Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  The weekend pigeon messages continued with much fanfare. No one doubted the story that Kazumasa’s great fortune was prophesied by Batista’s pigeon message, and the crowds grew and now never abandoned the streets outside the tenement.

  Batista, on the other hand, was more concerned with testing his pigeons and with extending the range of their flights. The National Pigeon Society had offered to sponsor a test flight from Rio Grande do Sul to São Paulo, buying Batista and his pigeon round-trip busfare to that southernmost state of Brazil. The pigeon had returned to São Paulo, over seven hundred miles, in a national record time of thirty-eight hours. In fact, it arrived in São Paulo while Batista’s bus was changing a flat, still three hundred miles away in Santa Catarina.

  Then there was the National Pigeon Society’s Racing Homers Division, whose three-hundred-and five-hundred-mile races were consistently won by Batista’s champions. Formerly an unheard-of sport, pigeon racing was suddenly followed with enormous enthusiasm by everyone from sportscasters to gamblers. Simple people on the street were soon aware of the difference between a Ptarmigan and a Belgian Voyageur. The latest results of the Belo Horizonte-São Paulo 500 race became a matter of common concern, and the announcement “Djapan’s Tropical Dream took first place by five minutes” had some obvious meaning and significance to almost everyone. The 8:00 PM soap had even introduced a popular actor in the romantic role of a pigeon fancier.

  Following such pigeon news, Rubens was anxious to try his own birds in flight. He began his birds with short flights from the street, peering into the sky as his sister watched from her post at the window above. All day long, Lourdes saw her son wheeling in and out of the apartment with his pigeon cages. Rubens passed the long lines of people waiting to see Kazumasa, who at the time, held audience in a little office on the same street. Some of the people admired Rubens’s shiny new wheelchair and nodded at each other that their wait in line would not be in vain. Each day, Rubens rolled his wheelchair farther and farther away until, one day, Lourdes awaited him at the door with all the fury of a mother expecting a child many hours past his dinner. She sent neighbors and even her patron, Kazumasa, into the dark streets shouting his name. Had anyone seen a little boy on a wheel-chair with a pigeon cage in his lap? He left in the morning. Now it is almost ten in the night, and he hasn’t returned. Nossa Senhora! Where can he be?

  But Rubens had simply gone a little too far and returned as unperturbed as his pigeon. The pigeon note had said as much: “Mama, I made it to the Avenida Paulista. It will take me a while to get home. Don’t worry. Your son, Rubens.”

  After this, Rubens was not allowed to leave the apartment for several days. He rolled around the apartment, cleaning cages, dropping birdseed onto the carpets, and bathing his birds in Kazumasa’s bath. Still, Lourdes would not let him leave the house. “This will teach you a lesson,” she said sternly.

  But Rubens had an idea. Nudging his older sister Gislaine into a corner, he convinced her to take his very best bird to the end of the subway line in Jabaquara. “You can take the subway,” he urged her. “Here is the money you need. The extra you can keep for yourself. And don’t forget to write down the time you release the bird.”

  Rubens watched out the window anxiously. He saw his sister cross the overpass, headed toward the subway, and smiled. Hiroshi had given him a watch. Rubens watched the time carefully. In the late afternoon, he came reluctantly away from the window when Lourdes called him for a snack. “Cheese bread,” she said. “Your favorite.”

  From the kitchen, Rubens could hear the tiny bell announcing the arrival of his bird. He wheeled out of the kitchen in a flurry, ramming his chair into the wall and checking the time on his watch. He could not wait for anyone to remove the cage from the outside wall. He hurriedly lifted himself by his arms to the window sill. Like others used to depending on the upper halves of their bodies, he had great arm and shoulder strength, even for a small boy, and these days of rolling himself around the city with his pigeons had strengthened him unusually. Misjudging this strength, Rubens shoved his body forward and slipped past the pigeon cages and out the fourteenth-floor window.

  Lourdes ran from the kitchen, thinking she would scold him for marking her clean walls with his wheelchair tires, only to see Rubens’s withered legs disappear over the window sill. “Rubens!”

