The Lift

21 June 2010, San Paulo do Brazil



Aoife hears the 'ding' of the lift when she is already setting off for the stairs. For a split of second she freezes; she thinks to go back, but she would feel like a fool. So she keeps going.
There you go. That one is the metaphor of her life: a life of choices taken late.

***

Leticia is staring at herself in front of the mirror. She has changed, in a definitive way as only pictures can. Her foot is sore, and this time she decides to struggle with her claustrophobia getting the lift. She pushes ‘7’. The engine gives off a moaning whistle and starts to work. She recalls the nightmares that she had when she was a child of herself inside a lift. The car goes up, up, faster and faster, vertigo squeezes her stomach. Once at the top, the lift smashes the roof and Leticia is shot out from a terrifying height and she falls through the air. She flies like a bullet and gets crushed on the ground.
Then she wakes up, the anguish burning her chest.

After twenty years she figures out the reason for that dream. Memories come to the surface of when her father, belt in his hand, dragged her by her hair to the lift's door and threatened to lock her in the attic, in the darkness among insects, mice and ghosts.

The lift stops at her floor. She hears the 'ding'. It's one of those old lifts with the two shutters to be opened manually. She gives a last glimpse at herself in the opaque mirror and she feels almost horny for her own image. For what she is now but especially for what she is no longer. Finally she feels herself, and not the daughter-fiancé-bride-sister of somebody.

She opens the door of her apartment, takes off her combat boots, her fishnet stockings, and decides to celebrate with a beer. Today she succeeded to take away the paternal authority from that horrible man that used to hit Maria, an eight year old child. This is her first victory. This strengthens her to carry on her fight. She turns on her laptop and opens the big files on the coffee table. It is midnight but she won't go to sleep, she will work on the new cases. Midnight, time of ghosts and vampires. It's her time, because she is a vampire-woman.


One month ago, Easter 2010, Ireland

Aoife fancies driving away from Dublin, along to the Irish countryside. Maybe because the landscape, monotonous blankets of green meadow dotted with peaceful sheep and cows, reflects her mood.
Her husband is absorbed in a sports magazine, her daughter asleep on the rear seat. Aoife is looking at her from the rear-view mirror. She has the same features as herself, the same green eyes under her closed eyelids.
Now I could start again. I still have some contacts, I have a curriculum with a movie released in Europe, few theatre participations and- she moves her gaze from her daughter to herself - I don't have any wrinkles yet.
I could start from where I left off six years ago. But this time it must be me to decide. I want to restart to be an actress. I do want to decide to be an actress, time can't decide on my behalf anymore.
She didn't regret the choice, she loves her daughter Suzanne; but she hates the fact that she had been in doubt between her career and the baby, and in the end it was too late to have an abortion and she let herself be dragged from the flow of events.
She honks. Her mother goes out to open the wooden gate, she waves her hand. The car slowly rolls and stops between the house and the roses bushes. Her father, uncle and aunt showed up. It's all kisses and hugs.
Placed on the table there are: Guinness beef pie, mash potatoes, beans, Farofa, Mandioca; to drink: Cachaca and beer; a mixture of Irish and Brazilian cuisines. Every year her mother chooses the same menu for Easter.
And Aoife loves it. She likes the rough wooden table. She likes sitting on the ragged armchair; victim of Charlie. After lunch, usually, Charlie bounces on her legs and starts to purr. She likes the scent of wax and old that comes from the furniture, she likes that picture of her mother when she was young. Every time she holds it in her hand and she stares at it, she wold like to dive inside the pictures, and surface in the moment when the pictures had been shot, looking at the photographer and her mother posing.



June 2010, San Paulo, Brazil


In the post office the clerk stays a few seconds open-mouthed. She is staring at her. Leticia knows it. She doesn't get offended. Every day is a different day: every contact, every glimpse brings something unpredictable, exciting, alive. The clerk asks to Leticia how she can help her. Leticia inquires for some stamps. The clerk takes the stamps and look at them, counting them, slowly from behind her glasses, scrutinising both the stamps and Leticia's features:
little stars tattooed over her whole face; earlobes pierced by thick rings; the piercings above and under her lips; the hair shaved and long like creepers; the eyes like a cat. The clerk adjusts her gaze to reside totally on Leticia and claims: “It is 50 Reals in total.” And above all the clerk is staring at those two bulges on Leticia's forehead, those two horns under her skin. Leticia pays, and thanks the clerk. She smiles showing two very long teeth. Vampire's teeth, the clerk is thinking. She keeps going to think even once Leticia has left, that scary face still in front of her own, that rare kindness in her voice.

