Feast Days

by Ian Mackenzie

  Some of the artists were famous, some were young, and they all took to the idea of occupying a defunct hospital with the exuberance of children. The businessman called it a “creative invasion.” Art stuff was everywhere, and it was not always obvious if something was new art or incidental hospital matériel. A stone bust of the hospital’s founder might have predated the creative invasion or been an invention of one of the artists, designed to appear as though it predated the creative invasion. It could have been ancient or faux ancient. Debris commingled with the fruits of artists’ labors; debris was the point. The walls of the hospital were crumbling, the paint was scaling, a dust of poisons hung suspended in air, asbestos and lead. The word for all this was decrepit. Wild plants grew everywhere, in sprouts and tangles; plant life climbed the exterior walls, jungly and lush. Once, the hospital would have seemed grand. Now it was an example of the decaying splendor for which there was an emerging market: ruin porn. Admission was free. But free doesn’t exist. Free means only that someone else is paying, or that you’re paying with something other than money. At the entrance was a backdrop emblazoned with the logos of banks, gas companies, investment firms, hotel chains, brands of vodka and champagne.

  The exhibition was well-publicized. Not long after we arrived the line already extended around the block. Vendors sold water and fruit. The length of the line made it seem like part of the exhibition, performance art: a group of volunteers playacting the role of people waiting in line for a popular exhibition. They behaved and dressed exactly as they would have behaved and dressed if an artist had conceived it.

  If the exhibition hadn’t been popular, the organizers could have paid people to stand in line and make it seem popular. I said this to Iara. “You can always pay somebody to do something,” Iara said.

  In spite of the crowd, some rooms were empty, even entire hallways. The old rooms and hallways, ghostly and unrestored, were more interesting to me than the art itself. Even the artists themselves seemed aware that the real attraction was the strange, low-grade thrill of visiting a place that ordinarily would have been off-limits. As if in acknowledgment of this, some of them simply signed their names to the walls of the dead hospital.

  I asked Iara if she’d ever wanted to be an artist. She laughed. “I am not even a failed artist,” she said. “But all your friends are artists,” I said. “I like artists, I believe in art,” she said. I hadn’t thought of art as a matter of belief. “I think I only feel things about art,” I said. “Yes, of course, you have to feel it,” she said.

  I saw a pair of destroyed foreign-made automobiles, one mounted on the other, like animals in heat. I saw bricks and other rubble gathered from broken floors and stacked into haphazard votive forms under the dirty light of old windows. I saw a sinister red glow beamed into a dark room frothing with machine-made mist. I saw the floor at the base of a marble stairwell transformed into a black mirror by half an inch of standing water. I saw doorways jammed full of magazines and newspapers and chunky 1980s-model desktop computer screens. There was a hospital chapel. Inside, I saw what you’d have to call lunatic party decorations, bulbous and hand sewn, hanging from the ceiling, brightening the altar, a fertility of color in the barren cave of religion. I saw exotic plants. I saw a maze of lights. I saw lumpy piles of white material, heaped onto a hospital bed, the shape of limbs, the size of bodies.

  The article in Folha mentioned that a couple of well-known Brazilian artists had refused invitations to participate in the exhibition. The artists said they didn’t want to be part of a publicity stunt to promote a real estate development. The businessman was unconcerned. He seemed to think he had plenty of creativity to sell with or without a couple of well-known Brazilian artists.

  I saw something that seemed too obvious to be interesting as art. Painted on the whitewashed walls of an enormous room were the heads and bare torsos of seven young black and brown men. They were larger than life, much larger, floor to ceiling. Their faces showed varieties of feeling: a smile, a bashful downward gaze, a defiant stare, faces mournful, bemused, doubting, wry.

  They were beautiful boys. I stared for a long time. They had gentle faces, gentle eyes. I was mesmerized, the way I became mesmerized in the presence of a Rothko or a Pollock. I was emotional. They were thin, bony, some had concave cheeks, flapping ears, black hair, thin mustaches. They were blazingly individual; because of their size they couldn’t disappear into a group. Here were people typically not extended the courtesy of epic portraiture, was the point. Here were the young men of the favelas—when faces like theirs appeared in public, it was in newspapers or on T.V., in connection with poverty, crime, police violence; it wasn’t like this. A kind of glow radiated from the wall, an effect of the lighting on the tones of the paint: to create the shades of the boys’ skin the artist would have used red, russet, brown, ocher, beige, chocolate. There was no single word for the color of their skin. The other visitors at the exhibition looked like me, not like the boys, and this, too, was the point. The exhibition, the hospital itself—they were monuments to money. But these boys were monuments to themselves.

  The faces loomed over me when I went to the corner of the room. Proximity and size transformed their expressions into something hard, aggressive. As a white woman I was conditioned to see any group of dark-skinned men as a threat. I waited. The humanity began to flow back into the faces, the range of feeling, the subtle individual electricity. The artist knew who would see his art; he had smuggled his subjects from zones of poverty into zones of wealth. I had been in the room with these boys for more than twenty minutes. That was the point—the attention you paid that you wouldn’t have paid if you saw them on the street. The time you spent.

