Away from Home (11 page)

“I know,” Helen said. She sipped at her coffee. She wondered what Bert was doing at the office, and thinking of him she felt a stab of longing that hit her with an actual physical pain. The sunshine seemed very hot. She imagined him in the city, having lunch with some men in a crowded restaurant, the Jockey Club perhaps, or the American Club. Maybe he would let me come into town and have lunch with him one day, she thought. He probably wouldn’t like it; he’s so busy.…

But she knew, even as she wondered, that Bert would not like it at all; he would consider her presence an inconvenience, even a nuisance. Perhaps it was. She didn’t know any more; she didn’t know anything. She realized suddenly that whatever had happened between her and Bert this past year had made her lose the ability to judge.

CHAPTER 4

A few minutes after noon, which was too early for Brazilians to think of lunch, Leila Silva e Costa drove through the mountain resort town of Cidade d’Ouro on her ascent from Rio to the town of Cidade d’Azul high above. It was a four-hour drive from Rio to Cidade d’Azul, and because she knew she would have to return that same afternoon she was already nervous with anticipated fatigue. She was driving an American car, a four-year-old Pontiac that had cost her five thousand dollars this year. By the standards of the ancient and disintegrating automobiles that crept down Avenida Atlantica every evening from five to seven in the daily traffic jam, Leila’s car was a good one. At least it worked.

She had opened all the windows to the cool mountain air, and as she passed through Cidade d’Ouro she looked at the yellow stucco, sun-splashed homes that had given the town its name—City of Gold—and seemed never to have changed. She had spent all her summers in Cidade d’Ouro when she was a child, when the family was all together—her father, her mother, her three older sisters, her older brother. She had been the youngest, the baby. Now her father was dead, her brother was dead, her oldest sister lived in São Paulo and never invited Leila to visit her, and her two other sisters lived in Rio but hardly spoke to her at all. The sight of the narrow, winding cobblestoned streets, the little river trickling under the bridge, the yellow houses, the splashes of red geraniums, the old-fashioned pastry shops, filled Leila with
saudade
. It seemed so long ago that she had been the prim, fat little girl walking along those streets with her French governess; it seemed a hundred years ago. And yet she was only twenty-nine, and she looked younger. When people saw her with her enormous twin sons of eleven, nearly as tall as she was, and her two beautiful daughters of ten and eight, they could not believe it. Or at least they said they could not believe it. Women married and bore children very early in Brazil.

It had been hot and cloudless when she left Rio in the morning, but the mountains here were like a cup for the sky, so as she drove up the winding mountain road she could see fog ahead. Below her, as if she were in an airplane, were clouds. It was a private world. On one side of her was the mountain, green with vegetation and red with the fertile soil where the mountain had been cut to make the road. On the other side was a low white metal fence, bent and twisted in many places where cars and trucks had careened into the abyss during nights of rain and fog. And below that was the vast green valley, beginning to disappear into mist, and the wide, fecund, rolling land. Brazil was so big you could never get to the end of it. Even driving eight hours in one day, as she was going to do, was not so unusual. People drove to Cidade d’Ouro to visit friends for lunch, and that was a three-hour drive if you went fast. You could drive for five days and nights across the country and still be in Brazil. You set your mind for distance when you lived in Brazil, as if it were a slow-moving clock, and you thought in terms of great spaces and great mysteries of closed jungle.

As her car climbed the mountain Leila knew it was going to rain. It had been raining steadily since the beginning of December in Cidade d’Azul, the blue city at the top of the sky. Already the air was cool and moist. Along the side of the narrow road were wild hydrangeas, blue and purple, rain flowers, some as pale as water, some azure and rich with the color of the sky itself. All the years that she had been coming up this road to Cidade d’Azul, Leila had been looking at those hydrangeas, and to her they were the color of tears.

Her fingers reached for the dials of the car radio, and she tapped the dashboard nervously waiting for the music. She wanted jazz, American jazz, or perhaps Carnival music. Carnival music always made her happy. She was humming between her teeth, her face set, her long black hair blowing around her face in the wind from the open windows. The first drops of rain appeared on the windshield, and rain blew in on the wind, dampening her face and sleeve, but Leila did not close the window. She sang with the jazz, her eyes wide open and fixed now on the difficult road that was a demon even though she knew it so well by now, her foot on the accelerator making speed.

