That Hair Read online

  Stepping off the plane, evoking the image of a statesman’s lover who lands hours after the plane full of government officials, the girlish Constança would begin by unbuttoning her jacket. The steamy Luanda air hinted at the long-awaited absence of her aunts from strolls through the park, during which, by simple miracle, there’s nothing to suggest that she’d been discovered walking hand in hand with my grandfather. From the state of the weather to the state of the state, she traded bits of conversation in exchange for being hand-fed biscuits dipped in tea. I can identify in her Papá’s noble carriage, in the era’s high-waisted pants, the coat, the hat, a certain uprightness that his old immigrant’s hunchback would later subdue. During the newscast’s commercial break—a toothpaste ad—Constança was a frequent subject of conversation between my grandfather and me, our fear of hurting my grandmother’s feelings often interrupting. But it was also a pretext to blackmail an irritated Grandpa Castro: either he gave us money for candy or “Hey, what about that blonde girl?”—as though we’d divined that there was more to this girl than the promise of fresh breath and reduced tartar. I leave her here, like a half-empty tube of Couto-brand toothpaste, abandoned in a plastic cup covered in a layer of mineral scum, next to the toothbrushes, in memory of my dear Grandma Maria, in whom a burning jealousy took root that would last for the rest of her life.

  I never did take the bus route with Papá to Cimov, a place that comes back to me now in almost mythic proportions. I don’t know what the city would look like if I were to see it with his eyes. Today, I find myself thinking of the row of high-rises along the way—a steely gray against the darkness—like an image of my grandfather’s thoughts, of his introspective manner as he sat on the bus in those predawn hours. It was always quite clear to him what the day would hold. A wandering repairman of household goods, he always had a passion for widgets: first, gauze, syringes, scalpels; later, first aid kits, pain-relief balms, razor blades wrapped in paper, Bactrim, thermoses, plastic bags, pens, the pocket of his shirt misshapen by blocks of lottery tickets and folded sheets of paper where he had worked out the algorithm for what, according to him, were the winning numbers.

  There’s nothing romantic about these things. The pain-relief balm and the rusty medical supplies were simply instruments from life as a nurse in Luanda, which he saw no reason to forget and which he in fact never left behind. He maintained the very same routine, diligently applied to his kin, of injections, medical prescriptions, and a few home circumcisions, which by a stroke of luck all the boys survived. The minute anyone sneezed or complained of a migraine, he would administer antibiotics; and he continued doing so, deaf to our protests, for the rest of his days.

  He’d attended nursing school in Angola, studying by candlelight, a habit he would pay for with a premature case of cataracts. He prided himself on having survived the entire course on only bananas and peanuts, a diet he recounted to me sometime during the ’90s, already in this other hemisphere, with the same nostalgia with which he used to speak of the butter and marmalade of our family’s golden years. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve pictured him studying, half-naked in his hut, the lantern tucked beneath his chin, angled toward his books—as though, in an implausible synthesis of times and places, he were a greenhorn working on the railroad, fearing a coyote attack on his camp as he slept—battling insomnia, the heat, mosquitoes; but I know all too well that nothing could be further from the truth. In Papá’s house in Luanda, where I would spend school vacations, everyone still ate margarine from a giant can, something I’d never seen before. As they scraped pans clean in the afternoon heat, the neighbor girls listened to my stories of Portugal. I introduced them to the concept of an “escalator,” which caused them to break out in song: “I’m happy as can be, there’s nothing else I want for me.” Not so many years later, as Papá left the house at sunrise, off to the bus and to Cimov, the air on the outskirts of Lisbon—laden with the refreshing chill of morning dew that I too would come to love—saturated everything with the vague scent of ammonia.

