At the Rialto the rates were cheap, made even more so by the favorable exchange rate, and they took a room with two cots, a sink with a mirror, and a small table desk. Most important and improbable of all, there was a “business center” in the hallway with an old desktop that provided internet for guests. The room had a window that opened onto a courtyard with some trash cans, an old wall covered in growing vines, and the hanging laundries of an adjacent apartment block.
Octavio was feverish, and for the first time during their trip Jonah began to worry about him. Even though the weather was temperate, the man was pale and sweating and refused to eat. Jonah went in search of soup and juices and when he returned some hours later, he found that Octavio had gone down the street and procured his own medicine of choice: yerba maté, or chimarrão, as they called it locally. He had bought the necessary gourd and was imbibing the stuff like a hydrating sports beverage. Having commandeered the desk, he spent hours hunched over it like a scrivener, muttering phrases that sounded like incantations in Spanish, Portuguese, and French, followed by a nasty suction upon the gourd’s metallic straw as his sallow cheeks puckered, the bitter green flowed, and his addiction grew. Octavio’s physical state, to say nothing of his mental condition, made further planning impossible, and they agreed to stay put at least until the end of the week to see if his condition improved. Jonah was concerned for him, but no matter how much he wanted to help, Octavio was verging on unbearable. He moaned and talked to himself in different languages through the night; worse still, he was constantly rising with sharp cries of pain and stumbling in the dark to urinate with loud splashy relief.
Between the two of them they had already amassed a small library of Brazilian poetry, though most of it remained unread. Jonah had hoped to practice occasional translation to acquaint himself with the words, but Octavio was becoming obsessive in his feverish way. He would lie in bed all through the morning reading slim, often incredibly rare volumes that Lazaro had recommended to him. Lazaro knew book dealers and handlers who operated from their homes, and against Jonah’s advice to remain in bed and rest, Octavio insisted on going out into the city alone to make specific purchases, as though dealing in highly sensitive contraband. He seemed to have gotten it into his head that he should have an edge on Jonah, and he made cryptic maté-fueled warnings to the effect that the books were his personal property, and he hoarded them accordingly, stuffing them under his shirts at the bottom of his travel bag. In just a few days Octavio had snagged a rare printing by the black poet João da Cruz e Sousa, one of Lazaro’s recommendations, an obscure Symbolist of the late nineteenth century who died of consumption in poverty and neglect. The next day he was obsessed with a volume of tropical haikus by Paulo Leminski, who wrote a biography of Trotsky and translated Bashō before drinking himself into oblivion. But his most revered discovery was a rare collection by Ana Cristina César, who threw herself out of a window in 1983 in the nineteenth year of the dictatorship. The same year and month, Octavio noted, that he had been born at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan.
Jonah decided to do his best to steer clear. He spent late evenings online in the “business center,” writing emails to Arna and Isaac and reading up on news from home.
It was uniformly depressing. The war in Iraq was going badly. Even the stalwart bureaucrats and blabbering policy wonks grinning their way through the morning shows were starting to admit that they were wrong. They had miscalculated. They had lied from the beginning through Colin Powell, who had done the state some service. His loyalty was exploited and he was being forced to take the tarnish as the story fell apart. This was the news—avarice and hubris smothering the future like burning oil wells. In New Orleans the black neighborhoods drowned by Katrina were still in ruins, most folks still displaced across neighboring states, some still in shelters, the stench of needless death extended by a spiking murder rate. The bumbling president was still insisting the government had done everything it could to help. The number of controversial police shootings was growing. Another kid had gone berserk and shot up a college campus, leaving scores of dead bodies in classrooms and hallways. It was said to be the worst shooting of its kind in American history. Talking heads warned there would be more to come as “copycats” stocked up their weaponry.
Arna was in Poland, according to her typically brief email update. Reading between the lines, it sounded like the first hairline fractures of disillusionment with her job had started to appear. The email didn’t suggest she was unhappy, but possibly that she had a better sense of the difference between what she had expected the job would be and what it actually was. He would have to wait until he could read one of her real letters to find out more. Isaac’s email was characteristically laconic. His take on the media frenzy over the massive school shooting: “Nothing new under the sun, chief—just another day in America.”
