A Brasília Christmas (continued)
At dinner, Victor poured the wine into gold-rimmed glasses and managed to spill some on the white linen tablecloth. The stain spread uncomfortably in Isabel’s stomach, as she awaited her mother’s reaction. But there was no reaction because tia Cecília and Henrique had come for Christmas.
Victor was particular about seating arrangement at dinner parties. The men had to be evenly distributed among the women, and those facing one another had to be somewhat compatible in personality. Isabel, faced across from Henrique, had been placed in her father’s usual chair. It was worn in and well loved by his heavier body, which made her feel a little shorter than usual. There was a Nativity Scene mounted on what was generally the serving table, to the side of the dining table. The figurines were made of wood and painted in bright, gaudy colors. Jesus was huge. He was four times as big as all the shepherds and animals (and only twice as big as Mother Mary). Arnold was going to participate in the nativity play at his church. He was going to be an angel, though Isabel thought he was more suited to a donkey.
At school one morning Arnold waited at the main gates, as usual, for Isabel. They had first period Math together and walked over every day. Arnold got a haircut the night before. It was too short, Isabel thought, but didn’t say. She had never noticed how big his ears were. Ever since Isabel accepted to be Arnold’s girlfriend, things about Arnold that Isabel didn’t usually think about began to bother her. Her friends, for one, didn’t like Arnold. He was American. At the American school, the Americans and the Brazilians pertained to separate social groups. When Isabel phoned her best friend, Romi, to tell her the news, Romi said, “But he’s so…American.” The rumor already spread that Isabel was dating a gringo.
When Arnold curled his fingers through Isabel’s that morning, he did it slowly, like a spider cautiously moving towards its prey. His hands were clammy. Isabel felt bad pulling away, so instead she curved her hand in a bit, leaving a gap between their hands, as if guarding a precious stone, or a baby bird.
In class, Arnold passed a note to Isabel ripped from a corner of his notebook.
Meet me tomorrow at the basketball courts at lunchtime
if you want to kiss me. If not that’s okay but let’s not talk about it.
P.S. Don’t answer this.
“Isabel, serve yourself,” Daniela instructed.
The food was spread across the center of the table. The duck skin was deep red and sweaty, with a few lumps that had bubbled up and blackened. There were bright green beans tossed in garlic, served with two long wooden spoons. In a batch of steam gathered some twenty whole fried potatoes, soft and still yellow at their centers.
Daniela believed that every meal should be colorful. If you couldn’t distinguish at least three colors on your plate, your meal was weak. “Be grateful that you’re not one of those typical Brazilian boys who only eat red meat and chips,” she’d tell Lucas. But it wasn’t only the boys, and there were worse things than red meat. At Eva’s house Lucas savored eating packaged ramen noodles or freshly popped popcorn on the couch with a large bottle of coke. Eva lived with her mom and her parents were divorced, which was unusual among Lucas’s friends. The mom drank coffee all day and hardly ate until about 9PM, when she’d eat at least six loaves of bread with marjoram. It was no wonder she had cancer. Lucas found out three days after their break-up. Eva had called Lucas crying, asking him to please come over. Break-up sex, he assumed. But when he went over to her apartment, the mom answered the door. She appeared surprised and pleased to see him.
“Lucas! How are you?” She was smiling and standing in place. Lucas wondered why she wouldn’t budge from the doorway.
“Oh, fine. Just fine thanks.” He was looking at her hair, dyed red this time. She was always dying her hair.
“How are you?” Lucas decided to ask.
“Not too good, Lucas. I have cancer,” she said, casually, as she leaned against the doorway, kneading her fingers through her bright red hair. She appeared drunk.
Lucas, startled, shook his head.
“You know what kind?”
With this, the ex’s mother took Lucas’s hand, placed it on her left breast, and clasped her hand over his so that his palm forcefully and slowly sunk into it. The breast flattened outward like a fried egg and its texture grew lumpier and harder. His eyes were wide and her face was serious; she was looking penetratingly into his eyes. When a noise was heard from one of the rooms, the mother calmly let go of Lucas’s hand, of which Lucas had not dared to resist in the first place.
Lucas wasn’t sure if it was the lump, the red hair, the break-up sex, or the colors in the Christmas spread that made him realize he lost Eva, and that he had to practice losing Eva.
“So, the American School?” Cecília said. “Does this mean the children are going to escape to the States after they’re done?”
She was too tan, and why was she smiling so much? “Not necessarily,” Daniela said.
“Then why send them to such an expensive school?”
“Well, because it’s a great education,” Victor answered. “They love it there. It’s a good place.”
