American Movies

Hey folks, this is my first attempt at writing fiction in English, so it’s more of an experiment. A huge thanks to my friend Michael Freshwater for revising everything. I also write a newsletter, but it’s mainly in Portuguese.

AMERICAN MOVIES

I used to watch those American high school movies, where the leads have the mission to enjoy summer down to the marrow before school comes back. Before it’s winter. Before the leaves, the warmth and the joyfulness in the air give way to once again uneventful grayish days, lingering by the window inside of the typical suburban house. I never understood those movies. I was used to almost yearlong summers. I watched those movies without giving much thought to them. After all, they were kids’ movies, and I couldn’t really relate to the storyline.

The pool’s gonna be there all year. The hot weather will still be there driving us thirsty, the fields will still be green a month from now, and the following month, and the rest of the year. I watched these dubbed movies with a sense of strangeness, foreignness, even more so because the voice-overs spoke with the same tone and emotion in every scene: the actors could be jumping, and running around in circles, and effusively gesturing in overflowing joy, but their voices would come out like cardinals at a Catholic mass. I was a kid, so I never put much effort into thinking about it.

“Hey, Rafa! I’m inviting the boys over to play FIFA and swim, wanna come over?” — an 8-year-old Gabriel, inviting me to enjoy summer. I told him that my mother wouldn’t let me go, but the truth was that I just felt like lying on the couch and doing nothing that day. I can’t even remember what I did that day. But Gabriel would always be there, inviting me once again, and I would go when I felt like it. That day, I probably just threw myself on the couch and watched anything that was on TV.

After that day, Gabriel didn’t call me again for the rest of the summer.

YOUTH

Young, passionate, endless, ambitious. All words that go well together. My great-aunt would still grab me by my cheeks and give them a little slap: “Oh boy, if I were your age, I would be dancing in the clubs all over again,” and she danced away to the kitchen two steps at a time, rocking her hips to the tempo, where my grandmother whisked a batter left to right to the same rhythm as she sang. When I was young, I wanted to be a pianist. A jazz pianist, to be more specific. I think the few arthouse movies that made their way to public TV gave me the impression that pianists were the sleek guys in the club. Now this thought lives together with all the other maybes I’m telling you about. The jazz piano, the astronaut, the cosmologist, the karate classes, the colleagues I never bothered to call. What could have been lifelong friendships are now only ifs wandering in my mind.

We’re now in Luísa’s house. A small apartment in a hipster neighborhood. We’re chatting about when we were young and protected from the world in our parents’ house.

— You know, one of the big realizations I had in my life was giving more credit to dramas. Movie dramas. The ones where the girl cries in her bed listening to sad music and weeping, then cuts to a scene of her walking around town, remembering sepia-colored scenes of past happiness that took place on a park bench or a table by the window in a café.

I lived through that once. And, yes, I wept. And I walked aimlessly across town. Because, in a certain way, a part of my life was gone, forever. And we must mourn. Because the Luísa who lived that life and saw the world as colorful as she did doesn’t live anymore. Only in my memories, and in a few pictures that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away, I confess. The colors came back to life, eventually, yes, but they are, I mean, it just doesn’t have the same feel to it. As if periods of my life had their own color filters.

THE CHILD

I once looked at my child and wondered how he would look if Julia were his mother. He was eating a bowl of muesli before school, and I was looking at him, ashamed that such a thought had crossed my mind.

I looked away immediately, swept the counter with the cloth I had in my hands, sweeping those thoughts together with the breadcrumbs away from sight. Am I still able to look at him after that? Again, I look at him.
— Why are you looking at me like that, Dad?
— Oh, it’s nothing, I just remembered an old friend of mine. From when I was younger.

I slept well that night. No nightmares bothered me. The thought was there, but it was like a songbird trapped in a cage, conveniently placed to be observed without causing a fuss around the house. I hope it doesn’t find out that it’s an imaginary cage. I woke up an hour earlier than usual, lying flat before the sunrise. Beatriz was still there, undisturbed.

