Feast Days

by Ian Mackenzie

  “Do you think you’ll ever have children?” I asked, surprising myself as much as I surprised Hannah by the question.

  I read an article in the metro section about rising crime in the poor parts of the city. The article told the story of a couple in an outlying neighborhood who robbed the same pharmacy on three consecutive Sundays. They took diapers, formula, and the cash in the register. On the fourth Sunday they broke with the pattern and hit another pharmacy—but it was on the same street, and the man was shot dead by police.

  We had plans for another trip. We had the tickets, reservations. Then my husband canceled at the last minute—work, what else. We were supposed to visit a preserved colonial city in the hills of central Brazil called Ouro Preto. Elizabeth Bishop once lived there; her house still stood. I was disappointed. I had wanted to see it. My husband said I should go on without him.

  He was at the office already when I took a taxi to the airport. Navigating an airport solo, without my husband—it was the first time in years I had traveled alone. The airport was different without him. Airports force you into a set of tasks requiring concentration inside a cinema of distraction; and Brazil’s airports were lousy with low-level criminal activity. Traveling with my husband, I could divide the required tasks, and in fact it was he who typically steered us through them. Now I was stepping toward the bag drop before I had my boarding pass. I wasn’t following procedure. There were signs behind the counters about an airport tax that I’d never noticed before. I decided not to ask anyone about it. I could see that there was in our marriage something of a protector-protectee dynamic. There were aspects of the world that, because of my husband, I had the luxury of not paying attention to. It occurred to me that marriage is another thing you can describe as nonlinear.

  “At least I know you aren’t having an affair,” my husband said, before I went away on my own, a joke.

  When you study a foreign language, among the first words you learn are mother, father, husband, wife. They are the words that organize relations, unremarkable outside the context of your own life. But once I was married, two of these words, wife and husband, suddenly took on a new, strange vibrancy. I was somebody’s wife. My husband was my husband. I felt something in my skin, even my heart—a feeling between elation and alarm—when I heard myself using these most basic terms, husband and wife, which seemed like things that did not belong to me.

  Do you mean with other women? Marcos had said.

  Flying for miles over the hard tundra of clouds that separated the plane from the world below. A storm. On descent, the turbulence grew fierce, and I was queasy, which was unusual for me, and unusually anxious; the state of the plane felt perilous. I tried to control my anxiety with a rehearsal of the basic physics that kept an airplane afloat on air, but I was unconvinced. I studied the flight attendants’ faces, calm, even bored; but their performance of normalcy, as they wheeled the drinks cart down the aisle, didn’t reassure me. From where had come this urgency to visit Elizabeth Bishop’s house? I could have waited until my husband was free to join me; we could have changed the tickets. Instead, we had conspired to be apart for a few days. There was a dark thought I was trying to keep at bay as the airplane bucked and rumbled: I didn’t want to die yet because my life was not the life I wanted. Rain lashed the windows all through the descent, and the wing, the city below.

  The central square of Ouro Preto was a tilting floor of uneven cobblestones, endlessly circled by birds, under a sky of voluptuous gray. At the tourist office I found a huddle of men in army-green jackets. They had the air of a guild. I chose one who said he could speak English. As if I’d put a coin into a slot, he immediately started to tell me about the soot-black church in the square. Ouro Preto seemed like one of those places where not to hire a guide would be churlish. I said I wanted to see the house where Elizabeth Bishop had lived.

  It had blue doors and brass fixtures. It sat on a narrow, bending road that ran lazily uphill from the main part of the city, and behind the house the land formed a valley of black and deep, hard-packed green, speckled with little red roofs and coal-black steeples. Elizabeth Bishop’s house turned out to be a house, in other words. A modest bronze plaque identified it as the house where the American poet had lived for ten years. I took some pictures. I took a picture of the plaque.

  The guide gave a lecture on Marxist themes disguised as a historic tour. As he told it, the government was little more than a clique of elites who produced a fraudulent, self-dealing version of history in the service of protecting their own interests, and he seemed to consider it his duty to give the other side of the story. I liked him. Another guide would have insisted on the Santa Claus version of history, assuming this was what tourists wanted. Instead he drew attention to failure, official hypocrisy, episodes of moral cowardice. He also told a lot of jokes. He saved them, it seemed, scavenged them, ready to deploy his jokes on Americans. He seemed to believe that Americans loved nothing more than a good joke. “The Pope comes to New York and the driver picks him up in a limo. But the Pope wants to drive, and so the driver sits in back, because in jokes everything is possible.” He told jokes as we navigated the cramped streets; the streets of the city were lightly scented with liquor. I took my bearings by whether we were walking uphill or downhill; otherwise the corners seemed to repeat themselves. The guide moved decisively. He touched my elbow when he wanted to make a point or to steer me out of harm’s way.