Leticia goes out in the hot-oven of the city, her combat boots sinking in the buttery asphalt. She hops onto the bus, which gets stuck in the traffic jam of downtown almost immediately. It's like an anthropological analysis, she notices. When she is among people, she always finds: the dude that peers at her from behind the newspaper, the woman that elbows her friend, the dull face that stares at her shamelessly, the scared glimpses and the murmurings.
She crosses the centre of San Paulo and gets the Court to solve some practical issues. The chauvinist Brazilian law thrusts a stick in the spokes of her wheels to slow down the action of her association against child abuses.
But Leticia, thanks to her image and Internet, is so popular worldwide by now that it wouldn't be convenient to play off against her. Every insult would be amplified by the Net.
In the court the policeman let her in without scanning her by the metal detector. That would start to sound crazy because of the iron that Leticia has above and under her skin.



Easter, Wexford, Ireland, 2010

Aoife is washing up while Suzanne is playing in the garden with her grandparents and her uncle and aunts. While she is rinsing the dishes, she scans the house with her eyes; the house is so different from the cosy and modern apartment in Dublin.
She wouldn't know what to choose, if she had been forced. What she would have been disposed to renounce? Living far away from here in the bustling city, with her Jacuzzi, the modern design of her furniture? Or at this countryside house that smells of wax, the fireplace, the creaking timber floor, the big kitchen with the ceramic sink, the brassy tap, and the wrought iron stairs that lead to the garden?

She's finished washing up. She lightly touches the picture of her mother, the bronze teapot, the book on the shelf. She opens the drawer plenty of odds and ends. This drawer is the drawer of indecision, that's why I like it. It's the limbo of the objects that used to play a role, now discharged, but we are not able to throw away.
She takes the black and white picture of her mother, depicting her when she was very young. She looks at it closely; she is mesmerised at how the flow of everyday life could be frosted, archived, and be available for our eyes. Photography is like witchcraft, she is murmuring.
After about ten minutes she is gazing the picture, she doesn't recognize it anymore, like the chant of a word that loses its meaning. Her mother had never had that mole on her neck. Aoife is trembling a bit and the frame slips from her hands. The cabinet glass crashes. Aoife kneels down, takes the pictures, leaving the glasses fragments on the floor. She turns it. At the back of the picture there are written a name and a date. Leticia, 7 January 1997.


15 June, Rio de Janeiro

The most popular talk show of Globo TV wants to take advantage of Leticia's face to increase its audience. Leticia thinks it's a fair exchange: at the same time she would satisfy her egocentrism and enhance the popularity of her association. She flies to Rio.
The first tattoo on her neck depicts a windy horse with a date: 7 January 1997, the day when she came of age and she could leave her parents’ place without the police bringing her back. And then, she explains to the famous platinum blonde host, like a Way of the Cross, the description of the events she suffered, the punches and the kicks she got from her father.
Now she doesn't have one inch of clean skin anymore. Horns, devils, dragons, snakes, moons, crosses all adorn her skin. “And this, did it hurt?” Platinum Blonde asks, pointing at the two horns on Leticia's forehead. “Yes, it did. I wanted to focus on my pain, working on physical suffering to feel myself stronger, invulnerable: I had my skin opened and implant these two steel studs: it was the last surgery in order to become what I am now: a vampire.”
Leticia smiles showing two sharpened teeth. “Are those real?” “Yes, rebuilt but real.”
Then Leticia talks about the organisation for children’s rights, but it's clear that it's the part that is less interesting for Platinum Blonde, who is gesturing to the cameramen to zoom in on her cat-like, her eyelids with their piercings, the ring in the earlobe, the blood red lipstick the frames her savage teeth, her tattoo, her horns. Then she thanks her, she hugs her and announces the adverts.

