The beat of the congas suddenly seemed louder and faster. Lourdes pulled the scarf from her head, her dark hair falling across her forehead and over her shoulders in soft waves. She grabbed Kazumasa by the hand, and together we ran out of the apartment, leaving the curtains flapping in the breeze of the open window.
Down there, waiting anxiously on the Djapan’s back porch, was Tania Aparecida’s mother with a watch. Her large bosom hovered over everything with an authoritative air. She had personally cleaned the pigeon’s cage and put out fresh water and birdseed. She wanted the pigeon’s homecoming to be as comfortable as possible. The children from the tenement scanned the skies attentively, each hoping to be the first to notice the pigeon’s circling flight. Occasionally, someone pointed at some ordinary pigeon in flight, causing false commotion, a few curses thrown to the wind and lighthearted ridicule. Generally, the pigeon arrived home without being spotted, often circling away from the noisy and expectant crowds below before landing. A tingling bell announced the pigeon’s arrival. The word passed through the jostling mass of people, through the corridors and out to the street.
Batista had arranged for three oversized men who worked as bouncers in the local nightclubs to protect the pigeon and Tania Aparecida’s mother, who hardly looked in need of much protection. The bouncers stood menacingly against the crowd while Tania Aparecida’s mother carefully removed the tube from the pigeon’s leg and unwrapped the message.
Batista had been forced to arrange for the bodyguard-types after last week’s incident in which a boy ran out from the crowd and grabbed the message from Tania Aparecida’s mother’s hand before she had even had the chance to unroll it. The boy had climbed over the porch and onto the adjoining roof, skittering over the tiles, down the side of the house, and over a wall. Several people tried to follow the boy, pushing Tania’s plants over the porch wall, breaking all the tiles on the neighboring roof and bruising themselves badly in the chase. But no one was able to catch up with the boy, even though a few people recognized him and tried to head him off at his own home. The boy’s family was not aware of his escapades and became worried when he did not appear for several days.
Batista and Tania Aparecida had returned home to a vigilant crowd and a weeping mother, remorsefully cradling to her breast what she felt to be an abused pigeon. When Batista heard the details of the pigeon-mail robbery, he broke down and laughed until tears dribbled down his cheeks. From his laughter, everyone speculated on the ridiculous nature of the message and the hilarious joke played on the foolish boy, who must have felt sure that he had run off with a veritable treasure map. But Batista never told anyone, not even Tania Aparecida, what had been written on that scrap of paper. Many weeks later, the boy who had stolen the pigeon’s mail, came sheepishly to Batista’s door and quietly thanked him for never revealing the message.
One could never be sure, then, what the message carried by the pigeon would be. It might bring wealth, some penetrating realization, or it might simply be one of Batista’s old jokes. As the crowds waiting to hear the pigeon’s messages grew, however, Batista became aware of the necessity to produce messages of greater profundity. He often pondered for hours about what the next message should read, but without success. It seemed to him that the messages came of their own accord when the time came to write them, and it always amazed him that what he had taken a few minutes to conjure and write should have such significance on its arrival.
Today’s message was cryptic. The three bouncers cracked their knuckles, and Tania’s mother smoothed the tiny bit of crumpled paper with her thick fingers, reading haltingly, “The Japanese with the ball will find friendship and fortune in Brazil.” Little boys scurried through the crowd with the message tripping off the tips of their tongues. Everyone consulted each other, as if mulling over a puzzle to be deciphered.
“It must be some Japanese who plays soccer,” someone suggested.
Another scoffed, “They only play baseball.”
“Could be that, too.”
“They all play baseball!”
“Could be my brother-in-law. He’s Japanese.”
Everyone ran off to hug a Japanese friend or relative and, then, drag them off to buy a lottery ticket. The lottery ticket shops were soon crammed with Japanese and friends of Japanese all trying their luck. One shop was greeted by a small excited cadre of people moving in a huddle with an elderly Japanese gentleman. “Step aside!” they all yelled. “This is the Japanese with the ball. This is our big winner!” They all pointed at an odd bump growing on the side of the old man’s right cheek. The old Japanese gentleman smiled jubilantly.
