Away from Home

by Rona Jaffe

  It did something to Bert to see that. It was as if suddenly he had been shown a vision of possibility. Anything was possible in this land—wealth, success, valor, discovery. That was when he had begun to be drawn to the mines. The men began to know him. The owners liked him because he took a personal interest and was always available for consultation when they thought they had struck a new vein. Sometimes, so many times, you would find two different kinds of valuable gem stones in the same pit. The owners didn’t really need him, because they were usually trained minerologists themselves, but they liked to have him there because he was a specialist and so willing to go, and so simpatico, and eventually Bert became so simpatico that the owners began to think they actually did need him. Call Bert Sinclair. What does Bert Sinclair think? Bert Sinclair, the American expert, agrees with me. It was a good life.

  A good life? It was more, much more. It was a special life. The pale, resigned faces of those men who did not like their work, who stepped toward it every morning like automatons, were something he wanted to put away from his memory forever, as if he had accidentally looked upon the faces of the dead. Someone had written once, “If you do not love your work you would do better to sit as a beggar at the gates and accept alms from those who do love their work.” It was a good thing not too many people took that advice seriously.

  The plane dipped and climbed down to the tiny airfield in the Interior that was its first stop. Two men got off and another got on. The air that came through the opened door was hot and moist. Bert closed his eyes contentedly. If he could drop off to sleep, even for an hour, it would make his arrival seem sooner.

  The plane put down at his stop at a little after two. A bare air-strip carved out of the jungle. A few wooden buildings, reassuring with red and white advertising signs extolling a pill for stomach acid. Bert took off his jacket, but by the time he had walked across the air strip his shirt was already sticking to his back as if he had gone swimming in it by mistake. His friend Hector Adolpho Moreiro Oliviera was at the edge of the field beside his jeep, and when he saw Bert he ran to meet him halfway.

  They embraced each other. Hector Adolpho was the owner of the mine, a wiry man in his early forties, taller than most Brazilian men, very tanned from the sun. He was a trained minerologist and he spoke several languages. With Bert he spoke English.

  “How was the trip?”

  “Good.”

  “Well go to the hotel. You can wash and we’ll have lunch. The Mayor and some other friends will join us there. Are you too tired to go to the pit?”

  “No,” Bert said. “I want to.”

  “We found a new vein last week. That mine gives on and on. But that’s not why I wanted you to come, of course. I wanted you to see the secret. If it is what I think it is—” Hector Adolpho’s face lighted up with the hope of it and he held up his crossed fingers. “I believe,” he said. “But I want you to see too.”

  He started the jeep and they drove toward the town. Neither of them said the word emeralds. But each of them knew, hoped, thought it, and were aware of all it could mean. There were no emerald mines in Brazil. If it were true that a new vein had revealed the companion minerals of emerald, or if any bits of emerald itself had been found, it was not only a valuable secret but a dangerous one. The vein would have to be explored further-how abundant were the emeralds, how good was their quality? It could mean a fortune, millions—dollars, not cruzeiros. When they were sure of what they had, the mine would have to be temporarily closed, sealed off, with guards and machine guns posted on top of the wall, while Hector Adolpho negotiated to buy all the surrounding land, pretending he wanted it for farming. There were rich emerald mines in Columbia, but some experts thought they were becoming exhausted. If this were so, then the discovery of an emerald mine in Brazil would be much more valuable. This new mine would be the only source of emeralds in the hemisphere; the only other place was Africa. There were economic factors: price, demand, supply. There were human factors: publicity, skepticism, belief. A small bright green stone for some lady to wear at her throat, for a ring, a gift, an eventual heirloom, for vanity, for sentiment, for lust—fortunes could be made or lost on just this.

  “What are you thinking?”

  Bert patted his flight bag. “I brought some Scotch.”

  “Good.”

  “For right away. Before lunch.”

  “Better.”

