J.B. Tweep had been, with the dissolution of the development resources research and viability department, transferred to the GGG International research and funding division and sent on assignment to the Matacão, where he was busy collecting data on the 9.99 selection of the feather. J.B. had never been to a foreign country and was initially alarmed at what he felt to be a sudden listlessness in his third arm. Upon examining himself in the hotel mirror, he actually thought his third arm might be atrophying in this hot tropical weather. And it exasperated him that things did not seem to work in this country. There was no organization. And they didn’t use plastic clips; the metal ones absorbed the humidity and rusted onto his papers. How could a third arm survive in such a place anyway? By the time he had located Mané Pena and exposed himself to the natives and the French ornithologist in an untypical show of ineptitude, J.B. was beginning to have serious doubts about his effectiveness in the Third World. J.B. would have left Brazil then and there, but the Matacão, like GGG, had a way of recycling everything.
J.B. Tweep, after he had begun to feel a sort of revival in his third arm (reasons for which I will explain later), went about with his usual trialectic efficiency to build GGG Enterprises’ international research and funding division into a major division, with the major investment and budgetary considerations it truly deserved. Suddenly, for reasons that, as I’ve said before, were known only to the original founders Georgia and Geoffrey Gamble, a tremendous and, since Brazil’s debtor-nation IMF agreements, unheard-of amount of capital poured from the U.S. GGG Enterprises into its Brazilian counterpart on the Matacão. This capital was likened to amounts loaned Brazil for Itaipú, the largest dam in the world, or Angra dos Reis, a nuclear-powered reactor that never worked. Anxious to duplicate GGG’s New York offices on the Matacão, J.B. made a trialectic decision to import an entire building, all twenty-three floors, to the luxurious Matacão Row, overlooking the Matacão itself. J.B. had no time for the handmade mortar-and-block construction, which would have provided jobs for and fed hundreds of people for several years. He wanted GGG’s presence to be felt immediately. After all, he reflected, there were historic precedents for such a grandiose move: the grand opera house imported in every detail from the iron fixtures to the parquet floors from England to Manaus on the Amazon River; or Ludwig’s ship, which sailed from Japan down the Amazon River to dock as a great factory in the dense tropical forest for the purpose of churning everything into tons of useful paper. J.B. simply had a twenty-three-floor office building constructed in Florida and flown in piece by piece, office by office, secretary by secretary, manager by manager. He even had the human resources department, complete with red-haired Texas-accented clones, recloned and flown in. Except for the fact that power failures were frequent and caused chaos close to hysteria (human resources had several ongoing seminars to help shocked employees: “Working in the Third World,” “Controlling Emotions in Dysfunctional Elevators and/or Dark Copy Rooms,” “What to Do When the Air Conditioning Fails” and “Sexism in a Friendly Country”), everything seemed to fall into place. And, if you have the strange sensation that all of this happened just like that, it did.
With a bustling, twenty-three-floor office building to back him up, J.B. Tweep became nothing less than a king and nothing more than a CEO. Of course, he would not think of appointing himself CEO of GGG. He continued to manipulate everything via memos while promoting and demoting himself to the various departments that might need his three-armed expertise. Titles meant nothing to J.B., and as Mané Pena had said of the angel Chico Paco, J.B. Tweep had great work to do.
Everyone got an office at GGG. The French bird professor got an office, of course. Even Mané Pena became what he heard was called a “consultant.” “This sort of work,” he explained to Angustia, “is like when the TV people came and asked about why we couldn’t grow anything, and I told them that her,” he pointed at the earth, “tubes were tied. It’s like that. Telling people things they already know.”
Angustia remembered. “Imagine. I was more fertile than this piece of land. Twenty-six children. God works in strange ways.”
“Angustia,” Mané looked at his wife meaningfully, “I don’t know if this Matacão isn’t fertile. I mean it is a strange place. Fertile not for manioc or tomatoes, but fertile in a different way. Do you see what I mean?”
“Either a place is fertile or it isn’t,” sneered Angustia.
“But don’t you see? It grows a different kind of thing. Buildings for example. It grows buildings!”