  I heard an eruption of young voices. They were fifteen or so teenagers, black and brown kids. They went right up to the walls, the walls of the old hospital, to the colossal painted faces of the young men who looked like them. They touched the faces. Their behavior was not the behavior of regular artgoers. I saw a woman with them, someone my age; it was a field trip. The kids laughed. It was as if they had become part of the artwork, as if their response created an additional layer of meaning: young people who weren’t usually the consumers of art looking at young people who weren’t usually the subjects of art. And for them I might have been part of the artwork as well, the privileged white artgoer, an exemplar of the status quo, the kind of person who uses Latin terms in casual conversation. I had come to the exhibition and they were brought to the exhibition, by a white adult, a benefactor. I assumed they would not have come on their own. That day may have seemed exceptional in their minds; or perhaps I was inventing thoughts for them they didn’t have. I doubted they noticed me at all, in fact. The quality of luxury is in the eye of the beholder.

  Because it was always there, a bulge in the mind, the question of a child became itself a kind of pregnancy. When we weren’t talking about it, I was aware that we weren’t talking about it, and aware that he wanted to talk about it. Aside from my husband, there wasn’t anyone I spoke of it with. For reasons I couldn’t name I obeyed a marital omertà. I perhaps didn’t want anyone to know that we disagreed about so fundamental a choice. And I thought perhaps I would be judged; wasn’t my husband’s preference the more normal? What sort of woman doesn’t want a child?

  The hospital was called Matarazzo, after its founder, an Italian who immigrated to Brazil and built an empire of plantations and factories, and who, in 1937, at the time of his death, was Brazil’s wealthiest man. The hospital was one of his good works. Matarazzo’s nephew later used the family money to found the São Paulo Museum of Art and the São Paulo International Biennial of Art. Now a wealthy Frenchman owned the hospital and intended to sell creativity, not to mention luxury hotel suites, and for the time being it was open to the public, who came in droves, and waited in lines, and delighted in the curiosity of touring an old building in decay, in the last days before it was torn down.

  “Havia mais futuro no passado.” The words were stencil
ed in Helvetica on one of the hospital walls. There was more future in the past.

  THE CHILDREN’S PARTY

  My husband accepted an invitation on our behalf to a children’s party. It was the birthday of a co-worker’s child. The party made me think of how children at Versailles must have celebrated their birthdays. It was the closest thing to a bacchanalia you could have involving nine-year-olds.

  The venue was the Planet Kids Buffet Infantil: an elaborate multistory funhouse devoted to the pleasures of pre-hormonal children. These party zones were a minor industry, irrigated by money from the city’s larger industries; all those bankers and plastic surgeons had kids. And seemingly every one of those kids received a fêting, annually, on a regal scale. The party zone supplied everything: activity leaders, photographers, videographers, courts for volleyball and basketball, stations where girls could have their nails painted and where boys could design papier-mâché swords, an indoor roller coaster, whole mountain ranges of balloons, three-layer cakes of chocolate and dulce de leche, actors dressed up as famous copyrights—fantasy characters that belonged to a time in childhood when the world seemed both sane and magical—and a full bar for the adults. The party zone handled theme requests: princess in a fairy tale; space adventure with superheroes; time travel with dinosaurs; cowboys and Indians in the desert. Evidently you were allowed to mix themes even at the expense of narrative continuity. The parents didn’t have to do anything; they only had to swipe their debit cards. There was a cruise-ship atmosphere of outsourced responsibility. Everything was the color of candy. The kids were drunk on the overabundance of stimuli. The adults were drunk in the usual way.

  And those kids—from the age of first memory, everything they could imagine was available to them. Often it was given to them without even being asked for. Catering was a fact of life.

  They weren’t growing up to be muggers; but they were growing up to be something.

  It was a titanic crowd, and my husband quickly disappeared, possibly with the co-worker whose child was turning nine, but I couldn’t be sure because no introductions were made. I found myself alone on the hostile terrain of Planet Kids. The only people I saw were strangers. I saw Spider-Man, Batman, the Incredible Hulk. I wasn’t panicking, but I wasn’t feeling well. Finally, I spotted João, and swam gratefully toward the oxygen of a familiar face.

  “You are looking perfect,” João said, kissing both my cheeks.

  “I’m not the first woman you’ve said that to today,” I said.

  “But with them I was lying.”

  We talked about his work. João was a veterinarian. If men like to talk about something other than their work, they do an excellent job of hiding it. He was planning a new venture with a partner.

  “Everything in one place. So we are not only taking care of the animals, but selling imported pet foods, equipment, things you cannot normally find in Brazil.”

  “There’s a market,” I said.

  There were times when I talked like my husband in order to be understood.

  “Let me show you,” João said.

  We went out to the street. João led me by the arm; I was grateful for the fresh air. He pointed at a woman being tugged along by two leashes attached to two small white dogs.

  I said, “Do you know her?”

