The Fugitivities

by Jesse McCarthy

  The new orders involved a long walk, at one point taking them along a highway, which cut underneath a mountain covered in shantytown constructions that Octavio pointed out to him were the “favelas.” They followed a narrow walkway caught in the violent tangerine glare of oncoming traffic. By the time they emerged the rain had finally passed, and you could see the stars again, pinholes in the tropical night.

  They came to yet another beach, long and brightly lit like a bracelet studded with empty café tables facing the ocean. There was a faint smell of rotting fish in the air. On one of the beachfront terraces, Jonah watched a middle-aged American couple as they struggled to order their drinks. Splotches of rose branded their arms and calves. It was the first time, he realized, that he was somewhere nobody would find his complexion remarkable. Now they were the minority, pinkish flotsam in a sea of honey, brown, and black.

  Dark-skinned women in heels walked distractedly back and forth in front of the hotels. Street vendors hawked anything on which they could print a Brazilian flag. A group of younger men came up from the beach laughing loudly and jabbing at each other. Hotel staffers in drab uniforms wandered in and out of their establishments, verifying things, making rounds, and scanning the beachfront expectantly. Begging children came asking for money and food. A shirtless boy in ragged shorts asked Jonah for a cigarette. He hesitated, then gave him one.

  Barthes had a room in a condominium tower on the rua Gustavo Sampaio in what appeared to be, from what they had seen, one of the ugliest parts of the city. When they rang her bell, she cracked open the door and then, seeing it was them, threw her arms around Octavio, greeting them both in the familiar, bubbly Esperanto of American collegiate irony.

  Jonah recognized Barthes immediately, right down to the way she swept her sandy blond hair under a bandanna. She had worn one around campus, as he recalled, a sign of alternativeness balanced out by pastel monochromes from American Apparel. Her place in Rio was really a studio, which meant the guests would sleep in a corner that Barthes had padded with some blankets and sleeping bags. Octavio noted that her minimal adornments to her pad reminded him of the tribal-patterned accent pillows and throws she had used to disguise the institutional prefab of her dorm room. Barthes said something sharp in Portuguese that Jonah didn’t understand. Somewhere along the line, she had acquired a confidence that Octavio hadn’t counted on, one that could not be reconciled with the geeky moniker he had pinned on her.

  * * *

  —

  Back home, she was Maggie Reynolds from Newton, Massachusetts. But in Rio de Janeiro, she went by her middle name, Grace, converted locally to Gracia. She seemed not entirely displeased to have Octavio and Jonah visit. Aside from the ex-boyfriend situation. The history with Octavio—or what remained of that history—was likely to prove “complicated.” Already, they were reprising a familiar game with each other, their banter sandpapery, with quips and ripostes over small talk that were clearly arbitrating much else besides.

  The studio room only had one window and it faced the favela of Chapéu Mangueira. During the day, music and the sound of construction work on a little botequim, a bodega that sold dry goods and fresh tropical fruit, came up from the bottom of the hill. The first time Jonah heard gunfire he almost convinced himself it was a firecracker. But the report was too acute, and it happened too regularly, rhythmically even, so that eventually you could even decode warning shots: a sharp pop with a loud echo shattering the night, then one shot in reply, then silence.

  Barthes was always up at dawn and heading out to far-flung corners of the city for her work. Octavio and Jonah would wake closer to noon, and usually began the day by roaming in search of a place to eat. At first it was difficult to get around, on account of the complexity of the bus system and the perilous street traffic. But once they learned how to give and receive the thumbs-up, a gesture of subtle significance and usage, everything else about the city became strangely logical. In Laranjeiras they spent an afternoon going down the menu of one of the thousands of juice bars, many of which offered fruits they had never heard of before.

