Tropicalia, p.16
Tropicália, page 16
I was gonna kill that man. I was gonna kill that man.
My revenge was coming!
My whole body was burning. I felt like I was scalding in a pot. Each breath I took scraped at my lungs. The rain felt hot like acid. But every feeling faded in the unstoppable movement of my feet. I knew they were here. I could smell the blood about to be spilled.
Bararabababoom!
The peopled knot loosened and I was on a bare patch of sand staring right at my sister.
Daniel?
Her hair and dress were drenched and she was wearing a necklace with her name on it.
What are you doing here?
I smiled. They were close.
Daniel?
I stared at her dark eyes. My sister. Was she?
We were back on the Ilha and it was New Year’s. No mother or father around. Grandma cooking in the kitchen. We were sitting there laughing recklessly smelling the heat burn on the gas stove. We didn’t have no mother or father. We were together in that. And instead of claiming that solidarity, I shirked her. I said She ain’t shit to me! Fuck Lucia! I’m going to the United States! Fucking shoved her off my boat and let her drown.
I grabbed her hands. This was why. I was gonna do this for her too.
My purpose was set!
The rabble tightened again and got loud. I pushed away. Shoving forward.
I knew it was time. I knew it was time.
Daniel! Where are you going!
Slow down!
I could hear Mateus and Rachel’s voices behind me. I couldn’t see nothing but the north star of my knife pulling me along like a reeled in fish. Bababdakaboom! The dam of the sky burst. The rain was dropping in sheets. Where did Daniel go? I can’t see anything! A scream rose up from the people, a scream that soured my stomach like an enemy goal sweeping through Maracanã. Oh shit! What was that? The knife was in my hand. The countdown was starting. Mateus grabbed my shoulder. Dude, where are you going? I shook him off. Ten! Hey stop pushing kid! Nine! Revenge. Revenge! The knife in my hand. Eight! Daniel slow down! What the fuck man. Happy New Year! Not yet! Seven! That guy has a knife in his hand be careful! Six! It crashed down on us like a wave. Arrastão! Five! Kids with knives and guns all around me. Pushing people to the ground. Grabbing phones out of their hands. Four! People started to run. And there in front of me. Daniel? My mother and that man. Three! My knife was ready. Rachel? Daniel what are you doing! Come on don’t do this. Two! A kid ran up. He had a gun. The rain stopped for a moment. One! Boomboomburumkarakaboom! Happy New Year! He pointed it right at Larry. Oh my god! Give me your shit now turista! The knife was in my hand. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it. I lunged. My knife plunged into the kid’s leg. Porra! Boom! Boom! The gun went off. No! Dad! Dad! Dad! No no no no. Larry! Holy shit that guy just got shot! My face was on the ground. Wet sand in my mouth. Mateus grabbed me. Dude what the fuck did you do? We gotta run! I looked back. My mother was gone. He was on the ground. Rachel was standing over him screaming. I did it. I didn’t mean to do it but I did it. My mouth was dry and I wanted to pass out. Run dude run! Boombababoom! All the rain dropped from the broken roof of the sky. I couldn’t see nothing. I couldn’t hear nothing. We ran toward the sea through the mud sand in silent horror like it was the end of the world.
january 1
LUCIA IN HER new white dress, with the necklace her mother gave her glinting in the streetlights, marched in doomed step with her turista troops as if anchor fated to the blood dark sea, Lucia and the drunk jittery multitude like an army in white uniform, her mother and her father and her sister by her side in rapturous felicity. Wait. Not her family, no. It was obvious she didn’t fit the picture, like black paint slurred on a museum canvas. Where did she belong? Lucia had no answer, lonely in the turbid throng, the black clouds watching her like vultures on a rooftop.
I didn’t know who I was. I was taking swigs from a vodka bottle after two years sober, after a life spent watching how alcohol slackens your holds, turns you into a loose prickly creature prone to catastrophic lapses. You might headbutt your daughter. Or, worse, tell the truth. Where could I find the truth about anything? It certainly wasn’t here with my mother, her mouth perverted into a perpetual smile, and her husband, who earlier today, with his christian acuity, diagnosed Daniel as a sinner and absolved him immediately. I can’t be mad at him for punching me! What would Jesus say? Though I’m sure somewhere in his heart, Daniel was tied to a breaking wheel and Larry was bashing him up with hammers and clubs.
