“Does she know about dinosaurs?” he asked Francesca.
“A little bit, we haven’t learned their names, but she knows about them.”
“Tell Paolina we don’t have lions and zebras in America, at least not anymore. But a long time ago, Africa and America were actually all one big piece of land stuck together, and back then we had some of the biggest animals that there ever were: the dinosaurs. They were ferocious but they all died when the Earth got hit by a large rock from space.”
This took Francesca a while to relate but it seemed to leave a strong impression on the child, and she remained quiet for a long time. Her doughy legs were draped over his thigh and her wondering head rested on Francesca’s hip.
They were climbing through green mountains. They passed a small white church and a long wooden-slatted hall, and then turned up a smaller dirt path that led up to a large sort of bungalow and, beside it, a stable. “We’re here,” Euclides announced with magisterial authority. “In the arms of the Serra do Mar.”
Euclides had built the house himself. He showed them where he got the wooden beams for the frame from a grove of faveira trees. He had used a large trunk that fell in a storm to build a support for his veranda. The whole house had more or less the shape of a wide boot, with a roof patched together from different materials that sloped upward, culminating in the kitchen in the back and its stove-pipe chimney. In the entranceway there was a vestibule stocked with riding gear: saddles, harnesses, heavy wool wraps, stirrups and packs, leather boots and spurs, and embroidered Paraguayan blankets. At the other end of the room there was a shrine for Euclides’s patron saints: Jesus, Che Guevara, and Lenin. Euclides had a small bookshelf as well, upon which were mounted several distinguished volumes, including books by Eduardo Galeano, the poems of Langston Hughes, The Count of Monte Cristo, and an elegant clothbound edition of Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas. The Americans made a point of showing their familiarity with the great Machado de Assis.
“One of the great black writers of all time,” Euclides mused, gazing lovingly at the tattered spine. “But,” and now he turned, with special attention to Jonah, “not a great writer of blackness. No…not a writer of blackness at all. The greatest Brazilian novelist—a black man born half a century before the abolition of slavery in his own land…and what does he write about? The flings and pangs of aristocrats…the little underwear affairs of the empire! Yes, I’m afraid it’s true! Nothing on the enslavement of his forefathers! A man of magnificent, innovative genius…maybe the only thinking man to emerge from that slumbering sick empire in exile…and he could not even talk…about himself. What he might have done with Palmares! What a Monte Cristo we could have had if he had looked to Zumbi for a hero! If he had the courage…to imagine the free slave societies of the Quilombos! I tell you, my friends…I have thought on these things a long time. A hero must have his labyrinth…a true hero struggles through one alone. But I have come to the conclusion that the labyrinth of the black hero has no exit.”
Before preparing dinner Euclides took them out to the stable to see his horse. As they approached, the animal became very agitated. But Euclides cooed and sweet-talked his way inside. It was dim in the stable and the only thing you could see was a giant watery eye staring out of the darkness. It belonged to a dapper chestnut criollo named Garibaldi. They stood and watched as Euclides brushed down Garibaldi’s neck, soothing him until only a little wreath of steam periodically appeared from his gray nostrils.
“I have always believed that a man is made complete by a horse,” Euclides confessed. “I can’t help it. In my blood, in my spirit, I am a gaucho. Sometimes I feel that I am even a horse myself,” he said laughing.
They heard a shout and turned to see an old black man walking up the path toward the house carrying an enormous bundle of branches. He was wearing a tattered poncho and walking steadily in dust-colored sandals. As he neared, they could see that the bundle he was carrying was lashed together with rope that rose almost four feet above his head and extended behind and over his back so that he looked almost like a snail in its shell.
“Oi, Orígenes!”
The two men engaged each other in a hearty greeting. Francesca looked on attentively. Jonah looked at Octavio, who looked back to confirm that he could not understand a word the old black man was saying. His words slurred into each other in a way that made his speech impossible to follow. After a moment it was clear that Orígenes wanted to ask Octavio something. But Octavio didn’t understand, and so he smiled, and the two became stuck in each other’s perplexity. Euclides explained that Orígenes wanted to know if he and Jonah were brothers.
