Feast Days

by Ian Mackenzie

  “Jean-Pierre was telling me about his family in Port-au-Prince,” Hannah said. “He has three daughters. He is worried they will become prostitutes. I asked if he ever went to prostitutes. He didn’t lie. He said he went sometimes. I asked if his wife knew. I asked if he got tested. He was very offended. Of course he didn’t talk to his wife about that sort of thing. What kind of man did I think he was?”

  Jean-Pierre was having trouble finding work. Hannah believed it was an issue of temperament. She heard him speaking with the recruiters. He was obstinate, he didn’t seem to want the work being offered, even though the recruiters demanded no qualifications, really; they only wanted someone to act pleased about being hired. I asked what sort of work he wanted.

  “He wants to work in America. He has a brother in New York. He looks at Brazil and he sees a station stop, not a destination. I think the coyotes who brought him here lied to him. They let him believe he’d be in the States in the end.” Hannah finished the toast. “Five years ago, these guys would have been dying in boats, trying to reach Florida, and now they’re hiking through the jungle to Brazil. The government here gives them papers, status. It’s not a bad deal. You can see that immigration patterns in the Western Hemisphere are changing. It seemed perfect for my research. And now—I’m having difficulty with Jean-Pierre. I have difficulty with the question of men like Jean-Pierre.”

  Hannah was unwithholding with talk. I learned that initially her research topic had been sex workers in the Northeast of Brazil, but for vague reasons that line of inquiry had petered out, and after a period of indecision, she turned her attention to immigrant populations. Casually she alluded to throwing out months or even years of work. Hannah appeared to be a woman who was comfortable with directionlessness. At one point, she had taken a break from research and found work in a pizzeria in some beach town. She was in Brazil on a student visa, so this was not strictly legal, and she mentioned running into some trouble with the authorities. “But it worked out,” she said. A very Brazilian way of putting it, I couldn’t help but think.

  The state orchestra gave a performance at which they played Stravinsky’s Firebird suite, and for an encore the conductor returned to the stage and led the musicians through the finale a second time—it took me a moment to realize that the music I was hearing was the music I’d just heard. Outside it was windy, and thin bodies huddled at the edge of the plaza. They were smoking crack. I saw small, trembling flames in the pipes; smoke seemed to grow from their mouths. Police were everywhere in gray bulletproof vests. Only as my husband and I were getting into a taxi did I notice the spray paint on the entrance of the concert hall. Queimar os ricos. Burn the rich, that is. Later I learned that a group of protestors had attempted to enter the concert hall during the performance; the police turned them back. No one told those of us inside while this was happening.

  According to the newspapers the protests were growing larger because the middle class was now involved.

  Someone’s remark on the protestors: “Those children are the children of the rich.” And so the arguments went in circles.

  João gestured with a cigarette. He approved of the protests, he said. It was long past time for Brazilians to speak out about the government’s corruption, malfeasance, degradation. I knew that João hadn’t approved of the protests initially; he’d found the premise childish. They want all the buses to be free, he’d said. Who do they think will pay? I asked why he approved of the protests now. No, he said, it’s good, people should express themselves, it’s one of our freedoms. João was already lighting another cigarette. The government has to know how the people feel.

  At dinner Brazilians smoked, or at least the Brazilians I knew smoked. We ate in restaurants with gardens, courtyards. We dined outdoors even when the weather was cool. Indoors there were candles, old mirrors; sometimes there were fountains, vines climbing the walls. I knew who had visited Rio lately. I knew who had beach houses on São Paulo’s northern shore, I knew how many bedrooms they had.

  Tergiversate: an obscure word in English that means to change one’s mind repeatedly with regard to a given subject, even to change one’s loyalty. The word has a connotation of cowardice and betrayal that equivocate and prevaricate don’t quite match. It is a word too seldom used, if only because of its obvious applications. Tergiversate has a Portuguese cognate, and the two words share a Latin root. The Latin root means “to turn one’s back.”

  I was watching Rossellini’s Journey to Italy when my husband came home. It was already late. He joined me on the sofa. He didn’t ask what the movie was, the plot. After a while he got up to fetch a beer. The husband and wife in the film were having an argument. From the doorway he pointed at the bottle in his hand as a way of asking if I wanted one, too.

  I did ridiculous things occasionally. For instance, I bought a piece of salmon from the fishmonger at the Sunday market because I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who buys fresh salmon at the market and then cooks it for dinner. But I was certain before I was even halfway home that I would never use it. The fish sat in the refrigerator for five days, diligently rotting, before I put the stinking carcass out with the trash. The next time I did this, I tossed the fish in a garbage can on the street on my way home, as a way of improving efficiency, and I told myself that it was really no different from purchasing a doorstop of a novel you know in your heart you will never read.

  “But it’s not like we’re going to live in Brazil forever. It makes no sense to think about it in those terms.”

  “I was under the impression that we were going to live here for a while.”

