by Nancy Burke
Jorge suddenly looked like he was going to cry. “Why are you making me the bad guy?” he said to all of them.
“Nobody’s against you,” said Sara, leaving for a minute to drag a chair in from the kitchen table. She sat down beside her son and patted his hand.
Jorge pulled his hand away and got up to go.
“Are you leaving?” Sara asked.
“I’m getting the coffee.”
He returned with two cups, and gave them to his mother and Joaquim. Then he brought in the other two and handed one to Larry.
“How about this?” said Joaquim, sounding suddenly amused.
“What?” said Jorge.
“We have to stop in Itatuba anyway, pretty close to Paruqu, if we’re going to have anything to bring with us to Lamurii, since there’s all that leftover barter there. How about if we take Larry with us, so he can get a feel for it? We can approach Paruqu by boat from the South, stop overnight, maybe bring the ashes and see if there’s a place there for James.” He looked at Jorge and smiled. Jorge looked away.
“Oh, and one more thing,” said Joaquim, winking at Larry.
“What?” said Jorge.
“I think if you want any hope of a decent outcome in Lamurii, you should bring along that woman of yours,” said Joaquim. “I had a long talk with her last night. You’re going to need her.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” said Jorge, jumping up. He looked around the room, from one side to the other, and started pacing between the kitchen and the living room. Then he walked to the front door and began twisting the handle rhythmically. At last he stopped, turning to rest his back on the doorframe. He took off his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief. “There’s more coffee,” he said.
XXIV
ASATOR AK HAD waited for a hands-and-feet of moon cycles after Timir’s death to approach Anok, though he had thought of it long before then. The two moon-cycles of Asator’s disappearance, in which it was said that the Gods had called him back to prepare him to lead, marked the start of his new life, and thus called for a new kartir to be painted across both sides of his chajan. Of course this painting was more elaborate than the sort that would be done for a first birth, and Anok took her time mixing the deep red and the ochre, carving out the design with the sharpest maata she had, so that it would be the deepest of his katira. She could feel him watching her as she worked, and for that reason, rarely looked up from the paints. When he came near, she would whack at him with the brushes as a joke, threatening to paint his knees rather than the chajan’s, but even then, she wouldn’t look into his face. After he was chosen to lead, she was even more remote, and huddled against the pole when once he stood behind her and put his hand on her shoulder as she carved out a spot. But the next evening, when he returned from the far village, he could make out, by feel as much as by his waning sight, her small mark on the inside surface of his chajan’s thigh, carved as deep as any.
XXV
“THIS COFFEE TASTES like silt from the river bottom,” said Claudio, dipping his finger into the sludge.
“Just the way you like it!” said Joaquim, dumping their ashtray into a bucket as Claudio patted him on the back.
Of all the cafes in Belem, Joaquim’s chosen one was Le Figaru, in the shadow of the Teatro da Paz, because it attracted the artists, the actors, the academics from the new university, and the misfits who lived on the fringes of such fringe professions. By the age of thirteen, he had managed to talk his way into a job there, washing dishes, emptying ashtrays, and waiting on the regulars, who called him Jobao and pulled the brim of his grey felt banded hat down over his thin face to his collar bones. While his school friends were out playing soccer or roaming the streets in packs, looking for girls to avoid and then whisper about, he was talking to grizzled old men about socialism, and the Constructivist movement, and Mario Quintana. (“O destino e o acaso que enloqueceu …”). And of course, treasured among all the grizzlies, as he called them, were the adventurers, marked by their darkened skin and cracked fingernails and disregard for how they smelled, who told of strange monkey-eating tribes and gunfights with loggers and enormous snakes, the girths of which bested their own. They were the early crowd, the first ones to arrive in the morning, and it was worth it to Joaquim to pull himself out of bed before dawn to open the café for them an hour early, before even the owner arrived. They never minded the day-old pastries, which was fortunate, as the delivery truck from the bakery didn’t make its rounds until nearly a quarter past six.
