DORA

At the Municipal Theatre ball on this last night of Carnival, Hugo and Dora sit at a table with their friends amid the fabric waves and painted, plywood boats, a dozen pairs of enormous eyes peering down from where the curved walls meet the ceiling. There are rows of tables like theirs, off to the side of the crowded dance floor, all covered in white tablecloths, fresh roses, open bottles of champagne, ashtrays crammed full. The brass band is excellent, as always, stationed behind two large pillars, metallic and candy-striped, that jut forward at an angle. Dora knows she should get up and dance—Your last Carnival! chime her friends again and again—but the energy she found for last week’s cocktail party has long dissipated, and she refills her glass, vaguely hoping to retrieve some of it.

It was absurd to think that if she busied herself with parties, she wouldn’t have time to collapse. To believe that if she did what she’d always done, surely life would somehow recalibrate, become recognizable. But now amid the frothy chatter, the giddily flung wrists, she is alone—even farther from Luiza and Hugo than before.

All around her twirl gladiators, clowns, and slinky cats, gashes of colour among the many men in white tuxedos. Hugo used to love to dress up for Carnival, but tonight he wears the same tasteful uniform as most of the other men: white jacket and black tie. Dora wears an elegant white, V-neck gown with black gloves and a simple black mask over her eyes. It would have been undignified for them to dress up, but for a moment she is breathless, struck by a swift and sharp pang of nostalgia, remembering how they used to celebrate when they were first married.

Once upon a time, Hugo insisted they join the street parades, even though Dora said they were low-class. They went to a different ball every night—first to the Cassino da Urca, where they danced to Carmen Miranda before she started wearing all that silly fruit on her head, and then to the Artists’ Ball, where most of the men wore costumes, and those who didn’t were sweat-slicked beneath their short-sleeved shirts, unbuttoned almost to their navels, not a tuxedo in sight. Guests threw confetti into the air and grasped one another tightly as they moved in concentric circles around the huge room in a dance-induced trance state. And then to the beach, where everyone spread out, detritus of costumes lost in the sand, and Hugo’s smooth shaven cheek and perfect hand pressed against her thigh as she slept. Then rest for a few hours, before returning to the frenzy of dancing, drinking, sweating—bacchanalia. He always had so much energy, and she did her best to keep up. Had she noticed it then, or were her memories imprinted retrospectively by what she knew now? He hadn’t, even then, been encumbered by the physical needs of normal people. He never seemed to tire, and now she couldn’t remember him ever taking more than a few bites of food before becoming distracted, clapping his hands, and seizing whomever happened to be beside him, proclaiming, ‘Delightful! Have you ever tasted such manna? What wonderful people you all are!’ She still misses it—the fever and delirium—before she knew enough to fear what followed.

‘But you must admit, a certain elegance has gone,’ someone says over the bleating of brass instruments. ‘It’s fine in here, but out there, in the streets, it’s all pau-de-arara.’

Pau-de-arara: migrants from the northeast who come to the city in uncovered trucks. Her friends still have the Rio of their girlhoods in mind, with its wild beaches and the sense that it belonged to them. ‘There have always been the poor,’ they say, ‘but they used to be less… obtrusive.’

‘The South Zone was ours,’ they say.

Those with money, they mean. Those who are claro. Her friends sink into sentimentality when they mourn for those years they claim were untroubled. But for her, those same years were punctuated by chaos and regret. Perhaps it was better for them to leave these people behind, she thinks. People who have never lost anything.

‘Speaking of lost elegance,’ says May Buchanan in a stage whisper, ‘did you hear about Ruthie’s niece? Well, apparently she’s got history. She’s here because her parents had to fire her tutor. There was something there.’

‘Wait,’ Dora says, leaning forward now. ‘Ruthie Cavanagh? What about the girl?’

‘Her niece, Brigitta. Well you know her, Dory—wasn’t she talking to the girls at your party? Lock them up, I say!’

‘But what did the tutor do?’

‘Oh nothing, I don’t think. Ruthie even said it was all the girl’s doing. They gave him two weeks’ pay and a good reference. Ruthie’s sister wanted her somewhere far away for the summer, teach her a lesson to straighten her out.’

‘I’m off to mingle!’ Hugo says now, paying no attention to the conversation.

Is she the only one who notes the subtly higher pitch to his voice, Dora wonders, watchful as he retreats into the crush of bodies crowded into the theatre. Their friends, always so polite, pretend not to notice for as long as they can. But after all these years, all his so-called ‘visits to Canada’ whenever he was hospitalized while Dora remained at home with the girls, she’s sure they suspect the truth.

When Hugo first got sick, Dora hadn’t known what to do, who to call, where to take him. No one spoke about such things—such private matters—until they erupted, and sometimes not even then. At times the politeness and the reticence (for they were all still Americans deep down) was stifling: who could she have asked for help? His family was a continent away, and he barely kept in touch with them. Sometimes she almost believed him when he said he felt like he had been born upon arriving in Brazil, as though he had no life before. He made it clear he didn’t want to remember or discuss his past. Dull place, dull people—let us not waste our thoughts on them, was usually all he said. This is the only life I want. Let us live in the now, like the Buddhists say. So when things escalated in those early years, and he spoke too much and too fast, or he was suddenly drained of colour and took to his bed, people made excuses. Oh, Hugo—you know how he is. Probably had too much to drink. And then they were all having too much to drink, so less was noticed than might have been otherwise, and even less was said.

