of mystery and promise, that it was almost as if they might be going to lie down together on a bed to rest after all. She could not even remember when she had last made love in the middle of the afternoon instead of waiting for any planned and special time of isolation in her own unprivate household. Sergio had suddenly made the thought of the act of love seem as new as if she had not done it for years. She felt herself trembling in the hot sunshine as they drove in the open jeep, trembling inside and outside as well with a combination of anticipation and shyness and need. She felt as though nothing could make her stop this delicate shaking except the entire weight of his body on hers to keep her from flying apart.

He drove the jeep to the driveway of her small guesthouse. It was so still outside in the sun that Helen could hear the buzzing of the bees and the crack of someone hitting a golf ball on the lawn in front of the big house. When the golf ball whizzed across her driveway in a white blur she looked at it as unrecognizingly as if it had been a missile from outer space.

Guillerme followed it, running, shouting, waving his arms and his golf club. “I have been waiting for you!” he shouted. “Where have you been?”

“Play golf somewhere else,” Sergio said nastily. “You’ll break a window and Uncle will break your stupid head.”

“I’m bored.” He gave Helen a milky smile.

“Make him go away,” she said softly in English. “Please.”

“Get out of here,” Sergio told him. “Disappear. Kill yourself.” The words were sharp but he looked in control of himself again; he was even smiling to soften their unkindness. “I want to talk with my
noiva
alone. Go away.”

“What’s
noiva?
” Helen asked.

“Fiancée.”

She looked down at the path, taken with embarrassment.

Guillerme swung his golf club, cutting off the heads of flowers at the edge of the path. “Nobody lets me bring my girl friend here,” he said sulkily. “Do you think I like to be here? All the time with cows and horses. I wish I was in Rio with
my
fiancée.”

“You’d better not have a fiancée,” Sergio said. “I know what kind of girls you take up to that empty apartment. The janitor gives you the key. Ha! I know all about you. Go away and leave the grownups alone.”

Guillerme smoothed back his sun-streaked hair with one hand. He tried to look winning. “Helen likes me,” he said pleadingly, more to her than to Sergio. “You like me, Helen, don’t you? Let’s all go and have a drink together.”