December started
with rain that year. Our house in the end of Avenida São Paulo seemed
in danger of being swallowed by the red mud. My mother's struggle to keep
the dirt out of the house was always lost when my father came home and insisted
on coming in with his shoes. Most times she just sighed at the sight of the
big splashes of mud on the washed floor boards; other times they fought. Mother
called Father "a pig." He snickered at her, saying that she had
been born in a hut and now wanted to put on airs. This was always a signal
for her to remind him he had taken her out of a very good home, where she
was the favorite daughter of a doting father.
For some reasons,
I never followed these arguments to the end. I guess their fights, even though
rare, seemed horrible , and I must have wandered off to either the front or
the back porch, where I could look out at the rain and carefully study the
rain drops falling from the sides of the house, making little inverted umbrellas
as they splashed in to the little puddles. December rains never last
very long, and neither did my parents' fights. Father always had to take a
nap in the afternoon, and nothing would distract him of something he considered
his God-given right. By the time he got up from the nap, an hour or two later,
Mother was busy doing other things, and they never pursued the continuation
of their argument.
One afternoon that
December, Father came home and told mother we were going to visit Seu
Vieira later that night. "What?" Mother asked, surprised. Seu
Vieira was the richest man in the neighborhood. His house, even though
located in that same part of the city, clearly did not belong there. It was
protected from all the dirt by a tall cement fence, by an enormous
garden, whose many big trees probably blocked the noise from Avenida São
Paulo as well.
Except for Seu
Vieira, we had never even seen the family that lived in what seemed to
us a mansion. Once my mother talked to their maid, who had come to the grocery
store to get something, but the woman was very discreet and didn't linger
around to talk to any of the women. We knew that they had one daughter about
my age, as well as an older one. We also knew that Seu Vieira was a
vereador—city representative, because during the political campaigns
he was seen walking up and down our street, distributing combs and match boxes
with his name on them. To be invited to their house was not just a surprise,
but an honor.
After dinner the
three of us, Mother, Father and I, started off to the mansion. At the gate
my father clapped, and two big dogs appeared, barking as if they wanted to
eat us alive. Soon a man, probably the gardener, came to the gate and asked
what we wanted. He grabbed the dogs' collars and let us in, but looked at
us with suspicion.
The house was indeed
very big, although it was made of wood like all the other houses in the
neighborhood. We waited in the big porch, my father holding his hat in his
hand, and my mother looking very nervous. Mother had tied her own hair in
a bun, and put a ribbon in my hair. I was curious about this house, but didn't
feel good about being here.
The longer it took
for Seu Vieira to appear, the more uncomfortable we felt, standing
at the porch while the gardener inspected us. Finally Seu Vieira appeared
and apologized for taking so long to come to see us. "We were finishing
dinner," he explained. When we entered the living room, the faint smell
of grilled pork chops reached my nose and my mouth filled with water. I loved
pork chops, and we hadn't had any in a long time, ever since we had butchered
a pig, earlier that year.
Seu Vieira
invited my father into a room and closed the door, while my mother and I stood
in the living room. Not knowing what else to do, I started looking at the
furniture and paintings on the wall. I had never seen anything quite like
that room, with its heavy sofas, its special cabinet for holding the crystal,
and its lovely velvet curtains.
The walls were covered
with big photographs. Under the sofas, there was a carpet which seemed to
be the apex of luxury. As I was looking at the carpet, Seu Vieira's
wife entered the room. She was about my mother's age, but her hair was
short, and curly. She greeted my mother and me and told us to please sit down.
A maid soon brought us some coffee, and the woman asked my mother many questions
about the neighborhood, as if she didn't live in the same one. I sat in complete
silence, as instructed before we left our house.
Suddenly, a girl
about my age entered the room. So, finally, here was the famous Sônia,
whom nobody had ever seen before. She was the younger daughter of this family,
and rumors had it that she lived with an aunt somewhere else in the city because
she didn't like the dust of our neighborhood. She approached her mother and
stared at me.