But this was only one weekend in a long entertaining succession over a period of many months, and while Batista enjoyed the fame he had gained from the pigeon messages, he was still, basically, a pigeon enthusiast. He had already joined the International Pigeon Society and was now the president of the local chapter of the National Pigeon Society. His pigeon had begun to win awards for beauty and flight.
Tania Aparecida now proudly accompanied Batista in his numerous activities and responsibilities. While Batista no longer felt the need to drive Tania Aparecida back to what he considered her proper nest, he was tormented every once in a while by the special attentions she received from one pigeon colleague or another. “He was explaining auto-sexing for white-cocks,” Tania Aparecida would protest innocently.
“Ah! Eh? I’ll show that bastard an auto-sexing!” Batista raged, strutting around the porch nervously.
But Tania Aparecida ignored Batista’s flights of jealousy, and Batista had to admit that she was becoming as knowledgeable and engrossed in the subject as he. It was Tania Aparecida who had encouraged Batista to invest in an attractive female counterpart to their prizewinner and to establish a pigeon corps. In a short while, Batista and Tania’s back porch became lined with cages and feeding troughs and pigeons in all stages of training and development, and Tania’s mother came every day, measuring birdseed, cleaning cages, changing the water and lovingly pressing the beaks of the yearlings into her cleavage.
The children in the tenements and surrounding neighborhood, too, were influenced by the activities on the Djapan’s back porch. Nowadays, all the children had pigeons which they cared for according to Batista’s careful advice. They came regularly to see Batista about some pigeon problem and to buy a few cruzeiros’ worth of Batista’s famous birdseed blend. Batista noticed that, while all the boys still carried slingshots in their back pockets, they no longer used them to try potshots at the pigeons. Slingshots were now strictly used to scare away stray cats on the prowl. On the weekends, while Batista’s prize-winning pigeon still arrived faithfully with messages, dozens of other pigeons were also homing into the tenements with special messages sent by young amateur enthusiasts and students of Batista.
The messages sent home via pigeon by Batista were, for the most part, like those in fortune cookies: aphorisms and pithy maxims, coincidental truths, humor, a thought for the day. Some suggested that Batista got them off the Seicho-no-Ie calendar—that dense compilation of daily words of wisdom attributed to a myriad of great teachers (both Asian and Occidental, famous, obscure, and unknown), ferreted out of sources as varied as the Bible, Shakespeare, Buddhist sutras and the Koran. Others said he copied them from the newspaper horoscopes. Some speculated that the messages came to him in dreams on Friday nights. Some went so far as to assert that Batista merely sent the pigeon with blank scraps of paper which were miraculously written on during the pigeon’s flight. Maybe, some thought, the prize-winning pigeon was literate! Every now and then, however, one of Batista’s messages was a prophecy. How could the message “eagle” be explained? Numerous people everywhere claimed to have personally understood and received one or another of Batista’s pigeon messages. There was actually a small pamphlet circulating, listing all of the pigeon messages and the subsequent meanings, miracles, fortunes, and prophecies attributed to each message.
Batista himself was baffled by the c
ommotion regarding the messages he sent by homing pigeon. What had begun as a simple training exercise to test the talents of his pigeon had ballooned into a massive cult at his doorstep, an institution akin to tracking biorhythms or weather broadcasting. Batista joked and bantered about his growing fame as a prophet/fortune-teller, but Tania Aparecida was not beyond alluding to the special powers of her now-famous husband.
When Lourdes heard the pigeon message repeated by everyone on the street, she felt a chill run through her body and travel down her arm to Kazumasa, who noticed me, in front of his nose, jittering in excitement.
Lourdes dragged Kazumasa and me from lottery stand to lottery shop. They bought every sort of ticket, from the illegal ones to the state-controlled ones.
“Chose five numbers from one to ninety-nine, Seu Kazumasa!” Lourdes instructed excitedly. “Five numbers,” she repeated more slowly. Kazumasa obediently circled numbers at random. Then Lourdes had him check off random squares next to a series of names. “Corinthians,” Kazumasa repeated. “What’s that?”
“A soccer team. You check if you think it will win, lose, or tie,” explained Lourdes.
