Lucia, Richard, Evelyn
Upstate New York
Richard
Brazil, 1987–1990
They left the motel at nine with only a coffee inside them. They were all hungry, so Lucia demanded they have breakfast somewhere: she needed hot food on a normal plate, not in a carton with chopsticks. They ended up at a Denny’s, the women tucking into a banquet of pancakes while Richard stirred a bowl of insipid oatmeal. Leaving Brooklyn the day before, they had agreed to stay apart in public, but as the hours went by, they forgot their caution. They felt so comfortable with one another that even Kathryn Brown had been incorporated into the group without a fuss.
The road looked in better shape than on the previous day. During the night there had been only a light dusting of snow, and although the temperature was still several degrees below freezing, the wind had dropped and the snow had been cleared from the highways. They could travel more quickly; if they kept up the same speed, Richard calculated they would reach the cabin around midday and would have plenty of daylight in which to dispose of the Lexus. However, an hour and a half later, as he was driving around a bend, he found himself a hundred yards from the flashing blue and red lights of several police patrol cars blocking the route. There was no detour, and if he did a U-turn he would only attract their attention.
The contents of his breakfast rose into his mouth, filling it with bile. Nausea and a phantom return of his diarrhea panicked him. He felt in the top pocket of his jacket, where he normally kept his pink pills, but could not find them. In his rearview mirror he saw Lucia crossing her fingers for luck. In front of him were halted vehicles, an ambulance, and a fire engine. A highway trooper motioned for him to join the line. Removing his balaclava, Richard opened the window and asked him in the calmest voice he could muster what was wrong.
“A multiple pileup.”
“Any fatality, officer?”
“I am not authorized to give that information,” the trooper replied, and walked off.
Richard collapsed with his head on the steering wheel, waiting with the other drivers and counting the seconds. His stomach and esophagus were on fire. He could not recall having had such a ferocious acid attack as this before. He was afraid his ulcer might have burst and he was bleeding internally. It was just his rotten luck that he would run into a traffic pileup right at that moment, when he had a dead body in the car trunk and desperately needed a toilet. What if it was appendicitis? The oatmeal had been a mistake; he had forgotten it loosened the bowels. “If these damned cops don’t clear the road I’m going to crap myself right here. That’s all I need. What’s Lucia going to think: that I’m a wreck, an idiot with chronic diarrhea,” he said aloud.
On the dashboard clock the minutes went by at a snail’s pace. All of a sudden his cell phone rang.
“Are you okay? You looked as if you passed out,” Lucia said, her voice reaching him from another planet.
“I don’t know,” he replied, raising his head from the wheel.
“It’s psychosomatic, Richard. You’re nervous. Take your pills.”
“They’re in my bag in your car.”
“I’ll bring them to you.”
“No!”
He saw Lucia climb out of one door of the Subaru and Evelyn out of the other, Marcelo in her arms. Lucia approached the Lexus with a completely natural air and rapped on the window. He lowered it, intending to shout at her, but as she handed him the pills one of the patrolmen came striding over.
“Miss! Stay in your vehicle!” he ordered her.
“I’m sorry, officer. Do you have a match?” she asked him, making the universal gesture of raising a cigarette to her lips.
“Get into your vehicle! You too!” the man shouted at Evelyn.
They had to wait thirty-five minutes before the accident was cleared, the Subaru with its engine on to keep the heating going, the Lexus an icebox. Once the ambulances and the fire engine had departed, the police allowed the cars lined up in both directions to get going. As they passed the accident they saw an upturned van with its four wheels in the air, an unrecognizable car with a completely crumpled hood that had rammed into it from behind, and a third car piled up on the second. It was a clear day, the storm had passed, and perhaps none of the three drivers involved had considered the possibility of black ice.
Richard had taken four antacid tablets. The taste of bile remained in his mouth and his stomach was still burning. He drove hunched over the wheel, bathed in a cold sweat, his sight clouded with pain, increasingly convinced he had internal bleeding. He warned Lucia on his cell phone that he could not go on and pulled up at the first stop he found. She came to a halt behind him just as he was opening the door and vomiting spectacularly onto the road.
“We have to get help. There must be a hospital somewhere near here,” said Lucia, handing him a tissue and a bottle of water.
“No hospital. It’ll pass, but I need a toilet . . .”
Before Richard could contradict her, Lucia told Evelyn to drive the Subaru and she got in behind the wheel of the Lexus. “Drive slowly, Lucia. You saw what can happen if the car skids,” said Richard, before collapsing onto the backseat in a fetal position. It occurred to him that in exactly the same posture, separated from him only by the back of the seat and a plastic partition, lay the body of Kathryn Brown. Half dazed by pain and weakness, he found himself sharing with her some of his worst memories and wondering if her spirit had already sensed much of what had happened to him in the past.