Isabel had trouble tasting her food when she tried to pay attention to conversation at the same time. But she knew that the meal wasn’t as good as she expected because she didn’t find herself wanting more. Henrique shredded his duck and left it uneaten.
“Henrique, do you like the duck? Do you need help cutting it?” Daniela asked. Henrique poked his fork around the pieces.
Lucas suggested that they should eat more fish at home. Salmon, for instance. Salmon had high levels of Omega-3, which was good for the eyes, or dry eyes at least. The fat digested from Omega-3 helped to build up the protective layer of the eyeballs.
Isabel looked at her brother’s eyes, webs of cauliflower growing fat from their roots. “No one eats salmon on Christmas. That’s just stupid.”
“I’m sure tia Cecília and Henrique have better fish at the beach than they would here,” Victor said.
Marcos used to grill fish at the house; it was practically all he ate. The house smelled of pirarucu the day he told Cecília that he had a brain tumor. The fish was freshly caught and there were small silver scales on the counter and on Marcos’ hands. He was wrapping the fish in foil when Marcos told Cecília about the tumor. He wasn’t looking at her. He was pinching the foil with his fingers. His hands were scales and foil, or scales on foil, or foil not scales. His hands were silver and cold and hard and it was as if he had already left her. But he had, left her. He had kicked her off the bus and out of his life, but now he had brain cancer. Cecília inhaled the smell of salt and raw fish and it swelled up in her head until she felt nauseous. She wanted to insult him, because now she would have to live with his disease.
“Yes that’s true, Victor,” Cecília said. “You should all come visit and leave this place.”
At least she had left Florianópolis and didn’t wait to leave her parents’ house to get married at the age of twenty-nine, Daniela thought but didn’t say.
‘This place,’ Brasília. Daniela had learned to live there. She was accustomed to its even planes and empty views. She once found comfort in the simplicity of its color palette—red, beige, and gray—that only darkened in tone when the rain came. And when the rain wouldn’t come, she liked it that she could probably see it fall elsewhere, in some satellite city. She could see the rain and not feel it.
There were things about the dry season that made Brasília more difficult. Nosebleeds became more regular, and Daniela would have to wake up a full hour earlier to avoid the scorching sun on her morning walk. The walls of the living room would fade a shade by early September. The trees in front of their building were like claws stuck in air, without a stir of leaves. With the lack of rain, clothes hung more freely from the windows and some would vulnerably fall to the ground, such as a sock or a pillowcase. The cicadas were also on the ground, dead and brittle. That year the dry season ran unusually long, through late November, and even then, in late December, it had not rained for nearly two weeks.
It was in this unusually long stretch of dryness that Brasília first made Daniela sick. She had been working late and alone in the mortuary corpses basement, hair greased back, hands gloved, and mouth covered. The body she was working on was faceless in Daniela’s memory, except for the hair growing around his mouth. Because, just as she was sterilizing her beard trimmer, the body convulsed and leaked clear throw-up out of his barely opened mouth, sticking to the un-kept hairs in a vaguely yellow sheen. Daniela over-soaked a towel under cold tap water and stretched it over his mouth, pulling at the towel’s ends and pressing it down with all her weight, as though she wanted to feel what it was like to suffocate and kill. She cried for a bit and threw up every night after that for a week. But it wasn’t the thought of him that made her sick. It was the gravel along the eixão highway pocked with holes; the scissor shaped roads that led to the same places; the runners’ panting in the park; her husband’s slow step; the mattress bump dividing her side of the bed from his; her daughter’s new body odor and growing breasts; the crappy electric shower’s unequal shoots of water; and the soundless, rainless condition of Brasília.
A Brasília Christmas (continued)
Tia Cecília, Lucas, Daniela, and her husband, Victor, gathered in the kitchen. Lucas chewed on a piece of bread and noted his mother’s perked up ass as she bent down to poke at the duck in the oven. His mom had a big ass and that night she was wearing a tight pencil skirt. The kitchen smell was thick with burnt and sugary bird’s skin.
“Do you have a girlfriend, Lucas?” Tia Cecília asked.
A couple of weeks earlier, Lucas’s girlfriend, or rather ex-girlfriend, had informed him that he was boring. She, Eva, was tired of his silence, of his droopy eyes and lazy mouth. Lucas wanted to know what she meant exactly by a “lazy mouth.” “It just sits there. Half-open and limp and…lazy,” she answered. She untied the jean jacket that sat about her waist, put it on, adjusted her purse to her shoulder, and left.
No, he didn’t have a girlfriend.
“Oh but you should, Lucas. Now’s the age, you know,” Tia Cecília chuckled.