Together, Lourdes and Kazumasa and I walked though the streets of the city. For one special day, the entire city seemed to become for Lourdes and Kazumasa a great bazaar, an enormous amusement park. We stopped for coffee and cheese bread and wandered on to the next lottery shop. We took buses to no particular destination, got off and sipped cokes or licked ice cream cones. Everywhere we went, Kazumasa spent his money on lottery tickets, raffle tickets, sweepstakes, and even the horse races. Everywhere Kazumasa went with Lourdes, he gambled and won. It was an immigrant’s dream.
Lourdes took Kazumasa and me to the movies, through the shopping centers, in and out of shops and restaurants, through parks and churches, up and down the wealthiest and the poorest streets of the city. Lourdes showed us the great mansions where she had once worked as a maid or a cook or a nanny, and then she took us to the end of one bus line and several transfers further to the outskirts of the city, where she lived with her own family. Kazumasa and I followed her up the dirt road lined with tiny houses, the better of which were cement block structures with tin or tile roofs, but all created out of construction-site scraps and cardboard with plastic wrappings for windows. Some of the houses were stuccoed and painted in bright colors—pink and blue and orange. Oil cans and pots surrounded the houses or hung from the eaves, filled with ferns, begonias, ivy, and draping succulents. Barefoot children ran in and out between the houses, stumbling over sleeping or scavenging dogs and scattering the chickens that wandered freely everywhere. The bigger girls all carried babies and toddlers on their hips wherever they happened to go. The boys pulled carts piled high with smashed aluminum cans and old Coca-Cola bottles. Old people sat in doorways or stared out the windows. As evening drifted over the city, men and women poured out of the buses and walked slowly up the paths, greeting and calling to their children as they arrived. Some brought loaves of bread and baskets with fruits or a plastic bag containing a liter of milk. The men were dirty and wet with perspiration, their hands and fingernails filled with the grime of their labor. The women trudged wearily from domestic jobs and piecework in factories. The workday had come to an end.
A young girl met us on the road. She was struggling with a heavy bucket of water which Kazumasa took from her. He was surprised that such a thin-looking child could carry such a heavy bucket of water. “This is my girl, Gislaine,” said Lourdes, handing the girl her packages.
“Mama!” the girl looked from the packages in surprise. “Cheese and goiabada!” She held out the large block of sweet guava paste and beamed with pleasure.
“A gift from Seu Kazumasa,” smiled Lourdes. “Go on now,” she nudged her daughter. “Put the water on for coffee. We have a guest.”
Lourdes’s home was a small one-room shack built of concrete blocks. Despite its shabby appearance on the outside, it was cleanly swept and cheerful inside. Lourdes had decorated the walls with photographs and bright pictures from magazines. She had hung starched white curtains over the only window and covered the small table with a hand-embroidered tablecloth.
Lourdes poured a demitasse of hot coffee for Kazumasa. The aroma of the coffee filled the small room like a strong spice.
The girl, Gislaine, ran between Kazumasa and a little boy who seemed confined to a cot in the corner of the room. I could see that the boy was lame, his withered legs useless beneath the ragged coverlet. The girl came close to inspect me near Kazumasa’s nose and ran back to report everything to the lame boy in the corner.
“That is Rubens,” said Lourdes, motioning to the boy on the cot. “Say hello to Seu Kazumasa,” she nudged the children who both only giggled. “My aunt looks after them during the day for me. If it weren’t for her, I don’t know what we’d do. Their papa left us a good while back. Rubens was just a baby. He went north to dig for gold with a friend. You heard of Serra Pelada? The friend came back with some gold nuggets and a pile of cash and this.” Lourdes showed him a gold wedding band that she hid in a tiny sack with other trinkets at the bottom of large trunk. “Said my husband got in the middle of a fight. They shot him straight through the heart. Never been sure about that story, Seu Kazumasa. There might have been foul play. All I got was a couple of gold nuggets. Who got the rest? But then again, I sometimes dream that he’s still alive, somewhere else with some other woman and kids. This life isn’t what it’s cut out to be. The Lord only knows how hard it’s been.”
Kazumasa nodded at the parts he understood. He smiled at Rubens and Gislaine, whose eyes were fixed on me, the strange ball whirling in the air by itself. Gislaine stepped away in fear, but when Kazumasa approached the little boy in his cot, Rubens put his finger up to try to touch me.
“Rubens,” Lourdes warned her son. “Don’t be a bother. Seu Kazumasa is our guest.”
