The chauffeurs, friends, maids, and secretaries also change with each new posting. I adapt very easily. In each country, I find a best friend, always a mother from the school my children attend. These are friendships that last for the duration of my stay in a given location. Of course, we keep in contact virtually, but this invariably fizzles out. That’s completely normal. There’s no drama involved in these transitions. When I married Guilherme, I knew it would mean accompanying him.
The first time we moved on a diplomatic assignment, he was still First Secretary. We went to Washington. As soon as the children started preschool, I made friends with Helen. We had a lot in common and became inseparable. Helen would give me a hand with the children when I needed some time to myself. To Helen, and Helen alone, I told secrets I lacked the courage to tell even my husband. We went out for dinner one evening and I overdid it on the wine. I ended up telling Helen how, as a child, I’d suffered abuse and sexual violence at the hands of my own grandfather. We cried together, with Helen really very moved by that shameful business. I asked her to keep it a secret, as I was completely mortified at having lived through such humiliation. She should think no more about that cross which, after all, was mine to bear, and not worry, because I’d been receiving psychiatric support in Brazil for many years, and the virtual sessions were very effective and always dug me out of a hole.
When we left Washington, we moved to Lima. With the children in school and readjusted, I met Lidia. On account of her sunny disposition, I soon introduced her to my husband. The children played together very nicely, and our families had many common interests. During the holidays, we would go with Lidia to her gorgeous beach house in Máncora. Often, sitting under the Andean sun, we would bring out some bottles from her Sauvignon blanc collection and I would confide small details about myself to Lidia. I remember once, during a stroll through the house’s gardens, telling her about my gorgeous beach home in Brazil. A dream of a place that I would have loved to share with her were it not for the irreconcilable family feud. My parents were no longer talking to my husband who, on one occasion, during an argument, had called my father an alcoholic. The consequence of this was my being disinherited, along with the children, and never allowed to set foot in that house again. Lidia’s heart bled for me, and she entrusted me with a spare key to her property in Máncora. We would go there all the time, even when Lidia was unable to join us. I asked her to keep my secret since that whole business drove my husband round the bend. On one occasion, a friend had commented on the situation, and it tipped him over the edge; he ended up beating me well into a night that seemed never-ending. If Lidia were my friend, and a friend to my husband, she wouldn’t ever raise the subject.
When, a few years later, I learnt that we would be moving from Lima to Prague, I was overjoyed. Lidia was becoming suffocating. I’d always wanted to live in Eastern Europe. Part of my family was from there, I wasted no time in telling my new best friend. But, with the wars, my parents had renounced their European nationality and embraced Brazil like a lifeline at the top of a cliff. They were Jews. I explained to her how much it pained me to have to recall that story. My grandmother had crossed the sea pregnant with my mother, who was born on a filthy boat. A family beset by tragedies—continued with my mother’s death in labour while giving birth to me and, a few months later, my father’s suicide. I was raised in abject poverty by an aunt who rejected me. My survival was a miracle. I only acquired an actual family after marrying Guilherme, after the children. But it was a painful story that I wasn’t proud of. I had such faith in Adéla that I told her of my relief at leaving Lima after discovering Guilherme was having an affair with Lidia, my best friend. But Adéla should keep that between us. I had no wish to revisit all that drama, please. Our departure from Prague coincided with Adéla becoming increasingly needy and making more and more demands on my time for chats and blowing off steam. I was at the end of my tether. It felt like a stroke of luck when we arrived in Angola.
I was now a middle-aged woman. Beyond middle-aged, in fact, as there was no way I would ever live a hundred years. Maria Isabel worked in Guilherme’s office. I made friends with her and she began coming round to the house on Saturdays. We would go out shopping together, for tea, to the theatre. It was Maria Isabel who learned of my brush with cancer, my repeated miscarriages, Guilherme’s problems with impotence—a form of punishment for having betrayed me with a woman from Lima and another while we were living in Prague. She learned about my “express kidnapping”, as a fifteen-year-old, on the streets of Rio, after it was discovered I came from a very influential family. That my parents were still alive, but my mother had Alzheimer’s. Such drama, such intensity, it was unfair to have to relive it all. It should be kept between us, with Guilherme never hearing of this discussion, as he was an extremely private person. Loyal friend that she was, Maria Isabel forgot everything and never raised these topics.
Other secrets and chapters of my life were entrusted to dear friends I’ll never see again. My three weddings, the domestic violence that left me with an almost insurmountable trauma, my time in London as a cleaner, in Paris as a call girl, Guilherme’s thing for threesomes, the son he’d had with another woman who ended up being murdered, the offer I’d received to publish a book, my travels as a soprano when I was twenty, the house I lived in with my five brothers—all orphans—which burned down, the father who squandered the family fortune on a prostitute and then killed himself, the time I’d become a minister’s lover. A rich life story.
I felt a degree of anxiety when I eventually learned that Guilherme’s retirement was coming up. We would be returning to Brazil in a few months, and that was that. The move would mean an end to my confessions, the secrets shared with friends. A full stop to my truths.
In Brazil, we bought an apartment in Bahia and went to live on the seafront. I have become Guilherme’s wife: the lady who never leaves her home. I find it difficult to make friends. My friends were left scattered across the globe, each in their own country. My family bothers me. I don’t know them very well. It’s been more than thirty years since I last lived here and I’ve become crystalized in their memories. My leaving the country coincided with my mother’s death. To my family these were two absences, two ruptures. We were left, my mother and I, trapped forever within that final minute of shared existence. It is my mother that I speak to out on the step, watering the balcony flowers. It’s her who keeps me company. We’ve been left for dead, abandoned by my father, brothers, nieces, and nephews. If we returned, my mother and I, from that great beyond, we would have to introduce ourselves, identify ourselves: nice to meet you.
Returning to Brazil with no plans to leave again means having to forget every truth I ever told about myself over such an extended period of time. It means beginning to grow confused, losing sight of the clues left behind. It all seems so long ago already. My memory is becoming jumbled up.
Immersed in this death of mine, I’m startled by the phone. It’s Daniel, my husband, who is leaving the clinic early so he can pick Mum up from the airport.
