Away from Home (28 page)

In recent years, of course, as any Carioca will tell you, Carnival has become more commercial. There are television cameras and newsreel cameras and photographers with flashbulbs covering the revelry for magazines. But everything has become more commercial in our day; there are even press agents for wars. The people themselves are the same; the people never change. And the people who say they will not go to another Carnival this year, or that they will only go a little bit, like Sergio Leite Braga, like Margie and Neil Davidow, find themselves involved in the holocaust and happy to be consumed.

On one afternoon of Carnival week Neil Davidow and Mort Baker attired themselves in striped shirts, white trousers, French berets, and face masks, and went to the ball for married men. Actually, as with any of the other balls, it was not restricted to married men and women who wished to meet them; it was merely given the title and held in the afternoon so married men could attend without their wives. Neil had a sense of rising excitement as he walked briskly down the hot street toward the hotel; he was hardly aware of the heat at all. The air was sirupy with heat, and bathers were shrieking on the beach. There were so many people in brightly colored bathing suits that you could hardly see the sand between them. The waves hit the shore wildly, casting up foam like cotton candy ten feet into the air. Neil felt full of energy. He glanced at Mort striding beside him, and although at times he had felt faintly jealous of Mort’s assurance and independence, today he was not jealous at all.

The ballroom of the hotel was filled with the unreality of artificial light in the middle of the day, with the curtains at the high arched windows drawn against the heat and sunlight. The air was heavy with the sickly sweet scent of ether. The band blared the same Carnival music, as if it had been imported entire, functioning and unceasing, from every other ball that had gone before. There were girls gathered about the room, alone and together, dressed in masks and head feathers and brief glittering costumes that showed their beautiful legs.

This room was a world in itself, a world of anonymous, willing, giving girls with red mouths and round breasts and tiny waists and long curving legs. Why did all the Brazilian girls have such tiny waists? Neil had been watching them on the beach for years, and they were all shaped like hourglasses. He had never seen such feminine women. He suspected that the ones who did not wear bikinis wore some kind of waist pinchers or girdles under their bathing suits, even when they went into the water. Margie had told him once that next to a Brazilian girl an American girl looked like a little boy.

He wasn’t going to think about Margie today. There were long stretches of time during his days away from her when she didn’t exist for him at all. Then when he was doing something as ordinary and unrelated to her as lunching at the American Club with some men from the office, suddenly a woman across the room would remind him of Margie—the color of her hair, the way she held her head up—and Neil would put down his fork and be unable to eat at all. He would feel something happen to his breathing, as if breathing were something you had to will and be aware of all the time or it would stop. Margie always held her head up very high when she walked across a room, her chin slightly tilted up, as if she were a little bit of a snob, but she was too short to look like a snob when she walked that way. She only looked like a small girl trying to appear taller, and there was something touching about it, or at least Neil found it so. Everything about her was touching; an accidental gesture of her hand, the look of fright that came into her eyes, even her complete, absolute, immobile frigidity. He felt like a deformed beast when he touched her, not like a man or a husband or a lover, but like some abomination from a Jean Cocteau movie. The enslaved beast, disguised, with the lonely heart of a man. Neil felt only that he had never been able to give her anything, and that unless he could … But he wasn’t going to think about Margie today. He was at the Married Men’s Ball with four hours to himself and he was going to get slightly drunk, just to have an edge, and then he was going to make love to a woman.

“Every man for himself,” Mort said, looking at him. “All right?”

“We’ll meet here later,” Neil said without conviction. He was being the proper husband with no seriously bad intentions, but he hoped Mort would protest. Mort did.

“Well …” Mort said, and for some strange reason he sounded slightly embarrassed. “
I
have nothing to do later. Maybe you won’t see me. But I’ll see you at eleven o’clock tonight, in time for the Copacabana. Okay?”

“Sure.” Neil patted him on the back, although the gesture at that moment seemed false. “
Te logo
.”

Mort held up his hand like an Indian saying “peace” and was gone in the crowd. Neil stood there for a moment listening to the music and watching the girls. Then he looked for the bar.

