Eventually they arrived in the neighborhood of Catumbi, where Barthes’s friend Teresa lived. Barthes had met her at the Universidade Federal, where she took her language classes, and Teresa had more or less become Barthes’s best friend in Rio. Teresa’s house was set back from the road and covered with a fragrant mousse of flowers. Laundry was hanging from the fruit trees on her porch. Inside, an older man with a wizened head of dreads pulled back tightly in rows was rolling a joint on a mouse pad. Teresa introduced him as her boyfriend Lazaro. He was studying sociology at the State University, trying to document the living conditions of street kids. He smiled quickly and easily and talked in measured tones, often lingering on phrases in English, which he spoke quite well, as he worked the green buds between his thumb and forefinger.
The friends made a small circle on the floor, and Lazaro slid in a CD on his computer and lit up the joint as the samba of Cartola filled the room. Octavio asked Lazaro if he could recommend any Brazilian writers for them to read. Lazaro went into his bedroom and came out with a novel by Clarice Lispector for Octavio and one by Machado de Assis, which he handed to Jonah. Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas. Lazaro explained that Machado was one of the greatest Brazilian writers. A black man. Jonah looked up, met the other man’s fixed gaze, and nodded with grave approval.
This ceremonious moment led Lazaro to initiate a long conversation about Brazil and the way it had become a lagoon within the ocean of world literature. He was also deeply versed in candomblé and explained that he had written a paper about Nina Rodrigues’s anthropological studies on the religious practices of the Africans in Bahia, but so far had been unable to publish it. Given his paltry understanding of the deities whose exotic names Lazaro invoked, Jonah could barely make out what he was saying. But Octavio was deeply enraptured and kept pressing Lazaro for more, occasionally exclaiming in Spanish as he recognized the equivalent of a certain figure or ritual he knew by a Cuban alias.
Teresa held the joint precariously and learnedly, tilting her neck way back, as she steered their talk back in a direction Jonah could more readily follow: the Brazilian cinema of the sixties and seventies, the brilliant madness of Glauber Rocha. The Americans listened intently, and Lazaro nimbly set about preparing more smoke. By the second round, the conversation had gotten predictably hazy and garbled. Teresa, Lazaro, and Barthes were slipping more and more back into Portuguese. Octavio seemed annoyed at his inability to keep up. He started tugging at Barthes’s sleeve and when she pushed him away, they got into a playfully sloppy tussle. Teresa started hooting and yelling at them to get a room already. Everyone was high.
A long report of gunshots crackled through the house. There was a second of silence. Then more gunfire, louder, traveling in bursting echoes. Lazaro shoved the Americans to the ground. There were two loud bangs, then the sound of cries and the helter-skelter of human feet as a new hail of machine-gun fire sweltered the air with deafening metallic impact. People were screaming. Single shots ricocheted, loud enough to come through distinctly above the fray. Jonah looked over at Octavio. He was holding Barthes against him, covering her head with his hands. He looked over at Lazaro, who said something, but the gunfire came again even louder, and he couldn’t make it out. There were more screams, some close and some distant, disconnected, lost to each other, coming from indeterminate corners of the night. Then it got quiet. Lazaro looked over. “Catumbi,” he said, without lifting his head.
A tinny voice barked through a loudspeaker. It was coming from the top of an armored vehicle, climbing like a beetle up through the favela. They could hear crying now. Above all, they heard the voices of women screaming, calling names. The armored car was close, and they could hear the heavy diesel motor changing gears. The samba was still playing, and Cartola continued his song:
…Mas o pranto em Mangueira
É tão diferente
É um pranto sem lenço
Que alegra agente…
Jonah thought of Angelica hiding on the floor clasped in her mother’s arms. Of her being shot, or, more likely, it occurred to him, her brother being shot. Was this the cleanup operation for the Pan American Games? There was an astonishing quiet for a time, with only sporadic, isolated shouts. But as the machinery of the military police receded again, someone somewhere in Catumbi turned the rap back up.