Jonah was often up late clicking aimlessly through screens that loaded with a sluggishness that made the experience brutally hypnotic, so he tended to wake up late, sometimes around noon when Octavio was already gone. He left behind the traces of his ongoing mania. A mound of reeking maté filled the trash can. Greenish-yellow dribbles keyed the sink. Normally, Octavio stashed his writings away with his books in his personal affairs, but one morning Jonah woke to find Octavio’s journal still resting on the little desk. Checking the hall to make sure he wasn’t around, Jonah returned and rifled through some pages. With a sense of curiosity and some alarm, he skipped back to the first one, squinting hard to decipher the dense Vesalian microscript.
Perhaps it is my turn. The hour of my madness. Santa Yemanja! She has brought me to this—to this!! Te acalma, minha loucura, I hear you, Ana Cristina. But is it even my fault? From my Asturian forefathers who came for the money. Who came feverish for cruzeiros. Didn’t I inherit? A case of King George’s disease? Across the world for money. Oro y plata for a Habsburg plate. Silver and gold for a Habsburg jaw. O yes! Cienfuegos men and women. My people in the centrifuge of history. Navel of Las Américas. Immortal Martí standing at the waters of the Contramaestre, the blood of the soldiers Quintín Bandera and Antonio Maceo, son of Mariana, mother and warrior, Paulina Pedroso “madre negra” de Martí, patriots of 1895, of the Grito de Baire, forged in Santiago, raised out of the generations that came in chains in the galleons and brought the African gods of the slaves Xangô and Ochún and Obá into the green hills of Guantanamera where the flowers of the virgin Guadalupe come into the songs of the people and inspire the feast days of San Juan, the tumbadoras calling forth the dancers into the square …ay, que linda la mélodia, sweetness of the rumba flaring like the heat of a wound in the open sea, el mar, el mar…elle est retrouvé…moi…l´éternité…for what was I a century ago? what am I today? Vagamundo. I only understand revolt, my voice planted in its wild survivors, the whole island entire, planted like Virgilio Piñera says, los pueblos y sus historias en boca de todo el pueblo…so what do I care if I come from an inferior race? A race blasted by science, a race the technocrats will always want to do away with, just as even now, someone, somewhere, is scheming to rid the world of blacks. To rid the world of all tropical tribes, to do away with once and for all those who refuse to be regulated, who refuse to work, who refuse to behave, who refuse the orders of the police, refuse the orders of the Big Men. Barthes could know nothing of this, she could never understand…I lost my mind for her anyway. And yet how she stays! O cheiro inebriante dos cabelos…O Ana Cristina, she has destroyed me so wonderfully, so exquisitely…I call on Cruz e Sousa, coração, tristíssimo palhaço…the heart a sad clown. But I go to Martí again…as one must…para aquel que ha logrado imprimir su pensamiento en la mente de los hombres, la muerte no existe, la muerte es un galardón—for he who has imprinted his thinking on the minds of other men, death does not exist, death is a wreath of honor. Will I go too far one day? I will go too far. Then they will come for me. Power always does. I will tell them what they cannot hear. I am the wild one. The Savag
e. The Poet. The Last of the Last. What could I do? Was it not the madness, the malady of kings, of my—
“Pinche pendejo!”
Octavio had opened the door before Jonah had time to put the journal away.
“What’s this shit about, Octavio?” he said, brazenly.
“What’s it about? You steal my girl, now you spy on my work! You’re so jealous of my success that you can’t help yourself? You can’t even mind your own business?”
“I’m traveling with you. You are my business. Look, man, I’m getting a bit worried about you.”
“You should be worried about yourself. I should beat you then leave you by the side of the road!”
Octavio snatched his journal back and glared at Jonah like he would hit him. If it was going to come to blows, Octavio would have the upper hand.