He knew. Eva had called him a sexist. He had been checking out an older woman, probably in her late twenties, wearing a short black dress and fishnets. He blamed the fishnets. “No. You do it all the time.” She looked away, elongating her neck and freezing it there, as in a Mannerist painting. He did do it all the time. He wanted to explain to her that it wasn’t just him; it was all men. They looked at beautiful, sexy women because they had to. It kept them sane. It was energizing and exciting; it kept the blood flowing. Instead, he said, “It doesn’t mean anything.” Her neck didn’t budge. “Yes it does. It means you want to have sex with all of them.” That was also true. “That’s not true,” he retorted.
“How about we start the wine?” Victor had uncorked the red wine and poured four generous glasses. The bread, the knife, and the corkscrew were all set down for the red wine that was too warm for the weather.
“To having you here, Cecília. I only wish that Marcos could be here too,” Victor said. No one spoke as the glasses touched, but tia Cecília was smiling.
“Beautiful bracelet, Cecília,” Daniela said. Marcos hadn’t yet come up in conversation.
The bracelet was carved from bone and dyed black. Cecília had stolen it four years earlier, in Florianópolis. She had been riding the bus with Marcos from the beach. Cecília rested her hand on his thigh and he refused it. He always refused it. They no longer loved each other but Cecília wanted to, though she knew that he didn’t. In the bus, Marcos lit up a cigarette and let it hang between his lips without inhaling. Cecília snapped it loose from his lips and smashed it with the sole of her sandal. He called her a bitch. He always called her a bitch. He called her a bitch for soaking up the bathroom floor; for laughing too loud on the phone; for listening to rock on the radio; for dressing up “his kid like a goddamn cartoon.” But he still wanted sex. Every other night the lights would go off and he’d shoot himself up between her thighs, but she’d feel nothing, only skin against skin. She’d reciprocate methodically, not even pretending to enjoy it. Sometimes she’d touch and feel her own body, searching for the life in her with her fingers. She would try to feel desire so desperately, as if it were a lost object in the dark room. Cecília let him call her his bitch. She wouldn’t say anything. But on the bus she told him she hated him. First she said it, then she screamed it. “Good,” he said. “Now get the fuck off this bus.” Cecília did. She got out and looked back, but Marcos wasn’t looking out the window. He had stolen her. He had stolen her from herself and she wanted to steal something too.
It was a beachside store that sold colorful beach wraps, bikinis studded with plastic flowers, whole coconuts piled in large iceboxes, and glitzy dangling earrings on cardboard displays. But it was the small box of three or four dark bracelets that caught Cecília’s eye. She wanted the bracelet’s soft, black sheen wrapped perfectly about her wrist, as if it would keep her in place somehow. There was sand on the floors and most people in the store weren’t wearing shirts, just bikini tops. The one woman who worked in the store was talking to a customer about how she was trying to train her dog with a Windex spray bottle that she had filled with water. Cecília calmly took a bracelet and slid it down her arm as far as it could go. It felt tight and smooth and safe. She thanked the saleswoman on her way out and walked home.
“Oh, thanks. This thing,” Tia Cecília said in reply to Daniela’s compliment, strumming her nails against the bone.
Daniela had smeared duck grease on her skirt. “Why don’t you come with me while I change into a different skirt,” she told Cecília.
In the bathroom, Daniela noticed her red lipstick was smudged and her pasty eye shadow faded except for the area along the bones of her eyebrows. “The heat,” she muttered.
“You don’t need to look like a clown for me,” Cecília said jokingly, as Daniela retouched her face.
Cecília was the one wearing polka dots, but Marcos just died and she had come for Christmas.
When Cecília was eighteen, she had a boyfriend who turned out to be gay. He sung in a metal band and liked to dress Cecília in men’s clothing. Cecília shared a room with Daniela, who was then fourteen years old. More often than Daniela would have liked to remember, Cecília would come home in the middle of the night with her boyfriend and send Daniela to the bathroom for half an hour or more. It had to be the bathroom because she couldn’t risk her parents asking questions. Daniela would get used to it, falling asleep on the tiles and awaking to her sister poking her in her underwear with swelled lips. But one night Daniela not only woke up to her sister’s underwear and swelled lips, but also to a body covered in lipstick designs. Cecília never wore lipstick. She didn’t own lipstick. Daniela would find her lipsticks, cap-less, scattered on her dresser with their ends blunted and vaguely covered in hair. “We were just having some fun, Daniela,” Cecília had said. “It’s called body art.”