The mother told
her to greet us, and she said a very unfriendly hello, looking only at me,
as if she was inspecting every inch of my person. Then she unexpectedly said
to me, "Wanna see my room?" I looked at my mother. Seu Vieira's
wife pronounced that that was a good idea. I got up and walked with the girl
through the ribbon curtain.
The house was even
bigger than I thought. One room led to another room and to another room. Each
one had glass windows! Our own house had only one glass window, in the kitchen,
so every time it rained we had to stay in the darkness or light the kerosene
lamp. To have a house with all glass windows! You could look outside any time
you wanted! Of course I said nothing of this to the girl, who took me to the
place where she had her dolls. I had never seen so many dolls in my life.
Sônia went
on and on telling me where the dolls had come from, places I had never heard
of. Some of them had glass eyes that moved. They all had fancy dresses. Suddenly,
Sônia looked at me and asked if I wanted to see her greatest treasure.
Sure, I replied. She opened a drawer in a dresser and took out a little shoe
box. Inside, there were colorful pieces of glass that looked like little mirrors.
"I got these last Christmas when some of our Christmas tree balls broke."
I had seen Christmas
tree balls in the church many times. But I had never seen them broken, and
never had even touched one. As I reached to pick up a little shard, Sônia
yelled, "Watch out! You can cut your finger with them!" "How
come you have them, then?" I asked. "That is why it is a treasure,"
she replied. "It is a secret. Nobody knows I have them. Not even my mother."
I felt very silly
and ignorant. Why didn't I know that a treasure is always something you keep
hidden and nobody knows about it? I was suddenly very embarrassed, but didn't
want Sônia to see what I felt. I gave her the box back and asked her
about school. She went to a nun's school on the other side of town. "Is
it true that you don't live here?" I asked. "Yeah," she replied.
"My father wants me to study there, so I only come home on the weekends."
I wanted to ask
her more about her school, about living far from home, but I heard my mother's
voice calling me. Sônia walked with me to the front room. As we passed
by the kitchen, I saw the maid sitting at the table spoon-feeding a boy older
than Sônia. He was sitting on what seemed a special chair. There was
food running down his shirt. He looked at me and smiled. His eyes were crossed.
Sônia gestured at him and said, so low that only I could hear, "My
brother. He's sick."
Then she opened
the door and we entered the living room, where my father, still with his hat
on his hands, was standing by my mother's side. Seu Vieira and his
wife saw us to the door and closed it as soon as we were outside. For us,
that was very rude, because in my family when somebody came over to the house,
my parents always walked that person to the gate and stayed there until the
guest waved goodbye for the last time from the corner. Here, the gardener
saw us to the gate, and closed it right after us.
I never learned
what it was that Seu Vieira wanted with my father, and why he told
my father to take my mother and me to the house. But the visit stayed in my
mind. The next day, after school, I told my friend and next-door neighbor
Joana about the visit to Seu Vieira's house. I told her about the house,
the photographs on the wall, Sônia's dolls, and Sônia's treasure.
I didn't mention the brother, I don't know why.
It was Joana's idea,
I guess, but it certainly was related to my visit to the Vieira's. Why not
have our own Christmas tree that year? Nonsense, I said. None of us had money
to buy even one Christmas tree ball, much less the tree itself. I reminded
her of how elaborate the Church Christmas tree was, and how we were not even
allowed to get close to the ornaments. "It's all right," she said.
"We can have different ornaments." "Yeah?" I doubted.
"But we still don't have the tree!" Joana laughed.
I loved Joana. She
was a working girl, going downtown with her blind father every day. Like me,
she studied in the early morning shift in our Grupo Escolar, so that by eleven-thirty
a.m. she was back home, had lunch, and left with her father. She was his guide.
He begged around the bus station. Her older sisters didn't want to go begging
with their father anymore, so now Joana had to do it everyday, even Sundays.
