WHEN IN 1991 RICHARD turned up for the first day of his new job at New York University, Horacio Amado-Castro was amazed at his transformation. When he had met him at the airport only a few days earlier he had been a disheveled, incoherent drunk, and Horacio regretted inviting him to be part of the faculty. He had admired him when they were both students and young professionals, but that was years earlier and since then Richard had fallen very low. The death of his two children had wounded his soul, as it had Anita’s. He guessed they would eventually separate: few couples survived the death of one child, and they had lost two. As if that were not tragedy enough, Richard had been the cause of Bibi’s death. Horacio found it impossible to begin to imagine the guilt Richard must have felt; if anything similar happened to one of his own children, he would have preferred to die. He was afraid Richard would be unable to take up his academic post, and yet there he was, looking impeccable, freshly shaved and with hair recently cut, and wearing a smart summer suit and tie. His breath did smell of alcohol, but the effects of alcohol were not obvious from his behavior or his ideas. He was appreciated from the very first day.
Richard and Anita moved into an eleventh-floor apartment for faculty members in University Village. It was small but adequate, with functional furniture and in a very convenient location, as Richard could walk to his office in ten minutes. When they arrived, Anita crossed the threshold with the same automaton-like demeanor she had had for several months. She sat at the window and stared out at the tiny corner of sky she could see among the surrounding tall buildings, while her husband unloaded, unpacked, and made a list of provisions to shop for. This set the tone for the brief length of time they lived together in New York.
“They warned me, Lucia. Anita’s family and her psychiatrist in Brazil warned me. How could I not see how fragile she was? She was destroyed by the loss of the children.”
“It was an accident, Richard.”
“No. I had spent the night partying and arrived befuddled by sex, cocaine, and alcohol. It wasn’t an accident, it was a crime. And Anita knew it. She began to hate me. She wouldn’t let me touch her. By bringing her to New York I separated her from her family and her country. In the United States she was adrift: she didn’t know anyone or speak the language, and she was far apart from me, the only person who might have helped her. I failed her in every sense. I didn’t think of her, only of myself. I wanted to leave Brazil, to escape the Farinha family, to embark on a professional career I had postponed too long. By the age I was then, I should have been an associate professor. I began very late and wanted to catch up. I was going to study, teach, and above all, publish. From the outset I knew I had discovered the perfect place for me, but while I was parading around the university rooms and corridors, Anita was spending the whole day sitting silently at the window.”
“Was she seeing a psychiatrist?”
“That was available. Horacio’s wife offered to accompany her and help her with the insurance bureaucracy, but Anita refused to go.”
“So what did you do?”
“Nothing. I was caught up in my own world. I even played squash to stay fit. Anita stayed cooped up in the apartment. I have no idea what she did all day; she slept, I suppose. She didn’t even answer the phone. My father used to go and see her. He took her boxes of chocolates and tried to persuade her to go out for walks, but she wouldn’t even look him in the face. I think she detested him because he was my father. One weekend I came to this cabin with Horacio and left her alone in New York.”
“You were drinking a lot at the time,” Lucia concluded.
“A lot. I spent the evenings in a bar. I kept a bottle in my office drawer; no one suspected my glass contained gin or vodka rather than water. I would chew peppermints to conceal the smell on my breath. I thought it wasn’t noticeable, that I had the constitution of an ox for drinking—all alcoholics deceive themselves in the same way, Lucia. It was fall, and the small square outside our building was strewn with yellow leaves . . . ,” Richard whispered, his voice cracking.
“What happened, Richard?”
“A policeman came to inform us, because we never had a phone here in the cabin.”
Lucia waited a long while without interrupting Richard’s stifled sobs. She did not take her hand out of the sleeping bag to touch and comfort him; she understood there was no possible consolation for such memories. From rumors and comments by her colleagues at the university, she knew roughly what had happened to Anita; she suspected this was the first time Richard had talked about it. She was deeply moved at being the recipient of this harrowing disclosure, the witness to his purifying tears. She knew the strange healing power words had from what she had written and discussed concerning her brother Enrique’s fate—how important it was to share one’s pain and discover that others too had their fair share of it, that lives are often alike and feelings similar.
Thanks to the unfortunate Kathryn Brown, she and Richard had ventured far from their known and safe terrain, and as they did so they revealed who they really were. Their strange adventure was creating a mysterious bond between them. Lucia closed her eyes and tried to reach Richard with her thoughts. She put all her energy into crossing the few inches between them to enfold him in her compassion, as she had done so often with her mother in her dying days to lessen her anxiety, and her own.