  In the early morning hours when my Grandpa Castro was born, his father was at sea. This in M’Banza Kongo, in Angola’s Zaire province, a place that has assumed mythic status in the family lore. In the distance, on the beach, the albino man’s blond hair was a speck of light on the horizon. He could often be found fishing with spear amid the rocks, waiting until a fish appeared. The next moment, the fish would burst out of the water, dark blood spurting everywhere, bringing into focus the fisherman’s own reflection against the surface. At times, on similar mornings when the tide was full at the break of day, the man would raise his spear into the air, parting the sea and taking his time as he crossed the gap, strolling between the parted waters, the waves forming a soaring wall at his side. He would never do this in the company of others or in a moment of danger, only when enjoying a stroll alone. However, being the only one to attest to a gift he could not share with others left him convinced he was one of the chosen. The satisfaction gained appears to have had an inverse relationship to the size of his audience: it was a ceremony to be performed in solitude. The day my Grandpa Castro was born, his father had left the house with a certain fish in mind, something special he’d seen swimming nearby. The beach was empty, the fog hovered low. As if he found himself before the only fish alive, my great-grandfather steadied himself on a rock, ready to pounce, stretching his arm skyward and holding his silhouette pose—milk on oil—his hair behind him in one long tress, as the fish darted below and then burst to the surface with all its size and weight. At home, his wife gave birth to a son. As the fisherman had foreseen, and as others later confirmed, the little Castro child had spoken, not cried, as he emerged into the dark of the ramshackle hut illuminated with fish-oil lamps, reeking of fish as all such huts did. It’s possible there aren’t even beaches or fish in M’Banza Kongo.

  I inherited from my Grandpa Castro a collection of imitation Parker pens he had stored inside a suitcase for the previous decade. He had come to Portugal in 1984 with the aim of seeking treatment at a hospital in Lisbon for one of his sons, who had been born with one leg shorter than the other. The leg required medical treatment unavailable in Angola at that time. He came to Portugal not as an immigrant in search of work, but as a father, staying longer than expected and then remaining, to the tune of operations and physical therapy, until the end of his life, a pleasant coda to Angolan years. In Lisbon, he and his son found lodging in boardinghouses near the hospital, as a great number of Portuguese Africa’s ill did at the time and still do, whether for the duration of their medical treatments or indefinitely.

  At the entrance to the Pensão Covilhã, kitty-corner from the Casa de Amigos in Paredes de Coura, the ill take in the Lisbon air. One of them has a bandage over one eye, another a gangrenous thigh, an arm protected by a tattooed cast that’s begun to crumble, a chopstick repurposed to itch beneath the layers of plaster and cotton. They are the remnants of empire, accidental Camões at the tender age of nine, spared from becoming childhood mortality statistics so that they might enjoy what to them seems like a vacation in the city. Even with a bit of luck, they are destined, each and every one, to discover in Portugal nothing more than the world from which they’ve come.

  Visiting the Covilhã is like sticking one’s nose into an old suitcase. The boardinghouse doesn’t carry the scent of alcohol one smells in hospitals, but that of ointments past their expiration dates mixed with the rotting odor of infections and a faint metallic note like blood, traces of mothballs, a concoction at once chemical and organic, attenuated by the tang of ketchup or Old Spice spilling from upended bottles into the suitcase between strands of hair and iodine tincture, rendering a package of Valium useless. My grandfather, dozing off to this odor with a perfect forbearance, asks my uncle if the room doesn’t smell of woman. “It’s just your imagination—go to sleep, Papá,” his boy responds.

  In the tavern next door, the sick make conversation with old men in whom, despite some initial repugnance, they ins
pire a measure of compassion. The sick take the day’s sports section from one of the tables back to their rooms at the Covilhã and celebrate each Belenenses goal scored the Sunday prior. The sight of the ill provokes strong reactions in the old men, sometimes ruining their appetites before they’ve even left home or inducing vomiting, transporting them back to the war and to their youth; but they stifle such anguish and downplay it to their wives, telling them that a deviled egg didn’t sit quite right or that “Tio Zeca must be serving bad wine, the sneaky bastard.” These same men frequently offer a deviled egg to their young friends, something the younger group has never seen, or introduce them to the ketchup they then proceed to get all over their noses as they eat. “Go on, squirt, make a wish!” they goad the kids, explaining that’s how it’s done when you try something for the very first time, an explanation that doesn’t quite compute.

