Bossa Novas, Bikinis, and Bad Ends Read online

  “I’m glad you’re pleased, senhora. I think she wants to take you to the botanical gardens today,” Miguel said. “They are magnificent. But first, I thought you and your friends might like a language lesson before you go. I have persuaded Lucas to teach you some Portuguese after breakfast. Does that sound good?”

  “Sounds fantastic, Senhor Ortega,” I said. “I want to learn some phrases and words in your language. Thank you. I’ll go tell the others.”

  “They’re in the dining room having breakfast,” he said. “They’ve been wondering where you were.”

  I walked into the elegant dining room where my friends were eating and talking all at once, the way they always do.

  “Good morning, Hoofers,” I said. “What’s new?”

  “Pat!” Mary Louise said. “What were you doing up so early?”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” I said. “I went for a walk with Yasmin.”

  Four sets of ears perked up. I was immediately the center of attention.

  “Tell us!” Gini said. “What did the beautiful and mysterious accountant have to say?”

  I told them about our conversation, and of course Gini fastened on her statement that you make your life happen the way you want it to happen.

  “What do you think she meant by that?” she asked.

  “You should know, Gini,” I said. “You’re always doing that yourself. She’s in charge of her life. But I was surprised to find out that she definitely doesn’t like Lucas. I thought they were a pair when we saw them at the beach, but she says he’s too negative.”

  “I don’t know why anybody would want that old grouch anyway,” Gini said. “I haven’t seen him smile once.”

  “Well, he’s going to give us a language lesson this morning,” I said, and then couldn’t help laughing at the expression on Gini’s face. Total rejection.

  “You’re kidding,” she said. “He’ll be a laugh a minute. I thought he was a bartender and a guide. Who knew he was a language teacher too?”

  “He probably gets a little extra money for doing this,” I said. “He’s always complaining that he doesn’t get enough as a guide.”

  “Nothing like an unwilling, grouchy language teacher,” Gini said.

  “You don’t have to participate, Gini,” I said. “Natalia is taking us to the botanical gardens later, but this sounds like something I really would like to do. I don’t know any Portuguese at all. Anybody else interested?”

  There were nods and yeses all around. Gini shrugged. “I guess,” she said. “Why not?”

  “Where and when, Pat?” Tina asked.

  “Right here. Right now. You don’t even have to move. Just tell Miguel ‘yes’ and Lucas will appear.”

  Tina left the table to find Miguel, and within five minutes, Lucas joined us at our table. Just him and his iPad.

  “Good morning, ladies,” he said, still unsmiling. “I understand you would like to learn a few words in our language.” He did not sound at all happy at this idea.

  “Hey there, Lucas,” Gini said. “You’re going to teach us some Portuguese?”

  “Yes,” he said, typing something on his iPad.

  He held it up. “This is how I would greet you in Portuguese this morning,” he said.

  He had written “Bom dia.”

  “Bom dia?” Gini said, pronouncing it “Bom dee-ah.”

  “No, no,” Lucas said impatiently. “You must say ‘Bong deer.’ ”

  “Bong deer,” Gini said. “Sounds like something you’d smoke a deer in.”

  We couldn’t help laughing. It was such a tension breaker. This man seemed so gloomily serious.

  Lucas glared at her. “If you don’t want to learn our language,” he said, “we don’t have to continue with this. If you’re going to make fun of . . .”

  “No, no, Lucas,” Gini said. “I’m sorry. I’ll be good. Go ahead. What else do you have?”

  Lucas wrote something else on his iPad and held it up.

  “ ‘Boa tarde,’ pronounced ‘boah tard’ means—can you guess?”

  “My snake is late?” Janice said. Tina poked her and frowned.

  “Does it mean ‘good afternoon’?” Tina asked, trying to soothe Lucas into a good mood with her friendly voice and smiling face. Wherever we go, I’m always grateful that Tina is our spokesperson. She has a way of making everything all right no matter what kind of nutty things the rest of us do or say.

  “It does,” he said, frowning at Janice. “Perhaps you will have better luck with boa noite,” which he pronounced “boah no-ee-te.”

  “Must be ‘good night,’ ” Janice said, behaving herself.