Leila Silva e Costa was a beautiful woman, or perhaps it might better be said, a beautiful girl. There was something in her face that was the look of an adolescent girl—not the features, or even the expression, but something reaching from inside, a confusion and restlessness and innocence. She had black hair and, like many Brazilian women, large blue-green eyes with long black lashes, like the eyes of a cat. Her eyes were her best feature, very striking in her tanned face. The rest of her face was delicately molded, and, unlike many Brazilians, she had good teeth, white and small and her own. When she had been a child fighting with her older brother she had often resorted to biting him, and sometimes scratching, so he had given her the nickname of
Gatinha
. Her brother was gone, they were all gone, and no one had called her Little Cat in years.

She reached Cidade d’Azul in pouring rain. It was gray and cold, the kind of miserable grayness that seems to have set in for weeks and weeks. Leila parked her car across the street from a small German restaurant and ran through the ankle-deep puddles to the shelter of the warm room. There was a large Brazilian family eating at one table, the parents and the old grandparents and the many children all together. At a small table against the wall was an English couple dressed in Bermuda shorts and raincoats. They had probably rented a house in Cidade d’Azul for the summer, not knowing about the rainy season—their pallor gave this away, and their look of bleak bewilderment. Leila sat at a table removed from the ones that were occupied and ordered broiled chicken with fried potatoes and palmitos and a bottle of beer.

She tried to keep her thoughts confined to this small, brightly lighted room with the painted biscuit tins lined up on shelves, and the huge wheels of cheeses, and bottles of wine beside them, but already in her mind these bright everyday things were melting away and she could see the gray, secret walls of the convent. Even on a sunny day the convent seemed gray, silent, with a hidden life somewhere within that even she could never know. She knew the nuns had a garden in which they raised all their own vegetables, and perhaps flowers too, but it was a secret garden. All Leila knew was the outside of the building, and the small visitor’s room with the picture of Saint Peter on the wall and the double row of bars behind which, one afternoon a month, she was permitted to see the face of her mother.

She paid the waiter and ran out again into the rain. Imagine! she thought. To live here where it rains every day all summer and is so cold! She wondered if her mother minded—or even noticed—the rain. Strange that she had never thought to ask. She always had questions ready, but when she was face to face with her mother in that short time she always forgot everything she had planned to say.

She parked the car at the curb in front of the convent and ran up the steps, splashing water on the hem of her dress. The little custodian dressed in black who opened the door knew Leila well and gave her a reserved, timid smile. Only her eyes showed friendliness. You are fortunate, the eyes said. How proud you must be.

“You may enter.”

Walking down the immaculately polished floor of the narrow corridor Leila felt her heart beginning to pound, as it always did when she came here. She was acutely conscious of her wet shoes and of the sound they were making in the great silence. She felt like a little girl again, a naughty child with wet feet, and she stiffened, trying to walk as quietly as possible. Not that it could offend anyone, really; the entire place seemed deserted, everyone hidden away. The custodian left her in the tiny visitor’s room and shut the door.

The only furniture in the room was a hard wooden chair and a small table with a drawer in the front of it. Once Leila had opened the drawer and found it empty. The walls were painted a dull, indistinguishable color. The picture of Saint Peter on the wall was the only decoration. But none of this mattered. The focal point of all eyes, of everything in the room and its reason for existing at all, was a kind of great window in one wall, completely barred with metal bars set two inches apart and bearing short, sharp, metal spikes pointing outside at the visitor. Two or three feet inside this row of spiked bars was another row of bars, this time without spikes. Behind them was a thin black curtain blotting out all sight. Looking at this forbidding array you could not help feeling that whatever was on the other side being protected was somehow superhuman, unreal. You could not believe that the black-robed figures who might speak to you were really only women, pious women, who had said farewell to whatever you knew of life. And perhaps they no longer were.

