Sarah and the Six Vaults

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She woke up with a headache. But, as Dr. Messina would say, the recollection of trauma comes at least with some distance from moments that usually change everything. “That poses an advantage, Sarah. A little one, if you will, but still an advantage”.

Sarah sipped her morning coffee and settled in for her sacred habit. Five new words, this time in Italian, one of her beloved six languages. Sarah’s mind had that musical magic. She called it ‘the vaults’, those places where her languages lived and danced. Those special, fanciful rooms of the mind that cast some color on the somber memories that cried for attention.

She looked out the window and grabbed the sill with one hand and held on tight to the coffee mug with the other. When did the smooth flow of waking up in Madrid under silky white sheets become her new normal? She could hardly ignore the horrid images of the Ministry back in Brazil, the face of the policemen of Belo Horizonte, the assault, the tepid water she received at the police Delegacía before handing in the report that could have cost her more than her own life that day. “Here you are ma’am, calm down and drink something”.

And now this innocent daily habit, so far away from home. “Why call it home if I’m not welcome?” She knew, however, that her languages operated differently, giving her the chance of escaping into a very unusual home. The door of the mind was always open. Why not delve in again today? She went on with the habit. It was fun to practice new words every day in her languages. The vaults that held the six languages were her refuge, her world in the world, a den of peace.

“You’re entitled to a new life, dear”, said Dr. Messina. But she meant something else, she meant letting go, until the day came.

Cycling through the new city had been a therapy in itself in her new life. Riding past the silverleaf maple tree in El Retiro park, she would get the best air of downtown Madrid. She would usually stop near the Crystal Palace and gaze upon the red cypress that dominated the famous Great Pond. She barely thought about those days in which she fought corruption face to face in her beloved Brazil, the country of nostalgia.

On a sunshiny day, right before her appointment with Dr. Messina, her mind went straight back to that day in Brazil. It was all triggered by the sight of a Spanish police car that she couldn’t avoid looking at. There she stood, sieged by the elegant downtown buildings of Madrid, looking through the depths of the superficial police car sign, perhaps into the eternal horizon of memory. No, Sarah, it was not the same police force, of course; she was in Madrid now, not over there; these were not the scents of those eerie men, yet everything came back. The lights, the sirens, the door breaking, the cries of her mother, the pounding footsteps and the burgeoning arrhythmia, casting a shadow over the barbarian that attacked her in the Ministry.

Then came the impact that dissipated all memories for days to come. She lost sight of everything as the front wheel of her bicycle was bulldozed by a gray car. Impossible to miss, unless you’re not really there, not really riding the bike, but gliding through the stream of thoughts. Her body was hurled along with the spinning juggernaut. She hit the tarmac in seconds and lost track of time. She found herself gazing at the cloudless Spanish sky, barely moving her lips up and down when silence dubbed in the whispers of the wind.

“You’ll be fine”, said Dr. Ramirez at the hospital. “It could have been much worse, señora Sarah. We will need some patience and I promise you’ll be back on your feet soon. Dr. Messina sends her regards. We know each other very well”.

Without the flowing use of her body, her best refuge became her own mind, that furtive, frenetic, complex world of connections that lived in quiet stillness of a hospital bed. That is when Sarah heard melodies of her childhood, which gave her some respite. There wasn’t much of an alternative in the hospital. The window panes offered a painting-like view of the Salamanca District. The smell of the place didn’t matter much. The voices became a soft breeze. It was the right moment to go back and explore that old life. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

Gazing upon the whole city, one understood the charm of the name. Belo Horizonte, the beautiful horizon, the wonderful sight. She was there with Marcius that day, on top of the world at the mirador of Mangabeiras. The white buildings that impressed everyone looked so little, so unimportant in the presence of the endless carpet of tabebuia trees.

“Think about it, Sarah, it’s simply not worth it”, he said with his elbows on the railing of the mirador.

“Worth it, Marcius? Here we go again. You know it’s not about money, not even prestige.” She faced him. But he wouldn’t turn to look at her.

“You know you can’t beat them. You don’t get to change the system, Sarinha. It’s bigger than you, and you’ve been lucky so far”

“Lucky?”, she responded with tense lips “you mean to tell me that one is lucky because one gets terrible anonymous info and then an assault? How’s that lucky?”

“Lucky that you’re alive!”, he shrieked and finally looked her in the eye. “Neither I nor Rodrigo will be able to protect you if you keep going with this”

“But you know the President was at the dinner. I have the pictures. He did get the money from the scumbags, bandidos, and I’m supposed to stay quiet? I already sent part of the package to the Observador journalist. Just a starter.” She took in a deep breath.