  “I have no idea who she is. But how do I know she will be here? Because I see her everywhere. Everywhere you go in this city, you see women with dogs. I will tell you a fact. São Paulo is the city that has the greatest number of dogs under ten kilos in the world.”

  We went back inside and were greeted by the furnace blast of children’s screams. One of the Planet Kids employees, using a wireless headset microphone, shouted orders for a group of the younger children to follow, like the leader of a cult. He wore a bright yellow shirt. It was some kind of dance sequence made up of swaying and nodding and clapping; the children seemed confused but happy. Other Planet Kids employees began arming them with red plastic balls for whatever the next phase of the game was.

  “The problem is regulation,” João said. “The government, they hate business, they are basically communists. In any business process, there are so many steps you have to take, because they want to make sure that their people have the opportunity to collect bribes. So you have to get this stamp, and that stamp, and for each stamp you have to pay a little extra just to make it go forward. Of course you know where the money goes.”

  He made a face that said he didn’t have to tell me where the money goes.

  Two children near us scoured the desserts table with the careful attention of truffle pigs. They selected small pink globs whose flavor I couldn’t imagine and pushed them into their mouths, whole.

  “They are literally buying the votes with welfare,” João said. “They can never stay in power without this.”

  I was used to hearing Brazilians we knew—people who lived in apartments like ours—complain about the government. They needed no provocation. A gynecologist once gave me a lecture after an exam. It seemed to me that Brazilians were unusually quick to divulge political opinion, but then I thought of how easily in America you learned someone’s opinion of the president. I’d met a lot more Republicans since the election of a Democrat.

  Waiters circled with more meat, more beer, like vultures who forced you to eat; they had sharp eyes for empty hands. The adults were as well-tended as the children. I saw some of the men drinking whiskey. João accepted a chicken wing and, brandishing it, made another point about the president. People I didn’t know came up to say hello to him, and the conversation migrated into Portuguese. One of them, a man, turned to me and introduced himself.

  I asked if he was a friend of João’s. João turned to us briefly, laughing, and said something in Portuguese that meant nothing to me.

  In Portuguese, the man asked what I did, who I knew.

  “My husband, he is work at the bank, we have the eight months here.”

  “I, day, all the cars, nineteen,” he said.

  “Are you watching him, the game of soccer, there are the teams?”

  “I speak English,” the man said, in English.

  I found myself alone again. My husband wasn’t anywhere that I could see, and I stopped looking for him. I wandered through the near-Caligulan ruination of the party—the whining music, the carnival barking of instructions over a loudspeaker, the horror-movie shadows cast by the Batmen and the Hulks, the dinosaurs—and realized that merely being there was proof I belonged among these people. Despite the fact that it was a children’s party, all the children seemed to have disappeared, having absconded perhaps to some other realm of Planet Kids with the man in the yellow shirt. The children’s parents were gathered into hives dense with conversation; for them, this was a political occasion, a business opportunity. The party now was many hours old, but the tables of food, which the staff was almost surreptitiously replenishing, looked as they had at the start, giving an impression of ceaseless bounty. I sensed the party becoming a darker, uglier thing, amid the distant screams of children and tinny pop music, the deepening inebriation of the adults, the way you notice the temperature in a room has changed only after the fact. I punted a balloon that had fallen to the floor. I ate grapes. I stepped outside to get away from it all, but the party was overflowing the building, and men stood around on the sidewalk, drinking from little glasses of beer and smoking cigars. Evening had lowered itself onto the city; it was early afternoon when we’d arrived. I was shocked by how much time had passed. The party showed no sign of relenting. The valets were huddled at their station in what looked like conspiracy.

  I went back inside and ate more grapes and spoke to another man I didn’t know about his profession.

  “My work is clichés,” he said.

  This, I thought, was me finally going insane.

  Seeing my confusion, he explained that the word referred to stereotype printing: he created the logos and designs on packaging.

  I told him that an interest of mine
was phrases that seem like clichés but aren’t quite: notable absence or desperate rebellion, absolute disaster, unseasonably warm. This didn’t appear to entice him as a subject of conversation, either because I had no examples to give in his own language, or simply because I had managed to steer us away from the topic of work.

  Iara wandered over with caipirinhas in her hands.

  “I don’t know if I can have anything else to drink,” I said.

  I had lost count of what was already inside me, already flowing through my bloodstream.

  Iara said, “Are you pregnant?”

  “No,” I said. “Did you think I was?”

  “You have been here many months, you have no job, you don’t have enough to do. For a woman, a wife, the usual thing is to become pregnant.”

  Marcos and Iara had two daughters. They were somewhere else at the party, eating cakes, having their nails painted, riding an indoor roller coaster, bouncing in an inflatable castle with crowns on their heads.

  “You should do it,” Iara said. “You should have a baby.”

  “Is that what I should do?”

  There I was, drinking the caipirinha after all.

  Iara said, “You think I am joking, but I’m serious—it would solve your problem.”

  “My problem?”

  “And men,” she said. “Men expect that we will do this for them, make babies. Even when they are not thinking it, they are thinking it.”

  I said, “Do you have parties like this for your daughters on their birthdays?”