  Barthes only worked three days a week, so on her days off she showed the boys around the city. Octavio refused categorically to be taken anywhere “touristic,” nixing the Sugarloaf, the Christ Redeemer, and the grand beach at Copacabana. This was agreeable to Barthes, and she walked them instead through random commercial shopping centers, and through the dense streets and public squares behind the old theater in the city center. They were a trio now—a bande à part, Jonah thought—living beyond the reach of family, of internships and institutions, beyond responsibility. That was how he wanted to see it.

  One day they took a commuter bus out across a long causeway to Niterói, a neighborhood on the eastern shore of Guanabara Bay. Octavio and Barthes sat next to each other, arguing; really Octavio was arguing while Barthes looked away furtively in despair. Jonah sat behind them gazing out over the traffic and the fast-food chains and the ocean. He was keenly aware that things were not as simple as Octavio had claimed they would be. Like all ex-lovers, these two were united in an unhappy need to pluck at the strings of the other’s desire. Octavio was constantly teasing, but Barthes parried handily. It looked like no matter which way things went, Jonah was going to be left holding the candlestick, as the French liked to say, a result he had dimly predicted without ever resolving what to do when it came up.

  The beach at Niterói faced back toward the city, so you could make out all the different neighborhoods with their cream-colored high-rises tucked between the green mountains, and the reddish bric-a-brac of the favelas atop the green. Octavio spread himself facedown in the sand while Barthes installed herself on a beach towel and opened a tome on microcredit financing in the developing world. Jonah had with him a pocket-size volume of poems in Portuguese by João Cabral de Melo Neto that he had picked up in a bookstore in Centro.

  He was fairly sure that the poem that had caught his eye when he was browsing, and that he now turned to again, was about the world coming to an end. Melo Neto said the world would end in a melancholy of indifferent men reading newspapers. One line was clear to him: “the final poem nobody would write.” But what was the final poem? Was it the melancholy world itself? Was it the words in the newspapers read by indifferent men? Was it some other poem entirely, one written for whatever people were left, who didn’t read newspapers but still wanted to get the news from poetry? Perhaps the world ended within the poem and the reader was one of the melancholy men waiting for something that has already happened?

  When his eyes tired of the page he watched the ocean. A Petrobras supertanker showed its stenciled letters against a block of orange rust. Octavio ran down to the water and dove in, his body splitting the blue like a porpoise. Barthes applied sunscreen. After a moment, she looked over and pointed the bottle in Jonah’s direction.

  “No thanks, I’m good for now.”

  “No, dummy, on me. Get my back.”

  She presented herself to his touch and pulled down her straps. As he was finishing, a group of European-looking young women set up their towels and beach chairs nearby. Reclining on his side, ostensibly keeping his eyes on the book lying on the towel, Jonah tried to identify what language they were speaking, but their voices were carried downwind and he couldn’t make it out. He tried to read more poetry. The poet was like an engineer, said Melo Neto, or the poem itself should be neat and clearly delineated like a tennis court, or perhaps it was precisely these things that poetry was not.

  Octavio was rejuvenating himself in the sea. The salt on his shoulders flashed in the sun as he thrust himself through the waves. A Brazilian man had joined the European women near their spot. He laughed with them while he took off his shirt. He was wearing a black Brazilian-style Speedo that ended at mid-thigh, and, around his neck, a thin gold chain. He stood watching over the women with his arms crossed and his feet planted beneath his shoulders, like a lifeguard. Jonah had never
seen such a perfect man, not in the sense necessarily of absolute beauty, but of masculine ideal. He was chiseled, his hair cropped and trim, his skin dark—darker than Jonah’s and with a glowing vermelho in it. Handsome in the inimitable, charismatic way of black men. Barthes was looking at him too, over the spine of her textbook. Jonah glanced at her breasts. They were small, not flat really, but diminutive. She still had an adolescent figure. Just then Octavio came crashing into view, dripping all over Barthes’s books and tearing towels away to dry himself. Barthes looked up from her reading.

  “How was the water?”

