Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn by Carlos Meneses-Oliveira Page A

while wanting one.”
                  “It’s a type of self-inflicted suffering,” Sofia once told Uncle Crane. “A light variation of masochism in case he really wants one of the cars he sells.”
                  “Not quite,” Crane opined. “Look, it’s like sports: imagine someone practicing sports four hundred years ago, tiring himself out on purpose, without needing too?”
                  “To stay in shape,” she argued.
                  “Well, with him, it’s the same thing. It’s a type of ‘suffering,’ as you say, but not suffering in and of itself, but with an objective—that of wanting one of those cars in order to more effectively sell that desire.”
                  The pastor, for example, spent his time questioning the existence of God out loud. “He’s making us look for the reasons for our faith,” she said to her friend. Sofia also repeated her paternal grandmother’s ideas from time to time, but people didn’t know that. It was her secret, something intimate. Sofia valued humanity in the abstract humanist sense. She recognized with some perplexity, and perhaps benign jealousy, that the Dexters liked concrete people. Her friend’s family was humanist in the idealist sense of choosing mankind first, but, well beyond this, they were fond of real physical people, their neighbors, their colleagues, common people they crossed paths with on the streets or who appeared on television.
                  Sofia Suren had inherited from her Iranian grandmother not only her last name, which her grandfather had courageously adopted to keep such a distinctive name from dying out. She’d also inherited her straight hair, thick but loose, opaque and shiny, black like the winter. On her white skin, the contrast of those bright strands made her look like a live painting, a three dimensional picture. She had also inherited something else: a mystery that only happened to a Suren every other generation, having to do with the rapid healing of wounds, even serious ones. Her grandmother was like that and so was she. Her pediatric surgeon did not know and was stupefied when, a month after her appendectomy, he couldn’t find a scar from the operation. He doubted that she was who he’d operated on and asked her if she had a twin sister. They had to quit going to his clinic because the doctor, more and more curious, didn’t pay attention when the grandmother told him that was normal among Iranians from Tabriz, her paternal ancestors’ hometown. He wanted to send her to another hospital for exams that the doctor seemed to need more than the girl.
                  Her grandmother, the last Persian in her family—her father was American—had instilled in her since she was a child the need to keep that secret: she was the descendent of princes, not a circus performer to be passed from one carnival to the next or to feed the curiosity of the “gods in white.” Her mother was descended from Italians from Venice and Siena, Goths like only Goths can be.
                  Mariah, transparent and surprising like a diamond, seemed to have no secrets. She repeated family friends’ phrases with apparent innocence and named them as if they were authors. She overflowed with spontaneous joy, frequently aroused by small, apparently common things. But what impressed Sofia the most was that this happiness went beyond simple individual contentment. It was contagious, a transfusion of happiness for others. Indeed, not only was it her friend who provoked this effect—her father was even more so. The attention with which Mariah’s father honored people was so special that it built up the self-esteem of those who spoke with him.
     
                  Anthony Crane could still be seen as an author. He was a brilliant figure, an odd star, so much so that Sofia didn’t truly understand his closeness to that family and, despite