  They drove into the town, a dusty cluster of white-painted buildings set around a dirt-paved square, with a fountain and statue in the center of it. The town’s only hotel was a four-story wooden building with ramps instead of staircases, surrounded on three sides by a rickety veranda. Bert’s room, one of the largest, finest ones, was clean but had neither screens nor windowpanes. Flies buzzed sleepily around the flowered chintz cover on the double bed. There was a bathroom with a shower down the hall, but since only one of the other rooms was occupied the bathroom was nearly private. Bert washed his face and put on the clothes he always wore at the mines—the faded tan shirt, the khaki trousers, the leather boots—and took the bottle of Scotch downstairs with him to the bar.

  He and Hector Adolpho spoke Portuguese because the Mayor and his two friends did not speak English. A waiter brought soda and doubtful ice, and they drank the Scotch at a long table in the empty room. There was an electric fan in the corner, and the barroom opened to the veranda, so it was cool. One of the Mayor’s friends was the banker, the other owned the general store. Both the bank and the store had been closed for this occasion, their doors locked and windows shuttered, while Bert answered questions about America, about business, politics, Latin-American friendship, and Marilyn Monroe. They drank several times to friendship. When they finished the Scotch the waiter brought platters of meat cooked in sauce, rice, feijoada, broiled filet mignon, and a bowl of raw onions and tomatoes chopped up together to put on the beef. There were white rolls and half-rancid butter, and huge steins of frosty Brazilian beer.

  They finished lunch at five o’clock in the afternoon. There was one movie theater in the town, showing an American film, and none of them had seen it. It was too late to go to the amethyst mine; it would soon be dark. As they all walked across the square to the movie house the proprietor of the rival general store saw them, waved, and said he would go too. He locked his doors and ran after them, putting the key into his pocket. Sunlight made the dusty street golden, and it was quiet. A dog slept underneath a dusty tree. The owner of the filling station stood outside his establishment, looking under the hood of a 1939 Ford. Some little boys stood outside the combination bar and candy store, watching them curiously.

  When they came out of the movie it was almost dark. Bert and Hector Adolpho crossed the village square to the bar. On a high tree a loud-speaker was playing tinny-sounding radio music, the music of the evening promenade. The young were out walking, the pretty girls, the unmarried men, the chaperones. Around and around the square in the casual watchful promenade, with nothing else to do—and nothing that seemed more important than this prelude to pairing. In the bar Bert and Hector Adolpho drank beer and watched the people outside in the square and talked quietly of the mine, each pretending there was no point in being elated so far in advance. Tomorrow they would know more.… But Bert knew that Hector Adolpho already knew. He did not need Bert to corroborate his judgment. If there were emeralds, this man knew it.

  Bert felt a secret pride that he had been chosen to give his opinion. It meant a great deal, not only professionally but because it was a sign of friendship. This man was not asking; he was showing.

  They decided to meet at five-thirty in the morning in the hotel dining room for breakfast and leave at six. Bert would have been willing to go even earlier. It was a nine-hour trip by jeep over rough jungle roads to get to the location of the emerald mine. Nine hours today, but perhaps several years from now the road would be opened wide and there might even be a town.

  They shook hands warmly at the top of the ramp that led to Hector Adolpho’s ro
om. “Until tomorrow.”

  It was only nine o’clock, but Bert felt tired and good. The beer on top of the aftereffects of the Scotch had made him sleepy. Through his open windows he could hear the loud-speaker with its scratchy music, far away and somehow pleasant. He took off all his clothes and got into bed naked. The mattress smelled of mildew, but the sheets were clean and smelled faintly of soap. He put citronella on his arms and face to chase the mosquitoes, and turned off the light. The scent of citronella always brought back his childhood—summer camp. He slept, still hearing the music faintly in his dream.

