Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  “Damn drunk!” one boy shouted, running from his cart.

  “No, he must be a tourist! Sunbathing is on the northwestern end!” Another boy gestured.

  “This invalidates the championship!” said the boy whose cart had almost separated Chico Paco’s head from his shoulders.

  “What do you mean? I won anyway by two lengths even before you came close to that guy!”

  The boys confronted each other in a pack, gesturing with fists and shouting insults over their shoulders. Chico Paco rolled over in a groan.

  One boy turned from the pack, “Hey, you idiots! He’s hurt! Look at his feet! He needs help!”

  The pack reorganized itself around Chico Paco, who struggled to raise himself up. After a great deal of scuffling and commotion, the boys succeeded in lifting Chico Paco up on their shoulders, each boy struggling to lift some part of Chico Paco’s body into the air. They proceeded in a winding amorphous procession along the edge of the Matacão, slowly carrying Chico Paco’s withering figure under the cloudless afternoon skies to help.

  “Take him to Mané Pena!” Such was the consensus among the children who began to gather from everywhere, joining the processional first with curiosity and then with a solemn sense of duty and playful pomp. The procession undulated through the poor section of town, down unpaved streets—red dust and urine spattered against the skirts of shuttered buildings, pink and blue paint peeling away in great scabs, graffiti bleeding ultimatums and lost people. Dogs and pigs and chickens scattered from under the marching feet of the children while dilapidated buses filled with tired laborers sat in traffic, sulking in the popular tunes of country music.

  Old Mané greeted the procession, with Chico Paco floating on its shoulders, as it approached the outdoor cafe and Mané’s favorite sidewalk table. A reporter with a tape recorder was seated there, interviewing Mané for a radio talk show. The reporter anxiously followed Mané and the children and Chico Paco’s floating figure to Mané’s humble home, recording everything: how Chico Paco was carefully laid in a hammock, his feet bathed and bandaged, and how Mané Pena took away the pain in Chico Paco’s feet by applying the point of his feather to Chico Paco’s ear. The reporter also interviewed Chico Paco, whose story was equally interesting—the miracle of Gilberto’s recovery, Dona Maria Creuza’s prayers for her grandson and her promise to place an altar to Saint George on the Matacão after traveling barefoot from her distant home on the seaside, and how Chico Paco had come to take the old woman’s place.

  Within several days, Chico Paco’s feet were healing, the raw flesh drying into a firm crust and the deep cracks in the skin between the toes joining in tender pink ridges. By then, everyone along the Matacão had heard of Chico Paco’s courageous journey and Mané’s remarkable cure. The radio station had repeated the recorded interview of events once every hour, and far away in the seaside town with the multicolored dunes, even Chico Paco’s mother, who had no other way of knowing, had heard her son’s name mentioned on a local evangelical station praising the Lord and miracles and Chico Paco’s deep faith, generosity, and inexhaustible spirit.

  Mané Pena’s wife, Angustia, filled Chico Paco’s plate with fish and a generous ladle of toasted manioc flour. Angustia, like Mané Pena, was a toothless, leathery woman. She had borne at least eighteen children, too many to remember. Ten of her children had survived so far. The youngest, Beto, a two-year-old, clung to her thick, veined calves as she slapped about the kitchen in rubber thongs. “Suely,” Angustia summoned one of the older girls. “Take Beto and give him his bottle.”

  Suely obediently dumped a spoonful of sugar and some thick coffee into a bottle of milk. Soon Suely and Beto were settled comfortably in the doorway, Suely singing songs while Beto leaned into his sister’s lap, sucking on his bottle and examining his toes.

  “You’d better eat more,” Dona Angustia nodded at Chico Paco. “Put some flesh on those bones,” she suggested huskily.

  Chico Paco himself had mashed the fresh garlic and salt into a soft pulp for Dona Angustia. “My menfolk won’t do any cooking,” Dona Angustia commented as she smothered the pieces of fish with tomatoes and onions. “Who taught you to cook?”