Daniela couldn’t remember the name of her second body at the morgue, but she remembered it was a woman. There was no facial reconstruction involved. She was very old, at least eighty-five, and deeply wrinkled, as if her skin were wound with string. Her scalp was mostly bald and her lips thinned to the proportions of a string bean. Her face was green, which Daniela hoped to counteract with a dominantly pink palette. But as she applied the make-up it began to crumble and blot until her face looked like a rotting, bruised peach. She was making direct contact with the skin, they would later explain to her. She had to use non-thermogenic make-up because the body was no longer warm to absorb and break down the color.
Daniela was reminded of the green old woman as she observed her slightly melted face, unevenly colored like a patchy terrain. She took her brush to the blush and watched the pink blossom through her cheeks. She wasn’t a clown, she wanted to tell her sister. None of them were clowns.
“It’s called body art,” Daniela said. But Cecília appeared as though she hadn’t heard.
A Brasília Christmas
Impossible to Love went on hiatus because I was revising the story. As a final project, I compressed the story into a Christmas dinner scene. There will be some parts that are repeated, but hopefully you will enjoy them within their new setting! I will be posting it in three installments.
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It was the first time that the Nogueira family would share their Christmas. “My sister hasn’t had the easiest of years,” Daniela had warned her two children, Lucas and Isabel. “With Marcos’s death and the rest of it.” Marcos, tia Cecília’s husband, had died of a brain tumor seven months earlier. In the six years that Daniela Nogueira hadn’t seen her sister, Cecília had had a little boy by the name of Henrique, who was then already five years old. It was the first time tia Cecília had ever taken a plane out of Florianópolis to visit her younger sister in Brasília.
As a young girl, tia Cecília did not have much in common with Daniela. Cecília shot slingshots at pigeons with the boys on their street. She talked with her mouth full and didn’t do well in school. She wanted to be a trumpet player, but wasn’t very good. She’d write out lyrics of American rock songs, because she had better English than most, and would sell them for 5,000 cruzeiros (the equivalent of about 2 reais today) a piece.
The Nogueira family apartment was located in the south wing of Brasília, on the block 207, in building “E,” on the fourth floor. In front of the building there was a small square with trees and no benches. There was soil rather than grass, and fruit bats slept in the branches. There was also a newsstand that rarely opened, and a permanently parked blue van, owned by Vania, the seamstress. During the day, the doors slid open, and dresses, socks, and ribbons hung on view.
There was duck breast cooking in the Nogueira apartment on Christmas Eve. The bread was cut and the avocado custard was in the fridge. Daniela had been smoking a cigarette by the living room window when she saw tia Cecília exit the taxicab. “Cecília.” Daniela said loudly, but did not yell. Cecília looked up, eyes struggling. The sun still hadn’t set and the light was bitter-yellow and dry. A boy, whom Daniela presumed to be Henrique, stood by the cab wearing an orange cap. Cecília let out a laugh and watched her sister’s body recede from the windowsill, observing the blackness of the opened window flanked by white shutters.
Tia Cecília looked plumper and darker since Daniela had seen her last. Her curls were dyed blonde and short. Daniela gave her a long embrace and wished her a happy Christmas.
“Henrique. Meet your tia Daniela,” Cecília said.
Henrique didn’t move from the doorway. His lips had that wet-glossy look from too much licking.
Daniela got down on her knees and rested her hands on his feet. “I can’t wait to get to know you.” Her crooked teeth kept her full, red lips apart. Her lids were large and puffy, to the point where Henrique wondered how well she could see. Her right eyebrow lifted like the curl of a spider leg, a contraction of which Henrique refused to accept by pushing it back down with his little index finger.
“For Christ’s sake you’re going to set your carpet and my son on fire,” Cecília said. Daniela’s hands were still resting on Henrique’s feet and the ash of her forgotten cigarette was caking at its tip and nudging the floor. “You should really give that up already,” Cecília added.
Daniela wanted to tell her that her tan made her wrinkles worse and that she shouldn’t have given birth at the age of forty. But Marcos had died and they had come for Christmas.
The three of them gathered in the living room, choosing the arrangement of white couches to the right over the gray arrangement to the left. The walls were dark green and bare. Her sister had always been that way, Cecília thought. She would color and adorn herself, but would inhabit the basest of spaces.
“You know, Henrique, Santa Claus will be standing in this very room tonight,” Daniela said. She had borrowed the idea from a friend who ordered a Santa Claus every year for her children. Daniela’s own children were too old for that sort of thing, Isabel being eleven and Lucas seventeen. But Henrique was not, and so Daniela called the service and scheduled a 10PM Santa Claus on Christmas Eve and made it known to every other family in the building.
