The Air You Breathe
by Frances de Pointes Peebles
Riverhead Books. 464 pages, $26.
AS WHOOPI GOLDBERG said of Julia Roberts, “Julia Roberts was not always Julia Roberts.” Similarly, Carmen Miranda was not always Carmen Miranda, as revealed in The Air You Breathe, Frances de Pointes Peebles’ near-epic novel about the fruit-wearing singer and film star of the 1930s and ‘40s. Miranda is the character “Graça” in the book, the spoiled daughter of a Brazilian sugar plantation owner. Her voice has a seductive allure and she has the confidence to vamp onstage. It is Dores, however, the fifth bastard of a farmhand, who is the narrator of this fascinating novel. Dores is the woman behind the woman.
As with David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, and other orphans of literature, Dores is observant and somehow marked for a destiny. Infant Dores refuses all wet nurses until she is held up to a donkey’s teats. Other servant girls make fun of her; she notices their naked bodies. And the minute she sees Graça, Dores is hooked: “Her beauty was an influence you fell under … infusing you with bravery and wit and affability you never knew existed until she teased it inside you and coaxed it out.” The two girls share rebellious impulses and a love of samba, which they hear when a radio arrives in the house, as well as in the dark night when they sneak out to listen to workers’ drumming and songs.
Frances de Pointes Peebles, a Brazilian-American who currently lives with her husband on his family ranch in Brazil, is flexible in naming sexual predilections. She has Dores recognize herself, in slang, as a Big Foot. “‘Big Foots’—that’s what Lapans called women with short hair who liked to wear men’s shoes and suits and who liked to keep the company of good-time girls as much as men did.” For disciplinary reasons, the girls are shipped to a Catholic school from which they escape on a field trip to Rio’s Cristo Redentor. By way of skillful misdirection, they ditch their classmates, descend Corcovado mountain, hike out of Tijuca Forest National Park, and find a seamy neighborhood wherein thrive cabarets, radio, song, more samba.
Dores and Graça show admirable resilience and acquit themselves well on the streets. Even Graça’s fool move of shoplifting is about 75 percent silver lining as it brings them before Madame Lucifer, a cabaret entrepreneur with an eye for talent and also a killer, a gangster, and a drag queen. The Madame is easily the most seductive character here, and the one who makes Graça’s success possible. The girls’ adventure and Graça’s rise to stardom enthralled me. This adventure is two-thirds of the novel, and the remainder, which takes place in Hollywood and Las Vegas, reads more like a detailed Wiki listing.
I admit that on first hearing of The Air You Breathemy mind flitted to the Carmen Miranda of my childhood, a Halloween costume of an entertainer and bright singer from TV movies. This novel rises above that impression with a story that I haven’t read before, in geographies I rarely read about. It’s a mostly joyous reading experience.
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Sarah Sarai is the author of two poetry collections.