Where was the truth? Hidden behind the eyes? If we flayed someone open, could we find it? It wasn’t with this girl, Olivia, and her floppy blond ignorance, shrilly proclaiming in her american tone, Let’s be friends! the second she saw me. You’re so pretty, Luchia! The c catching with an awful clank. Was I pretty? Was that my value in the precise economic geometry that shaped our skeletons for purchase? I fainted in the kitchen, and when I woke, my mother wanted to take me on a shopping spree. Let me buy you a new dress! You don’t have to pay for anything when you’re with me, Lucia. She bought me. I traded my worn flipflops for elegant new sandals. I was wearing her dress, her necklace. I ate dinner in their sumptuous, ridiculous hotel and spoke english while the waiters gawked at me suspiciously. I laughed at Larry’s boring, unpleasant jokes. My mother dragged me into her world. Wasn’t she mocking me? See, Lucia, even you have a price. The only moments she was ever partial to me were when Daniel faltered, and I basked in it, and now I was the one who accepted her new husband, so she rewarded me.
Marta sat on the bed watching silently while I tried everything on.
—What do you think?
—Lucia, didn’t you say you were gonna stay here tonight?
—I’ll take you to the roof some other time. Ok? I promise.
—It’s gonna rain! You won’t be able to see the fireworks anyway. Stay home!
She begged and I snapped at her. I was annoyed. My mother puppeted me so perfectly that I was her living copy, rebuffing Marta like she used to do to me. My grandmother heard and came into the room.
—Lucia, don’t talk to her like that. She just wants you to stay. We both want you here.
—You lied to me grandma! I can’t ever trust you again.
—Lucia, I’m sorry. Let’s talk about it.
—No. You hurt me!
She started to cry. I stared at those weepy brown eyes, and I didn’t flinch, I walked right past her and out of the apartment, as if that was courage! Why? Because she lied to me about the thing she was most ashamed of? No. It was deeper than that. She was the only model I had for goodness, the only inviolable life I could point to, the only standard I could judge myself against. There was no more certainty. I didn’t know anything about anything. So later, when I was with my mom in her hotel room, sitting on the bed while she put her makeup on, just the two of us, talking and giggling excited about how I looked in my new dress and the wonderful day we spent together behaving like mothers and daughters were supposed to, I didn’t know what to say when she brought it up.
—Lucia, have you ever thought about coming to the United States?
—What?
—You’re only twenty one. You could still go to college. You know, Larry can get you free tuition at his school. And of course, we have room at the house. It’s not forever. You can always come back. Think about it! It could be a great opportunity.
I smiled. That’s what I did. I didn’t think about Marta, or my grandmother, or anything, all I imagined was Lucia in a college library reading and studying for tests, walking in a college graduation, choosing her own life freely for the first time. Hadn’t I spent so much time deferring my own life? I deserved better. I was smart and capable, I deserved opportunities, those denied me because of rotten facticity, opportunities Daniel had and squandered. I deserved, I deserved. What was more spurious than merit? But I understood the thinking now. My mother brought me into her arms and hugged me, and I could feel the cleanslate power of a new conquerable world revealing itself, as if my caravel landed on the empty shore and all I could see was an impossible verdancy to claim and cut through. What were love and duties to me? Dusty trade pieces, shackles to shuck. Wasn’t it time to be a whole new Lucia?
We were almost on the beach and Olivia handed me a pill. You like percocets? Mommy and daddy were out in front of us, holding hands and laughing, and I took it and remembered a haze of brutal vomit covered mornings and dawn walks home, despair rattling like rocks in my brain. Marcus. Who, lucky Lucia! chose me out of all the bodacious avistable women, and I got a taste of what it was like to romp permissively around this city, served at places I served at, finally elevated to the vaunted realm my mom spent my childhood celebrating. All it took was submission. When he choked me past pleasure and said, I own you! I could give myself up because the return was so worthy. What was it worth being me, being free, if it meant a paltry, meager life? But when he returned that last time with his sure swaggering thunder and asked me to marry him, to live under his thrall and be thrust into that vile realm of motherhood where everything you do is a failure, I couldn’t do it. I could see my grandma and Marta, brokenhearted at the door watching me leave, and I couldn’t do it, because I was certain which side I was on, that I wouldn’t be my mother under any circumstances.