“Calm down. Look, man, you’re unwell, I don’t just mean with a flu or whatever it is—you’re a mess, I mean look at you. Your skin is practically the color of that shit you’re drinking. C’mon, man, let’s get out of here and go see some sights along the river. That’s what we’re here to do, isn’t it? Maybe there’s a bookstore where you can re-up on some poets. I’ll buy you a poetry book. Whatever you want as long as it’s not more Rimbaud or any other tragic poet who died young. Just, let’s go, yeah?”
Octavio looked at Jonah and then back at his journal. He flipped through a few pages, then tossed it on the desk.
“All right then, a truce, but don’t think I’m not gonna remember this, Jonah. Don’t think you can just slip out of this shit, cabrón…”
In Porto Alegre the jacaranda trees were in bloom and puddles of purple blossoms rounded the dark trunks all along the quiet streets of Bom Fim. Jonah and Octavio strolled around a park and examined the area around the university before turning and making their way back to the city center. There, close to the banks of the Guaíba River, they came across the semi-enclosed terrace of a grand former waterfront hotel—the Majestic. The building was an art-deco palazzo painted pink, spruced up and converted into a cultural center named for the poet Mário Quintana, with a café, a cinema, a bookshop, and a multivalent space for contemporary artists. Jonah examined the movie-house marquee. They were showing a film by one of the old French New Wave directors who was still alive and working, a nostalgic black-and-white remembrance of Parisian youth and revolutionary aspiration in the heady days of May 1968. Jonah was pleased to see that it was being projected on thirty-five-millimeter film. They paid forty-five reais each and went in.
The theater was empty. They decided to sit three rows from the screen, dead center. As the dark and grainy images swept over them, Jonah felt the languor of Paris. A jump cut between worlds. The lead actress, who played a young sculptress more in love with her art than with politics, had a mischievous intensity that reminded him of Arna. Octavio was entirely entranced by the actor who played her love interest, a morose poète maudit whose death was the inevitable and symbolic price to be paid for the tattered dreams of a failed revolution. When the lights came back on, they made their way up the aisle past the only other person in the theater, a young woman who must have entered late and taken up a seat in the very last row. They exchanged glances, but she remained seated, her eyes returning to the rolling credits.
They were sharing a cigarette outside the theater when she emerged. From the way she dressed, Jonah figured she was an art student. She spoke to them in Portuguese and Octavio answered “Pois não,” and handed her a smoke. She said something back to Octavio in Portuguese, which erupted into a discussion that Jonah struggled to follow. Then Octavio gestured at Jonah and himself. “New York,” he said.
The woman started sputtering scattershot words in English that had the lovely and strange coloring of her Latin cognates. It was obvious that her English was as poor as Jonah’s Portuguese. She smiled gallantly. She said something to Jonah in Portuguese, but Octavio beat him to a reply. “I told her you don’t speak Portuguese very well,” he said. Jonah attempted to rebut this claim with some imitations of the native tongue. Her smile turned into a concentrated frown. Octavio again came to his rescue and translated for Jonah as they attempted to discuss the film they had just seen. It wasn’t until Octavio told the woman that Jonah had also lived in Paris that they found a common tongue. “Tu parles français, alors,” he said.
“Oui…mmm, un peu,” she said. At that, they both burst out laughing.
The three of them entered into a conversation where everything had to be translated to someone, and eventually the person least translated to was Jonah.
The woman was slightly older, he guessed; it was hard to say because her features were youthful, but something around the eyes and about the way she carried herself suggested her age. She was dark-haired and rocked gently on her feet when she talked. He could see Octavio picking up on the same things. In fact, he seemed enthralled, if somewhat subdued. Octavio was trying to summarize what they were doing in Porto Alegre, and he was struggling because she seemed only increasingly puzzled, if also amused, by these wayward Americans.
“Tourism, tourism.” She kept nodding and pointing at them.
And Octavio, in a panic, kept trying to nuance the label. “Traveling,” he said. Viagem.
She didn’t seem to buy it, but she didn’t mind either. She turned to Jonah directly and surprised him with an entirely different question: Did he like Beyoncé? She was a huge fan of American music. Jonah wearied of being the ambassador for black America, but he was happy to indulge her.
