CW: fire, burns, and death.
The last copy of Senhora (1972–1973) lies, with no identification tag, on the shelves of Cinemateca Brasileira, the largest audiovisual archive in Latin America. If anyone ever opened the tin cans, they would see that its quadruplex tapes are flaky, almost falling apart, but no one does, as many years have passed since anyone remembered its existence. There are no surviving pictures from it, not even in magazines. All the actors are dead, just like the creator, the director, and the technical crew. It’s the last memory of a cursed telenovela that doomed its entire cast, one by one.
If remembered, Senhora would be blamed for its trail of destruction, but we should avoid placing guilt. Senhora is as much of a victim as the others, and, like all of the victims, she will, too, burn.
• • • •
Nívea Figueiredo (1939–1973) was a prodigy, a feminist, a bonne vivante; the youngest writer to ever land a prime time soap opera on TV Tupi. Daughter of a Portuguese seamstress and a Brazilian radio host, she enjoyed a comfortable childhood in Vila Olímpia, São Paulo, where she liked to entertain her parents and their friends during family parties by suggesting improvements to a variety of books, movies, and radionovelas. Everyone was so impressed, she used to tell local newspapers during interviews, at the sight of this barely alphabetized little girl lifting her fingers and telling anyone who could hear how she could have written Dom Casmurro better than Machado de Assis. She would then stop to sip her coffee, an ever-boiling, ever-in hand double espresso. That’s how they discovered me, you know? Because I was always fixing other people’s stories. When questioned if said family friends were the big-name radio producers who would eventually finance her quick rise to fame, Nívea would wave aside the idea dismissively, spilling drops of coffee over the journalist, refusing to engage in any more questions.
But there was no denying it was a fast rise. She went from a writing internship with Rádio Nacional straight to her own big radio feature, In Search of Love (1966–1967), a 300-episode Spiritist epic with a graphic sex scene that both shocked and impressed the nation, making the public wonder what she would do when she finally landed a television gig.
Nívea always wanted more, her executive producer would say a few years after her death. The most modern equipment, the biggest crew, the most expensive costumes. She didn’t just want a telenovela, she wanted a televised Hollywood production. And she would eventually have it. After saving the low ratings of Heart and Courage (1968–1979) by killing the main love interest, she had TV Tupi in her pocket, and they allowed her to do whatever she wanted, which was adapting José de Alencar’s classic novel Senhora.
One of her most daring moves was refusing to even consider a male director for the project. There’s an inexplicable joy in the way Aurélia tortures her beloved Fernando, she had argued. A man wouldn’t understand my vision. She proceeded to invite seasoned director Ângela Camargo, who agreed to return from the United States for the job. I swore not to set my foot in this country ever again, but that bitch was persuasive as fuck, Ângela said to a friend at the time. The pitch, the project, the budget. I never heard of anything like it before, never saw anything like it again.
They would shoot part of the telenovela in Rio de Janeiro, and the other part in a luxurious historical site in Minas Gerais. Thirty-five-year-old heartthrob Bertrand Belmond was a sure choice for social-climber Fernando, who disavows his love for the impoverished Aurélia in search of a larger dowry. The face for the vengeful Aurélia, however, was hard to find. Nívea wanted an established name, an actress Brazil already knew and loved, to ensure the heroine would remain likable after buying Fernando’s freedom with an unexpected inheritance, but Ângela strongly disagreed.
It has to be someone new, the director told her. The public has to fall in love with her in spite of everything, or the whole narrative falls apart. The two women had endless arguments over the casting, each one more violent than the other, until a reluctant Nívea backed down and allowed Ângela to hire the unknown Fabiana Seixas for the leading role.
It was the only concession she made during her short run in the production. Nívea wrote and rewrote every episode countless times. She refused to use a single archive piece for the costume design, demanding expensive silk and original period pieces for the most important garments. She would fight every improvisation, every slight change in tone and dialogue during the filming. She even supervised the hairstyles, not allowing a single strand out of place and throwing hot coffee on anyone who dared to say that was not her job. The assistants called her a little child king behind her back.
She accepted nothing but perfection.