Henrique, cupping a glass of soda with both hands, looked up at Daniela with indifference. Tia Cecília was gazing beyond them out the living room windows, and chuckled until the white polka dots on her dress began to shift. “Brasília! My God.” Polka dots had hidden in the stomach folds.
“It’s not all that bad, Cecília,” Daniela said. But before their arrival, Daniela had been sucking at the nicotine of her cigarette to avoid the taste of the dust that had been streaming coarsely through her nostrils.
Daniela had been anxious about her sister’s arrival. She was never good at solving other people’s problems and she wasn’t good about death; or, at least, she didn’t react the way people wanted her to. She could deal with death itself, but she didn’t know how to relate to the life that deteriorated around it.
Daniela was a mortuary makeup artist. After beauty school she worked a job at an upper scale salon for a few years. Unhappy with the job, she decided to go to school for mortuary work.
Days before tia Cecília’s arrival, Daniela had thought of Rosa, or rather of Rosa’s husband, of whom she had not thought in years. Rosa was Daniela’s first body at the morgue, a middle-aged woman who had died of heart disease. Daniela was first asked to inspect the body, and then to meet with the family to agree on how to proceed. The body was wrapped in a bright blue plastic cocoon, laid out on a rolling tray like room service dinner. The light in the room was pure white; it screamed. It was an unattractive light that clung to people’s faces. A man in rubber gloves unzipped the cocoon as Rosa’s body expanded over the blue wrap. She was a large woman with enormous, veiny breasts. Her nails were blue, her lids were closed, and her skin was blotchy. Her body was stiff and had already rid its bowels. Daniela had a photograph of Rosa, one that the family had given her so that she could study the nuances of her living face. In the photo, Rosa looked at least ten years younger. She had on a blue flowery dress and was holding a birthday cake with white icing. She was almost laughing and her skin was pink. Daniela was pleased by Rosa’s bright make-up choices.
Rosa’s husband told Daniela to do what she thought fit. Just bring back Rosa from the photo, he said. Bring back Rosa from the photo. There would be reconstruction involved. Rosa’s cheeks had sagged and her chin was lost into her neck.
Rosa’s skin was colder than the wire mesh that Daniela used to pull and reshape it. She applied plaster of Paris over the face and neck, smoothing it out with her thumbs. “There, Rosa.” She would say. She would make her pretty again. “There, Rosa. Much better.” She would paint Rosa’s nails pink like the lipstick on her lips. She laid Rosa’s hand over her own, gloved hand and painted the nails one by one. Daniela pictured the little pink nails going into the casket underground, keeping Rosa some company.
At the funeral, the family claimed that it wasn’t Rosa in the casket. It didn’t look anything like her, they said. The funeral home manager had to call Daniela over. You put in the wrong body, Rosa’s husband said. Daniela looked into the casket and saw Rosa, the Rosa that she had spent six hours cleaning, grooming, and coloring. Daniela said that was Rosa all right. Rosa’s husband was crying. He called Daniela an idiot and a sinner. She had ruined his Rosa for death. Daniela retorted that she had reproduced the Rosa from the photo. The Rosa that he knew before death was not Rosa from the photo. The husband walked away. Daniela stayed. She would stay with the Rosa that she knew, until she had to go.
Daniela hadn’t flown in for Marcos’s funeral. She wondered, but didn’t ask, whether he had been left open in a casket or if he had been burnt to ashes.
A rattle of keys was heard at the door before Isabel and Lucas walked into the living room. Isabel was going through a lilac phase, from her headband to her capri pants to her shoes. In his hands, Lucas balanced a large textbook entitled The Oculus. They would greet their aunt and cousin with a kiss on both cheeks and sit amidst the arrangement of white couches, as they were expected to do with any other stranger.
“The Oculus?” Tia Cecília enquired.
“Lucas wants to be an ophthalmologist, Cecília,” Daniela said.
“I’m reading about myopia,” Lucas said.
“Yes, Lucas is myopic,” said Daniela, with regret.
According to The Oculus, people who were myopic had larger eyes. Lucas also had dry eyes, thanks to Brasília’s climate. And, according to Lucas’s research, people did not blink as much when they wore contacts (which he did), a habit that dehydrated the eyes. Dry eyes had a thinner layer of aqueous humor, a kind of fat, to protect them. A lot of the time Lucas could feel his eyeballs hanging like two dry, fat bellies.
“Oh?” Was Cecília’s answer.
“Isabel. What’s on your lip?” Daniela asked. A tiny cut on Isabel’s upper lip had scabbed deep red, and though she had put some of her mom’s concealer on it, it still looked like a stain because Daniela’s concealer was of a darker complexion.
“Nothing,” Isabel said and wrapped her whole right hand around her mouth. Lucas laughed. He rightfully suspected Isabel had been shaving.
