Away from Home (38 page)

“But land is so cheap here,” Sergio said. “Believe me, eighty thousand acres isn’t something extraordinary.” He pointed. “Look there. Eucalyptus trees. We use them to make paper. I’ll take you to see the paper factory. And we have a sugar-cane factory too, where we make liquor out of our own sugar cane. All the workers live on the property. See there—a restaurant and stores for the workers. This farm is really more like a town.”

“The man who owned a town. It sounds like the title of one of those tycoon novels.”

He seemed embarrassed. “See the cattle?” he said. “Over there.”

“It looks like an ocean of cattle! How many are there? And if you say a million I won’t be surprised.”

“Only twenty-eight hundred head,” Sergio said. “This isn’t a cattle farm. What are you smiling about?”

“I can’t help it, darling. It’s only that it strikes me funny, your saying that. ‘Twenty-eight hundred. This isn’t a
cattle
farm.’ I never expected any of this. It’s not that I’m laughing; I’m just kind of shocked silly.”

He gave her an amused glance and turned the car off the highway on to a smooth dirt road. There was a white wooden sign nailed on two tall wooden posts which made an archway under which they drove. On the sign was painted a kind of insignia and the word
fazenda
in black paint. The road continued and was bordered on both sides by a forest of sweet-smelling eucalyptus trees. The trees were tall and blackly leaved against the sun, and beneath them it was cool. They drove on under the trees for what seemed like miles.

“These are the trees that make paper?”

“A certain kind of paper, yes,” Sergio said. “Rough paper mostly, wrapping paper, corrugated paper. Not stationery. We don’t have the facilities here to make special things like stationery. This is only a—”

“Small farm,” Helen finished, interrupting him. They looked at each other for a moment and then they both laughed.

“Gringo,” he said.

“I am, aren’t I.”

He skidded the car to a stop in a cloud of dry dust and pulled Helen close to him and kissed her so hard he hurt her, and then he kissed her gently. There was no one on the road, no other cars, no houses, only the dark wall of trees on either side. It was very quiet.

“I’m so afraid I’m going to say something to hurt you,” Helen said. “And I won’t even know I’m doing it. I
am
a foreigner, we
are
different, you and I, and I’m so afraid I’ll say something you’ll take the wrong way and you won’t tell me. You have a terrible pride; I know that. Promise me you’ll tell me if I say something wrong. Promise me you won’t keep it to yourself and stop loving me.”

“I promise, of course,” Sergio said lightly, but she knew she had been right.

He took his hands away from her with an effort, as if they had been glued, and started the car again. “I don’t think I had better let any of the workers find me taking off your clothes in the middle of the road,” he said.

“No. They might be shocked.”

“Of course they’d be shocked. They do it with their clothes
on
.” He smiled at her with that look that had seemed so mysterious to her that night at the swimming pool and now had become very personal and dear.

“It’s so strange to be looking at somebody and wondering what he’s like and if you’ll ever in your entire life get to know anybody like him, and then such a short time later to find that he loves you,” Helen said.

“I felt that way about you too. The blond American.” His voice became tender. “Scared to death to be standing in the swimming pool in a bikini with a strange man looking at her stomach.”

“I wasn’t!”

“Yes you were. I liked that.”

In the distance was a huge house, painted white, with a red tile roof. There were several smaller houses grouped around it, one perhaps for servants, one a garage, and one the guest house Sergio had told her about. Next to the main house Helen could see a swimming pool bordered by weeping willows, and then a wide, smooth, bright-green lawn with patches of flowers and umbrella-shaped flamboyant trees with their brilliant orange-colored blossoms. At the edge of the lawn there was a row of palm trees, and beyond that she could see a lake glittering in the sunlight. Sergio drove up to the main house and parked in the driveway.

There was a veranda at the side of the house, shaded by the sloping roof, and on the veranda Helen could see small tables and large chairs and a hammock with someone’s feet protruding from it. A male voice was singing an American song in an atrociously bad accent. “‘You must remember this, A kiss is still a kiss … a sigh is still a sigh …’”

“My cousin is here,” Sergio said. He took Helen’s overnight case from the car and led the way into the house.