“More sludge?” said Joaquim, looking into Claudio’s cup.
Orlando laughed. Abarta, the owner, walked in past them with a nod, singing “Bom dia! Bom dia!” in every direction, scratching himself as he went. That was usually the cue for Orlando to start chiding Joaquim not to be late for school, which he was every morning anyway, in large part because of them. Instead, they motioned for Abarta to come over, and showed him the sludge with mock indignation.
“This one we no longer regard as qualified to make the coffee.”
“Pois nao! Pois nao! Nao foi nada!” said Abarta with a good-humored frown.
“I think we’re going to need to take this one away with us, for some training. Can you part with him for a month or so? I promise that by the time we return him to you, he’ll be the finest brewer in Belem!”
Joaquim watched, wide-eyed, not sure what he was hearing.
“Take him away!” said Abarta, patting him on the back. “He’s ruining me with his terrible reputation for sludge!”
“What do you think, boy? Want to go? We’re down one assistant, and thought you might fit the bill. Can you manage it? Whose permission do you need to get?”
Joaquim’s face fell. There was only his father at home, and although he barely saw him—his father was asleep when he left, and also by the time he got home—he relied on the money his son made at the café. “I guess not,” he said quietly, looking at the ground.
“Of course, there’ll be a stipend up front in case you don’t come back.”
“What’s a stipend?”
“How much do you pay him here per week? About two cruzeros? That’s about what he’s worth, huh? Anyway, bring me the check, and write the number on it, so we can see how well you think of him.”
Abarta brought over the check on a small black wooden plate, as he did each day; the sertanistas never ran a tab the way the artists did. When Joaquim leaned in to try to see what was written on it, Orlando pushed him away. “So you’re sure you can let us have him? One month only?”
Abarto knocked the ashes from his cigarette into Orlando’s cup. “I know you two. One month, and then one year, and then forever!”
Orlando shrugged and turned to count out bills into the tray. “Pay your busboy and get him out of here.” Abarto took out the price of the coffee and the stale brioche and placed the rest in Joaquim’s hand. Joaquim’s eyes widened again when he saw that he was being given three times as much as his usual month’s wages.
“Now run that over to your father, and tell them at the school that you’ll be out, so they don’t start to miss that snoring commotion from the back of the class. Meet us back here with your clothes by half past ten.”
Joaquim stuffed the money into his pocket and headed for the door.
“I’ve heard from Alejandro’s kid that that’s what he does—he really does sleep all day, with his head on the desk!” said Orlando after Joaquim left.
XXVI
WHEN JAMES’S BELONGINGS had been laid out on the bed, Larry looked them over and found them all familiar. There were some things, khaki pants and socks and white v-neck T-shirts, which James owned in multiples. The others, the green-and-white checked shirt with snaps instead of buttons, and the blue short-sleeve shirt with the pleated pockets, and the olive canvas roll-up hat, with their spots and holes and stretched-out places, bore the marks of their specific, visceral importance; Larry was sure that he could find them, if he looked, in the pictures on the stack in the living
room. He stood back and surveyed them, understanding well enough that all losses give way to other losses, that the things that were laid out in front of him belonged together, like a set of china dishes the integrity of which was lost when the smallest piece was broken. He took the green-and-white shirt and put it to one side. The socks and underwear went into a shopping bag to be left at the church, and the rest of the clothing was piled in the center of the bed. After hesitating for a minute, Larry placed the pile neatly into James’s pack on the floor, as though to ready him for a journey.
