River Aria

By Joan Schweighardt

River Aria is narrated by Estela Hopper, who, as a ten-year-old girl living in the impoverished fishing village of Manaus, Brazil in the early 20th century, is offered a twist-of-fate opportunity to study opera with an esteemed voice instructor. During her years of instruction, Estela, who is talented, passionate and dramatic by na

• Language: English
• Publisher: Five Directions Press
• Release date: Oct 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781947044289

Joan Schweighardt

JOAN SCHWEIGHARDT is the author of The Rivers Trilogy (Before We Died, Gifts for the Dead, and River Aria), The Last Wife of Attila the Hun, Under the Blue Moon, and other fiction and nonfiction titles. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Book preview

1

December 1928, Manaus, Brazil

When Tia Adriana’s tearful outbursts first began, JoJo thought it was because she would miss him so much. And surely that was part of it. But the bigger part was that she had lied to him, long ago, when he was a little boy. And as there didn’t seem to be any harm in her deception at that time, as it made JoJo happy in fact to hear her build on it, Tia Adriana had done just that. She’d embellished her lie; like clay, she kneaded it and stretched it, working it until it was as high and as stalwart as the tall ships that sometimes still came out of the night to rest in our harbor, until it was as vast and mysterious as the river itself. She even made it official, hauling it up the hill to the Superior Tribunal of Justice building to be recorded and made public for anyone who cared to see.

Many times in the weeks before JoJo and I left for New York, Tia Adriana tried to tell him the truth. But every time she opened her mouth, her effort turned to sobbing. Dropping her head into her hands, she would cry with abandon. And when JoJo crossed the room to lay his callused palm upon her heaving back, she would only cry harder.

She wept so much that not two weeks before our departure JoJo said he wouldn’t be coming with me after all, that he would rather stay in Manaus and live the life he had than break his mother’s heart. He made a joke of it; he said if she kept crying, the flooding that year would be twice as bad and everyone in the city would drown, and it would be on him, that he would be forever cursed and become a Corpo-seco when his days were up, a dry corpse, because the devil would return his soul and Earth would reject his flesh. He was joking, yes, but he was also toying with the idea of changing his mind.

It was then that the other two got involved, my mother, whose name was Bruna, and Tia Louisa, who were sisters—in heart if not in blood—to Tia Adriana, and to each other as well. Is that what you want for your son? Tia Louisa scolded when JoJo was not around. You want your only child should grow up here, fishing for a living in a ghost town? Dwelling in a shack up on stilts and likely to flood anyway? Every day a sunrise and a sunset and barely anything worth noticing in between? My mother would chirp in then, adding in her quiet way, her coarse fingers extending to cover Tia Adriana’s trembling wet hands, Adriana, wasn’t it because you wanted more for him that you lied in the first place?

The three of them would become philosophers once my mother and Tia Louisa had calmed Tia Adriana sufficiently that she could think past her grief. They weighed JoJo’s future, how it would unfold if he stayed in Manaus, and how it might unfold if he left. Would and might: they might as well have been weighing mud and air. Could he be happy, they asked themselves, eking out a living on the docks for the rest of his life? Blood and fish guts up to his elbows? Endless squabbles up on the hill trying to get the best price for his labors? Drawing his pictures on driftwood—because between us all we couldn’t keep him in good paper—or on the shells of eggs, or even our shabby furniture?

Was that what was best for our beloved JoJo? Or was it the alternative that promised more? America! America! O my America! My new-found-land! In America he would be attending an art school—the grandest art school in the grandest city in that country—not because he, our JoJo, who had grown up ragged and shoeless, had ever even considered that he might travel to New York, but because a man by the name of Felix Black, the protégé of a famous American artist and a former teacher of art himself, had come to Manaus to study our decaying architecture some months ago. And as The Fates would have it, he wandered into Tia Louisa’s restaurant and saw JoJo sitting in the back booth with some paints he had paid for with money he’d made scrubbing decks on one of the locals’ boats, painting the young woman sitting across from him (me, as it happens) on a canvas so scruffy it could only have come from someone’s rubbish pile. Senhor Black watched for a long while and then bent over JoJo and whispered in his ear—startling our dearest JoJo because, except for his eye and his breath and the fingers holding his brush, he was barely there in his own body when he painted—to say that he was a benefactor at an art school far away in New York, and if JoJo were to come, he would help him to realize his full potential—a message I quickly translated as JoJo did not speak much English at that time.

