Luiza’s bedroom is narrow, with just enough room for the bed, a small side table, and a desk in the corner opposite the bed, though there is a large window. The bed is also narrow, so they must lie close, the lengths of their bodies touching as they stare up at the ceiling, which is unusually high at over twelve feet. And yet despite the actual dimensions of the room, there is a feeling of spaciousness, of openness. All the furniture, doors, and trims are made from lustrous wood, and the walls are off-white and calming, and as they lie on the bed, some part of Dora finds herself understanding the pull of this place. To have your spaces so clearly defined, so circumscribed, your choices almost entirely made for you.
They’ve ended up here because they don’t know where else to go. Some incalculable distance has been traversed and even though there are still moments when rage flashes through her, Dora wants only to be beside her daughter, this warm body that was once her baby, her child—more familiar and real and precious to her than her own. When Luiza was little and bumped her head or scraped a knee, Dora used to tease her, ‘You be careful with that little body! I made that body!’
All those times when Hugo went away for treatment and she used to let Luiza sleep in her bed. Let her—she needed her there. She wanted her child so close that she could reach out and wrap her fingers around Luiza’s ankle, remind herself that she was safe. By morning Dora always ended up curved around Luiza’s perfect, little body. An ear within an ear. But when Hugo came back, what happened then? She can’t remember. Luiza must have gone back to sleeping in her own bed, alone. Pressed against her daughter now, maybe she can absorb some understanding of her, see past the queer expressions that keep settling on her lovely face—haughty, sympathetic, aggrieved. All tried on. All fake. All meant to push Dora back to the threshold.
On the walls are a few small statues of sublime human bodies, eyes upturned in ecstasy. Convenient, she thinks, that there are no ugly saints. Believing what these women believed meant you could spend your days in quiet reflection, making things with your hands, singing, praying, gardening—devoted to a clear, singular purpose. If you believed. She envies them. Will she spend her life seeking what they already have? It doesn’t seem possible for people with lives like hers. Imagine always knowing what to do next, believing that one’s actions have worth and beauty and grace—a perfect kind of peace. Free of constant, plaguing doubt, wondering if you’ve done the right thing for your family, wondering if you’ve been good enough. But now that she’s had her children, she can’t imagine another life, a life without them. She can’t wish herself backwards. She can only nudge herself forward with her mind, try to heed that low, hissing voice: Get them out. Save them. But which ones?
Suddenly she’s up on both elbows and shaking Luiza from her sham sleep.
‘You know these places were tombs for women, don’t you? The Portuguese, the plantation-owners—they sent their daughters here to keep them pure, to keep them from committing adultery or losing their virginity. Or if their fathers couldn’t afford to marry them off, this is where those poor girls came. You think your father is the only one who knows anything about history, but I’ll tell you something about your precious cloister. It was just a place to bury women alive. And whether it was by their fathers or their husbands or their church, they were all hidden away. Made to disappear.’
Luiza pulls herself loose from her mother’s grasp and lies back down on the bed.
‘Why did you come here? Really?’ demands Dora.
Luiza’s eyes are open, but she just stares at the ceiling, her arms crossed over her chest, already adopting the position of someone mummified. ‘Tell me a story,’ she says finally, when their breathing has returned to normal. ‘Something about our family.’
Dora understands her daughter is telling her that they are not going to talk about Carmichael. Overtired, she starts to tell her old favourite, about how her parents met: how her grandfather was an entrepreneur who started a company that ferried cargo from large ships to shore. Then, a jute factory, a diamond mine, a hotel on Corcovado Mountain where the wealthy spent their summers, almost airborne, lifted above the heat and filth and the crowds. He became rich. His daughter came home from school to visit in 1891, set to travel from the train station to his house by horseback. But just as she arrived, it began to rain, and she arrived at her father’s house wet, soaked through to the bone! A family friend was visiting, a young dentist, and just as he entered the darkened central parlour off which all the rooms adjoined to light some lanterns, a door suddenly burst open.
‘And in ran my mother, your vóvó, stark naked,’ said Dora. ‘Running from one room to the next to get dry clothes. She never even noticed this young man standing in a corner in the dark. The next day he threw a rose through her bedroom window. He never told her what he’d seen, even after they were married. But he told me.’
