Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  As if this were not enough, Gilberto loved to be on television. Besides the regular attractions, where people would one day be able to observe themselves (thanks to souvenir videotapes) wandering around in famous scenes from Gilberto’s favorite movies, there were hundreds of hidden and planted cameras, usually focused on some possible source of danger to Gilberto. Chico Paco posted a twenty-four-hour guard to scan these monitors, making sure Gilberto was not up to some mischief. But Gilberto knew of all the monitors and purposely arranged elaborate situations in order to be seen doing something fantastic on the screen. The guards became used to seeing Gilberto disguised in elaborate costumes, often representing an odd combination of human and animal attributes rescued from discarded pieces of the ever-assembling plastic fantasy, stealing up the Eiffel Tower still in construction or the fire escape of a prop for King Kong, sliding down the back of a brontosaurus, or threatening to swing from the plastic vines of the jungle onto a subsequent scene, bouncing off the spongy bed of Marilyn Monroe. Chico Paco would hear the warning peal on his beeper and race with his heart pounding anxiously to the monitoring room only to see Gilberto in some Arab garb trying to force a mechanical camel to fly off a steep precipice into the sparkling white sands below. Gilberto got out of most of these episodes with only bumps and bruises, but to Chico Paco’s dismay, even a broken bone did not slow his friend down much at all. What had happened to the invalid quietly weaving lace in the shade of a coconut tree? thought Chico Paco, gripping his heart and wondering whether he could live through another one of Gilberto’s crazy escapades.

  As more and more of Chicolándia was completed, Chico Paco wondered at the wisdom of this joint venture with GGG Enterprises. No sooner had the deal been closed than that strange skyscraper on the Matacão began to churn Gilberto’s mad ideas into forests of paper, high-priority meetings, pressurized schedules, jobs, egos, ulcers, and the odd result that came to be Chicolándia.

  The message Hiroshi received was as cryptic as all the others but more meaningful and distressful than any: “We have two pretty children, a boy and a girl. Rubens and Gislaine. The boy can’t run anywhere. And the girl . . .? We will be happy to exchange these precious children for the Japanese with the ball. Let us say, one child for each commodity. The girl for the Japanese himself, but more importantly, the boy for the ball. You will be hearing from us again.”

  CHAPTER 26:

  Pigeon Communications

  Where was Tania Aparecida now, Batista asked himself. Was it Rome she had written on the pigeon express message? Zurich? Amsterdam? He could not remember. Where was she when he needed her? Who was she with? What was she up to? She sent him packages from everywhere she went, trinkets and souvenirs, things, she said, that had reminded her of him: a postcard of Au Pigeon Voyageur in Lille, France, monument to the twenty thousand pigeons killed in action during World War I; a painted porcelain Hummell doll with a dove on his finger; a Donald Duck hat; a photographic encyclopedia of birds; a stuffed replica from the Smithsonian of Cher Ami; the famous homer who in 1918 saved the “Lost Battalion”; and so forth. The packages came daily, but Batista had lost the desire to figure out what about the presents reminded Tania Aparecida of him. He threw the unopened packages in a pile angrily. When was that woman coming back?

  Djapan Pigeon Communications International, he mumbled to himself. Thanks to Tania Aparecida, they were an international communications system, but being able to communicate for free with Tania Aparecida over thousands of miles seemed a lousy trade-off to having her right there in bed with him. How she missed her dear Batista—that message had traveled along the distant pigeon routes, but there she was, still out there somewhere in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America.

  Batista was alternately consumed with jealousy and depressed with his inability to treat their separation with nonchalance. He imagined Tania Aparecida in every sort of situation of infidelity. He tossed in his bed at night with visions of Tania Aparecida in the arms of another man or even several men. He envisioned her escorted into fancy hotels and restaurants, drinking expensive wines out of stemmed crystal glasses, flaunting her hips or exposing her legs, making seductive passes, her brown eyes narrowing under their thick lashes. He imagined the men of every race, creed, religion, and color running their foreign tongues up and down the curve of her neck and touching all those secret places only he was supposed to know. The blood rushed to Batista’s head at the very thought. He flushed purple and spit venom, but Tania Aparecida did not return. There was always one more place to see, one more deal to close, one more client to keep at bay. “I’ll be home by your birthday, darling,” Tania Aparecida would promise, only to break her promise and send him a singing telegram in her stead. “That woman can go to hell!” Batista screamed at the poor baritone who choked on the word happy and ran off in a fright, forgetting to deliver the bouquet of flowers that went with the telegram.

  Tania Aparecida’s international life was a whirlwind of meetings and deals. How little did she realize that her first meeting, when she had put on her very best dress and shoes and persuaded that cute old man Carlos Rodrigues of the Pomba Soap Company that Djapan Pigeon Enterprises could put his company on the map—that meeting would be the prototype for all future encounters. Now she had a dress for every sort of client and situation.

  As Batista had long known, Tania Aparecida had a phenomenal head for figures, and she never forgot a face or a name. A captivating smile, a quick mind for details, a voice full of charm and resonance—Tania Aparecida herself was a woman few could forget. “If only they’d run that country the way this woman runs her business!”

