by Tim Wirkus
We were living at the time on our grandparents’ majestic fazenda, which they only occupied a few weeks out of the year and had graciously offered up to my parents while they found their feet in the country. For many visitors, the fazenda itself was attraction enough. The main building, a colonial mansion built in 1850, sat nestled between two hillsides, with three guesthouses and a house for the help not far off. The fazenda could, and often did, sleep twenty guests, and in warm weather, with hammocks strung along columned terraces, it could sleep even more. Visitors might go all day without seeing another soul if they opted to take advantage of the many natural features the ten-thousand-acre property had to offer—a picnic by a stream, a ride on horseback through a flowering meadow, a hike to a scenic mountaintop.
Usually, though, a thick knot of people remained at the central cluster of buildings. In spite of its spaciousness, the fazenda, during weekends when my parents were hosting an event, often felt overstuffed to my siblings and me. Everywhere we turned, we found friends of our parents debating politics, seducing each other, arguing over the merits of the latest art-world craze, sleeping in the yard furniture, eating our food, drinking, and fighting. Although the world of adults was of increasing interest to me, three days of this revelry was usually too much.
I would have been fifteen then, Rex thirteen, and Anne only seven. We’d been in Brazil for a year and were adjusting with only mixed success. Our situation was unique—I could spend all day recounting the history of our family, but in short, our mother, Gabriela de Queiroz, was the scion of a fabulously wealthy Brazilian coffee dynasty, and Dad—Jack Cooper—was the oldest son of a reasonably successful hotelier in Lodgepole, Idaho. They met when Mother and a few of her globetrotting artist friends—I should tell you, incidentally, that Mother was a very talented painter. As a young woman, she’d studied at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes in Madrid before dropping out and falling in with a group of minor surrealists who worshipped the work of René Magritte. On returning to Brazil, she’d proselytized the aesthetic within the burgeoning São Paulo art scene, but that’s another story for another time.
What concerns us now is the trip she took with a few of her friends to the wild and wooly expanses of Yellowstone National Park. Back then Lodgepole, Idaho, was the last train stop before the park, and so Mother and her friends stayed the night there in—as it happened—our paternal grandfather’s hotel. She met Jack that night at dinner. It was peak tourist season and the hotel was understaffed due to a summer stomach flu making its rounds through the town, so Jack was filling in as a waiter. Somehow he caught Mother’s fancy. He was not an especially handsome man, but there was something so quintessentially American about his looks—that’s how Mother always explained that initial appeal. She waited until his shift ended, asked him what a girl might do to have fun in a town like Lodgepole on a night like this, and he responded by rustling up a pair of flashlights and leading her on a hike to the top of Moosehead Peak, where they sat talking until the sun came up.
The next week, after visiting Yellowstone, Mother’s friends headed west for California. Mother stayed behind, though, and following an intense three-month courtship, she and Dad were married, much to the consternation of Mother’s parents.
The newlyweds stayed in Idaho at first, Mother having been besotted by the region—this was virgin territory as far as surrealism was concerned, and Mother was convinced that the rugged Idaho landscape would inspire paintings such as the world had never seen: Old Faithful spewing bales of human hair, a bloody-mawed bear in a three-piece suit, aspen groves with their white bark replaced by soft pink skin. During those pleasant early years, then, while Dad helped his father run the hotel, Mother roamed the countryside, producing dreamlike renditions of the monstrous Tetons, of the relentless Snake River, of the already fanciful hot pots and geysers of Yellowstone National Park. I was born during those salad days, and then Rex came a few years later. Of course, Mother’s painting slowed down bit by bit as each of us children arrived, and then unfortunately the war came. Dad went off to fight, while Mother stayed in Idaho with us—no time to paint, only to worry.
My earliest memories are from that period. It was always winter, as I recall it, and baby Rex was always crying. I didn’t meet Dad until I was seven—or rather, I have no memory of meeting Dad before that. It was a strange time, our family fragmented and discouraged, but thankfully the war did eventually come to an end, and Dad came back in one piece not long after V-J day.