‘No more family myths,’ Luiza says. ‘I’m so tired of myths. Tell me something real about our family.’
A relief because Dora, too, is tired of these stories. ‘Myth’ sounds so grand and gilded, almost supernatural—how she herself thought of them not so long ago. But now they feel sticky and vestigial, secreted into her mind even before she could think for herself. A residue she can’t scrape away.
‘Tell me about when you and Father met.’
Her daughter has heard this story countless times already, even more than the rose story, and it sounds just as make-believe, just as apocryphal. She used to work as a translator at the American embassy (she had once taken dictation from Truman!), and there were always two copies made of each translation: one original, for the Americans, and the carbon that she had to burn in an old sugar tin after transmittal. She always insists on telling this part of the story even though Luiza seems impatient with it. Dora wants her to know: she had another life once.
But today Dora skips ahead to the part Luiza wants to hear, about how, when Hugo stepped into her elevator at the embassy, she immediately thought she’d never known until that day that a man could be beautiful. And when he stepped off the elevator at her floor, she took the hand of her co-worker, a sweet woman named Betty, and whispered to her, That was him. That was the man she was going to marry. The doors closed before they could get out and they were too caught up to press the open button, so they had to walk down three floors, giggling the entire way. Everybody loves the romance of this story, but what it reveals embarrasses Dora now. Her naiveté, her caprice, her shallow attraction to a man she didn’t know. Those few brief moments have become myth, but the truth that followed from them is what now sounds to Dora like something from a fable. Or a warning. Could she bring herself to tell her the truth? That she married a man because he was so very beautiful. He spoke pages from books but moved like an animal beneath his clothes. His tastes, his smells; she craved them, and marrying him was the only way to have them. Thank god the world is changing and her daughters will never know the pressure of having to make that choice: to have to marry someone just to experience their body, to learn they are broken. But she says none of this. What she says instead, her voice breathy and false: ‘And then I turned to Betty and said to her, That’s the man I’m going to marry. And so I did.’
How hollow and comical the story rings in her ears now that they’ve been with the same man, now that she’s been so exposed. She rolls onto one elbow to look at Luiza, her anger, for the time being, drained away.
‘Carmichael… we didn’t know what he was. I think he must be sick, and it was him after all who did everything, not us. Maybe it doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters.’
‘But maybe it won’t when we leave here and we’re in a new place and we don’t have to see him.’ Dora hears her voice grow thinner rather than lighter. ‘Maybe we won’t even feel like ourselves anymore. We’ll be new people, Canadian people. We’ll be stoic and hardy. We can still hide what you’ve done. Come up with some story. I know we can fix it.’
‘You left too. Can we fix that?’
‘I never left! I never—’ She can’t pretend she doesn’t know what Luiza means.
‘When Father was in the hospital and he started coming. You may as well have left.’
But Dora can’t answer, can’t acknowledge what she knows to be the first, the smallest heart broken in all of this. She lies back on the bed. Hoping feebly to exploit any feelings of love and nostalgia for their family that the elevator story might have inspired in Luiza, Dora tells her about the ship they’ll take to Canada, tears sliding into her ears. There are performances every night, and a full band and a swimming pool. They’ll bring you breakfast in your room with a single rose in a doll-sized vase. But as she speaks, Dora hears herself listing off the kind of diversions that could only please the child she lost years ago, so then she tells her the truth: as you move out into the deeper water and the land behind you disappears and you see nothing but water for weeks, something in you changes. You feel distilled, reduced to your essential self, and lesser things fall away. You moult, leaving your old, shedded skin behind you in the waters.
‘And what about when you arrive? And you have to move in, and unpack, and fill out hospital forms and school applications. What then?’
Dora can think of nothing to say, so Luiza answers for her.
‘I love you all so much, I do,’ and here her voice catches and Dora knows that, for now, she’s telling the truth. ‘But I already have a new self here. Or I could. But I don’t think I can keep hold of it if I leave.’
‘And when you tire of this,’ Dora says finally. ‘What will you do then?’ She asks this matter-of-factly, almost robotically, without any accusation in her voice.
‘I could be different. Better. I could do some good.’