Despite his amazement at the Matacão’s ability to grow buildings, Mané Pena did not like to venture much inside the GGG offices. He did not like to ride the elevators; he could feel the whirring of the machinery on the balls of his bare feet and feared his toes would get stuck in the automatic doors. He preferred to walk up the stairwells, SO J.B. kindly sent a memo out to put Mané’s office on the first floor. J.B.’s memo provided Mané with a computer and a secretary and an expense account. Mané Pena padded in barefoot to the offices once or twice to look at his desk, the ample supply of plastic clips, and the computer, and to meet the secretary, but he could not think of anything else to do there. Occasionally he charged a beer or a cup of coffee in the coffee shop on the first floor and returned to his outdoor café table in the old section of town to banter with his cronies. If J.B. wanted to talk to Mané, he had to go down to that outdoor bar. J.B. tried to make Mané wear a pager or walk around with a mobile phone, but these things invariably got lost or broken. For a while, Mané’s cronies in the bar put money in a jar and passed around the pager every day, wearing it conspicuously on the belts of their pants. If the pager went off while a crony was wearing it, he got the winnings in the jar.
Still, Mané Pena was an enormous help to J.B. and GGG Enterprises. Consulting with Mané Pena and the French ornithologist, J.B. began narrowing down his selections and closing contracts with key feather distributors. The value of a feather depended, of course, on the availability of the source. The rarer the bird, the more expensive the feather. J.B. wanted to limit the selection to parrots, whose availability was generally good. Although Mané Pena praised the attributes of the common pigeon feather, J.B. knew that parrots had the reputation of being exotic and that the colors of these birds would give the accessories and design department, as well as the publicity department, a lot of room for imagination. The value of feathers was rising with this new demand, but J.B. could still cut a deal to get high-quality double-A parrot feathers in blue, green, red, and yellow for $150 a kilo. J.B. wanted to close a series of five-year deals to beat the rising prices, but no one was willing to extend themselves for longer than a few months. Feather distributors could see the future heaped in gold feathers, speculating that it could be the biggest rush on Brazilian resources since gold was discovered in Serra Pelada back in the eighties.
As J.B. sent his high priority dispatches back to New York, the export-import department and the legal research department were preparing paperwork, looking up customs regulations and discovering loopholes through which feathers might make their entry into the American market-place. GGG lobbyists were busy in Washington and in Brasilia, feting politicians and handing out expensive feathers. GGG had already made some initial thrusts into the marketplace with enormous success. People were beginning to talk about “The Feather,” and GGG was touting it like a sensation akin to Coca-Cola. GGG public relations people were promoting their product as one of those projected to become a part of American life, like coffee and orange juice at breakfast or potato chips and dip. Talkshow researchers were trying to line up guests with some knowledge or experience in feathers, and a few magazines were beginning to develop feature articles.
Back on the Matacão, the creative center of this brainstorm, it was becoming commonplace to see people walking and talking with feathers slipped comfortably above or behind their ears. Some people carried feathers in their pockets or purses. Others had small feather-carrying cases. It was not unusual to se
e people in bars, offering each other feathers and casually stroking their ears with them while carrying on animated conversations. The tourists who came to visit the Matacão were easily drawn to the use of the feather. They spent a great deal of time selecting from feathers under glass cases, asking about the birds from which the feathers originated and the type of feather best suited for their particular ailment or temperament.
Mané Pena, now the feather guru, was so frequently accosted by feather enthusiasts and salespersons about the nature of the feather and its proper uses that he was finally summoned to give classes and lectures at the local college. Lectures were not, after all, difficult for Mané Pena—he divided his knowledge into a series of topics and simply chose one to talk about for an hour. In the beginning, he likened being at a podium to his sidewalk café table. He sprinkled his lectures with anecdotes: every sort of story from the one about the girl with hiccups to the man with a twitch in his eye.
“Some say they feel funny holding this feather,” Mané pointed out. “But it’s no more funny than some people sucking the smoke of charred leaves. And you talk about pollution of the earth—what’s more polluting than a plantation of tobacco?”
