Away from Home (12 page)

I can’t even touch you, Leila thought. This metallic scent is all I have of your flesh and blood and bone.

She turned and opened the door, and walked quickly down the silent corridor, not caring now how much noise her shoes made. The custodian let her out.

“Would you like to go into the chapel for a while?”

“No, thank you,” Leila said. “Goodbye. Until later.”

“Happiness.”

“Ah, yes,” Leila said. “Happiness to you, too.”

Driving back down the mountain, she was forced to go slowly because of the great patches of fog that made her feel as though she were in an enormous, cold, Turkish bath. In some places she could not see anything ahead, even with the lights of her car turned on. Perhaps this was what Heaven would be like—clouds and quiet, and a sense of limitless height. Perhaps this was the dream that sustained her mother’s life. Leila believed in heaven implicitly, as she believed all the things she had been taught, but since her divorce she had begun to read books that told her of psychology and love and lust and earth. She had begun to read avidly out of frustration and loneliness, and a feeling that if she had not been such a limited person perhaps her marriage would not have failed. Somewhere in those books there must be an answer to the bitterness of life and to the questions faith could not answer. A few years before it had been chic among her friends to be intensely religious, to go to church and speak of God. It had been a fad, in a way, and Leila had not been able to join in it, although she of all people, with a mother in the convent … And now psychology was the rage. Women who had been given the most perfunctory of educations, aimed completely at a protected marriage, were trying to read and to talk about what they had read.

She had talked once of a book she liked with a friend who seemed extraordinarily intelligent. And later she had seen all her friend’s comments, verbatim, in a magazine review. Leila had been so annoyed at this deception that she had not even realized until much later that at least the friend had had the intelligence to read and memorize the review. But it was a fad, like memorizing a new card game or a new dance step.

Emerging from the fog to lower ground, she pressed the accelerator down, driving faster, recklessly. She turned on the radio, finding jazz. There was no answer in her books, none at all, for loneliness and dependence and desertion. She had married when she was still an adolescent girl, and she had leaned on João Alberto, depended on him, expected he would be there forever. During the years of her marriage she had never changed at all, not even when she had begun to suspect that her husband was interested in someone else. She had suffered, she had wept, she had waited; but she had not changed. When he finally left her and married someone else, Leila had mourned for three years, as if she had been a widow instead of a divorcée. She did not have the slightest idea of what to do with her life. She had been a matron at seventeen and now she was a teen-ager at twenty-nine.

Life was easier for the young girls in Brazil marrying today, because they had more freedom than she had been given, and they at least had an idea of how to think for themselves. Some of them had gone to the university. Some of them had even taken jobs, even though they did not need the money. When they became engaged many of them were permitted to go out with their fiancés without a chaperone’s coming along too. It was all different today. Often Leila felt she did not belong anywhere. The old, sheltered, governed order which had prepared her for its own kind of world still existed, but it was inhabited by married women with families, who led the life they had been trained to lead. For the modern young girls of Brazil, freedom was a gift. The ones who had it knew what to do with it. But Leila was right in between the old and the new, and freedom meant not adventure but peril, loneliness, and unwanted responsibilities which belonged better to men.

No matter what happened to her, it always made her think of her husband. Her friends teased her; they said no man could be as unforgettable as all that. She still spoke of him often: “My husband used to say …” or “When I was with my husband …” Even while she was speaking about him and praising this or that which he used to do or say, Leila was aware that João Alberto was not really such a unique, superior, and marvelous person as she pretended; it was simply that he was her husband and she loved him. She looked back at the days of her marriage, even the unhappiest days, as a sanctuary. Now that she was separated from them by time and had read all those books, she could see certain events more objectively and she realized that she had not known João Alberto as well as she thought she had, even though they had known each other since childhood.

