by Will Forest
I had this sudden image of Lisbeth—whom I had never seen—as the iara, the water spirit in the mosaic at the bottom of Zé’s pool.
“Hmmm… So did he ever get over her?”
“I think he did. This was years ago, just before she married Pedro, and then Pedrinho was born.”
Dora’s gaze shifted over my shoulder. I turned around to see a woman seated at another table, diagonally across the pool from us. She was breastfeeding a small boy while rubbing her swollen belly—she must have been almost full-term in her pregnancy. She sat right on the edge of the pouring rain—pushed back from the table, her half-empty plate abandoned—looking into the pool. She radiated an urgent desire to jump in.
I looked back at Dora. “She must be ready to have her baby anytime now.”
She smiled. “This would be a good place for it, no? What with all the rain and the pool.” She sighed. “A vida passa em um instante. Life passes by so quickly. Here I am telling you about my husband and my sons, and I was remembering being pregnant myself.”
I tried a bite of a promising ham-stuffed pastry from the basket of salgados, and sipped a bit of the incredibly strong cafezinho. I felt wistful, too, even though I was reflecting only on the past few days. “Dora, I don’t know what will happen between Zé and me, but I know that I like him enough to hope that he ends up happy, whether with me or not.”
“What a nice thing to say,” Dora said, placing her hand on mine. “I…”
She stopped and turned toward the pregnant woman. The rain had let up, and we both heard it—the woman was making a humming sound. It was hard to know if it was a song, or if she was straining against her labor having set in, or maybe both. She was still rubbing her belly and gazing at the surface of the pool, which was disrupted now only by softer and less frequent raindrops.
Dora stood and approached the woman, wending her considerable hips around several tables. “Você está bem?” I heard her ask, but then I couldn’t follow the conversation over the noise of the other people around me. How had we heard her humming? I wondered, and then I remembered again how easily water carries certain kinds of vibrations.
Several minutes later, just as I was debating whether to gather our purses and leave the table, Dora returned. She told me the gist of their conversation—the woman said she was waiting for her husband to come take her and the boy, her son, to the hospital. She said that her previous pregnancy had been very painful, so her mãe-de-santo had recommended humming to alleviate her labor pains.
“I’ve never heard of that before,” I said, although a thought was beginning to form about all the humming in the story of Sun Prince. “What’s a mãe-de-santo?”
“Oh—she’s like a priestess in candomblé, a religion of African heritage here in Brazil.”
“Wow. So did the humming seem to be working?”
“Sabe uma coisa? You know what? I think it was. She was smiling the whole time, and she’d go right back to humming whenever she finished saying something. She had her little boy humming along too.”
We saw a man arrive and make his way to her table. He kissed her in greeting, sat down for just a moment, then held her arm as they walked back out of the patio with the boy. As she was leaving, the woman waved at Dora.
A short while later, Dora paid the bill and we left Parque Lage, our umbrellas closed. Jota was waiting for us in the car. I looked back up at the mountain and glimpsed—in an eddy of surprise amidst the clearing clouds—the Christ statue, giving his blessing. Then it was quickly swallowed up again by the mist.
We had a subdued beef stroganoff dinner at the Queluz home. Zé had not been able to contact or find Nelson, who wasn’t answering his apartment phone or his cellphone. This had agitated Zé to the point where all he could do was talk fruitlessly about the possibilities for why Nelson was out of reach.
After a dessert of homemade quindim—like a coconut flan—we said our goodbyes to Dora and Pedrinho, who would meet us at the eco-lodge a day later, and went to bed soon after dinner to be able to wake early for our flight to Manaus.
Chapter 19: The Animal Lottery
March 30, 2012
Manaus, Brazil
“Is this where we’ll be coming back for the show this evening?” I asked Zé. We were slurping purple açai sherbet on the stately Largo de São Sebastião, the plaza in front of the grand Teatro Amazonas. The Largo and Teatro together are the best known landmark of the city of Manaus.
