Feast Days

by Ian Mackenzie

  Later I learned that the police had used rubber bullets. Against the same crowd I was part of. So it was possible to have been there and not to have known. It was a crowd large enough to contain microclimates. There were reports of eye injuries. I watched the news with my husband, once he came home, and saw the footage of bloody faces under the lysergic strobe of police lights, camera lights. I watched again on T.V. events I had witnessed a few hours earlier. The barbaric yawp of the protestors could now be controlled with the volume button.

  A gente vai abalar o Brasil!

  I watched, and already it looked nothing like what I had seen.

  “They want change. But what do they think change looks like? Change looks like other politicians.”

  “Why is it wrong for people to want change?”

  “Because wanting change is vague. You don’t get anything when all you want is change. Or else you get something you didn’t expect,” my husband said.

  “They’re sending the message that the status quo is unacceptable.”

  “I’m only saying that you have to know what you want.”

  “They know what they don’t want.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “So what do you think happens with all this?”

  “Nothing. Not much. I think it fades away. I think everything goes back to the way it was.”

  “I don’t believe that’s possible.”

  “I know you hate it when I put things in market terms, but when I look at these images on T.V., when I look at the hundreds of thousands of Brazilians in the streets, what I see is irrational exuberance. I see a phenomenon that cannot sustain itself.”

  “Do you realize this is the first time in forever we’ve argued about something other than children?”

  “I didn’t know this was an argument.”

  “Would you go to the protests if you were Brazilian?”

  “I’m not Brazilian. This isn’t my country. The protests aren’t for me.”

  “What if I went?”

  “Why would you go?”

  Abalar—I looked it up. It means “to shake” or “to unsettle,” “to upset,” “to overwhelm.” Of disputed origin, perhaps from Vulgar Latin, advallare: “to descend to the bottom of the valley.”

  DO YOU WANT SOMETHING?

  Toll collectors on the highways leaving São Paulo made you wait after you paid the equivalent of ninety cents to receive a printed receipt of payment. This was to discourage theft on their part. On the back of each receipt was the name and picture of a missing child; as we drove, missing children accumulated in the cup holder. I looked at the slips of paper. Some of the children had been missing for so many years they were no longer children.

  Marcos was driving. My husband was in the passenger’s seat, and I sat in the back with Iara. We were going to a place called Paraty, a place by the ocean.

  It wasn’t supposed to be us, my husband and me. Other friends of theirs canceled at the last minute, and the reservation at the pousada was nonrefundable; at least this was the story Iara told me the night before. Our interest was piqued. We said yes. Paraty: an old colonial port, planted on some tattered coastline at the southern wedge of Rio de Janeiro State. The name conjured a vision of Portuguese sailors, houses made of stone, the tall masts of ships. Gold going out, slaves coming in.

  Marcos and my husband talked business in the front seat. The only names I recognized were the names of banks and companies; when they used a person’s name it meant nothing to me. For my benefit Iara was counting the ways in which her parents were going to spoil her daughters while she and Marcos were gone.

  We turned off the highway, the clean, inland speed of it, and drove down a tumbling, curling, almost impossible road; on the G.P.S. device Marcos was using, it looked ridiculous, more like a diagram of an intestine than something an automobile might navigate. It was not only curving but steep. The road was taking us down to the ocean. Marcos drove aggressively, a style of driving I’d come to associate with Brazilians generally, as he took every opportunity, including opportunities he should not have taken, to pass the cars ahead. Something inside me twisted sympathetically every time he slammed through another 180-degree switchback. From my seat, behind my husband, I could see Marcos in profile—round, shaven, darkish Southern European skin—and I wondered how he would react if someone actually managed to overtake him.

  “They will buy them new dresses, they may buy them another dog, you never know,” Iara said.