  “Pigeons are very clean and quiet,” Tania Aparecida would say. “You can keep them practically anywhere. Djapan Enterprises will provide you with a starting couple or a larger brood, if you like. We show you how to build your roosts, and we start you with a three-month supply of our famous feed. Once your brood is established, which doesn’t take very long at all, you are ready to make them available for our communications network. Then, we provide you with messenger tubes, sample greeting messages, and a map of our network posts. The larger your brood, of course, the more messages you will be able to handle, but we believe it is best to start out small. So you begin with one network post, exchanging your birds back and forth. As you become more comfortable with our network, you can grow with us and add on more network posts.” Tania Aparecida was able to convey this information with such charm that people everywhere seriously considered starting a network post in the same manner that they might consider buying Tupperware.

  “Now, we have a starting fee, the amount depending on how large a brood you are willing to start with. If you have a large area and more capital, you can use our Plan B or C, but most people start with a couple and Plan A, and they can grow from there. Some clients do not want to get too big, and they simply limit their messages. Djapan is very flexible that way. We work with a lot of mothers who are busy at home with their children and who can make a little extra money on the side. I know one woman, Dona Clara in Campo Verde, who buys all her groceries from her profits in the network.” People always liked Tania Aparecida’s personal way of talking. They all thought of Dona Clara and her six children and how the network was feeding her family.

  “Now, we have monthly membership dues for using the network and a per-message service fee, which is charged to the customer, of course. Besides putting you on the Djapan network map, membership entitles you to our special services—our pigeon wellness hotline, veterinarians and medicines at a discount, our professional advice, and our network newsletter.”

  If Batista could hear his Tania Cidinha, he might have been impressed, but he had no idea. He got the newsletter, which was now published in several languages; it amused him to read about himself, but he wondered why Tania Aparecida insisted on putting a new squab recipe in the cooking column every week. He had seen the network map grow into a mass of posts over the globe. He knew that their operation was big, but he had no real sense of
it. He was too busy breeding new pigeons to cover these distances. All he knew was that Tania Aparecida was far away. It made very little difference how far. Batista’s jealous imagination could follow Tania Aparecida to the next room or to the moon.

  Tania Aparecida would have laughed if she could have known Batista’s imagination, which placed her in the midst of glamour and international escapades. Tania Aparecida sold network posts all over the world in basically the same manner she had sold them in Brazil: door to door. If Batista imagined Tania Aparecida hobnobbing with men in pinstripe suits, wining and dining them, he was far removed from the reality of a pigeon communication business, which had to be built in a series of steps from one neighborhood to the next. It was something like setting up hotdog stands or small post offices everywhere. Certainly Tania Aparecida was no stranger to the big cities and grand hotels, but just as setting up a coke machine in a lobby did not require speaking with the president of the company, neither did establishing a pigeon post.

  That Tania Aparecida attracted attention and admiration, there was no doubt. If people wanted to look, what was it to her? If it helped sales, then all the better. Tania Aparecida was indiscriminately charming, but there was something about her, a wanderlust, which kept her from staying anywhere long enough to form attachments, no matter how friendly or attractive the admirer. Perhaps, it was part of something the Brazilians called saudades, the bittersweet sensation of exuberant but temporary joy. To have it all the time, you have to keep moving on and savoring memories. It was something like putting a pack of misbehaving kids to bed after a very wearing day and spending the evening poring lovingly over an album of photographs of the same naughty kids. The reality of love and life with Batista was so much sweeter at a distance; Tania Aparecida could forget Batista’s insane jealousy, his volatile fits, their crazed fighting. But each time, when the memory swelled so deeply and so painfully that Tania Aparecida could only think of rushing back to Batista’s arms, an angry message would come through the network, betraying Batista’s jealousy and startling Tania Aparecida’s sense of reality. “I will teach that man a lesson,” she would say to herself.

  It was possible that absence and time would make Batista forget as well. Months of absence were quickly turning into years. But people who have a propensity for jealousy are usually the sort who cannot forget, and Batista could not forget. Work was a salve, but when the evenings came, there was no work. So it was with more and more frequency that he wandered over to Hiro’s to find companionship and to sing his loneliness away. As always, the women flocked around him, dropping their eyes and their hints. Every evening, Batista strode into Hiro’s with a new determination to find some sort of revenge for Tania Aparecida’s absence. He found the most attractive woman in the nightclub and danced and drank with her all night, but that was all. He could not follow her out. Sometimes he paid the taxi driver to take off without him. Or he made a trip to the men’s room his excuse to slip out. The women talked among themselves; they badgered and laughed at him, but they could not help loving him. Later, some of them boasted having been with him; he did not contradict this. It would seem embarrassing not to have won such a claim, so after a while, all the women lied about their passionate rendezvous with Batista. Everything about Batista’s jealousy was a wild fabrication, but he could not see this.