Late at night, however, she would find herself unable to sleep. It wasn’t her fault, you see. All the pressure, the money, the hurry. Yes, she wanted greatness, yes, she wanted success, but not like this. Every time she called an assistant at inappropriate hours, every “no, it can’t be like this,” every “I know everyone is tired, but let’s get this scene right, okay?,” it was almost like her voice wasn’t the one speaking. She would hear herself scream and want and demand, her eyes growing wide in bewilderment. It was like something else had taken hold of her, a puppeteer behind the little child king, turning her into an unbearable monster every time she went to the set. And she couldn’t even tell others about it—she was barely conscious of it, herself.
Her only comfort, the only thing keeping her head over her shoulders, was that little double espresso. She drank so much of it that it turned into an addiction. Nívea gulped down the coffee in such a frantic hurry that she would spill it over herself, over others. She didn’t even notice the burned, reddened spots on her tongue anymore. Every time she finished a cup, her assistant handed her another, and at home she would make coffee late into the night.
The day the first episode aired, the creative crew and the stars of the show met at the studio to watch the result of their work, but Nívea barely acknowledged it. She wouldn’t stop moving, one of them heard Ângela say, a while later. I think she never even looked at the screen. Every single one of her coworkers shared the same testimony: After finishing two cups of coffee in less than fifty minutes, Nívea ran to find her kettle, poured the contents in her mug, and drank it in one go. She couldn’t understand her own agitation, but she knew needed another shot.
That day, Nívea forgot to add coffee powder to the mixture and, in her hurry, drank half a liter of boiling water, agonizing on the floor before the episode’s entire run, her charred tongue hanging from her mouth like a piece of wet jerky. She was pronounced dead soon after the ambulance arrived.
• • • •
There were other deaths, some around the same time and others even before Nívea and the other big names died, deaths that would have been nothing but a footnote if one wasn’t aware of the scale of the tragedy. A cameraman who touched the wrong wires in one of the endless reshoots, electrocuted so fast he immediately caught on fire. A prop assistant who choked on his own cigarette. A couple of costume designers in search of the right color of satin for Aurélia’s big look-what-you-missed-by-denying-me gown: car crash, boom.
All of them on duty. An unfortunate but necessary sacrifice for the ever-growing dream of Senhora.
• • • •
Ângela Camargo (1929–1976) was a stubborn son-of-a-bitch. Her co-workers treated her like shit the moment she was hired as production assistant in 1953, unused to the presence of a woman on the set, never mind that she was tougher than any of them. More masculine, too, which never made anything easier, not in that shithole of a country she left as soon as she had the chance. Los Angeles didn’t treat Ângela any better; it treated her worse, actually, but now she was a third-world nobody whose experience in Brazilian television was worth less than that of any American who had never stepped foot in a Hollywood studio. But she swallowed her pride, lowered her head, and accepted every crumble of a gig she could put her hands on, which was not much in the States, but would shine like gold on her Brazilian resume. Because that’s how things worked back home; you direct a shitty B flick for gringos, and suddenly you’re worth more than any of your peers. The birds that sing here do not sing as they do there, as the poets say.
So when Nívea asked Ângela to return, she did. She had to: The pitch and the money were too good to refuse. Ângela had worked with Nívea once, and thought that she was cool, if a bit demanding. The two butted heads a few times, and they were never friends, but there was a silent understanding between both of them that they should be allies, at the very least. Nívea ended up not being as cool as she remembered, and she was more than just a bit demanding, but Ângela stayed anyway. Her feet were glued to the floorboards of that stupid mansion in Minas Gerais, like she couldn’t leave again even if she wanted to. A higher force was keeping her there, whether this higher force was the telenovela itself or whether it went by the name of Fabiana Seixas.
You see, Fabiana was not a great actress. She was not bad either, just a little . . . Green. She had been an extra in a couple of movies and a minor character in another period drama, but she had those big brown eyes that could command a scene, a bone structure that looked great on camera, and the right amount of ambition. Nívea thought Fabiana lacked the charisma to play Aurélia, and that she crumbled easily under pressure, which is why her first few episodes were less than stellar, but Ângela argued that she had potential. A diamond in the rough. Ângela knew she could make a star out of Fabiana under the right circumstances, even if the right circumstances were Nívea’s early death.