  We continued shedding altitude, and then we were at the bottom, driving again on straight, flat asphalt. The Atlantic forest draped the hillsides in fronds and vines, waves of tropical density—nectandras, jacarandas, brazilwoods, pink jequitibá. On the passenger’s side, the shelf of land fell away, depositing into ocean; mist lifted from the face of the ocean and flooded the air around us. My husband passed the digital camera back to me and said I was in charge of taking pictures.

  On the G.P.S. map our dot was less than fifty kilometers from Paraty when traffic on the two-lane highway suddenly came to a halt. It had been stopped awhile; people stood outside their cars. Marcos left to investigate and walked up the road until he was out of sight. Farther on, I saw a nimbus of red and blue, the queasy pulsing of emergency lights. Marcos returned. “An accident,” he said.

  He and Iara spoke in Portuguese. A man was dead. When traffic at last started to move, I saw for myself. He was middle-aged and still lay in the place of dying. The body was in an awkward half twist, wearing jeans and a mustard-yellow tee shirt, and it had a strange, crumpled heaviness, a lurid animal weight, the limbs arranged badly, nothing like the body of a man asleep.

  I saw the driver. He stood next to his car. No one spoke to him. He stared blankly, away from the body.

  I imagined his mind, not racing, but empty.

  We drove on, gained speed.

  Marcos and Iara, in conversation between the front of the car and the back, speculated about how it happened, the angle of incident, based on where and how the body lay. My husband was silent, a silence I interpreted as shock, if only because I was in shock myself. Marcos and Iara seemed to consider it a routine matter. There was some cultural gap at work. We rode the gentle curves of highway above the photogenic green coves of Rio de Janeiro’s coastline, the windy plains of water and jutting blades of beach. I tried to enjoy what I was seeing. I may have taken more pictures with the camera that was still in my hands. But the memory of the man’s body, lying in the same rich yellow sunlight that glazed the beaches, was more vivid than a photograph. It wouldn’t leave me, and I couldn’t help but feel—as Marcos was again driving relentlessly and overtaking every car in our path—that we, too, should bear some guilt for the man’s death.

  That evening the four of us sat outside at the pousada with drinks, by the pool, the scene burnished perfectly by torchlight. We watched other guests walk through the garden among the palms and hanging lobster claws.

  “I didn’t expect it to be so crowded,” Marcos said. “It’s the middle of winter.”

  The next morning Marcos and Iara said they were going for a walk in town. We didn’t see them again until nightfall. I don’t know why this surprised me. We were two pairs of adults; we hadn’t made an arrangement to spend the entire weekend together. My husband was slow to mobilize. I went to the front desk and asked what one was supposed to do in Paraty. They gave me pamphlets with pictures of speedboats and faux pirate ships. I made arrangements for a harbor tour.

  At the pier were dozens of boats. Men called from the prows to anyone who walked past, picking off the tourists who hadn’t booked ahead, while party music detonated from onboard speakers; in the smaller boats people lay on brocaded pillows like sultans. The bars on deck were already doing business. We found our boat—the Netuno—and lay on white vinyl daybeds fixed to the main deck, out of the sun. Engines rumbled impatiently in the water below. The boat rocked softly and knocked against other boats.

  We sailed from shore. The de
ck hands brought plates of fried fish, chicken legs, cold Heinekens, caipirinhas, bottled water, fruit, white pudding. The boat maintained a low speed. The sun was strong, in spite of the season. When the boat stopped near a small island, in a traffic jam of other boats, our fellow passengers hurled themselves off the side and into the turquoise water. Swimmers helped themselves from a nest of foam water noodles on deck, and soon the water was a churning broth of bodies and colored foam noodles. No one swam far; and so the swimmers stayed stuck together in a single, glutinous horde. It was a spectacle whose absurdity was lost on the participants. At the next stop my husband and I jumped in. I worried about getting too much sun. I tried to move away from the horde, to put two meters of water around me in every direction, and I felt calmer. I peed in the ocean instead of using the bathroom belowdecks, which I assumed was disgusting. I was alienated, totally, from the people doing the same thing I was doing, certain their context was not my context. My husband found me in the water and kissed me, our feet batting together, and he put his hands on my legs, my breasts. Everything was stupidly pretty. Behind him was the coast of a small island, a narrow belt of sand tight around the jungle. I saw birds of unusual colors. All the Brazilians seemed to have waterproof cameras.

