Waters Swelled on the Earth
By Livia Ford
.
If nothing else had been a sign that the drive had gone on for entirely too long, then Luiz landing a kick in the middle of my chest most certainly was.
We were on a long, winding road from the airport in Rio de Janeiro to the nowhere countryside village where my grandparents lived – not that location mattered when it came to the choking humidity. Around hour two, Luiz and I started bickering about leg room. Luiz had stopped mid-sentence and folded himself in half vertically. I wasn’t quite sure how he managed to get his leg above his waist while he was sitting, especially considering he was about as flexible as a concrete slab, but he had wiggled one of his long, chubby legs and angled his foot towards me. When he had released the coil of his muscles, the bottom of his flip-flop slammed me right in the sternum. The kick hit me so hard that I tasted the spice of my own blood as the walls of my lungs compressed together. Seatbeltless, I was pushed into the window like a wave pounding onto shore.
There was utter silence when I slowly turned towards Luiz, a plum-colored bruise already forming on my sunburnt, peeling red forehead. I saw the full whites of Luiz’s eyes as he realized his mistake when I grabbed him by his hair and pulled his head towards me. I used my other hand to muffle his high-pitched screams, covering his face, and I quickly moved the hand that was gripping his hair to restrain his thin arms. I caught a whiff of the sharp, tangy smell wafting from Luiz’s sweat-soaked shirt, because he insisted that “since he was only twelve, he didn’t need deodorant.”
He was wrong.
Luiz thrashed like a fish, slippery with copious amounts of sweat due to the lack of AC. Our mom briefly stopped her conversation with the paid driver, probably regretting her insistence on having both of her kids ride in the car with her while her parents and our father drove separately.
She didn’t bother turning around.
“Are you guys fighting back there?”
“No!”
..
“What’s that neighborhood?” Luiz asked as we rounded the corner of another looming hill. The rosary on the review mirror swayed as we turned to pass a valley. The valleys during the drive were so few and far between, like puncture wounds in the bumpy flesh of the perfectly green grass hills and waving bamboo stalks. The scenery, paired with the blue, cloudless sky, almost looked like CGI. To the left of the road, the valley cradled a hundred little houses, scattered about like a bucket of spilled Legos. As I peered into the neighborhood, I could see people going about their lives. Men and women worked outside, hanging laundry to dry on a thin wire, stacking dull brown bricks on cement to make new houses, and carefully parsing through tangled-up telephone wires. There were also more than a dozen kids running around, and one boy, no older than 11, had this bright, neon orange Adidas shirt.
Our mom hummed “It’s a favela.”
The driver turned to her. His voice was crackly, perpetually sounding as though he was parched, but it managed to flow steadily and deep, like a waterfall thumping into a pond.
“—— houses —— government —— end —— job —— very difficult —— ——”
“What?” Luiz asked, since his Portuguese was even worse than mine.
“People moved towards the city to find jobs,” our mom explained, “When it became too full in Rio, and people could afford it, some moved back towards the country into these neighborhoods” I absentmindedly picked at the scab on my elbow as I tried to use Mom’s translation to figure out exactly what the guy had said was “very difficult”, and I got the distinct impression she was leaving something out of her translation. My attention was pulled back to reality when blood started gushing out of the wound. I used my shirt to apply pressure to it.
“What do people do when it rains?” Luiz asked in thoroughly accented, but somewhat accurate Portuguese.
The driver shrugged, with only one slumped shoulder visible to us from the back.
“Hopefully, they can swim.”
…
“And then you were here, my chicken-legged little baby!” Our vovó laughed as she told the story of the first time she saw Luiz. We were all gathered around the dinner table, smiling and laughing. Our vovô laughed too, sounding more like a gurgle due to twenty years of smoking. Our dad gave a very polite chuckle, though I could tell from the slight furrow in his eyebrows that he had no idea what she was saying. After he married our mom, he tried his best to learn Portuguese, meaning he had at least a four-year head start on me, and seven years ahead of Luiz. Somehow, even his own children grew to surpass him in understanding. It was largely a mystery how this disparity happened, considering that our family shared the same source of language exposure: Mom.
No one brought up the fact that our vovó recounted the same stories on every visit (sometimes multiple times a visit, even) because that would mean we would all need to stop ignoring the fact that she was developing dementia. Luiz curled in on himself like an armadillo to hide his flaming face about being called a “chicken-legged little baby” at the age of twelve. I would have said something, maybe rubbing more salt into the wound, if I could.
I imagined what it would have been like to speak to my family, unfiltered and unbound by the language barrier. Something besides the “Hello”, “Thanks”, and “Sorry, repeat that?”. I thought of what my grandparents would think of the person that I actually was. I wasn’t really “a little pink sweetie” as they had talked about when they eventually shifted their storytelling to my birth. Both of my avos happened to be visiting Stateside during my birth, and, apparently, I had popped out with the pinkest little face, all frustrated and wailing. They always seemed to leave out the part of the story where my mom was at home when she suddenly started bleeding heavily, and she sobbed as she believed she would have a miscarriage, and my vovô didn’t know the way to the closest hospital, so he accidentally drove in the wrong direction for 30 minutes. I wondered if I should bring up how I almost drowned before I was born.