  CHAPTER 11:

  Saved

  With a terrible shriek, Lourdes nearly flung herself out the window, but she could not see her son below. She ran hysterically out of the apartment, down the corridor, banging on all elevator buttons and on the elevator doors themselves. By the time she had herself fallen by elevator fourteen floors, gathering apartment tenants at every stop, a tremendous crowd of people ran with her from the elevator, clinging to their pounding hearts and their soundless screams with their bare hands, anticipating a mother’s horror.

  But Rubens’s body was not to be found. Lourdes ran with the crowd up and down the parking lot at the back of the apartment house. Curious tenants were coming from their cars. A boy? Fallen from the fourteenth floor? Everyone looked up at the open window with the pigeon cages and shrugged. This woman had gone crazy. But Tania Aparecida’s corpulent mother had seen the boy fall too. She screeched incoherently from the Djapan’s back porch and waved a poor pigeon, captured tightly in her fat hands, at the confused and excited crowd in the parking lot: “The truck!” she managed to scream. “The boy fell into the truck!”

  Everyone clambered down the driveway in search of a truck. They screamed at and surrounded every truck double-parked along the street. They ran into the refrigerated compartment of a meat truck and searched between the giant cuts of bloody meat, causing the meat man in his blood-stained white apron to topple over in the street with a one-hundred-kilo side of beef. They climbed up the sides of a watermelon truck and accidentally pushed the carefully balanced load of ripe melons onto the sidewalk. Watermelons rolled out into the street and smashed against passing cars. People ran out of the tenements and grabbed the melons. The driver came out of the local grocery and was waving his fists at everyone. The people lined up in front of Kazumasa’s so-called charity foundation office stretched their necks to see what the commotion was all about. People stepped in and out of the line, afraid to lose their places. The entire street became a live wire of conflicting information. The story of Rubens falling out of the fourteenth floor into a passing truck was so absurd that people tended to believe the other stories about a man’s body being found frozen in the meat truck or about the driver giving the watermelons away because their price wasn’t worth the cost of transporting them.

  Amidst all this, Lourdes ran to the front of Kazumasa’s charity line and burst into his office. Lourdes did not need to say a thing. Kazumasa could see the terror in her eyes. He ran with her to the end of the street, jumping over the watermelons, but not knowing why they were running. “Rubens!” she gasped. “Rubens!”

  Beyond the intersection—hundreds of cars and trucks passing from every direction—I could see Gislaine calmly weaving her way home from the subway with an empty pigeon cage, but Rubens and his pigeon, whose cage had also fallen with the boy, were by now speeding away atop a truck filled with bolts of old cloth and bags of sewing remnants. It was one of those open trucks, newly painted dark blue with scrawling designs (probably of Portuguese origin) along its sides and an inscription along the back: “Carrego tudo no meu peito aquilo que Deus manda de cima.” (I bear in my breast all that God sends from above.)

  Lourdes knelt down right there on that busy intersection. Kazumasa, who was always trying to do what was right, knelt down too, without question. Lourdes rocked back and forth as if in a trance, praying for her son, praying. Kazumasa could not understand, but I could hear her praying to a distant and magical place, to the small shrine of Saint George on the Matacão and the angel who had built that shrine, Chico Paco: “Please bring my son Rubens back to me alive. Please, by the grace of God, by the footsteps of the angel, Chico Paco. I will g
ive Chico Paco a good pair of boots this time, and he will make a pilgrimage from this very intersection to the great Matacão and make your glory even greater. I promise it. I promise it.”

  Hiroshi and Kazumasa ran around the city, in and out of every police station and morgue, pulling strings and making promises to anyone who might be able to find the boy. They did not have hopes of finding Rubens alive. It was a long fall. They were searching for the body of a dead boy with withered legs.

  But it was the pigeon who saved Rubens.

  Rubens was awakened from the shock of his fall by the driver of the truck. The driver had not believed the nonsense of a boy falling from an apartment window with a pigeon. He angrily told Rubens that he wasn’t taking any hitchhikers and that Rubens could get off. When Rubens didn’t move, the driver swung the child, who clutched desperately to his pigeon cage, onto the crumbling edge of the asphalt road and drove away.

