by Rona Jaffe
When Bert had been gone for a day and a half Sergio telephoned. It was early: nine o’clock in the morning. So this was how it happened. If she could have imagined how the moment of decision would be, it would never have been like this, at nine o’clock of an ordinary morning, in her calm household, with the sun shining through the windows and the maid clearing away the breakfast dishes from the dining-room table. But the moment she heard Sergio’s voice the everyday world disappeared, and Helen was alone with the receiver cupped in her two hands, listening to his voice, her face as alive as if he could see her standing there. He had to go to the farm unexpectedly for business the following morning. He had to leave very early, so they could drive through the hottest part of the city before the day became too unbearably hot. He would be gone overnight and the next day, and drive back at night. Could she go with him?
Helen hesitated, but reluctance now was a slow, lovely pleasure, the last instinctive wile of woman, not a thing of conflict and indecision. She knew she would say yes, and hesitated now only because it made the final acceptance more of a relief to herself.
“The farm? Is it far?”
“Six hours by car,” he said. “Five if I drive fast. Don’t you want to go?”
“Isn’t your wife …”
“She is in Rio. She came here for a week to have some new dresses made. I … please come with me. If you want to.” His voice was gentle, almost diffident.
“I do want to.”
“Good! Can you be ready at seven o’clock?”
“Seven?”
“I usually go at six. But I will go at seven for you. No later. It gets very hot.”
It seemed so strange to be talking about time and transportation and weather this way, as if she were actually going to the farm only out of curiosity about what a Brazilian fazenda looked like. “All right.”
“I wait for you in a taxi at the corner in front of your apartment. It is safer. You look for a taxi.”
“Yes.”
“And then we take the car. Does it sound like a spy melodrama?”
She laughed, relieved. “Yes.”
“I love you.”
“What?”
“I tell you tomorrow,” he said. He hung up.
Helen stood there motionless for a moment and then replaced the receiver slowly. She felt happiness illuminating her face, as if she were giving off light or endless energy. I love you. It was not something to analyze or to doubt or to argue against. He loved her now, and he would love her tomorrow and the day after. He would make love to her with love. Love always changed, she had learned that now, but this was new love, and fresh, and freely given, so that even for the moment it mattered and was important. Sergio would never love her only a little; he had told her that when they had first met. I love you too, she thought, realizing even as she said it to herself that it was the first time she had ever dared to think those words. The feeling of love rushed through her, making her feel strong and alive again. How bright the floors were here in the hallway in the sunshine, polished and rich and clean! How beautiful everything was in this room, as if she had noticed it all for the first time.
Julie came trailing down the hall, wearing her new bikini, carrying a partly deflated rubber beach ball for her mother to blow up for her. Helen knelt beside her and put her arms around her child’s small, compact body, filled with love for her, and kissed her cheeks and forehead and silky hair.
“Oh, Julie, you’re going to be so beautiful when you grow up!” she said. “So beautiful!”
CHAPTER 17
The small plane was airborne at eight in the morning. It was already a hot day; the night mists that were left at the rim of the land burned quickly away. There were six other passengers on the plane, and it would make three stops. Bert was not sleepy at all. He lighted a cigarette and looked down out the window at the last markings of city and civilization disappearing under the wing and he felt the first, free exhilaration that always hit him at this moment, as if suddenly they were flying into rarer air.
He had with him a canvas flight bag filled with rough, worn clothes, his boots, a carton of American cigarettes, and a fifth of good Scotch. The seat next to his was unoccupied, so he took his bag from under his own seat and put it on the empty one so he would have more room to stretch his legs. He yawned, moved his ankles back and forth until he felt the faint crack, dragged on his cigarette, and felt fine.
Below was an ocean of trees. He looked down at it, seeing only the beauty and endlessness of it; and then he reminded himself of what was really down there, awakening in himself the slight fear, the prickling knowledge of danger, and liking that feeling more than the awareness of beauty. Those trees were enormous, ancient, joining their leaves to block out the sky. Below them it was dark and damp, filled with the screeches of unseen wild creatures, the clicking and clacking of life unknown, gibberish and howls, and sometimes sudden silent death. A man dropped into that jungle, a plane downed there with survivors, would be lost forever. There was no way out; the vastness of that leafy, vine-choked land prevented it. You could run until you had to walk, walk until you had to crawl, reduced to the level of the animals who were your sole companions, and finally, unlike those animals, you would pay for your weakness and superiority by dying. But animals died too, down there. The constant chain of killing and eating went on; kill to eat, eat to live, live to die and nourish, nourish so that he whom you nourished would grow into rich food for another stronger claw and fang that would then devour him, you, all. There was death in the jungle, but there was never nothingness, for whatever died, fed, even if it fed only those strong vines thicker than a man’s arm, those deep roots sturdier than his body.
Between the trees there were sometimes rivers, like thin threads, yellow or brown. Miles, miles, miles of trees, on and on, punctuated only by those occasional rivers, and nowhere was there man. After several hours of flying there would be a town, and then the jungle again, with no way in between but the air. The amethyst mine with its mining town was at the end of this trip, a remote and vigorous world where Rio was an image, a name, nothing more.
