Florida(32)

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Helena woke in the mid-morning to find the boy gone. In the kitchen, she discovered a plate he’d left with a smiley face drawn on it in hot sauce, and she set it in the sink and watched as the face dissolved under a stream of water. She spent the morning slowly caring for her body, taking a long bubble bath and exfoliating and depilating, filing and polishing, seeing elaborately to her hair. The gnawing feeling she’d woken to hadn’t gone away, and so she put on her primmest outfit, a long black dress and sturdy walking sandals. She hesitated and threw a shawl around her shoulders to give an even fustier impression. She hadn’t, as yet, bought anything from the grocery across the street—the owner of the apartment had warned her in his letter that the prices at the clean chain grocery three blocks northward were half what the local shop’s were—but she needed some bananas and papayas and coffee and bread, and she gathered her courage to face the shopkeeper.

The store smelled strongly of fruit on the cusp of rot, and the shelves were packed, the rows tight. Two people with baskets could have hardly slid by each other. There was nobody else in the store, she was relieved to see, save the shopkeeper and a friend of his who had been chatting by the register until she came in. She gave them a small nod, and they nodded back, both unsmiling.

She browsed for a while, until the men began to speak again in a low tone. Back by the toilet paper and festive paper napkins there was a little narrow doorway in the wall, which was empty when she first looked past it. When she looked again, though, she saw a small foot, then a hand, a dark head. When the whole person came into the light, she was either a very short woman or a young girl. Helena assumed she was indigenous, brown-skinned and broad-cheekboned, then wondered if she was the shopkeeper’s daughter, though she had assumed the moment she saw him that the shopkeeper was black; he was only slightly lighter than the boy from last night. But Brazil was so confusing this way, Salvador especially so, with its slave-trade blight of long ago: you never could tell exactly where people belonged. She had been surprised to find that this city upset some deep Northern Hemisphere sense of order that she didn’t know she treasured.

The shopkeeper saw the girl or woman and said something in a harsh voice, and by the swift fear Helena saw on her face, the way her shoulders dropped subserviently, and the speed with which she vanished from sight, Helena thought there was something wrong here. She didn’t know what to do; she had to swiftly rest her head against the cool metal of the shelves to pull herself together. When she took her purchases up to the shopkeeper, her hands were trembling and she could barely look at him, getting only an impression of shortness and powerful shoulders. She fixed on a small tin statuette in the window above his head, a woman knee-deep in sharp-looking waves. Yemanjá, she remembered from the marketplace, goddess of the sea. The man pointed at the numbers on the register with a blunt finger. Helena paid the money to Yemanjá, not to him.

By the time he put her purchases in a plastic sack, she was able to look him full in the face, saying silently, You are a bad man and I am watching. For the rest of the day, she fretted over the girl, wondering if she needed rescuing. Still, she savored the way the shopkeeper had flinched under her eyes.



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For three days, Helena dressed with ostentatious primness and made small purchases at the grocer’s, but the shopkeeper never greeted her and she never saw the girl or woman again. Helena’s ardor had cooled by the third day, and she began to wonder if the girl wasn’t simply the man’s wife or girlfriend or stock person, a person to whom it was a wrong but not a crime to speak to in such a way. She began to feel a chill of guilt that she had jumped to such conclusions—what an arrogant, American thing to do!—and to avoid the whole marshy emotional terrain, she began making her purchases at the chain again.

On a trip back from the other store, her milk and eggs swinging in a bag by her hip, she saw the shopkeeper out in front of his store, and he looked first at her bag, and something folded in his face, and he gave her a not-unfriendly wave, and she, confused, pretended to not see him.

Upstairs in her apartment, she fretted. Was she never to walk out of her house without being swamped with bad feelings? Was the shopkeeper going to ruin her entire vacation? She made herself a fruit salad and sat vengefully on her balcony to eat it. A great thick cloud had formed, and the wind had risen, and when she finished, she stood to take a look at the ocean. She watched as a distant sheet of water descended from the black clouds and sped toward her, drawing a swift curtain over the cruise ships outside the harbor, then the fishing boats motoring in, then the harbor itself, then the church steeple. When it hit the red rooftop across the street, she stepped inside and shut her glass door a breath before the storm smacked loudly at her, as if raging that she was still dry and safe when all the rest of the world was vulnerable.



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    The storm against the many windows was terrifically loud, and for a full day, Helena was stuck in the apartment, unable to go out to her museums or films or restaurants and bars and nightclubs. She read all of her books and wrote letters to her sisters and mother, telling them of this strange, dreamy town with its pastels and hills and wandering bands of drummer girls who danced under the streetlights and played ferociously in the former slave market filled with textiles and handicrafts. She wrote of the first man she had met there, though she stretched the truth far out of shape, taking what was simply a jet-lagged hour or so and implying a love affair, as she always did in her letters during her months at large. Her mother was a romantic, and her sisters, stuck in their happy marriages, only pretended to censure her entanglements, tsking and gorging themselves for a full year on Helena’s hints and subtexts. She wrote of visiting the Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim, translating it as Our Lord of Happy Endings, knowing her mother would hear the sonorous Portuguese and imagine a dark-skinned Jesus on a cross, that her sisters would get the joke and laugh behind their hands.