I listened to your feet pat against the shower tiles. The words, useful, Marta, useful, Marta, spun in my mind, until all I could hear were sounds with no meaning.
For days I would sit in the kitchen over the course of an afternoon, reading, eating, sorting through papers, while Marta washed dishes, cooked, ironed, swept. You said she and I needed to spend more time together, and so that’s what I set out to do. I tried to lure her into conversation with different entry points. I asked her opinion on Portuguese versus English, if she spent any free time in São Paulo, what her hometown was like. She answered me thoughtfully (it depended on what she was trying to express; she liked to go for walks through Ibirapuera; Atibaia was a humble town in the mountains), but these questions did not hook her for long. She was always concentrated on the pot she stirred, the shirt she folded, the dish she washed. She didn’t do these tasks absentmindedly. I could see that there was an energy behind her brown eyes, the careful lines that formed at the corners of her lids and across her forehead, the way she held on to her hip with one hand. Marta retreated into a deep meditation as she cleaned and cooked; in an instant, as if by magic, she blocked all exterior noises and clamor to form a quiet, solitary bubble inside her mind. Occasionally she would ask me a question over her shoulder: How much coffee do you want? Will you eat dinner at home tonight? Who does this shirt belong to? I would respond, and then she would return to the inside. There wasn’t much room for me.
It crossed my mind that maybe I should leave her alone. I could stay on one side of the apartment, she on the other. But even when we were separated, my thoughts would tiptoe out of my ear, through the kitchen, and next to her. What was she doing? Folding? Washing? What was she thinking about? I wondered if she wondered about me. Or did I escape her memory as soon as she walked out the door?
I read every travel brochure discarded in drawers around the apartment. I went for walks down Avenida Paulista, stopped at street vendors, and circled around sidewalk performances. I saw art exhibitions at MASP and Pinacoteca. I tasted strawberries at outdoor markets and photographed Beco do Batman graffiti murals. I spent several afternoons lounging on a blanket in Ibirapuera, watching a group of boys practice soccer, or trying to read a book, but I would glaze over the pages, wondering what you were teaching that day or what Marta was doing at the apartment. I saw every tourist site in a ten-mile radius, until I realized that experiencing São Paulo alone, guided by old tourism pamphlets, felt like observing the city through backward binoculars, distant and warped. Each day I tried to feel a part of the world around me, but more and more I felt like I had jumped into a well when I wanted to swim in the ocean. I wanted to feel involved, surrounded, woven through. At the very least, I wanted to have a small sense of purpose when I woke up in the morning.
And so I concocted a plan, whereby Marta and I would have separate but equal shares of the apartment duties. She would have hers, and I would have mine. I decided to run this idea by her while she was brushing her teeth at the laundry room sink, using the bamboo toothbrush she kept in her apron.
“Marta, how would you feel if we divided the cleaning and cooking?” I asked.
She responded inaudibly, her mouth full of toothpaste, and nodded, so I took that as an indication that I should show her what I meant, though somewhere in my mind I knew that I had purposefully asked her at a time when she couldn’t really answer.
When I heard Marta close the door to her room, I went and found a large sheet of grid paper underneath the bureau. I drew a map. A large square in the middle for the living room. Below the living room, a smaller rectangle for the kitchen, and below that another square for the laundry room and Marta’s room. To the right side of the living room I sketched a Tetris snake hallway with two small squares for the bathroom and bedroom. HOME I wrote in big bubble letters at the top, then scribbled over and rewrote, OUR HOME, and then, even better, OUR TEMPORARY HOME. I drew little pictures to represent the chores that belonged in each room and circled the ones that belonged to me. Marta’s chores I enclosed with a square. I drew a circle around the spider plants in the living room and kitchen. I put a box around the dishes. The bathroom too—I carved a large box around the bathroom box, and circled the chicken and apple in the kitchen and wrote “Linda—Lunch.” I would cook again.
That’s all to say, the map looked quite beautiful by the time I’d finished, but Marta was not pleased.
“Why am I square?” She stood over me while I sat at the kitchen table. She had just come back out of her room wearing a denim dress with a white lace trim.
“I was already circle,” I told her. “So I made you square.”
She seemed apprehensive—hands on her hips, clucking her tongue—and so I explained what each picture symbolized and how we could schedule the chores around different rectangles and squares. As I spoke, she took a damp sponge from the sink and began to scrub a few stray ink marks I had left on the table.
“Does that make sense?” I asked, and she nodded, but I sensed she wasn’t paying attention. Once I finished, she went straight to the laundry room to hang her clothes and fold ours.
I hurried after her.
“Marta,” I said, and pointed to the blue shirt I’d drawn with the circle around it. “I can do the laundry.”
She had my underwear in her hands, a particularly ugly pair that was faded and worn, which she finished folding and then faced me, her eyebrows pointed.
“You want to fold the laundry?” She had one hand on the pile of clothing.
“Yes,” I said and pointed again to the map.
Marta brushed past me and into the kitchen.
“Okay,” she said. “Then can I do the dishes?” But before I could answer I heard the faucet squeal.
I had entered a fight over territory without realizing that Marta ruled the universe. The apartment had never been mine for the taking. I left the map out on the kitchen counter every night before bed so that Marta would see it as soon as she arrived in the morning. She didn’t offer it a glance or a touch. And why would she? Her routines were hardwired into the floorboards, the rafters, the walls. There was no use in trying to make my own. She had been there long before us, and she would be there long after. Some days I would remind her about the division of labor I had proposed, like an old tired song bellowing from the jukebox, and she would politely nod and smile as though it were the first time she’d heard it. Then she would proceed to clean and cook faster than I could keep up.
“I think it would be good for you to go outside,” you said and pulled some money out of your wallet. “Breathe some fresh air.”
“I’ve been outside,” I said, splayed on the bed. “There’s nothing left for me out there.”
“How about lunch?” You threw the money next to me. “Take yourself out.”