  “My father died when I was little. I always helped my mother out. There was only my mother and me,” said Chico Paco. “Some cilantro and green onions would give the fish flavor,” he added.

  Dona Angustia nodded, avoiding Chico Paco’s glistening green eyes. Those people who lived near the ocean were different she had decided.

  Eating the fish and manioc, Chico Paco watched the children and thanked Dona Angustia and Mané Pena through the iridescence of his expressive eyes. “It’s been my dream to come to the Matacão, Seu Mané,” Chico Paco said earnestly. “It’s not just Gilberto’s miracle and Dona Maria Creuza’s prayers. My own prayers have been answered too. That day I saw you on the television, I knew I must come here. It is another miracle sent from God that I am here in your home with you, a famous healer and inventor of the feather.” Chico Paco brushed aside his tears.

  Mané Pena grinned modestly, spooning his food down rapidly. He looked up from his plate and said, “But now you, son, are a famous pilgrim and payer of promises.” He thought a bit and added with his characteristic humor, “Next time, you ought to wear shoes, or at least, travel at night when the ground is cooler. You might avoid burning those feet. I’m allergic to shoes.” Mané pointed to his own bare feet. “These have got their own kind of soles, but I don’t do your kind of walking, son.” Chico Paco chuckled at the suggestion that he might make the journey on foot a second time, but in less than a week, the radio station was flooded with letters and telephone calls requesting Chico Paco to personally carry out promises made to every saint from Nicholas to the Virgin Mary.

  In the beginning, Chico Paco ignored the pleas for his assistance and went about quietly erecting the altar to Saint George on the Matacão, as Dona Maria Creuza had requested. It was a simple structure, no more than a few feet high and wide, but building it was more difficult than Chico Paco had expected. He paid the most attention to the base of the altar, to which everything had to be nailed and cemented, as there was no way of attaching anything to the Matacão. No amount of nailing or drilling could possibly make a dent in its surface. He tried pouring a mixture of common cement around the base, but it did not adhere to the Matacão. The only manner in which he could ensure that the altar would remain in place was to fill the base with cement and heavy discarded pieces of iron and metal to make it too heavy to be moved easily.

  By the time Chico Paco was carefully setting a dozen tiles down for the small roof, he had attracted a number of observers and officials who argued about the legality of placing such a structure on the Matacão. Wasn’t it like any roadside altar or cross erected by mourners for a loved one killed in a car accident? The roadside belonged to no one, just as no one could put a claim on the Matacão. Government officials, on the other hand, argued that the Matacão was a national park and that allowing Chico Paco to build an altar would be an open invitation for others to do so as well. They envisioned a Matacão cluttered with altars and relics, plastic flowers in porcelain vases and peddlers selling candles and rosaries. The Church was careful in its estimation of Gilberto’s miracle, but there was a noticeable scurrying about among the clergy attempting to capitalize on the possible spiritual magnetism of the Matacão and the miraculous ways of God. A case could be made that the Matacão was without doubt the natural base for the world’s greatest church. Surely Chico Paco’s small gesture was a clear sign from God. The Matacão, then, belonged to the church. Poor Chico Paco found himself in the center of a brewing storm.

  The controversy over the altar to Saint George on the Matacão only augmented Chico Paco’s fame and popularity. More than ever now, he was flooded with proposals to walk from one place or another to the Matacão, in some form or fashion—barefoot, on his knees, backwards, holding a cross or the flag of some soccer team, carrying a burning torch or the photograph o
f the Pope—to comply with some promise made in return for a miracle. Moreover, people all over were beginning to rally around the new cause: Chico Paco’s right to establish a shrine in thanksgiving for a patron saint’s blessing.

  Far away in the seaside town with the multicolored sands, Gilberto walked carefully before the cameras with his grandmother, Dona Maria Creuza, speaking of the miracle and the generosity of his lifelong friend Chico Paco, who had arrived (Gilberto had seen it himself on TV and heard it on the radio) barefoot at the Matacão. If the altar to Saint George were destroyed or removed, surely Gilberto would be reduced to his former state, to being an invalid once again. Was this not a crime? Who could walk the earth with a clear conscience knowing that, without the fulfillment of Dona Maria Creuza’s promise, they had damned Gilberto once again to a life without legs?