Mud or air? Foot-sucking muck from the bottom of the river or the breath of the heavens, sweet and suffused with bird song? Stinking dead fish or full potential?

We knew what was best for JoJo all right; and we knew that JoJo, who was fearless—though he could barely read or write—would never get an opportunity like this again. And as I would be traveling to New York too, what could be better than sending us off together, one to watch over the other? But the fact remained that Tia Adriana could not bring herself to tell him about her deception, and he could not be permitted to arrive in New York without knowing about it.

I didn’t know the lie was a lie myself until the week before our scheduled departure. Being more than a year younger than JoJo (and loose-lipped, if my mother and as tias could be believed), no one had been foolish enough to trust me to keep a secret of such consequence. I had even participated in the lie—albeit unwittingly—which was nearly as exciting to me as it was to JoJo.

And so it was that when my aunts and Mamãe first began to look for ways to throw light on the truth, they didn’t include me in their conversations. But when they failed to find even a single solution, they called me into Tia Adriana’s shack and sat me down at the table and told me the whole long story from beginning to end.

While they spoke, interrupting one another with details as was their way, I slouched in my chair and leaned back, until I was looking up at the ceiling. Our images were there: Me and Tia Adriana and Mamãe, and Tia Louisa and Tia-Avó Nilza, who was Tia Adriana’s mother (and JoJo’s grandmother). Three years earlier, JoJo had painted all of us on a large rectangular ipe wood table top that Tia Louisa was throwing out from the restaurant because rain from the roof had leaked on it a time too many and it had begun to blister and crack. When JoJo claimed the piece of wood for himself, Tia Louisa scolded that his mother’s house was far too small to hang a thing that size. But then an out-of-towner who’d been listening to their conversation over a bowl of fish stew told JoJo about The Sistine Chapel, which JoJo had never heard of. And so impressed was JoJo with the stranger’s story of how the famous artist (Michelangelo, whom JoJo hadn’t heard of either) had come to paint on the ceiling of the Pope’s chapel, that JoJo decided he would nail his painting up on his mother’s ceiling, where no one could say it was in the way. And there it remained. But instead of scenes from the Bible depicting man’s fall from grace, JoJo had painted us floating through our labors, all smiling as if we were saints already—me and Tia Louisa at the restaurant, serving rowdy wage earners, and my mother and the others sitting shoulder to shoulder all in a row on the wooden bench outside Tia Adriana’s shack, repairing fishing nets and singing their favorite fados with strong voices and extravagant gestures.

Usually when I looked at the painting it was to marvel at how young I was back then, how much I’d changed. But now I was thinking that with the exception of myself, JoJo had unintentionally painted the very women who knew about the lie from the beginning, who had most probably helped to shape it, knowing them. I felt my face grow hot, with anger first and then with embarrassment and then with despair. And then Tia Louisa, who was just hoisting the story into the present, changed her tone and snapped, Estela, are you listening to what we’re saying?

I straightened at once.

This is important, young lady, so please pay attention, she said in Portuguese. She knew a little English, but we always spoke in our native tongue when we were all together. Once you’re safe on the ship on your way to America, you need to tell JoJo about the lie—

And the truth it was meant to hide, Tia Adriana broke in, nodding excitedly.

And the truth it was meant to hide, yes. Tia Louisa closed her eyes and sat in silence for a moment, perhaps in prayer. Then she went on. You’ll be almost four weeks traveling, the two of you sharing a cabin. He’ll have nowhere to escape to! When you arrive in New York, we’ll want your full report, your letter saying he knows and has accepted—

And that he loves me…us…in spite of…, Tia Adriana cried, her eyes filling with fresh tears.