Bert felt happiness and contentment seeping through him as though they were drugs he had taken. Flying into the sun there was a small sun on the glass of his window, golden, sending off sparks. The plane throbbed like a heart. How far he had come from the past, only nine years ago, and paradoxically how much farther from the years that followed directly after!
He remembered those years of the past dreamily now, with benevolence and a touch of poignance, although he knew (and this was perhaps what made the poignance) that he never wanted to go through all that again. Smiling now, he remembered himself as he was in those lost days, striding to work on the first fall mornings of his first job. The city seemed his city then, and the office buildings of New York seemed very clean and bright against the blue autumn sky, their windows catching the sun. He would emerge from the gloom of the train tunnel and join the people of his city, the others who were out to conquer it too and the ones who had long since given up hope, and he felt as though he would outstrip them all. It was a secret belief, and one he would have felt embarrassed to confide to anyone, even to Helen.
He and Helen were first married then, and he knew she was still in their tiny apartment in Riverdale, cleaning the place. He would think of her fleetingly for an instant, but his thought was mainly a mind picture of an unmade bed and a table with coffee cups on it, and the machinations that women perform to alleviate all this disorder before sundown. It was not his world back there in that apartment, although it was his home. It was more like his chrysalis, from which he had emerged the way a bright, vigorous butterfly does, leaving the shards behind. This was his world, the morning city, and the offices full of ambitious people. I am doing it all for her, he would tell himself sentimentally, because he was in love; but at heart he knew this was not true. He was doing it for himself. It was his life force, as if his strength and youth entered and interreacted with the receiv
ing life force of the working world, thrusting, straining, giving, and finally at the end of each day withdrawing, spent. Being young and intelligent and full of enthusiasm and vigor, he was always successful, so that although he was tired at the end of the day it was the kind of tiredness that only needs a night of deep sleep to be gone.
Once Helen had said to him, laughing, “I really think you’re having a love affair with your job.” He had been surprised and had pretended to be offended. “Honey,” he had said, looking put upon and unappreciated, “I’m trying to make a life for us and the children. I’m knocking myself out for you.”
“I know, darling,” Helen had said quickly. Then she was the one who tried to cover up. “I didn’t really mean it.”
Every Christmas, during those first years, he became nervous and tense, because he knew the raises would be given out. It seemed almost as though Christmas should have been called the Season of Reckoning; the bills came in and so did the raises, and you knew then what you had wondered and worked for all year—whether or not you were worth what your spending said you thought you were. It was not that he and Helen were extravagant, or even extraordinarily materialistic. Helen, especially, like many girls who have been brought up in good families who have never known either extreme want or extreme waste, adapted very well to the stringencies of living with a young man who was just beginning to earn a living. She liked to save money for him. But still, it was Christmas, and there were the children, and he loved his wife, and you couldn’t be a piker. Money was a symbol, Bert liked to think. It was a symbol of whether you were appreciated. It didn’t matter whether you agreed with the system or not. You might despise it. But still, if the boss thought he didn’t have to give you a raise this year, then five years from now he might not think he had to give you a promotion, and twenty-five years from now you would still be slaving in the same underpaid job, doing other people’s work, and all you would have to show for it would be a gold watch.
During those pre-Christmas days, when the streets were filled with the music of tiny bells, and fat and thin Santa Clauses cried out by their multiplicity the falseness of the legend, Bert would walk to work with his face set grimly, looking as if he had never heard of Christmas spirit. If I don’t get the raise I asked for I’m going to quit, he would mutter to himself. It’s the only way I can keep my dignity. I’ll leave and find another job. It’s the only way. And then, finally, he would get the raise. He always did. But it never mattered; every Christmas the tension would be the same, because it had to be proven to him that he had done well; it had to be shown.
After the first two years the autumn-morning streets did not have that same new feeling about them, except on certain mornings when something about the angle of sunlight striking a windowpane or the sweet bite of the air reminded him of how he had felt every day. Then he would walk a little faster and hold his head up, breathing deeply and even smiling. It was still his city; he still had freedom and the future. Less frequently too, then, he would think of Helen as he had left her in their apartment in Riverdale, but this time his mental picture would include Helen holding Julie in her arms, and Julie waving her arms and her sticky hands and smiling lovingly, and putting Pablum in Helen’s hair. I am doing it all for them, he would say then, but even then he knew in his innermost heart that this was not true. There was something almost martyrish about saying you were doing all this, giving of your youth and strength and vigor, for two other people. It sounded lofty, but it wasn’t true, nor was it even entirely right that it should be true. You could not give these innermost things, these important things, only for others. You could not give away your very life. He was doing it, Bert knew, because it was his way of life, and his reason for life, and, most of all, his feeling of life came from this work. He wondered sometimes why Helen did not seem to have the slightest idea of the intrinsic importance his work had for him. Sometimes when he had to stay late at the office and came home tired she would put her arms around his neck and say, “Poor thing!” as if she actually thought he had suffered. But somehow, when he tried to explain, he always discovered that it was much easier to pretend that he had suffered rather than to try to explain. Explanations made him lose it, made the whole idea seem rather high flown and corny. It was almost as silly as trying to explain the feeling you had when you were in bed with a girl you loved, making her happy and making yourself happy and even rather proud in the process.