  A drunkard stumbled from the bar where the truck had stopped. “Where is this place?” Rubens asked the drunkard without fear. “Where are we?”

  The drunkard swung around. “Godforsaken place. You don’t know this hellhole they call Freguesia do Ó?” The drunkard made a rude circle with his fingers. He made a fist at the trucks and automobiles rumbling by, one after another. “Know what’s good for them. Don’t stop here!”

  It seemed to Rubens that a cloud of black oil and rubber soot never ceased to churn around the drunkard. Rubens fumbled for the small pencil he kept in his pocket. He snatched a dirty gum wrapper from the ground and scribbled the name of the place on the wrapper. The wrapper went into the pigeon’s carrier tube.

  “Mighty fine bird you got there,” snarled the drunkard, coming closer, but the pigeon flapped its blue-gray wings in a sudden flurry, dispersing the putrid fumes of the drunkard’s dissipation, sailed up and, circling its lost owner, was gone.

  Well, that was how Rubens came back to Lourdes’s arms alive, but there was also the small question of the promise made to Saint George on the busy intersection of that São Paulo street. Lourdes wrote a simple letter addressed to “the Angel Chico Paco, in care of the shrine of Saint George, the Matacão.” She enclosed a small photo of Rubens, glued the envelope closed, licked the stamp, and kissed the whole thing with another prayer.

  Meanwhile, back near the Matacão, the angel Chico Paco was toying with the idea of returning to his home on the multicolored dunes of the northeastern coast. He missed his mother and Gilberto. The Matacão was amazing and sacred and stretched into the horizon in one smooth shiny immensity, but it was still not like the sea. He missed the salty spray of warm tropical waters and the cool breeze running through the coconut palms and the thatched roof of his mother’s house. On the Matacão, the wet air often stood still, a great cooking sauna, and everything—people and animals and even the thousands of species of insects—seemed paralyzed by the dense atmosphere. When it rained, Chico Paco would race with the children out to the Matacão to listen to the drops spatter against the smooth surface and to slide with wild abandon across the slippery surface of that tropical skating rink. At least it was wet then, but it was still not the sea.

  When Lourdes’s letter arrived, Chico Paco’s first impulse was to toss it into a pile of others he had received. He had accumulated a small pile of fan letters containing requests that he walk for some miracle or other, like he had done for Gilberto. In the evening, he read these letters to Mané Pena and Angustia, who could not themselves read. Mané and Angustia both nodded: “There’s great work for you out there. Great work.”

  But Chico Paco thought the idea of complying with any one of these requests more than absurd.

  Mané insisted, “What about that one there? It says that the man had a sick mule, and he prayed to Saint George and promised that he’d get you,” Mané pointed at Chico Paco, “You to walk from where was it? to the Matacão. And, poof, his mule stood up and hoed an entire field. If that isn’t a miracle . . .”

  Angustia agreed. “God has chosen you, son.”

  Chico Paco shook his golden head and laughed. “I’m just an ordinary man. Saint George did this, not me.”

  “No one is arguing that. But it’s you that has to keep the promise. You’re the key!” insisted Mané, rubbing his ear with his feather to help him think this matter through.

  But Chico Paco could not see this reasoning until he opened Lourdes’s letter and the photograph of Rubens fluttered from the pages. Chico Paco dropped to his knees and stared into that face—the dark mischievous eyes and unkempt crop of dark brown hair of a common Brazilian boy—the very face that returned night after night, imposing its memory until the dream stared back, a living reality.

  The next day, Chico Paco bid Mané Pena good-bye from the dusty window of an old bus. Mané Pena handed him a handful of feathers. “For the trip,” he insisted. “Seven days they say. Rainy season. Could be more. These buses get stuck. You have to all get out and push.”

  Chico Paco nodded. Going by bus to São Paulo was the easy part.

  Mané Pena continued, “They say São Paulo is a big city. I seen it on TV. It don’t all fit into one TV screen. It’s that big.”