  Chico Paco nodded, his beautiful green eyes flooding with emotion. He could not allow such a thing to happen, but a bulldozer, armed with signed mandates, rolled onto the Matacão anyway to push and scoop the shrine away. Chico Paco bowed his head sadly while an enormous crowd watched in painful silence. The TV cameras watched, too, and far away, so did Gilberto and Grandmother Maria Creuza, who were in turn watched by other TV cameras. The man driving the bulldozer crossed himself and drove slowly toward the shrine. Poor Gilberto tottered to one side, but he did not fall. Gilberto, in fact, stood rooted to the ground. The bulldozer grunted and smoked angrily, but it could not push the shrine over. It could not budge the shrine an inch from its site. By some strange magic, the shrine was fused tight to the spot. It was as if the solid base of the shrine clung to the Matacão by some powerful magnetic force. The crowd cheered, running toward the bulldozer and dancing wildly around Chico Paco and his humble altar. The multitude pushed the bulldozer off the Matacão, and the driver jumped off and ran to prostrate himself before Saint George. In the midst of this, Chico Paco was shyly exuberant, and despite his awkward appearance, his eyes shone.

  In a miraculous moment, Chico Paco’s altar became a place of worship and the destination of pilgrimages. People from everywhere, foreign tour groups and simple farmers, would come to visit the famous shrine, to hear the guides tell about Gilberto, who as the stories were embellished, was even said to have been in a coma for several years, while his grandmother, Dona Maria Creuza, had suddenly become a saint. And the youth, Chico Paco, then came to be called the angel who translated prayers into earthly realities. But this was just the beginning.

  Mané Pena scratched the back of his weathered ear with a feather and smiled whimsically, recalling the vision of his own confused figure before the cameras. He had sons younger and older than Chico Paco and certainly more children than he needed or remembered, but Chico Paco got absorbed into the family circle as if he had always belonged there. Poverty made no difference. Somehow, the fruits of everyone’s labor got spread around. Chico Paco slept in one large hammock with a youngster cuddled close to him on either side, his long golden hair entwined with the darker locks. Mané Pena stroked his ear and watched the sleeping boys. Maybe this Chico Paco was an angel, Mané thought curiously. His wife Angustia had said as much. He certainly didn’t look like the others.

  Meanwhile, Chico Paco dreamed about his friend Gilberto, now cured, running the long length of beach and riding the waves before sunset. Intruding into this recurring dream was always the face of a young boy; it was not Gilberto as a child nor any other boy Chico Paco could remember knowing. True, it was a common Brazilian face, the sort you always see—the dark mischievous eyes, the unkempt crop of dark brown hair—but the face reappeared night after night, transposed over the face of Gilberto, his bright curious eyes seeming to follow some distant object. Chico Paco thought about the boy’s face and looked for him among the boys who had rescued him on the Matacão. He looked among all the children who surrounded him daily but could not find the boy in his dream. Chico Paco wondered what this dream could mean. Maria Creuza’s promise had been satisfied, and Gilberto was saved; what more could God be asking?

  CHAPTER 9:

  Three Hands

  Back up north in New York, J.B. Tweep started work at GGG on the first floor in the personnel file cabinets. In less than a week, he emptied twenty cabinets, shredded old confidential materials—unflattering memos, reams of transcribed interviews with internal informants, extensive tables on employee absenteeism and personal habits, moldy employee evaluations, ex-employee personnel folders—and sent into storage countless miscellaneous studies done by outside consultants on subjects such as “Viability of Enlarging Company Commissary,” “Coffee, Smoking, and the Work Place” and “Natural VS. Plastic Plants and Employee Morale.” The efficiency and speed with which J.B. conducted this massive project was indeed remarkable, but after all, he could carry the boxes out and examine the material within, all at the same time. J.B. cut ruthlessly through the thick blanket of dust with one hand, drew out the precious heart of the personnel files with another and reduced it to a single floppy disk with his third. Awarded, finally, with a large pile of rusty paper clips, J.B. knew instinctively that he had surpassed the requirements of his job and that, after one busy week, he was once again a free man in search of a job.

