Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  However, some people began to wonder when new instances of human death were discovered. These bodies, different from the first two, were found a great distance from the Matacão, as far as two or three hundred miles, clutching similar bunches of feathers, their heads buried in nose-dives into the muddy pasture of some poor farmer or skidding across an abandoned highway, all of them a great distance from any tall buildings or cliffs from which they could have leapt or been pushed off. One body was found impaled on the dry branches of a dead tree. Another was discovered by Indians in the deeper regions of the forest. Strangely, the cause of death was always found to be the impact of an immovable object, in this case the earth, meeting that delicate fleshy mass of falling organs, blood, and bones. Some coroners simply called the cause of death “gravity.”

  The chiefs of feather worship spoke from prison, crying out that their followers were dying for the sake of birds. All of the bodies discovered were identified as having been members of the feather-worshiping cults. However, one of the names on the list of dead struck the attention of Mané Pena. “Camilo Santos,” Mané Pena murmured in disbelief.

  Camilo was a young man who did errands for J.B. Tweep in the offices of GGG. Mané Pena had gotten Camilo the job as a favor for Camilo’s father, one of Mané’s old-time cronies. Mané had not known that Camilo was involved in feather worship. He had always supposed Camilo to be one of those simple feather enthusiasts who used feathers occasionally. Upon further investigation, Mané Pena discovered that Camilo’s body had been found, unlike the others, without the accompanying bunches of feathers, and no one could trace Camilo’s activities to any secret feather worshiping. This raised the horrifying possibility in Mané Pena’s mind that the simple feather user might in fact, unknowingly, be in danger of taking flight. Mané Pena spent sleepless nights pondering the possibility, reworking every piece of evidence surrounding Camilo’s death. For the moment, he kept these thoughts to himself, tortured by the possibility that all his work might suddenly come crashing down. Cause of death: gravity.

  For the moment, however, Mané Pena’s worries regarding the feather and flight were overshadowed by another much graver malady. Government officials and the press had generally disregarded the public health reports and outcries regarding the growing number of cases of what seemed to be typhus in and around the Matacao. As is often the case, news of what public health officials were now calling a major epidemic had been relegated to information of minor interest as long as the epidemic remained with the poor and destitute. Even when middle-class families were stricken with the disease, people generally thought that those affected had not taken the proper precautions with their domestic help. But when the hospitals began filling up and, in fact, overflowing with people from the loftiest places in the social pyramid, there was an outcry against any former generalizations regarding the natural selection of the species, especially when the statistics counted more rich people with the disease than poor. This disease, like other diseases, was indiscriminate in its choices; it afflicted rich and poor, young and old, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, clean and dirty, wise and stupid, optimist and pessimist, innocent and cynic, powerful and peon, beatified and atheist, philanthropist and criminal, rational and mad, peaceful and warlike, complex and simple, activist and indifferent, ingenue and pervert, heterosexual and homosexual, and everyone else in between.

  Everyone knew someone or had someone in their immediate family with the disease. Soon, everyone on and around the Matacão could recognize the first symptoms of the disease—the red rash that began to cover the neck and ears and the menacing headache that soon overcame the afflicted with such intensity that people were often seen rolling in the streets with their hands pressed to their heads. Then, there was the high unabated fever that racked the body, sending its victims alternately into stupor and delirium. The end was almost inevitable. Nine out of ten people died. There was no cure. This particular strain of typhus did not seem to succumb to any of the normal procedures or recognized remedies. The typical vaccines were pronounced useless. Antibiotics such as Aureomycin, Chloromycetin, and Terramycin and even para-aminobenzoic acid were of no avail. Everything attempted was a mere placebo on a rotting wound. Epidemiologists were dumbfounded by this tide of horror, the prospect of burying hundreds of new victims every day, limited hospital facilities, dying people lying in cots and on mats or on the cold floors in the corridors and on the steps of all the hospitals, incinerators burning day and night to destroy the old clothes and bedclothes of the dead. A cloud of doom settled over the Matacão. People huddled fearfully within their houses, staring at the ghostly visions of their televisions in the dark, watching the figure of death strut and reel and carouse across the screen.