***

A child is chasing a ball tossed by his little brother on the foreshore. The ball stops one metre from Leticia. It’s weird to look at a Vampire getting a suntan, but she is not an ordinary vampire. Leticia smiles, the black bodice is barely noticeable, getting confused among the pictures of her skin; it’s hard to understand how much she is undressed. The child looks at her sharpened teeth, the shining of the piercing on her superciliary arch: he makes a dash for it.

Lying down on the beaches of Rio, drinking a chilly beer under the beach umbrella, Leticia is thinking; “Who knows what kind of person will become of that scared child, if he will be conditioned even slightly from this chance encounter?”
So, even her story of domestic violence, the humiliations and the knocks gotten when she was child, looks strange from a different perspective. Not because of her decision to become a vampire, but necessary condition. Here’s what the meaning of the cross tattooed on her body is: the depiction of the pain, the death and the resurrection, the reincarnation and rebirth in her new life.




15 June 2010, San Paulo du Brazil


The lady at reception has stretched-out eyes like two big dewdrops; eyes like a clown. Even her voice is only apparently cheerful, as though she had to struggle for a smile. Her husband is staring the football match on the little TV lean on the shelf of the reception. The lady makes Aoife fill in the form, mixing her language with some tourist-English words. Aoife speaks, recalling some words of Portuguese. She doesn’t know how many nights she’s going to stay. She pays for 7 nights in advance and says goodbye. Then she climbs the stairs and she finds her room. She opens the door. The fatigue of the trip and the jet-lag are climbing up her neck like a big insect. She throws herself onto the bed. The sheets are white and clean but coarse like cardboard; the ceiling emanates an unmerciful neon light, a hospital light. Even the washing basin reminds her of a hospital. As soon as she lay down she is squashed by an endless sadness. From the window comes screams of men and women, not coherent words. She stretches out her arm and takes her trolley. She unzips and takes out the photo. She looks at it, for the thousandth time, but this time is as if it was the first. Her sister’s features are identical to her mother’s but for that heart-shaped mole; the sharp nose, the tall forehead, the languishing eyes. “How do you feel about having a sister?” She is wondering. How would her life have been? Playing together, confiding their secrets, making jokes to mom and dad, introducing their boyfriends, asking for advice. Her fantasies are deduced, a combination of stories told by some friends, movies seen, books read, scripts learned by heart.
But what bewilders her the most is to know that her mother has another daughter; a daughter that could be herself but she’s not, a daughter that can be similar or different, a daughter that suddenly despoils her of her uniqueness. She feels betrayed and jealous at the same time. “I hide everything you to protect you, you don’t understand?” Her mother shouted, crying. Her words rolled down from her mouth shattering on the floor like fragments of crockery. Aoife couldn’t believe it. The crying and the screams summoned everybody back into the living room. You could breathe in the air something apocalyptic. Then Aoife jumped into the car, her husband on her right in a desperate attempt to console her, Suzanne speechless on the rear seat with big and watery eyes. This time the Irish landscape rose up a hysterical anger; all that immobility, that apparent serenity. She felt she has been teased. ‘Fuck’, she shouted to her husband who was caressing her hair. Even her husband had always treated her like a fool, naive: he didn’t think that she should suffer for the abortion; he didn’t think she could run some risks for her actress career. Enough! She can’t stand anymore that bell jar.
She looks at the pictures of her sister, that heart-shaped mole. And she imagines, as usual, diving into that picture and to surface where it was taken: Brazil. She had just a vague idea where that place was. And now, without any protection, she really found herself in Brazil to seek her sister.



20 June, sky between Rio and San Paulo du Brazil

Leticia requests a beer from the flight attendant. She takes off her combat boots and closes her eyes, listening to Beethoven from her iPod. She is looking forward to playing the drums in her experimental orchestra. The rhythm that rumbles in her veins like a heartbeat, the energy she sucks like oxygen. “I am sorry.” The children she is defending and the art she nurtures have something in common, she thinks: they are both born from pains of women. “I am sorry.” She feels like a superhero into her vampire skin, generous, strong. “I am sorry.” Leticia opens her eyes. The man sat beside her asks to let him go to toilet. Leticia stands up. The man, once up, opens the overhead locker let a heavy little bag fall on the bare foot of Leticia. For a second, everything fades away. A shooting and dull pain is crossing her like an electric shock from the tip of her toes to her neck. The man ladles out his apologies but she can’t hear him, she’s astounded. Suddenly she feels lost, vulnerable for this ache different and unpredictable. She feels sad, naked, and lonely, she gets nostalgic of a place she’s never been to.