A rumor spread that Monica, a girl at school, had a prickly mustache. All the boys who kissed her said so. Monica was a year older than Isabel. She had thick, black hair and big boobs, but an unattractive face and wore braces.
“So, Henrique, Santa Claus is coming tonight I hear,” Lucas said. Henrique nodded. Isabel thought the idea was stupid, and felt uncomfortable that multiple families from the building were joining their Christmas dinner just because of Santa Claus.
Isabel watched Tia Cecília’s chest visibly swell and lower as she drank some coffee. The steam threaded through her hair, though discretely, like breathing grass. She reminded Isabel of a meadow.
“Isabel why don’t you play with Henrique while we get dinner ready?” Daniela suggested.
Isabel and Henrique sat on the floor of Isabel’s room with crayons and paper. But in the time that Isabel had drawn a still life of flowers and cups, Henrique had been patiently going over the same small circle that he had colored in with an orange crayon. “Want to play another game?” She asked him. Henrique looked up at Isabel and then to the wall by her bed, covered in a collage. “What’s that?” He pointed to the wall.
Isabel proposed they rearrange the pieces of magazine cutouts to make a new collage. There were monsters she wanted to destroy—the armadillo with the body of lipsticks; the bear with the blue eyeball stomach; the elephant with the candy-filled trunk; and the snake wrapped with purple ribbon. She had made them while on the phone with Arnold. She narrated her creations—how she caught a snake with the ribbon she bought from Vania’s blueberry van and the bear whose eyes were too big for its stomach. But Arnold didn’t get it. He probably wasn’t listening half the time.
Arnold and Isabel were in the same sixth grade class at the American School of Brasília. They didn’t have much in common. If Arnold wanted to go swimming, he had a pool in the backyard of his Big American House in Lago Sul. If Isabel wanted to go swimming, she’d turn on the cold water in her bathtub and wash her hair with mint shampoo. Every week Arnold had Nerds, Twizzlers, and Jolly Ranchers delivered to his house from the American embassy. Isabel watched him carry candy in his backpack like it was his own neon-plastic turtle shell. Arnold was a Mormon. Isabel didn’t really know what it meant to be a Mormon. When Arnold mentioned it, she thought it was an American thing she didn’t understand.
They spent hours on the phone. One day Arnold paused and said, “Bel?” He made the effort to pronounce Bel like the Brazilians did, substituting the “l” for a “w” sound, but always exaggerated the “w.” “You…have a very nice voice.” Isabel laughed incredulously and nervously.
“Thanks, Arnold.” Was she supposed to pay him a compliment in return?
Isabel was ripping her last monster apart when she noticed Henrique’s own project. He had collected the many amoeba cutouts of glittery make-up samples of glosses, eye shadow, and nail polish to make a long, continuous form traveling across the wall in pinks, whites, purples, and yellows. “It looks like a cloud,” Isabel told him. “Heaven,” he corrected.
Impossible to Love
Later that evening Arnold rang but Isabel wouldn’t take the call. She went to bed a full hour early, afraid of the bats that could come through her window and smother their wings in her face while sleeping. Lucas couldn’t sleep either. He rolled around in bed like a rotisserie chicken, heating up in his duvet. His closed eyes kept growing farther and farther from himself with thoughts, until he felt that they might fall from their sockets altogether and decided to open them. It never got dark in his room. The greasy yellow streetlights seeped through his shades every night. He knew the sleeping patterns of the residents in the building next door, because he’d watch their lights go off one by one, as separate squares of his room darkened at a time. Without his contacts or glasses on, the wall of posters and pictures became a blur of rectangles. It was relaxing not to see things clearly. Lucas was myopic, and according to The Oculus (a book he had checked out from the school library), people who were myopic had larger eyes. He also had dry eyes, thanks to Brasília’s climate. But, to top that, according to Lucas’s research, people do not blink as much when they wear contacts, which dehydrates the eyes. He could feel his eyeballs hanging like two dry, fat bellies. Dry eyes, Lucas also discovered, had a thinner layer of aqueous humor, a kind of fat, to protect them. His myopic eyes had gone on a diet of their own accord.
A blue light appeared on the ceiling, suddenly like a firefly in the night. It was his cellphone. He had left it on silent. Lucas took the phone close to his face to make out who was calling. The ex.
“Hello?”
Was she laughing? Or was she crying? It was hard to tell.
“My mom has cancer.” She was crying. The eye had a blind spot; there were things that Lucas couldn’t see. We discerned objects and colors because of something called lateral inhibition, which activated neighboring visual neurons at separate times. The fewer fired, the better we saw. Images were a result of contrast. Lucas closed his eyes and covered them with his left palm to make it a little darker. Everything, he thought, was relative.