I just stuffed more underseasoned black beans into my mouth instead.
….
I stepped out of the house, away from the porch light that attracted insects like a magnet. I would be eaten alive by quarter-sized mosquitoes regardless, but I could almost pretend to be safe just a few paces to the right. Breathing was hard with the thick air, moisture crawling down my throat with each inhale. I could smell the bitterness –just a hint of the earth trying to get into the air– and I knew tomorrow there would be a downpour so heavy that we would be stranded on the island that was the house. We were uphill, at least.
The night shrieked around me. The animals were ecstatic –or maybe horrified– about the prospect of rain. The frogs didn’t croak, they bellowed. The cicadas didn’t buzz; they yelled. When the bats clicked overhead, I could hear the desperation in each microsecond-long call. A few years ago, I tried to point out the high-pitched bat calls to my mom, but she couldn’t hear them. She said she was too old, and that one day, I too would stop hearing the clicks of the bat. I didn’t believe her, though, not with the calamity of the earth awaiting its yearly apocalyptic flood. Every creature gave its two cents to the abyss that was the overcast sky.
I had the weirdest thought just then. I suddenly remembered when my dad told me that the sperm whale was the loudest animal on earth– that it had a call louder than a jet engine, so powerful that it could cause enough tissue damage to kill you. Standing outside, I wondered if whoever discovered that fact had heard the sound from the largest aquatic animal on earth– the Brazilian countryside: a being with a call so loud it could swallow you whole.
…..
The room that Luiz and I shared in the house was completely white, save for the specks of mold growing in the corners or the odd lizard that managed to cling to the walls and run from our flip-flops when we tried to exterminate them. There were two twin beds– both of which were as hard as a rock. There was one window in the whole room. It could be completely blacked out, and the bedroom would get so dark that we would end up sleeping in until late afternoon if we weren’t woken up, hard beds be damned.
The first prophetic drop of rain for the yearly ritual had fallen earlier that day as the clouds covered the sun. By mid-noon, it was pouring outside, so thick that the taste of aerosolized gasoline burned on my tongue when I opened the window to our room, and I had to slam it shut. It was unfortunate that there was no airflow because, after years of termites eating the bed frame, Luiz’s bed broke the moment he sat on it. Our entire bedroom was suddenly filled with the foul stench of rotting wood.
The rain was a warning and a threat all in one. I almost laughed when the lights flickered.
Once, twice. Out.
In the beginning, there was always darkness.
……
By the third day of straight downpour, I was starting to wonder if we should have built an arc, and if maybe this whole thing would end with a rainbow arching in the sky and some sort of otherworldly promise.
It was Sunday, the weirdest day of the week, as it consisted of both of my avós gathering around the TV and praying. My dad said that they were “the most devout Catholics to never go to church,” as every Sunday they played a live video of a local church broadcast and walked through every motion.
Staring at my vovô, frail and hunched over while kneeling on his thin prayer pillow, I felt pseudo-pain in my knees. His torso was wide and square, but his limbs hung off of him long and disproportionate. His knees hardly worked from an unhealed soccer injury and arthritis. He used to be a star player, by my mom’s account, but messed up his ankle, and instead of letting it heal properly, he kept playing. Eventually, the injury took away most of his ability to walk. I could see the grit that pulled him along in his life. It was probably the same grit that he taught my mom, a determination so great that it put her on a nine-hour flight away from her parents. But the toughness warped him, making his legs wobbly and weak.
My vovó was to his right, though she smartly chose to sit in a chair. She was plump, someone who gave the best hugs when I was younger, like a laughing pillow engulfing all of my sadness. It reminded me of when Luiz was little and would hug me tight, too young to be embarrassed about his older sister being his best friend. That dissolved when he went to junior high and decided that I was the epitome of a loser, which was undeniably true, but still left me feeling full of some unshakable grief. This feeling returned when I saw my vovó for the first time after my growth spurt at fourteen, as when my vovó tried to hug me, she no longer towered softly over me with her ever-persisting laughter. Maybe she had changed during the two or three years between our visits, like someone had taken my grandmother full of joy and softness and replaced her with this woman, still kind, but smaller somehow.
I eyed the rosary in my vovós hands. Rosaries were all around the house, the largest one being about as long as I am tall. It was made of light brown wooden beads the size of limes, and it was hanging in the hallway above at least fifty Mother Mary statues. The Mary’s were all different forms– from smaller than my palm to as big as my forearm. Some were pale, or, if they were Nossa Senhora Aparecida, they were dark-skinned with draping garments; some had a baby in their arms, others did not– but they were all the same woman in the end.