Mané Pena had a way of putting together information that people found ingenious. “There’s a guy I heard about says we got sensibilities from way back before we were ever born. I mean back generations and generations. So take this other theory I heard about the dinosaurs, that these dinosaurs been changing and changing every generation until now they’re birds. Think about it. Bird sensibilities coming from way back millions of years. Now, that’s a power.”
And Mané had answers for his skeptics. “Well, they say I’m a primitive. But you suck smoke—that is primitive. After all, you can see smoke. Look at TV—they say the pictures are sent through the air by invisible waves.” Mané pointed at the feather. “Principle’s the same here—invisible waves, a force you can’t see.”
After outsiders got used to Mané’s regional tongue and accepted his bare feet, they began to feel that there was really no other way of talking about feathers. Everyone raved over Mané’s charm and erudition disguised by his humble appearance, the bare feet and those foreign university T-shirts he liked to wear. This was, someone said, science in the guise of folklore.
CHAPTER 13:
Pilgrim’s Progress
It took more than seven days for Chico Paco to reach São Paulo. It took a week just to get a few hundred miles outside the Matacão and another to reach Brasilia. As Mané Pena had warned, the rainy season was the worst time to travel. Water and the red silt of the earth ran through the newly cut forest in open veins. All along the way, the roads were clotted with broken and stalled vehicles, tractors sinking in the mud, abandoned Volkswagen Beetles turned on their sides. Small groups of stranded passengers ran out in the rain from their stalled vehicles and waved down the moving vehicles. Chico Paco’s bus quickly accumulated new passengers, their cargo, their animals—both living and dead, and their hopeless stories of the road. Chico Paco gave up his seat to an old lady and her chicken and sat in the crowded aisle until it was soon necessary to stand. It was common to get out to push or heave the bus from the gutted road or to walk up an incline rather than risk having the bus slip backward or into a ravine. It was necessary to do this in the rain, sometimes at intervals of only two or three miles. The poor but well-groomed passengers were soon caked and spattered with mud, and by the end of the trip, the outside of the bus was indistinguishable from the inside. Chico Paco felt as if he had, in fact, walked to Brasilia. When he could later compare taking the bus to walking this piece of God’s earth, he often praised the virtues of walking and was apt to suggest this alternative to the stranded and wet travelers he met along the way.
When Kazumasa looked up from his paperwork, I immediately recognized Chico Paco. But to Kazumasa, this was just another muddy, green-eyed, dark-skinned, blonde northeasterner who wanted some of Kazumasa’s lucky money to ease his suffering on earth. After so many months, Kazumasa continued to give away his money as a matter of course. It ceased to concern him whether or not people had legitimate requests. No matter what, Kazumasa smiled and listened carefully, thoughtfully. Although much of his fortune had been spent, there was, by Hiroshi’s private estimates, a fortune to last a lifetime. Cousin Hiroshi, who would have been a business and economics student at the University of Keio, was an entrepreneur and investor par excellence. No matter how much money Kazumasa gave away and despite Hiroshi’s harangues about Kazumasa’s giving, Hiroshi was able to triple whatever remained, so there was virtually no end to it. Many people stopped referring to Kazumasa as the Japanese Santa Claus and began to call him the Japanese Robin Hood. It was, they said, just a more modern way of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Hiroshi himself explained the phenomenon to the press as “recycling capital.” Kazumasa would not have thought of any of this. He was simply listening to people’s stories and their desires, trying to figure out what it was that people wanted or should want out of life. After so many months, you would have thought that Kazumasa had finally gleaned something important from his research, but there we were, still listening when Chico Paco’s turn in line came up.
“I’m looking for a particular woman and her child,” said Chico Paco.
“I see,” said Kazumasa, smiling understandingly but fearing immediately that this was one of those desires that money could not buy. Kazumasa was ready to put this request in the category he called Miracles, but Chico Paco insisted.
“Her name. The woman’s name is Lourdes, and her son is called Rubens. I believe Rubens, the poor boy, is handicapped.”
Kazumasa smiled and then, realizing that Chico Paco had spoken about Lourdes, was suddenly taken aback. “Lourdes?”