I looked at their faces. Only my mother was leaning forward, waiting anxiously for me to respond. The other two trusted me better, especially Tia Louisa, who was sitting back now with her arms folded under her ample breasts.

I let them wait. I looked beyond them, at the cast iron skillets hanging from hooks over the wood stove, the clay dishes out on shelves, the cot in the corner where Tia Adriana slept, the old tin washtub in the opposite corner, the curtain—worn to gauze from years of handling—that separated the kitchen from the back room where Tia-Avó Nilza and Avô Davi (who was Nilza’s husband and JoJo’s grandfather) and JoJo slept.

Yes, of course, I mumbled.

They chuckled then, all of them, with relief, and in that moment it occurred to me that I would have to lie to them, Mamãe and as tias, in the event that JoJo was unforgiving.

2

We went early to the dock, me and JoJo and Mamãe and Tia Adriana and Tia Louisa and Tia-Avó Nilza and Avô Davi, because once we were all awake, there was no other way to pass the time. Then we stood there, my mother and Tia Adriana sniffling, and Tia Louisa trying—but failing—to sound lighthearted by commenting on the sky, which was full of dark clouds and about to weep itself.

But of course everyone knew JoJo and I were leaving, and we expected others would come to see us off. And sure enough, within the half hour we heard their voices, even before we saw them, almost all of our bunch—the fishermen, who had the day off because it was Sunday, and their wives and children—coming down the road directly from Mass at Igreja de São Sebastião. And behind them, all my group from the music school, including Carlito Camilo, our instructor. Oh, and weren’t they all the liveliest crowd, all joyful smiles and kind words and tight embraces!

Many of the women brought us gifts for protection, and as our valises had already been taken on board, we had no choice but to stuff their prayer cards and tiny statues of São Sebastião and Nossa Senhora da Conceição into our pockets. Modesto, who was my special friend, had even brought me a wood-carved Iara, the siren who seduces fishermen with her song to get them to live with her in the deepest part of the river. He called me Iara sometimes, when we were alone. As he pressed her into my palm, he whispered that all I had to do was ask and he would find a way to come to New York, even if he had to swim there. He had said this many times in the previous weeks, but I knew such a change was not in his nature. He was the youngest of ten, all but four of them with different fathers. They were very close, Modesto and his siblings, but he was the only one who found the time to care for their aging mother. He would never be happy away from Manaus, and much as I cared for him, I would never ask him to endure such a conflict.

The women brought us food too, in case the ship’s crew should forget to feed us. Not wanting to stuff their cakes and breads into our pockets with the rest of their gifts, we shared them around there on the dock while our loved ones made predictions about how our futures—mine and JoJo’s—might unfold. No one who had grown up in Manaus—especially in our part of town, which was to say the folks who made their living off the river—had ever been to New York; there were only a handful who had ever even been out of the state of Amazonas! Our great opportunity, mine and JoJo’s, was theirs too. They had all contributed to the unique setting that had made us who we were, they reminded us. We were the seeds in their Basket of Life, and they were the ones who had tilled us. They had rocked us when we were babes howling in the dark night with hunger or fear, hadn’t they? They had put up with us when we were depraved children, singing their stories of visagens with supernatural powers in the hope of scaring us toward better behavior. They had endured our scowls when we were moody adolescents who could hardly stand our own selves. And now we were their ambassadors, trailblazers going off in their name to discover a new world—and to bring back some small part of its bounty, more seeds for the basket.

My eyes filled with tears listening to them, and I resolved for the thousandth time to do what was necessary to make them proud, even the few who had liked me better in the old days before I’d gone to study with Senhor Camilo. JoJo would sooner die than shed a public tear, but his laughter, which was louder than usual—too loud, in fact—confirmed that he was feeling their pleasure too.

I looked around for Senhor Camilo in the crowd and found him off to the right, staring at me. He stood upright and dignified, his hands, which were happy only when they were slicing the air, folded in front of him as if in prayer. When our eyes met, he nodded once, solemnly, to remind me of everything we’d talked about. I nodded back, solemn as well. After my family and Modesto, I would miss him most of all.