  “Or ‘good evening,’ ” Lucas said, somewhat mollified. It’s hard to stay mad at Janice. He really didn’t want to be here, though. Janice or no Janice. I could have done without him, too, thank you very much, but I tried to be a credit to Tina.

  “How do you say ‘thank you,’ and ‘you’re welcome’?” I asked.

  Lucas almost looked pleased for a minute. “For ‘thank you,’ you say ‘obrigada’ if you’re a woman or ‘obrigado’ if you’re a man.” He pronounced them “oobreegadah” and “oobreegado.” “Then for ‘you’re welcome’ you would say ‘de nada,’ not pronounced the Spanish way—‘day nah-dah’—but the Portuguese way—‘chee-nah-dah.’ Would you like to know how to say ‘please?’ ”

  “Yes, please,” our polite Mary Louise said.

  “You say ‘por favor,’ pronounced ‘porh fa-vohr. ’ ” He wrote it down on his iPad.

  “That is like Spanish, isn’t it, Lucas?” I asked.

  “Yes, senhora,” he said. He wrote something else on his pad and held it up. “This is how you say, ‘I’m sorry,’ in Portuguese. ‘Desculpe.’” He pronounced it “des-cool-peh”. “What else would you like to know?”

  “I’d like to know how to say something I need in every language,” Gini said, “which is ‘I don’t understand.’”

  Lucas gave her his version of a smile. “In Brazil, you would say, ‘nao entendo.’”

  Gini repeated his pronunciation. “Naw en-tehn-doo. Is that right?”

  “Very good, senhora,” Lucas said.

  “I have one for you, Lucas,” I said. “I want to say, ‘How do you say that in Portuguese?’ ”

  “You would say ‘Como se diz em portugues?’ Try it, senhora.”

  I came as close as I could to imitating his pronunciation. “ ‘Coo-mo seh deesh en poor-too-gaysh? ’ Is that right?”

  “It’s close enough,” he said. “People will know what you’re saying. And if you want to ask ‘Do you speak English?’ you say, ‘Voce fala ingles?’ Can you say that?”

  I did better with this one. “ ‘Vo-ceh faleh en-glehsh? ’”

  “Very good, senhora.” He glanced toward the entrance to the dining room. “I see Natalia is coming to take you away to the botanical gardens. We will conclude our lessons in Portuguese with the word for ‘good-bye.’ Does anyone know how to say that?’

  “I think I heard someone say ‘Adeus,’” I said. “Which would make sense, since it’s like adiós or adieu. Is that right?”

  “That’s the formal way of saying ‘good-bye,’ ” he said. “But people don’t really say that unless they’re saying good-bye forever. Most of the time, we just say ‘tchau.’ It’s like ‘ciao’ in Italian and it’s pronounced the same way. It just means ‘See you later’—same as in Italian. Or you could say ‘ate mais.’ Same thing.” He stopped and looked around.

  “That concludes our language lesson for today. Tchau.” He made a small bow. “Feel free to ask me any questions you might have while you’re here at the Copacabana.”

  He nodded to Natalia as she joined us.

  “Bom dia, Natalia,” Gini said, managing to keep a straight face while saying “bong.”

  “And a very bom dia to you, too, Hoofers,” Natalia said, bubbling up to us, fresh as a new day, adorable in a white cotton shirt and leggings. She wore a turquoise necklace and matching earrings a
nd I found her irresistible. She naturally turned on the tease when she saw me looking at her.

  “Miss me, Pat?” she said.

  “You’re very bad,” I said, shaking my finger at her.

  “Actually, I’m very good,” she said, smiling a wicked smile.

  “I understand you’re taking us to the botanical gardens today, Natalia,” Tina said. She likes my Denise a lot, and she wasn’t going to let this wild little flirt distract me from my true love.

  “Yes, yes, yes, Tina,” she said. “Come—Ramon is waiting for us.”

  Pat’s Tip for Traveling with Friends: Don’t

  try to compete with that friend who packs

  everything in one small bag for a week’s

  vacation. Take a big bag.

