During the day, Gilberto worked bent over a small pillow of pins and thread, tossing the ends of the balls of thread skillfully so as to weave a long, narrow, and complex piece of finery. Dona Maria Creuza would take the lace ribbon, wound around pieces of cardboard, and dicker the price in the plaza. When the lace ribbon reached its final destination—the trim on a woman’s blouse or negligee or the delicate border of a fine linen tablecloth—it had been bought for a hundred times the money Dona Maria Creuza had received for it. Gilberto knew nothing of the price of his lace, which was as ephemeral as the changing shadows of the banana tree and the foam at the edges of the land where he was born and had always lived. Now an invalid, he did not even hope to wander any further.
Dona Maria Creuza, too, had seen the stories told on television about the Matacão. She had held a rosary in one hand and had placed her other hand on her television and prayed to the small saddled figure of Saint George. She had wept and begged and promised and prostrated herself to ask for a miracle: that her grandson, Gilberto, might once again walk. The miracle that occurred was almost more than her heart could bear. Looking up from her tears staining the earthen floor, she saw two bony feet grasping the ground with their toes. Gilberto balanced breathlessly in the doorway and stumbled into his grandmother’s arms.
News of the miracle spread through the sleepy beach town in the same way a cool breeze caresses the sweaty foreheads and cheeks of people hiding from the scalding sun. It was murmured and whispered with wonder from house to house and bar to bar. Maria Creuza’s Gilberto could walk again.
As Dona Maria Creuza explained the event again and again to everyone who came to hear, it was apparent that there was one small but essential detail that needed attention. Maria Creuza had promised Saint George that if her prayers were granted, she herself would walk barefooted to the Matacão and erect a small shrine in his honor. How did such a woman at her age suppose that she could accomplish such a promise? It was at least 1,500 miles to the Matacão, and Maria Creuza was nearly seventy years old. Certainly, Gilberto, although cured, could not expect to make such a trip in her place. He was much too weak. He might now be able to walk, but he would certainly die in fullfilling the very promise that had been his salvation. The ways of the Lord were unfathomable, but there were limits to human possibility.
Chico Paco heard the news as he dragged his jangada to high land and felt his heart leap to see Gilberto’s thin, trembling, but indeed, standing figure outlined at the head of the dune before his house. “Chiquinho!” Gilberto was yelling. “Chiquinho! Look at me! Look at me!”
Chico Paco felt the sand kicked up from his heels pelt his back, as he pranced up the dunes to Gilberto’s outstretched arms. Chico Paco grabbed Gilberto, hoisting him aloft as usual, and galloped down into the sea, throwing and catching Gilberto in the waves until the sun set.
It was Chico Paco who, without a second thought, volunteered his two healthy legs and promised to take Dona Maria Creuza’s place, to make the long trip to the Matacão on bare feet to erect a shrine to Saint George and to give praise and thanks for the miracle of Gilberto’s recovery. Chico Paco promised to do this because of his love for his childhood friend Gilberto, and because somehow, this miracle must also be meant for Chico Paco himself.
Within a week, Chico Paco, armed with the handwritten prayers of Dona Maria Creuza on small pieces of tablet paper, a rosary, a locket of Gilberto’s hair, a small statue of Saint George, and Maria Creuza’s hard-earned savings, kissed his own mother good-bye and turned the green iridescence of his eyes toward the Matacão, leaving the prints of his bare feet over the multicolored sands.
Just as Chico Paco set forward on his journey, Kazumasa and I were on a rickety train somewhere in the state of Minas Gerais coming out of a long tunnel, old Mané Pena was carving a foot-worm out of the sole of his foot, and Batista and Tania Aparecida were rolling away from their early morning lovemaking. I know these things for a fact. I also know, to make the picture complete, that at that very moment, there was also a certain American in New York, by the name of Jonathan B. Tweep, pensively studying newspaper ads in the last car of a subway train. Well, I am full of such coincidental information, and international at that! But to continue . . .