“You did what, Sarah?”

“Don’t play innocent here, Marcius”, she put her hand on her chest with vehemence and stretched her neck, “that is what I had to do, whether you like it or not”

Then things happened too quickly. The pounding on her door started. They raided her house while the leaves rustled below the mirador. Her reaction, as she was pushed about, was to disappear as best as she could. The vaults were the best option. Her mind offered a secret door out of the tragedy. She found herself in a panicked flight, scouting the Adriatic Coast, but the struggle came back; she was thrown into the circumstances. The celestial water of her daydream turned to tears when the masked men were holding her against her shower wall. The splashes mixed with the screams, until they brought her mother. The distant thoughts hushed. She collapsed. It really was her mother. There was nothing she could do. She showed them to the safe, opened it and fainted.

“Would you like some more tea, Señora Da Silva?”

“Me, what? Excuse me” –she noticed herself waking up.

“Some tea? The doctor said you like tea. Lavender? I’ll bring you a small one to see how strong those hands have become”

“Yes, I am so sorry, lavender is good. Gracias”, she smiled and found herself exploring the ceiling of the beige hospital room. It was strangely quiet that day in Madrid. Of course, it had to be Sunday, the day that hurts lonely patients the most, perhaps the best one to fly away to her vaults. She remembered her mother’s funeral and sighed. “Let’s go Sarah, let’s move into the vaults for a bit.”

Dressed in a white gown that weaved with the air, she stood before the colossal bronze doors. As if she were entering the Roman Pantheon, she gently pushed the green surface of the door and saw how beams illuminated the room from above. Six smaller doors surrounded her in perfect symmetry. Their glistening golden facets seemed to create a circular overhang that pleased her. The room smelled of harmony to her. Maybe incense and honey once again, she thought and smiled. Her hand started leading her to the third door, the one that read “Italia” in perfectly crisp letters. She turned back and gazed upon the opposite door. “Hellas”, written in Greek. To her left stood two more golden doors, “Lusitania” and “Hispania”, the symbols of her Portuguese and Spanish realms of the mind. To her right, her other two worlds stood, “Engla-Land” and “Germania – Theodiscus”. They represented English and German, written in their archetypes.

The six vaults were her own small endless empire. Behind each door, the riches of the history of each land and its people came alive through manuscripts, music, handcrafts, utensils, symbols, past and present. In every room, a fleecy daybed stood there waiting for her, with a wooden table next to it, and opposite, on the ornamented wall, a window of boundless landscapes. She was home, she was away, alone, yet in concert with her soul.

No one could penetrate this fortress of thick walls and impossible windows anymore. She could fly out through any of them and feel the music of each language. The guttural sound of German would mix with round melodies that echoed through gilded ceilings and shuffled moments of time immemorial. She could also glide to the Greek vault. There, ultramarine tones would mix with ivory walls and interminable lengths of ancient text. She could hear the bouzouki, smell the angel’s share of the ouzo and lie back hearing the waves breaking gently. Then everything would disappear again.

Dr. Ramirez had better news after some days. The results were in, and it seemed more like a miracle, because she would be up and running very soon. “Perhaps I wouldn’t run around el Retiro or bike through the city, that’s for risk-takers –she smiled at Sarah– and we don’t want to have you visit us so soon again, do we?”

“No, doctor, but I would still come and say hi”, she sat up a bit, “I never expected this warmth here, not in a hospital, not in a busy place like this”. The doctor said something to the nurse and walked out. Sarah sighed and took a piece of paper. Her hands were cooperating fully now. She stretched, breathed and clenched her teeth in pain, but it did her good, she thought. No one saw the word she wrote on that paper. She looked at it with pride and resolve. It was time to get him.

The bumps of the landing gear extending as they cut through the air woke her up. She was about to land in Sao Paulo. She would have a short layover there and head directly to Tancredo Neves International in Belo Horizonte, a return termed impossible and absurd by Marcius.

And there she was, her sunglasses reflecting the sunbeams, her tight black jacket delineating the silhouette that made the scoundrels at the Ministry insane, and a massive onslaught hidden in the vaults of the mind. Yet she knew that her mental sanctuary would never be perfect until she went back into the dragon’s den itself. The men responsible for her suffering and her mother’s death now appeared in the news as heroes, as innovators, as statesmen.

She started her journey at the mirador. She missed Marcius, imagining him crossing his arms on the rail and then flapping them. He used to fill her daily routine with some color and the few smiles she saw around her in the office. His green eyes had so many stories to tell. Yet he was gone. Sucked into the services of the State, owing everything to politicians and, to protect her, so unreachable. And that was ok. The trees and the breeze were there to remind her how beautiful life could still be.