Octavio looked at Jonah. “No. No, we’re not brothers. We’re friends. We’re visiting Francesca. We have been traveling through the country.”
Orígenes looked incredulous. He started to laugh and wheeze as the branches creaked over his back. Euclides invited the old man to join them for a beer, but Orígenes declined, saying that he had more work to do, that a drink was a bad idea for him, that he had stopped drinking, more or less. More or less? Euclides prodded. Mostly chimarrão now, Orígenes clarified. Euclides nodded approvingly. And with that Orígenes moved off into the dusk, climbing up the hill behind the house along a line of cashew trees.
That night they cooked together, raising a hot ruckus in the kitchen. They were making a feijoada. First off, the sausage bits. Euclides cut the slices roundly, their faces mottled and rouged. Francesca cut up morsels of beef and oxtail, peeling away translucent strips of fat. Octavio worked on chopping onions, peppers, and garlic, and Jonah peeled carrots and potatoes. Paolina sat on the counter and, in her own manner, exhorted the workers to greater productivity. When the stew was ready, a small dune of farofa was added to each plate and served hot.
After dinner Euclides produced a bottle of clear cachaça and held forth on his two favorite subjects, politics and the past. He described his efforts to promote land reform laws that would eventually allow Orígenes to own a portion of the land that he had worked his whole life. But he explained that there were complications in the contracts of land ownership and inheritance that he had so far not been able to overcome. A second story was about his father, whom he referred to as Francesca’s grandfather. The old man had been an important figure in the movement, and fairly radical. The military chief in charge of her grandfather’s region had leftist sympathies. He arranged for sentences to be lightened or commuted. He wanted order, but he wanted his orders executed cleanly, without blood. So, at first, her grandfather was placed under house arrest.
“I could tell you a thousand stories about that time,” Euclides said proudly. “The greatest stories are all from those days. How he fooled the guards to attend secret meetings using coded language on the telephone, signals and messages passed in toothpaste…It became almost like a game. But eventually the leadership changed and sometime around ’78 they decided a heavier hand was necessary. A new station chief was brought in from Brasília. They started to torture people. He would never talk about it, but I know from people who went in with him, the ones who came out…They strapped him to a bed frame in a basement of the police station. They brought in a little generator and a voltmeter. Then they taped electrodes to his testicles. My father was tortured like this. You have to understand, when you go through something like that…you never forget.”
Euclides was a man who took great pride in telling tales the way they should be told, at length and with notable digression, with recurring motifs and luminous surprises. But women always had the best stories, he said. Best because they were all true. They were the only ones who ever knew the truth, and who could still remember the stories of their mothers and hand them down in ways that allowed their truth to pass on—just enough truth, passed down through the generations so that the crookedness of men would never completely triumph.
After she had put Paolina to bed, Francesca joined Jonah for a cigarette on the veranda. Oc
tavio was exhausted and had decided to turn in; he agreed to keep an eye on Paolina, who was still whimpering a little.
They sat smoking under the moths gathered along the sides of the house and over the screen door. The view on a clear night up in the Serra do Mar was sublime. Francesca moved away from the lights of the house and Jonah followed her. The grass was cool and dry underfoot. When they were far away enough, she motioned for him to sit down with her. Orion was lifting a leg over the ridgeline. Cool air passed over their bodies, and in the dark, he felt her hand feeling its way to his and then up to his arm. But she wasn’t pulling him to her. It was more, he realized, that she was holding onto him, almost for support. She spoke very slowly. “I am thinking…he will go away again…you too…and…I will be in pain when he goes…I’m afraid for this.”
Jonah thought on this carefully. “Yeah, I gotta go sooner or later—probably sooner—but Octavio, I don’t know…I can’t speak for him.” He watched her face, gazing out into the inky darkness of the valley below them.
“I have already had some man leaving me. I want to be happy…and Paolina…I don’t want her to see always men coming and going.” She dropped her head for a moment, but she raised it again. He couldn’t tell if she was crying.