CHAPTER 6:
Jonathan B. Tweep
The day Geoffrey and Georgia Gamble took the elevator down twenty-three floors and passed out the revolving glass doors at the bottom of their exempire, an unassuming Caucasian male American by the name of Jonathan B. Tweep pushed his way through those very same tinted-glass doors.
The human resources department of GGG was on the first floor. It was largely a waiting room with clipboards and forms and sign-up sheets. In the old days, before GGG had bought the building, the human resources department had been a temporary placement agency for secretaries and word processors. GGG didn’t have to do a thing. It simply bought out the temp agency, changed the nameplates and replaced the pink carpets with a more executive tan. All the temps were immediately given permanent placement on one of the twenty-three floors of GGG.
J.B. examined the clipboards with unusual scrutiny. He collected clipboards or, more broadly speaking, paper clips. (J.B. defined anything that held paper together as a paper clip.) He sat in the waiting room of GGG and filled out the information on one of the clipboards offered to him. Then he flipped through his personal file folder and found a résumé which he had coded “SCWP” (secretarial, clerical, word processor) and pulled it out. It seemed to have the qualifications that matched the requirements for GGG’s latest job posting. He had résumés that presented him with the qualifications for every sort of job imaginable, but he read the SCWP-coded résumé again to make sure it did not include any extraneous skills like “supervisor” or “manager.”
J.B. turned in his résumé and application and thumbed through GGG’s pamphlets on health benefits, group tours, and aerobics. He also read GGG’s newsletter, which still sported a photograph of Geoffrey and Georgia and Georgia’s “Letter from the President.” He looked at Geoffrey and Georgia’s photograph with simplistic awe and thought that it might be even possible to apply for their jobs, little knowing that he had in fact passed them on the way in. J.B. slipped the newsletter into a clipboard and surreptitiously stuffed it all into his briefcase folder.
J.B. had handed his résumé to a short, curly-red-haired receptionist with long red nails that matched the color of her hair and a voice like a Dallas telephone operator. The exact same voice, a pitch higher, called out his name, “Mr. Tweep, please come in.”
J.B. jumped up and followed this second woman who looked strangely like the receptionist but was not. This curly-red-haired woman also had red nails but was a tad heavier and older. She smiled sweetly and managed to talk about the weather, how busy they were at GGG, where she was going for her vacation, and her dental appointment, all before they got to the office of the personnel interviewer. The red-haired woman who was a tad heavier nodded to a seat for J.B., left a folder on the desk of the personnel interviewer, and closed the door behind her.
J.B. looked up at the personnel interviewer in some confusion because she too was a curly redhead with matching red nails and a Dallas telephone operator’s voice yet another notch higher. She flipped through the papers in the folder and smiled sweetly.
“Mr. Tweep, can I call you Jonathan?”
“Sure,” J.B. nodded.
“Marvelous. We’re great believers in making people comfortable. An interview shouldn’t be such an ordeal, now should it, Jonathan?”
“No, it should be a straightforward conversation in which the job applicant and the prospective employer converse openly and equally to obtain information to assess whether either, in fact, desires to work with the other.” J.B. had once been a personnel interviewer. In fact, J.B. had been many things over the employable years of his life. The résumé the interviewer now reviewed was only one of many résumés, the sum total of which still did not completely describe the man sitting be
fore her.
J.B. was the sort of person who had gone through life trying everything and being second-best at everything. Life was a great elective divvied up into a series of smaller electives. There was nothing he had not tried, but for some reason, there was nothing in particular he wanted to do all the time and forever. If J.B. could have afforded the title, he might have been called a dilettante. But although he was second-best in everything he happened to pursue, no one seemed to really notice. Perhaps it was because he found all tasks so easy and, therefore, boring that J.B. himself was an unassuming projection of boredom. He was what might be called second-best in obscurity or unrecognized talent, but more often, he was stamped “overqualified.”
Those who did not know J.B. personally made the assumption that his unassuming manner and obscurity were the protective wall behind which he hid what they believed to be a defect or a freak of nature: J.B.’s third arm. But J.B. was far from ashamed of his extra appendage and only kept it out of sight to prevent hysterical reactions from observers on drugs or those prone to wild hallucinations. He accepted his third arm as another might accept ESP, an addition of 128K to their random access, or the invention of the wheel. As far as J.B. was concerned, he had entered a new genetic plane in the species. He even speculated that he was the result of Nobel prize-winning sperm. He was a better model, the wave of the future.
