Away from Home (19 page)

“Oh, I do too,” Helen breathed. Tears came to her eyes. “I do too. But I always feel as if …” She could not finish. She wondered if he knew what she meant.

“If you hold it to yourself it will hurt you,” Sergio said. “I don’t know anyone who hates the world who could not have used all that energy to make love instead.” He laughed. “Do I sound like I make a sermon?”

“No,” she said. She laughed too, then, and let him take her hand again. “I like you,” she said.

“Thank you. I like that much better. If you like me very much I like it better than if you love only a little bit.”

“Well, I won’t love you a little,” Helen said, gently and smiling at him. She leaned her head against the back of the seat and felt safe.

“No,” Sergio said seriously. “You won’t.”

He started the car and drove slowly out of the courtyard, through the alley, and into the street. A streetcar rumbled by on the tracks, almost entirely empty, a few people sitting separately and sleepily in its lighted interior. Helen wondered where they were going. She wondered where Sergio would go after he left her. Home, perhaps, to an apartment that was empty now because his family was away at their
fazenda
. There might be sheets covering the living-room furniture, and on the small tables there might be photographs of him and his wife in the early days when they felt differently about each other. He might go home and sleep, or he might go to a night club to see his friends. Wherever he went, Helen had the certainty that she could ask him to take her with him and he would.

“What are you going to do tomorrow?” he asked casually.

“I have to take care of the children. The governess has the day off. I’ll take them to the beach, I think.”

“The beach in front of your apartment?”

“Yes.” She wondered if he intended to risk being seen talking to her on the beach, if he would follow her there, or wait for her to come. She didn’t know. She realized then that despite all the things they had said to each other, she really knew very little about him and the way he lived. “What will you do tomorrow?” she asked.

“Go to my office. Then I have a lunch with some very boring bankers, and a conference in the afternoon.”

“Then you couldn’t have met me anyway.”

He turned to look at her quickly. “Then you
will
meet me?”

“No, no. I mentioned it only because you must have forgotten you had other things to do.”

“Conferences can always be changed to an earlier time.”

“What a casual attitude you have toward your work!” Helen said.

“You think it is strange?” Sergio asked. “Your American men are so busy working and buying big life-insurance policies. Then they leave their wives the life insurance. Life insurance is not a very good substitute for memories.”

“
Your
wife must have lovely memories,” she said nastily.

He did not answer for a while but he did not look angry. “All right,” he said then, but he did not sound put down either. “Now we’re even. I said a cruel thing to you and you said one to me.”

“You turn at the next street,” Helen said.

They turned on to Avenida Atlantica, the mosaic sidewalk showing patches of dark and light, some of the burned-down Macumba candles still flickering on the beach. The sea was tossing up white foam that lifted and separated in the moonlight.

“It’s the next apartment house,” she said.

Sergio stopped his car in front of her doorway. She let him get out and walk around to her side of the car and open the door for her, and then she stepped quickly past him. There was no one walking by; the street was deserted. On the beach in front of her apartment she could see two lovers sitting in embrace on the sand. “Good night,” she said.

He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it lightly. “Good night. Thank you.”

“Goodbye,” Helen said. “Let’s not part with hard feelings between us. I’m sorry for anything I said that might have been rude or assumed too much in our very brief friendship.” She stood there, smiling, waiting for him to make the formal apology in reply and have done with it. Manners would be the fence between them now, much higher and stronger than any antagonism or hard feelings could be. There was nothing so good as manners, she thought; nothing so useful, nothing so protective, nothing so firm and gentle. Her smile was frozen, polite, and she felt a hopeless sadness.

“We must never be rude to each other,” Sergio said thoughtfully. “Never again.”

Helen turned quickly and walked into the house, and while she waited for the self-service elevator she deliberately kept herself from turning around to look back until she heard the noise of his car motor starting up and the car driving away.