Not too long after that, Anne was born. With the family now complete, long-delayed plans to move to Brazil were finally set in motion. Mother wanted to reconnect with her community of artist friends, and Dad wanted to try his hand as a freelance journalist abroad, so after tying up their loose ends in Idaho and making the necessary preparations—a process that actually took a few years—we all moved to São Paulo.
The three of us kids spoke the language well enough because our mother had spoken it to us the whole time we’d lived in Idaho, but still, we sounded and acted like the foreigners we were. Children more socially adept than us might have parlayed that foreignness into an alluring mystique, but the three of us, socially competent at best, came across as clumsy and gauche to our schoolmates. As a result, we had no friends from among our new peers, only each other.
In a way, this wasn’t so different from our life in Idaho, where we’d inherited a patina of foreignness from our Brazilian mother and had never quite been regarded as fully authentic Idahoans. Still, at least we’d been born there, which counted for something, whereas in São Paulo we couldn’t even claim nativity. We children were foreigners who spoke the language reasonably well, who were only tenuously connected to the land by our native-born mother.
This distance solidified a dynamic that had been developing for years within our family, a sense that we were a sovereign, indissoluble nation of five, having been united by our highly peculiar shared history, our insular mishmash of cultures, idioms, and classes. We pledged allegiance to each other, and as long as our family remained together, we children felt like we had a place in the world.
I realize I’m making it sound as if we were outcasts in Brazil, which wasn’t really so. Mother and Dad fared much better in our new country than the three of us did, quickly establishing themselves as the toast of the São Paulo art scene. Mother had been much missed during her years away, and everyone took an instant liking to Dad, which was the case wherever he went. The man had a genius for likeability. Their parties were numerous and legendary, and in addition to Mother’s immediate circle of friends, over the years they hosted such luminaries as Carlos Lacerda, Alexander Calder, Clarice Lispector, Elizabeth Bishop, and Lota de Macedo Soares, to name just a few.
Our parents’ friends, it must be said, did treat us well, but in the way an indulgent human dotes on an inoffensive dog. They brought us gifts, laughed at the things we said—whether or not they were meant to be funny—and told us repeatedly how delightful we were. We rarely felt delightful, though. Resentful mainly, and as I said, bored.
• • •
Madge looked to her backlit siblings, who nodded in affirmation, while I shivered beneath my coat. Their ratification of her memories had all the weird potency of an incantation. It was as if by an act of shared will, they were reanimating the chilled corpse of the distant past.
• • •
Such was the case, Mr. Antunes, two days into that fateful weekend-long Festa Junina (continued Madge). The trouble began when, in a fit of pique, Anne created a flipbook in the blank, creamy pages of a leather-bound notebook that Emílio Lazaretti, one of my parents’ guests, had acquired in Florence. Lazaretti was Anne’s bête noir thanks to an unfortunate incident several visits previous when he had accidentally, he claimed, thrown away an elaborate yarn doll that Anne had spent two days creating. On this visit, he had not only made an ill-advised joke about the yarn doll incident—the joke’s supposed humor springing more fr
om Anne’s distraught reaction on that infamous occasion than from his own blunder—but he had also disparaged Lobinho, a rangy farm dog that Anne had recently taken under her wing, calling the dog one of the ugliest, stupidest mutts he’d ever seen.
About an hour after the slight had occurred, we found Anne on the porch of the second guesthouse, pen in hand, hunched over the notebook that, two evenings previous, Lazaretti had boasted he would fill with a series of poems destined to redefine the literary landscape of Brazil. To Anne’s credit, the flipbook was very amusing, depicting a bear in a tutu executing a clumsy pirouette. Anne was the only one of us children to inherit Mother’s genius for visual art. Given Lazaretti’s famous temper, however, we thought it best to return the journal to his room and concoct an alibi for our guilty sister.