  “Maybe for a while. It depends on what you and I want.”

  “What we want. That’s a good question. What do we want?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say. What do you want?”

  “If I have a kid, then I’m just a woman who has a kid.”

  “The word for that is mother,” he said.

  I found myself telling Hannah about the robbery. I did this while also working with one of the Haitian men on his paperwork. I was dwelling, I told Hannah, on the fact that I wouldn’t have noticed the boys who robbed us if they hadn’t robbed us. I told her I didn’t believe it was traumatic, this wasn’t why I was dwelling on the robbery, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  “I’ve been robbed three times since coming to São Paulo. I was with a friend the last time. There were two guys, and the guy who was robbing my friend clearly knew what he was doing. He got my friend’s iPhone, all his money. My guy wasn’t as experienced. He was like an intern, like a mugger intern. An experienced guy would have just taken the purse. Instead this guy’s looking through my purse while we’re standing in the street, asking me what do I have, what do I have. And I’m like, What do you want, man? He ended up with a few bills and missed the four hundred dollars sitting at the bottom,” Hannah said.

  She spoke about what happened to her in the way I wished I could speak about what happened to me. She was witty, good humored, relaxed; she manipulated the story into comedy. Hannah spoke about the mugging—her three muggings—as just another episode of life. She was laughing; she gave the impression that she had been laughing even while the robbery took place, laughing as the mugger intern did a beginner’s job of mugging her.

  “He was still building his résumé,” I said.

  I went out at night. Iara was at Bar Ritz with friends; she kissed me on both cheeks when I arrived. I knew some of the people with her, some I didn’t. My husband was working late. Iara seemed always to have some rich friends with her and some artist friends. They had come from an event. Everyone was laughing. I ordered a glass of wine and began to gather strands of meaning from the Portuguese being spoken around me. Iara leaned into my ear and asked what Marcos and my husband were doing. “Doing? He’s still at work,” I said. Something happened at the corners of Iara’s eyes. Then she looked away and said, “I thought maybe I would see Marcos here. I know it is a place he likes.”

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nbsp; I read an article by a feminist who out of nowhere referred to “the disaster of heterosexuality.” It went more or less unexplained, this provocation, unelaborated upon; it was left to stand on its own, the way you would write “glass ceiling” and assume your reader knew what you meant. I searched online to see if “the disaster of heterosexuality” was standard in a subfield of academic thought, the way “queer poetics” or “symbolic interactionism” is. I found it nowhere else. But I couldn’t shake the phrase from my mind; it glowed with life. I saw the rich idea gestating within “the disaster of heterosexuality”—heterosexuality being the means by which we reproduce as a species, as human beings, by which we accumulate more of ourselves, and thus create war, ethnic hatred, standardized tests, profit-and-loss, status updates, top-ten lists, genital mutilation, A.T.M. surcharges, native advertising, Black Friday, Pumpkin Spice Pringles, radioactive waste, global warming, everything.

  “I keep thinking about where they sleep.”

  It was late, I couldn’t blot out the glare of thought.

  “Seems like they mostly work nights,” he said.

  “I’m sure they don’t have beds, not beds in the sense that you and I have a bed. They don’t have blackout curtains, extra pillows, a white-noise machine. You’ve seen the favelas. It has to be loud, stinking, always too hot or too cold.”

  “You aren’t obligated to empathize with the kids who robbed us. You really don’t know anything about their lives. I haven’t seen the favelas. You haven’t seen the favelas.”

  “They must never be able to sleep. They must always be so fucking exhausted.”

  YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO

  EXPLAIN WHAT THE

  GINI COEFFICIENT IS

  Almost daily, it seemed, there was news of another protest. No one knew how far it would go, where it was heading. The newspapers wrote in historic terms, in terms of making history. The size and persistence of the crowds, the resonance of their demands: something in the country had to change. Everything now seemed important. The scope of what was happening. The way people were talking. There was a feeling of electric uncertainty, of endings unwritten. One night a group attacked a Santander bank, a Mercedes-Benz dealership. They destroyed several cars and savaged an A.T.M. Police tore into crowds with rubber bullets, bombed them with tear gas. I told myself this was the country where I lived, the city. The major dailies disagreed about the cost of the damage to the Mercedes-Benz dealership.

  “It annoys me, people who bitch about the end of things—the end of bookstores, the end of travel agencies, the end of newspapers, the end of, I don’t know, some language no one speaks anymore. As if we’re the first people who watched things end. Doesn’t every century have the last of something? The last Neanderthal, the last bohemian, the last pygmy rhino. It’s just time. There was a last Neanderthal for a reason. Time demolishes stuff. Time happens,” my husband said, demolishing some wine himself.

  “Vinyl records are popular again,” I said. He drank, and said, “Lazarus.” He laughed. He touched the bottle at the level of the wine to indicate how far it had fallen, as one example, I supposed, of marking time; the night had started with a full bottle, and martinis before that. He laughed.

