Feast Days

by Ian Mackenzie

  Iara knew a man called Washington who made conceptual art about barriers. For instance: a sculpture in which glass shards bristle up from a plaster foundation, inspired by the makeshift security of people who can’t afford to install razor wire. My husband and I went to Washington’s show, at a gallery on Praça Benedito Calixto. The gallery was loud, packed, the vernissage. I accepted a plastic glass of champagne that turned out to be Guaraná soda—ultrasweet, the color of urine. I didn’t know what the secret was to getting actual champagne. I had a look at the price list. Washington was making some real money.

  A woman was talking to me. For some reason she assumed I spoke good Portuguese. I didn’t correct her and my silence must have signaled comprehension. I was smiling, surely. Her facial expressions indicated that she was friendly, and I wanted her to like me, to continue speaking. She probably said her name, who she was, whom she knew, and in the fog of language panic I missed everything.

  It turned out that she owned the gallery. “I like the art very much,” I said in Portuguese, giving myself away. She switched promptly to English.

  Because I spoke English it was assumed I had money and was a prospective buyer. The gallerist introduced me to Washington, the artist. He was born in one of São Paulo’s most famous favelas, a place called Paraisópolis—Paradise City; his gallery knew how to make use of this background material. He didn’t speak English, but for some reason I understood him more clearly than I had understood the gallerist. Perhaps he was speaking more carefully, for my benefit. Perhaps my brain was calming down. I finally had champagne. He, too, was under the impression that I was a prospective buyer, and I saw no reason not to play along.

  My art says that poor people also want security. Poor people also want to protect what belongs to them. When we think of walls, we think of rich people putting up walls to keep out poor people. Dangerous people. But everybody wants to be safe. What if the Palestinians decided to build a wall? The Mexicans? My new work is inspired by a visit I made to Mozambique. I saw walls like this. I saw these walls around the homes of people who were upper-middle-class in Mozambique. But they were people who would be considered poor in Europe or America. I thought of my own city, São Paulo. I was thinking of the condominiums in Jardim Europa and Higienópolis, with those high, beautiful walls that look like Rome. I was thinking also of little walls, in Bixiga or Mooca, the little walls of my childhood. It is too easy to blame rich people for walls—everybody wants walls. It is what people do. Putting up a wall around your home is a kind of aspiration. It means you have something worth protecting. Even the poorest people have something they want to protect, something they purchased although they could not afford it. Poor people have doors and locks. You forget, most of the crime in this city doesn’t happen to rich people. It happens to poor people. Poor people have smartphones, too.

  Then he kissed me on the cheek and was gone. He held a glass but never took a sip. He knew how to work a room.

  The gallerist, whose name I still didn’t know, wanted to show me the back room. My husband joined us, and the conversation digressed into Portuguese. She wanted to show us more of Washington’s work, but my eye was drawn immediately to some other framed prints, leaning against a wall. One struck me particularly. A field of scribbling that only after a moment’s attention revealed itself as loops of crazed script. What language was it? Even if the text had been in English, I couldn’t have deciphered it. It was writing that wasn’t writing, a false calligraphy, unraveling as it fell to the bottom of the frame, words and letters tangled like steel wool. The gallerist saw my interest. “Ferrari,” she said. The prints had come in the day before. “Do you know him? Do you know his work?”

  I liked it. My husband liked it. We needed prices. We had no sense of the value, the going rate. She was going to say a number and we were going to decide if it was outrageous. The calculus had a certain purity. We were going to determine if the object was worth the price without the benefit of market knowledge. It struck me as incredible that we might buy a piece of art from a gallery and then take it home, as we would buy shoes we had just tried on; that anyone could do it. We could hear the rumble of the vernissage through the dark curtain that divided front from back. We were on the other side. We were buyers. The gallerist instructed an assistant to wrap the artwork in butcher paper.

  We went out, into the night, the print under my husband’s arm, swaddled in the brown, stiff paper. The print came in a good frame of blond wood. I had never owned art. It would hang on our wall and the only people who would be able to see it would be the people we invited into our home. This was art, privately held. I had seen the gallery labels in museums: Private Collection. My husband carried our collection under his arm. Anxiety struck me almost immediately. We were out in the night with something of real value.

  We headed to a bar off Rua Harmonia with Iara and some of the others. Iara was delighted we had bought a piece. She couldn’t stop talking about it. She and the gallerist and Washington, something, something. Marcos wasn’t there; suddenly I couldn’t remember if he had been at the gallery. The caipirinhas looked like drinks for children, festive and precious, aquariums of pure alcohol and colorful flotsam, kiwi and tangerine and pink peppercorns. There was a mural covering the long back wall, the city of São Paulo in black and white—the density of buildings, the avenues, the bridges, the parks. Iara was talking about a visit she had made to San Francisco. From the kitchen came the aroma of onions cooking in oil.

