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  Rosa Imaculada received a new heart and survived it.

  Rosa Imaculada also received much more than a new heart, and that she did not survive.

  But now Rosa rocks Ulrike in her lap like a rocking chair on a spring, lost in entirely other thoughts. What lovely things Thereza had done with the five hundred thousand reais her son had left her through the medium!

  The gall of bitterness wells within Rosa. If she had found half a million reais in her sheets, she wouldn’t be in this fix right now, that was for sure. She would be at home with her son and grandmother, recovering from major surgery, and she wouldn’t have had to worry for a moment about her income. She would have been able to recover in peace. The operation itself had gone remarkably well, and Rosa hadn’t suffered from any rejection symptoms. On the contrary: the new heart had pretended to become a seamless part of her. It hadn’t just taken the place of the removed heart, it had taken over everything. It began to pump strange thoughts into her body. And then things started happening. Bad things. Because of money problems.

  If Rosa Imaculada had had half a million reais, she never would have opened the door of her home to Estêvão Santoro again. She would have stood tall and in a resolute voice said, “Enough. Dear Estêvão Santoro, my words are insufficient to say how grateful I am to you and your son Murilo, whose heart now beats in my chest. I can never express how sorry I am for his death and your loss. But dear, good Mr. Estêvão Santoro, now you must seek help for your sorrow elsewhere. I must focus on recovering and on my little son. These are the most important things in my life right now.”

  But Rosa Imaculada never said those words to Estêvão Santoro. She didn’t have half a million reais, so she opened the door of her home to this father who had lost his son. This father who was the grandson of a rubber baron and who was swimming in cash. She opened her door, and she opened it so many times that she lost count.

  If only she’d had money wrapped in a sheet . . .

  Because Ulrike has calmed down and because Rosa’s eyes have stopped glittering, Shlomith sees fit to open her mouth. Let Rosa tell her moving story about her heart now. She is clearly in an amenable mood. Let Rosa tell about her death and about Esteban Santiago, or whatever the man’s name was, the man whose name Rosa repeats in her fits of madness and who has clearly done her much evil.

  It is obvious that no matter what direction Rosa Imaculada’s story takes, she will become so thoroughly emotional about her own tale that calming her down will take the “rest of the day”. The thought of that feels, as theoretical as it is, somehow comforting, and comfort is what Shlomith longs for now more than anything else. In order to receive comfort herself, she is prepared to comfort her afterworldly sister as she convulses with no tears. In fact she practically longs for Rosa’s grief, which might go dry in time as well. Like tears, secretions, pain and ecstasy went dry. She waits with more anticipation for Rosa’s grief than for perhaps any of the scraps of story she has heard, which quite frankly she could never understand in the least. Even Nina didn’t understand Rosa’s stories, despite having practiced “a little fado” for her “own enjoyment” long ago (or so Nina claimed, although she would never agree to sing a single line for them). Rosa’s torrent of words only left behind snatches of detail that never joined together in any imaginable way, and two names which repeated persistently, little Davi and this Esteban or Eduardo, who, as Shlomith understands it, knocked at Rosa’s door over and over and who, of this Shlomith is more or less sure, bought something with his cold, hard cash that she didn’t ultimately want to sell to him.

  THE STORY OF THE HEART

  The heart located and working on the left side of Rosa Imaculada’s rib cage was, in principle, when viewed superficially, almost normal: two atria, two ventricles, valves, veins, arteries, and aorta. But it wasn’t an entirely normal heart, because for some unknown reason, the left ventricle began to expand, and the heart muscle couldn’t pump blood at its previous efficiency. That was where Rosa’s troubles started.

  The woman who surrounded the heart was at least as extraordinary as her recalcitrant organ. At first glance she too could have been almost anyone. She was not particularly striking or of sufficient visual caliber to attract many lingering stares, but she was also not insignificant. Definitely not that. Rosa was fleshy without being slack. Black hair plaited in innumerable small braids framed a face that had an undeniable lack of symmetry. Her nose was a little too large, and if you wanted big, you just had to look at her lips. Her ears and cheeks protruded sharply and crookedly, as if someone had shaped her face with a hatchet sharpened only on one side, perhaps during a cigarette break, ignoring the final sanding; Rosa’s cheeks also bore pockmarks. However, there were times when Rosa’s eyes sparkled with a wild, provocative glow of adventure in the offing, and in such moments those eyes might have been the only thing in the world.

  Rosa lived with her son, Davi, in a small house located on a mountainside in a favela of twenty thousand residents. Rosa’s grandmother lived upstairs, and in the last, most decrepit shack on the road lived blind old Gustavo with his three chickens. Then the street ended at a wall with a slope beyond so steep it was impossible to traverse. Unless you had the nimbleness and strength and courage of an acrobat. But the agile children of the neighborhood had grown big. These days they had other things to do than climb on the mountain. They had become quick, dexterous, and extremely perishable. Only a few of them returned from roaming out in the world, with hard faces and gold chains around their necks. The ones born after them were still too small and too afraid. They were either sucking at the breast or chasing balls in the street, and the mountain slope could be at peace, likewise the tin roof of Gustavo’s house, which was the best place to start onto the slope if you wanted to go there for some reason.

