As she rushes through the darkening streets of Salvador, Dora is grateful for her prescriptions: one to help her sleep, one to keep her awake, and the one she’s just taken to quell the electrical storm beneath her skin. This one makes everything feel like a dream, like it’s not really happening to her. Everything is more colourful somehow, but also so much gentler, and the babble of people in the streets is familiar and comforting. Soon the enormity of what has just happened is going to hit her, and the ground will give way again, but she’s not ready. Not yet.
She walks the steep streets, past farmers packing up crates of watermelon, bananas, maxiera. Past multicoloured buildings and gilded seventeenth-century churches; the thought of their many carvings, their baroque and dimly lit interiors, make her feel queasy. Then through the market, with its stalls filled with flour sacks of beans, a man selling hot peppers spread out on newspaper and wedges of squash. And the black women wrapped in shawls and wearing big tiered dresses, colourful fabric wound around their heads—they are here, just as she’s seen in photos, at Carnival, on tea towels, at the borders of neighbourhoods she never goes into.
She wonders if somewhere behind one of these painted doors is a scene like the ones she saw in a magazine years ago, of women with shaved heads in dresses of white cotton and lace, armbands made from cowry shells and twine, wrists covered with silver bangles, white dots painted all over their brown skin, a single feather tied to their foreheads. They were being initiated into Candomblé, a kind of fusion of Catholicism with indigenous and African religions. In some of the pictures, they were covered in blood and feathers from a sacrifice, and in others they simply sat with their heads tipped forward, their eyes closed, appearing unearthly and at peace. The pictures had caused a stir—Brazilians as savages, the brides of bloody gods and all that. Dora wishes she could find them now, have them perform some sort of reverse exorcism on Luiza. In the convent, as soothing and alluring as it was, Luiza had already seemed less embodied, less alive. Her daughter wanted to believe she was being restored, even transfigured, in some way, but she already seemed less of a person than when she’d disappeared. The Candomblé initiates had looked, Dora remembers thinking, as though something had been put into them, not taken away. They looked full, serene. Whole. Or haunted? Filled with ghosts. Luiza would probably be angry with her if she said any of it out loud. So much of her own country remained a mystery to Dora.
How can she leave her here? In this old, cluttered city, teetering on high cliffs above a bay. It startles her, the force with which the conviction comes—she has to.
Even now Dora can see her, Luiza as a small child, not even three, running on the beach. Of course they went often, but on this day Luiza behaved as though it were the first time. She ran and squealed, her face widening, seeming to expand as if to hold all that joy, the white shine thrown off the waves. She pulled off her clothes and ran, crying out to no one, I go far! She ran until she was a pink dot on the horizon, where the water and the sky became indistinguishable, hazy and golden.
How can Dora hold these two things inside her at once? This memory and the acute, painful love she feels for Luiza thinking of that day, and the simultaneous conviction that she must leave her behind? Because it is necessary, she tells herself, to save the girls, and Hugo too, and because she will come back. She will come back for her child, whom she loves, who she knows is suffering in some unutterable way. All of her daughter’s justifications—she hadn’t believed them. There was still something Luiza wasn’t telling her, but Dora couldn’t stay. A small fissure had opened between them years ago. She has to leave before it is a complete rupture. At some point it will hit her, all they’ve lost. But right now, there isn’t time. The weight of the rest of her family, the pressure of them waiting, waiting as they always did for her to decide, to tell them what to do—she can feel it. Hugo, Evie, Magda, all in unsteady orbit around her. How far would they spin out with her gone? No hospital doors could contain Hugo if he really wanted out. We are getting away! repeat shrill, wild voices in her head. Voices, terror, madness—is it all catching?
Hugo must first be stabilized before he can spread any more chaos. But if Hugo or the girls were to find out Luiza was alive, none of them would ever agree to go to Canada. And how many people can she drag across two continents, resenting her for it every step of the way? No one can know, not yet. Once they have a new home ready for her, a new life that is gentler and real—then she’ll come back for Luiza.
For now she has to go to them, collect Hugo from the hospital, get them all on the ship. Sometimes, she imagines them aboard without her: Hugo giving the girls one of his ‘lessons,’ moving like an unstrung puppet, a parody of himself, silent though his mouth is moving. And yet when she pictures them now, they are just three—Hugo, Magda, and Evie. For almost a year, whenever Dora has seen the three of them together, she would focus on the empty space beside them where Luiza ought to have been and wonder for a moment where she was. Now, just as flesh can heal around a foreign object, they’ve grown into other versions of themselves, shaped around her absence.
Brazil is the place where, for years, they’ve been stuck, unspooling, radiating grief. Maybe once away from here, Dora can gather her family back up again, shape them into a single cord, trembling and alive.