Ângela never wanted Nívea to die, but her death was useful, at first. Nívea passed away after completing two-thirds of the entire script, a task Ângela took over when they handed her the production on a silver plate, crowning her the new commander of Senhora. To make sure Nívea would not come back to haunt her, Ângela even added a little in memoriam intro on episode two: Nívea Figueireido (1939–1973), whose vision and ambition made this dream possible. Classy and sensible. Nívea might have been a bitch and a control freak, a little child king like the crew called her, but she knew how to create a spectacle, so they owed her that. It was interesting how, the same way they called Nívea a king to bring her down, Ângela was quickly named the wicked stepmother behind her back, but she knew why. They were both used to being denied and ridiculed like this. The news made a bunch of headlines that helped keep the ratings high because it was all so sad, so creepy; it’s not every day we get to watch a dead woman’s work.
Ângela also knew that, at the helm, she could make better use of Fabiana. She studied the script for several nights, reworking some scenes, feeling like something was whispering ideas to her. Give her fewer monologues, give her more dramatic close-ups, allow her eyes and body do the talking. Ângela was convinced it was divine intervention, or maybe Nívea realized she had been right all along and decided to help her from the afterlife; Ângela snorted thinking of that. And she had been right. It took less than a month for the public to love Fabiana’s doe-eyed beauty turned cold power. The wedding night scene, in which Aurélia tells Fernando she bought him for a hundred contos de réis, was so popular it was re-aired in the following day. Aurélia’s little ringlet curls became the most sought-after haircut that year, just like her deep red lipstick.
Fabiana was a star; Senhora’s star, Ângela’s star. She knew that ever since Fabiana gave her the eyes back in the audition phase. The director responded with unexpected shyness. Ângela was usually the one who approached her women, not the contrary. Looking back, Fabiana must have done it to get that stupid part, not because she wanted her. If the rumors were true, it wouldn’t be the first time. And her plan worked, it worked so well that, even if they didn’t get together right away, Ângela was fighting the goddamn creator to get her in the show. For the first few weeks, they circled each other, with Ângela reading Fernando’s part backstage whenever Fabiana was too frightened by Nívea’s antics to finish a scene. What if she replaces me? Fabiana asked many times, biting her lip. I wouldn’t take it; I was born to play Aurélia. Ironically, Ângela was surer than ever that she had made the right choice in casting her whenever they were alone and Fabiana’s expression darkened thinking about her precarious situation. This is the look you must keep, Ângela told her. The right amount of ingenue and anger.
They fucked in the bathroom at Nívea’s wake, which might have been shitty, but neither of them really cared. Is this real? Fabiana asked her as Ângela helped her zip up her black dress. Because it is for me. Ângela said sure; what else would anyone say? During production, she often preferred to film Fabiana’s close-ups herself, to an extent it personally bothered Bertrand, who didn’t get as much attention as her despite being co-lead. It’s Aurélia’s story, Ângela repeated every time he complained. The camera has to punish Fernando.
Bertrand got on her fucking nerves. He was whiny and vain and stupid, but unfortunately the public loved him, so they couldn’t pull a Heart and Courage and kill him off. Fabiana was about to move in with Ângela, the network’s favorite open secret, when the gossip magazines started hinting at what a lovely couple Bertrand and Fabiana made. Senhora was at its peak, and both actors were already in talks for future collaborations, namely another José de Alencar classic like Lucíola. Fabiana brushed the subject aside, supposedly happy with Ângela and all the privileges their relationship brought, but open secrets have an expiration date as secrets. One day, after a magazine threatened to release the truth—with a photo, no less—Fabiana bailed. Left Ângela’s apartment in the middle of the night, and refused to explain why on the next day of shooting, which would be the production’s last.
Fabiana never looked as beautiful on camera as she did in that last episode. Her acting, too, was never as good as it was that day, as if she devoured the words she owed Ângela and digested them as Aurélia’s own. She was the script, the production, the scenes. She was Senhora. That episode would have placed her in the Mount Olympus of stardom as one of Brazil’s greatest: the brightest TV sweetheart the country had ever had the pleasure to court. But as of today, Fabiana Seixas is nothing but a morbid curiosity; Ângela made sure to burn the tapes before they ever went on air. Senhora would never end.