She told me that
sometimes she took some money from her father's hat, since he couldn't see
anyway. Other times people gave her the money. It was always fascinating to
see her arriving home from school in her uniform, and then see her some fifteen
minutes later dressed in very poor dresses, looking like a beggar herself.
It was a transformation.
She found it all
very funny indeed, she told me. But many times I knew that she didn't find
the business all that funny. Many kids in school knew that she begged with
her father, and sometimes they made fun of her. One day she returned
home dirty and with a torn uniform, a result of a fight in the street.
That afternoon her
mother led her father to the bus station while Joana stayed home crying. She
didn't even open the door to the house for me when I went there to ask if
she wanted to play. The fight happened around the middle of November. Joana
had been sad ever since, so now, a month later, it was a pleasure to see that
the idea to get a Christmas tree was interesting to her.
She explained to
me how it would be done. We would go into the bushes around our houses one
day, get a small tree, and plant it in my yard. We couldn't plant it in her
yard because her house was located in a big yard with many families. "Somebody
can break our tree if we plant it in my yard," she said. I agreed.
My mother had no
objection to a small tree being planted at the side of the house. We didn't
tell her we were going to make it into a Christmas tree, but that didn't seem
to be a problem, anyway. Next, Joana started gathering empty cigarette packs
and collecting the foil lining. Because Joana worked around the bus station,
she soon found enough cigarette packs for us to start the next phase of our
project.
I couldn't contribute
any paper because my father smoked the tobacco he bought rolled up like a
black snake. Each time he wanted to smoke, he'd cut a piece of the tobacco,
break it into little pieces, then roll it in a brown paper. Joana said it
didn't matter that I couldn't find any glittering paper, because she had found
enough.
Joana asked her
father for a free day for us to do the balls. I was in charge of the foil
papers. It seemed we had hundreds of them. My mother let me iron the wrong
side of the paper, and even helped me place each sheet inside a book, so that
it wouldn't get creases. Joana and I got up early that Saturday, and set to
work. We had already crumpled newspapers into little balls the previous days.
When Joana jumped
the fence and came over to my house, my mother made flour glue for us, and
we started sticking the foil on to the newspaper balls. Then we put each ball
to dry in the sun. Joana had lunch in our house that day, so that we didn't
have to interrupt our job. Her mother checked on our progress from the other
side of the fence. Her big sister Terezinha, who had to take her father begging
that afternoon, made some unkind comments about the shape of our balls, but
we ignored her. After the balls dried a little, my mother taught us how to
run a thread through the middle of each, so that we could have a loop to hang
it on the tree.
Two hours and many
pricked fingers later, we pronounced our job complete. The floor of the front
porch was spotted with what seemed to us the most beautiful things in the
world. Of course they were mostly the color of aluminum foil, because that
was the prevalent color of the lining of cigarette packs, but we still found
each ball a work of art. The next question was, when to hang the balls?
I favored doing
it right away. Joana thought we should wait for a week. It was only the beginning
of December, she reminded me. I didn't care. I wanted the tree ready, because
I wanted to look at it. The two of us couldn't agree on when to hang the balls,
so we decided to compromise and do it the next Sunday, when she could have
another free day.
Besides, she told
me, our classes were almost over, so the next week we could use the mornings
to enjoy and play around our tree. I was convinced. She helped me put the
balls inside some shoe boxes my mother provided, and we both went about the
rest of our day checking our dolls' dresses for Christmas. My mother provided
some fabric scraps and we made some skirts, and some scarves for our plastic
dolls.
The week passed
very slowly. Classes ended. We brought our school reports home. Both of us
passed with good enough grades. I liked my third grade teacher, but was happy
I could have all day to stay home and read the magazines my older brother
Nê had accumulated for me since July. It was also good to remember soon
it would be Christmas.
