The galera (crowd) in Elisa's kitchen

The sun came out strongly for Christmas day in Rio, a beach day. Before I tell my story, please accept my warm wishes for the Christmas that was yesterday, for the many to come, and for the year 2008.

And here is the story:


This morning there were many people in my cousin Elisa’s kitchen.

The kitchen door separates two worlds at her apartment in Ipanema Beach. The apartment is part of a building that Brazilian real state business calls “of noble location,” Nascimento Silva Street, between the beach and the lagoon, Lagoa. People with money live here. Elisa lives here with her two young adult daughters, Paula and Joana. The apartment belongs to her former husband Paulo with whom she still has a very cordial relationship.

Elisa’s former husband was born in a family of Jewish immigrants who came to Brazil as ghetto refugees with a lot of education, scientific and business sense. They built their wealth through chemical products, construction, real state and other enterprises during the booming 1950’s. They were not religious. In fact, they wanted to be in a country where religion of origin was not an issue.

I had the pleasure to meet her husband’s mother, now deceased, a few years ago when I came to Rio for kidney surgery. She was a petite woman, very thin, always elegantly dressed, with impeccable taste and manners. Dona Janete had been educated in New York. Unfortunately, I do not know exactly where. I will ask her son next time I see him because I would not be surprised at all if she graduated from Juilliard. She was a pianist. Her family could afford to send her to study in New York.

There she met her future husband, a dashing—and poor—young Brazilian of Italian descent, Heitor Alimonda. He was studying to become a concert pianist and composer. Just thinking about the romance between these two Brazilians from opposite sides of the social class spectrum, loving each other passionately and deeply amidst concerts in Manhattan sends shrills through my spine. Yes, I heard it with my own two ears: she told me that the romance was hot, her family against it, but at the end they won.

I guess in a sense he won—he became a well-known figure in Brazilian classical concert rooms. She became a mother. Yes, she continued to play for pleasure, but she did not have a career as a concert pianist as intended. “I was not as good as he was,” she told me. (I did not believe her for one second, after years in Women’s Studies. But I nodded, said nothing.)

Yes, the marriage did not work, they parted ways later, he had affairs, then settled with another woman, and Dona Janete became a grand dame of Brazilian salons, receiving guests in her apartment, noted musicians from all over the world, a gracious and knowledgeable hostess. In her enormous apartment, in an even nobler location in Leblon’s Bartolomeu Mitre Avenue, she had a stellar international collection of works of art. I was there only once. I could not take my eyes from the walls and from the grand piano. A couple of young musicians from Italy were staying there for the month.

But that was a while ago. She is now gone, the apartment rented to someone who can afford its luxury. My cousin Elisa got to house some of the art, at least temporarily.

It is at Elisa’s that I found myself this morning waking up early. The apartment was quiet. Joana had stayed at her boyfriend’s. Paula had wandered in her room (where I was sleeping) half way through the night, surprised to find me, who she still considers her other “mother,” in her bed. I told her mom had made the arrangement for me to sleep there. Elisa herself was getting ready to go to a party around 11 p.m. when I was going to sleep after the daily dosage of TV Globo soap opera (more about this another time.) I did not see Elisa return from the party or even if she did return. The two dogs, Phoebe (named after the Friends’ character) and Zuca, had barked only when Paula came in.

So, it was a quiet morning after a night of revels. They like to sleep late anyway and they had all the right reasons to stay in bed. I had to go back to my dad’s home.

I opened the kitchen door and closed it behind me. Water was boiling on the stove. “Good morning, Dona Tania!” We walked toward each other and embraced as if we were good friends. “Valdineia!” I saluted one of the maids, “I love your hair!” Valdineia looked like one of the Black dolls from when I was a child, with her hair tied in knots all over her head. “How’s life?”

Valdineia proceeded to tell me that life is good. She is adept of ballroom dancing, she tells me at once, the secret of happiness. I told her of my experience with Rodrigo, the dance teacher and partner my sister “rented” a couple of years ago to go out dancing with us. “I could not follow his directions, I bombed, one-two, one-two, he goes to one side and I in opposite direction, a shame!”