Later that day, then, when Lazaretti came storming across the grounds, defaced journal in hand, we were ready. He’d deemed us the most likely culprits, so we were the first ones he confronted. The three of us stood in a little cluster next to the swing set our grandfather had built for us near the main house. Waving the journal under our noses, he demanded to know the meaning of this obscenity. My siblings and I looked at each other uncomfortably, just as we’d planned. He asked which one of us had done it, flecks of spittle flying from his mouth.
At fifteen I had an honest, sensible face that adults trusted, so when I responded, voice breaking, that all three of us had promised the guilty party that we wouldn’t reveal his identity, Lazaretti didn’t doubt me for a second. Instead, he cajoled and threatened until, with a tremulous plea that he not be angry with us, I told him that Mr. Salgado-MacKenzie was the flipbook’s creator.
“Who?” said Lazaretti.
I said, a little louder, “Mr. Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie.”
Lazaretti said, “I heard you the first time. Who is this Salgado-MacKenzie?”
I said that he must remember the young man who had tripped and fallen into him during the quadrilha on Friday night.
“No,” said Lazaretti.
I said, “But he fell right into you. And when he picked himself up, you shoved him back to the ground, you were so upset.”
Lazaretti had consumed a prodigious quantity of quentão that Friday night, so I counted on his memory of the evening’s events being more than a little hazy.
Rex chipped in, “He was one of the only people not to come to the party in costume, remember, and you called him an elitist swine?”
Lazaretti had called someone an elitist swine for failing to arrive in costume, but it was the painter José de Moraes, not the fictional Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie. We could see the wheels turning in Lazaretti’s head.
“And when he defaced my notebook,” he said, “what did he say to you?”
Anne said it was a very rude thing, what Mr. Salgado-MacKenzie had said, and we didn’t want to repeat it.
“Now I must know,” said Lazaretti.
I said, “If we tell you, you have to promise not to be angry with us.”
He said he promised. I told him we’d found Mr. Salgado-MacKenzie on the porch of the second guesthouse writing in the journal.
I’d said, “Isn’t that Mr. Lazaretti’s notebook?”
Mr. Salgado-MacKenzie had smiled at us and said, “I’m filling these pages with something far more consequential than anything Emílio Lazaretti will ever be capable of producing,” and then he’d held up the notebook, flipping through its pages to show us the little cartoon he’d drawn.
After a moment’s silence, in a very quiet, very controlled voice, Lazaretti thanked us for our honesty and asked us where he might find Mr. Salgado-MacKenzie. We told him we were sorry, but he’d left soon after we’d spoken with him.
Tucking his notebook under his arm with great dignity, Mr. Lazaretti thanked us again and took his leave. For the rest of the afternoon we heard him raging around the fazenda complaining of the great slight against him by that putrid upstart, Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie. I think the other guests found the anger off-putting enough that—not wanting to prolong the abrasive interaction with Lazaretti any longer than they had to—they didn’t inquire further about this mysterious Salgado-MacKenzie, even though they’d never heard of this young offender before in their lives. Everyone loved a good Emílio Lazaretti anecdote, though, so our story grew legs and began to travel among our parents’ friends and acquaintances.
During lunch one day about a week after the party, our parents brought up the nascent feud between Lazaretti and Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie, saying that for the life of them they couldn’t figure out who this Salgado-MacKenzie was. He was supposed to have been at their Festa Junina, but they’d never heard of him. Could it be that Emílio had begun to imagine things?
“No, Dad,” said Rex, feigning confusion at their confusion. “Salgado-MacKenzie was the one who brought that bouquet of flowers that sat in the vase in the library all weekend.”
Anne added that he’d also played fetch with Lobinho for some time, and had been very complimentary of the dog’s intelligence.
“Then you met him?” said Dad.
“Yes,” we all said.
“But who is he?” said Mother.