  And that’s how, between stepping on dog shit in open-toe sandals (which they sport in spite of the autumn weather) and making love to placards advertising Olá-brand ice cream—reason in itself to live—the sick young men spend their days trying out new flavors and the old men redeem themselves for the queasy sensation they experience at the sight of the young men, a queasiness they dismiss with a wave: “OK, OK, OK.” Then the little squirts close their eyes and ask for a Perna de Pau. It’s in this exchange that the old men reveal themselves to be good souls, though they have only themselves in mind throughout this entire marathon, patiently awaiting the kids’ reactions in order that they might feel something for the young people before their eyes.

  Lisbon’s teeming Covilhã is not some charming countryside inn but a roadside leper colony, simultaneously at the very center of the city and at the margins, because it only takes one wrong turn for you to find yourself in the middle of nowhere. From their bedrooms, the sick can see between the window bars to the back of the hospital; they watch as the trash is collected and entertain the hope of a larger room, envisioned just beyond the gray walls of a building that more closely resembles a factory than a health-care facility.

  Often, the sick spend years at the Covilhã. They manage only a glimpse of the city, and of the country nothing beyond the concept of chanfana, which Dona Olga—a woman who probably comes from Seia and is owner of the boardinghouse—translates for them on good days, when she isn’t busy calling everything a pigsty as soon as she’s had a glance at the mountains of suitcases, dirty clothes, and empty bottles that characterize the rooms of the sick, rooms she never enters and from which can be heard the sound of a cassette tape playing the lambada. The sense of Portugal one gathers from the lobby of the Pensão Covilhã is that of the country’s typical dishes, the basis of our ignorance about any country: a banquet of rudimentary explanations, about the taste of pork rinds, the taste of snow peas, the taste of pig’s blood stew. The garden must be ripe for the picking this time of year, think Dona Olga and the legion of the sick.

  My grandfather stashed the pens he would later bequeath to me in one of his suitcases over a period of ten years, rusty utensils wound together with a piece of string. He had come prepared to assume obligations, provide signatures, sign contracts, when what really awaited him was years of sharing a bathroom, years his aftershave went unused. A decade later, he would leave the Covilhã for São Gens, a shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon, sending for his wife and other children in Angola, storing the very same half-unpacked suitcases beneath a new bed, in a new house filled with the same whiff of old suitcase.

  2

  The very first salon I ever went to was tucked alongside a steep street in Sapadores that I would come upon again by chance when moving neighborhoods some twenty years later. We walked quite some distance, my mother and I; she was taking her summer vacations in Oeiras, staying with my Grandma Lúcia and Grandpa Manuel (on my father’s side), in whose house I grew up. This time, however, we didn’t walk so much as we had on a previous expedition to nearby Barreiro. I retain the memory of an interminable wait—an allegory for my life—for the ferry we referred to as “the boat to Cacilhas,” rather imprecisely. Though we hadn’t boarded at the Cais do Sodré or gone to the beach but rather to get my hair done on the other side of the Tagus, this trip to Barreiro leaps from the pages of Ramalho Ortigão’s guide to the river’s beaches. I can picture my mother there, out of place, unnerved by the twentieth century, by the public transport system whose existence has made this story of African hair salons possible. “There are species of fish who care for their offspring,” Ramalho writes, in an apt description of my mother and me: trout who bury their eggs in secluded coves. We’d missed the last boat: that’s the only possible explanation. We’d missed the last boat and spent the night at the wharf, gas lamps casting their glow upon us, and in the cold, ruining our hair as we rested our heads against a wooden bench. (Or was it all a dream?)