IN THE DAYS WHEN RICHARD LIVED in Rio de Janeiro people drank as a matter of course. It was a social obligation, part of the culture, a necessity at every meeting, even business ones, a comfort on a rainy evening or at a hot noon, a stimulus for political discussion, and a cure for a cold, sadness, frustrated love, or a disappointment in soccer. Richard had not been back to Rio for years, and yet he guessed it must still be the same: certain customs take generations to die out. At the time he drank as much alcohol as his friends and acquaintances, not considering it anything out of the ordinary. Very occasionally he drank himself into a stupor, but that was always unpleasant. He preferred to float, to see the world with no jagged edges, a friendly, warm place. He had not given his drinking much importance until Anita declared it was a problem and began obsessively counting how many glasses he downed, discreetly at first but later humiliating him in public with her comments. He had a good head for liquor: he could drink four beers and three caipirinhas without any drastic consequences—on the contrary, he lost his shyness and thought he was wonderful. Yet from then on he restrained his drinking to assuage his wife and his ulcer, which had the habit of springing unpleasant surprises. Although he wrote frequently to his father, he never mentioned his drinking, because Joseph was abstemious and would not have understood.
After giving birth to their daughter, Bibi, Anita became pregnant three more times, but on each occasion suffered a miscarriage. She dreamed of having a large family like her own; she was one of the younger daughters among eleven children and also had countless cousins, nephews, and nieces. Every new loss deepened her despair, and got it into her head that it was a sign from the gods or a punishment for some unknown fault. Gradually she began to lose her strength and joyousness.
Without these essential virtues dancing lost all meaning for her, so that in the end she sold her academy. The women in the Farinha family—grandmother, sisters, aunts, and cousins—all closed ranks, taking turns to be with her. Anita clung closely to Bibi, watching over her anxiously all the time for fear of losing her. Her family tried to distract her by getting her to write a book with the recipes of several generations of Farinhas, in the belief that nothing bad can resist the remedy of work and the comfort of food. Then they made her arrange eighty albums of family photographs in chronological order, and when she had done that invented other pretexts to keep her busy. Richard reluctantly allowed them to take his wife and child to her grandparents’ ranch for a couple of months. The sun and wind revived Anita’s spirits; she returned from the countryside weighing four kilos more and regretting that she had sold the academy because she wanted to dance again.
They made love as they had in the days when that was all they ever did. They went out to listen to music and dance. Richard tried a few steps with his wife until he could see that all eyes were fixed on her, whether it was because they recognized the queen of the Anita Farinha Academy or simply out of admiration or desire, then he gallantly gave way for other men who were lighter on their feet. He retreated to drink at their table and watch her tenderly, vaguely wondering about his existence.
He was of an age to plan the future, but with a glass in his hand it was easy to postpone that concern. He had completed his doctorate more than two years earlier but had not made anything of it apart from a couple of articles published in academic journals in the United States. One was on the land rights of indigenous people in the 1988 Brazilian constitution, the other on gender violence. He made his living giving English classes. Out of curiosity rather than ambition he occasionally applied for one of the job vacancies he saw in the American Political Science Review. He considered his time in Rio de Janeiro as a nice pause in his destiny, a prolonged vacation. He would soon have to carve out a professional career for himself, but that could wait a while longer. The city was conducive to pleasure and leisure. Anita had a small house near the beach and they got by on the money from the sale of her academy and his English classes.
BIBI WAS ALMOST THREE when the goddesses finally answered the prayers of Anita and the rest of the women in her family. “I owe it to Yemaya,” said Anita when she told her husband she was pregnant. “Is that so? I thought you owed it to me,” he laughed, lifting her in a bear hug. There were no problems during the pregnancy and she reached full term, but the birth itself was difficult and in the end a caesarean was needed. The doctor warned Anita she should not have any more children, at least for a few years, but that did not upset her too much because now she had Pablo in her arms. He was a healthy boy with a voracious appetite, the little brother for Bibi that the whole family had been waiting for.
At dawn a month later, Richard leaned over the crib to pick up the child and hand him to Anita. He was surprised Pablo had not cried from hunger in the night, as he usually did every three or four hours. He was sleeping so peacefully that Richard hesitated to disturb him. A wave of tenderness engulfed him to the core. The overwhelming sense of gratitude he often felt in the presence of Bibi made his eyes sting and brought a knot to his throat. Anita took the baby with her night gown open to put him on her breast. It was then she realized he was not breathing. A visceral scream like that of a tortured animal shook the house, the neighborhood, the whole world.
An autopsy was required to determine the cause of death. Richard tried to keep this from Anita, because the idea that their tiny Pablo would be systematically cut open would be too horrible for her to bear. The pathologist’s report attributed it to sudden infant death syndrome, or crib death. An entirely unpredictable misfortune. Anita fell into a deep, dark sorrow, an unfathomable cavern from which her husband was excluded. Richard found himself rejected by his wife and banished to the farthest corner of his home as an encumbrance by the rest of the Farinha family, who invaded his privacy to take care of Anita, look after Bibi, and make decisions without consulting him. The relatives took over his small family, thinking he was incapable of understanding the magnitude of the tragedy because he did not share their sensibilities. Deep down, Richard was relieved, because it was true that he was a stranger to this kind of mourning. He increased the number of hours he taught, left the house early, and found excuses to come back late. In need of distraction, he started drinking more.