He bought scrip and then he had three straight whiskys rapidly in a row and then a whisky and water for a chaser. He began to feel relaxed. It was going to be a good party. The people seemed nice, the music was good, the whisky was not bad. He finished the whisky and water, put out his cigarette at the bottom of the paper cup, and went off to dance.

He would dance for a while and then he would repair to the bar for a drink, and if he was dancing with a girl who was attractive he would buy her a drink. He had the feeling that he shouldn’t try to press it, that this afternoon was a very important one shot, and there was a lot of time left today to pick a girl he would really like. Every time he found one who seemed particularly attractive and he was on the verge of asking her if she wanted to leave and find a drink someplace better he would reconsider and decide this girl was not good enough. Her legs were too thin, her mouth too small, or she seemed too silly. He wanted a particularly voluptuous girl, even a rather dirty girl, the kind of girl the guys used to call a “pig” at college. The drinks he had had were making him think in slow motion and it was pleasant. Today was going to be an important afternoon. I want, Neil thought pleasantly, the kind of girl you can drown in, the kind you want to tear apart. A great, round, wild, silky, resilient, fleshy girl,
but not fat
; with long, long hair and slightly smeared lipstick, the sort of girl who looks slightly messy
before
I mess her up, a girl who moans, a girl who …

“Neil …?”

The girl standing in front of him at the bar had a timid, slightly thin voice, and she was neither fleshy nor resilient-looking. She was short and slender, and she was wearing a black and white striped tiger costume which covered her from the top of her head to the top of her thighs. It had a cap with two perky ears, and it covered the entire upper half of her face. The costume even had a long tail. She wore black mesh stockings and high-heeled black shoes, and she had the kind of legs you see on an Apple Blossom Queen—nice but not particularly sensual.

“Do I know you?” he asked.

She giggled. The giggle was unexpected. “You don’t know me?”

The voice was completely familiar, and if he had not had so many whiskys Neil was sure he would have recognized it in a moment. She had the slightest of Brazilian accents, almost imperceptible. “Say something else,” he said.

“I have loved you since the moment I saw you.” She put her arm through his, to show she was teasing, and peered into his face.

“Something more.”

“I have loved you for years, and you don’t know I’m alive.”

Neil looked at what was left of his drink, and then swallowed it. “Keep going. This is nice.”

“I would like very much to kiss you. Will you kiss me?”

“My pleasure.”

He put his arms around her small waist and pulled her close to him. Something about the feeling of her body was both familiar and strange and he suddenly felt very much aroused. He kissed her mouth hard and kept holding on to her.

“You’ve had quite a lot to drink,” she said. She did not sound reproachful, only surprised.

“What would you like to drink?”

“Could I have a Coca-Cola?”

“No.”

“I can’t drink,” she said. “I have a bad liver.” She smiled at him. “Don’t you really know who I am?”

“Christ, how should I know who you are?”

“Good.” She kissed him again, lightly, and this time Neil really could not let go of her. He kept his arms around her tightly and forced her lips open with his tongue. She was trying to get away from him now, but subtly, squirming a little. Her movements only made him more excited, and he suddenly hated her. He remembered whom she felt like with that tiny waist and that slim mobile body; she felt like Margie. She turned her head away from him.

“Let’s have a drink,” she breathed. Her voice sounded frightened. Neil wanted to choke her.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he said angrily. He was really drunk, he knew, because her face kept getting blurry and he had never spoken to a woman in this way before. “Damned little cock-teaser! Who do you think you are?”

“Oh …” she said, very softly. “Oh …” Suddenly, surprisingly, he saw that she was crying. “I didn’t mean to make you angry. I thought it was a joke,” she whispered. She reached up and pulled off the tiger cap and mask so that she could wipe her eyes.

