museum, I had the same feeling I had had while I was sitting for him: that I was not just a type or prototype for him, that it was not just any girl, some other girl, to whom he was responding but me, myself./was the person at whom he had looked so deeply and with such delight, and in a way that no one ever had or, in fact, ever did again.
My decision to move to New York-where I have lived ever since- may have come partly and at first from a desire to remain close to the museum displaying his work. But although I can never get enough of studying the drawings, I can rarely bring myself to look at the paintings. They are no longer meaningless-everyone knows now how to interpret those savage, searing colors dripping off the canvas-but I still try to avoid them, even turning my back on them, unable to face what he faced, at night and in secret, through all the years we knew him. And I still wonder that, while he was possessed by these visions of our destruction, he was at the same time drawing-
Frances de Pontes Peebles
The Drowned Woman
from Indiana Review
IT WAS the summer of the year Juscelino Kubitschek was elected as president of the Republic, the summer when the drought in the farmlands got worse. The summer when someone mysteriously opened all of the birdcages at the Madalena Market, and for an entire Saturday morning canaries and parrots and sabias flew free in the square as the vendors waved their hats and makeshift nets and tried to reclaim the birds. It was the summer when my grandmother's nurse washed ashore in front of our beach house. She wore a flowered dress and her shoes were missing. Her body was bloated and stiff, and one of her arms stood straight up in the air. No one knew what had happened to her.
We were finishing lunch when the body came ashore. Our cousin Dorany ran into our dining room.
“They just found a dead woman on the beach,” he panted.
He was in his swim trunks and bare feet. I remember there was sand stuck to the hairs on his chest. My father would have never allowed Dorany into the dining room like that under normal circumstances. He put down his napkin and slid out from behind the table where he and my mother had just begun their meal. In our house, the children ate first and always at a separate table. Our meals were simple. Lunch was meat, beans, and rice. Dinners were always some kind of soup: black bean, or vegetable, or chicken, with a cup of cold milk. We were not allowed to have sugar.
Every once in a while my mother made us a plain yellow cake with a small swirl of chocolate in the center, which was a luxury. Looking back I realize we were well fed, even healthy.
My fathers untouched serving of calf brains steamed on his plate. They were white and covered with tomato sauce, which looked to me like chunks of blood. My mother ate plain rice, steamed pumpkin, and black beans, all in separate piles on her plate.
My brothers and I stared at my father expectantly. He looked confused. I squirmed to the rim of my chair, making my skirt hike above my knees.
“Let's have a look, then,” he said slowly.
With that we bolted from our chairs and ran from the house. My mother stayed behind. My father followed with Dorany at his side. He yelled at us to be careful crossing the road. It was a only a dirt path back then that separated our house from the beach, and the only car that passed was our own, but our father was concerned with decorum, not safety.
Our house was in Boa Viagem, near Piedade. We spent our summer breaks-from December until after Carnaval in February-at this house. All of the respectable Recife families did this. Our house was between our aunt Annali's and aunt Gilmara's houses. It was five doors down from the Heracles’ house, and two doors down from the Brennand family's sprawling mansion that my father detested.
“What a waste!” he muttered each time we passed it in the car.
Back then, Boa Viagem was deserted except for those old homes. There were no high-rises, no Avenida, like today. We had to drive forty-five minutes just to find a bakery for fresh bread.
My brothers and I were the youngest of all of our cousins, and I was the only girl among this pack of boys. My brother Edgar was thirteen, I was twelve, Artur was ten, and Joao only seven. By February the beach's solitude began to wear on Edgar and me, especially during Carnaval. All we could do during those three days and four nights was chase each other with firecrackers, and light sparklers in the dark at the edge of the water. In later years, when we wouldn’t go to the beach house anymore, we would finally spend Carnaval in the city. We would go to country-club parties and carry small vials of ether that my father bought for us. We would pour the ether into our handkerchiefs and sniff them throughout the night to make the room spin and the music play faster and faster.
A boy we knew died from sniffing too much ether. Geraldo Coelho was his name. He sniffed it until he fell unconscious on the dance floor and his cousins had to carry him to their car and take him to the hospital. I remember him because he was the only person, outside of my brothers, who ever asked me to dance. Strapless dresses were in style back then, and all of the other teenage girls were wearing them. I begged my mother and she got the seamstress to make me one with a matching jacket so I could leave the house without my father noticing I had a strapless on. I looked so silly in that dress. One of the boys at the country club joked, “Hey, Lucia, you’d better be careful in that dress-if you raise your arms it’ll fall right off!” Edgar punched him right in the face and Geraldo Coelho led me away from the brawl and onto the dance floor. He let me take a long sniff from his handkerchief and I couldn’t stop laughing.
It was only when the ether wore off that I missed the silence of our old beach house Carnavals. But that summer, the summer when I was twelve, and it was February and I couldn’t yet appreciate the quiet of the beach, a dead body was a big attraction.
A small crowd had already formed when we arrived on the sand. My aunt Annali stood sweating in her black dress and holding a rosary. Aunt Gilmara stood next to her, in an almost see-through linen robe, shaking her head. All of my older cousins, Annali's five sons, crowded at the edge of the water. The Brennand family and their servants huddled around the corpse. She lay on her side, with her bottom arm spread out on the sand. Her legs were bloated, and her skin was a pasty tan. Only the man who sold coconut water dared touch her, feeling for a pulse.
My uncle Paulo parted the crowd and directed the male servants to turn the woman over. We saw that it was my grandmother Dulce's nurse Rita. Her flowered dress was twisted. The side of her face was covered in sand. The arm that had been under her, and turned outwards when she rested on her side, now stood straight up, stiff in the air. The fingers of her outstretched hand were separated and it looked as if she was reaching up toward the sun, begging to be rescued from dry land. My uncle Paulo tried to force Rita's arm down but it would not go. My father had turned his back on Rita after she had been rolled over, until Artur and Joao laughed out loud at the sight of her uplifted arm. He turned around, slapped each of them across the face, and told them to go to the house.
My grandmother's wheelchair could not be pushed out onto the sand, so Aunt Gilmara's maid, a large woman who could lift three full buckets of milk at once, carried Grandmother Dulce out to the beach. My grandmother wore her best black dress and she looked like a doll bumping across the sand in the maid's arms, her tiny legs bobbing back and forth, making the embroidered beads of her dress swish and crunch against each other. Grandmother Dulce yelled over her shoulder at my mother, who held an umbrella over the old woman to protect her from the sun. When they reached the body my grandmother gasped, then covered her face with her hands and nodded, confirming that it was Rita.
“Emilia!” Grandmother Dulce barked at my mother, who was staring back at the house, “my rosary.” My grandmother proceeded to recite three Hail Marys while the maid who held her shifted in the sand. Everyone bowed their heads and mumbled the prayer, or pretended to. My uncle Paulo only moved his lips. My father looked