Barthes, who hadn’t quite lost her composure, said calmly that they should go home. The acrid smell of the firefight was in the air, and there was an ambient tension all around them. Men shouted at each other in the darkness, and the sudden beam of search-patrol lights and gleaming muzzles clasped by paramilitary forces in balaclavas seemed to emerge from the darkness swift as roaches. Jonah and Octavio walked directly behind Barthes single file, at her own recommendation, as she was least likely to trigger a nervous shot. She had dealt with patrols before and she had a set pattern of phrases in both Portuguese and English to signal that they were American tourists. The soldiers barked at them and instructed them to proceed in the direction they were already heading. The sound of children crying came from the maze of shadows.
It was dawn by the time they got back to the rua Gustavo Sampaio. Coconut vendors were setting up their stands and adjusting their displays. Joggers headed out for their morning runs on Copacabana Beach.
13
Two days later, Teresa invited the three friends on an outing to an area south of Rio that was renowned for its beaches and popular with the locals, who preferred to avoid the iconic waterfronts like Ipanema. Everyone agreed it would be good to get out of the city.
They piled into Teresa’s blue Volkswagen Beetle and headed south on the highway, rounding the favela of Rocinha, then jetting past unfinished condominiums, the New York City Center on the Avenida das Américas, and the guarded entrances of gated communities built on the landfill of a newly dredged lagoon. The road broke away into higher altitudes as they followed the coastline, and the massive relief of the land came sharply into view. The green counterforts and protrusions guided them along, thumbing grandly into the glittering sheen of the ocean. The magnificent voice of Elza Soares and her bossa negra poured out of the car stereo hooked up to Teresa’s new iPod. Barthes’s spangled hair kept flicking past the headrest. The sun rushed the windows. Below them the ocean spread to the horizon, and they descended gradually toward it.
When they arrived at the far end of a mostly unoccupied beachfront, Lazaro went down to the water with Octavio and Barthes, leaving Teresa and Jonah to set up the picnic. As they were waiting on the blanket with the spread, she suddenly turned to him and asked in her broken English, “So, what you think of Brazil?”
He had sensed a question like that coming but didn’t have a good answer worked out.
“I love it,” he said after a moment.
“You love it.”
“I mean, I love the atmosphere, I guess. The people, the life.”
“The shooting, you love it too?”
“No. It’s true, that was pretty bad.”
“For us, it’s like this…from forever. We are more used to it than you. I saw you were very afraid. Yes, you were very afraid. It was a lot of shooting for you, I think.”
They had finished setting up the spread and Teresa was sitting in lotus position now at one edge of their checkered blanket, rolling trees.
“It was a lot; I’m not going to lie. I was scared—weren’t you?”
“Mmm, yes…but, how you say…I’m coming from here, so it’s my home. I know the favela…I know what can happen, but I am always walking in my beliefs. Like God, he is watching for me…Look, you see how it says?”
She was pointing now to a tattoo done in an italic script running along the inside arch of her foot.
“In faith.”
“Faith? Yes, I am walking always in faith…I have it here with me. And I am not afraid for this. But for you, I think, I am afraid.”
At this she la
ughed, and he felt the playful warmth of it rousing him.
“Are you believing?” she asked, grave again, but looking past him toward the shrieking and laughter coming over the waves. “Are you walking with God too?”
This brought him up sharply, and he considered whether to take the time to ask himself and then tell her what he genuinely believed, or to tell her what he thought she would want to hear, except that he realized he couldn’t entirely know what that was, or indeed if she would care to the degree that it would be worth maximizing or minimizing the accuracy of his response. Fortunately, Teresa was just then preoccupied with lighting up, tilting back, taking in the sun and the fragrant smoke with her eyes closed to the world. When she opened them, she was looking straight at him. With a soft smile, she reached out to pass him the joint. The hot smoke rushed in, its peppery fumes watering his eyes. Teresa watched him struggling with his composure and laughed.
