At the bar they found Lazaro drinking with a group of friends and cheering on the squad. Flamengo had already opened with a scorching, if opportunistic, golazo by Renato setting the Maracanã Stadium on fire.
Octavio was in his element, and immediately fell in with the group, yelling about the qualities of the various players, annotating the progression of the play with his sweeping gestures, entering into passionate dispute with anyone and everyone, singing the heroics of Ronaldinho and the young Argentine Lionel Messi, poised to bring glory to Barcelona. Teresa wasn’t there.
Jonah pretended to be involved, but he couldn’t match Octavio’s fluency, and in its presence he had a creeping sense of isolation. In the dance halls, when the sambas came on, the dividedness only deepened. On the one hand, the rhythms connected; a wall of sound, the battery of drums crashing with a relentless, implacable sweep. The whole thing was suffused with African synchronicity. But the vocals were another matter. It was as if each and every song were a national anthem, and every person in the crowd lifted their voice on cue. Everyone knew the words, everyone loved the same songs and sang them with the same passion, the same understandings. To be surrounded by this ecstatic chorus, and be left unsinging, was an insurmountable indicator that you were a gringo. Without the words to the sambas, without a soccer team, without becoming one with the spirit of the people, there was no way to truly be a part of the city, to be whatever it meant to be Brazilian. Eu vou torcer. He had asked Octavio to translate the words from Jorge Ben’s song for him. They meant, he explained, to cheer for, the way you cheer for a team, but more than that—because in Brazil a team is more than just a team, and soccer is more than just a game. One cheers not just for the team, but for the hope of goodwill, for peace and comprehension among men, for the beauty of women, for the garden that is the city, for the seasons and celestial science, for the green beauty of the sea, for the haven of the human heart. Jonah felt the soulfulness of this. He was in awe of its expression. But he was not of it. He could not make it his own.
14
The burning sensation of cachaça coated the back of Jonah’s throat and his head was pounding when he woke to the sound of Octavio and Barthes arguing. He was too groggy to care about the details, but her tone conveyed displeasure. He heard Octavio leaving the apartment. There was quiet for a time, and then a long strip of light along the floor coming from the bathroom. Barthes was in the shower. The room was dark. Someone had closed the shutters and the apartment was still cool, but he could see through the small slats that it was bright outside. He half dozed that way for a time, listening to the ceiling fan overhead and the shower spraying with a lulling flush.
When he opened his eyes again, he saw Barthes, or rather Barthes’s wet feet and ankles. She was wrapped in a beige towel and her hair was dripping. The air was pungent with the aroma of her soaps, and he could smell her body. The towel fell. Before he could make sense of it, she was down beside him. Running her fingers over his legs. The tips of her wet hair stringing along his chest. She whispered and he nodded. She took him in her mouth, and when he was ready, she sprang up and went to the bathroom and returned with a condom. She kissed his shoulder as he rolled it on. Her body was frailer and bonier than he had imagined. The sex was uneven, and because it was going that way it was not easy. He felt as though he had to prove something to her, perhaps something he would have wanted to prove, but not just then. And he was too conscious of wanting to be away, anywhere else, and with anyone else. He was also disconcerted by not knowing the sincerity of her desire for him, or her motivations, which in that moment seemed the same thing. To satisfy a curiosity, to attack her lover, or simply because she felt like it—these were not the reasons he wanted her to have, but not reason enough for him not to go along with it. Since it was happening, if it was to go that far, what he now wanted was to make Barthes come. To see something, anything, through. But her moans remained deeply ambiguous, the tow of her pleasure rising and falling away again, her breath vacillating so that he wondered if the either of them would make it. And in the very moment of wondering he felt an iron tenseness in her arms that was not pleasure but panic, or rather instinctive fear, as they heard Octavio’s voice rising in the hallway.
The first blow came in the ribs. Barthes was screaming. Two more blows came to the shoulder, the jaw. Octavio was kicking, trying to stomp the shit out of Jonah and hold off Barthes at the same time. He managed to roll away and get up. Barthes was screaming at both of them. With the towel in one hand, Jonah was trying to reason with Octavio, insisting that they take it outside. But now Octavio had turned on Barthes and was all in her face. When she refused to answer him, he tried to slap her, but she anticipated it and blocked the blow. That got Jonah back in the melee, the two struggling in a wrestling hold. Barthes joined in, kicking at them as she screamed in the center of her tiny flat, “GET OUT! The both of you! Just get out of my LIFE!”
They gave up the struggle, exhausted, and looked up dazed at Barthes, who was still trembling with rage.
“The two of you. Spoiled brats, two pathetic kids so full of themselves you don’t even see what’s going on around you. You’re an egomaniac, Octavio. And Jonah, Jesus, you’re a loser—all you do is follow him around. What are you even doing, like, with your life, other than being mopey, acting cool and shit? You’re insane. Both of you. Why did you even come here? I never asked you to come. I never asked you to visit. I never called for you to come down here and just take over my life. I’ve been making a life, my own life down here! I’ve been trying to accomplish something. Which is more than either of you ever could imagine doing for anyone!”