“Let’s go take the tour,” he said. “The Teatro Amazonas is a gorgeous building with a compelling history. But, to answer your question, no. The performance tonight is in a much smaller venue.”
The grace I extended him in waiting for more detail melted as quickly as the sherbet in the equatorial sun. He had been very mysterious the whole long way to Manaus about some sort of plan having to do with theater. “Ya,” I told him, “enough. I told you I don’t like surprises.”
“‘Tá bom,” he said. “Alright, have you ever seen Hamlet?”
“I saw a movie version once but fell asleep before the end. Don’t tell me we’re going to see Hamlet. In Portuguese? Oh, hell, it’s hard enough to understand in English... Are we?”
“Não. This will be much more… interactive. But Hamlet has a particular kind of interaction that… just might…”
“Oh, fine—don’t tell me. Whatever. But am I right to suspect that it’s nude theater?”
Zé smiled and looked down quickly.
“Fine. I expected as much,” I said. “I’ll do what I can to prepare Filo when she gets here, but I’ll leave Bill to you. In the meantime, let’s do the theater tour, and then it will be time to pick them up at the airport, right? What time do they arrive?”
“Four-thirty. I rerouted their flight through Panama City.”
“I’m so glad Filo’s coming. I know she’s excited. And it was very nice of you to arrange for a few days in Rio for them when they leave here, since that’s where we all thought we’d meet them in the original plan.”
“I hope Filo can see that I am a man of my word. I am sincere. And Bill…”
I sighed. “You felt guilty, didn’t you? You wanted to repair your bad karma from hitting him on the head?”
“Yes, you could say that. But you… I want to spend my life making up to you. You know, Marisol, you are a wonderful woman, beautiful and intellectual and sensible. I knew all that within minutes of meeting you, but I had no idea how vital you would become to me. And don’t misunderstand me—I don’t mean just because of your specialized knowledge. It’s because… I don’t know where I was before I met you. I missed you without knowing it. Now I know that wherever I go, I want to be with you.”
He kissed me. He surprised me with all that, in that particular moment, when we were just about to walk into the theater. And when I think back on it now, knowing how many telenovelas I watched growing up, I was probably searching my memories for what to do next, what to say according to the script. I think I considered acting bitter, saying something like, “I like you too, Zé, but I will never forgive you.”
But I couldn’t do it. And it was because I understood what he was saying as the truth of what I felt too. I certainly was not strong enough to conquer that, or even to want to overcome it.
So I kissed him back, tasting the açai still on his purple-stained lips. And tropical civilization being the open-air, open-mouth glory that it tends to be, we soon had strangers joking with us and taking our photo in front of the riotous pink façade of the Teatro with its green and gold cupula.
I wanted to be clever. I said to Zé, “Hey, we’re in front of the theater. So was that kiss staged?”
He laughed. “I am not a good actor. Trust me, you would know if I were trying.”
“Great,” I said, “then let’s commit to doing more improv.”
For an hour we toured the building, learning about the improbably European architecture and decoration of the theater, the obscene wealth of the turn-of-the-century rubber barons and
their exploitation of the landscape and people, and the Encontro das Águas—the roiling chiaroscuro of two rivers running separately in one riverbed that become the Amazon proper. Then we met Jota to get some coffee and drive back to the airport.
Our colleagues’ flight was late, so when Bill and Filo finally arrived, Jota drove us all straight to our posh hotel, Amazon Towers. The hotel was owned by Indians, as in from South Asia—Brazilian diversity I never would have imagined. My former teacher, once she relaxed from the long flights, was really enjoying herself, especially the made-to-order caipirinha that she had adapted to her taste with a hot pepper they called malagueta. I ordered her another one, just in case. I mean, when we were together in the car I had let her know we were going to a nude theater event that evening and she seemed alright with the idea, but I was hoping to lower her inhibitions as much as I could dare. Bill’s plan was to just enjoy his surprise Brazilian sojourn. He didn’t seem bothered at all by the prospect of a night of nude theater.