In the world in which she had been raised you grew up together and married each other; it was a simple, small world for all its formalities. João Alberto was three years older than she, and she had always adored him because he was handsome and intelligent and sensitive. During the summers in Cidade d’Ouro all the children played together; her older sisters and brother, João Alberto and his sisters and brothers, and the young cousins of the two families. She had always wanted to marry him, ever since she could remember, and then from the time she was fourteen on she had
known
she was going to marry him.

She remembered often the day he had written the poem for her. And she remembered too that he would read poetry to her from a book and it was so beautiful that she would cry. Looking back now, she remembered other things that were not so sentimental and lovely. She remembered that when the children had gotten into some sort of mischief together and had been caught it was always João Alberto who would be the first to confess and to tell on the others. She wondered now if it was that weak trait in him that had made him leave her years later, if perhaps their entire lives together from childhood were paved with clues that would explain the harm they had visited on each other as adults.

She remembered her eighteenth birthday, the first one she had ever spent away from home. João Alberto had taken her to Monti-video, in Uruguay, for a vacation just after the twins were born. It was not far from home, but she was homesick, and awakening in that strange bed in the strange hotel on the morning of her eighteenth birthday Leila realized that only a year before she had been a virgin and a child, and now she was a wife and the mother of two infants. The entire situation seemed overwhelming, and recalling her parents’ house where she had happily spent all previous birthdays Leila was so depressed she could not speak. The worst of it was that João Alberto was not in the room when she awakened, and she could not imagine where he was. She lay on her back and stared at the sunlight on the ceiling, inert under the weight of her homesickness.

Then the door to the bedroom was kicked open, and João Alberto came into the room carrying a huge white-frosted birthday cake on a plate in his two outstretched hands. He put the cake on the quilt beside her with a flourish, so happy with the pride of what he had done that he looked like a small boy again.

“Good morning! Happy birthday, my heart!” He kissed her so tenderly that all her homesickness and depression disappeared, evanesced, floated away like the smoke from a blown-out birthday candle. “I brought you a birthday cake for breakfast,” he said.

“We’ll eat it for breakfast, then!” she cried happily. “Bring a knife! No, no, I can’t eat it; I’m too excited.”

Who else could have found a birthday cake in the morning at a hotel, complete with her name written on it in chocolate and a pink, sugary heart? Who else would have crept out of bed while she was still sleeping, to bring it back? Who else would have suspected that even though she was on a vacation in a beautiful city she would be taken with homesickness and loneliness when she awoke on her birthday? On that birthday morning Leila felt there never was a man so sensitive or so kind as her husband, and now, years later, when she remembered it, she held the memory to her heart purely and emotionally, untouched by anything wrong and unhappy which had come afterward or even before.

Oh, what could she do now? All this love, all these beautiful things, were only memories, existing only in her own mind. Probably João Alberto had forgotten them. And if he had forgotten them, and if they had happened so long ago, perhaps they did not exist at all. Everyone was gone—her husband, her mother, her family, and there was no answer, not even from her mother, who loved her still. The only thing that was real was this road and this steering wheel, and later the hours of the night. Leila knew what she was going to do tonight. She would do what she always did when she returned from these terrible eight hours of treacherous driving, and from the more terrible ordeal of trying to see some answer in her mother’s face. She would call up some man and go to a
boâte
, or to a party. She would dance the samba all night and she would drink champagne. She wanted to do the wildest things she could do, to tear apart the cord between her life up on that mountain and her life below. Her life below was the one she had to live, the one she had to bear. She would drink, and dance, and she would laugh. Perhaps some night she would even have the courage to forget João Alberto, who had forgotten her, and she would make love.