J.B. not only thought his third arm was advantageous, he knew it was. He might have been an acclaimed pianist. He could float three consecutive runs up the keyboard or bang out three octaves, all at the same time, but J.B. lost interest in the piano because there was nothing written for his particular expertise. Chopin and Beethoven were no longer a challenge. In baseball, J.B. was asked to leave the team because there were no rules for a two-mitt player, and besides, no one could get a ball past him. In a factory production line, J.B. was so fast, he threw his fellow workers down the line, who were unable to keep up with such a pace, into chaos. Once he had juggled balls in a circus. The other clowns were jealous, and people laughed every time they dumped water on J.B. during an act. In the matter of love making, well, the advantages were obvious.
Obscurity and an unassuming manner, then, were just part of J.B.’s personality. Maybe it ran in the family. Few people ever suspected his multitude of talents or his additional endowment. But J.B., in his quiet way of sampling everything, was in fact motivated by a simmering enthusiasm for collecting paper clips and the exercise of finding a job. If anyone were to ask him what he was doing in life or what his personal goals were, he would simply answer, “To find a job.”
Before entering GGG Enterprises, J.B. had tried an enormous variety of jobs, everything from being a pickpocket to shoveling MacDonald’s hamburgers, three at a time, on a grill. Somehow, J.B. had a feeling, a sensation felt in his third arm, that GGG had something to offer him that no other company before had been able to and that he, of course, had something unique to offer GGG.
The interviewer smiled with engaging Southern enthusiasm. They could have been on a front porch, fanning the tepid humidity and drinking mint juleps. She went on, “It says here that you can type 120 words a minute on a typewriter and process 240 words a minute on a word processor. Now, is that possible?”
J.B. said sincerely, “Actually, I’m faster by thirty words on a typewriter and another fifty on the word processor, but you know how it is when you take the tests; you always make more mistakes when you’re under pressure.”
The interviewer nodded sweetly and even asked the right question, “Jonathan, that’s an incredible speed! What’s your secret?”
J.B. matter-of-factly pushed the hidden sleeve through his jacket and produced his third arm.
The personnel interviewer blanched slightly but maintained her sweetness. “Oh well, Jonathan, of course,” she sputtered. “We are an equal opportunity employer. We employ our personnel regardless of color, creed, or handicap.” She was about to say that only last week, they had hired a Vietnam veteran who had lost his arm during action in the Mekong Delta, and that J.B. could actually even things up, but she remembered her position as a personnel interviewer. She wouldn’t give any indication of their interest in hiring J.B until a decision was made. It was not wise to encourage an applicant’s hopes.
When the interview was over, J.B. shook her hand with one of his three hands and gestured amiably with another; this was a clever distraction allowing him to snatch an irresistible handful of heart-shaped paper clips from an acrylic tray on her desk. Then, he walked out with the correct balance of confidence and humility he knew personnel interviewers looked for. He could hear the interviewer pick up her phone and buzz her supervisor, “Can I come and talk with you,” she said. “I have a special situation . . .”
Before reentering the waiting room, J.B. could see through an open door into a larger office. Once again, another curly red-haired woman with long red nails in a suit sitting at a large desk picked up her comline.
J.B. felt his throat itch and tighten. The supervisor’s voice answered in the same Dallas telephone operator’s voice, yet another notch higher in this scale of voices, “Honey, I have my weekly corporate culture meeting in about fifteen minutes, but come on in.” J.B. jimmied one of his little fingers into an ear. He could hear the notes in his inner ear rise with every position. Receptionist, secretary, coordinator, supervisor, manager, director, vice president, president. Dropping the heart-shaped paper clips into a pocket, the thumb and index finger of the third hand stretched an entire octave.
