Brazil-Maru

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  To make matters worse, I would come back to Esperança only to slap Shiozawa on the back with a new project. I think the last straw was the New Hampshire hatchlings deal. “Shiozawa, I’m glad we’re finally getting the managerial help that I’ve always needed. I really am indebted to your fine work,” I said brightly. “Now, I’ve been talking to Americans in the business, and they are interested in sending us that New Hampshire breed that Befu wanted. I knew you’d approve, so I ordered them right away. Even with airfare to Brazil and the customs documentation, it’s not much money at all. A real deal!” Shiozawa was then sent into a frenzy about how to deal with a seller as far away as America.

  As time went on, Shiozawa became thin and bedraggled, with deep shadows under his eyes. He seemed to suffer from a bad stomach and had to refuse the generous portions of food that Haru dished up for him when he stayed for meals. I began to feel sorry for Shiozawa, whose hands began to shake when he drank tea. Someone spread the rumor that Shiozawa slept fitfully every night, and that recently he had awakened in a terrible sweat, grabbing his wife’s hair and shouting at the top of his lungs, “Stop! Stop the New Hampshire shipment!”

  There was no end to Shiozawa’s humiliation; we had no mercy. Everyone sent him in circles after illusions while I continued to make deals for our produce. I would slip off, unknown to Shiozawa, to the city. When I came back, I would have an address for Ichiro, a shipment destination and consignee who would pay in cash. In the middle of the night, everyone was rounded up to load the truck full of eggs at the southern corner of the commune. The crates were hidden surreptitiously during the day. Ichiro would drive this shipment to my secret dealer, where I would be waiting to receive his cash. I would count the money with satisfaction, shake hands with the dealer and wave Ichiro on. He had to return before sunup and slip back in with the truck before Shiozawa noticed his absence. Inevitably, Shiozawa would come pounding on his door just after he had returned. “Ichiro!” he’d yell, “Wake up! Let’s get that shipment counted.” Without even changing his clothing, Ichiro would obediently turn around and go back to São Paulo. His days and nights passed in a blur. He took catnaps between shipments, fell asleep more than once on the road, luckily surviving for lack of traffic. When Shiozawa came to question him about expending twice as much diesel as before, he could only mutter nonsense. Even I don’t know how Kawagoe must have justified the fact that we had produced two and three times more eggs than we had been paid for.

  In everyone’s eyes, Shiozawa and the bank became the villains, the enemy against which we had to fortify our defenses. As the furor surrounding the “Japanese victory” began to die away, we became caught up in a new cause, a new struggle for survival. After a year of this, no inroads had been made securing the stability of our operation, but Sawada had discovered my secret deals, and my extravagance and my love affair with Natsuko became common knowledge.

  I do not know when this information about Natsuko became known in the commune. For a while, Ichiro must have been the only one who knew anything. Shiozawa must have quizzed him several times about my trips to the city, and often people made comments when he made deliveries. When Ichiro drove Sawada to the airfield to take his small plane back to São Paulo, Sawada must have told Ichiro enough for him to realize that that the woman they were all talking about was the “housekeeper” he had seen so briefly at my city house. Yet he spoke to no one of these things, for he was never sure what to think. These things must be rumors, gossip spread to dissuade him from his duty. Besides, in his physical state, he was never sure what it was that he had seen and heard and what he had perhaps dreamed. He must have often arrived in São Paulo not knowing how he had gotten from one point to another, thinking that he had only dreamed that long stretch of road. But the gossip began to come to Esperança from so many different sources that my people all found themselves whispering the same things.

  Then one day, Befu heard it too. I was not there that day, but I’m told Befu rose up in an angry rage and growled so that everyone could hear, “If this is true, I will kill Kantaro with my own hands!”

  When I came home, everyone was strangely quiet. I sat at my place at the head of the table and sighed contentedly that I was glad to be back, that city life was not for me, that there was nothing more pleasurable than getting back to Esperança and having a bowl of rice with tea. “You don’t know, Befu,” I continued to wax nostalgic about rural life, “but city life is a rat race. No, people like me and you belong right here.”

  No one said anything, and Befu glared at me with his dark eyes hidden behind those black bushy brows. “City life?” he asked. “I wouldn’t know. Fancy restaurants. Expensive food. Prostitutes.”

  There was a terrible silence, and they all waited.

  I flung my rice bowl suddenly from the table. “Get out!” I screamed. “All of you! Out! Out!”

  Everyone shuffled hesitantly away.

  But to Befu I motioned, my tone softening, almost pleading, “Stay here. We need to talk.”

  Befu sneered self-righteously. “I want to know the truth.”

  “I will tell you the truth,” I said. “I have been meaning to tell you these things for a long time. I need your advice.”

  Befu softened but continued to sit stiffly.

  “I met a young woman. It’s true that she does not have what people call a respectable background, but I saw from the moment I met her that her spirit could be raised, that she deserved to realize her dreams. I thought in the beginning that she had great potential, that she could rise among young women in the colony and become a leader. This was my only intention—to save a human spirit, to lift her out of her poor situation.”