But now. My mother was offering me an opportunity that had nothing to do with submission. Maybe her absence had transformed her into a mystic, malevolent force that only existed in my head, maybe she earnestly cared about me but her material concerns got in the way, she was diverted by a petty selfishness, but now that she was comfortable, she wanted to prop me up to free myself, to break the sullen bars of this soft brasilian prison. And this freedom could be generative. What could I do for Marta if I stayed here? What kind of life did I want to live? One like my grandma’s? My mother was right about her, she didn’t have the courage to live the life she wanted, she didn’t even love my grandpa, she endured her flat, weary, unprofitable life, heaping misery on misery as time chewed its nails down to the quick. But I wanted to live! I wanted to live, but I wanted to be good. Good! What did that even mean? Grandma lied to me. I was so harsh to her about it, but it was only one lie. A lie that lied beneath all these foundations. Because if Nara wasn’t grandpa’s daughter then that drew a straight line to me, didn’t it?
My mother lied to me for twenty one years. I remember she dragged me to church the week before she left, and I sat the whole time, pummeled by stultifying boredom, staring at a striking painting of Saint Sebastian, eternally fleched, arrows gored into his chest and neck, and I remember I read that he was tied to a tree and shot with arrows but he didn’t die, and I thought, Wow, that’s what having a father is like. God was his daddy, and no matter how vicious the world’s scourge became, he could endure it, because he had a stable, strong, encompassing love to catch him if he fell.
On the way home, I asked my mother for the last time.
—Who’s my dad?
—Lucia!
—Seriously, mom. I don’t care. I just wanna know.
—Your father is your father. God rest his soul. Enough, ok?
That was the same story I had to hear from Nara, who I trusted like the sun, even though when I would look closely at Antonio’s face, I could see little resemblances. I was so naive, thinking that if it was true someone would tell me, even Nara, because if it was true it would mean Antonio wasn’t the person she thought he was, right? Nobody is who we think they are, there are real lives teeming under ground you can never breach no matter how hard you dig, you’re stuck trusting the long, lying, soil sprouted stalks. I was Lucia, floating around untethered, unbegotten. I would never have a father. Unless I chose this man, in front of me. Who kissed my mother on the cheek and then jumped back horrified when a big bellied man skipping through the crowd stopped and yelled in his face.
—O Brasil tá fudido né mano?
—Ohbreegado! Larry said, and then tried to keep walking, but the guy tugged on his shirt and held him there.
—Ué que mulher linda hein, é tua?
—What did he say?
—He said that’s a beautiful woman, is she yours?
Before he could answer we heard someone scream, Cavalo! and the multitude lurched in tandem and sent the drunk questioner down headfirst on the cobblestones, where Larry would’ve fallen too, but I stepped in, unthinkingly, his big wet head thumped into my chest, and I caught him.
—Good catch Luchia!
He got balanced back on his feet and thanked me. Luchia, Luchia, Luchia. Maybe I was part of this family now. I could be like Olivia, who squeezed my arm and joked that I must be stronger than I look. Olivia who frolicked boundlessly, she didn’t have to know anything, she didn’t have to do anything because she had a doting father whose wealth shined on her, so she could prance around my carioca garden stomping all the flowers, forever consequenceless. Why couldn’t I have been born like that? Olivia. I could wear her name like this dress. Try on that life. I could take my mom’s offer, and I could have that. How fast would I change? How true was the me entombed in this lucialike body? There was nothing natural in a name, it was like clothes, a daily habit, you wore it to hide the nothing you were born with. My mother recognized that and she put on a new outfit. A sharp horror shuddered through me as the thunder cracked above, and I realized, there was nothing stopping me, I could leave all this behind.