CHAPTER 5

When she came home from her day at the Gavea Golf Club with the children Helen Sinclair remembered that she was going with Bert to a Brazilian’s home, to her first really Brazilian party, and suddenly she was refreshed and delighted. The party seemed to take on an importance beyond reason, as if it were some kind of salvation. All through this long day she had not been able to escape the feeling that she had failed, that soon Mrs. Graham would be taking the children to the club again, sitting beside the pool as custodian of the towels and clothes and chewing gum. Her mind told her this was not such a dreadful thing, that, after all, to be like those placid women who wanted no conversation other than the limited chatter of tiny children would be a hypocrisy and, even worse, an unnecessary one. But her heart told her she had deserted her children and in so doing had herself been cast loose, like a balloon without a hand for its string, left to float purposelessly in the empty sky.

“I only met this Brazilian yesterday, at lunch,” Bert said. “And he invited us to his party. You’ll like him, he’s charming. His name is—believe it or not—Baby Amaral.”

“
Baby?
He’s either young or a playboy.”

“He’s neither. He’s about fifty years old. A lot of Brazilian men are named Baby; their governesses named them and the name stuck when they grew up. But that’s a lot better than the ones who had German governesses when they were young.
They’re
apt to be named Bubi.”

“Booby? My lord, I wonder if anyone told them what it means in English.” Helen smiled at Bert, thinking of the odd names, but she could not help feeling a little envious. How much he knew that she did not know, the places he was allowed to go, the people he met! He did not have to sit by a pool all day, with sewing for a hospital his only diversion. “I’m so glad we’re going to this party tonight.”

“To tell you the truth,” Bert said, “I’d rather not go. I’m exhausted. I’m going only because I think it might amuse you.”

“We don’t … have to.”

“No, we’ll go.”

“You’ll enjoy it when you’re there,” Helen said, beginning to feel guilty. “You always love to meet new people.”

“I know,” he said resignedly and went off to the shower.

Why did he have to tell me that, Helen thought unhappily. Now I’ll feel as if I’m driving him to an early grave, like those dreadful women you read articles about in magazines. Now I won’t enjoy the party. This whole day has gone wrong, and I’m tired from doing nothing, and I’ve failed my children, and now I’m failing my husband. What I should really do is give him a quiet little dinner and go to bed early. What’s the matter with me, anyway? I never used to be like this.

She went determinedly into the bedroom and began to choose accessories and jewelry for her dress. They were going to that party and she was going to enjoy it, that was all. It would certainly be a waste of time if
neither
of them had fun.

They had some difficulty finding the street address in the dark because it was a neighborhood neither of them knew. Great leafy trees lined the street, and behind a wrought-iron fence they could see a lush garden with lights strung among the trees. When they walked up the path through the grass to the house they could hear an orchestra playing on the other side of the house, and the sound of people talking. Bert seemed cheerful, and he looked very handsome in his white summer dinner jacket, and not tired at all. Helen felt happier. There was a kidney-shaped swimming pool in the garden in back of the house, with people gathered around it dressed in evening clothes. The orchestra was in an enclosed porch affair with one open side, which must have been the patio of the bathhouse. They were playing an American popular song with great spirit, and for a moment Helen almost thought they had made a mistake and gone to the wrong party. There were large palm trees in the garden, and white wrought-iron furniture, and stuck into the bark of the palm trees were red, blue, and green pointed glass Christmas balls, bristling with bright glassy colors all the way from the grass to the palm fronds above, like some kind of strange tropical growth.

Baby Amaral came bounding out of the patio to greet them. He was short and plump and easily fifty, with a kind, eager face. “Ah,” he said, “How are you? Well?” holding out his hands. “How are you?” He shook hands with Bert with one hand and put the other arm about Bert’s shoulders, rocking back and forth in that embrace as if they were a pair of tango dancers. Bert patted Baby Amaral on the back too, and rocked and smiled and laughed, and the two of them looked more like long-lost brothers who had finally been reunited than two people who had only met for the first time the day before at lunch.

“How are you?” Bert said. “Ah, fine, fine.” He turned to introduce Helen. “This is my wife, Helen.”

Baby Amaral lifted her hand to his lips briskly, all respectful formality. “A very great pleasure. I’m glad you came.”