There was a pause. Barthes pushed her way between them and threw Octavio’s arm violently away when he reached for her as she passed. She had moved to the window, and she threw it open. The sounds of light traffic, birds chirping, and children playing flooded in with the fresh air. Her tears started to flow, which they could see made her angrier. She wiped them away before turning back to face the two still standing motionless and mute, as though waiting for her further scolding. She steadied herself.
“Do you know I made a website for the kids in my classroom so they can share their art with the world? Do you? Do either of you have any idea what it is I even do? Do you even care? Christ, you could at least have pretended to care! I learned Portuguese. I made friends, and guess what? I’ve had plenty of lovers. All of them better-mannered, better in bed, better than either of you. God. Get over yourselves. You hear me? Get over yourselves; in fact, get out of my apartment!”
At this last, Barthes crumpled down in a corner, heaving. Octavio, ignoring her command, kneeled down beside her, trying to give her his hand. She pushed him away.
“No…it’s over. I’m sorry, but it’s over. I’m leaving,” she said. “I’m leaving you and I’m leaving Rio.”
“Pero no me puedes dejar así. Mi amor. No seas así,” Octavio was saying.
“No…no, no. I can’t. I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to do this. Anymore. I’m leaving.”
“But I love you,” Octavio said, now in English.
“I don’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I did, I did at one point, actually, at several points…but I don’t anymore. I don’t know when it happened, please don’t ask when…or why…I don’t think…I don’t think that would be a productive conversation.”
Barthes got up and went over to her laptop. She opened a few windows on the screen and then began typing. Jonah looked at Octavio who had rolled over onto the floor with his back against the wall, his hair falling over his reddened eyes. His face was pathetic. He could not compose himself. There was a menacing sense of cruelty in the air.
“You know, I was just considering not even telling you, but you might as well know. Taìs died last night,” Barthes said, without turning away from her screen. “I watched her vital signs go flat. Her whole family was there, watching. There wasn’t a da
mn thing anyone could do. I’ve never heard…I never heard anyone scream like that. She was eleven. The NGO people think it was a drug soldier who did it…possibly unintentionally. Either way, it doesn’t matter now. They’re probably gonna torch the guy they think did it in a pile of tires up in the favela. That’s what I’ve been dealing with. That’s how things work around here.”
There was nothing to say. The little ball of life from the soccer game, from their walk up through the crooked streets, who was an entire world of joy in the present and full of promise for the future, was going to be buried before her twelfth birthday while they lived on. Felled for no reason, for no purpose or motive other than the fact of exposure. The misfortune of having being born in a time and place where the risks to her life were infinitely and unfairly grave, even compared to that of some other girl living in a doorman building within spitting distance from the favela Taìs had called home, who might at that very moment be watching a popular movie about the elite squads fighting the drug wars or playing with friends in her private pool.
They had no standing to give Barthes comfort, certainly not to attend the funeral. They were strangers passing through, and they had outworn their welcome. Suddenly, Barthes was banging on the hard plastic of her keyboard.
“I have to get out of here…goddammit, I have to get out of here…Shit. Shit. Shit. I’m leaving. Don’t you get it? I hate you, both of you! You bastards! I’m leaving.”
Two days later everything was settled. Maggie Reynolds’s parents eagerly paid for her ticket back to Boston. The month’s rent on her sublet was paid for in advance but Barthes insisted on leaving extra money to have the place cleaned up. The elderly lady she was renting from came by to wish her well and when they embraced Barthes began to apologize and then burst into tears, and then apologized for her embarrassing display. The old woman hugged her, patted her back, and told her not to worry.
Octavio wanted to take Barthes to the airport, but she refused. They helped her pack her things and carried her luggage down to the taxi waiting on the rua Gustavo Sampaio.
When the taxi was out of sight, the hapless Americans walked to the Avenida Princesa Isabel and stood with their bags on the corner. They were homeless, they had nowhere to go. Octavio peeled a banana. Jonah felt in his pocket for a lighter and lit a cigarette. To their left the beach stretched out to meet the waves. The crowds were coming out for the afternoon, and most of the people heading up the Copacabana strip were giving themselves to the sun. A light breeze rustled the awnings of the coconut-vendor stands. To their right the wide avenue of commercial banks and hotels on Princesa Isabel led to the ugly yellow mouth of a tunnel.
“What do you want to do?” Jonah asked.
“We follow the plan. We’ll go south.”
“What plan? South where?”
“Florianópolis. Porto Alegre. I’m not going to let this define me. I have come too far, and I intend to go farther.”
“Don’t you think we should go back? What’s the point of going on now?”
“You can go your own way if you want. I don’t need you.”
“I’m sorry, Octavio.”
“Cállate! I refuse to talk to you about that. Do you understand? In other circumstances I would have you tried like Che did the counterrevolutionaries at La Cabaña. But now is not the time for tribunals. Now is the hour for decisive action. We must go like Martí to the Battle of Dos Ríos. To meet our fate.”
“You mean we’re going to die?”
“No. I mean we still have a reason to live.”
“What—”
“Too many questions! We’ll need to conserve our resources. Or find a way to make some quick easy money. I’m running low on funds. An intolerable situation, especially in our precarious position, which you put us in!”