Although that first, vigorous feeling which composed his happy early memory became dissipated during the years, and almost disappeared into grinding exhaustion during the years of commuting from Westport and back, when he took his family to Rio he felt again as he had on the first job. Rio was a new city, a new future, when he already had the experience to promise success in it. He would look at the suntanned faces along the streets as he left the place where he parked his car and walked to his office building, and they were entirely different-looking faces from the ones he had seen in New York. They were lethargic, cheerful, devil-may-care. He remembered a story one of his colleagues had told him about a recent revolution—that the entire revolution had been temporarily halted so everyone could go out to eat lunch.
“Oh, yes,” his Brazilian secretary had exclaimed, “I remember that! I was in a night club one night when we were having a revolution. I didn’t even know anything was happening, except that when we went out on the street we couldn’t get a taxi.”
The other American men Bert knew didn’t really take the Brazilians very seriously in business. No Brazilian was in a hurry, no one seemed afraid of what might happen if they didn’t stop to drink a cafezenho every time someone stepped into the office. Cafezenho first, business later. An executive with a mistress—whom he usually called a fiancée, even if he were married—would leave the office for an entire afternoon if the “fiancée” telephoned. Love first, business later. Even the telephone system seemed against any show of urgency. There were not enough telephone lines in Rio to service the number of telephone instruments, so from two until four in the afternoon you might have to wait over an hour to put in a business call to an office which was within walking distance. You could purchase any kind of new telephone; the modern one that was only a handle with the dial on the base, in a variety of pretty colors, but you might as well purchase a toy telephone for all the good it would do you. You can’t call today? You can call tomorrow, or after tomorrow. You Americans, the Brazilians said, are always in a hurry. That’s why you have heart attacks. We don’t have heart attacks. Liver, yes; terrible. It’s our climate. But heart attacks, ulcers—never. Those belong to the American business world.
Some American businessmen in Brazil got ulcers because they could not cope with the aggravating slowness and casualness with which they were forced to conduct important business. To Bert Sinclair, this national business apathy seemed a stroke of luck. If the others wanted to play grasshopper and sing and play all summer, then he would play ant. The morsels belonged to the provident ant, who stored them away for the harsh winter, but in Brazil it was always summer, in a way. Winter would be back home, where he would return one day, but he would return secure. These mornings, going to work, Bert often thought how content he was in this rich, fertile, growing land full of promise. It was a primitive land in many ways, with flaws and lacks you never could get used to even though you learned to tolerate them just below the threshold of irritability.
He knew just how primitive Brazil was whenever, as now, he went into the interior to the mines. Actually, as a gemologist, he need never have gone to the mines if he did not want to. He had never told Helen that. She thought he was indispensable to the mines in some way, as if he had to tell their owners whether the stones the miners hacked out of the rich earth were fabulous fortunes or useless chunks of mineral. It was in the mines that Bert felt a true resurgence of the old, autumn-morning feeling.
The mines meant more to him than he almost dared to admit to himself. Each mine was different, with its own secret wealth hidden in i
ts dark layers. First you would strike away the earth with heavy, sharp tools, to the rock, and then reveal the first layer of mineral, the one that told you by its composition what was hiding beneath. The aquamarine, the amethyst, the citrine, or the tourmaline, clung back to back with the poor, coarse mineral, like a beautiful young Brazilian virgin with her chaperone. You would pry away a chunk of this twinned solid mineral from the side of the mine pit and then you would spit on your finger to moisten it and rub it on the stone. From the moisture a bright color would emerge. Not so pure and bright a color as would later be revealed when the stone was cut and polished as a gem, but enough to substantiate what your practiced instinct had already told you. It was.…
The first mine he had ever seen in Brazil had been this same amethyst mine in the State of Bahia, to which he had first been invited as a guest by a friend. It was such a richly giving mine that rough amethysts lay on the dusty ground all over the floor of the pit. Dullish purple, some as small as gems and others like chunks of coal, and some larger than your clenched fist, their octrahedron crystals so perfectly formed it seemed as if some divine stonecutter had cut them that way before he hid them in the earth for men to discover. Some of them were inferior-quality amethysts taken from nearer the surface of the pit, but even knowing that, Bert was speechless for a moment at the wonder of this profligate richness. Nearby some Brazilian workers, dirt-poor, were preparing to eat the midday meal their wives had packed for them to take to the mine. The food had been put in round tin pots, stacked one upon the other. Bert watched one man gathering rocks and bits of wood to make a fire to heat his food. And then he saw a sight he never forgot. Another miner, lazier than the first, merely squatted on the ground and scooped up a small pile of amethysts, which he used to hold up his tin pot of feijoada. He made the fire within this cradle of purple amethysts, as if in their abundance they had been no more than rocks.