“I think it would be better if I left Porto Alegre,” Jonah said.
She seemed to think on this gravely. And then said, “But then he will go with you…you will leave me both alone.”
“No, it doesn’t have to be that way,” he insisted. “I just think it’s probably best for me to give you space to be together, if that’s what you want.”
There was no reply to this, and they stayed that way a long time staring into the starry night, until with a start she leaned over, kissed him softly on the cheek, brushed his face with her hand, and walked back to the house without waiting for him to follow.
17
When Jonah awoke, he could hear Octavio singing Spanish in the shower. He found Francesca and Paolina in the kitchen making breakfast together and talking. They had been out that morning in the orchards and they had gathered a bowl of black marbles that turned out to be jaboticaba berries. There was a glowing force that radiated in Francesca when she was caring for her daughter. He was struck by her fearlessness, if that’s what it was—some deeply humane folly. Parenting was the most common activity in the entire world, happening all the time, and yet he couldn’t fathom how or where a human got the courage and the mental resiliency to keep track of all the possible risks, monitor and arrange for every contingency and danger, know how to do what Francesca did every day.
Jonah thought of his own mother and father. They hadn’t spoken since he had left New York. He knew his email inbox was full of pleading emails from his mother, and threatening emails from his father, demanding to know his whereabouts. But he never responded. He simply read them and kept going. Eventually they sent fewer missives. He still regularly received junk mail, mindless top-ten lists, scam promotions, links to humorous headlines and videos. His father forwarded or copied him on increasingly bizarre and angry letters to gallery owners, accountants, and tax attorneys, or on salacious jokes between old buddies who had washed up like him and were angry at the whole world. He couldn’t help but feel that the voiceless emails and the forwarded flotsam actually made them feel more distant. The concerns of their world, the one that he was really from, sounded trivial and more annoying than ever. The tone of things was increasingly ferocious and tinny, the content derisory and manic. His folks had their faults and contradictions, but they had also come up with these huge revolutionary clashes to fight over and take sides on, and rightly or wrongly they had lived under the sway of a historical dynamic that seemed to matter, that you could understand and take a position on. He had grown up knowing only different things, and they stayed apart, fragmented.
Everyone he knew was like this—busy trying to figure out some way through the web, barely taking the time to know each other. But the real time, the clock of the world, ticked off the hours indifferent to their confusion. Life was what it was, no longer or shorter or richer or sweeter here or anywhere else but made up only of what you had really touched, known, believed, sweated your tiny cup of being into. Francesca and Paolina were each other’s world, and had to be, at least for now. But what a rich life they had. Francesca refused to let mothering stand in the way of her enjoyment of whatever she wanted in her life, whether it was her friends, her art (even if it wasn’t likely to lead to a career), seeking out men and sleeping with them if she pleased. It was impossible to be indifferent to this prowess, her ability to burn with a soft, ribbonlike flame. To find the path that took in more with less.
* * *
—
The next day Euclides took Garibaldi out riding and left a note saying that he would return by nightfall. The day was open to them, and they decided to go for a walk in the mountains. They started up the hill behind the house, passing under the cashew trees and winding up a little mountain pass. In places the climb was steep and rocky, and Francesca carried Paolina on her shoulders. She picked her way around loose rocks, hiking uphill with her daughter’s little hands wrapped around her forehead. She moved with serene confidence, talking to her daughter the whole time, pointing out flowers and beetles and bees as they went along. They passed over a ridge. On the far side sugarcane fields extended on a long descending slope as far as the eye could see. The green stalks sashayed under the breeze, rustling like water.
Francesca guided them down along the side of the field. Ahead, they could hear the tack-tack of a machete and the hiss of falling cane leaves. It was Orígenes. They stopped to say hello. Jonah and Octavio still couldn’t understand him when he spoke. Francesca explained that Orígenes was saying again that the two Americans were brothers. Octavio said that perhaps because they had been traveling together for some time, they had acquired that kind of knowing way about each other that siblings have. Orígenes considered this and then spoke.