  The Matacão itself was suddenly swept clean of devotees and tourists. Instead, it was strewn with votive candles, like an enormous birthday cake, thousands of prayers to match the thousands of dying. At night, the candles flickered throughout its enormous expanse, mimicking the starry skies above. That the Matacão could be the center of so much pain and doom seemed to everyone an impossibility, an evil turn of events.

  Even worse was the fact that the disease was not limited to the environs of the Matacão; there was a discernibly widening circle of affliction. At Radio Chico, where the enormous maps usually followed the routes of pilgrims approaching the Matacão, little red tacks now spotted new out-breaks of the epidemic as people telephoned in requesting votive candles for loved ones with the disease. As the little white tacks representing pilgrims seemed to inch their way toward the Matacão, the red tacks multiplied in every direction, spreading farther and farther. Chico Paco himself read the map’s demoralizing tale—the unholy war—saw the puny forces of his pilgrims amid the growing splash of typhoid death. Someone at Radio Chico calculated that the disease was spreading on the map at an average of an inch per day, which meant fifty miles per day. If things continued at this rate, the epidemic could reach as far south as Patagonia and as far north as Canada in three months!

  Just as the disease would not remain with the poor, it would not be confined to the Matacão. It had become a national disaster. For the moment, most people assumed that it would confine itself to the Third World. Europeans, Asians, and Americans eager to see the Matacão simply rearranged their vacation plans that year. Wait until they find a vaccine, they thought. Epidemics, plagues, drought, famine, terrorism, war—all things that happened to other people, poor people in the Third World who cavorted with communism and the like. When we travel, we don’t drink the water, some said. Terrorists shouldn’t be negotiated with either, others said.

  Mané Pena had not seen his wife, Angustia, since even before he had been granted the honorary title of doctor. The old couple now clung to each other in complete pity, weeping for an irrecoverable past and for their youngest two children, Beto and Marina, now dead and buried. Cause of death: typhus. Mané Pena had rushed to the bedside of the little ones he had been so particularly fond of only to see his wife desperately rubbing a series of feathers over their ears. “To ease the pain,” she held back her tears. “To help them to sleep.” But the feather, always useful in any of their former family crises—the time their son Edivaldo was drawn out of a violent seizure or daughter Suely was cured of thumb-sucking—was now absolutely useless. Mané watched their feverish eyes roll up under the lids, the sweat roll off their foreheads, and their small hands clutch the sheets. Mané kissed their hands and feet and moaned helplessly while Angustia continued tenaciously with the feathers. “Gustia!” Mané wailed. “It’s no use! Can’t you see?”

  Angustia bit her lip till the blood ran, watching her husband crush the feathers in his hands, sweeping the little porcelain vases filled with feathers from the television in anger. The colorful feathers floated everywhere, deceitfully. Mané Pena had heard of new cases of fallen bodies, the descriptions of their deaths similar to Camilo’s, ordinary everyday feather users with no connection to the convoluted rituals of the cults. The feat
her was becoming, in the eyes of its inventor, a monster. And it had not curbed the terrible disease, had not even demonstrated a ray of hope, much less eased the pain of his children’s deaths. Mané Pena wept, cried out against the deception of his dubious fortune. In less than a week, he would join his buried children. Cause of death: typhus.

  Dona Angustia was forced to tie Mané to the bed, and although she had closed the shutters and filled the open chinks with pieces of cloth, the neighbors could hear his continuous screams for five days and five nights. Angustia, in desperation, literally sawed at her poor husband’s ears with the powerless tanager feather. It was as if all the pain, irritation and emotions so carefully absorbed by the once-indefatigable feather had suddenly released themselves in a cursed torrent. So torn were Mané Pena’s ears that the morticians were forced to sew the old leathery ears back into place before displaying the body to the paltry remnants of Mané Pena’s family, friends, colleagues, students, and close associates. Chico Paco gazed upon his old mentor, dressed in the striped tailored suit he had worn on only two occasions—the autograph party for his autobiography and the conferring of his doctorate. Chico Paco noticed with sadness that the morticians had found a shiny pair of black shoes into which they had smashed Mané Pena’s callused feet. Former admirers and ordinary feather users, who all owed their habits to the Father of Featherology, remained in their homes, cowering, watching only one of many sad processions to the graveyard. International telegrams and cards of sympathy fluttered in, but Mané Pena’s secretary, Carlos, had already died several months before.