  Michelle Mabelle, who was nearing the last months of her pregnancy, still managed to find a way to get to Hiro’s with Napoleon and sing Catherine Deneuve’s old hit songs. Besides her usual repertoire of French songs, Michelle liked to sing some of the new protest songs written by members of the trialectics movement. “We shall overcome the use of one more thumb,” and so forth. Then there was a tropical bird-call song with the authentic songs of birds in their natural surrounding, which Michelle loved more than anything.

  Batista noticed the French bird professor in her modified form. He noticed also that she now came alone to Hiro’s, and he wondered about this.

  “I’m communing with music, you see,” she said, pointing at her large belly. “I have so much on my mind lately. It must not be good for these unborn ones to have me so pensive. Music cleanses the spirit.”

  Batista did not know what Michelle Mabelle could have on her mind lately, unless it was all the controversy about the conservation of birds.

  PART VI:

  Return

  CHAPTER 27:

  Typhus

  Lourdes was beside herself with worry and guilt. “Maybe it was wrong to come here, to leave the children like that. Poor Tia Carolina. It’s not her fault. What will I do? What will I do? My poor babies. My poor babies,” she sobbed.

  Hiroshi tried to console Lourdes. “Be calm. Be calm. We will find a way.”

  “Do you think they are well? Do you think they are a—, a—” Lourdes gasped at her worst fears.

  “Of course they are alive! Of course! Put this out of your mind!” Hiroshi paced about. “If only those scoundrels would take money. I could unload that GGG stock on them.”

  Lourdes shook her head. It was a terrible dilemma: her children for the man she loved, Kazumasa. But where was Kazumasa? If he only knew what had happened, he would turn himself in in exchange for Rubens and Gislaine. He would do it in a moment, without a second thought. Lourdes shuddered. It was a horrible choice. Everything was lost. If she lost her children, she would not care for anything again in this world. And if she lost Kazumasa forever, it would be the same.

  “We have to find Kazumasa,” said Hiroshi. “I have sent detectives out everywhere, but whoever is hiding him has managed to make him invisible. I can’t understand it,” Hiroshi threw up his arms. “How do you make a Japanese with a ball invisible?”

  “Every other day the radio station gets calls,” said Lourdes.

  “Yes, but he can’t be everywhere!”

  “We have to keep trying,” insisted Lourdes. “The people who subscribe to the foundation are loyal to Chico Paco. Let them be our eyes. Let the radio be our voice. Let the votive telephone operators be our ears!”

  Hiroshi thought Lourdes was beginning to sound like Chico Paco over the radio, but he said nothing. Hiroshi knew now that Lourdes did not love him, but he looked fondly at her tear-stained face. He wished that he could be the one to kiss her fears away, and he envied Kazumasa, wherever that fool cousin of his might be. Hiroshi thought of his own choice to stay in Brazil, to become a Brazilian. He remembered the salty breeze on the beach of Ipanema and smiled to himself. In those days, he had nothing but a soft spot in his heart for this country. He thought about how so many things had changed since Kazumasa had also arrived in Brazil. He thought about his karaoke business and about Kazumasa’s endless wealth. Hiroshi bowed his head. It was all his fault; he had betrayed Kazumasa’s trust. If Hiroshi could not find Kazumasa to confess everything, he would never be the same, and those first beautiful days—when the warm sea had churned the white sands over and over, scrubbing away his shedding skin to reveal the new—would all come to mean nothing.

  Lourdes ran to the radio station. The message was sent out everywhere. “Kazumasa! The Japanese with the ball! Call Radio Chico! Call Radio Chico! Call R-A-D-I-O C-H-I-C-O!”

  The death of the two feather cultists, remembered by most people via an award-winning color photo spread of their lifeless bodies, their outstretched arms clutching bunches of feathers, had sent out a wave of speculation concerning the darker side of the feather. The photograph of the dead feather worshipers had captured the gruesome tragedy in an extraordinary metaphor of flight; several filters and some fancy developing techniques had produced a representation in which the bodies seemed to be floating through a shiny mercuric matter, which was, anyway, the steellike surface of the Matacão.

  It was revealed that the feather worshipers, prior to flight, had attained a trancelike state which resembled the hallucinations of the old LSD trips, similar to those described by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or to those induced by peyote buttons and described by Carlos C
astenada during his discipleship with the Yaqui Indian sage, Don Juan. However, in subsequent interviews with cultists, even those former cultists who claimed to have been deprogrammed, no one would admit that these so-called flights had not actually been real. Everyone who had attained this privileged nirvana were adamant in their claim of having experienced actual, physical flight. When questioned by the prosecutor why no one, neither the air force nor air traffic controllers scanning the Brazilian skies, had picked up any evidence of flying human beings in the atmosphere, all the witnesses asserted that flight could only be accomplished by birds whose forms they had naturally taken. What then had occurred to the two people whose bodies were found spread-eagled on the Matacao? These people, said the chiefs of feather worship, had been abandoned by the very birds that must carry them in flight. It was a clear sign of revenge, a message to the human animal that the destruction of so many beautiful birds without proper ritual and payment to their spirits would no longer be tolerated. The judge, like most people, looked askance at this testimony and sent the chiefs of feather worship to jail for their roles in these deaths.