  The younger people at the table were artists, the older ones Iara’s friends. They all lived in Vila Madalena. Iara did not, but she had money and spent it on art, and so she was well-liked. Now we were people who spent money on art. Creativity had been sold. My husband took my hand under the table. I knew he was tired. The Ferrari print was at my feet, ours. We had done that together. I was hungry and wanted to stay out. I thought I was understanding more than usual of the Portuguese being spoken around me; and I was perhaps also drunk. Everyone spoke excitedly of the protests, the manifestações. What would happen? How would it end? I was in love with my husband. The parks were empty. Rua Harmonia ran downhill to the cemetery.

  After thirty generations, the average person will have more than a billion descendants.

  León Ferrari’s was a story of exile, a South American’s story. He left Buenos Aires during the time of the generals there and came to São Paulo during the time of the generals here. The generals were crazy right-wing men, obsessed with anything vaguely radical. This was happening all over South America at the time, artists and intellectuals and rambunctious leftists wandering the political desert their continent had become, squirming away from one dictatorial regime and into the clutches of another, escaping arrest, waiting for news. Fernando Henrique Cardoso fled to Chile, Roberto Bolaño fled from Chile. León Ferrari lived in São Paulo for fifteen years and made art about crowds, traffic, highways. He drew Christian angels riding bareback on American-made fighter jets.

  Hannah told me the news that Jean-Pierre had disappeared. Another man as well. By disappeared she meant the men had left the church’s care without, to anyone’s knowledge, acquiring work authorization or employment with one of the recruiters, and without telling anyone where they were going. They might have headed south, to the border with Uruguay, was one theory. Men on the move have a thing for borders.

  Padre Piero was troubled by the possibility of criminal involvement. There were rumors of Haitians being drafted into the local gangs—running guns, transporting drugs. This seemed to me fearmongering, but I didn’t really know. Padre Piero knew that even two Haitians mixed up in any of that would imperil all the rest of his work.

  I could appreciate the attraction of disappearing. You boarded a train, which no one but you knew you were on, and you arrived in a city, which no one but you knew you were in, and you sat down at a café and ordered a sandwich and a beer, and a man brought you the sandwich and the beer as if nothing were the matter, and he took your money. The rest of the worl
d would say you had disappeared, but you knew exactly where you were. You moved on without reporting your whereabouts. You didn’t discuss decisions with anyone before you made them.

  Two men from Haiti who were living in Brazil had disappeared. But they hadn’t disappeared the way housewives disappear in Antonioni films or suburban children disappear in literary fiction. They were assumed to be alive, not dead; it was assumed they had made a decision. It could be said perhaps that they hadn’t disappeared at all; or, if it could be said that they had disappeared, then they had disappeared long before—from Haiti, from their families, their people, their homes. Everything that had happened since, including the weeks they spent in the care of the church, was an event within this period of disappearance. Haiti was the only country they had known until a few months ago; and yet nobody thought they had returned to Haiti. Life there was already the past, the pluperfect.

  “São Paulo has the world’s largest population of crack addicts and the world’s largest population of dogs under ten kilos.”

  “Have you been reading something?”

  “It’s palpable here. It’s in the air. One side has so much more than the other side. You start seeing the signs everywhere. You could guess without being told that Brazil has one of the highest Gini coefficients in the world.”

  Every television screen in the building across from ours showed the soccer match. Fireworks detonated a few streets away.

  “If you say things like that, you have to be able to explain what the Gini coefficient is.”

  “It’s admitting that you can’t have happiness without money. It’s poor black kids robbing rich white guys who work for investment banks.”

  It was a dangerous line of thinking because if you took it too far everything beneath you started to crumble. Because it was only faith you were standing on. The faith that told you it was morally acceptable to live in this two-bedroom apartment, thirteen hundred square feet, and own these nice things, have a bank account and access to health care, potable water, etc.

  Another night of protests. I watched on T.V. In Brasília, protestors climbed onto the roof of the Congress, and the camera lights below projected crazy alien shadows onto the white curved underside of the building’s inverted cupola. The protestors were singing and chanting: a political invasion. Brasília was an organized city. The rigid streets, the rectangular lawns, the thin reflecting pools. A city that began life as a blueprint. Every square meter was planned out, a city dreamed up by a politician and his favorite architect; and now citizens were dancing on the lawns in front of government ministries. It was like a garden party filling up. There was a feeling of drunken abandon. Of possibility. This was happening in every city in Brazil. The people kept coming, they would not stop. Their demand—they had no single demand. The nation was in crisis. The systems of control that the politicians relied on were cracking apart. The World Cup was a year away and no one knew when the protests would come to an end. The elites looked fragile in their pleas for normalcy. Normalcy wasn’t what people wanted, the status quo ante. The only word anyone could think of to describe what people wanted was change. Something had to change. The country, the politicians, the way things were. The course of events wasn’t yet decided. I imagined the president in her palace, watching this from her window, not knowing what to do. A president is someone whose failure to meet expectations is almost ordained.