And then, much too soon, the ship’s horn silenced us with one low-pitched blast and it was time to board.

I froze, literally, unable to either proceed up the plank into the future or back into the safety of the past. Only my hand had the power of movement, and up it flew to grasp the hard green stone that hung from my neck, an act that was habitual. The muiraquitã had its inception back in the days before the first foreigners arrived on our shores, when the Icamiabas, a tribe of fearsome female warriors, lived along the banks of Rio Tapajós. The Icamiabas allowed no men into their village, but once a year, when the moon was full and the river spirits were in harmony, males from the neighboring Guacaris village were permitted to visit on the fringes of their lands, for the purposes of mating. If the Icamiabas were satisfied with the experience, they dove deep into the river and emerged with a handful of green clay, which they quickly shaped into simple animals—the clay dried too fast for anything more—and gifted to the men. My muiraquitã had been given to me by my mother, who had received it from her mother, who had received it from hers, all the way back to the sister of a Guacaris warrior who had been awarded his by the Icamiaba he had once satisfied, the sister having taken possession of it upon his death.

Several of the local people had muiraquitãs that had been handed down from one person to another through all the years—though some had sold theirs during the rubber boom to the wives of wealthy barons who had come to learn that the stones had supernatural properties. While it is true that the muiraquitãs brought in a high price, those who exchanged them for a handful of reals lived thereafter in fear that they would be cursed for their greed, and many were. I was only thankful that my mother, who was poor as poor could be back then, during the boom, had not sold hers. Instead she gave it away, along with her heart, to Jack Hopper, my father, on the night I was conceived. But in his hurry to get about his business the morning after, Jack Hopper left it behind in the cabin of the fishing boat where they’d spent the night. My mother retrieved it later that day and wore it herself, right up until my plans to travel to New York began to materialize. Then she gave it to me, with the suggestion I give it away when the time was right, by which she meant when I fell in love.

I glanced at Modesto, who was watching me intently, his dark eyes bright with tears. What was I doing? I asked myself. Had I lost my mind? I loved my life. Why would I want to change it?

JoJo pinched my elbow, hard, and brought me back to the present, where I recalled that I had already sacrificed so much in preparation for this moment. There was no turning away from it. I found my feet and went to as tias and kissed them and then held my darling mother so tight she had to push me away to catch her breath, and with one more look at Modesto, up I went, with JoJo right behind me, his hand on my shoulder to keep me moving forward.

There were only a dozen or so other passengers—we would be picking up more in Santarém and again in Belém before we left the river and headed out to sea—and we all gathered quickly at the portside rail of the lower deck. Goodbye, world, JoJo whispered as the boat began to pull away from the dock.

Our audience waved frantically, and JoJo and I waved back. Mamãe held a handkerchief over her face to hide her tears, and JoJo’s mother cried outright. But no one wept as hard as Tia Louisa—poor Tia Louisa who had never had children of her own. Two of the young men in the crowd, fishermen, rushed to her side to keep her upright and ensure she didn’t fall off the dock in our wake. With her arms pinned down between them, she wept even harder, her mouth wide open like a child. It was then I remembered the promise I’d made, to tell JoJo about the lie, and already I longed for the moment it would be behind me.

* * *

We were third-class passengers, JoJo and I, which is to say we had accommodations in the lower part of the ship. If we had been in a passenger ship coming from Europe, we might have been squeezed in together with hundreds of other third-classers and denied fresh air and dining accommodations. But our ship was a cargo ship carrying passengers but also coffee beans, textiles and cables of piassaba (a rigid fiber used for making brooms), leathers and nuts. We had our own private compartment, and the walk to the water closet, down a hallway lined with doors leading to tiny rooms full of housekeeping supplies, was not far at all. Mamãe and as tias had saved long and hard to pay for our tickets, and having come up short anyway, had been forced to accept Senhor Camilo’s offer to make up the difference. JoJo and I intended to pay back every centavo.

