Feast Days

by Ian Mackenzie

  Sundays in our neighborhood were market days. Vendors piled up great lordly mounds of tropical fruit, brightly glowing, still wet—papayas, mangos, watermelons, pineapples, kiwis, bananas. There was star fruit, cashew fruit, passion fruit, dragon fruit. Every man had a knife in his hand, and as you walked past he sliced off the flesh of the nearest thing, and bade you to eat it.

  Friendship overseas was tenuous. You exchanged intimacies right at the start, and then one person or the other clammed up, slipped away. People were promiscuous with the word friend; they used it to describe fucking everybody. The constant drinking surely played a role in all this. People disappeared. Other people turned up. One of the Wives, someone I never would have guessed, was twice divorced.

  Day—from an Old English word that also means “day” but can mean “lifetime” as well, and from the Sanskrit dah, “to burn.”

  I was seeing Iara more often. The time I spent with Iara was distinct from the time I spent with Marcos at our lessons. Each of them was a hemisphere; only one rotated into view at a time. Iara mentioned Marcos more often than Marcos mentioned Iara. “I’m not the kind of woman who waits around,” Iara would say, apropos or not.

  My husband was generally very good with informational empathy. He didn’t use potentially unfamiliar names as if the person listening should know them, and he had a strong instinct for which facts the listener would recognize and which needed context. It’s the sort of trait you don’t notice until someone else does the opposite; and most people do the opposite. He was good in English with nonnative speakers, operating in an idiom that didn’t sound infantile, and also wouldn’t confuse his listener. He knew what was colloquialism and what wasn’t. He was sure-handed, in other words. But he never betrayed moral anxiety. He was sure of what he was sure of.

  “I think the plant is dying.”

  “The one we bought three weeks ago? It’s dying already?”

  “Look at the leaves. See—yellow.”

  “Maybe it needs more water. This could be reversible. I’m getting some water.”

  “Don’t you think it’s not a good sign that we can’t even keep a plant alive? What did the woman at the store say? ‘Requires almost no care’?”

  We met at a party, Manhattan, someone’s apartment. We spoke for a while, and eventually I went home, and later the poet I was sort of dating came over. We had sex, and then we smoked cigarettes on the fire escape and shared a bottle of beer, and he asked me how the night was, and I didn’t say anything about the party. Years later I would remember smoking with the poet on the fire escape, the view of other buildings, other fire escapes, the feeling of New York City late at night, the feeling of being young. There was nothing consequential about that part of the evening, but for some reason it survived as memory. It’s possible that the memory of smoking on the fire escape with the poet comes from a different night, not the night I met the man who would become my husband, but I wouldn’t know, so firmly do I now associate the two events in my mind.

  It occurred to me that you could put it another way: There will be more past in the future.

  A word might have an unknown origin. Bludgeon, hunker, slang, dog, flummox. It was one of those things, like an island without people, that could seem either beautiful or sinister.

  “No, not the restaurant in Paris. I’m thinking of the restaurant in Lyon, the one where we ate the second night, not the first night.”

  “The one with a chandelier made of Coke bottles?”

  “No, the other one.”

  “Then I don’t remember it. I really thought the Coke-bottle chandelier place was the second night.”

  “Actually, I think the chandelier was made of wineglasses.”

  “Really?”

  “Anyway, whichever it was, we had the exact same conversation there. And you said something totally different then.”

  “There and then. I really did think that was the Coke bottle–wineglass chandelier place, the second night.”

  “That part doesn’t matter.”

  “Don’t you think two people’s memories should complement one another, not cancel each other out?”

  The Haitian refugees at the church told me their stories. I helped where I could, I sympathized. I initially had the idea that I might come to know some of them individually, but that wasn’t really how it worked.

  There was an Angolan man, tall, with a round, soft face, soft lips. The upper shell of his forehead shined with sweat where the hair had fallen out. The man’s name was Boaventura, and he’d worked with Padre Piero for two years. He was in essence Padre Piero’s lieutenant. He organized the new arrivals, sorted out problems with the kitchen staff. He performed lowly errands, and he was the only other man who had a key to Padre Piero’s office. He was once a refugee himself.

  I assumed he stayed with the church, helping other refugees, out of a sense of duty, the desire to do good works. I assumed he was a Christian. This wasn’t the case.

  I don’t have anything to say to God, he said. You want to know why I stay with the church. In any job I seek, people are going to look down on me, an African, but here at the church I am always less of a refugee than the new refugees you see here.

  I saw what he meant. The newcomers looked at Boaventura as a man who had something to offer. He had a kind of status. Brazil is like your country, he said, a country of immigrants. For many people it is a destination. But my plan was never to go from one colony to another. One day I am going to live in America.