“That’s only in the beginning,” Valdineia reassured me explaining that one has to keep dancing, “So I learned! I only dance with the teacher, though. If I do something wrong, he corrects me.”

“Where do you go dancing?” I ask. “Tiradentes square. I went two years in a row to Estudantina,” Valdineia responded mentioning this nightclub I had never attended during my well behaved Catholic girl youth but I certainly knew about it, “the” place to go dancing. This very moment I felt like dancing with a good feet shorter than I, very spunky Valdineia right there in front of the stove. But she was making the morning coffee, I was afraid of interrupting her with a samba.

She boiled water in two different containers. She poured one in the thermos that she had carefully washed. She used the second container to pour water through the filter filled with Mellita coffee, just oh, so good, robust, aromatic. She discarded the water from the thermos in the kitchen sink and filled it with the strong, rich golden brown liquid. “Would you accept a cafezinho, Dona Tania?” she asked, gently, setting the delicate white china demi tasse cup on top of the small kitchen table. “But of course.” I accepted what its called “petite coffee” here, eagerly. She poured my first one (and typically it is enough of a caffeine jolt) and I continue to pump the gold after I finished two, three, drinking coffee like an American. “No sugar or artificial sweeter?” she asked me horrified at the thought of drinking coffee straight. “No way!”

Valdineia goes back to work in the kitchen and I look at the headlines on the fresh newspaper, named O Globo also, same powerful media group, set on the table. Not for long. There comes Tania, maid number two and first maid; actually, Tania is the dona da cozinha,“owner” of the kitchen, the cook, and decider. Tania looks thinner than when I saw her last year. She came in wearing tight exercise pants and a t-shirt. Her skin is a coffee-and-milk shade, she wears long straight black hair down her back and a beautiful smile. She got rid of an abusive drunken husband.

Tania asked me how I was, when had I arrived, and prepared to drink coffee and milk in a large cup. Valdineia joined her for breakfast. They both ate toast--torrada—with creamy cheese, and chatted about how they really want to save money to come visit me in the U.S., asking about ticket prices.

Then Senhor Sebastião came in. Almost 70, he is Elisa’s chauffer. She inherited his services when Dona Janete passed away. Mr. Sebastião had been Janete’s chauffer almost all her life. “I knew her son, Dona Elisa’s husband, since he was a young boy!” Sebastião had immigrated as a young man from the Northeast and was able to create a good life for himself and for the family he created in the South. He is extraordinarily faithful to my cousin and to her two daughters, especially Paula, who has all the spunk in the world. He has already had breakfast at home, so he did not join the crowd but sat nearby.

A few minutes later there comes in the building’s porter. Also from the Northeast, the man was a veritable Hulk. He does not want any coffee. He walked in to step immediately on the scale that I had not noticed on the floor just beside the stove (Tania begged for years to get this new good stove to work) “Eighty-five kilos, he said, I need to lose ten more!” (And I think, “Me too”, already overtaken by the carioca’s obsession for slim figures and perfect bodies, amply advertised on the beaches and on TV stars… ) I touch his arm and comment, “Forty kilos each bicep here, do you lift weights?” He looked proud for me noticing the giants, and replied, “Not anymore, at my age…” “No age!” I said right back, “I am almost seventy like Sebastião” and laught. I don’t believe him, I half believe him… He then pointed to Tania’s skinny arms, no tone, dangling flaccid skin, and tells her to malhar, a verb that means to exercise but more than that, to work really, really, really hard at something. Whoever can say, I malho, is a human being proud of themselves.

I say goodbye to the animated friendly group. I am ready to leave. Mr. Sebastião says he is going to take Paula to work shortly. “She should be at work now!” I say. “She sleeps until one minute before she needs to go, and I take her.” But Paula today is going to sleep late and Elisa managed from bed to tell her chauffer to take me to the Metro station. I am happy to get the ride.

We leave Valdineia and Tania to domestic work. The two men and I take the elevator to the garage. My cousin and her daughter sleep away the tiredness of the late partying on the side of the apartment that the kitchen door keeps quiet, free from the noises of pots and pans and the smells of good coffee and black beans cooking on the stove.