  With all her miserable heart Rosa Imaculada loved her small son, who had come into being almost virginally, during Carnival. Now or never, Rosa had thought. I want a husband and a family! So Rosa made herself up. She glowed and shimmered, giving off a lovely, provocative scent of carnations, which made the stray dogs howl as she waddled past them in her sequined high heels.

  And things went as intended. A certain Caio (or was it Flávio?) let her take his hand as the axé music played, as the drums beat, as the wild, howling whistle blared the chorus and the güiro grated rolling, enticing rhythms in the air. Caio (or Flávio or João or Fernando or Antônio) was driven mad by this woman who smelled of carnations and shook her buttocks properly in time with the music, who whispered in his left ear that she was a respectable woman and then immediately murmured in his right ear that yes, she was a woman—a woman who needed love, and for once the planets were in alignment. Vamos, vamos, let’s go!

  Rosa and the man rollicked in the throng. They danced and kissed each other with lips wet with sweet maracujá juice and strong cachaça and nearly swooned. Finally, as the drums still beat, they slipped from the press of the crowd into a dark alley and joined, quickly and intensely, in the first doorway they found by fumbling with their hands.

  That was how Davi came to be.

  She never heard from the man again. The phone number he left Rosa was fake. But the boy born of his seed was healthy and fat, breathtakingly beautiful and hair-raisingly loud, and above all Rosa’s very own. Davi would not disappear. Rosa would see to that. She would raise her son into a man, not a rat in the shape of one. Davi clearly agreed. He cried day and night, those cries filling the small house and his mother’s heart, the heart which began to act up even worse after the child’s birth.

  It was April. Rosa was rocking her six-month-old son in her arms when suddenly her heart skipped a beat and then only weakly returned to operation. Rosa sat down on the floor and couldn’t get up under her own power any more. The baby screamed and Rosa couldn’t lift him to her breast. The whole house and street filled with ear-splitting bawling that didn’t end until the grandmother finally arrived, snatched up the boy, who was sweltering from his cries, and ran thre
e blocks down as fast as her legs would carry her to pound on the door of the largest and tallest house and yell, “Mr. Rogerio, come help!”

  And so old Doctor Rogerio struggled up the hillside after the grandmother, up the same hillside that Rosa Imaculada hadn’t been able to climb for ages without becoming winded. When she was expecting Davi she had been forced to take long breaks, during which she traded gossip with the women who came by on the street, as much as she could amidst her fits of coughing. She thought that the panting was all part of pregnancy at the comfortably plump age of thirty-five. She thought that the cough that troubled her, especially during physical exertion, was caused by dust. She hadn’t had the energy to clean her home, and there was dust at work too. The Salão de beleza Alessandra, where she styled, was full of hair and chemicals that smelled nice but irritated the lining of her throat. She was more sensitive and that was normal, all the women said. Irritants simply bothered you more when you were pregnant.

  But this time they were wrong. Most wrong of all was Rosa Imaculada, who knew within her, in a place that someone less knowledgeable might call the heart, that all was not well. But the desire to have a child was great, and the fear of losing that child was even greater. Just as human brains often do, erroneously, when threatened with danger, so Rosa’s brain forced into her consciousness the command, Flee! And Rosa didn’t know how to interpret the command other than in the way that was natural to her: she buried her head in the sand.

  Rosa reeled. Rosa gasped. Rosa endured a frailty that began to be more miserable than her eighty-year-old grandmother’s infirmity, at its worst making her short of breath from simply talking on the phone, and Rosa was a master at much talking. She could talk after the other person had run out of things to say, and even after she herself had run out of them too. She talked about television series or the newest nail polish innovations, like the phosphorescent party enamels they had just received a box of at the salon. They had become a hit in Rio too, and now the São Salvador girlboys sent messages to each other in the darkness of the night with their glowing fingers in a new phosphor language . . .

  Rosa blamed her other symptoms on the pregnancy as well. Like the swelling. Salts and fluid began collecting in her body. She worked as much as she could. She curled and blow-dried and dyed and cut, and did manicures and pedicures and was very conscientious about her job, and talkative, a veritable windbag, except when her lungs bothered her. Then she was quiet. And as she bustled about, her lower limbs began to swell into shapeless lumps. If she pressed on the swollen area, a strange pit remained in her skin for a moment, and then the pit filled with fluid, and the leg was ugly and enormous again. They all wondered at this, she and the other women in the salon, Leticia, Raquel, and Alessandra. “It’ll pass when you have the baby,” Raquel said, and gave Rosa a jar of cooling foot cream made of horse chestnuts and peppermint.

  However, edema was the most harmless of Rosa’s new ailments. Her eyes clouded over more and more often. Sometimes her heart skipped a beat, as they say, and the beat ended in a flutter. After a quick but terrifying series of incidents like this, Rosa was so tired that she couldn’t lift her scissors even if she sat on a stool. Then her lovely coworkers took over her clients for her. They would hustle Rosa into the back room to rest on the couch. She had to be careful. She wasn’t a young woman having her first child!