Impossible to Love
A white cloth covered the orange vase on the dining room table like a bad omen.
Next Sirene appeared, her face sweating and flushing in odd places, similar to a bruised peach. She was dabbing a cold towel on the nape of her neck.
“Ai Lucas! There’s a bat in there!” She waved her towel at the vase.
“A bat?” Lucas approached the vase, which was slightly translucent, and made out what seemed more like a shadow than an animal. Isabel hid behind Sirene, protecting herself from the possibility of a bat attack.
Sirene suggested calling Luís. Luís was the doorman.
Lucas was now observing the vase closer. “I can do it,” he said. If Luís could do it, he could probably do it too.
“You?” Isabel laughed, a bit too loudly. “Right.”
Lucas was still staring at the fallen animal, which occupied the very bottom of the vase. It could have been a low, dark cloud in the dawn, or a heart that had lost its glow and had stopped beating. This shadow in this orange luminous globe reminded Lucas of death, of something sunk and buried. A wing slid up the edge of the vase. Lucas jumped. “Ok. I’ll go get Luís.”
Impossible to Love
Lucas waited for Isabel in the car with the music blasting Nirvana. He was pissed off that he had to pick her up from singing lessons. He knew that this occasional favor would likely escalate into a habit. Upon noticing that her brother was in the driver’s seat, Isabel took a long breath and opened the car door, the sound of drums and electric guitar tumbling out like something she could have tripped on. She looked up at her brother; he was staring out the dashboard. Isabel fell into the car seat, a carpet texture she detested. The Brasília desert sun had overheated it with its stare. Lucas backed out of the parking slot, air conditioning pouting and puffing through strands of Isabel’s blonde hair.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit. Nirvana,” Lucas yelled over the song. “Absorb it. Good stuff.”
Isabel didn’t say anything. She was staring at the white painted lines that divided the road, waiting until the car passed one and then the next, and the next.
Lucas felt uncomfortable with his sister’s silence and then more uncomfortable when he realized he had told his little sister to absorb a song largely about sex. When his eyes rolled right, he caught a group of tears, clustering like grapes on Isabel’s left cheek.
Lucas turned the volume down to the point where you could barely hear it anymore.
“Why are you crying?” That wasn’t the question he was supposed to ask.
Isabel wiped her face with the back of her hand and sagged into the chair. “I like Patti Smith’s version better.”
“What?”
Isabel remained silent. She wasn’t going to give an answer to the wrong question. He had to play along.
“Patti Smith’s? It’s not the original. Nirvana is.”
“I don’t care if it’s the original. I just like it better.” Isabel leaned forward so that her face was close to the air vent. It dried the tears off her face, leaving a sticky sheen around her eyes.
Driving down the eixão, Lucas had an endless perspective of the superquadras, of the blocks of identical apartment buildings, looking flat and square like the people who probably lived inside them. He was tired of Brasília’s even planes and empty views; the whole city seemed dusted in red, beige and gray, darkening in tone when the rain came. He was tired of the drivers who brought warm lunches for the government kids at school and the chicken catupirí pizza that their family ordered on Sundays. Now, after the breakup, Lucas would go back to hanging out with his guy friends on weekends, spent at the only two nightclubs in Brasília that were any good. They would stand at the back of the dance floor, red bull and vodka in hand, eyeing girls and grabbing them as they passed, like things being lost to the wind. He didn’t even like red bull.
Impossible to Love
At lunchtime, Arnold was leaning on the metal gates that skirted the outdoor basketball courts. He appeared surprised to see Isabel. She stood before him and said hi. “Hi.” They stood like two totem poles, arms dangling by their sides. Isabel tried to keep her face in slight profile so that Arnold wouldn’t catch the scab-stain looming over the corner of her lip. Arnold’s eyes were blinking compulsively. It was distracting. Isabel wandered her eyes up and down, up and down. There was a mango on the floor. She looked above her and found a sizeable mango tree. A couple of ripe red mangoes hung from the green leaves like earrings ready to break off.
“Bel.” Arnold’s face was close. Isabel could feel his breath channeling toward her in a clear, warm stream. He rested his lips on hers, closing his eyes. Isabel rather squinted, imagining what would happen if a mango came down on her in the moment. She would faint and Arnold would take her in his arms. He would call her darling as he shook her by the shoulders. But Arnold was thin and weak and would never call anyone his darling. He’d probably leave her to die. Arnold unlatched his lips from hers and took a large step backward. Arnold’s ears were not just big; they were huge. They were floating parallel to his face and the sun shone through them in a brilliant raspberry-red.