Jota drove us to the performance venue, a small gallery called Espaço Cultural A Soleira, “The Threshold Cultural Space.” We went in not knowing what to expect, other than the fact that there would be naked actors. Zé had told us only the title of the performance, “Gente da Bicharada,” which he said means “People of the Beasts,” and at the same time it also means “We of the Beasts.”
Once we had all taken our seats, I saw there were twenty-five of us, in five rows of five with plenty of room between the aisles. A robed actor came around and asked someone from each row to draw a number from the hat he was carrying. After receiving the five numbers, he loudly announced that we had just determined the evening’s performance from our drawing. A robed actress came in, carrying a poster of the Jogo do Bicho—a Brazilian lottery that looks like an animal bingo board. We could see the numbers 1-100 grouped by fours under stylized drawings of animals, also in five rows of five. As the actor read out our chosen numbers, the actress answered with the corresponding animals: cavalo (horse), jacaré (alligator), veado (deer), avestruz (ostrich), and borboleta (butterfly).
Then the actor and actress shouted together, “Vamos soltar os bichos!” (Let’s release the beasts!) The lights went out. We began to hear roars, shrieks, moans, hoots, and grunts getting very near to us. As the lights slowly came back up, we saw the small performance area becoming overrun with actors wearing only wings and beaks, or snouts and tails, or hooves and manes, etc., crawling and flapping and trotting while making their noises. I had never seen anything like this, nor really thought that it could exist, and I’m fairly sure Filo had not either.
The animal actors slinked and galloped through the aisles, pretending to sniff and lick us, until Pachelbel’s Canon began to play. ‘The music calmed the savage beasts,’ who curled up and dozed near our feet. The robed actors appeared again, and as the music stopped they dropped their robes to reveal, all over their skin, bodypainted numbers - Arabic digits, Roman numerals, even Mayan numbers. They explained the history of the animal lottery as a game invented to raise funds for the zoo in Rio. As these two narrators spoke, the beasts slowly became human. Without losing their costumes, the beasts began buying and selling tickets, until they were chased offstage by a ‘police officer’ just as the narrators were explaining the game’s eventual prohibition.
Then the lights dimmed, and the strutting narrators’ skin ciphers glowed fluorescent. They adopted a mysterious tone to assert that the animals hold a secret symbolism, and that we would now see revealed the occult meanings behind the numbers we had chosen...
Filo, Zé, Jota and Bill helped me remember all of this afterwards, because in the moment, I experienced it like a waking dream: The lights grow stronger again, with some New Age instrumental music. A voice calls, “O Cavalo!” We see a nude man sleeping on the floor. A woman comes, galloping around him. Soon she is joined by another woman, and then a third. All of them are merely nude, not wearing any tails or manes, and they gallop and gallop for some time. I look around me—people are transfixed, watching these women hop and skip, and the women themselves radiate joy with every bounce. Then the man stirs, reaching out as if to touch them. He stands, eyes closed, and stumbles around, trying to touch the women, who tease him by passing close to him. But as hard as he tries, he cannot touch them, and they gallop away, one after the other, as the man lies back down. Later Zé told me this scene portrayed the popular belief that dreaming about naked women was a sign for animal lottery players to bet on the horse.
Darkness. Sounds of the ocean. A voice: “O Jacaré!” I remember this part clearly, because I had lived it. When the lights come up, a man stands, wearing only an alligator snout, next to a large sign that reads NUDEZ OBRIGATORIA. The jacaré-man is frozen except his left hand, which he moves back and forth holding a Speedo. He is the sign at the entrance to Abricó beach in Rio! A fully dressed couple, looking very stern, approaches and tries to pass him, but he moves the sign to block them. They remove their shoes and coats and try again, but meet the same obstacle. This goes on a few more times, with the couple removing more garments and showing less stress each time, until they are completely naked, and the jacaré-man lets them pass. They joyfully toss a beachball back and forth.