  Back on ship, a man who overheard us speaking English asked in English where we were from, and my husband responded in Portuguese, and of course the guy worked for a bank in São Paulo, and they talked about that.

  At the next stop for swimming the man who was speaking to my husband held aloft one of his children and offered him up as a floatation device if all the water noodles were taken. The joke was a hit with the people nearby; and the child he was holding gave a peal of anguished delight.

  My eyes were closed. I lay on the white vinyl daybed just out of the sun and enjoyed the delicious sensation of the ocean shrinking to salt on my skin.

  That afternoon we learned why the city was so crowded. There was an international literary festival taking place, a semi-famous one, apparently. Writers had come from England, India, the United States, the Middle East, the Balkans. They had descended on Paraty to give readings and participate in roundtables, and they trailed an exhaust cloud of publishers, editors, hangers-on, in-the-know festivalgoers.

  It was an editor back at the pousada who told us this. The editor was Italian, he had lived in Brazil for many years. He worked at the Companhia das Letras. It was a venerable house, he said; perhaps we knew the name. Three of his writers were to appear during the festival. There was a detachment of children playing in the pool while we talked, some mean-spirited game with a ball. The editor drank Campari over ice with a wedge of lime. His wife appeared, a Brazilian—sunned, freckled skin, at least a quarter century younger. The editor wore no shirt. He was the kind of older man who took care to delay his own decline.

  The editor talked about his work. I was interested. His English was flawless. He was amused that we had come to Paraty without knowing about the literary festival, as if we were tourists in Rio who had come without realizing it was Carnaval.

  “The real difficulty is getting our writers into translation. Among writers in Portuguese, you can tell me José Saramago, Clarice Lispector, and who else?”

  I could tell him no one else.

  “There you have it. You cannot name anyone, and you live here, you are a reader. Machado de Assis is the greatest Brazilian writer, and yet he has no following outside this country. Jorge Amado is another. I have an author, Bernardo Carvalho, he is a very significant figure in contemporary fiction. There is an excellent writer from Mozambique, Mia Couto. In Italy, we don’t have any problem selling our writers abroad, but in Brazil, a country three times the size, it is much more difficult. Of course, you know, Brazilians will read Philip Roth or Ian McEwan in translation before they read their own writers. They will read Stephen King. We are always looking to America.”

  At some point, while the editor was talking, my husband stepped away, and I saw him now at the bar, chatting with a man there. The children were out of the pool; the pool was empty except for the ball they left behind, floating pointlessly from one end to the other on some invisible current. Everything had become still, picturelike. I saw this picture reflected in the editor’s sunglasses, the tanning oil on his chest, the yellowing radiator of the lime wedge in his Campari.

  “I should write down those names,” I said.

  The editor’s wife moved in her chair, turning a different side up, though the sun was all but gone.

  “My wife, Monica,” he said.