I watched my avós from the doorway, understanding the static of mass almost perfectly after my years of 8:00 AM gatherings back in Indiana. Translations weren’t hard when I knew the script. As I listened, I wondered whether both of them were physically present at my baptism, or if they only saw the photos afterward.
…….
By day four, I was convinced my dad was developing some sort of acute onset psychosis.
“It’s just water,” he said to my mom, “And it’s just a run.”
And when he set his mind to something, it was the end of the story. My mom shook her head, looking at the basket of fake fruit on the dining room table, the styrofoam apple having teeth marks from when Luiz tried to take a bite from it six years ago. Her eyebrows were pulled together like she didn’t approve, but I could see the quirk on her lip, as if she silently had an affinity for his antics. My vovó seemed to catch on to the wind jacket my dad was wearing, and she immediately started to lecture my mom.
“Rain —— dangerous —— grippe—— white boy!”
“I will not get grippe. Safe!” My dad replied in heavily broken Portuguese to his mother-in-law and ran out the creaky door. Outside, the sidewalk was raised about a foot off the ground, just high enough to be above the flowing river that used to be a street.
“Oh, Saint Rita!”
………
My dad, in fact, did not contract grippe during his run, but did come back with about ten little mangos wrapped in his shirt like baby Jesus.
“I saw them floating down the street!”
My mom stood in front of her husband, crossed arms and face full of that faux disappointment from earlier, except she failed miserably not to smile at the small pile of fruit he dropped on the floor.
My brother and I immediately got to work with the mangos, peeling off their thick skin and cutting out the seed from the center. It was the perfect sweet and tangy flavor, the texture smooth and firm. I paid no mind to the fact that the mangos were floating down in dirty flood water or the mess of juice that I was making on the table and my hands. When I finished my carnage of three mangos, I went to the sink to wet a paper towel and clean up. When I pushed the knob, nothing came out of the spout.
……….
“It’s finished,” my vovô said.
“Finished?” Luiz repeated.
Apparently, with all the water pouring down outside, we were somehow out of water. No sinks, no showers, no toilets.
I frowned at my sticky hands that started to smell like sour mangos.
“Finished,” my vovô nodded, unbothered as he reattached the dustpan to the broom.
He had just finished beating a bat to death with a broom upstairs after one had sought refuge from the storm when Luiz explained the sink wasn’t working.
I remember my vovô beating a frog with the same broom years ago. We had arrived from the airport and opened the shower curtain to find a small, bright green frog sitting in the middle of it. It had enormous black eyes and an innocent face– it was just some thoughtless frog. Luiz insisted that we name it, but I screamed when I saw it, loud enough that my vovô wandered over with his broom. He saw the big-eyed creature, brought his broom up carefully, and suddenly whacked it.
Once, twice. Out.
He gingerly picked it up by the leg and dropped it into the toilet before flushing it. When he looked at my face with sheer horror, he smiled and said, “It’s just sleeping”.
My mom interrupted my thoughts of the long-dead frog when she came in after cleaning up the puddles my dad left on the floor. She let out a sigh of genuine disappointment at the news of the water.
“Good thing we have enough water bottles to survive the end of the world,” she said.
I wondered if we did.
……….
On the seventh day, the rain stopped.
………..
When we returned home to Indiana, I joined the math club after one of my friends talked me into it. I helped Luiz write his final project for English, a book report on To Kill a Mockingbird. My parents went back to work. My bed didn’t break when I sat on it, there were never any bats, frogs, or lizards in my room, and water always came out of the spout when you turned the faucet handle.
If anyone noticed that I didn’t leave the house when it rained, they never mentioned it.
…………
I was being swallowed alive by a sperm whale, my breath escaping me. My bones snapped in my chest when the creature’s throat contracted. I could not scream or speak. I could not breathe.
I was going to die being compressed into nothingness.
When I woke from the nightmare, it was dark and stuffy in my room, but still not dark like my room in Brazil. I still felt the compression, memory and imagination blending together into something unrecognizable. Rain pounded on the roof, and I let myself listen to the whisper of the pattering. No matter how many breaths I took, the humidity and heat continued to weigh on my chest. Every inhale was laborious, like I was running away from something as fast as I could.
I still wasn’t going to open the window.
Sitting there in my soft sheets, it was one of those rare occasions when I thought about the drive back to the airport from my avós’ house. The favela we passed had turned into a pond, completely invisible in the murky depths. It reminded me so much of the myth of Atlantis, a city suddenly lost to water. As we were all peering out the window, I suddenly grabbed Luiz’s face and shoved him down. Luiz protested and fought, trying to pry away my hands and lift his head, but I remained as still as a statue. I stared out into the water, my heart stuttered with the beat as my mind finally caught up to what I was seeing. There was only one small disturbance in the still water, small ripples originating from something floating on the surface. Off the coast, a neon orange Adidas shirt clung to a bobbing back.
Livia Ford is a Brazilian-American Chemistry major from the Midwest. When she’s not in the lab, she enjoys indulging in far too much coffee and going on runs. This piece was partially inspired by her irrational fear of whales.