  “Spectacular,” said Octavio. “You need to stop all this reading, it’s unhealthy, we’re in Rio, try and act the—”

  “The water is filthy,” Barthes cut in. “They drop raw sewage in there for miles up the coast, so do me a favor and don’t touch me.” Instead of following her orders, Octavio came after her. Barthes refused to scream as Octavio wrestled and tussled with her in the sand and Jonah remained neutral until they kicked up sand in his face. He noticed the Brazilian man looking over. He didn’t seem bothered at all, just indifferent, as if he expected the foreigners to be exactly what they were.

  On the bus on the way back Jonah felt sick. The couple sat in front of him bickering. Or at least Jonah thought they were bickering. But then after a while, to his astonishment, Barthes’s head was resting on Octavio’s shoulder, and he had placed an arm around her and was whispering something, or really kissing her softly, his face buried in her hair. To feel alone in the company of quarreling lovers is not the worst kind of solitude, Jonah thought. But few things are more grating to the demands of ego than to be alone in the presence of their reconciliation.

  12

  About a week after their arrival, Barthes invited them to a beach picnic her NGO had organized for her students. When Jonah and Octavio arrived, they found the young woman everyone called Gracia surrounded by a circle of kids and assistants handing out pieces of fruit, small sandwiches, and potato chips. Barthes was radiant. The sun was shimmering in her hair; she seemed less pale and twiggy, full of a raw vitality she hadn’t yet fully displayed in their presence. She was wearing bangles and colored bracelets and she laughed easily with the kids as she played with them, chasing them around in the sand. Jonah and Octavio joined them and ate hungrily like little boys, and then Octavio got a game of soccer going.

  The three friends played against five younger and more skilled kids who threw themselves across the sand diving and dribbling while the Americans tried to keep up. Octavio scored just enough to keep them in the game. After one goal Jonah saw him looking at Barthes and thought he saw a glimmer of relief, a look that said—Why haven’t you always been this way?—and—I knew you were like this all along—and—This is how I like you—and for the first time it was clear to him that their abrasion against each other had also polished them like lenses. This in no way assured they would always be together, or even that they would always be there for each other in times of need; but it had fostered in them an inconvenient conviction that no other person would ever understand them so well, that all other relationships, even happier ones, must suffer a little for their comparative misalignment.

  It was getting dark, and Barthes announced that she would be accompanying two of her students, Taìs and Angelica, back to their homes in the favelas. Octavio quickly insisted on joining them, which meant that Jonah would have to go as well. They all caught a van on Avenida Atlântica and headed north in rapid bursts, swerving over as the fare handler threw open the door, crying out a string of destinations, and hustling more rides. Along the way, Taìs and Angelica quizzed the young men on their sightseeing accomplishments and were tickled that they had been in Rio for weeks without visiting the Christ Redeemer, or the famous Lapa steps where Snoop Dogg and Pharrell filmed the music video for “Beautiful.”

  By the time they reached their stop night had fallen. In the increasingly narrow lanes where they were walking, the streetlights either hadn’t come on yet or someone had disabled them so that they never would. Barthes was walking ahead with Octavio and Taìs, who had taken him by the hand, while Angelica walked quietly at Jonah’s side. A moped driven by a young man, carrying an older woman with some grocery bags behind him, squirreled past noisily. Octavio was becoming quieter as Barthes, ever sure-footed, marched them up to what they could see was the beginning of the favela. They climbed a long flight of stairs in near darkness. At the top Jonah looked back and saw the twinkling lights of the city strung out below in undulating waves. They had passed the first low brick constructions when he heard the click. Two boys came out of the shadows with long guns dangling casually at their sides. Their faces were sullen. Barthes was pointing at the Americans, signaling they were her friends. One of the boys lifted his weapon at Octavio’s head. Then he swiveled and pointed the muzzle into Jonah’s face. He stared at the mouth of the gun. A half inch squeeze of a finger the only thing it needed. Here it was, Jonah thought. The end of the world, and it would be their own names in the newspapers being read by indifferent men. Jonah couldn’t understand the gun boy’s words, but he understood what he was saying perfectly. You shouldn’t be here. Then Octavio spoke up. Instantly the barrel swiveled upon him.