  Eventually Marcos and Iara surfaced. They were hungry. The streets were lively. Every hotel in the city was packed. The literary festival was in full swing. People met in the streets and embraced, everybody knew everybody. I had the feeling of arriving at a gathering in the home of someone I didn’t know. By now I’d heard of three different events taking place just that evening, but the crowds they attracted didn’t dent the crowds at the restaurants, all of which were idiotically full, as we found, going from one to the next, the four of us like a wandering troupe, hesitating at any remotely plausible option as we audited the menu and judged the ambience, there being a good deal of socially normal but situationally counterproductive politeness in all this as we tried to determine without directly asking whether any member of our party wished to veto an option. My feet were beginning to scream from all the walking on broken stones, when Iara remembered that there was a French crêperie, well spoken of, not indecently out of the way. We headed there and found that of course the crêperie was overrun as well. Marcos rounded up the owner, and whatever he said had an effect, because one of the two waitresses on duty produced a folding table and some chairs (which a moment ago they claimed not to have) and staged them on the sidewalk, out past all the other folding tables and chairs, almost a full block from the entrance to the restaurant, so far from its light that we were in near total darkness. The night was tropically hot in spite of the season. The waitress brought candles and carafes of warm red wine. It was the only restaurant on the street, the only real activity. After the drama of finding the restaurant, and then procuring the table, no one was in the mood for conversation. Iara lit cigarettes. Marcos and my husband fell back to the safe territory of work; they could talk about work all night if they had to. But soon Marcos and Iara got started: Brazilians possess inexhaustible reservoirs of talk. Fine by me, fine by my husband—we let them do the conversational heavy lifting. I had to kill a few yawns. Dogs roamed the darkness, just beyond our outpost, a sound of paws on the dirty, soft stones. They stayed along the edges of stone walls, walls that hid any view of the ocean, although you could sense a faint, briny presence, the nearness of water.

  Iara said, “You know our friends, the couple that was supposed to come with us this weekend?”

  She made a motion of breaking a branch in two.

  “That is why they do not come.”

  “It was sudden,” Marcos said.

  The next day my husband was bored, and went for a walk in town. I opted to stay by the pool. I felt pleasurably stagnant, and ordered another drink from the barman. I was watching a Brazilian family, three people, and trying to puzzle out the relationships. My guess was father, adult son, and youngish stepmother, but Brazilian habits of physical contact made it difficult to decipher, and I kept changing my mind. The three of them stood chest deep in the pool, for hours, talking and drinking nonstop; they seemed not to notice when children invaded the pool and initiated a warlike sequence of messy dives. Then the editor’s young wife came out to lie in the sun.

  She had a truly excellent body, which she did as little to conceal as possible. I saw golden curls, like eyelashes, on her thighs; Brazilian women shaved down from the knee only. She lay on her stomach and aimed her face in my direction: with sunglasses on, she could have been watching me or not. I turned away. My husband came back. I didn’t see if he looked at her. She shifted position as he sat down beside me.

  “What did you find?” I said.

>   “I found a beach town. Kitschy little art studios where you wouldn’t want to buy anything. A truly gratuitous number of ice cream parlors.”

  I was convinced the woman was looking at us again—at me or my husband, I wasn’t sure.

  “Bom dia,” I said, and smiled. She made no response.

  Then her husband was there, waving to us. He lay down and shut his eyes.

  His wife reached over and touched the bony knob of his hip, briefly, before withdrawing her hand. It might have been routine affection, or a failed signal for attention. When he stirred a moment later, it was to reach for his book. His wife said something in Portuguese or perhaps Italian that I could hear but not understand. We were all of us in close proximity by the pool; no conversation was truly private. He looked at me, or seemed to, and then said something to his wife, sotto voce.

  I felt a budding awkwardness, the kind that is perhaps unique to Americans.

  I said, “Do you have no event to attend today?”

  He smiled. “This morning, there was a talk, on the face of Islam in literature today. It was so dull, and so overheated with opinion, that I am now too exhausted to do anything more than this. My own writer makes his appearance tonight. I will feel much improved by then.”

  He lowered his eyes to his book. His wife rotated her head so that the silver mirrors of her sunglasses faced me once more, and lay that way for a long time. I tried to ignore what I felt sure was her stare. I couldn’t know. Maybe she found my husband handsome—he was handsome, and his skin was newly tanned from hours in the sun. For a moment I looked at him like an object, a photograph, like something in a magazine ad: my husband as luxury good. He was reading the Economist. I wanted to point out the wife to him, the wife’s behavior, but there was no way to do it without her noticing.