Certain principles of packing were transparent to Larry; he had an intuitive feel for exactly the things he would need for comfort under the most difficult of circumstances, the right selection of books, and the pen that felt best in his hand, and the perfect metal box to hold the bottles of pills and vitamins that James had assembled and labeled. He packed in anticipation of the events that would take place inside himself, because he did not know how to prepare for the events of the world. Throughout the next two days, things were sorted out and condensed and refined. His possessions were mingled with James’s and then divided up again. He lined his books against the pillows with their spines out and moved his eyes from title to title, acknowledging each one. At last, he pulled out a few of them—his old boxed copy of The Lord of the Rings, Henry Walter Bates, the Aeneid, James’s battered Comte, a paperback copy of Van Gogh’s letters—and put them in his pack on top of his clothes. Then he reached into James’s pack and pulled out a few things that James might need were he to change his mind and join him after all, an extra hammock and mosquitero, his roll-up hat, the checked shirt, and laid them on top of the books. At last he turned and knocked on Jorge’s open door. When Jorge looked up, he came in and put James’s small gold penknife beside his elbow. Jorge turned and smiled at him reluctantly, standing to put the knife in his pocket. But instead of sitting down again, he pushed in his chair and walked with Larry towards the door.
“You and Joaquim are going to have to be ready at 5,” he said.
“Where are you going?” said Larry.
“To my place. I haven’t slept there in a week.”
Larry followed him to the front door and stood awkwardly beside him.
“Who’s Martina?” he asked.
Jorge looked at him for a minute in silence. “James was oblivious too,” he said, “and I loved him like a father.”
“Oh,” said Larry, looking at the ground.
XXVII
OVER TWENTY YEARS, the memory of his father had eroded almost completely, but if Jorge had noticed, he never admitted it to himself. The images that bound the two of them together had become rote from overuse, as unremarkable as the thumbtacks with which he pinned his maps and memos to the bulletin board on the kitchen wall next to the phone. Thus, when Martina Barend—after knocking over his shopping bag at the market and helping him retrieve the onions that had rolled beneath the partitions between the stalls, and compensating for the bread that had slipped from his bag into the dust through the purchase of two ices from a street vendor—had leaned forward on the bench on which they sat and introduced herself by saying, “Moretti’s not Brazilian. So tell me where you came from,” the words he used to answer her barely claimed his attention.
“I came here with my parents from Italy when I was four,” he said.
“And how old are you now?”
“I’m twenty-nine.”
“And what work do you do?” she continued.
“Is this a job interview?” said Jorge, simultaneously amused and irritated. “I’m a pilot.”
“And what does your father do?” she said, clearly not yet satisfied.
“Why?” he asked, suddenly angry.
“That always says a lot,” she said.
“He’s dead,” he said.
“How?”
“That’s kind of personal,” said Jorge, reaching to pick up his bag and then putting it down again at his feet. “Thanks for the ice.”
“I’d like to know,” she said.
Jorge regarded her for a minute, her heart-shaped face and her nut-shaped eyes with their intensity of color and expression. Then, despite himself, he started, while she leaned in to hear him over the commotion of the market behind them.
“In Italy, he was a potter,” he began, “but when he got here, he got a job at the Museu, restoring artifacts, and ended up meeting this guy who got him a job with the IPS, the Indian Protection Service.” She nodded as if she knew the story already, and waved him on. “He was trying to broker a deal between this tribe and a mining company that wanted their land, and the Indians took him hostage, and these two friends of his tried to rescue him, but they couldn’t, and they barely got out themselves.”
“So you hate those friends of his?” said Martina, as though she were nonchalantly handing him a wasps’ nest.
“No,” Jorge shot back with pure anger. “I love them. They risked their lives for him. They’re like fathers to me.”
“I meant that too,” she said.
“So why don’t you tell me where you’re from?” he said, aggressively.
“Rotterdam, Lyon, Amsterdam, Munich,” she said, folding the empty paper cone that had held her ice.
“And what does your father do?” he asked, less with interest than out of a wish for revenge.
“Birkenau,” she said, as though she had decided to take back the nest for herself. “The camp. And my mother and my sister.”
When he was silent in response, she went on. “So you must know something about ceramics. Why don’t you stop by my shop sometime, and give me some pointers?”