The main hall of the mansion was dimmed against the sun and cool with the trapped cool stillness that a great house has in the summer when all the shutters have been closed in the early morning to keep in the coolness of the night. The floors were dark polished wood, and scattered on them were the skins of cattle and steers, made into rugs, white and tan, white and black. They bore only the outlines of the cows, but they made Helen shudder just the same. A cow rug wasn’t like a bear rug or a lion-skin rug.

“From our own cows,” Sergio said rather proudly.

“They’re very pretty.”

A butler emerged from the shadows, dressed in a black uniform and white gloves. “Good morning, Senhor Sergio. Your father is having his massage,” he said in Portuguese.

“What would you like to drink, Helen?”

“Gin and tonic?”

“Is the liquor locked or unlocked?”

“Locked, Senhor Sergio.”

Sergio looked annoyed. Then he shrugged and looked at Helen with a little smile. “My father keeps the liquor cabinet locked and he keeps the only key. It’s a … habit of his. We’ll have to wait until he comes down. Would you like some iced tea?”

“Of course. That will be fine.”

“Two iced
maté
, please. Tell my father I have taken my guest to the little house.”

The butler bowed and disappeared. Sergio picked up Helen’s overnight case and led the way out into the bright sunshine again. “I’ll put you in here and you can put on a bathing suit and we can swim before lunch,” he said. He was suddenly very formal, as he had said he would be. He opened the door. “Here is your bedroom, the larger one. It’s quite cool. The bathroom is there. Have you enough hangers? Will you be all right?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“I’ll meet you at the swimming pool when you’re ready. Hurry up.”

“I will.”

He stopped, with his hand on the doorknob. “I hope you didn’t mind about the liquor,” he said. “I forgot to tell you before. I’m sorry.”

She wanted to run to him and kiss him, but she thought a maid or a butler or perhaps the mysterious cousin might come in at any moment, and, besides, the strange house awed her. She compromised by touching his arm rather timidly. He immediately put his arms around her and put his lips against her hair, and she almost began to cry with relief. She wished they had gone somewhere alone instead of here. She felt like two different people: the fascinated houseguest-tourist being polite and
simpatico
, and the woman in love who only wanted privacy with her lover. Her morality could not yet cope with both selves at once; it was too much of an adjustment even to be one. How much I have to learn, Helen thought.

“I want you to be happy here,” Sergio said. “You like it, don’t you? I’d like to stay here forever. I wish you could stay here with me forever.”

“It would be wonderful …” With his arms reassuringly around her she really meant it.

“I hate the city. You and I could be happy here together for the rest of our lives.” He sounded sad.

“I know …”

“Put on your bathing suit,” he said abruptly, releasing her. “I’ll meet you at the pool.” And he was gone.

Helen looked around the huge bedroom, seeing it for the first time. It contained high twin beds with lace-trimmed sheets that seemed to have been hand-embroidered, a tall, heavy old-fashioned armoire for her clothes, a small dressing table and mirror, and a night table with a lamp on it. Except for the elaborate heirloom sheets the room was almost spartanly furnished, but immaculately clean. There was a straw rug on the floor. It was a real summer house. White-painted wooden shutters covered the large windows and shielded the room from the sun. Helen opened one shutter and looked out. There was a beautiful view of the lake, and a little to the side of her window, near enough so she could reach out and touch it, was a tree with wild purple orchids growing up the trunk. She reached out and snapped off a spray of the tiny orchids and put it on the bare dressing table, and then she opened her overnight case and laid out her cosmetics and comb and brush beside them. It made her feel more at home.

She walked into the bathroom. It was as huge as the bedroom. You’d need roller skates to get from the sink to the toilet, she thought, and ran around in delight. There were twelve narrow windows, with vines curling in from outside, and a tiny lizard walked down the tile wall. The bathtub was set on a kind of platform with three steps leading to it, like the bath of a Roman emperor. The floor of the entire bathroom was made of golden marble and on it there was a large oriental rug. Brazilians evidently had greater respect for bathrooms than Americans did.