“Yes, this is the address I was given. I’ve been in this line for three days now,” Chico Paco explained. He did not explain how he had also been lost in the city for another two days, taking buses and subways twisting around what seemed to him a dense concrete jungle, no different from the living jungle he had left behind, where the sun barely filters through a tight network of skyscrapers trapping a thick layer of carbon monoxide, electric and telephone wires grasping tenaciously at everything. “Everyone has said that you will be able to help me.” Chico Paco’s iridescent eyes glistened pleadingly.
For the first time in his life, Kazumasa felt a sudden twinge of something one might call, at this point, possessiveness. “Why?” he asked cautiously. “I mean, why do you want to find Lourdes?”
I knew that this Chico Paco was a young man, not even twenty perhaps, but Kazumasa could only see the mud on his feet and clothing. The men who went to Serra Pelada to dig for gold were all muddy, and perhaps this was the man, the husband that Lourdes had lost to that gold rush back in the eighties. It did not occur to Kazumasa that Chico Paco would have been a young boy, maybe Rubens’s age in those days. Kazumasa looked at Chico Paco intently, not knowing what to think, what to hope for. He had not been very successful at making Lourdes happy, he thought. Money could not cure Rubens’s paralysis, but at least, the boy was alive. That was something to be grateful for. He sighed.
Finally, Chico Paco produced Lourdes’s crumpled letter and the faded photograph of Rubens, which Chico Paco had so often gazed upon before he dropped off to sleep. The photograph had become very important to him. It was a sign from God. It reminded him of his purpose. When he looked at the photograph before he fell asleep at night, he seemed to sleep better. He could then sleep with the memory of the boy on his mind but the picture of his friend, Gilberto, in his dreaming. The boy’s face no longer superimposed itself on his dear friend, and Chico Paco felt at peace.
“Shiko Pako!” Kazumasa jumped up. “The prayers! Of course!”
People at the front of the line could hear the jubilant commotion.
“I told you,” someone said. “It is him. It is the angel Chico Paco!” Pretty soon there was a great hubbub of people, and Kazumasa’s sleepy cha
rity line disintegrated in an excited mass of people repeating the suspicions of one bystander. “Didn’t you see those green eyes? Who could forget them?” One woman began weeping joyously. “It is God’s will!” she cried. “I prayed that I would be able to come to São Paulo from Rondônia to see the Japanese with the ball to ask for the money to buy an ice cream cart. And I am here only fifth in line. Then, I prayed that if my prayer was granted, the angel Chico Paco should take my promise to the Matacão. And he is here!” The woman was close to fainting, and the people in line around her had to brace her up.
When Kazumasa appeared, smiling with Chico Paco, people followed us down the street to Kazumasa’s apartment building. Ever since Kazumasa’s sudden winning on the lottery, the building supervisor had had to double the guards at the door in order to keep eager people away from Kazumasa’s apartment. We slipped past the guards, while the crowd clambered at the door. Kazumasa was used to this; he had to run from everyone, smiling and nodding every morning and evening. Lourdes found it easier to bring lunch down to Kazumasa at his office. Kazumasa nodded at Chico Paco, who could not help staring at me. “Nothing to worry,” he assured Chico Paco. “People very friendly. Very friendly,” he explained. “My friends.”
When Chico Paco recognized the boy in the wheelchair, all of his doubts and confusion vanished. Here was the very boy, the vision of whom had been sent to Chico Paco on the Matacão. This was the magic of the God-given mind, greater than TV, as Mané Pena had said. Chico Paco stared carefully at Rubens. Better than a faded photograph was the boy himself, saved by a pigeon and a slow-moving truck full of rags. Everything about Rubens reminded Chico Paco of Gilberto. Despite the paralysis in his legs, Rubens was a restless child, always moving here and there in his wheelchair, his hands constantly occupied with some project or another, some curiosity, some prank to play. Gilberto had been the same way; he could not be without some activity. Chico Paco wondered what Gilberto must be doing now that he could walk, now that his legs could follow his hands and his mischievous mind. How many times had Chico Paco refused to carry Gilberto somewhere to perform some ridiculous task, like painting the old Turk’s white horse with black stripes to resemble the zebras Gilberto admired in the movies, or agreeing to strap some handmade wings to Gilberto’s back and throwing him off the edge of the dunes.
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest Page 9