“It’s strong,” he said. “I don’t know…I might have to go easy on this one.”
“Yes, it’s strong. Here, I will take some more, but…you still haven’t asked me my question.”
“Asked your question?”
“Are you believing in God?”
“Ah…well, I guess I believe in the universe, you know, everything all around us, I feel like I believe in that…but I don’t really go for, like, a church thing. But I would like to think that I walk with faith…I just think for me it’s more of a personal thing, you know?”
Teresa was smoking pensively and examining him. Her attitude suggested that his answer had not impressed her, and he wished that he had formulated a better reply, something perhaps closer to a useful lie.
“You don’t believe—you are like my old boyfriend. You want things to be easy, you have answer for everything, but…when it is the bad times, when it is not so good for you, when an evil comes. Then you are scared. You say everything to make everyone happy. You say this to me now because you are wanting to make me happy. You want to get what you want…but you don’t want to trust. That you cannot do, you could not go that far, not for God, not for me. So you believe in everything…but that way you can get nothing. Can you be happy with nothing?”
Jonah guessed that the tone of her last question was harder than she probably intended, but he wasn’t sure.
“I know I don’t have a good answer. But I don’t think it’s nothing—at least I hope it’s not nothing. I try to be in the moment, to believe in that. Like right now, here with you, in this beautiful place, I feel like I can believe in the importance of this, even if I can’t say for sure that it means what God means for other people.”
“But how you can love this place? You don’t know Brazil. You don’t know even Rio. You don’t know me. There are tourism where I live. With guides they come up into the favela to look at us. Like we are animals. But what do they know? They want to enjoy Brazil, like you. They want to have their photo and see Copacabana and see football and maybe sleep with Brazilian girls. What makes you different from this tourist?”
He didn’t know what to say to this. She had caught him in a crosshair he couldn’t dodge.
“Maybe you too…you want to sleep with Brazilian girls?”
He didn’t answer.
“Don’t be sad,” she said, cocking her head. “I am making you feel sad?”
“No, no…”
“Don’t worry, Jonah! I am liking you very much…Don’t be sad!”
She repeated this last point again in her own language. The tone in her voice had stung him, but to his astonishment and relief there was also more than a hint of a smile in her face. It was a mocking smile, but it wasn’t cruel. It left him no room for escape—but whether instinctively or in accord with her beliefs, it also afforded grace. What saved him, however, was the raucous return of the others traipsing up the beach, their shoulders glistening with salt water.
They ate sandwiches and drank beer that Lazaro had brought for the occasion. There was no talk of the police raid, other than a passing reference by Barthes to the fact that she still hadn’t heard from some people that she wanted to check in on. The others had tired themselves in the ocean, and after eating there was a certain cozying up between the two couples, and Jonah felt increasingly awkward in the arrangement. He let them know he was heading out for a swim.
The water was colder than he had expected, but the waves were not rough, and he easily made his way through the breakers to a place deep enough to tread fully immersed. He enjoyed swimming alone, the solitude and sense of space. He relaxed his body upward in the water so he could stare into the brightness of the sky.
Teresa’s body was magnificent, her color, everything. Her voice, the words she had said expressly for him: eu sou muito apaixonada pra você. He wished Isaac were with them, that he could talk to him about Teresa. He would have to write to him, describe all the crazy things that he had lived through since arriving. It was as if the place had intoxicated him with equal measures of nightmare and fantasy. Visions of being randomly shot and dying in the street, but also of a life far away from America, with a woman exactly like Teresa, living in one of the little houses in Santa behind a wreath of tropical flowers. Teresa reclining with her back against a shutter, reaching for a joint resting on the little yellow serving dish, taking a hit and waving off a spiral of smoke before stretching out her dark legs in the sunshine as she listened to the sound of the tram going by on its way to the Largo das Neves. Its lilting grumble showered in the cries of schoolchildren jumping on and off the sides, chasing it down the street. Eu sou muito apaixonada pra você…você sabe isso…The weight of her breasts, the heat of them chest to chest. The blue Fusca parked outside under a palm tree. A world of cold beer and trips down to the ocean on any given day, the breath of solar splendor and the beauty everywhere of colored bodies like his own; the sweat of lovemaking in the afternoon.