  He dreamed of the mine, of tomorrow, of great mountains of emeralds, green as grass, Kelly green, shiny and already cut. Strangely, it was not the Brazilian emerald mine at all, but the stone quarry where he had hiked as a boy at camp. The great piles of stone were no longer granite, gray, but emeralds and green. No one seemed aware of it. He was the only one who knew and he wanted to tell someone, his counselor. His counselor was handing around a bottle of citronella to chase off the mosquitoes, because it was evening and they were going to sleep at the quarry that night under the stars, with sleeping bags. When Bert tapped his counselor on the arm, the man turned around and his face was the face of Hector Adolpho, tanned, lined, handsome and shrewd. Bert smiled at him, suddenly stupid with adolescent admiration. If Hector Adolpho didn’t notice the emeralds, who was he to say anything?”

  “I thought I would help you,” Bert said in the dream. “Is there anything I can do?”

  The face of Hector Adolpho disappeared and so did the emeralds; the boys were all sitting on the floor of the quarry where the ground was flat, and someone had lighted a campfire. There were about a dozen boys, all singing. The black sky was dotted with lonely stars. It was a foreign-sounding song, and somehow he didn’t know the words, so he moved his lips and pretended. They were all happy and sleepy and very good friends, so no one seemed to care. They swayed to the tune of the song and watched the hot fire. Bert knew that the summer was almost over, this was the last hike of the season, the long three-day hike, and he felt nostalgia and sadness filling his throat so that he could not sing any more. I’m going to come back every year, he thought loyally. Every year until I’m too old, and then I’ll be a counselor. I’ll never leave my friends. I want to stay here forever. But even saying that resolutely to himself, he knew it would not come true. It would all vanish, all of it, the night, the campfire, the friends who swore to remember. All this good feeling would be gone. The gang would be gone. It made him sad, as if he had no human insides at all but only something bitter and black.

  The tiny alarm on his wristwatch went off like the buzzing of a hornet. At first Bert did not know where he was; then he sat up in bed and looked around, shaking off his dream. The huge wooden dresser loomed up at him, then the dark square of the opened window, lightening now to gray. It was five minutes to five in the morning and he was in the hotel. He found an opened pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his shirt and lighted one, and then dressed. He washed in the bathroom down the hall but did not bother to shave. When he went down to the dining room at five-thirty the sky outside was already blue.

  They ate sliced rolls with jam, and coffee with condensed milk, and took along a package of food and several bottles of beer and soda for the trip. Hector Adolpho was wide awake; he said he had been up since four.

  The two of them took turns driving the jeep. The jungle seemed tamer on either side of them, conquered and familiar. It was not the jungle Bert had looked down on from the plane, and yet a short time ago it had been exactly like it. “Look at this road, that jungle,” Bert said. “Eventually man conquers everything.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” Hector Adolpho said.

  After an hour and a half of driving they passed the road that led to the amethyst mine, but they kept going and did not turn off. There would be plenty of time for that in a day or two, on the way back. Amethysts were only bread and butter now. The sun was very bright.

  They reached the new pit at a little after three in the afternoon. It was a deep, narrow valley, over a quarter of a mile long. The land around it had been cleared and was flat and treeless. Dusty and ugly—and beautiful. There were Brazilian and Indian workers and guards, but the digging had been halted just at the point when Hector Adolpho’s assistant had told him he suspected the existence of something entirely different from what they were looking for. They greeted the men casually, as if this were only an inspection trip. Bert climbed down into the pit and felt his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. He had been stiff from the long hours in the jeep but now his tiredness vanished. His breath came in gasps that hurt his chest. Even his eyeballs felt dry, painful to move from side to side. His hands were trembling.

  His sharp tools were attached to his belt. On the wall of the pit there was a serpentine vein of black mica, a yard wide—the biotite in which emerald crystals should be embedded. He hacked at it, going deeper. As he chipped into the formation there were crystals embedded—greenish—bigger and greener as he cut deeper into the vein. He chipped off a tiny piece of one and kept it in his closed hand as he climbed back up the side of the pit.

  “It’s very hot here,” Hector Adolpho said, taking his arm. “Let’s have a beer in the shade.”