Impossible to Love
There was tapioca for breakfast the next morning, with sugar, berry jam, and melted cheese for toppings. The light was lazy and blue because the sun hadn’t fully risen. Isabel inhaled the bittersweet smell of steamed milk, keeping its warmth in her lungs.
“Your tia Cecília and your cousins Maria Carolina and Henrique are coming this year for Christmas,” Daniela said. The three of them lived in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, where Daniela and Cecília had grown up as children. Isabel didn’t remember ever meeting them. Christmas was only two weeks away. Usually they spent it just the four of them.
“My sister hasn’t had the easiest of years. With Marco’s death and the rest of it.” Daniela shook her head. Marco was tia Cecília’s husband; he had died of a brain tumor. Isabel was spreading the jam on her tapioca with a spoon. She was trying to form a whale. Lucas didn’t talk in the mornings. He already knew all the labels of the jam jars, milk cartons, and yogurt tubs off by heart. He couldn’t stand re-reading them anymore.
As young girls, Daniela and Cecília didn’t have much in common. Cecília shot slingshots at pigeons with the boys on their street. She talked with her mouth full and didn’t do well in school. She wanted to be a trumpet player, but wasn’t very good. She’d write out lyrics of American rock songs, because she had better English than most, and would sell them for 5,000 cruzeiros (the equivalent of about 2 reais today) a piece.
“Anyway, I thought we could make this Christmas special,” Daniela continued. Isabel couldn’t bring herself to focus. Her brain was hot and wavy, gleaming white, with the prospect of kissing Arnold. The tiny cut on her upper lip had scabbed deep red, and though she had put some of her mom’s concealer on it, it still looked like a stain because Daniela’s concealer was of a darker complexion.
Impossible to Love
At home, Isabel pressed her lips against the cold bathroom mirror. She kept her eyes open and watched her breath fog up the glass. She stuck her tongue out but quickly tucked it back in when she tasted something faintly like lime soap. She ran her index finger along her lips, disappointed to find some rough, dry patches. That week a rumor had spread that Monica had a prickly mustache. All the boys who had kissed her said so. Monica was a year older than Isabel. She had thick, black hair and big boobs, but had an unattractive face and wore braces. Isabel ran her finger along her upper lip to find a few tiny hairs and panicked. She opened her bathroom door, and, just to make sure, yelled to see if anyone was home.
Back in her mother’s bathroom, Isabel held the razor to her face. Two metal blades with slits between them. She ran it down and across her dry upper lip, combing out the hairs. The blades were cold and faintly wet and left the contours of her lip damp. She was proud of the result. Upon leaving the bathroom, she raced down the hallway and was startled when she headed for Lucas’s stomach.
“What’re you doing?” Isabel said accusingly, without thinking.
“What do you mean, what am I doing?”
“Never mind.” Isabel’s cheeks were swelling hot.
“You’re bleeding by the way,” Lucas took his finger to his upper lip and tapped it. Isabel wrapped her whole hand about her mouth.
“Were you shaving?”
“No.”
“Man. That’s funny.”
Impossible to Love
At school that morning Arnold had been waiting at the main gates, as usual, for Isabel. They had first period Math together and walked over together every day. Arnold had gotten a haircut the night before. It was too short, Isabel thought, but didn’t say. She had never noticed how big his ears were. Ever since Isabel had accepted to be Arnold’s girlfriend, things about Arnold that Isabel didn’t usually think about began to bother her. Her friends, for one, didn’t like Arnold. He was American. At the American school, the Americans and the Brazilians pertained to separate social groups. When Isabel phoned up her best friend, Romi, to tell her of the news, Romi said, “But he’s so…American.” The rumor had already spread that Isabel was dating a gringo.
When Arnold curled his fingers through Isabel’s that morning, he did it slowly, like a spider cautiously moving towards its prey. His hands were clammy. Isabel felt bad pulling away, so instead she curved her hand in a bit, leaving a gap between their hands, as if they were guarding a precious stone, or a baby bird, between them.
In class, Arnold passed a note to Isabel that had been ripped off of a corner of his notebook page.
“Meet me tomorrow at the basketball courts at lunchtime
if you want to kiss me. If not that’s okay but let’s not talk about it.
P.S. Don’t answer this.”
Upon reading it, Isabel neatly folded the note several times, tightly pressing down on each crease, until it was no longer possible to fold it any further. She nestled it between the pencils and pens in her pencil case and zipped it closed. She didn’t look at Arnold and when the bell rang she quickly got up and left the classroom before Arnold could speak to her.