  Boaventura used an alloy of Portuguese, scrapyard English, and some patois he picked up from the Haitians. He liked the phrase “the pursuit of happiness.” He always wore a baseball cap, the Yankees.

  I was a powerful man in Angola, I had money. My family was involved in oil. We made enemies inside the government, and I saw how unstable it was, how fast it was going to happen. My money was in the wrong banks. In my country you can’t have faith in what you own. That whole story, how we lost what we had, now it seems like a single chapter in a much longer book. This book is still being written. One day Brazil will be like that for me, a single chapter, a paragraph, when I am living in America.

  If I cannot go to America, I will go to London.

  For Boaventura, it was necessary that I believe his story, both his account of the past and his account of the future—that I believe he was once a man of importance in Luanda and would be important again. That he was something more than the man I was seeing: a refugee. I wanted to say, I believe you. But saying it aloud would have convinced him that I did not believe him, and then he would have resented me.

  I saw Boaventura washing himself at the sink. He slowly cleaned his hands, his forearms, his face, and the back of his neck, like a Muslim performing ablutions. He scooped water into his mouth and rinsed, and then he washed the Yankees hat, wringing it out before replacing it on his head.

  It’s easy for sympathy to become condescending, of course; but empathy can turn to condescension as well. Then you’re really stuck.

  Luciano wandered into the kitchen during a lesson with Claudia.

  “My son, he shows his face,” Claudia announced. “Luciano, be polite, say hello.”

  “Hello,” he said, and drank a glass of juice.

  “You know, he has changed the passwords on his phone and his e-mail,” Claudia said after he left.

  My husband and I boarded a plane and flew south—Florianópolis, an island city that a few years earlier people had started calling the new Ibiza. I don’t think the label stuck. People are always looking for the new something when the old something becomes too expensive, too crowded, too familiar. Florianópolis wasn’t Ibiza, but it was very nice.

  We spent hours in bed, fucking, dozing, drinking bottles of champagne delivered to the room, watching movies—it was that kind of vacation. We slept late and then took long naps in the afternoon; all that drinking and non-procreative sex was exhausting, apparently.

  It was also a way of avoiding the subject of procreat
ive sex. The trip felt like the reenactment of a time in our marriage before the question of children arose, a time when such questions still belonged to the future.

  Late in the day, we would head down to the beach, passing through the private access/egress provided by the hotel, to the narrow skirt of sand along the water’s edge. The noise of the Atlantic Ocean was surprisingly gentle. All that size and power, reduced to a comforting susurrus.

  We didn’t agonize over where to eat dinner, we just wandered into a restaurant and ordered too much seafood and ate greedily, then went back to the room and had more sex. Then we slept again.

  We didn’t do anything cultural—no churches, no museums. We learned nothing about the place we were visiting. It was the kind of vacation in which you board an airplane in order to be in a room that’s different from the room you’re normally in. I usually think of pleasure as something that’s supposed to be complicated.

  Clubs—the one thing we did in Florianópolis aside from eating and sex. Clubs sat at the edge of the beach like boat landings, open to the water, pillowed white chairs on the boardwalks, candles on the tables, fairy lights outside, black ocean. We weren’t alone. All around us were schools of lounging bodies—moneyed Brazilians and Argentines, Uruguayans—everyone on their portables, racking up page views, likes, posting images of the night scenery, choosing filters, taking more selfies and group shots. All of this was less stupid than it looked; it was life. The speakers played David Guetta and Calvin Harris and Rihanna. They were names I was used to thinking of as ephemeral, in a way that Beethoven and Mozart and Bach were not. But Rihanna’s music was surely heard by a larger fraction of the world’s population than Bach’s ever was in his lifetime, a fraction that quite possibly included more people than the whole of the world’s population when Bach was alive. We danced. The lyrics of that kind of music weren’t supposed to matter, but I found myself seduced anyway by the promise at the heart of those songs—that pleasure was inherently disposable, that the enjoyment of disposable pleasure was the only enjoyment life really offered, that life was nothing more than one disposable moment after another, and if life had a point, it was to ensure that as many of those disposable moments as possible were pleasure, not pain. Those songs said: Don’t make it harder than it has to be.

  On our last day in Florianópolis, I realized I was happy, and I knew that any more time there would ruin the effect. Vacation—something enjoyable in small doses that in any larger dose would become unbearable.

  Somewhere on the Internet I read that Florianópolis was once called Nossa Senhora do Desterro—Our Lady of Banishment. Good thing they changed it. That isn’t the way to sell the new Ibiza.

  When you flew into the airport after a period of time away, São Paulo seemed to have grown. I was surprised by a feeling almost like nostalgia, a feeling of missing something that wasn’t yet gone, because I knew that whatever else was true about it, it wouldn’t last forever.