  CHAPTER 28:

  Carnival

  This time, Rubens did not have his pigeon to save him. He and Gislaine sat huddled together in a small dark room. They had agreed that they would do everything possible to stay together. Gislaine wisely made it known to their captors that Rubens could do very little for himself, and she would be needed constantly as a nursemaid to feed, dress, and help him get about. Rubens, for his part, made himself as helpless and dependent on Gislaine as possible. For the moment, this plan seemed to be working. Gislaine was a tough young girl approaching adolescence. She had her mother’s eyes and facial expressions and the same thick brush of black hair. She put her arms around Rubens, who bounced between ideas of great courage and deep depression. “Quiet,” she said. “They’ll hear you, and then they’ll put those gags over our mouths again.”

  Rubens whispered, “Maybe I could lay down in the doorway, and when the guy comes in, he trips, and you take something and bash his head.”

  “I have to have something to bash his head with,” remarked Gislaine, looking around the empty room.

  Rubens thought about this and felt depressed again. “Ginjinha, what do they want with us?”

  Gislaine patted her brother’s head and tried to smile. “Mama will find us. Don’t worry.”

  Rubens sighed and soon fell asleep.

  In the midst of death, Radio Chico and the Foundation for Votive Pilgrimages were busier than ever. It was not because people in times of extreme suffering turned to God and prayer; the churches and the priests were, of course, overwhelmed by these people. It was because out of so many sufferers, some people, indeed, survived. After all, Radio Chico and the foundation were in the business of praising God for the victories, the miracles, the “answered” prayers. The rest was God’s will. In this typhus crisis, one out of ten people afflicted were reported to survive. If a hundred new cases of typhus were reported each day (and this rate of infection was expected to rise steadily to, some predicted, a thousand), Radio Chico and the foundation could expect an average of ten new calls per day from survivors of the epidemic, requesting votive pilgrims. Radio Chico was, amid this harsh tragedy, a singular voice of triumph and hope.

  Despite Radio Chico’s expression of optimism, its offering of the chance of life, some people had begun to feel that the typhus epidemic was heralding the inevitable apocalypse, that the Matacão was the center of God’s storm, the very door that would soon open to release the cataclysm that would cause the ensuing devastation. These people were further convinced of the end when more and more bodies of people, who seemed to have been tossed out of airplanes in midflight, were strewn over the Brazilian countryside. Those feather worshipers must have been in cahoots with the devil, and this was part of the final judgment. In preparation for such finality, people began to reappear again on the Matacão but, now, in various acts of self-flagellation: people baring their backs under whips, fasting under the hot interminable sun, puncturing their hands and feet with nails, pulling their hair out from the roots, dipping their hands and feet in scalding water or actually burning themselves over smoldering coals, filling their mouths with hot peppers. Then there were those who began to crawl on their knees the length and width of the Matacão, holding various banners or votive pictures of saints or dead loved ones. The Matacão being a perfectly smooth surface, the first such knee-crawlers lugged bags of sand and gravel that they tossed in handfuls before them to roughen the way and eventually tear at the soft flesh of their knees. In no time at all, peddlers could be found selling everything from candles and small whips to bags of sand of varying coarseness.