His ‘spells’ (Dora had, at the time, no other name by which to call them) were relatively mild at first, marked by a seductive exuberance followed by melancholy, and lasted only a few days or weeks at a time. For a time, the spells made him a more brilliant, more appealing, more exciting version of himself. Nights when they stayed out until dawn and he took her to places she’d never otherwise go and they made love for hours. But soon small, knotted obsessions began to take root—Keats’s poetry, Beethoven’s concertos—and he would stay up all night even after they’d been out to the casinos, reading and listening to music. Then things would change; he didn’t want to go out, to dance, to shimmer or seduce. And while his lows were defined, distinct, and harder for Dora to understand, there existed a word in Portuguese for his more melancholy moods. Saudade. A longing or nostalgia for a lost place or person, or something beloved that you once had, that you ached for still. So everyone said, Oh you know, Hugo—so far from home. It’s just saudade. Not just a feeling but a collective temperament that marked the Brazilian people, who were a commingled diaspora, far-flung from their native countries. It was normal, wasn’t it? It was even, perhaps, an act of empathy on his part. He was, in his heart, a true brasileiro.

Early on, there were breaks, plateaus, during which he was good and forthright, decisive and smart—himself. And enough time would lapse between each cycle of high and low that the last was nearly forgotten when the next arrived; too few and far between for a clear pattern to emerge. And the truth was, once his peculiarities—for still she had no name for them—became impossible to deny, it was really just a confirmation of what Dora had known for some time, that they were not just a quirk of personality but a thing. A condition. Something that should be named. And following the naming of it, what? She didn’t know. It worsened while she was pregnant with Luiza, when he barely touched Dora and she was surprised by how much she missed him, missed the weight and heat of him, missed the way his thick, warm arms wrapped around her in the kitchen. Even that was enough, just an embrace as she made coffee, as though he needed to hold her. Needed her. Was it her naked, pregnant body that alarmed him? The livid, purple fissures spreading from her vagina toward her belly button, like inverted veins on the surface of her skin. By this time the war had started and she worried it would have seemed childish—unpatriotic!—to demand too much attention. She knew he was doing important things at work, drawing blueprints for the Allies. So she busied herself playing canasta with friends and told them Hugo was occupied with work requisitioned by the Department of Defence. Top secret. Something to do with bridges.

Everything seemed fine, and if occasionally his laugh was particularly loud, particularly abrupt, or if he ran his fingers so roughly against his scalp that it left channels in his Brylcreemed hair, then she told herself it was the stress of the war, of not sleeping well, of his new executive position, of having a baby on the way. When the baby comes, she told herself, that will help focus him. He had always loved children. He was meant to be a father.

But after Luiza was born, things only got worse. She was a colicky infant, crying for hours every day for the first few months of her life. (Was it because she sensed what was coming? Silly thought, but Dora couldn’t help it.) She noticed that Hugo became more distracted and withdrawn than normal, but so was she—they were exhausted, after all. Lack of sleep could make anyone feel crazy.

Until one night something inside him cracked in an almost audible way, as though his sane self ruptured and some other being was secreted. He was standing by the window when she entered their bedroom, and it startled her, the sight of him, so rigid. It had been almost a week since she’d seen his full height, seen him stand upright all on his own, and he seemed even larger somehow. She tried again to coax him toward the bed, but that night he wouldn’t come. He didn’t resist or get angry, he just stayed staring silently out the window, solid and inert as a granite block. Dora didn’t know what else to do.

Eventually, she climbed into bed, resolved not to fall asleep in case he moved from the room. To keep herself awake, she listed in her mind the things she loved most in Petrópolis, where they would soon return.

When she shuddered awake, Dora immediately narrowed her eyes to see through the gloom. Hugo’s place by the window was empty, as was his place beside her in the bed. Adrenaline surged through her. She was up quickly on the front pads of her feet, and when she opened the door of the nursery, she didn’t expect to see anything horrible exactly, but she sensed something new, an unfamiliar vibration in the air. And there it was, Hugo’s great, strong body, standing sentinel by Luiza’s crib, his back to the door. He turned when she approached, looking toward but through her, his face inanimate but for his mouth, all affect drained. His voice was toneless, unmodulated.

‘That hair, like the sun, I had that hair but mine was yellow also like the sun but the yellow sun not the red sun. That child I was with yellow hair, I killed that child and I can’t find him. When we grow up we kill the children that we were, the purest versions of ourselves. We should instead age backwards and die as single cells, never knowing that we had died, having given birth to our own child-selves, and then for a time we’d all be children together and she would never be alone and never kill her most beautiful self. Where did that little boy go, that sun-haired boy? I killed him. This poor child. Who will take care of this poor, poor child.’