  Davi was born, but Rosa’s condition did not improve. On the contrary. When wise old Rogerio walked in and looked at poor Rosa sitting on the floor, swollen and panting, he saw immediately that this was serious. He checked her pulse, which was one hundred and twenty, and listened to her chest with a stethoscope to hear her delicate heart ticking away amidst the wheezing. Rogerio sent the grandmother to the nearest pharmacy to fetch nitros and diuretics, and shook his head. “Rosa, go to the hospital, soon, before it’s too late!”

  The fetus developing in her womb had not weakened her; it was her heart, her very own heart, which was her downfall. The fact was that secretly, as it seemed to pump away relatively irreproachably, Rosa’s heart had deteriorated to the point that it was mostly just a liability. And so the sick heart within Rosa Imaculada, along with Rosa herself, ended up in Hospital Geral Roberto Santos, where everyone, including the indigent-like Rosa, was given the best possible treatment. The equipment at the hospital may not have been quite as flash as the miraculous instruments at the private sanatoriums on the north side of the city, but it still provided test results, and by her third visit, Rosa Imaculada’s diagnosis was clear: dilated cardiomyopathy.

  And thus, Rosa Imaculada’s heart received a new name. This muscle throbbing for its life turned into the lair of a monster called dilated cardiomyopathy. Whatever that meant. The young doctor attempted to explain. Rosa, my dear, your heart is dying. The left chamber is expanding like outer space and growing brittle like parchment, and your heart muscle isn’t as efficient as it used to be. Actually, your heart is drowning in blood. It can’t pump it any more. Do you understand? Even with the drugs, you’re going to get more tired and out of breath. You’re on a whole battery of pills, and even so the pumping strength, the “ejection fraction”, is incredibly low at only fifteen percent. We can’t give you any more medicine. And you’re still having atrial fibrillation attacks. Rosa, I have to ask you one important question now. Are you motivated to live? Are you ready to go on a journey? I’m speaking both metaphorically and literally now. Because—and now I’m going to be very blunt—with this heart you have less than a year to live. Absolutely no more than that.

  At this point Rosa could only sleep in a sitting position; she couldn’t breathe lying down. And there was no question of her going to work or caring for Davi, whom the women in the neighborhood were taking turns looking after (the grandmother’s health had declined dramatically just from worry). It was unambiguously clear that Rosa wanted to live. She wanted that more than ever. The surge of adrenaline that accompanies the will to live is a familiar feeling to anyone who has ever been in real danger. The faintness you feel from voluntarily standing on a mountain cliff is only distantly related. Rosa wanted to see her son grow up. Only that mattered. “I’m ready for anything,” she whispered to the doctor, “for anything that will give me more years to live!”

  And so Rosa first became a transplant candidate and then, after passing the tests, number thirteen on the national heart transplant list. She was an emergency case, but not the only one by any means. The doctor wrote a heartrending statement about her to the Foundation of the Sisters of Saint Angela, which helped “poor women of good reputation with the cost of treatment for serious illnesses”, as the foundation’s bylaws stated. Mothers received first priority. With the help of three guarantors—the angelic Leticia, Raquel, and Alessandra—Rosa was also able to acquire a low-interest loan from the foundation, which she meant to use to cover the rest of the expenses. These included everything she had to pay, after donations: for the tests and the doctor, the medicine and the care both before and after the operation, the operation itself, the new heart, and her stay in Federal University of Ceará Hospital, ward eight, in the city of Fortaleza on the northeast coast of Brazil. Those were minimal costs compared to the astronomical fees for private hospitals, but Rosa had no savings. The loan felt big to her, almost impossible ever to repay. And she had even voted for Lula! She had believed the former nut merchant would build a society for the poor that would help citizens when they were in need. On the wall of her home was a photograph of a laughing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with gray hair, with which she sometimes held secret council, because Lula was second only to God, and he actually had a face to talk to. And now she was in this bind: with her life on the line, she was taking a giant loan from a charity, which would crash down on her beloved coworkers if she couldn’t pay it back.

  “Rosa,” Lula’s picture whispered from the bedroom wall, “everything will be fine. I promise you. You will get a new, strong heart, and after that you will be a new person.” “But, Lula,” Rosa whispered a
s she packed her bag with clothing, nice-smelling skin oil, and a stack of thin magazines to cheer her up, including two-year old copies of Claudia (orgasmo inesquecível!), last year’s Ana Marias (12 kg em 1 mês!), and an ancient Uma (Horóscopo 2007: amor, saúde, dinheiro, sucesso, amigos!), “it’s so much money, eight thousand reais! What if I die? What will happen to Davi? What will happen to Leticia, Raquel, and Alessandra?” “Dear Rosa,” Lula said with a smile, “don’t worry. Seize the moment. You have to save your life. That is your duty as a mother. You’ll find the money!”