The black curtain moved aside. Leila was a daughter, the closest blood relative, so she could speak without the curtain and she could see. Her hands were so cold they were almost numb. She was filled with resentment and love and loneliness and anguish, and she could hardly speak.

“Hello, Mother.”

“Leila. How are you? You look well.”

You don’t care! Leila wanted to cry out, but she tried to smile. “I’m well. How are you?”

“I am well.” How calm her mother looked, how detached, and how strange. On her pale, scrubbed face, the heavy black, unplucked eyebrows stood out as the main feature. Her eyes were quiet, calm, and said nothing. “How are the children?”

“I don’t know what to do with them!” Leila burst out. “The boys miss their father terribly. They won’t mind me; they won’t do anything I tell them to. And Teresinha is so shy she has no friends at school. I can’t do it myself.”

“He will come back. You must take him back,” her mother said evenly.

“He won’t come back. He’s married. You know he’s married again.”

“He is married to you. There is no other marriage.”

“Mother, I need you,” Leila whispered. She tried not to cry, holding her breath, feeling her heart struggle in her chest like a caught fish straining for life. “I can’t do it myself. I have no one.”

“You have God.”

“I don’t have anybody!”

“You must take your husband back,” her mother said calmly. “Many women have suffered more than you have because of their husband’s sin. He is your husband, and you are his only wife. You can suffer much for him. It has been done before.”

Anger at her mother’s calm, sure tone gave Leila strength. “He doesn’t want to come back,” she said, enunciating clearly. “
He
left
me
. He doesn’t want me. He wants
her
. He doesn’t want to be married to me. He told me so. You know that, Mother. You know that. Only you never will admit it.”

“Your divorce caused me great pain,” her mother said quietly. “It was a sin in the eyes of God. I pray for you, always.”

“I need more than prayers.”

There was silence between them then as they looked at each other, but it was not the kind of silence that makes a bond between two people who love each other. Leila stared at her mother’s face, winged in black cloth like a pale, half-shrouded portrait, and she wondered what her mother was thinking. I don’t know her any more, Leila thought. She’s my mother and I don’t even know how she feels about me any more.

“I can’t bear to talk to you from behind these bars like an animal in a cage,” Leila cried.

Her mother smiled distantly. “Your only cage is the prison of your own sin.”

“If I were
dying
, Mother, if I were dying in the hospital of
cancer
, would you come out to see me? Would you come to me if I called you from my
deathbed?
”

Her mother’s smile was less distant. “I would pray for you.”

“But you wouldn’t come out to me.”

“God will take care of you.”

“Sometimes I …” Leila began. Sometimes I hate you. But she could not say the words aloud, even though they were crying out inside her. Something prevented the utterance; perhaps awe, perhaps love.

“I pray for all of you,” her mother said.

“All my life I was guarded,” Leila said. “Don’t do this, don’t go there. You never let me think for myself. I had a governess until the day I was married. And then, for no reason, you disappeared into this convent. I have no one, Mother. I’m alone. I don’t know how to be alone. I don’t know how to take care of myself. What about me? Is my life over now; am I dead for you?”

“I had reasons.”

“You couldn’t face life.”

“Can you?”

“I’m … sorry,” Leila said with effort. “I didn’t mean to come here and fight with you. We always have a fight, don’t we?”

“I have learned how to forgive you.”

“Maybe someday … I’ll be able to understand you,” Leila whispered.

“I must go now,” her mother said gently.

“I’ll come back next month.”

“That will be good. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Mother.” The black curtain dropped, and her mother was gone. There was no sound. Leila wondered for one crazy moment if her mother were still sitting there behind that curtain, if an anguished cry could bring her back even for a minute, for one more goodbye, for all the things that should have been said or perhaps for more things that should never have been said at all. The room was very still. It was such a bare room, with almost nothing in it, but it was so filled with wild, mute thoughts that there was no room for furniture or decoration. No wonder it’s bare, Leila thought bitterly. She stood, and walked around the small table to the bars. She took hold of one of the bars with her hand, between the sharp, neat spikes. The metal was not as smooth to the touch as it was to the eye, and when she took her hand away it smelled metallic.