  Befu nodded. “So there is nothing. She is just an acquaintance?”

  “I cannot lie to you, Befu. You are my best and closest friend. What I am going to tell you I have never told anyone. Only you know these things.”

  Befu leaned closer.

  “I thought it would never happen again. I thought love, this passion, the passion I felt for Haru, that it was gone, could not be retrieved. But I have been blessed again with great love. How could I deny such a blessing? It would be to deny life itself. Suddenly I feel my youth again, my creative powers have returned in full. Look at me, Befu. Can’t you see it in me, you who are my closest friend? You among everyone must understand my greatest, deepest needs. What should I do?” I looked hard at my friend for his answer.

  Befu felt confused. “You love this woman?”

  “It is not just any love. If it were, then you have every right to take my life, to end it now. But you know that I cannot live in an ordinary way for an ordinary love. It would be to betray everything I believe in. Do you understand?”

  Befu broke down, his eyes welling with tears. He had heard my confession of love, so he said, as each of my loyal followers would also say, “Kantaro told me everything. He confided in me. After hearing what he had to say, I am convinced that it is a man’s right. This woman has stirred in Kantaro a renewed energy and a greater capacity to create. We should be thankful.”

  I believe even Haru was thankful. She said nothing, but continued to bustle about in her habitual manner, ordering this and that and caring in that general brusque way of hers for everyone’s needs. She seemed unaffected by the gossip, and when anyone mentioned the details within her hearing, she would speak out loudly, “That Natsuko is a very nice woman, you know. Kantaro said so.”

  In the meantime, Yōgu continued to follow Haru about. He was beginning to talk in sentences and to remember other names and faces. “Tsuruta,” he said one day. “Tsuruta?” When Haru told Yōgu that Tsuruta had died, Yōgu sat down in a corner of the kitchen and cried like a baby. Slowly but surely the memories returned and with them, emotions. One day Ichiro climbed into his driver’s seat in the truck and encountered Yōgu sitting on the passenger side. “City,” he nodded seriously. “Drive,” he ordered, spitting out the window. “Yōgu go.”

  By this time, the Baiano and I
had come to an understanding. This understanding was a long time in the making and to my way of thinking began to take form about the time my father-in-law, old Okumura, began to teach the Baiano about cooperatives. The relationship cultivated between these two men over the years and certainly during the war became much closer and important to the Baiano than anyone in Esperança could imagine. The death of Takeo Okumura was a severe shock to the Baiano, changing and humbling him in ways he admitted to me. “Okumura was a father to me. I never had a father; I was orphaned at birth. I’ll never forgive myself for not understanding the danger he was in. I could have prevented his death.” By the time the Baiano had gotten an education in the Japanese way of cooperatives, it was an easy matter to move on to something like our communal operation. We were the next step in a natural evolution of thinking. We didn’t just belong to the cooperative, we lived our lives as a cooperative. We weren’t concerned with just a better price for our produce, we were concerned with a better life. Well, this is how I explained it to the Baiano.

  There was one other reason why the Baiano was ripe for an understanding with me. It had to do with Maria das Dores, the woman he married. One day the Baiano left Santa Cruz and returned with a twelve-year-old girl who clung to him on the back of his horse. I heard the story that the Baiano had been to see his old patron—the Colonel, they called him—whose wife was dying. The Colonel’s wife had called for the Baiano; she would not die until the Baiano arrived, and when he did, she made him promise to marry her youngest daughter, Maria das Dores. The Baiano said that he was not one to argue with the wishes of dying people, and the following year when Maria das Dores was thirteen, they were married. That was the way he was. When he made promises, he kept them.

  People say that the Baiano spent the first several years of his marriage raising his wife. Contrary to what people expected, the Baiano was gentle and extremely patient with her, and many women in Santa Cruz d’Azedinha wondered what magic the Bahiano had performed to turn Maria das Dores into a proper wife and, soon after, mother. People say that the Baiano himself taught his wife to cook and sew. Some people remembered the Baiano making a painstaking effort to teach Maria das Dores to embroider and crochet. They say that the first towels and bedspreads that were used in that household were made by the Baiano himself.

  Maria das Dores turned out to be the sort of person who adopted everyone and everything into her own family. Before long, the Baiano and das Dores, as she was known, had not only a large household of children, several adopted children and two Indians who wandered in for meals, but animals of every description, tropical birds, dogs, cats, donkeys, ponies, goats, pigs, chickens, a llama from Peru, snakes (among them a large slow-moving anaconda), monkeys, all of which roamed, flew, crawled, and slithered in and out of the large spacious house that the Baiano had built. All of this and the fact of having raised his own wife must have had a domesticating effect on the Baiano.