  The plane descended toward the airport along the flight path I could see from our apartment window. I looked for our building; but the buildings all looked the same. I couldn’t make the sighting in reverse—couldn’t see myself watching from our apartment as the plane descended.

  I saw the boy who spoke English in our building’s elevator. I said hello. He began asking questions. Where are your children? Are they in America? What city are you from?

  Iara turned up at my apartment toward the end of a lesson with Fabiana, and immediately they were seized with conversation; Brazilians who had known each other for minutes could seem like blood relatives. Iara had arrived blooming with shopping bags and from one of them produced a bottle of sparkling pink wine. Fabiana stayed for lunch. Soon the two of them were discussing a retrospective of Hélio Oiticica’s sculpture, and then a recent exhibition of Lygia Clark’s work; Banco do Brasil maintained a cultural center downtown that put on first-rate shows: one of the exhibition spaces was inside the old bank vault. And then it was the traffic caused by road work on Avenida José Diniz. Then the general political situation. They mostly spoke English, for my benefit, and when they switched to Portuguese, Fabiana would touch my arm and say, “Vamos, uma lição.” Iara loved that. She said she found Marcos’s politics increasingly unpleasant. “He thinks businessmen should be in charge of the country.” They asked about my husband’s views. “I think my husband and I have basically the same politics,” I said.

  “Then what is it?”

  “What?”

  “There is always something,” Iara said.

  After a moment, I said: “Differences of sensibility, maybe.”

  It came up that Fabiana had worked as a journalist for a while.

  “Everyone works as a journalist at some point,” Iara said.

  Fabiana mentioned the name of the magazine.

  “Fascists,” Iara said.

  Fabiana nodded in agreement, then said: “But what can we do? What else do we have?”

  “I’m watching T.V.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There are literally six different soccer matches going on right now.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, I found the news. It’s another protest. Can you see it from your office? I can’t tell where this one is.”

  “I don’t see anything. It’s probably on Paulista.”

  “People look angry.”

  “They’re protestors. They’re angry.”

  “It seems like this is serious, the protests. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to stop anytime soon.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you coming home soon?”

  “I just have to finish this thing.”

  “The signs look like the ones I saw last time. Do you think they recycle the signs? They must. There’s a guy dressed as a skeleton.”

  “Listen, I have to go.”

  On the matter of procreation I did not feel what my husband felt. I did not feel the native urge that most women felt, supposedly. I saw only complication, peril. I saw Luciano, the boy who was failing his tests and sequestered in his room watching revolution porn on the Internet. I saw the impoverished boys who robbed us. I saw the difficulty ahead for all of them. The rich housewives whose nannies spent more time with their kids than they did—every argument sounded trite once it came out of my mouth, but this didn’t undo the strength of my feelings. Children seemed inherently fraught to me, reproduction, the whole species, the planetary consequences. Having children wasn’t in my mind an act of selflessness, but rather one of enormous selfishness: the making of a creature whose existence is entirely your fault and who has to bear the costs of your decision; and this is not to mention the costs society bears. I thought of the weaknesses every person has, the unmet desires, the confusion, the anxiety, the pain, the personal inconsistency, the incoherent striving, the dependence on animal pleasures and material distraction. I wasn’t sold. I worried that any child would turn out to be the victim of something, or the perpetrator. My husband didn’t see it this way; he couldn’t understand why I did. Are we victims? Are we perpetrators? He became exasperated when I used the word species. We’re not talking about the species, he said, we’re talking about the two of us, two people. “But that’s how a species happens,” I said. They were awful fights, truly awful, sometimes.

  An e-mail from Helen:

  I’m absolutely convinced I know less than I did five years ago. Certainly less than I did when I graduated from college. Is it possible I reached the peak of my intelligence when I was twenty-two years old? I still have a copy of Malone Dies from that comparative lit class you forced me to take senior year. Notes in the margins! Who wrote those? Now they might as well be Cyrillic. If I read the book now, I would write: Why does Beckett hate paragraph breaks? Why does Beckett hate me? If I had gone to grad school instead of going straight to work, I would feel less ignorant, but I would also have less money. Men in D.C. come in three types: lawyers, government bureaucrats, and congressional staffers. They might all be lawyers, actually. T
hey talk about work to the exclusion of everything else, to a degree I did not think possible, and I came here from New York. I was so certain it was time to go. Now I miss it. Isn’t that funny?

  At the church a young woman removed toast from the toaster and proceeded to butter it on both sides. This was in the small kitchen on the second floor. I had never seen anyone actually do such a thing, butter one side of the bread and then the other.

  Her name was Hannah. She was a graduate student of some kind, American, living in Brazil to do research, and her research had led her to the church. She was the only other affiliated American. The most interesting thing about what she was doing with the bread was that, having buttered both sides, she nevertheless attempted to hold it in such a way that her fingers didn’t become greasy. That was the tricky part.