Sarah felt some spiritual relief and got back to her thoughts. She had to be resolute. She sat down on the wooden boards and started breathing deeply. Tourists would say she was meditating at the mirador; she would feel airborne by now. She gradually entered the room of the six vaults and chose the Portuguese vault. The language of her mother, the balmy rhythm of Bossa Nova accompanied her to meet her mother during childhood. There she was, in her lovely red dress, walking in haste to get some groceries and the coconut milk crackers that everyone loved in Mina Gerais. She was trying to say something to Sarah, but it was impossible to understand. Her mother seemed vehement, then faded away, and so did the music. It was time.

The Ministry building still had its gloomy flair. She opened the door and showed the determination that her country so urgently needed. She told the receptionist to come closer, whispered something in her ear, and the poor lady jumped and went immediately for the phone.

“The vice minister will see you now, Senhora”.

It all happened quickly. She went into the exquisite office that oozed more ornamentation than sincerity, threw the folder on the vice minister’s table and approached him. She grabbed him by the tie and whispered something that opened his cold eyes.

“Let me just ask you one thing, Sarah. Why come all the way to do this? Let go, for your own sake, not for mine” – he rearranged the tie and cracked his neck.

“Senhor Vice Ministro, I wanted you to see it for yourself. Have a great afternoon”.

She walked out in haste, but they were faster. Immediately after leaving the building, a black van pulled up in front of her. Two men got out and forced her in. She didn’t scream. She imagined the cozy rug of the German vault and saw herself before a portrait of Goethe. For a long moment, she forgot that she was being taken to an unknown place by strangers. She smiled.

After taking a bumpy road, typical of the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, the van stopped. The men started arguing with someone else. “I’m more important than I thought”, she grinned and reasoned with herself in a very low voice. The door opened widely and a masked man with a rather obese shape waved gently, asking her to come out. Her hands were still tied, but she was thankful she could see her surroundings.

“You’re going to behave, lady. We don’t want to hurt you”, the masked man said nervously.

Sarah stopped him short, “Let me guess, just doing your job, rapaz?

“Yes, senhora. Let me do my job and no one gets hurt”.

“Listen, there’s something your bosses need to know. Although, it’s a matter of hours in any case. Tell them about the green folders and see how they react when you mention O Observador”.

They shrugged and kept going. After walking with her for some minutes, they reached an abandoned cottage and put her in a sparse little room with only a lightbulb and a white mattress. “Sit here and don’t do anything stupid”. She pitied the men in a way. How do you become a bandit who serves those lowlifes?

After some minutes, one of the masked men came in and put an old cell phone to her ear. “Speak. He’s listening”.

“Is that you, Senator?”

“Sarah, who would have thought. You know, little Sarah, I don’t like to get my hands dirty, but you know very damn well you cannot go around threatening people, especially not his people”.

“Senator, I just needed to tell you one thing. You see, a journalist was waiting for me before you and your vice minister puppet had me brought to this pigsty. I’m not the problem anymore. Just watch the news at 7:00. The video of the President assaulting me, the tapes of the embezzlement conversations, all the emails, in the hands of the press”.

He didn’t answer. The masked man understood the conversation was over when the silence became unbearable.

“Sir, what do we do with her now?”, he left the room and closed the door, but she could still hear them. She decided there was a more beautiful place to escape to. She let herself feel the mattress, breathed the air in spite of the mugginess, and allowed herself to smile. She decided to fly into the English vault. As every one of her sacred rooms had a magical window, she felt she could fly out into the endless pastures of New Zealand, then simply return to the happy afternoons of her college days in Washington. She remembered the sunset over the Potomac, the coffee with her classmates near Foggy Bottom, and all those dreams that made the future steal her beautiful present as a student. In the English vault, she would find her unending bookshelves, from Hemingway to Wilde, or the most important of all, Frost’s poem of the Escapist, for “all is an interminable chain of longing”, even in the sanctuary of the six vaults. Even here, the mind wants more than the endless. Even after justice is to be served. She finally fell asleep.

Some hours later, national TV started airing a ruinous report of the worst corruption scandal of Brazilian history. Sarah’s picture appeared everywhere, the whistleblower herself, being held captive outside of Belo Horizonte. The journalists showed the exact location, thanks to the responder that Sarah carried. The President himself could not do much anymore. Everyone saw the video of him attacking a young lady earlier in his career. Now, even this was public.

When the police stormed the cottage, they found her still, gently sleeping. She was flying, coming back to one of the vaults, asking herself what the right Italian word and melody would be for a moment of freedom.