Barthes was shouting his name down the beach. The crew was ready to head back. He stumbled out of the water and Barthes came to him with a smile and a towel.
“How was it?”
“It was great. The water is fantastic.”
“You looked like you were having a good time out there. I was watching you.”
She gave him a look, and then they were interrupted by Octavio shouting about wanting to avoid traffic. Barthes was already heading back. Jonah dried and toweled in a dopey run up to the car that Lazaro already had revving and ready to go.
Teresa was in the driver’s seat, beaming as usual, adjusting her headwrap and setting her playlist. She eyed Jonah in the back through the mirror.
“Someone has been smoking too much today, even when he’s gone swimming, that one still looks like he’s stoned! Octavio, your friend, our marijuana is too strong for him I think.”
“Nah, he’s all right, we do more than this in New York on a long night—caballero, mi socio, how you doing, man? I swear he’s getting skinnier though! Man, you need to eat more—I need to get you back to the city for some churrasco or something.”
“Truthfully, I feel good, man. I feel good, don’t mind me. I’m just taking it all in. The sand, the water, the sun. It’s just beautiful to be here.”
The colors in the sky over Rio were beautiful, and everyone was somewhat fatigued. Lazaro and Teresa sang along with each other to the sambas. The Americans each basked alone in their thoughts.
* * *
—
The next morning they learned that Taìs was in the hospital. From what they could gather, she had been hit in the head with the butt of a heavy rifle. It was unclear whether the gun belonged to a police officer or a drug-gang commando. By the time her mother had gotten her to help it was too late. There was heavy hemorrhaging and she had slipped into a coma.
Barthes was furiously making phone calls all through the morning to people who worked for her NGO. She set up a meeting with Angelica so they could go to the hospital
together. Octavio and Jonah asked Barthes if she wanted them to go with her. But she simply packed an overnight bag and left without an answer.
There was nothing to do but wait and pray. To the universe, if that was what might rescue her, although Jonah felt keenly how much better it would be to walk, as Teresa did, with a deity one believed would deliver. He could remember only sparsely what he had read of the Bible. Now, involuntarily, he thought of an image that had bothered him when he first read it in the Book of Job. It was the line about the human body being crushed like a moth. He had been a boy when he first heard that passage and had seen himself trapped under a boot, his slim chest crumpling like a chocolate wafer. He was so seized by the image that he looked it up online when they went to check their emails. He had basically remembered it correctly, but it was the lines that followed that now struck him viscerally, with an almost unbearable realism. They are destroyed from morning to evening: they perish for ever without any regarding it. Jonah thought of the students he had left behind in Brooklyn. He tried to think of something else.
* * *
—
The weather was gorgeous, the city humming with life. Octavio and Jonah wandered, saying little, trapped in a daze. Eventually they ended up in a café in Copacabana watching a telenovela called Paraíso Tropical. That night Barthes didn’t come home. She left them a message saying she would be at the hospital and that she didn’t know when she would be back. The next night there was no word from her, and they assumed she was staying on at the hospital. Octavio got in touch with Lazaro, and he invited them to come watch a soccer game. Jonah hoped Teresa would be there.
The night was warm and the doormen of the edificios they passed were sitting on the edge of their swivel chairs, their shirts opened a button or two even more than usual, their heavy gaze not sunk into the surveillance monitors but riveted on the Japanese handheld radios broadcasting the Flamengo vs. Vasco da Gama match. You could follow its progress as you moved from building to building, bar to bar, corner to corner; it blurted out from passing taxis, from the corner grocers, seeping out of the living fabric of the city itself. Team flags and pennants appeared in windows; every other person in the street was wearing the anarchist colors of Flamengo.
The Fugitivities Page 16