THEY WERE ONLY A FEW MILES from the turnoff to the cabin when they heard a siren and a police car pulled out from where it had been concealed behind some bushes. Lucia saw the lights whirling between her and the Subaru behind. For a moment she seriously considered putting her foot down and risking her life on it, but a cry from Richard forced her to change her plan. She slowed and pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. “Now we really are done for,” groaned Richard, struggling upright. Lucia lowered the window and waited breathlessly while the patrol car came to a halt behind her. The Subaru slowed down as it went past, but she managed to signal to Evelyn to continue on without stopping. The policeman came up a moment later.
“Your license and registration,” he demanded.
“Have I done something wrong, officer?”
“Your documents, please.”
Lucia searched in the glove compartment and passed him the Lexus’s documents and her international driver’s license, which she was afraid might have expired as she could not remember when she had obtained it in Chile. The policeman studied them slowly and glanced at Richard, who had sat up and was straightening his clothes in the backseat.
“Step out of the car,” he ordered Lucia.
Lucia obeyed. Her legs began to give way beneath her. It flashed through her mind that this must be how African-Americans felt when they were stopped by the police, and that if Richard had been driving their treatment would have been very different. At that moment Richard opened the rear door and almost crawled out.
“Wait inside the vehicle, sir!” yelled the policeman, his right hand moving toward his gun holster.
Richard was on his knees retching. He vomited the rest of his oatmeal all over the man’s boots. The policeman jumped back in disgust.
“He’s sick, he has an ulcer, officer,” Lucia explained.
“What is your relationship to him?”
“I’m . . . I’m . . . ,” Lucia stammered.
“She’s my housekeeper. She works for me,” Richard managed to groan between two bouts of retching.
The stereotypes automatically fell into place for the policeman: a Latina employee driving her boss, probably to the hospital. The guy seemed genuinely ill. Curiously, the woman had a foreign license; this was not the first time he had seen an international permit. Chile? Where on earth was that? He waited for Richard to straighten up, then told him to get back into the car, but by now his voice had softened. He went around to the rear of the Lexus, called Lucia over, and pointed to the trunk.
“Yes, officer. It just happened. There was a pileup on the highway, you might know about it. I was hit by a car that didn’t manage to brake, but it was nothing, only a slight dent and the rear light casing. I painted the bulb with nail polish until I can find a replacement.”
“I’m going to have to issue you a ticket.”
“I need to take Mr. Bowmaster to see a doctor.”
“I’ll let you go this time, but you must replace the light within twenty-four hours, do you understand?”
“Yes, officer.”
“Do you require help with your sick passenger? I can escort you to the hospital.”
“Many thanks, officer, but that won’t be necessary.”
Lucia’s heart was beating wildly as she slid back behind the wheel. The police car moved off. I’m going to have a heart attack, she thought, but thirty seconds later she was wracked with nervous giggles. If she had been fined, her identity and the car’s details would have been registered in the police report, and then Richard’s worst fears would have come true in their full horror.
“That was a close one,” she said, wiping away tears of laughter, but Richard remained unamused.
The Subaru was waiting for them a half mile farther on. A short while later, Richard spotted the entrance to Horacio’s cabin, little more than an almost invisible track covered with several inches of snow that snaked between the pines. For about ten minutes they made their way slowly through the woods without seeing any signs of human life, praying their vehicles would not get stuck. Suddenly they saw the sloping roof of a cabin straight out of a fairy tale, with icicles hanging from it like Christmas decorations.
Still weak from vomiting, but in less pain, Richard undid the padlock on the gate. They parked the cars and got out. He had to push as hard as he could to open the front door, which was swollen from the dampness. As soon as they stepped inside a foul smell assaulted them. Richard explained the house had been shut up for more than two years, and that bats and other creatures must have taken it over.
“When are we going to get rid of the Lexus?” asked Lucia.
“Today, but give me half an hour to recover,” said Richard, flinging himself down on the battered living room sofa. He did not dare ask her to lie down with him or embrace him to warm him up.
“Yes, get some rest. But if we stay here for long we’re going to freeze to death,” she told him.
“We have to switch on the electricity generator and fill the heaters with fuel. There are cans of kerosene in the kitchen. The pipes are frozen so we’ll melt snow to cook with. We can’t use the hearth, someone might see the smoke.”
“You’re in no state to do anything. Come on, Evelyn,” said Lucia, covering Richard with a stiff moth-eaten blanket she found.
Within a short while, the women had lit two heaters but had been unable to make the decrepit generator start. After he managed to get to his feet, Richard also failed. In the cabin there was only a kerosene camping stove, which he and Horacio used when they went ice fishing. In their luggage Richard had included three flashlights, sleeping bags, and other items essential for an exploration up the Amazon, as well as a few packets of the dried vegetarian food he took with him on his long cycling trips. “Food for donkeys,” commented Lucia good-humoredly as she tried to boil water on the tiny stove, which turned out to be as uncooperative as the generator. However, after being soaked in boiling water the donkey food turned into a decent meal, although Richard was unable to touch it and had nothing more than some clear soup and half a cup of tea to stay hydrated since he could not keep anything more down. After that he collapsed once more, wrapped in the blanket, while Lucia and Evelyn shared a cup of tea and talked quietly so not to disturb him.