There was another door, leading to the other bedroom. It was smaller than her bedroom, and furnished almost the same. Then there was the hall, with a smaller room and bath at the end of it, which must have been the governess’s room when Sergio and his friends had stayed here as children. She wondered if his children stayed here now, in this house, when they were at the farm. Perhaps not, because there was no sign of children now, no forgotten toy lying anywhere, no pencil marks low down on the white walls, no little shirt or bathing suit or dress left behind in her armoire. The children of Sergio and his wife probably stayed in the main house with their grandfather, who was old now and liked to have children around him. Helen was glad there was no trace of them in this house where she would sleep tonight with their father. It made it easier to pretend that she and Sergio were both free, so that when he said to her, “You and I could be happy here together for the rest of our lives,” it would not sound so make-believe and sad.

When she came down to the pool Sergio’s father and cousin were there. The father was a thinner, older version of Sergio. There was something grayish about his face, and Helen suspected he was not in good health. His hair was gray streaked with white, and worn rather long, and he wore a white linen suit and a white shirt and a red silk tie. He did not seem to be bothered by the heat. He sat on a white filagreed metal loveseat on the lawn beside the swimming pool, all in white, with his thin grayish face and white and gray hair, and he looked as if he were going to die before winter. Helen thought Sergio must be his youngest child. She realized that she had never asked Sergio how many brothers and sisters he had, or if all of them were living; but at her age and his those things were so unimportant. The last time she had been courted by a man information about members of his family had been part of the expected earliest conversation, but now, years later, when you fell in love with another grown person each of you tried to be separate and important as yourself, without any past. But she wondered now if Sergio had known his wife since childhood, as Leila had known her ex-husband.

The cousin, Guillerme, was about twenty-two years old, almost as short as Helen, and he had light-brown hair bleached blond on top from the sun, and a healthy tan. He eyed Helen with open delight and covetousness.

They all spoke Portuguese. It became evident to Helen immediately that Guillerme could not speak any English at all, except for the words to the popular song he had been singing, which he had apparently learned by rote, and that Sergio’s father could speak only a little English but preferred to speak none at all.

“It has been years since I have spoken to an American,” Sergio’s father said in Portuguese. “I go to France every year, and often to Germany for the health baths. I speak French very well. I apologize to you for my English.”

“I apologize to you for my Portuguese,” Helen said. They both laughed politely, sizing up each other.

“Come sit here next to me,” the father said.

She sat beside him on the hot iron bench beneath the sparse shade of the weeping willow tree and decided she liked him. She tried to think of something to say.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked. He put his arm around her.

“Yes, thank you.”

He gave her a little hug. Then she wasn’t quite sure whether she still liked him or not. He was smiling at her, and the look he gave her was not fatherly at all. Sergio was sitting on the grass at his father’s feet, and he and his father began a very rapid conversation about politics and inflation and what the inflation was doing to the prices of their liquor output. The cousin Guillerme lay on the grass under the tree with his arms under his head and sang quietly to himself: “‘Saturday night is the loneliest night of the week …’”

The butler came to them with a silver tray of cold drinks—tea. Sergio’s father looked at Helen. “Would you like gin instead?”

“No, thank you,” she lied, because an icy gin and tonic was exactly what she would have wanted after their long hot drive to get here.

He seemed pleased. “We will have wine with lunch,” he said, and turned back to his discussion of politics with Sergio.

“‘I don’t mind Sunday night at all,’” sang Guillerme, “‘Because that’s when my friends come to call …’” He sat up. “Do you know Frank Sinatra?” he asked Helen in Portuguese.

“I know who he is. I like him very much.”

“Is he your friend?”

“I never met him. I mean, I like his records very much.”

“Oh.” He flopped down again on his back. “I have all his records,” he said, waving one foot in the air like a baton. “I know all the words. If you meet him, tell him I like him.”

“All right.”

He looked at her, with that openly acquisitive look. “Do you have a boyfriend?”