  Chapter Eight

  Come to the Garden of Eden

  “Wait till you see this botanical garden,” Natalia said, as Ramon drove away from the hotel. “I think it must be the most beautiful one in the world, though of course I haven’t seen them all. It covers three hundred and thirty-eight acres, full of the most beautiful flowers and plants and trees you’ve ever seen. Orchids—purple and white and every color. Some flowers that look like candy. And everywhere there are birds you won’t see in New Jersey. And monkeys jumping around from tree to tree. Everywhere you look there’s something delightful. I can’t wait to show it to you.”

  It was hard not to feel Natalia’s enthusiasm and joy as she described the Jardim Botânico to us. I looked it up. That’s what it’s called in Portuguese.

  “It was the dream of a Portuguese king called Joao VI when he came to live in Brazil in 1808,” Natalia continued. “There are over 8,000 different kinds of flowers in this garden. Can you imagine! It’s the most peaceful corner in the whole city. There are so many places where you can just sit down in the stillness and breathe in the quiet. You can see the statue of Christ on Corcovado from almost everywhere in the garden. Actually you can see him from any spot in the city.”

  I was hooked, and I could tell from the look on the faces of my friends that they were too. Especially Mary Louise. She had a lovely garden in back of her house in New Jersey. She actually enjoyed all the planting and weeding and hard work that is necessary to make things grow. I never had the patience to do all that, but Denise does, and she’s turned our yard into a place of beauty. Azaleas, forsythias, and magnolia blossoms in the spring. Roses in the summertime. Asters in all different colors in the fall.

  I don’t know how I got along before I found Denise. She makes every part of my life better. And I adore her son, David. I loved him right away when he came to live with us because the first thing he did was to run to my cat, Eliza, and pat her. He’s the one who makes sure her bowl is full of food she loves, and that she always has fresh water. He empties her litter box. And best of all, she cuddles up next to him wherever he is and purrs so loudly you can hear her in the next room. Cats always know a good person when they meet one. Or at least the person most likely to spoil them.

  When Ramon pulled up to the elaborate gated entrance to the garden, we piled out. “Why don’t you wander through the gardens on your own,” Natalia said. “I’ll meet you at the Café Botânica in an hour. You don’t want me yammering at you in such a peaceful environment. We’ll have some lunch and then I’ll take you to the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain on one of those cable cars. It’s another beautiful view of the city. How does that sound?”

  I felt a little guilty. I didn’t want Natalia to leave, because things are always more fun when she’s around, but her plan made sense. Actually, I welcomed the chance to roam about this flower-filled paradise on my own. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even my friends. Much as I love them, I’m glad we’re not joined at the hip. We each have our own interests, our own lives, when we’re not dancing together.

  “What do you say, Hoofers?” Tina asked, echoing my thought. “Shall we each explore this garden separately and meet at the café in an hour?”

  We all agreed. I set out to walk across the little red footbridge that led to the Japanese garden. The minute I crossed that bridge, I was in another world. There was a small pond with huge water lilies floating in it, a small gazebo with benches inside, and along the path there were flowers I had never seen before. Bright red blossoms that looked like lots of tiny candies bunched together with a spray of yellow fronds popping out of the top. The sign said they were called combretum reticulatum and were from Africa. Farther on there were more red flowers shaped like lobster claws, called heliconia latispatha.

  Somehow they belonged here in this Japanese garden. It seemed like a place where surprises happened when you least expected them. For instance, in the middle of a patch of soft green leaves was a red flower that looked like a large wax rose. The sign said it was called a torch ginger, a red ginger lily, a philippine wax flower, or a rose de porcelaine. It was from Indonesia.

  I found a small bench tucked away behind the gazebo and sat down to half meditate, half figure out what was happening here in Rio. I closed my eyes and let my thoughts come and go without trying to examine them very closely.

  I started meditating about five years ago. It’s one of the great blessings in my life. It seems to clear out all the annoying anxieties and bothersome stuff that accumulates during a normal day, and leaves me with what matters. It doesn’t always work, of course, but most of the time it does.