It’s breakfast. He looks at me. He has a few minutes before school, and I really want him to pick up reading to fill the gaps, but I guess he’ll do that in his own time. He goes around the house talking non-stop to his little sister, while she only follows him and looks up at him with giant eyes to listen to whatever he’s lecturing about at that moment. The woman who married me doesn’t deserve those kinds of wonderings. Beatriz is everything I hoped for in a relationship and as a mother. “I love you, son, and you have the same energy as your mother.” I buried my hand in his hair as he said that he loved me back, and he went to grab his backpack for school.

THE COUCH

— Hey, hun.

— Hey. — Julia doesn’t turn her head from her phone to look at me.

I sat on the other side of the couch, and it was as if the Iron Curtain separated us. I reached for her, waiting for a moment of reconnection. We would hold hands and then hug. Then we would spend all night awake in the bedroom. Everything would pass, the tensions would evaporate like rain on a hot summer day, like the sweat on our naked bodies. She would look me in the eyes and say that she loved me and that we were amidst a hurricane, but now it’s over. It’s all over. We can now go back to the days when our only worry was doing the dishes after dinner.

I look at her staring at her phone, her hair in front of her eyes covering the anticipation. She gets up, looks at me, and says she’s going to get ready for tomorrow. My hand still in the middle of the couch, I see my own reflection in the TV, slightly leaning left like a stone sculpture, as she walks away from me.

That night I lay on my back as I never do. The white canvas of the ceiling gave way to a gooey feeling between sleeping and waking, with broad brush strokes soaked in memories, fantasies and the noises from the big city spanning miles beyond the open window. Suddenly the bed is huge when she lies away from me.

Fast forward eleven months. It’s her birthday, and I happen to walk past the nightclub we used to go to with our friends downtown. I grab my phone and search for her Instagram. It’s private. I still have her number, though. I look at the nightclub. It’s not impressive by daylight. We can see all the piss stains on the neighboring shops. I want to text you. I want to call you and meet up and say I still think about you and unravel her hair with my fingers. Fuck, I would straight up say I still love her. Let us walk together once again under the rain where only you, me, and the rain exist. But no. It’s too much of a fuss. We can only have so many emotional rollercoaster rides with someone before one of us cashes out the ticket for good. Between us there is life, a life that grew separating us, every hour we were away, and, to be honest, I’m quite fond of these new flowers in these new fields that filled the void you left. I wouldn’t say better, but a new and different set of color filters for my life.

THE CANALS AND FLOWERPOTS

I am now in Amsterdam. It’s dead winter. I walked a long time under the last rays of the winter sun, roaming through the canals. The sky is gray and there’s a bicycle every once in a while to break the emptiness of the narrow riverside paved streets. I stopped on a bridge to take a deeper look into the city. All the houses fit tightly against one another and stand tall painted in black, like trees competing for sunlight in the forest. Dashes of light emanating from the windows and remains of Christmas decorations gave hints of color in an otherwise grayscale day. I can see warmly lit rooms through those windows, sometimes a gesture, laughter, a glimpse of candles in a room full of people chatting with cocktails in their hands. A woman explains something to a shadow whose owner we cannot see. Her wrist covered in a soft sleeve, drawing lazy gestures in the air: she draws a circle, then grabs it and holds it to her heart. I am alone, traveling for no reason other than trying to escape from the stillness of my life. It’s so cold it bites your toes; my hands can no longer feel the handrails. There are many empty flowerpots hanging from the windows. Terraces with the furniture packed on one side, with the lights always off. There’s a dead feeling of a world long abandoned that I never saw back home. Summer was no longer here. All the long chats by the canals should have already been done. No more opportunities for beers in the park. I finally understood those American movies, and unless my memory fails me, that day was the last time Gabriel ever invited me to go swimming. Alas, I can only hope for the next summer.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to comment; I’m open to conversations and feedback. Subscribe to get the next one (probably in Portuguese).