  It would be easy to blame some bad Brazilian for our troubles. There were unscrupulous people, both Japanese and Brazilian, who took advantage of our situation. I will not name them here, but they know who they are. They must have thought, like me, that wherever the money came from, it was fathomless. Well, I cannot blame them. They only thought about their own gain. But the Baiano was not one of these. He understood our ideal. He was a man everyone respected. He and I initiated a strong friendship on one of those jaunts by air to São Paulo, sharing the small biplane that I hired to make weekly flights to the city. Ichiro drove me to the landing to make my flight and translated for the Baiano and me. I described our financial problems to the Baiano, who listened with concern. “I was never aware that you were having these troubles,” the Baiano shook his head. “Why didn’t you come to me earlier? You know my feelings about Okumura, God rest his soul. After all, you’re his family. This ought to be a concern for all of us in Santa Cruz. From what you are telling me, that bank of yours is playing some serious games. I wonder if that man Shiozawa should even be here taking over your operation. I wonder if that’s even legal. It all has the ring of something invasive and underhanded to me.”

  I nodded my head sadly. “I don’t know where to turn for help.”

  From that moment, the Baiano was a listener. He began to learn about our dream, and he began to be a believer in this great experiment. He would say to his friends and anyone who would listen, “You ought see the operation that these Japanese have put together. It’s marvelous really. These are people with strong Christian ideals, hardworking, productive people, the sort of stuff that Brazil needs more of. These people have got an answer to our problems, and they are showing us it can work. Marvelous. Just marvelous. That chicken ranch is something you’ll never see anywhere else. The man who runs things, the master over there, is Seijiro Befu. A genius. And everyone works together. Even the children. Hardworking people. These people are going to feed Brazil, I tell you. But the children—you can tell if something is working by the children. Befu’s son, just this little shoot of a kid, is an artist. I’m serious. Paints like the stuff you see in the museum. If that doesn’t tell you something is right, I don’t know what.” The Baiano could not praise us enough. He brought visitors constantly to show off this miracle in the rural wilderness.

  Pretty soon, the Baiano had Brazilian newspapers, ministers of agriculture, ministers of culture and education, social scientists, politicians of every party, Brazilian investors and lawyers interested in my commune. Reporters came through, constantly interviewing me, the King of Eggs, while photographers took quaint shots of Befu sporting his long black beard, the girls in the chicken coops, the women in the kitchen, the men in the fields, three hundred of us at mealtime. There were large spreads and articles in every major local and national newspaper and magazine in Brazil. They were exaggerated somewhat. One article said we covered an area of 36,000 acres and had 220,000 laying hens. Well, this was not an exaggeration if you included all of Esperança and meant to say that we were largely responsible for the great production of eggs in the area. Overnight we became famous. All of Brazil looked upon our modern operation, our fabulous production, our idealism, and my leadership and could not but believe that this was a lucrative business of the future.

  This brought a great deal of consternation to Umpei Sawada and the Nibras Bank. A famous Brazilian lawyer took me and my commune on as his personal cause; he was quoted in a national magazine saying that the Nibras Bank was illegally taking advantage of Kantaro Uno and that he could prove that the bank had invaded our operations. He implied that the bank was part of a kind of mafia, built on greed, which subjected their clients to unreasonable deals to keep control of lucrative businesses in the Japanese colonies. That I had taken this issue out of the community and had engendered this sort of publicity enraged Sawada.

  Sawada gathered with his board of directors and his lawyers. He sent his men out to literally scoop me from the streets and bring me captive to the bank’s feet. “This has got to stop!” Sawada yelled and pointed with emphasis at me. “All the evidence is here. You are worthless! This is Shiozawa’s report on your inventory. Here is the full assessment. It all shows that even if you sell everything, you are still indebted several times over. This is not only an assessment of your debt to the bank, but it includes debts to other banks, investors, the cooperatives, and to numerous shops and hotels and restaurants. I have personally seen several people enter this terrible mire of yours. A craftsman named Takemura who built furniture for you. He wept. He has a family to feed. Then there is a woman who sold several bolts of expensive cloth to you. There are dozens of small merchants, too numerous to mention. Have you no pity?” Sawada slammed his hands on a pile of bills. “And all this. Truckloads of tires, tractors, diesel, chicken feed, flour, salt, oil, oil paint, and canvas! Nothing has been paid! Your name is mud! You have wreaked a terrible havoc on all of us. Is this the thanks we deserve for supporting you? Your manner of dealing with this situation is chaotic! You are nothing! You must face the fact that you h
ave very few choices in this matter. Very soon three hundred men, women, and children will have nowhere to go! All because of you, Kantaro Uno!” Sawada sat back in an exhausted huff.

  I said nothing. Something that Sawada said gave me hope: “three hundred men, women, and children.” Of course, no one could turn out three hundred people from their land and homes. It would be scandalous. Sawada and the bank could never do such a thing without an uproar from the community. This would be a heartless and cruel thing for which no justification, especially not one based on money, could be made. I said nothing.

  “We have drawn up the proper papers for an accord which you will have to sign, for the sake of everyone concerned. This paper calls for your resignation as leader of New World Ranch, negates your authority to sign for anything. And it turns over the existing property to the two remaining founding families—the Unos and the Befus.”

  “But the others,” I protested. “We are not only two families.”

  “The land cannot accommodate the others, and they have no legal title to it anyway. You will have to make arrangements to compensate them in the best way you can. I’m sorry. This is the best solution for dissolving the commune that we can arrange. Give these people their freedom. They are hardworking people. You have influence on them.”