Lights out again. “O Veado!” Sudden, loud disco music of a kind Zé told me is called pagode. Disco lights. Two nude men are dancing, embracing, kissing. Zé whispers to me that veado means deer but also is a pejorative term for a gay man. The music stops suddenly, the lights come up, and two more men walk in from either side—one wears the robe and wig of a judge, the other wears the robe of a priest and holds a cross in his hand. The gay men embrace to protect each other, and the priest and the judge each grab one of them, trying to pull them apart. All the while the judge and priest are shouting at them what must be biblical and legal injunctions against homosexuality, the terminology hopelessly formal and garbled as they yell past each other. In the confusion, two actresses wearing only rainbow scarves unzip the robes of the judge and priest from behind, pulling their robes to the ground, exposing them. The priest and judge freeze while the actresses wrap their scarves around the genitals of the stunned authorities. Then the music and disco lights resume. The original couple dances again, the actresses dance together, too, and the priest and judge stay frozen but look at each other with longing.
The lights fade out slowly with the music. “O Avestruz!” Lights up on a man wearing only a hat that’s red on one side, black on the other. He holds the animal lottery poster and points repeatedly at the ostrich. Samba music plays, and he drops the poster to dance with a nude actress who has a reddish-black flower painted between her navel and her vulva. They dance very sensually, grabbing each other’s buttocks and lifting their legs on each other. But in the middle of the dance he dies, and the woman grieves him. When she finally walks away, she is met on the other side of the floor by a man dressed in white pajamas. He consoles her, and they dance—very stiffly—to, of all things, a bassoon solo. Then the woman steps apart, trying to dance alone the way she did with the first man. She does not see that the “dead man” arises again and approaches her as she dances awkwardly. He pinches her buttock and surprises her. She looks from one man to the other in confusion. The first man walks right up to the second, sticks out his tongue, makes faces and waves his penis, but the second man does not respond. The woman crosses herself, realizing he is a ghost, but then she dances with him again. As the lights go down, she proudly walks away with one man on each arm.
“Claro!” Zé whispers to me. “I didn’t realize until the end, but that was Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, a novel by Jorge Amado that’s been adapted for film and TV.”
“A Borboleta!” When the lights come up, we see all of the actors—ten of them—wrapped shoulders-to-knees in colorful cloth, writhing and wriggling and rolling all over the floor. We hear birds chirping and rushing water. The actors stop moving one by one, and then after a few moments they begin to break free from their cloth, one after the other knee
ling, standing, spreading the thin cloth wings and flying around the performance area, along the aisles between our seats, eventually disappearing to the back. My eyes leaked a little, because the actors were so earnest, so free and beautiful in their nudity, and the whole scene made me recall the butterfly dance from the life of Sun Prince.
Darkness for the last time. With the lights up we applauded the bowing actors. Filo and I talked about the performance while Zé waved down his contact, Jônatas Bandeirante, who was the group’s founder and director, and he was also the actor who had played the numbers man and several other parts. I knew he and Zé had never met, only corresponded by text and email. They greeted each other effusively and then by the time I heard the conversation, I realized they were talking about Zé’s Hamlet plan.
“You want an allegory of Amazonas, is that right?”
Zé nodded. “Isso.”
“Well, that’s easy. There are lots of Amazon allegories written for the stage. Mine needs all ten actors.”
“The company plane can fly twenty, so if you need ten actors, plus Marisol, Filo, Bill, Jota and me, that’s fine. My brother and his family will arrive separately.”
“‘Tá ótimo,” said Jônatas. “That’s great.”
“But so, your play…” said Zé. “It’s about the history of Amazon exploitation, right?”
“Sim, você vai gostar! If you liked the show this evening, you’ll be pleased with this other one, too. Thank you for the opportunity! This is prestigious for my company, and it puts us in the good graces of the state culture department.”
“Nada disso. On the contrary, I’m indebted to you for getting your group together on such short notice.”
“I’m just glad they can all go. Cara, when you wrote me the other day, I didn’t know what to think. Five thousand reais payment for my company, plus transport, lodging and meals. I mean, some of the actors are going to miss work, and a couple of them had to get family members to keep the kids for two days, but they all jumped at the chance to do this. We’re all ready to leave tomorrow morning.”