  He took me to the Museum of the Inconfidência. It commemorated an eighteenth-century rebellion against the Portuguese crown inspired by America’s revolution against England. The revolutionaries themselves were an odd bunch, not obviously destined for success, a grab bag of ex-soldiers and failed poets. They were manqués of all stripes. Their true goal wasn’t Brazilian independence, but commercial autonomy for their mineral-rich state. Political leaders had tried to obscure this fact ever since, the guide said, in order to use the incident as a foundation stone in the national myth. In any case, the thing didn’t come off. The revolutionaries were exiled to Africa, except the leader. He was called Tiradentes—Toothpuller. The Portuguese hanged him and quartered him. More than a century after the fact, the government got the idea of making Toothpuller a sort of Brazilian George Washington, and declared the date of his death—his martyrdom—a national holiday.

  I ate lunch with the guide at a restaurant he recommended. It was a cafeteria, food sold by weight; not a place tourists came. I was skeptical until I tasted the food. He asked if I wanted a beer or a glass of wine, and I said wine, and then one of the boys loafing near the cash register brought it for me. We didn’t talk much while we ate. I checked my phone and saw some texts from my husband, and a few from Marcos, all of which I ignored. “You have a boyfriend or something in America?” the guide asked. I slowly chewed a sun-dried tomato down to the skin. “Do you have a wife?” I said. “No, but I have kids,” he said. He ate olives and pulled the pits from between his lips and arranged them in a row on the edge of his plate.

  In the hollow belly of a church, the guide named the saints, wooden statues stationed in the eaves, and told me their stories. Anthony was the patron saint of lost things and unmarried women, and a magnet for superstition. An unmarried woman may bury Saint Anthony upside down until he brings her a husband, or else on the eve of Saint Anthony’s feast she may fill her mouth with water and wait to swallow it until she hears somebody utter a man’s name, which then she knows is the name of the man she will marry. The guide told me this and then waited for me to say something.

  Under the baroque scowl of yet another church front was a market where boys and young women sold dishes made of soapstone and soapstone trinkets and soapstone replica churches. The stuff was piled in stalls like rubble, washed by rain, etched with birds and other animals. The soapstone sellers perched on low stools, working on the next thing, surrounded by all the unsold surplus already larding their tables, apparently undeterred by the extent to which supply outpaced demand. They picked at the soft mate
rial with pocketknives and thin files, giving the impression of deep concentration. It was work that could go on forever—refinements. This was our last stop, and the guide encouraged me to buy something, a memento. He was doing his part for the local economy; he wanted tourist money to go to the people who depended on tourist money. I chose a small replica church and the boy insisted on etching my name into the side. Emma—my mother’s choice. A name with a lot of literary overhang, it has to be said.

  In Brazil, there is a tree called the mata-pau—the killerwood. The name is well-deserved. The killerwood starts life parasitically, spawning and growing upon a healthy tree, its roots extending and thickening and strengthening, powerful tentacles that descend toward the soil; once the roots engage the ground, they begin poaching water and nutrients from the host tree. The killerwood strengthens its grip and finally strangles its host to death. It may encase the host tree like a skin. Once established, it lives like this, forever embracing the corpse of the tree it murdered. The killerwood is unique to South America, and even produces fruit—figs.

  At the church, I found that Hannah was already gone. I saw Boaventura, and he didn’t mention it. It seemed like an admission that he, unlike Hannah, would never leave. The ridiculous freedom of a U.S. passport, I wanted to say to him.

  Elizabeth Bishop, in that volume for the Life World Library, wrote that in Brazil there should be a revolution every month or so. This was 1962. Then came the coup d’état, the long military dictatorship. She was supportive, on the evidence of her letters. So. She wrote to Robert Lowell: “But this isn’t my world—or is it?”

  Padre Piero pulled me aside. Something has happened, he said. Four of our Haitians were assaulted. They were returning to the church in the evening, from jobs they had just started, and were attacked by a group of men yelling Africanos! The men beat them and stole everything they had, phones, money. They were hospitalized. I didn’t say anything as Padre Piero spoke. When he stopped talking, he put a hand on my shoulder, as if I were the one who needed comfort. Then I realized I had tears in my eyes. Oh, what a thing, what a thing, Padre Piero said.

  Someone e-mailed me a map of Brazil that identified the states by their literal English translations. Green Water, Great Northern River, River of Crabs, Thick Bushes, Thick Bushes of the South. There was a Bad for Navigation, a General Mines. Rio de Janeiro, it’s easy to forget after saying it a thousand times, is the River of January. The person who sent me the map did so because she was amused—what a funny country, being the point. There was a Place of Rain, a Holy Spirit, a Toucan’s Beak. For the most part they were Indian names. You can play the same game in America. Illinois is the Land of Those Who Speak Normally.

  “Do you remember?”

  “We stayed at that bed-and-breakfast.”

  “We weren’t married yet.”

  “The weekend in the country. The bed-and-breakfast.”

  “I remember being happy that weekend. The morning light in the woods. There was a brook. The rich air.”

  “We visited that house, the famous house.”

  “Fallingwater.”