I told our parents that Ms. Elizabeth Bishop had told me that Salgado-MacKenzie was a very talented young novelist, only just arrived from Scotland. He’d been born and raised in Fortaleza, but when he was fourteen, his mother—Charlotte MacKenzie, the famous Scottish botanist—had moved back home to Edinburgh to accept an appointment at the university, and she’d brought young Eduard with her. His father had died, or otherwise abandoned the family, a few years earlier. Young Eduard had spent twelve years in Scotland, but now he was back in Brazil working on a novel that held great promise, according to everyone who’d read excerpts from it.
We were generally very honest children, so our parents had no reason to disbelieve our story.
Dad said, “How did we miss meeting him?”
Mother said, “You know how these parties can be,” and the matter was settled.
The hoax may have ended there, more or less, if not for a rainy Saturday a couple of weeks later that kept us all indoors. Mother and Dad were visiting friends in Pernambuco for the weekend, and we had opted to stay behind. I was old enough to keep an eye on little Anne, and Maria de Jesus—our cook—and Neuze—our maid—were on hand to keep us well fed and out of any real trouble.
• • •
Madge smiled briefly at this memory before continuing.
• • •
As much as we’d looked forward to having the place to ourselves, though (she said), boredom soon got the better of us. An empty house was no less tiresome than a crowded one, and after a half day spent diverting ourselves—me with my guitar, Rex with an illicitly obtained book of off-color jokes, and Anne with a children’s watercolor set—we were ready for some excitement.
The three of us were sitting in the library trying to teach the stubborn and lethargic Lobinho to roll over, when Rex said, “Do you know what would be funny?”
Anne shook her little head.
I said, “What?”
Rex said, “If Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie published a story.”
Rex and I laughed and little Anne looked deeply puzzled. “But he’s pretend,” she said.
I said that yes, he was, and that this would be part of the game. We would write a story, but say that Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie had written it.
Once she caught on, Anne was delighted. We had to do it, she said. Rex and I agreed. We snuck into Dad’s office—a big no-no—uncovered his typewriter, and got to work. All three of us were avid readers, and Rex and I were both burgeoning science-fiction fans, thanks to a crate of pulp magazines that an artist friend of Mother’s had dropped by the house so Mother could check out the covers—this friend was in a proto-pop-art phase and evangelized the aesthetic to everyone who would listen. Mother hadn’t b
een interested in the magazines, but Rex and I got a kick out of the stories we’d found inside: rocket ships, telepathic humans, penal asteroids, space pirates—a cavalcade of novelties. Given our enthusiasm for the genre, then, we decided that Salgado-MacKenzie’s story would be set in outer space. Rex and I took turns typing, but all three of us shouted out ideas. We’d become so tightly knit since our move to Brazil that collaboration was second nature.
As I remember it, the story takes place in a large colony on the far side of the moon. The colony’s governor, a petty megalomaniac named Ian MacTavish—we were leaning pretty hard on the Scottish angle—gets the idea one day to convince the other colonists that Earth’s been destroyed by a nuclear war. Everybody is half expecting this to happen anyway, so there’s very little resistance to the idea at first. The colony observes three days of mourning for their fellow humans, and then on the evening of the third day, Governor MacTavish convenes a colony-wide meeting in the giant stadium next to the government offices.
Once everyone arrives, MacTavish gets up on an elaborate platform in the middle of the field and, speaking into one of those booming stadium microphones, tells the colonists that before he was dispatched to the moon, he was given an elaborate set of protocols to follow if the Earth were ever destroyed. He tells the colonists that for the sake of humanity’s future, it’s essential that they follow these protocols to the letter.
He says that for starters, his gubernatorial stewardship now extends over all of humanity, given the recent and tragic demise of all more senior government leaders on Earth. He is, in essence, the supreme ruler of the universe, although of course they don’t need to address him as such, except on very formal occasions. The rest of the time, “Governor MacTavish” will do just fine. As for the rest of the protocols, he’ll reveal them as they become relevant, and everyone should just go about business as usual until the next such colony-wide meeting becomes necessary.