  To this day, when I think back to Sapadores, I’m flooded with the dizzying scent of ammonia and the memory of walking down some stairs to a cramped basement with white walls, a salon whose excessive zeal for cleanliness, common among the poor, denoted luxury to my six-year-old eyes. There’s little I remember beyond the hot-pink packaging of a hair relaxer called Soft & Free (or was it Dark & Lovely?), whose children’s variety featured smiling black children with straight hair, instant role models. False advertising, I would realize the next day. The treatment (whose abrasive chemicals require the use of latex gloves) consisted of “opening up the hair,” leaving it more supple, they explained to me. (This trip to Sapadores had, in reality, been preceded by a memorable test-run closer to home with Dona Esperança, my Grandma Lúcia’s hairdresser. Unwilling to accept the state of my hair, she grabbed a dryer and a brush and, during the brief interludes between fixing my grandmother’s hair, generously straightened out two tufts of hair to prove it wasn’t a lost cause. “You see? Didn’t I tell you that Mila has beautiful hair? It’s only a question of straightening it out a bit and—voilà!” We left Dona Esperança’s holding hands: my grandmother with her typical perm, me with my tufts of hair stretched until they hung over my ears, which we didn’t touch so we could show them off at home, the two of us attempting to hide our doubts about this miraculous fix. My grandfather expressed his approval with his eyebrows, giving us to understand that this “women’s business” was neither his concern nor within his sphere of interest, placing responsibility for an unlikely solution—this, also, done with his eyebrows—squarely in my grandmother’s hands.) Opening up the hair was, in fact, something else entirely. I would be lying if I said I remember the ritual visited upon my head in Sapadores, but it’s unlikely to have included anything out of the ordinary. First, they must have sat me on a chair with a pillow beneath my rear, and I must have undone my slapdash hairdo. In the mirror, I could see behind my back to the salon, where there may have been other people getting their hair done, too. Someone would have then parted my hair into four sections, brushing much too hard with a fine-tooth comb. Later, someone else would have forgotten to protect my scalp with the recommended cream, a precaution often dispensed with by those who’ve undergone this experience with some frequency. I also cannot remember how I left Sapadores. This baptism was, then, also my rebirth: to the horrifying thought that the hairdressers had forgotten about me after the waiting time necessary for the product to take effect, and to the impression that they were speaking behind my back, wicked tongues. At that moment, I was reborn with a high degree of paranoia about my hair and, at the same time, with a certain idea of what a woman should be. On the packages of hair relaxer, there was a girl who, my mother contended, was not black, sporting a polka-dot jumpsuit, the first outfit I can remember: a brand-new jumpsuit that I would one day wear to a birthday party. Hours before the party, the jumpsuit got a stain, which I fixed by cutting it out with scissors; which I then fixed by cutting away a bit more, until there was a gigantic hole in the jumpsuit—which, in the end, I may never have actually used. This was the first in a series of techniques I would develop to conceal clothing sta
ins, such as sewing buttons over each splotch.

  The “good girl” had learned to sew buttons with Dona Antónia, my Grandma Lúcia’s seamstress, who would visit once a week to spend the afternoon at the same desk where I learned to write, darning socks and mending seams, glasses resting on the tip of her pointy little nose. Dona Antónia, whose anachronistic head—an impeccable perm on a black head of hair—I never gave a moment’s peace, was not as dear to me as Dona Lurdes, whose unmemorable head of hair visited us each and every day. I never lacked for conversation with Dona Lurdes, who would leave a trace of sodium hydroxide when she left and whose house I once visited. She lived in São Domingos de Rana. As she worked, the three of us would talk in the kitchen: me, her, and Grandma Lúcia—a fact that exasperated my Grandpa Manuel, who would then summon me and my grandma to the living room, complaining, “Don’t stay there talking all alone, you two.” On such afternoons, I learned from Dona Lurdes the art of talking without saying a thing, a social skill my Grandpa Castro abhorred, but which I consider a practical skill of great moral utility. I asked after her children—who were growing up in São Domingos de Rana and every now and then would visit us, blushing with shyness—as though I weren’t also growing up there in the kitchen, and I spoke to her about the goings-on at school, same as always. In my role as cute kid at a retirement home—building things with matchsticks on the living room floor, later moving on to sewing, confusing elbows with shoulders or heels day after day as though to mark the passage of time, triggering lessons that lasted entire afternoons, or pooping on the carpet merely to be able to examine the result closely—I had no idea what it meant for my grandparents to be “retired.”