JoJo offered to take the upper bunk so I wouldn’t have to climb down the ladder if I became sick once we were out on open seas. I agreed, but not because I was any more likely to become seasick than he was. We’d been out on boats on the Rio Amazonas and the Rio Negro and all their tributaries all our lives, in all kinds of weather. We’d been pushed off course by winds so savage they nearly hurled us into rough banks where we could see Chuyachak, the fawn dwarf who hates humans, waiting among the ceiba trees to lure us so deep into the forest that we would never find our way out. We’d experienced tempestuous waves that rocked us lee to port and back again, and lightning so fierce it exploded in balls as well as in bolts. We’d found ourselves encircled many times in the dark of a quiet night by spirit orbs—the ghosts of men who had perished violently in waters that had absorbed so much blood over so many years it was a wonder they didn’t run red—and we had learned to observe all watery mysteries cautiously, with fear but not panic. We counted the orbs when we saw them—albeit in whispers—as if we were only counting stars, or the bright eyes of caiman bobbing along the banks, and waited for our vessel to move on from them.

No, nothing the ocean could throw our way—short of the ship sinking or a pirate attack—could frighten us. I wanted the lower bunk because I wanted to be as close as possible to the engine room, which was somewhere below us, because JoJo had told me that it had not only one big steam motor but also many other smaller motors that compressed the air and fed the pumps and handled any number of mechanical tasks. I wanted to hear them working in unison.

JoJo had brought along a sketchpad, and we were barely underway when he started looking for someone to draw. One of our fellow passengers was an English-speaking woman with a long nose, like the wicked witch in Hänsel und Gretel. I hoped JoJo wouldn’t ask her to pose because I feared she’d think he was poking fun at her, not that JoJo, who had not a mean bone in his body, would ever do such a thing. But the first evening on our way to the dining salon designated for third-class passengers, we passed the grander salon where the first- and second-classers ate, and we saw her over the half-wall that divided the two areas. Not long after, while I was nibbling at my supper and simultaneously telling JoJo about Odysseus after the war and how he had longed for his homeland—a story Senhor Camilo referred to several times so as to prepare me for the homesickness he feared I would experience in New York—I found his gaze drifting in the woman’s direction, and I knew it was only a matter of time. I wonder if it gets in her way when someone kisses her, I whispered. JoJo glanced at me, but he made no comment and his gaze slid right back to her.

The next day we saw her sitting on a bench on the lower deck looking out at the jungle, a peaceful smile on her face. JoJo approached her at once and told her in his special brand of English, which I’d been teaching him—and which included some pantomime—that he would like to draw her. When I saw her features tighten into a knot of irritation, I stepped in to explain that JoJo was soon to become a student at the Art Students League in New York, that he had been recruited by one Felix Black, who had once been the student of one Robert Henri, who was a famous artist, or so Senhor Black had said. The woman, who had turned her full attention on me, emitted an exclamation of surprise and joy. She was from New York, she said, and she knew of the art school. And while she didn’t know Felix Black, everyone in her circle knew of Robert Henri. It made complete sense that his protégé had recruited someone like JoJo. Mr. Henri collects immigrants, she cried. And while I can tell you there are plenty of associations in New York that would sooner see the sun fall into the sea than encourage immigrants to come to our part of the world, Henri is not one of them. He celebrates them—you lovelies—for your authenticity! Authenticity is what he cherishes above all else!

I translated for JoJo and we had a good chuckle. Is that what we were? Authentic? The Whites who ruled Amazonas had a word for us: caboclos, from the Tupi word caa-boc, which literally means, that which comes from the woods. When the missionaries first came to Amazonas, they corralled all the Indians they could—which is to say the ones that didn’t perish first from their foreign diseases or weren’t able to flee into the deeper jungle—realizing they could not survive on the river and in the jungle without them. These captives, severed from their land and family and everything meaningful, were forced not only to work for the missionaries but also to worship their gods. In time the government began to fear that the missionaries, benefiting as they were from so much native wisdom, were becoming too powerful, and thus they decreed the Indians should be permitted to mix with the settlers pouring in from Portugal and various locations in northeastern Brazil. After all, everyone coming into Amazonas needed drudges to ease their way forward in such a backward place. And thus procreation among the races began in earnest. Now, nearly three hundred years later, our allegiances were only local. We had no unified history. We were the lowest of the low, copper-colored peasants who were despised by the Whites and so far removed from our native pasts that few could say the name the tribe their ancestors had hailed from.