And though the small folds of Luiza’s eyes remained closed, she began to squirm and become unswaddled. Dora had to get him away from the crib, out of the room. So she knelt before him and wrapped her arms around his trunk and pressed her hot cheek against his cool pant leg, for he was still dressed in his day clothes, and tried to pull him back from an invisible but definite precipice, draw him back into the shared secrecy of their little family. For the first time (but not the last), she was afraid that some vital part of Hugo had been irretrievably excised; he was blighted. She waited for his face to rearrange itself into an identifiable expression like it had the past few nights, the corners of his mouth turning strangely upwards as he wept, an inverted grimace, collapsed but familiar and, yes, like that of a child. But he remained somehow inflexible, even as he allowed himself to be led back to bed where, slow and susurrous, she tucked him in, remembering how much she’d always disliked street clothes touching bedsheets. Remembering when such things mattered.

After that night, she began sleeping with Luiza in the guest room and soon hired help. And now, when she remembers this time, before the maids came, it gouges something in her. Hugo’s mind, his body—these, she believed, might be unrecoverable to her. So she wrapped herself around her baby daughter instead and absorbed the warmth of her rosy skin and listened for her shorter, infant breaths, trying to breathe in time with them. And when, years later, Luiza began to cling to Hugo whenever he left the house, Dora told herself it was because he needed their daughter more—needed more of everything—and Luiza was performing his need back to him, just like Hugo had once done for the freaks and the cross-dressers weeping in derelict bars. But still the amputation was shocking—the heat of Luiza’s body pressed against her own in sleep, climbing onto her lap, gone from her now. Only Hugo could hug her, hold her hand as they walked along the shore. Hadn’t she saved Luiza from her father? And then dutifully, as a mother should, kept that rescue a secret from both of them?

Someone takes the seat beside Dora at the table, and she comes slamming back down to the present, into the hard wooden seat at the Municipal Theatre, her ears suddenly filled with the crash of cymbals, some woman’s light-hearted protests (‘You never did and I won’t hear any more about it!’), some man’s low-throated chiding (‘You know absolutely that I did’). A gold streamer has fallen across her lap. Her friends have all gone off dancing and Hugo hasn’t returned.

‘You’re in the clouds tonight.’

The voice is muffled, stifled by a hideous mask with a monkey’s fanged underbite and large, protruding ears. Still, Dora recognizes it, but then she’s known him since they were teenagers and everything about him—his voice, his movements—is familiar. But she waits, motionless and silent, trying to suppress a smile. They sit like that until Dora leans forward and gently pulls away the mask, looking around quickly as she does so: she can’t see Hugo, or this man’s wife. And there it is—this face she hasn’t seen for almost a year, except at the funeral, where it would have been awkward to speak for the first time in so long, but where, touchingly, he had wept. Carmichael’s face is lined around the eyes where the holes of his mask have imprinted the skin, but smiling and welcome.

‘You didn’t come to the party at the house,’ Dora says finally.

‘I came here,’ he says.

She’s aware of how close they’re speaking, how careless he seems. There is whisky on his breath. ‘I see that,’ she says, leaning back.

‘I thought it might be uncomfortable.’

‘It would have been. Yet you came last year.’

He runs the palms of his hand over his face now, rubbing so hard the skin stretches. ‘Yes, that was very uncomfortable.’

‘Thank you for your condolences. Afterwards,’ says Dora, handing him the mask, almost wishing he’d put it back on. ‘That was very kind.’

‘I should have liked to come see you, but I thought—’

‘No, it’s better that you didn’t.’

He casts about for something to say. She doesn’t help. Eventually he asks her, ‘How are the girls?’

‘Well. As well as they can be.’

‘The service was lovely.’

‘I saw you there,’ she says, nodding slowly. ‘It was good of you to come.’

More silence. ‘And Evie and Magda, they’re well?’

‘They’re fine.’

‘Sorry. You just said.’ Carmichael puts the mask back on. ‘Well, this isn’t goodbye. Alice said there was an invitation for the Copacabana in a couple of weeks?’

‘Yes, that will be goodbye,’ says Dora, meaning it as a caution but detecting a current of sadness running through her own voice that she hadn’t expected.

He stands, takes her hand, and, bending toward her, touches it to the hard plastic mouth over his own.

As he walks away, Dora thinks of all those times Hugo left her with just the servants and the children—beginning that year he went to England for the war, when Luiza was just a few months old. So many husbands and fathers were going off to war at the time, she knew it was selfish to feel lonely, and he was only gone for a year—far less time than some. And he returned, unhurt. But then there were the times he went into the hospital, sometimes for a month or more—that went on for years. Being alone became unbearable, and she was often still lonely even after he came home. And then there was Carmichael—coaxing, bass notes—a physical approximation of her husband if she drank enough. They promised: fun and brief. A diversion. But it ended painfully when she insisted on their original terms—it meant nothing and no one would ever know. She held him ruthlessly to that promise despite knowing that she, too, had broken the rules. That she had loved him.