Vista Chinesa by Tatiana Salem Levy

Author:Tatiana Salem Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000, FIC089000, FIC044000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

I was born strange, a very ugly baby. As I grew, I became ungainly and buck-toothed, and my parents decided that I’d have to get braces. Back then, everyone who wore braces was teased at school. To make things worse, I was the only one with braces attached to headgear, and that was how my purgatory began. On the dance floors of teen discos in Rio’s South Zone, I was the one nobody asked to dance. I’d dance with a broom — literally with a broom. Sometimes I’d be saved by Rafael Augusto, a boy with a heart problem whose lips and fingernails were always purple as a result. He suffered from the same problem as me, being different from everyone else at an age in which difference is anything but an advantage. Dyslexic, with headgear, and chubby, I felt like the worst of all creatures.

One sunny day, we were both in front of the school when three boys a year above us came and made fun of us, the cadaver and the donkey. Oh, what a cute couple, oh, woo-hoo, their guffaws coming through the gate. Rafael Augusto and I were tongue-tied, used to the joke, but tongue-tied. Other students going in, the gate closing, 7.40 a.m. Aren’t you going in? No. What are you going to do? Want to go to the beach?

Rafael Augusto and I on the 583 bus on a Wednesday morning, backpacks on our laps, the silence, Rio’s South Zone passing in the window, Laranjeiras, Botafogo, Humaitá, Jardim Botânico, Gávea, Leblon, Ipanema. We got off the bus and walked almost without speaking, only making a comment now and then about our maths and geography teachers.

The beach was empty, with just a few surfers in the water. I had a jumper tied around my waist, and that was what I sat on, my feet bare. Shyness raised a wall between us. I remember thinking that no one could see us there, no one could know I’d skipped class to go to the beach with him, the boy with a heart problem whose lips and fingernails were always purple as a result.

Rafael Augusto stood up and took off his T-shirt, his weak, curved body moving away, the sun beating on his back. When he saw me beside him with my school clothes drenched, he said I was crazy. How was I going to go home? I shrugged and sank underwater. The water was calm, the temperature perfect, and I didn’t want to think about the future. I hadn’t even remembered to leave my headgear in my backpack. I can still hear Rafael Augusto’s voice saying, Take it off. And me holding the gear, swinging it back and forth, with a childish smile.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, my body was enveloped by a big wave, and my hair was full of sand. Where was the headgear? Another big wave. I dived under, quickly, my hand reaching for his under the water until I found it; this time, a deep dive, and the wave breaking above our bodies without dragging us along.

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