  A big company like GGG, however, was not so easily dismissed, even by three hands. Recycling productive personnel was part of GGG’s interpretation of the old courses in Japanese corporate business sense. The human resources department immediately sent J.B. on loan to marketing development on the second floor as a secretary-receptionist. J.B. could be seen typing memos, answering phones, ordering office supplies (mostly paper clips), and filing all at the same time. The other two administrative secretaries, who shared the same office, felt an unsettling sense of their sudden inefficiency before this whiz of the office. When there was some talk of eliminating their positions, which could be easily handled by one three-handed employee, namely J.B., there was a furor of weeping and backbiting behind closed doors.

  J.B. shrugged, took the entire marketing development supply of paper clips and was transferred to the third floor of that understaffed department called development resources research and viability. He was given the title of Assistant to Assistant Manager, which was odd because there was no assistant manager. In fact, the department did not even have a manager. Everyone told him his title was just a formality for billing his salary, and J.B. sighed with relief at the absence of both managers and assistant managers.

  J.B. followed the poor, overworked clerk around the cramped office and in and out of the walk-in vault. So this is where the twenty file cabinets from human resources had ended up! The clerk squeezed between them and sneezed, leaning against the file cabinets, which rattled emptily. J.B. examined them. The clerk had carefully typed titles, A to Z, and even dated the cards on all the drawers, but these cabinets were completely empty. J.B. was puzzled, but the clerk replied, “Things are developing, always developing, you know, but the question is, ‘Are they viable?’” The clerk sighed heavily as if in answer to his own question.

  In one corner of the room, there was an “in” box with stacks of paper in and around it. The clerk pointed hopelessly to the mountain of paper. “That’s the latest development. We got that ‘in’ about 11:15 this morning. The interoffice mail people had to wheel it here in a wheelbarrow. We’ve got to get that mess cleaned up before the next mail run.”

  J.B. rolled up each of his three sleeves while the clerk glanced at the top of one pile muttering, “9.99 . . . it’s all 9.99.” To J.B.’s surprise, the clerk opened one very overstuffed cabinet marked 9.99 and began cramming all the papers in.

  Indeed, as J.B. soon discovered, it was all 9.99. There were memos about acrylic tape holders; waterproof LCD clocks with suction cups for use in the shower; bookmarks that play music when the proper page is turned to; artificial nonpolluting snow to spread on Southern California and Florida lawns at Christmas; earrings with exchangeable velcro butterflies; creams that had collagen, keratin, turtle oil, aloe vera, PABA, sunscreen 1
5, vitamin E and a money-back guarantee for complete rejuvenation if used as instructed. (J.B. himself was partial to the large musical clips for closing potato chip bags called “potato clips.”) Neither J.B. nor the clerk knew quite where to begin nor how to categorize so much varied material. It was not enough to alphabetize. At one time, 9.99 had been a simple category, a file cabinet unto itself, but now it was the entire department. J.B. and the clerk ran around stuffing folders haphazardly to meet the afternoon mail room deadline. As the clerk had warned, another wheelbarrow arrived at 4:00 PM, and the end was still not in sight. At 5:00 PM, J.B. fumbled for three mittens, stuffed his third arm under his overcoat, and went home to think about his first day at his new position and what exactly it all meant.

  Early the next morning, J.B. made it known to the human resources department that the backlog of filing in the development resources research and viability department was so immense that at least two more employees like himself would be required to make heads or tails of any of it. Human resources sent over three two-armed temps to satisfy his request. J.B. orchestrated the filing with superb technique, conducting all eleven arms of his newly expanded office into an efficient concerto. As the opening and closing of file drawers reached a steady staccato, J.B. slipped away from the office and whistled down the hall to the office of the viability commission.