Upstairs, she went quickly to her bedroom and put away her purse and hung up her dress. She put on her silk bathrobe and walked past Roger’s room, glancing in the partly opened door to where he slept very quietly, a tiny rise under the white sheet, a patch of darkness where his head was. How small he was, and how vulnerable. She was filled with love for him, and hope, and tender pride. In the next room Julie was sleeping surrounded by such an army of stuffed animals and dolls it seemed as if one night she would smother herself. They were all tucked in beside her under the sheet so that she had left herself only a small place, barely enough to turn in. She slept deeply, very still. On the studio couch at the far end of the room the governess slept, wheezing a bit in her sleep like an asthmatic old Scottie Helen had owned as a child. How can Julie stand it, listening to her snore? Helen thought. Children can take so much, it’s amazing!

She stood there looking at Julie from the doorway and felt peaceful with love. Julie would be with her for years, and she would watch her grow, and give her things, all the silly and good and grown-up things that little girls wanted when they grew older. Could she die for her children, as Sergio had said he could? The thought made Helen shudder. She couldn’t bear to think about such things; even reading in the newspapers back home about mothers who tried to rescue their children from burning houses had always made her ill with sympathy. Life was so filled with dreadful things: dangers and sorrows and lost years. It was better not to think about those things at all, if you could help it.

She walked into the dark living room and opened the heavy curtains, looking out at the beach and sky. In the distance she could see the outlines of the mountains in the clear night. How calm Sergio had been when he had spoken of dying to save his children! Perhaps I am a monster, Helen thought guiltily. I’d rather never think of anything so horrible at all. I couldn’t say, I’d die. He must feel as though he’s lived a very happy, good life if he can speak of giving it up without shuddering. I couldn’t. I’d feel that everything was wasted—everything—and that I’d vanished without very much ever having happened to me … as if I don’t matter.

It was odd, she thought, that she could stand here in the home that belonged to Bert and her and think of Sergio so easily, without any guilt or fear. It was easier to be with him now when he was not here than it had been when he was right beside her. She almost missed him. Strangely enough, in her own home with all its personal identifications holding her as if they were hands, she allowed herself to like Sergio Leite Braga for the first time without judgments, and she missed him. In the home where even the thought of him should have seemed a treachery, the memory of him entered and was welcome. She held out her hand, the hand he had touched with his lips, and she noticed that it was shaking.

CHAPTER 8

In Rio nobody thinks it is very strange if an entire apartment building falls down. It is not usually a tragedy, because the tenants have at least a day’s warning to evacuate all their belongings. Usually the building begins leaning well in advance. Often a large crack appears across the face of it. Large buildings in Brazil are made of poured concrete rather than with steel structures underneath. The concrete contains a smaller or greater amount of sand, depending on the reliability and honesty of the builder. In one apartment house in Rio the landlord wanted to get rid of his tenants so he could get new ones and raise the rents. So he announced that the building was about to fall, and the disgruntled tenants moved their things outside to the street and waited. Nothing happened by nightfall, so they went back into the building to sleep. A week later he warned again, and again they went outside with their possessions to wait. Everyone has a great loyalty and curiosity about his apartment house in Rio; it would never occur to anyone to go away to a hotel and allow the building to fall down all by itself. The tenants waited again, and when the building did not seem even shaky, they moved back in again. By this time many of them were so tired of this nonsense that when the landlord gave the warning for the third time they moved away for good. It wasn’t that they thought their building was a death trap. It was simply that their landlord was getting to be too much of a pest. He happily raised the rents, and the building is standing to this day.

In America people like to watch buildings being constructed. They stand outside the fences which have been erected to guard the excavation and they peer through conveniently placed peepholes. In Rio they like to watch buildings fall down. So one night in the middle of January there was a large crowd gathered in front of a fairly new, modern, twelve-story apartment house waiting for it to fall. The building was made of beautiful clean white stone, with great glass windows overlooking the hills. The name of the building was written in gold letters on the plate glass of the lobby doors:
EDIFICIO APOLLO
. The apartment houses in Rio are named poetically—Edificio Chopin, with two wings named Sonata and Preludio, is one of the most famous. The Edificio Apollo was not nearly that elegant, but it was a nice building, and some of the crowd gathered outside on the sidewalk were heard to murmur that it was a shame it was going to fall.