* * *
BEFORE WE walked down to the sand, Olivia asked her father if she could go to the main stage to watch the concert, bringing me along of course. Larry looked out into the roaring multitudinous sea of soaked people dressed in white, drunk, screaming, and stumbling.
—I guess so. But be careful girls!
—Text me updates, okay?
I thought my mother said that to Olivia, but she was looking right at me. I didn’t have my phone, but that gesture shook me. Did she care? It felt like suddenly there was an anastomosis between the rended, diverging streams of our lives, and I felt, as a shock even to myself, that I could ignore the initial separation, treat it like a tossed rippleless pebble in the riverrunning flow of time, and move on. The hot rain hit my face, and I was happy. I hugged my mother goodbye, and when Larry held his hand out to shake mine, I hugged him. I thanked him for taking me out to dinner and I said it was very nice to meet him, and I walked off with Olivia, feeling the rumblings of a potential sisterhood.
I was corrupted, but everything was corrupted, everyone here wearing white, foolishly aping a forgotten candomblé ritual, turistas heading shoreward to toss their white flowers in the ocean as an offering to Iemanjá because it was a Thing to Do on a travel guide. This storm felt like a judgement. Xangô banging his axe on the world’s roof. Maybe it would rupture and release another earthwiping flood, but with no Noah this time because nobody was sinless and nobody deserved to survive. Rio de Janeiro would be left to rot and ruin, extinguished by perpetuity. My death would mean nothing to time, it would keep rolling on, immense beyond imagination, it would be around long enough to see even the world’s skeleton tossed on the bone pile. Why not live now? Live for me? My finite material reality was a truth I grasped everyday. If I lived for that, I couldn’t fail. Or I could be my grandmother, living for her saviors and paradises on behalf of whom she paragoned an impossible virtue which she failed to uphold. It was all failure, death, and lack. Maybe goodness was an error. Maybe sin was invented to implement domination. Maybe it was time for Lucia to live for herself.
—I’m trying to meet up with this cute girl I met yesterday.
We were in the middle of the closed down, peopleful street. Olivia was talking to me.
—I gotta text her to see where she is.
—Oh.
—Her name’s Rita.
—Rita?
—Isn’t it pretty?
It couldn’t be my Rita. I didn’t say anything. We kept walking. I led the way, pushing through a gargantuan mass of men who swayed over me like rickety buildings. The path cleared a little, and we were in a space with more breathing room. Olivia had her phone out trying to text, intermittently wiping the rain off with her shirt. She looked up and spoke to me.
—I mean, you’re a lesbian, right?
—What?
—Sorry just a vibe I got. I’m drunk.
She pulled out a flask from her shorts and handed it to me, and I took a long swig. Everyone was always trying to tell me or ask me who I was, but I didn’t know! I felt tyrannized by ascriptions, I was crumbling under the weight of a named and categorized Lucia. I hadn’t had sex in two years. I loved Marcus. I loved his body and his strength and his unexpected moments of kindness, but it was nothing like what I felt with Rita. Those long nights in her apartment with a cramped fan sputtering as we talked and held eachother until sunrise, those full ample curves and the dizzying plunges deep in a soft pink pleasure. There were others too. Nameless nobodies who took what they could from me when I was addicted to sundering myself from my actions. I loved Rita and I told her so, but I couldn’t be with her because of preponderant responsibilities I had, over and above romance and pleasure, I needed to look after my dying grandpa, my fading grandma, and my little orphaned tamanduá, Martinha, my cousin daughter sister, and I needed to figure out who the hell Lucia was. Two years of dutystuck asceticism and I was more lost than ever. I felt like my limbs were amputated and scattered, left to crawl disgustingly toward a wholeness that was never really there. I needed a thunderbolt to scalp me down to my soul and melt my flesh and maybe the charred remainder would reveal the truth. If there was any truth at the core.
Olivia was holding her phone out tauntingly. I almost warned her, but at the moment the thought occurred to me, a little kid like a bolting blur nabbed it out of her hand and took off running, navigating the crowd as expertly as a rat.
—My phone!
—Thief!