“I don’t know anything about ceramics,” said Jorge,
“It must be somewhere in your blood,” she said. “You could give it a try. 172 Bartolomeu de Gusmao,” she said, smiling at him as he stood up and gathered his bags.
XXVIII
AFTER YEARS OF squatting and facing the chajans from sunup to sunset, Anok had become used to speaking over her shoulder, without looking up into the faces of those she addressed. Meanwhile, everyone else had grown used to talking to her back, knowing that she could tell by their voices what their expressions and gestures were like. Yet while her posture had come over the years to be as unremarkable as that of the chajans themselves, her face had become that much less familiar, and therefore all the more startling, even when her expression and her tone of voice were kind. Even her short stature, the fact that she seemed to shrink so much as she aged that most of the men in Pahquel might easily have picked her up and moved her at will between the three interconnected villages, made her seem inhuman and therefore frightening, lending her fragility itself a fierce and threatening aspect. This was the real reason why even those who were closest to her always addressed her by her honorific, Ak, and watched her from the corners of their eyes while she moved with her pigments from hut to hut. And it was one of the reasons she had remained with Asator for as long as she had; because she knew that he was the only one whose regard for her was based upon something other than fear.
XXIX
SARA DIDN’T GO with them to the airport. Ever since Jorge had started to fly, she had refused to see him off. Instead, she insisted that he drive the five blocks to her house every morning before the sun was up and wait while she reached into a small ceramic pot for a one cruzero coin, which she would give him as a loan, after securing his commitment to repay it. The cruzero was always warm when he took it, even on chilly mornings; it contained the heat of her anxiety, which he could feel for a minute as it fluttered against his skin and broke through the veins in his arm, disappearing into his bloodstream. As they drove off, he looked up to see his mother in the window, ephemeral on the other side of the glass in the gray half-light, her hands empty at her sides.
In the back seat, Larry and Martina studied each other’s knees in silence, sizing each other up, and then turned away to look out their windows onto opposite halves of the world. The landscape streamed by on either side of the cab li
ke the two rivers, one black and one clear-running, that came together with a force too strong to let them mingle. The car seemed to follow a river’s course, turning first one way and then another, heading toward a gray metal hangar that stood off somewhat from the main part of the airport. They pulled up at a door in the side of the corrugated metal hut and began unloading their bags onto the pavement
“Sure you’re ready?” Joaquim addressed himself to Larry’s back.
“Umm,” said Larry, embarrassed to be asked within earshot of Martina. It was the sort of innocuous question that he hated the most, the kind that that drew attention to the fact that the gulf between his intentions and the world’s purposes was wider and deeper than he thought.
“Have you flown in one of these?” Martina asked.
“Only his old one,” Larry said, still unable to look at her. “Have you?”
“It’s a great plane,” she said.
Joaquim looked at Jorge, who was gassing it, and smiled. “Maybe I’ll turn you in after all,” he said.
Martina laughed.
Jorge scowled. He put away the hose and spent a long time positioning their bags in the hold, moving them back and forth until at last, standing back to look at his arrangement, he nodded that he was satisfied. Then he motioned them in, in the same configuration as in the car, with Joaquim in front.
As the doors slammed shut on either side of Larry, a panic rose in his throat. The whole plane shook as the engine started up, and the vibrations made it impossible for him to tell how much of the tremor came from within and how much from outside himself. They taxied for what felt like several minutes and then stopped, the silence of the wheels revealing the sounds of the plane’s organs working, as a runner will hear his heart beat in his ears as he stands at the starting block waiting for the gun. Just as suddenly, the plane took off with a roar and a jolt that made the bags slide backwards. Larry sat up in horror, unable to decipher from the sound they made whether they had become hopelessly unbalanced. There were windows on either side of him, but they were small and steamed over, and thus had almost nothing to tell him about their relationship to the ground. He pressed his feet into the floor and held onto the wall with one hand, nearly reaching with the other for Martina’s arm.