Margie and Neil Davidow had come to watch because an American expatriate friend of Neil’s named Mort Baker lived in Edificio Apollo or, rather, had lived there until that morning. Mort Baker was a sculptor, working mostly in marble and some cheaper Brazilian stones. He was twenty-nine years old, with a lean, cynical face, hairy wrists, very white teeth, black hair cut in a crewcut, and a very dark, carefully cultivated suntan. He had been born in Pennsylvania, had lived for a while in Greenwich Village in New York and on the last vestige of the Left Bank in Paris, and for the past four years had been living in Rio because it was inexpensive for Americans, and beautiful, and he liked the beach. Now he was sitting on one of his suitcases smoking a cigarette, surrounded by four other suitcases, two huge cartons of books, a dozen small stone statues of various sizes, and a wooden crate of stonecutter’s tools. He wore a pair of Army suntan trousers that had been cut off a good deal above the knees, because it was a hot night, and a light gray sweatshirt of the kind that college boys wear after they have been rowing on crew. Margie was sitting on one of his suitcases, holding a small transistor radio on her lap. Mort had three other transistor radios, the smallest of which he could keep in the pocket of his shirt. Neil Davidow was standing beside Margie and Mort, trying to adjust his camera to take a picture of the building at the exact moment when it would begin to fall.

A television station had brought cameras and lights, setting the lights up along the sidewalk so that everything was very brightly lighted. It gave the impression of being a movie première. Most of the people in the crowd seemed filled with excitement, as if they were waiting to see movie stars. A reporter walked from person to person in the crowd holding a little microphone and interviewing them for a local radio program. Two Kibon icecream men, in rivalry with each other, had set their small yellow wagons on the curb to service anyone who might be hungry. There was also a man with a glass-topped wagon that made popcorn, and a man who was selling Coca-Cola. Several of the onlookers who were of a practical nature had provided themselves with sandwiches from home, which they munched while they waited and washed down with Coca-Cola from the cart.

“I feel so bad for you, Mort,” Margie said sympathetically. “I wish we could have brought the big statue down. I feel sick about it; I really do.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mort said. He did not seem particularly depressed. “All the time I was working on that statue I kept wondering how I was ever going to get it out the door. I finally realized it was impossible.” He shrugged. “At least this way I’ll get it out of the house.”

“Oh, Mort.”

“It’s a great solution,” he said. He laughed. “What I’m really worried about is where I’m going to live now until I find another apartment I can afford.”

“You can live with us,” Neil said. “Can’t he, Margie?”

“Of course.”

“No,” Mort said. “It’s too much trouble.”

“Don’t be silly,” Margie said. “That’s what friends are for.” She smiled at him, the smile of a happily married housewife who mothers all her husband’s bachelor friends. “We have lots of room. But only one thing—you can’t make any ten-foot-high marble statues in
our
apartment.”

“I’ll make you one and you can keep it,” Mort said. “It will be a house gift.”

“That’s really why we invited you,” Neil said.

Mort took a handful of cruzeiros out of his pocket and waved at the ice-cream man. “What do you want, Margie?”

“Chocolate, please.”

“Let me get it,” Neil said. Mort waved him away.

They ate their chocolate ices sitting on the row of suitcases and watching the motionless building like people waiting for the main feature of a movie to begin. Now at last the building, which had been tilted slightly since the day before, seemed to move almost imperceptibly and settle lower to one side.

“It’s moving!” Margie cried.

“It’ll take another hour at least,” Mort said calmly. “I’ve seen this before.”

“What I can’t figure out,” Margie said, “is why nobody tries to save it. Can’t they prop it up or anything?”

“Are we far enough away?” Neil asked worriedly. “Will we get hit with something when it falls?”