20 June 2010, San Paulo du Brazil


She hates the odour of sweaty iron that emanates from the bus in this infernal hot city. While she is walking, she covers her mouth with a tissue to not breathe the bad smell of burst tyre; the horizon reflects flickering tongues of light coming from the burning and soft asphalt.
The policeman makes her wait for a colleague who speaks English. When he arrives, he takes the picture of Aoife’s sister, writes down her personal details and says: “We will let you know”, with that Portuguese accent with long vowels.
While he speaks, his gaze always is focused on Aoife’s décolleté. She thanks and leaves, with the feeling that the first stop was absolutely useless. She printed hundreds of photocopies with her sister’s picture and her details. She is hanging them everywhere. Sometimes she gets in some shops asking if she can leave the picture on the window, with those few Portuguese sentences learned by heart.
The majority of people she meets are gentle, they smile at her and then they start to ask some questions she can’t understand. She’s hanging around downtown. She wanders into a postal office. She can see the employee is free. She asks to her, showing the picture, if she had never seen that girl. The employee thinks for a while, instants that swell Aoife’s vague hope. Then she shakes her head; “I’m sorry.”


Aoife’s mouth contracts in a frown. She asks if she can hang the picture. “Yes, sure.” When Aoife leaves, the employee looks again at that picture on the noticeboard. That gaze, sweet and restless, she had already been seen somewhere.



{{center}u}***



Aoife is in a queue in a bar to get a coffee and a croissant. A week of unfruitful research is over. She got into thousands of shops, offices, malls, post offices; she asked anybody, strangers, caretakers. She hung around different areas of the city, some of them permeated with a pure, dangerous smell.
She came back to the police station and found the same policeman who told her to return in two days, “We are waiting for an official answer from the central office.”
While she is deciding if she wants a coffee or cappuccino, her mobile rings. It’s her husband. “Your mother is seriously sick, and you have to come back immediately.” The tears start to glide on her face silently and involuntarily. People are staring at her, a guy is handing a tissue. Her mother is maybe dying and she is queuing in a bar in Brazil. Her crying becomes a flooded engine. She goes out and runs away. She enters in the first travel agency and buys a flight ticket for the next day.



21 June, San Paulo du Brazil


Before her return flight to Ireland, Aoife has few spare hours. She had come back hopeless into the police station, only because it was on the way. She found a photo, a name and an address. She couldn’t believe it. And, according to the policeman, she is a notorious person in Brazil. But she changed her name… and not only the name. Aoife observers the picture she hold in her hand. Obviously that woman was not her sister, they were mistaken. That one is a monster. Her sister – she hands again the picture to the cop – is a beautiful girl. Yes, but that was before, years ago. Now her sister Leticia, Mrs Vampire, is this way.

A few hours later, Aoife is standing under the landing lights of the building where her sister Leticia lives. It’s 11PM; she has half an hour to kill before her flight. She stares at her watch like a sentenced prisoner. When another 20 minutes are over, she begins to stress out; she doesn’t know what to do. She thinks maybe she is arriving right now, a minute is not a big deal, she doesn’t want to lose everything just for one minute, she will tell to the taxi driver to rush.
The second hand flows, and she is wondering when the lost time would become
irretrievable, the taxi stuck in the traffic jam, the rush for the check in, the gate closed, the flight missed.
She looks at her watch: 23:29. She can’t wait anymore. She calls the lift. She hasn’t given up yet; the hope, until the very last moment, like an infant, the hope that Leticia is inside the lift. 23:30, after the time limit. She takes the stairs. Down half a flight of steps, she hears the ‘ding’ of the lift. She freezes, her heart bouncing in her chest. She thinks to go back, but she would feel stupid. So she continues down at breakneck speed, towards the rest of her life, far from her sister, that Destiny chose on behalf of her.