When he saw who she was he became almost sober. The mysterious girl with the supple body, dressed as a tigress, his drunken memory-image of Margie, and the prosaicness of who this girl really was—a secretary in his office—all blended into one improbable girl. “For God’s sake, Gilda,” Neil said. He tried to make a joke of it. “As they say in the movies, I didn’t recognize you without your glasses, Miss Jones.”

“And then she’s always Lana Turner,” Gilda said. “She’s not just me.” She wiped her tears away with her fingers and Neil handed her his handkerchief. She smiled. “I think I could use that drink now,” she said. “The hell with my liver.”

“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t dream of it.” He slid some more scrip across the bar to the bartender. “Double whisky and a Coke.”

She was an odd girl; he really didn’t know her very well. She was from an old, rather social, Brazilian family, and she had been educated in the States. In fact, she had even gone to Radcliffe, giving it up after two years and coming back to Rio and getting a job. Office work paid almost nothing for these girls, but Gilda’s parents had money and she lived with them. Her way of dressing, her speech, her manners, were all more American than Brazilian, and in a way Neil had felt sorry for her around the office because she seemed lost. She wasn’t feudal, or dependent, or unthinkingly passive like other girls from her background, and yet she had to live here in Rio and behave like everyone else. He had sometimes wondered what kind of boys she went out with.

“What are you doing at a party like this?” he asked her.

She straightened the seam of her black mesh stocking. “I don’t know. I was bored. You know, I haven’t been in Rio at Carnival time for six years, and before that I was too young so my parents used to ship me off to my grandparents in the country. This is really my first Carnival. So I thought I’d go to everything.”

“Including parties where married men pick up girls?”

“If you’re worried that I’ll remember, I won’t. You’ll find this ball is as secret as the confessional. A friend of mine was in love with a man who she thought was at the Married Men’s Ball last year, but when she begged everyone she knew to tell her if he was there, they wouldn’t answer. Not that anybody
does
anything. But not telling adds to the mystery.”

“It does,” Neil said. He was beginning to like her, and his anger had all ebbed away. He felt a little embarrassed. “I’m very drunk,” he said, by way of apology for what had gone before.

“Everybody is.”

“Are you here alone?”

“Entirely.”

“And are you having fun?”

She shrugged. “In a way. I think I’m crazy—you know? I hate Rio and I love it. I hated sitting around the
piscina
all day drinking orangeade, so I got this job. And do you know I don’t even make enough money to buy myself a new dress? If I bought three dresses a year I wouldn’t have a penny left for anything else. I figured it out. And sometimes when I go to a party where there are a lot of girls I grew up with, who are all married now and have babies, I catch them looking at me as if I’m some sort of a freak. I even think they’re sorry for me. They think I’m an old maid.”

“How old
are
you?”

“I’ll be twenty-one next month.”

“Terribly old,” Neil said. “Disgraceful.”

“The worst of it is, I have nothing to say to them any more. And they have nothing to say to me. They tell me how nice it is to be married and have babies. And then there’s a long silence.”

“Not so different from in the States.”

“Oh, it
is
different!” Gilda said. “I love the States. There are so many men to go out with. And they treat a girl like a person, not just a wrestling partner. At Radcliffe I went out every night. Well, I don’t know why I’m telling all this to you.”

“Because you’ve loved me ever since the moment you first saw me,” Neil said.

“That’s right! How could I have forgotten?”

They both laughed. Neil wanted very badly to put his arm around her, but this time he felt foolish, like the older man, the executive, the boss chasing the secretary behind the filing cabinets. “Put your mask on again,” he said softly. “Please.”

She did not ask him why, or even look puzzled. She merely slipped the tiger mask and cap over her head and tucked in the stray wisps of hair. Neil put his arms around her.

“I can feel your heart beating,” Gilda said.

“Are you always so candid?”

“It’s a defense.”

“If you can say so, it isn’t.”

“If I say it to you it’s the truth.”

“Yes,” Neil said. “I believe you.”

“Do you want to dance?”

“No,” Neil said. “If I start knocking myself out in there I’ll sublimate.”

“You frighten me a little.”

“
I
do?”

She smiled. “Because I like you. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” he said.