  This seemed like the ideal place to meditate and clear my mind of all the theories I had collected about who killed Maria. There was Lucas who was sick of paying alimony to his ex-wife. And Sumiko, Ortega’s wife, who didn’t want Maria to take her husband away from her. There was the doctor—Souza, I think his name was—who might or might not have supplied the anesthetic that killed her. Maybe it was Miguel Ortega, the manager, who was interested in someone else. Maybe he wanted Natalia. Maybe he and Natalia conspired to steal the anesthetic and kill Maria so they could run off together. Actually, I could not bear to think of my Natalia as a murderess. And there was Yasmin, my accountant friend. Maybe she wanted Lucas to spend his money on her instead of paying alimony to Maria. Too many maybes. I let it all go. Cleared my mind of all this stuff and tried to return to no thoughts at all.

  I concentrated on my mantra, which was om-tiddly-om. Well, you could make up your own. I didn’t want anything ordinary. This not only emptied my mind but made me smile while I was doing it. Not a sound interrupted my reverie. I thought there would be other people bustling about this forestlike garden, but Natalia must have picked a nonbusy time to come here.

  After a while, I realized I only had an hour to spend in this Eden, so I reluctantly left my lovely haven and walked along a stone path through tall palm trees and huge bamboos. Everything was carefully tended and cared for. I walked along until I came to another water lily pond. This one was full of the enormous white lilies called Victoria Regia, which are the biggest water lilies I’ve ever seen. Next to this pond was a little hut that was labeled REPLICA OF AN AMAZON FISHERMAN’S HUT. It was a humble shack, but the best part was a sculpture of a man in fisherman’s clothes sitting on the bank of the pond fishing. Nice touch, I thought.

  Next I came to a large building called the orchid conservatory, which claimed to house 2000 species of orchids. I went in and was overwhelmed by the beauty of hundreds and hundreds of orchids, some in a white-columned gazebo, some all around it, in purples and whites and pinks—every variation of orchids you could find. I took some pictures with my iPhone so I could look again at all this beauty on some dreary day back in New Jersey.

  Time was getting short, so I walked a little faster until I came to an iron structure called the Fountain of the Muses, with the four muses of music, art, poetry, and science carved on it. Science? There was a muse of science? Who knew? The spray from the cool water coming out of the fountain was refreshing. It was a really hot day, and I welcomed the cold mist.

  I realized it was time to head toward the Café Botânica and consulted the map on my iPhone
to find my way. When I arrived, my friends were already there talking to Natalia and eating sandwiches.

  “Here she comes, Miss America,’” Natalia sang as I walked toward the table in this outdoor restaurant. I bowed and did a pageant-type walk to join my friends.

  “Where did you go?” Janice asked. “We didn’t see you anywhere.”

  “I meditated awhile in the Japanese garden,” I said. “It was heaven. And I went to the orchid conservatory, which was awesome. And there was a little hut with a fisherman. It was incredible. I wish we had more time here. Where did you guys go?”

  “Did you know there’s a museum of carnivorous plants in this garden?” Gini asked.

  “Only you would find a place full of plants that eat things!” I said. “What do they eat?”

  “Mostly insects. But some of them eat frogs and even mice. You should go there, Pat. It’s fascinating.”

  “How do they catch the things they’re going to eat?” Janice asked.

  “They have long skinny arms that reach out and grab flies right out of the air,” Gini said. She loves to tell Janice totally outrageous things that aren’t true because she knows Janice will play along with her.

  “Get out of here!” Janice said.

  “Oh, Janice, don’t believe that!” Tina said. “How do they catch them, Gini—really?”

  “Well, see, they have all different ways,” Gini said. “Some of them, like Venus flytraps, sort of lie in wait for their unsuspecting prey, like insects or frogs or even mice. They’re flowers, but they look like open jaws with teeth. When the bug or mouse touches two of the flytrap’s hairs, the plant shuts up around them and slowly, slowly eats them. Yum.”

  “Gini!” Mary Louise said. “We’re eating lunch!”

  “No mice or frogs on the menu, though, Weezie,” Gini said. “Don’t worry.” She took a bite of her ham and cheese misto. “This is so good.”

  “If you’re through ruining our appetites, Gini,” I said, “I think I’ll have what you’re having. Looks good.” I motioned to the waiter, and he went off to get my sandwich.

  “I have to tell you about nepenthes,” Gini said. “They look like beautiful pitchers and they’re mainly found in Australia and Asia. They have this sweet-smelling liquid inside them that attracts insects or little mice, who fall into the plant and are devoured.” She licked her lips and made slurping noises in Janice’s direction.