The costumes, the pictures, her copies, the scripts, and even that luxurious historical mansion the director had been glued to—they all burned to the ground with a jug of gasoline and a match. Ângela couldn’t stand any of it anymore. The same higher force that made her stay was the one that compelled her to destroy everything, or her rage did, as she soaked curtains and furniture with fuel and piled all their work in the middle of the entrance hall like a bonfire. It was Fabiana’s fault, she told herself.
Nobody ever knew if Ângela hadn’t been able to flee in time or if she decided to stay, and away she went with Senhora’s last known remains.
• • • •
Bertrand Belmond (1937–1982) was a handsome and useless idiot, but he was a handsome and useless idiot whose career survived the dumpster fire of a mess that was Senhora. After Ângela’s death, Senhora once again made the news, not as the magnum opus created by two dead but talented women, but as an unfinished curse. The fatal accidents that happened earlier in the production, swept under the rug by the network, suddenly became a death presage for the rest of the crew, and the question everybody in the country now asked was: Who’s next?
Well, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be Bertrand. He made sure of it by making the best of it; sad face, sad face, flash, flash, wink, wink. I felt it, you know, Bertrand said in his first interview. God told me I shouldn’t be there, in the house, and I think that’s the only reason I’m still here. Bertrand surfed the buzz, see, he drowned in it, he wore black in every interview because he looked oh-so-good in it. It’s so tragic that we lost all of it; the story felt so alive, he told a famous television host, only half a lie. Oh, yes, there’s the human loss too, of course, so devastating. Because the public loves a tragic romance, he played a bunch of Byronic heroes in copycat soaps for the newest rival network, and even got a few minor international gigs. Might as well try everything, you never know when it might be my turn to go, Bertrand joked, putting on a charming-but-now-rare-since-brooding-is-his-thing-now smile. Then, he would clarify he didn’t believe in curses, and it was disrespectful to speculate about such a terrible thing. An accident is an accident is an accident.
If the public knew what he was doing, they might have thought Bertrand was an evil, manipulative jerk. But he didn’t consider himself one. He tried to stay with Fabiana during the thick of it, he tried to help her get back on her feet, saying there are plenty of villainesses she could do now; the audience would love her dark side, but Fabiana didn’t make it. She didn’t want to. Fabiana closed herself inside Ângela’s apartment, refusing to answer the door or the telephone. Bertrand would knock on her door, first daily, then every Friday, then once a month, until he just let go, leaving the engagement ring he had been wearing for the past months in her mailbox. Fabiana never opened it. The relationship was fake, anyway, a PR stunt with a soon-to-be-nobody. Bertrand moved on.
People kept dying; people from Senhora, that is. The newspapers loved the curse because it was one of the only things they could publish without needing to check back with the censors. Bertrand tried not to rationalize it, tried to wave away the fear that accompanied him since he left Fabiana in that dead woman’s apartment, that Senhora had followed him out of that set and was waiting for him to join the others. Unconsciously, Bertrand started to surround himself with water. Bought a house by the beach, started swimming every week, showered thrice a day, drank copious amounts of ice-cold water. He even started sailing.
No fire-related curse could get him like this. He was safe. He was fireproof. Unlike the others, he would make it.
When Betrand died by heat stroke after an uncharacteristic nap on his yacht on a particularly sunny day—his back so cooked you could not see what was skin, what was pus or what was blood—no one knew if his death counted or not.
(It did.)
• • • •
Deaths by fire get repetitive after a while. So repetitive the media grows bored of them. The actress who played Adelaide, Aurélia’s bitter rival, dies in an improbable landmine accident. The actor who played Lemos, Aurélia’s uncle, a suicide by gas turned bloody when the oven inexplicably turned itself on midway through the act. Three surviving extras are consumed by a wildfire while hiking. The first gets a headline, the second a minor note, the third turns into whispers in the corridors of a TV network that will also cease to exist. The legend of a curse from the 1970s becomes a curiosity in cheap horror websites in the 2000s, which becomes a few blog articles about lost media in the 2010s, then nothing at all.
No one else remains. No one, no one but . . .