I lifted my muiraquitã from my throat and passed it back and forth over my bottom lip. Cool and smooth, mine happened to be in the shape of a frog, a creature I identified with because frogs are loud, love water, and can be poisonous. I hoped the story I’d been told about its origins was true, but for all I knew some poor servant had stolen it during the rubber boom from the White for whom she cleaned house, who had bought it from a dark-skinned child selling trinkets on the riverbank to help feed his family. But did it really matter how it had found its way to me? It was a precious stone fashioned by a female warrior from a clay that everyone knew no longer existed. Its powers were intact, no matter what its journey.

I snapped out of my trance. The woman was still beaming at me, happy, apparently, to be in concert with Felix Black, and by extension, Robert Henri. Authentic, indeed. I beamed back at her and let my muiraquitã drop into place on my breastbone.

Getting her to agree to pose was child’s play once she knew that someone connected to someone from her circle had deemed JoJo worthy. She could hardly wait to have her portrait drawn, enormous honker and all. JoJo was discovering more and more potential in her face; I could see it by the way his eyes whipped over her features as she and I talked. He asked me to ask her if he could do a series, five or six drawings from different angles. She agreed; all she wanted in return, she said, was that JoJo sign one of them and gift it to her, in case he became famous one day and the thing proved to be of value. "A fama é tudo para os Americanos," I whispered to JoJo. Fame is everything to the Americans.

We had a grand time working with her. I say we because while JoJo sketched, I answered her many questions to keep her from trying to converse with him while he was concentrating. I brought her glasses of cold tea and plates of pastries when she was hungry, and wet linens to wipe the back of her neck when the heat became unbearable. We worked outside on the deck when it wasn’t raining, or in the third-class dining salon when it was, because the light was poor in her cabin and nonexistent in ours.

She was astonished to see how good my English was, and even more so when I said I knew a bit of Italian and German too, and of course Portuguese, my native tongue. The few Americans who came to our part of the world were always surprised that anyone whose skin was darker than a marasmius, a parachute mushroom, might actually have had an education. Of course, few had one like mine, and if not for Carlito Camilo, I wouldn’t have had one either, a fact I never let myself forget.

She wanted to know if we were married, JoJo and I, and how I laughed at that! Even JoJo, who—though absorbed in some detail of the woman’s right eyebrow had picked up a word or two—snickered. I began to explain that we were cousins, but midway through my account, I remembered that JoJo was my cousin no longer; that had been part of the lie! Horrified by this realization, I drifted off mid-sentence and had to close my eyes and breathe deeply before I could go on. When I recovered, I told her—her name was Harriet Bottomglass—about JoJo and me growing up together, playing along the bank of the river, swimming out to the bôtos with peacock bass entrails in one hand, to appease them so they would never turn on us when they shapeshifted into human forms, how we searched in the jungle’s last light with other boys and girls for curupira, the forest creature whose feet are on backwards to trick pursuers following his trail. Harriet smiled broadly, as if she could see us in those moments for herself.

When I’d worn myself out amusing her with stories about our childhood, I moved further back in time to tell her the story of JoJo’s birth, which he would never have let me get away with if he wasn’t so busy with his pencils. JoJo was born, literally, in flood waters. He came to feel pinched floating in his own meager juices in Tia Adriana’s womb, and then he wanted to be let out that instant. But it was storming fiercely that night, and the shack was already flooding from the rising river. And then a corner of the roof blew away, and the rain began to pour in from above as well. And there was Tia Adriana, screaming in pain, pressing her hands on her estômago grande, trying her best to persuade JoJo to wait at