  They walked back to the jeep, the dust stirring around their heavy boots. Bert opened his hand and looked at the tiny bit of greenish mineral.

  “Well?”

  “It’s emerald,” he said. “You can test it, but I’m sure now.”

  “Yes. I am too.”

  They looked at each other for a moment and neither spoke. Bert moved the piece of rough emerald between his thumb and finger, feeling it, looking at it. Deeper into the vein the emeralds would be loose, lying in caves of white powdery-looking albite, gem-quality stones, valuable, hard and bright. He looked at Hector Adolpho.

  “This must be a secret,” Hector Adolpho said. “Don’t tell anyone. No one.”

  Bert nodded. “No one. You can rely on me. Besides—” he smiled—“who could I possibly tell?”

  CHAPTER 18

  Four hours by car from the city of Rio de Janeiro, toward the city of São Paulo, there are miles and miles of highway cutting through the rich hills and leaving gashed red earth on either side, land so rich it seems to bleed like a living thing. The green grows above the red earth, thick and moist, and far away the hills dip into purple shadows. The sky is very blue, flat, with long white clouds that look dry in the bright light of the sun. It was eleven o’clock in the morning.

  Helen sat next to Sergio in his car and they did not speak often. He held her hand. There were very few other cars on the highway, and once the Rio-São Paulo bus, the Cometa, came streaking by, honking, and disappeared over the next hill. Sergio drove steadily, and fast, but completely effortlessly. He had made the trip many times. Every once in a while he glanced at Helen to make sure she was all right.

  “I feel as if you belong to me,” he said. “Isn’t that strange? Do you feel that way too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right now I adore you more than anyone else in the world. There is no one else in the world. Whenever you and I are together, and alone, from now on, it will always be this way, but every time it will be better and better.”

  She said it to him now for the first time. “I love you.”

  “I haven’t even made love to you yet.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s strange too, not to touch you for such a long time, and to want to so much.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t. I was afraid to before. Now I want you to.”

  He held her hand very tightly. “We will be something together, won’t we!” he said softly. “I know it.”

  She heard his faint accent that revealed itself whenever he was intense or excited and she realized again how different he was from her and from any man she had ever known, out of a completely different world. She had never wondered about his other mistresses, other affairs, and eve
n now she did not, but there was that experience about him, that emotional intensity, which drew her to him and frightened her a little at the same time. She felt very naïve beside him, completely passive and innocent. She had never in her life gone to bed with any man but her husband, and her thoughts had never been whether or not she was a passionate woman but, rather, how she reacted in relation to Bert. She and Bert were good together—or, they had been. Her life was changing minute by minute now, and she did not know what she would have to think of next. She felt shy.

  “When we get to the farm,” Sergio said after a while, “my father will be there. And maybe my cousin. I will be a little formal with you when they are there, but I don’t want you to mind. You will stay in the small guest house right next to my father’s house. It’s very pretty. I stayed there with my friends when I was growing up—boys, that is.” He smiled at her. “Not girlfriends. But later I will stay there with you.”

  “Why are you taking me where your family is?” Helen asked. She looked at him, shocked, and felt so unnerved that she almost pulled her hand away from his, as if his father were already there watching them. “I thought we’d be alone.”

  “It’s so beautiful there,” Sergio said. “I wanted you to see the place where I grew up. I have always loved it more than any place I have ever lived since. You don’t have to be afraid of my father. He loves life. He has a sense of humor. He’s almost seventy years old, but the only thing you’ll have to be afraid of is that he will probably try to take you away from me.”

  “I’ll chance it.”

  “I wanted to take you to a special place this first time,” he said. “I didn’t want to make love to you in a garçonier, or in a hotel room. Do you remember that hotel where we had lunch upstairs on the roof? You can walk down the stairs from there, without taking the elevator, and go right into a room. People reserve the rooms in advance, you know. In case. I couldn’t do that with you. We may have to do that some time; but later on, when we trust each other enough so that it doesn’t make any difference where we are.”