“Well, I can loan you some money if—”
“Excellent. Buy my bus ticket and we’ll call it even. For now.”
PART THREE
Nous avons goûté, aux heures de miracle, une certaine qualité des relations humaines: là est pour nous la vérité.
—ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY
I’m in Berlin, writing to you from my favorite café on Weichselstraße near the canal. My work meetings are dull and endless, of course; but as soon as they end, I become an enchanted wanderer in this city. I sail down the hushed boulevards of Kreuzberg. I stand in awe before the Gates of Ishtar, visit with Tiye and Nefertiti. Even the bone-headed students from all over Europe spending their Erasmus money on cheap beer and techno have a cheerful innocence about them. Everyone clicks along in a timely fashion like the yellow cars of the U-Bahn on their viaducts. And yet nobody ever seems rushed to get anywhere or do anything. There’s a kind of parallel time here, a gritty but lovable heart murmur that everyone agrees not to notice, like an underworld in daylight. A realm of libertine nights. I’ve been wanting to tell you about how I slept with another girl. Does it surprise you? I mean, my acting this way? I don’t even know her name. I met her at a new club they’ve set up in the old gasworks. We were both smashed. She had this wonderful deep voice, and she was saying all this stuff to me in German, which I was too out of it to really understand. She was cool with leaving together. We walked, I swear it felt like miles, and at one point we ran into some friends of hers. I thought they were her friends but then it seemed like she was going to get into a fight, and I realized it was because they were making fun of me. We stopped at this sausage place and I needed to pee, but they wouldn’t let me in, and she started yelling at them and we ended up getting thrown out and peeing between some cars. When we finally got back to her place it turned out to be gorgeous, full of plants and mirrors, and these big atelier windows that she nudged open, letting in the plush summer daybreak. I was thinking we would pass out, but she lit a cigarette and watched me and waited. Right away it was more intense and very different from what I’ve known with Mariam. In my mind it went on for hours—who knows how long it really was—but eventually I blacked out. When I finally came around, I knew I was going to be sick. Ran to what I thought was the bathroom but was actually the kitchen and heaved all over her sink. It was bad! I was shivering, trying to get it together, and all I could think about was Mariam. Trying to compose a text message to her in my head to send later. But for a split second I didn’t know at all who I was. I did know, but it also felt like I didn’t. And I stumbled around this apartment getting my things together, and there’s this stunning girl lying naked in her bed. I’m looking at her and I hate myself because I know I’m hurting Mariam even if she never knows. And I’m walking out on this girl I just met. Would you blame me? Did I screw up? I swear I’m ready to be in love. I used to think I didn’t want it to happen, I mean the confusion and neediness of it. But I’m feeling more and more that it would be better than the confusion that I feel without it. What I’m afraid of is letting myself make it that serious, of taking it there with Mariam, especially if she won’t feel the same way. I worry she won’t. I worry that she sees me as a fun thing, not a life partner. But how can anyone know? I’m ready for a change, I just don’t want to ruin what’s good about my life already. What do you think I should do? If you were here, I know we would walk through the city and talk it out. I would show you the trams rolling past Zionskirchplatz, and the little bridge in Neukölln where the swans come to sleep at night. The green water in the canals. They remind me of my Indre. If I could, I would bring you there one day and show you the bridge outside the town that my grandfather lined with dynamite in the summer of ’44. My Indre, moving so slow you can follow a leaf on foot. As I send you this letter, I think of its waters as a poem, a hymn to the globe between us. My sweet Jonah, you are always so far away. I imagine you bounding across the great southern night like Saint-Ex in his aeroplane. But I can always recognize the lonely boy that I know, the little prince who is still probably madly in love with me despite everything. Look at the two of us, in love with
our idle, fickle wanderings. Sometimes I wish I could do or be one thing sincerely. Have my motion fixed in space. Like the Indre, which goes only in one direction and takes its time and knows its place and is loved for some reasons that we can say, and some that we can’t.
—A
15
Thick rolling forests of palms, large patches of them charred and covered in chalky stumps of ash, yielded to flatland, then badland, horizon-spanning swatches of rust-red earth stretching out to mountains that must have formed when the ocean shoved the continents apart and the land bid farewell to Angola, home of the human cargo who would journey back across the waters in chains. The wheezing bus advanced, road conditions worsening as it plunged farther south, the monotony of travel hours bleeding out.
When Jonah woke it was raining. Curtains of water swept across the windows of the bus as it sloshed through murky streets. They had arrived overnight in another distant city. He clenched his teeth and stared out the dark window. Beside him, still curdled with Barthes’s contempt, was Octavio, his body wracked by spasms of inconclusive origin.
They were in Porto Alegre, the capital of a federal state called Rio Grande do Sul. The Great Southern River. They had traveled to a city they did not know, with no plan for where to go, without a friend to call, or a reason to stay. In the fetid air of the crowded bus station they studied a cheap and poorly printed tourist map they’d bought from a black boy in a Yankees baseball cap. Octavio decided they should aim for the Albergue Rialto, located close enough to what appeared to be the city center.
The Fugitivities Page 17