Every day I looked
at the little tree we transplanted from the bushes to the side of the house
and it seemed drab. I very much wanted it to be all decorated for Christmas.
I could see it sparkling, returning the light that hit the foil in the balls.
I could imagine the effect it would have on the other girls who lived in Joana's
yard. We'd invite them to come and see the tree, of course, but we wouldn't
let them touch it, no sir. We'd even let the boys come and take a look, if
they promised not to get too close to it.
By mid-week, I checked
with Joana if she still thought we had to wait for Sunday to decorate the
tree. She was resolute about Sunday. "Besides," she reminded me,
"I have to work everyday, you know." I knew. Her father, who had
become blind many years ago, had moved the family to Maringá precisely
because here he thought people would be generous and give him money.
In the beginning,
he took the older daughter, Antônia, to guide him. Soon she didn't want
to do it anymore, because she was ashamed. She was a girl of about fourteen,
and she had big breasts. In school, boys whistled to her and made comments
about her thick legs. I think one of them once saw her downtown with her father,
and that was the end of her guiding days. Terezinha took Antonia's place for
some time, but she too didn't last long. Now it was Joana's turn. Her father's
income was the only income the family had. Unless, of course, her mother charged
something to wash the clothes of some single men who came to the house sometimes
in the afternoon when nobody else was at home. On Sunday mornings, when the
mother guided the husband to church for the early mass, sometimes Joana
walked with me and my mother. I was so glad she was my friend.
By Thursday that
week the weather turned ugly. Our house was dark because we couldn't open
the windows. My mother was in a bad mood because the clothes she had washed
couldn't dry in the line outside. Inside our house there were lines strung
up everywhere. Sheets, pants, shirts, underwear hung over our heads. I looked
at my Christmas balls and hoped the sun would come out on Sunday for us to
put them in our tree. The rain finally stopped on Friday but the days were
still cloudy.
To our delight,
Saturday started with a big, glorious sun. The ground was soon dry. Sunday
morning Joana and I went to mass together, first thing in the morning. She
had arranged with Terezinha for her to take the father downtown that day.
We returned home and brought the box with the balls outside. By eleven, the
tree was decorated.
It turned out the
balls were a little bit too small, but since there were so many of them, the
tree looked nice anyway. Then my brother Zico arrived home with his friends.
They had been playing soccer somewhere in the neighborhood, and now came home
to have some lemonade. Our Sunday lunch was usually at one o'clock.
Joana and I were
sitting by our tree, on the side of the house. Zico and the two boys passed
by us in silence. We didn't care. We continued looking at the tree ourselves,
and commenting on one or another of the decorations. Then one of the friends
came out of the house and asked us who had made that tree. We said we had
made it. The other friend came out of the house and whispered something to
Zico. Zico laughed. I gave him one of my worst looks.
I hated him always
lately, but never hated him more than when he was with his friends, because
he usually liked to make me angry in front of them. Once he had turned me
upside down so that his friends could see my panties. No wonder I had thrown
a stone at his forehead and said I didn't care if he died.
Zico approached
the tree and squatted down beside it. He reached for one of the balls. Joana
and I yelled at the same time, telling him not to touch. He said the tree
was in his yard, and he could touch anything. I said we girls had made the
tree and nobody could touch it without our permission. Meanwhile, one of the
other boys had reached from behind Joana and plucked one of the balls from
the tree.
This was all that
was necessary for the fist fight to start. One of the boys stayed out of it,
but Zico and the smaller boy started punching and kicking the two of us. We
fought back. My mother came out of the kitchen and told us to drop it. We
didn't. Then my father ran out of the kitchen with his belt in his hand. We
knew what that meant. We all scattered in the yard while Joana jumped the
fence and went to her house. Zico's friends ran to their houses too.
The two of us went
outside the gate and waited for my father's anger to pass. Usually, when Father
got angry like that, Zico and I found it more prudent not to fight. That Sunday
I continued wanting to fight with him—scratch his face, bite his arm,
something that would hurt him. But we just resigned ourselves to sit on the
ground in front of the gate and receive the layers and layers of dust from
the street.