Francesca said that Orígenes understood this, but that all the same he could see they were brothers. What were the chances, he said, of the two of them being here, and all of them meeting on the mountain, in the scheme of the world made under God’s vast heavens?
Octavio nodded in solemn agreement.
Orígenes continued after a moment, and, for a while, Francesca went on translating haltingly. Jonah tried to follow as best he could. Orígenes was talking about souls, the soul having clothes, or not having them…or souls needing clothes when they got too far from the heat of the creator…souls putting on bodies the way people put on different coats in the winter…going from one body to another…to animals too…everything going back to where it came from. And then Orígenes stopped and looked at them expectantly.
“What was that last thing?” Octavio asked.
Francesca thought for a moment as she translated in her head. “Orígenes says that even the most wayward souls come from God and so even the most wayward souls have to go back to Him, and so there is a confusion—or, how do you say—contradiction, in the idea of Hell…because God is all-powerfulness and infinite love, and so it must be that all souls go back to Him. All souls are eventually saved, he says, even the Devil’s. All souls are brothers, you two and all of us here together share of the same soul. And all of it will be saved, he says, at the end of time.”
Paolina wanted her mother to let her down, but Francesca felt they should move on. Octavio wanted to try cutting a sugarcane stalk. Orígenes showed him how to cut the end of the stalk and chew out the juice.
With that, they thanked Orígenes and he shouted farewells as they moved on deeper into the valley. As they marched Octavio sang in Spanish for Paolina. She squealed with delight when he sang, and as soon as he ran out of steam she demanded more, clapping her hands wildly as Francesca tried to concentrate on walking.
They came to a field of tall grass. Francesca put Paolina down and let her chase Jonah aro
und in a game of tag while she and Octavio held each other and kissed. Suddenly Paolina was wailing. Jonah crouched beside her, awkwardly patting her back. She had a small cut on her forehead, a streak over her eye. It was a fine, superficial cut. Francesca licked the blood away, laughed, and soothed her. Paolina soon calmed, looking into space for a while, a little stunned.
Jonah was mortified. “I’ve hurt her,” he kept saying. He was overreacting. Octavio knew why and he tried to reassure him. They were thinking of Taís. They had talked about her only once since leaving Rio de Janeiro. They never would again.
Octavio gave Paolina some sugarcane to chew on. Francesca disapproved but didn’t say anything. They stopped on the way home to pull up wild garlic for dinner. Paolina demanded more and more sugarcane to suck on, and Octavio shaved off more pieces and obliged sheepishly. By the time they got back and started cooking, Paolina not only sang but also banged on everything, shrieking repeatedly in her mother’s face even when she was told not to. Francesca seemed exhausted. Jonah struggled to keep Paolina distracted and out of the way. Euclides had not returned. Francesca told them that it was normal, and that they shouldn’t worry. Sometimes he decided to camp out on his own on the mountainside. Sometimes he went to find one of his women. He would be back sooner or later.
After dinner Francesca tried to put Paolina to bed, but it was useless. The girl would start bawling and wouldn’t stop unless her mother came and stayed by her side until she fell asleep. When she finally could get away, it was late and chilly outside. She joined Octavio and Jonah on the veranda, and for a time they huddled and chatted together like old friends. It was hard not look up at the stars, so clear at this elevation. To think of the world, and the sky, all those colorful spinning tops Jonah knew from the Hubble foldouts in National Geographic. He had read that the spiral arm of the Milky Way would one day reach the bend of Andromeda, and the two great puddles of stars would commingle a while, before returning into a void with no boundary at all, only an infinite thicket, like a wild jaboticaba tree climbing the visible realm, its billions of candescent branches fanning out through space and time. Perhaps Orígenes was right. On the other hand, he was still a black man laboring in a sugarcane field, most likely as he had been his entire life. As though even in all the immensity and beauty of the universe his world had no exit, no line of flight.
The Fugitivities Page 20