  “Time doesn’t make things old. Time makes things new,” he said.

  Claudia said Luciano was becoming secretive. She was finding things. She found masks, firecrackers, cans of spray paint. He said he was holding them for friends. This didn’t mollify her. She evidently wasn’t concerned about invading the privacy of an adult male as a matter of course. Brazilians by custom will live at home with their parents until they marry, until they are twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, knocking on the door of thirty. Although of course many Brazilians also marry young.

  I read the newspapers. Information began to accumulate. Young people were disappointed with politics. Many of Iara’s artist friends said they saw no difference between the two main rivals, the Workers’ Party and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, everyone was corrupt, it was all part of the same system. I asked Fabiana for her views. She said that party was once identity—you saw tattoos on the arms of older Brazilians—but that this was slipping away. I thought of Luciano, unaffiliated, angry, bored by the future. He saw no choices. He was a rich boy but in this way was no different from the boys in the favelas. The difference was that Luciano surely would not be punished for his mistakes, and so he was determined to make them.

  There was talk of 1984—the year the military dictatorship collapsed. Mass protests and labor strikes brought down the regime, people in the streets, pressure from below. Brazil was a young democracy, everyone said.

  The newspapers were fascinated by a group calling itself Black Blocs. Supposedly this group was infiltrating the protests and causing mayhem. They had a Facebook page; the Facebook page proved that anarchists were as fluent in emoticons as everybody else. They were inspired by namesakes from the past—West Germany in the 1980s, the Seattle W.T.O. riots. They were young, university students, high school kids. I read one article in which the reporter claimed she had spoken with a fourteen-year-old. It was the Black Blocs who attacked the banks and the car dealerships. A politics of broken glass. The police took special interest. There were rumors that the Black Blocs had formed an alliance with the country’s most notorious prison gang. The anarchists organized over the Internet: no leaders, no required reading.

  There was a rumor about vinegar: a cloth soaked in vinegar would protect you from the tear gas. People were arrested for having bottles of vinegar, I heard, or read. When I asked Claudia if she had found bottles of vinegar in Luciano’s room, she only stared back at me, confused, maybe thinking she didn’t know the word I had just used, although the English was a cognate of the Portuguese.

  Claudia, perhaps because of the housekeeper, was comfortable with the idea of other people being inside the apartment while she was not. She was always dashing off to attend to one of her children.

  And so I had another chance to talk to Luciano. “I read something in the newspaper about the Black Blocs,” I said. He said, “The newspapers don’t tell the truth. The police provoke the violence. The people don’t provoke the violence.”

  He was a teenager, a boy, and I thought how pure everything must have felt inside him. I wanted to tell him it’s funny what you believe so ferociously when you’re young, ferociously enough to commit stupid acts, such as putting on a mask and picking fights with police. It’s not that what you believe changes, or completely disappears; it’s that it fades, like paint fades. Like paint—in exactly the same dull, predictable, universal way. And the few people for whom it doesn’t fade are, let’s face it, completely unbearable.

  Why do you feel this way? Is it because at seventeen you have lost faith already in your government? Is it because the rich have too much power, because the poor have no voice? Is it because the class system in your country is too rigid? Is it because the police provoke the violence, because the very presence of police is a form of violence, part of a system controlled by the state and designed to protect the status of wealth? Is it because doormen have to act happy about holding doors? Is it because under capitalism free will is nothing more than the engine of profit? Is it because the entire point of capitalism is to turn human beings and the choices we make into disposable units of value?

  Claudia would be home any minute, and I would become the tutor again. We would look for refinements.

  My mother doesn’t see that people are suffering, because the only suffering she knows is medical suffering. She knows what to give someone to relieve physical pain. But she doesn’t understand that people need other kinds of relief. What I feel, I can’t explain to her, to anyone. She has only one idea of life. My friends don’t know, my girlfriend. Her dream is to visit New York City.

  I’m sure your mother only wants you to be happy and safe, I said, or words to that effect.

  “Really—can you name even one of your great-grandmothers?”

  “I can name t
hem all. Marie, Nancy, Glenda, Flo. Flo was for Florence.”

  “Marie.”

  “She was French, born in France.”

  “You know all this about her. Do you remember her?”

  “Glasses of lemonade, the porch in summer, bacon sandwiches. I don’t think I’ve ever asked about your great-grandparents.”

  “Why would you? I have no idea.”

  “My mother keeps a book.”

  “I become anxious when the bank wants me to use my maternal grandmother’s maiden name as an online security question. Who actually knows that sort of thing? Shut up. I know you know.”

  “Kincaid,” he said.

  I was raised in Massachusetts. I had loving, intelligent parents who were occasionally aloof, or simply missed the point. But no fights. What do I recall? The slow, deep summers, passing like glaciers. The bite and raw silence of winter. Massachusetts children remember seasons. When my husband talked about childhood, he talked about his brothers, what he and his brothers did together, the battles.