  “Because you once had that poster on the wall in your dorm.”

  “I told you that. I wanted you to understand why it was important to me.”

  “Because you once lived with an image of a place you hadn’t seen in real life. Because you didn’t want a photograph to be a substitute for reality.”

  “It was so crowded with visitors.”

  “You hated that. You hadn’t considered the inevitability of other tourists.”

  “I had the wrong idea. I imagined an empty house. I thought maybe there would be a gray-haired woman, a docent, to show us around.”

  “Now you don’t have to go there at all. Now you can take a virtual tour on your phone.”

  “Is that true?”

  “It must be.”

  “We bought that print in the gift shop, the small one, we framed it. Do we still have that?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know where it could have gone.”

  There were texts from Marcos. Sometimes I responded, sometimes I didn’t.

  Iara was my friend, the only friend I had made in São Paulo, really. I hadn’t seen her in a while, not since I had lunch with Marcos. She suspected her husband of infidelity—she had made this clear without ever stating it directly. And now I had proof that she was right to suspect him. Did I suspect my husband of infidelity? I wasn’t certain. I couldn’t quite imagine it; and yet I knew that you should assume your own imagination has its fair share of blind spots.

  Proto-romance refers to the last common ancestor of the modern Romance languages. It is an unknown tongue that nonetheless had to exist in order for Latin to become French and Portuguese and Italian. Something had to exist in between. It would have crept around the darkness of Europe, at the back end of the Roman empire, evolving, branching into new forms. Nothing of it was written down. It was a language of soldiers and slaves, something that survived by traveling. It is, in other words, the missing link—a theory, lacking a fossil record, but necessary to explain how we got from there to here.

  Empires—there are always empires.

  TEXTS

  I was rereading The Heart of the Matter, disappointed to find that it didn’t live up to my memory of its power from the first time I read it, in college, when my phone buzzed with a text from my husband. I read on a bit longer; failing to enjoy Greene as I did when I was younger felt like a betrayal of that younger self, that pre-husband, pre-everything self. I started skipping pages. I saw too easily the formula of plot. “It was like the hint of an explanation—too faint to be grasped.” My memory of reading the book wasn’t even ten years old. My husband sent another text.

  He was texting to inform me that he had to stay late at work.

  “No problem,” I replied.

  The phone buzzed again.

  I assumed with a message intended to mollify me.

  Except this time it was Marcos, not my husband.

  “A question for my professor,” he wrote.

  I didn’t respond to this, and in the time during which I didn’t respond, my husband sent another text.

  “Hope not too long,” it said.

  “You know what is my favorite word in English,” Marcos wrote.

  “It always takes longer than you think,” I wrote to my husband.

  “Moon,” Marcos wrote.

  “I wouldn’t have thought,” I wrote.

  “You mean the word,” Marcos wrote.

  “Have a drink with Iara,” my husband wrote.

  “Or don’t,” my husband wrote.

  “Or something else,” Marcos wrote.

  “I don’t know,” I wrote to Marcos and my husband.

  “I am thinking of the word because I can see the moon from this window,” Marcos wrote.

  “Don’t be upset,” my husband wrote.

  “My favorite word in Portuguese is either cidade or saudade,” I wrote.

  Marcos texted again. Except it wasn’t Marcos, it was my husband.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “It’s O.K.,” I wrote to my husband.

  “O period K period.”

  “I prefer it with the periods.”

  “I know.”

  “Go. Do your work.”

  “I am at the hospital.”

  “Why are you at the hospital? Should I come?” I wrote.

  “My daughter,” my husband wrote. “I am here because my daughter is sick. Yes. Come.”

  Of course my husband didn’t write that, since we did not have a daughter, and of course I had written the last message to Marcos, not to my husband. It was Marcos who was at the hospital with his daughter.

  “My wife is at home,” Marcos texted, although that also would have been true if my husband had texted it.

  “Here I go,” my husband texted.

  Text—the origin of the word concerns weaving, something woven from many threads.

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nbsp; “Hospital very cold and I forget to bring sueter,” Marcos wrote.

  I found two of my husband’s old sweaters and took a taxi. Marcos was sitting in his daughter’s room, in the only chair. He stood when I came in.

  I gave him the sweaters, and he set them down.

  “Your daughter,” I said.

  We looked at the girl in the bed.

  He said, “It’s her heart. The blood is coming out in the wrong places. A—vazamento.”

  He opened his hand, spreading his fingers, as if allowing water to fall through.

  “A leak,” I said.

  “A leak,” he said. “From birth. Congênito.”

  “Congenital,” I said.

  “Yes, congenital disease. She must have the surgery. For Juliana, five times now, like this.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “How would you know?”

  Marcos closed his hand around his daughter’s small foot, under the blanket.

  “She is sleeping,” he said.

  She was indeed asleep, powerfully asleep. Her small body was full of strong drugs. She could have been in a coma.

  “Let’s go downstairs to the café,” he said, and turned off the lights.