Just as Kazumasa had seen Lourdes apply her talents to his own kitchen, here in her simple dwelling, she quickly had the pots bubbling with rice and beans. Lourdes had terse commands for Gislaine, who quickly ran out of the house. Kazumasa could hear the cackling of a chicken and the excited voices of other children outside. In a moment, Gislaine returned with a chicken, its wings flapping frantically all about, and bunch of collard greens picked fresh from the small vegetable patch at the side of the house. The chicken’s neck was swiftly and deftly wrung and stripped of its feathers. Soon the house was filled with the smell of garlic and fried chicken, all cooked with amazing ease on a small stove with a single burner.
Lourdes, Kazumasa, Gislaine, and Rubens all broke bread and ate hungrily. Lourdes watched Kazumasa eat with a relish she had not noticed before. She smiled thoughtfully. This was the meal she had been waiting to feed a man who had left so many years ago for Serra Pelada and never returned. She fingered the gold band in her pocket wistfully. Kazumasa noticed me whirring peacefully near his fork, which was loaded with tender rice and beans. He had come to like Lourdes’s cooking and her kind, insistent attention to all his needs. He wanted desperately to do something for her in return. He wanted to tell her how much he had enjoyed their day together and how he had suddenly come to feel that this new country was, indeed, his home.
Someone was clapping at the door. “Lourdes! Are you there? Gislaine, it’s me, Tia Carolina!” Tia Carolina rushed in, her son Jorge at her skirts, but stopped with surprise when she saw Kazumasa.
“This is my patron, Seu Kazumasa, Tia,” Lourdes explained easily, but Carolina’s eyes were fixed on Kazumasa and me.
“Lourdes, my God, it’s him! So haven’t you heard the pigeon message? Everyone has heard it by now. The Japanese. The ball. Who would have thought!” Carolina was sputtering excitedly.
“Quiet down, Tia,” Lourdes tried to calm her aunt. “Everyone in the neighborhood will hear you.” But it was already too late. Gislaine had slipped out the door with her cousin Jorge, and both were running down the narrow streets to tell everyone. Soon we could hear a noisy
commotion outside. People from all over the hillside were converging on Lourdes’s tiny home.
“What shall we do?” shrieked Tia Carolina.
Kazumasa looked at Lourdes in confusion, but he stood up calmly and walked to the door. “No worry,” he assured her. As Kazumasa opened the door, the crowd shuddered in surprise and stepped back. The little boys who had crawled between legs to get to the front looked up at me spinning, a bright light in the dark, reflected off a lantern from within the house. Kazumasa looked at the sea of curious faces and smiled happily. “Today is the happiest day in my life,” he announced. “So many friends!”
All of a sudden, people in the crowd began to step forward to shake Kazumasa’s hand, to embrace and kiss him. In an instant he was carried up by this sea of humanity, rocking and singing and cheering. All through the night, the people danced and sang in the road in front of Lourdes’s home, and Kazumasa and I were there, in the very center of it all, laughing and singing and crying, all at once.
CHAPTER 8:
The Pilgrim
After walking 1,500 miles barefoot over burning sands, cracked clay soil, slimy mud, steaming pavement, and sizzling asphalt, Chico Paco finally stumbled onto the Matacão. He sat down on the edge of it, drew his bloody feet toward his body and winced though his tears. The Matacão stretched before him, filling the western horizon as far as he could see, the heat pulsing through the air in waves into the deep blue skies. It was a desert with no trace of sand, and it was a plain so flat that ball bearings were said to roll forever into the distance as if in perpetual motion.
Chico Paco stretched his emaciated figure reverently over the Matacão and prayed for Gilberto and Dona Maria Creuza and for his own poor wounded feet. A few children nearby were tossing marbles in a hoop on the Matacão. In the distance, a dozen boys on low box carts made from discarded wood and shopping-cart wheels were racing madly toward the finish of their race. The children tossing marbles scattered in every direction, yelling at Chico Paco as they did, “Hey you! Get out of the way! You’ll ruin the championship!” Chico Paco glanced up to see the fury of the charging box carts, rolling over in time to avoid possible decapitation by one cart and causing a second cart to swerve recklessly into its competitor. The carts shot off the Matacão onto the dirt, bouncing off the pebbles and weeds, stopping another hundred feet from the Matacão in a cloud of dust.
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest Page 5