  It seemed something bad might happen then; even Barthes began to lose her composure, her voice breaking into a panicked plea. But the boys, excited by the presence of Americans, were tripping on Hollywood now, calling Octavio “Taxi Driver,” toying with the muzzles as they cackled to an improvised version of De Niro’s lines. Perhaps Angelica felt how stricken Jonah was with fear, or perhaps she simply felt momentarily more mature than the clearly floundering adults around her. She must have passed through checkpoints every day of her life, and here these Americans couldn’t even do it once. She grabbed Jonah’s hand, gripped it tight, and spoke to the gun boys in a tiny voice. When he heard her name, the boy with the gun shouted in surprise and lowered the Kalashnikov enough to signal a détente. Angelica talked with the boys for a minute. They were asking about her family. After a moment, they shrugged, gave a thumbs-up, and waved them all through, laughing.

  Jonah’s legs felt heavy; his jaw clenched. His hands were trembling, but he focused on his pace, on keeping it even and rigid. Tripping over a stone, making any false movement, anything unpredictable or unexplained might set off a nervous trigger finger attached to a boy who was high and hearing things. It was worse with the boys behind them now. The feeling of a gun possibly aimed at the back of one’s head.

  They moved deeper into the favela, rising along narrow streets that were lit in spots and where there was more life and the sounds of children and babies crying and hundreds of families preparing dinners. They dropped Taìs off first, and then made their way to Angelica’s home.

  Angelica’s mother, who addressed Barthes as though she was part of the family, insisted they all stay for dinner. An aunt was helping to cook some chicken and rice. In the far corner Angelica’s older brother was sitting on a wooden stool watching a soap opera about drug lords and their love lives on Globo, apparently the only television station in Brazil. Angelica helped her mother and her aunt and brought them soft drinks. The older women spoke with Barthes as though she were saintly. Not a spiritual saint, not a figure of salvation, but saintly in her ability to do no harm, to say nothing wrong, to bring only good. Did Barthes feel that way? Sometimes it seemed to Jonah as if she was driven by a tremendous guilt that she had recast in an armor of irreproachability.

  While the visitors ate, Angelica looked up from time to time and asked the Americans to teach her new words for the things they were eating. Octavio talked animatedly with Angelica’s mother, showing off his Portuguese and trying to make a good impression. Despite the terror of the ascent, there was a spectacular peacefulness in Angelica’s home. It looked out over a ziggurat of corrugated roofing and down to the bright lights of the city below. A balmy breeze lilted inland from the ocean.

  Afte
r dinner, Angelica and her mother thanked the visitors profusely for coming to visit and made them promise to come back. When they stepped back into the alleyways, Jonah noticed that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. The favela cascaded down below like a river winking with isolated lamps. Somewhere farther above in the honeycomb, the distinctive propellant of American rap sent down snapping echoes of growling bass and syncopated voices interlocking call and response.

  They followed Barthes back down a different path that took them into a gully and then across a narrow walkway made of wooden planks and back up a new set of stairs as they made their way along the side of the neighboring hill. They came up to a small roundabout with streetcar tracks. Largo das Neves. The Square of Snows. A strange name for a roundabout in these parts, Jonah thought. The night, with its sudden brushes with death and pockets of eerie tranquility, had turned surreal. His mind jumped from Nas rapping from the point of view of the gun to Villon’s mais où sont les neiges d’antan? Criminal lingo for those in the know. Bold steel shoved in your face runs the blood hot; the mind ice-cold. Enough of this, Jonah thought, and Rio would get to feeling like Paris in January.

  They were ambling gingerly now through streets marked by snaking entranceways to baroque and once ornate villas that were now caving in on themselves and smothered in knotted arboreal growth. They passed a disquieting mauve facade. Barthes said it used to be a dance hall where people came for the Samba de Gafieira and stayed late into the night. There were plans to reopen it, she said, as a hookah lounge.