  Chico Paco watched these demonstrations of ardent suffering with a great deal of repugnance and personal pain. It seemed as if, daily, hundreds of people died from typhus, but those who survived or who were yet unclaimed believed that they had been saved for some greater suffering unless they could somehow purge themselves of sin. Chico Paco had gone on the radio again and again to denounce self-inflicted pain as a purgative for sinfulness. He invited these people, instead, to show their devotion by becoming votive pilgrims, telephone pilgrims, volunteers for hope. Chico Paco felt that there must be some way to pull them from this insidious dread. Fear permeated the social fabric, a cancer worse than any epidemic. It might turn into the lowest common denominator of human degradation; Chico Paco could not imagine what that might be, but it did not sound pleasant. He remembered his life on the sea on his jangada, that flat raft with sail, whose every rough-hewn board and characteristic he had once known. He looked out over the Matacão, at the stretch of sky and clouds, and felt confusion. Back in his home on the coast, he would have been able to wake at dawn and look out across the sky from east to west and north to south and read the day’s weather in that stretch of sky. It would say, for example, cloudy morning followed by mist and drizzle, winds at noon, clear by afternoon, cloudless sunset, crescent moon, starlit night, sudden gusty winds and heavy clouds, torrential rains by dawn. But the skies over the Matacão were a mystery to Chico Paco, unpredictable and inscrutable. He could read no weather, no future there.

  Chico Paco’s mother, Dona Feliz, continued to wander barefoot around her son’s carpeted apartment, just as if she had never left her home on the beach, oblivious to the human tragedy surrounding her. As I have said before, Dona Feliz spent most of her days on the Matacão at the riverside, washing the clothes the only way she knew—by beating and pounding the dirt out of them. “Clothes need to be beaten to learn to stay clean,” she would say. The hired driver who accompanied Dona Feliz would carry her basket of dirty laundry to the river side and then sit and sun himself on the rocks or smoke languidly while staring out across the river. Daily, the driver would recognize the same two people in a small boat for hire rowing out to the distant center of the river to dump a package into the water. He guessed every day that this package was another corpse. The two people in the boat no longer waited for the furious swell which eventually occupied the waters where the body had been deposited, the piranhas snatching wildly at the flesh to expose the bones, soon to be bleached flotsam bobbing at the river’s edge. The driver tossed his cigarette stub into the flotsam mixed with Dona Feliz’s soapsuds, picked up the heavy basket of tightly wrung clothing and followed her to the car. Back at the apartment, Chico Paco’s mother carefully spread the wet pieces out on the patio Astroturf to dry in the sun.

  Chico Paco continued to be traumatize
d by Gilberto’s inexhaustible energy and his dance with danger. Nightly, he would find himself coaxing Gilberto, who liked to straddle the railing of the balcony overlooking that gross display of torment on the Matacão twenty floors below, to come away. “Please Gilberto. Not tonight. I can’t take any more accidents. I need some peace.” After some amount of begging, Gilberto would be coaxed into a round of video games, pinball, or some fast-paced movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark, which Chico Paco had now seen one hundred times. At some unexpected but inevitable point, Gilberto would suddenly drift off to sleep. Chico Paco would take one long, loving glance at his wild friend and close his eyes in relief. Dona Feliz, used to waking at dawn, might find the two young men wrapped snugly in each other’s arms, swinging on the balcony hammock, and cover their sleeping bodies. They were momentarily huddled together against an unknown doom, and although Chico Paco insisted that they were a part of the lucky 10 percent, his own insistence betrayed him. He clung to the former invalid and slept fitfully, always hearing the distant sound of waves.

  When the construction of Chicolándia was completed and most of the contraptions and confabulations had been tested or broken by Gilberto, a date was set for the inauguration. Chico Paco chose Carnival, that devil-let-loose time of the year, which would provide the people with a genuine experience of surfeit and intense celebration, something to release—with some finality, he hoped—the dismal atmosphere of gloom which had settled everywhere. Wouldn’t this be the sort of thing that would make people forget their suffering, promote that ray of hope, that they might just be one of those lucky people in the surviving 10 percent? The people, Chico Paco felt, were desperately in need of a change of spirit. By opening the doors of Chicolándia, Chico Paco hoped to turn the ugly presentation of suffering on the Matacão into a new dance of hope. Once again, the Matacão, lately so grossly stained, must become a stage for celebration. In preparation, the government had hired a nightly cleaning crew, which consisted of a couple hundred men and women with brushes and mops followed by a tank which sprayed a roaring torrent of water, to cleanse the Matacão, that would-be polished road leading to a paradise of plastic delights.