“She’s our queen,” he said with a smile. “Tell her,” he relayed to Octavio, “that to paraphrase the great Keith Murray, when we see her shine we feel like we’re all the most beautifullest person in this world.”
Octavio gave him a look and was coming up with a deflection that would bring things back to him, but she looked straight at Jonah with a smile and simply said, “I understood you are saying…I think so too.” This placed the momentum back with Jonah, who now took a different line but one he hoped would make clear something about where they were coming from.
“Tell her,” he said to Octavio, “that when you are coming from the United States, being in South America can feel like visiting the scene of a crime.”
Octavio was game, and she absorbed this even more intently, her attention now fixed on Jonah.
“Tell her there is no place in Latin America where it can feel good to be a gringo,” he said. This led to an awkward pause between the three of them.
Then she spoke, but too quickly for Jonah to make it out. “What did she say?” he asked Octavio.
“She said Americans are imperialists who have a lot of blood on their hands. But a lot of that blood is at home and not just abroad. She respects the black people of America because they have been so strong in the face of everything. She says they are an example for the world, and that is why she, like everyone, turns to them and loves their culture.”
“Tell her I appreciate that,” Jonah said. He did appreciate it; he also noticed that she was still looking at Octavio in a way that was different, that meant something more, and he decided to make the diplomatic move and excuse himself. “I’ll catch you back at the Rialto,” he told Octavio. To the woman he gave a simple salut, but she insisted on pulling him toward her and kissing him on the cheeks and, as he leaned in, his nose got caught up in the fragrant mass of her dark curls.
It was late when Octavio returned, and Jonah was now the one reading poems in bed. Octavio unpacked his washing kit and prepared to shave. Since leaving Rio, Octavio had let his beard grow, and now he seemed to take pleasure blading it off in front of their small mirror.
“You have a good time?” Jonah asked casually.
“With Francesca? Yeah.”
“Francesca, got it. What did you all get into?”
“We had coffee in the café at the cultural center. She was over the moon when I told her I had
been reading Clarice Lispector, her favorite writer. She even bought me a copy of one of her books right there at the store.”
From a bag, Octavio pulled out a green book with the illustration of an undersea coral on the front and handed it to Jonah. He opened it up to the title page, where he noticed that Francesca had written her full name, Francesca Meireles, followed by her digits. He flipped to the first page and read aloud the Portuguese: “É com uma alegria tão profunda. É uma tal aleluia.”
Octavio’s face had regained its color, and now he even seemed to be glowing. “It’s with such profound happiness. Such a hallelujah,” he translated proudly.
“Sounds amazing,” said Jonah, a little more flatly than he intended.
“Francesca?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s more than that! She’s…well, you know what, man, you can find out for yourself. Because she’s invited us, both of us, to a gallery reception at the Pinacoteca tomorrow.”
The next evening, they met Francesca on the second floor of a beautiful open-plan art gallery. Octavio and Jonah both wore ties, but the effect didn’t come off as classy as they had hoped. Their accessories had been hopelessly creased in their luggage, Octavio’s shirts were lightly stained, and neither of them had jackets. Francesca didn’t seem to mind. She spoke in Portuguese, with a sprinkling of French art terms, as she walked them around the room, pointing out prints, acrylic paintings, installations that merited attention. Her own work was on display in one corner. She had cut out speech bubbles from local comic strips and used a magnifier to blow them up to canvas size before filling them with a collage of images of politicians, pop and movie stars (there was Beyoncé), newspaper clippings, old maps, sea charts, fashion icons, parts of wild animals, and zigzagging lines of pastel coloring that connected or bisected the fragments so that the whole thing had a kind of televised talismanic quality. She was proud of her work, and when she explained it to Octavio, their glances would invariably latch onto each other and she would turn away hurriedly and show them another piece. The place was crowded, and eventually they all ended up separating so that Francesca could greet people while Jonah and Octavio wandered on their own.
The Fugitivities Page 18