  Iara called. She wanted to go, to be a part. I took a taxi to her building, and from there we continued to Avenida Paulista. My husband was at work; which is to say I didn’t know where my husband was. I didn’t leave a note.

  Police stopped the taxi. The roads were closed. We overpaid the driver and walked the last kilometer on foot. The police looked tense.

  Iara’s older daughter had come with us. “I want my child to see this,” Iara said. “We are making history. Brazil is making history.”

  People in masks were dancing; people singing and making music, more dancing. Horns and drums. It was a phantasmagoria of different meanings, mixed messages. A general drift of movement but no sense of hurry. More than anything the protest march reminded me of the street parades and block parties I had seen during Carnaval. White tungsten light from the office towers above—the banks, the foundations, the state industrial federation—rained down on the street, the people, spraying the heads of young Brazilians. During earlier protests the media made a fetish of counting those heads—one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand. An avenue of bodies, squeezed together, the image purpose-built for filmic consumption. And there they were, the cameras—on tripods recording the scripted language of T.V. reporters, inside the smartphones in protestors’ hands, mounted to the helicopters circling overhead. Police helicopters and news helicopters were indistinguishable in the dark. Was I considered a participant, now that I was inside this crowd of people? Was I counted? There must have been others who came only as witnesses. People watched videos on their smartphones of protestors in Brasília, protestors on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, as surely people in Brasília and Rio were watching the footage from São Paulo; everyone was filming, posting, tweeting, sharing, hashtagging. They took selfies. They took crowd shots. A feedback loop, an ouroboros of self-reference, consuming and being consumed, the self-aware creation of spectacle: genuine political feeling became confused with the pleasure of common adventure, with festivity, the fear of missing out.

  They would edit the footage later, they would choose the right filters.

  They played bells, chimes, vuvuzelas.

  I moved at the pace of the crowd.

  I saw the elderly, and parents with small children. Iara was ecstatic.

  I looked at the streets filled with people and thought of other consequences. Somebody was making money, somebody was losing money.

  I usually have a skepticism of collective sentiment.

  I saw skinny lone men with bare torsos and their shirts wrapped around their faces, covering everything but their eyes, chasing and being chased by the T.V. cameras. They would make the news because to the camera they looked like terrorists.

  Luciano was somewhere in this crowd. I was looking for him, I realized—for a boy, disappearing himself in black clothes, some kind of mask, seeking purpose in anonymity and destruction. The foolishness of my attempt was obvious immediately, among waves of young men dressed in black, in masks, the torrents of people: you would never find anyone in this. He was there, and he wasn’t there. Iara enthusiastically joined the group chants, beat the air with her fists.

  She caught her breath. Her face, serious a moment ago, relaxed into a smile, then laughter. She was sweating. She pulled me into an embrace. “This is wonderful; I need some water,” she said. Her face turned serious again. Her daughter was quiet, looking at the ground, away from everything around her.

  Something was happening. I heard crackling, hissing. The thunk of metal landing heavily on stone. Yelling—but there was already yelling. The patterns of movement shifted, the direction. I heard the ordnance of megaphone voices. I saw a group of black-clad people advance toward the police line and throw something in unison, a payload of stones, or firecrackers, and then quickly retreat. Glass shattered nearby. More crackling, hissing. The pale gauze of smoke didn’t dissipate—tear gas; the police were using tear gas. Something had happened. An hour had struck. For reasons I couldn’t discern three policemen closed around a young man and brought him down with truncheons. The gas was getting in my eyes, a frantic rabid itching. The celebratory mood had vanished, replaced by something dark, medieval, unpredictable. In the confusion Iara and her daughter were missing; I’d lost them. Some people stood in place, others ran furiously. Some drifted like crowds after a match. More yelling, running. My eyes cooled. I walked and then jogged. They launched more tear gas, now at a distance from me.

  I walked down from the avenue. Iara wasn’t answering her phone. I passed lingering floes of people also leaving the protest. They radiated a nervous energy. I kept going. The shops we
re closed, the restaurants. There was nowhere to go inside. Nobody wanted his property damaged. Usually this neighborhood was lively, cosmopolitan; the shuttered faces of cafés made it seem desolate and abandoned. Some men passed me and I felt a gust of adrenaline. I thought of the boys who robbed us. They had not thought of me as often as I had thought of them, although perhaps I was wrong about that. I couldn’t know. I passed another group of people who had come from the protest and saw a face I knew.

  He wore a hooded sweatshirt. He came over when he saw me. He was trembling; he had been crying. He showed me his hands. There were cuts, blood. He began to cry again: Luciano seemed for the first time truly young, unformed. His body, vibrating, fell into mine, and I hugged him. “What happened? What happened to you?” I said. “O que passou?” He shook his head. He went on crying as I held him. In the air was a last remnant of smoke, and from somewhere nearby I heard the keening of sirens.

  After a while he said, “You don’t say anything?” “I don’t say anything,” I said. His friends were gone.