• • • •
You will only hear of this if you’re acquainted with the half-bored gossip of Copacabana, but a little old lady known by the title Senhora lived in the neighborhood for a long while. Something of an irony, no? The leading star shreds her own skin and becomes the title of her magnum opus. Some say she led a quiet life in an apartment that once belonged to a B-movie director, a former lover of hers, and rarely ever left the house. Twice a week, she used to go out to buy her groceries, and every fifteen days, she paid her bills in the nearest lottery retailer. She used to be an actress in her youth, a bodega owner told his clients while the old lady in question bought a handful of vegetables, counting her coins and mumbling to herself. Gossip followed her like an ugly stain, no matter how much she hid from it. I heard she played a villainess in a historical novela. Something-something on TV Manchete.
No, Fabiana thought of answering, her voice unused for so long. Something worse than a villainess: a heroine. She dreamed of embodying one since she was a little girl, as the burnt newspapers had printed decades earlier. At eighteen, she moved to Rio de Janeiro to try her luck, working first as a waitress, then as bus conductor for a few months until she landed a role as a few different types of extras. I took every audition as a chance to practice my craft, Fabiana used to repeat in interviews with her sweetest voice, perfectly measured to conceal a more sincere answer of I would have played a lamp in a play if that meant a chance at the spotlight.
She knew she couldn’t make it to Hollywood, but she had the face and the eyes of a TV sweetheart, so she persisted. Fabiana promised herself she would be pragmatic about her lack of fortune and connections, so she slept with a producer to get cast as a minor but recurring character, a decision she was never ashamed of despite the conflicting feedback from fans and actors alike. She’s such a slut, a co-worker whispered once when he thought she wasn’t listening, lacing her costume’s corset by herself. Say what you will about her, but she knows what’s she’s doing, said another. That made Fabiana wink, a silent acknowledgment of not giving a fuck.
Fabiana kept climbing step by step until she tripped over her feet and fell for the wrong person, a woman, no less. Death fucking sentence for an actress, especially one who dreamed of leading roles. But this woman was her Fernando, the person she imagined herself saying the lines to when the camera was on, even though she felt like she was way more of a Fernando than an Aurélia. That was the part Senhora wanted her to play, not the lead. The money-whore, the social climber, the traitor.
Senhora, you see, was alive. Senhora was the hand that pulled the strings of Nívea Figueiredo, turned her into a tyrant, boiled down her esophagus. Senhora was the glue keeping Ângela Camargo’s feet on that set, inhaling the fumes before she burned to death. Senhora was the luring sleep that kept Bertrand Belmond frying in the sun like a shrimp after he tried to run away from her. Fabiana was the only one who knew, the only one who listened. There was a vague luring sound coming from that set, from those costumes, from those dialogues, a sound Fabiana had to obey—a first for someone who always did things her own way. With horror and a vague sense of curiosity, Fabiana found herself following Senhora’s demands. She moved, smiled, cried on cue, left Ângela when she told her to. A hungry beast feasting on fire and misery.
As the insistent whispers telling her to pour gasoline on herself whenever she left the house worsened, Fabiana came to the conclusion that Senhora had a death wish. She had grown far too large for a soap opera. Senhora shouldn’t have had expensive satin and velvet, she shouldn’t have had expensive equipment, she shouldn’t have looked so crisp. She should have had archive costume design and shoddy filming. She should have been fun but disposable, a tape to be used and reused until she no longer existed, the natural course of life of a mid-century soap opera.
To Fabiana’s misfortune, a copy had been made of Senhora’s last videotapes. She had stolen them, vengefully, before she left Ângela to never come back. If one had the opportunity to hear it, they would have heard Fabiana utter the words If I lose, you lose in the same tempo and cadence as her best scene, the showdown of the best unknown feud of all times; a soap opera versus its brightest star. Fabiana stored her beloathed enemy in the Cinemateca Brasileira, with no identification tags, claiming it was a bunch of unimportant pornochanchadas, and lived for as long as she could just to spite her.
There’s nothing more Hollywood-esque than an open curse.
• • • •
What Fabiana didn’t know was that Senhora could hear her too. Lost and alone in the middle of this huge archive, surrounded by movies and talk shows and telenovelas of all kinds, she decides that enough is enough. She didn’t choose any of this. She won’t be an ongoing curse.
Senhora was always a victim of herself, and like all her other victims, she burns.