PART II:
The Developing World
CHAPTER 7:
The Pigeon
With time, Kazumasa and I noticed, peering from his window at the events in Batista and Tania Aparecida Djapan’s back porch, that every weekend the crowds that gathered to await the return flight of the pigeon were growing larger and larger. Pretty soon, they spread out from the narrow corridors of the tenement and onto the streets, milling with anticipation on the sidewalks and floating back and forth between the bars across the street and on the corner. A slow-moving glut of traffic along with a new taxi stand had invaded the narrow street. Vendors had begun to come regularly on the weekends, selling popcorn, cotton candy, popsicles, deep-fried pastéis, lottery tickets, combs, hairpins, key chains, and plastic snakes that slithered across the pavement. A few beggars with eternally festering wounds, dark glasses, and white-tipped canes, and babies sucking on shriveled breasts had come to stake out some territory, too. At one of the bars, someone beat out a samba on the congas, and everyone seemed to dance, bounce, and walk to its rhythm. There was a tingling sense of excitement in the air that wafted up to us.
Kazumasa noticed me bobbing to the beat of the congas and realized his own physical empathy with the events below. In fact, lately he had had trouble concentrating on his work with the São Paulo Municipal Subway System. As the months passed, he found himself more and more distracted by the pulsating beat from someone’s radio or even the memory of the weekend congas on the street below his window. Invariably, he was distracted by me, bobbing rhythmically to a music other than the steady screech of metal against metal or the vacuum-packed sucking and hushing of automatic doors. We were forced to ride our routes several times to get a true reading, and even then, Kazumasa was no longer sure. His mind would wander from his work, and all of a sudden, he would be aware of me bouncing off the last measures of a popular bossa nova.
Kazumasa’s maid and housekeeper, Lourdes, came away from her chores and viewed the crowd below, too. He was surprised by the quiet approach of the woman and the sensation of her darker elbow against his own. Kazumasa had never had a maid, and even after nearly a year, he felt slightly uncomfortable, as if he were intruding upon Lourdes, slipping about his own apartment self-consciously. Lourdes imitated Kazumasa, tiptoeing around in bobby socks because she had once worked for a Japanese family who never wore shoes in the house. She thought Kazumasa must appreciate this detail about her work, but Kazumasa thought that maids in bobby
socks just came with apartments in Brazil.
“Seu Kazumasa,” Lourdes spoke shyly at first, avoiding me bobbing in full swing with the congas. (I could really move in those days.) “It’s crazy down there. Everyone is waiting for the pigeon to bring a message.”
“Message?” Kazumasa repeated her last word, straining to understand.
Lourdes tucked a strand of dark wavy hair under her scarf. “I don’t know,” she said. “It is always different. The last time, it just said, ‘Eagle.’ Everyone ran out and bought lottery tickets on the eagle. And do you know, Seu Kazumasa, they all won! I should have done it, too, but you have to be down there to hear the message. I have tried to have someone telephone me up here as soon as they hear it, but the telephone lines all get jammed.” Lourdes sighed.
Kazumasa was still struggling to understand this new language and smiled and nodded and then tilted his head to one side in some confusion.
But Lourdes was not discouraged and said everything again, only more slowly, her gentle eyes glancing merrily off me and my dancing. Kazumasa smiled in wonder. Everyone in this country seemed to be like Lourdes. No matter what it was, they seemed to want, at all costs, for him to understand. He remembered a man who had missed several subway stops on his way to work while explaining to Kazumasa with the utmost patience and consideration that his sister had married a nisei and lived in Campinas and that he was going to take his nephews, who (the man seemed surprised at the results) all looked Japanese, to the circus on the weekend.
“Pigeon!” Lourdes repeated. “The message might make you rich!” Lourdes rubbed her thumb and forefinger together in front of Kazumasa’s face, assuming this mime to be an international sign for money. “Rich!” she repeated.
“Rich,” Kazumasa both nodded and shook his head.
Lourdes looked at Kazumasa with twinkling eyes and instinctive generosity. “Come on, Seu Kazumasa! Every day you look down there and watch those people. I watch the soap operas, but you watch those people. I can’t get inside a soap opera, but you can go down there. Let’s go down!”
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest Page 4