  PART III:

  More Development

  CHAPTER 12:

  The Feather

  Two days after Chico Paco left the Matacão on a slow bus headed for the great city of São Paulo, the American J.B. Tweep jetted in from New York, representing that big company that I have already described in some detail, GGG. Mané Pena thought this American was a strange sort, slightly lopsided, and that his name was funny. Mr. Tweep, Mané called him. Mr. Tweep spoke to Mané Pena through an interpreter, asking a lot of questions about feathers. He wanted to know everything: names of birds, feather size and color, methods of use, positioning of the feather on the ear, how long a particular feather was effective, historic use of the feather, how to the use the feather in conjunction with other remedies and apparatus, feather power in Indian and local folklore.

  Mr. Tweep and the interpreter went with Mané Pena to one of the classy local hotels, which had a large aviary with every sort of tropical bird. He pointed out the various birds to Mr. Tweep, describing the feathers and their particular attributes. Some, Mané Pena admitted, were purely ornamental. Peacock feathers, he said, were an example. Too big and fluffy. Made you sneeze.

  The next day, Mr. Tweep showed up again at the sidewalk café with his interpreter and a French bird professor (Mr. Tweep called her an ornithologist) who happened to be doing her thesis on the rare Brazilian tanager. (The Thraupidae family, she had said.) She was also studying the migration patterns of the red-eyed vireo, taking intermittent trips into the forest and banding one of the few species known to migrate to the Amazon region.

  The French bird professor wore binoculars around her neck and had a talking parrot, which perched on her shoulders and seemed to go everywhere with her. Mané decided that the parrot talked in some funny language different from the one Tweep spoke. It said things like, “Bonjour, messieurs-dames!” and sang a tune the bird professor called “the Marseillaise.” Mané kept staring at the parrot’s green primaries. Their particular iridescence reminded him of Chico Paco’s eyes. The self-conscious bird screeched at him angrily, “Monsieur, parlez-vous français?! Parlez-vous français?!”

  The professor took careful notes on everything Mané Pena had to say about tanager feathers. Mr. Tweep also took notes and tried to record everything on a small tape recorder that kept jamming and chewing up the tape, which was strewn in garbled brown ribbons over the café table. “It’s the humidity,” Mr. Tweep fumbled in exasperation. “Nothing seems to work in this country!” The interpreter did not translate this, but it was not necessary. Both Mané and the interpreter thought nothing worked either. The interpreter had gone to pick Mr. Tweep up at the hotel, where Mr. Tweep was hopelessly yelling into a broken phone. Then there were no taxis to be found, and when at last the interpreter located one, six arrived all at once. The taxi Mr. Tweep chose broke do
wn before they had reached Mané Pena’s outdoor café, and they were forced to walk the rest of the way.

  Mr. Tweep was in a visible sweat, and at some point, Mané Pena noticed that Mr. Tweep, in his excitement, was actually untangling the spaghetti of tape with two hands and thirstily gulping down a glass of Guaraná soda with a trembling third hand. Mané Pena and the professor looked on in astonishment. Americans certainly were more advanced! Mané jittered his feather back and forth over the lobe of his ear, like the bow on the strings of a violin in a high C. This was Mané’s way of absorbing shock, but the professor fumbled for her sunglasses and went crimson in confusion while the parrot sang, with a certain fervor, the Marseillaise.

  As the days went on, Mané Pena grew accustomed to, and reverent around, Mr. Tweep’s third arm. He shared his experience with his old cronies at the bar, who all scooted their chairs around to Mané’s table when Mr. Tweep arrived, gripping their cold beers, to get a full sense of the phenomenon. There was, indeed, in the beginning a sort of quiet awe, rather like, Mané thought, seeing television for the first time. In the beginning, Mané and the others noticed that Mr. Tweep’s third arm had a sort of twitch or tremble to it, as if it were not quite well. Not understanding third arms, they assumed this was a normal third-arm characteristic. They discussed third arms at length. Did other Americans have three arms? How about three legs? And better yet, three penises?

  The French professor and her parrot now seemed to accompany Mr. Tweep everywhere. She had the glazed look of someone with a miraculous discovery. It was announced that she had been chosen as the first recipient of the GGG Fellowship for Scientific Studies in Ornithology and the Relationship of the Feather to Human Health. She was all aflutter with talk about hummingbirds. But Mané Pena understood intuitively that her studies had moved on to topics tertiary.