After one hour we
went back in. Father was calm now, and lunch was almost ready. We both stepped
in the kitchen, quietly, looking down. A good thing about my father was that
his anger didn't last very long. And today he was particularly glad because
there was chicken for lunch. We all sat to eat. Father asked about the tree.
I explained to him how it was made. He said it was very nice, looked very
pretty. Zico kept looking at me sideways. I knew he was snickering. But I
ignored him. The tree wasn't his, and he couldn't do anything about it. After
lunch, Mother and I washed the dishes. Father went to take his nap; Zico went
to play more soccer; Eltom left the house to visit a friend.
I went to the fence
and called Joana. It took her a while to come out. She looked very strange.
I told her my father liked the tree. She didn't say anything. I asked her
to jump over the fence; we could play with my dolls all afternoon. She said
no and turned to go back inside the house; at that moment a young man who
came to visit her mother sometimes left the house. Joana's mother came to
the door and said something to him I couldn't hear. Joana lowered her head
and got in. I didn't see her anymore that afternoon. I think she just stayed
home all day.
That evening, as
soon as the church bells stopped tolling, it started to rain. Mother and I
rushed to close all the windows and collect some clothes that were in the
line outside. It rained for several days. Every day I looked at the Christmas
tree and it looked very good. It liked the rain, of course. But the decorations
didn't. By the time it stopped raining, there were only strings hanging from
the tree. All our balls had dissolved into little white puffs of newsprint
at the foot of the tree.
Joana's house was
quiet. I wanted her to come over and see what had happened to our tree, but
nobody answered when I knocked at the door. Nobody in the yard could tell
me what was going on with Joana or her family. The house remained closed until
a week before Christmas. Joana's mother was there one day, putting everything
in boxes.
I went and asked
her what had happened. She said they were moving. "Where?" I asked.
She looked at me, seeming unsure whether to speak or not. Finally, she said,
"Oh, we're going to move to Cianorte, because it is a better market for
my husband there." I wanted to know about Joana. The mother said she
was coming over in the afternoon to say goodbye.
Goodbye! My friend
was coming to say goodbye! It was shocking. I went home and told my mother.
My mother went to the neighbor's house to ask if there was something she could
do to help. The woman said no, everything was under control. She looked very
sad and tired. My mother told me to go home ahead of her. She stayed there
talking to the neighbor. I went home and wondered what it was that I couldn't
know.
Joana came to her
house in the afternoon. I had been watching her yard and jumped over the fence
to talk to her immediately. She looked very, very sad. Her hair was tied up
in a red ribbon, but she was wearing her old working sandals, as well as the
same black skirt. I asked her why they were moving. She said that her father
had been sick and now they had to live somewhere else. She asked about our
tree. I told her that the balls were ruined by the rain. We walked together
to my yard, this time not jumping over the fence. She inspected our tree.
We stayed there,
squatting, for a time, in silence. She touched the little tree branches, then
got up and told me she had a present for me. She reached into her skirt pocket
and took a bundle of cigarette paper. "Here," she said, giving it
to me. "You can make the balls again."
I took the bundle
of paper, my eyes already beginning to fill with tears. My friend was
leaving and I didn't know what to say. Joana turned around and ran out of
the yard. When she opened the gate, she waved and screamed, "Feliz Natal!"—Merry
Christmas! I waved back. She was my best friend. I never saw her again. I
still wonder if now, as an adult, she too remembers that tree as the most
beautiful Christmas tree that ever existed in the whole world.
Eva Paulino
Bueno has published books on Brazilian literature and cinema, Latin American
Popular Culture, fatherhood in world literature. She teaches at St. Mary's
University in San Antonio, Texas. You can get in touch with the author emailing
her at evapbueno@yahoo.com
