Labels and Other Stories

by Louis de Bernières

  On the day that Anane conceived Rebu by the female dolphin, he had risen from his hammock in the communal choza at precisely the correct time, which is to say that it was precisely the time that he actually felt like getting up. He had been awakened because some people had already got up and opened the opening, so that now there was not enough smoke for a man to sleep in peace. He left his wife sleeping in her hammock beneath his own, and their child sleeping in the hammock below that with his ocelot curled up on top of him for warmth and company, and went out into the crescent of huts. He straightened his necklace of jaguar claws and his anklet of bark, and went straight down to the river to take his first bath of the day, where he noticed that the female dolphin was rolling lazily in the water.

  When he came out he squatted down whilst Aurelio the displaced Aymara Indian who was his apprentice picked out all of his ticks and lice, as was his obligation as a social inferior. Then, with the feeling that this was to be a day of celebration, he plucked out every body hair he could find and mixed up pigments with which to decorate his body. He mixed piquia oil and annatto, and painted himself red and yellow; he mixed wood ash and put in the white bits; he took genipapo, and drew in the blue and the black. Then he donned his acangatara headdress of feathers, and went around to see how everybody was. They were all astonished to see him dressed up in so much festive paint, because today was not a festive day, except for the man who had taken over his wife’s birthpangs so that she would not suffer. He had groaned in his hammock, suffering the most appalling cramps and contractions for four days so that his wife could give birth as usual after a few minutes squatting over a hole in the ground. But it was a festive day for him today, because today he felt better, and was able to eat an entire haruzam toad for breakfast.

  Anane went to check his bananas, his maize and his groundnuts, but there was nothing to do except pull off some weeds, so he went and watched the women making chicha by spitting the chewed wads into a fermenting bowl, and he watched the women who were grinding manioc and singing ‘Cuddle Up a Little Closer, Lovely Mine’, which had been handed down amongst the people ever since the days of Maharon, when the only explorers who had ever escaped had taught it to them before escaping. Humming the tune, he went to ask when it would be that the adolescent girls would be ready to come out of their huts and start being women, but nobody knew exactly, since they had only been sitting in the dark for a couple of months with their hair over their faces, and it was still too early to question them since they had to be spared even the shock of being asked questions about how they were. Anane went down to the river for another bath, even though it would take off a lot of his pigments, because he had the idea that the bufea that was swimming there wanted to tell him something.

  When Anane came out again he went to ask his wife to ask her mother if he could exchange the hammock she had made for two scarlet macaws that he had captive, and who grew good feathers for decorations, and his mother-in-law told his wife that she wanted three macaws, and so he agreed, and his wife had to go back to her mother again to say that it was settled. Anane was pleased, and never questioned once the tabu against talking to one’s wife’s mother. His wife whispered something in his ear that made him smile, and she took him into the forest where they did toke-toke together because it was good and because she wanted another child. In the forest he told her that the bufea in the river wanted to mate with him and have a dolphin-child, and she said yes, but he was not to disappear with the dolphin for ever like so many others who found the ecstasy so great that they failed to notice that they were drowning until they floated away with dead eyes, but with a joyful smile and a stream of tiny bubbles rising from their mouths, to be stripped by caimans and piranhas, so that the other tribes would find only their thigh-bones and make them into flutes whose bell-like notes could call dolphins from afar out of the curiosity and the melancholy of regret. Anane said that he would be careful, and then they came back and dug a candiru fish out of the wet sand where they had buried it yesterday to keep it fresh until today. They roasted it in the embers and tore off half each, throwing the bones where the birds and animals could squabble for them, but keeping the jaws with their teeth that were so good for surgery and for extracting jiggers from the flesh.

  Anane went down to the river for his third bath, and the bufea came against him and brushed him with her rubbery smooth flesh, nudging him with her long snout and provoking him into flirtation, so that they rolled together in the water. Coupled together, the bufea sang out beneath the ringing water and flipped with her tail in short sweeps so that the paje Anane knew all at once why it was that so many died by mistake simply because the loving dolphins tried so hard to give pleasure. Anane reminded himself to breathe every time they rolled to the surface; he reminded himself to keep up a pressure on his nostrils so that he did not breathe in the water which was so fresh from the mountains that it was infinitely more intoxicating than the air. When they had finished, and they were returning from the bliss of their submarine delirium, he held on about the flexible neck of the bufea, and she swam to the place where she would leave upon the sandbar their child, Rebu.

  Rebu grew up amongst the Navantes much as Venu had grown up amongst the cabocos, except that he had a father in Anane, and another father who was almost a father in Aurelio, and he had a mother who was a bufea who swam in the river, and a mother who was almost a mother in Anane’s wife. He learned how to wrestle with the men and play music in the men’s hut, except that he could play the flute just by using his own voice. He learned how to make toy arrows that whistled like a dolphin because at the tips would be fastened the shells of nuts, and he learned that because his eyes were of different colours, he was a dolphin man who would one day swim away for ever.

  Rebu swam away when he was ten years old, without knowing where it was that he was going. In the water he lost much of his human nature and all his memories, because his nature was confused and ambivalent, and for a while he lost much of his power of sight, since it was more use in the water to sing out and listen to the sounds that reverberated so much more clearly than the light shone in the dappled darkness. When they found him and took him in, he was exhausted and half-starved, lying on a sandbank ringed by caimans who were cautiously waiting for him to die because they did not know what kind of food he was.

  Venezia first knew about Roberto when she was walking down the Calle Bolivar. Roberto was singing to himself in a pitch so high that only someone like Venezia could have heard it. It was a melody so alien and so plaintive that Venezia was reminded of the time when her name had been different to what it was now, but also somehow similar. She thought that she knew how the melody continued, and as she walked towards the river where Roberto was sitting on the bank watching the water that had once died because of the miners’ mercury, she joined in the song so that suddenly Roberto’s melody changed to a joyful one, and he joined in with her joining in with him.

  Venezia, eighteen years old, and as tawny-skinned as Amadea her mother, broke into a run and allowed the contents of her muchilla to spill over the road and be danced upon by the dust-devils. When she arrived at the river she came straight upon Roberto, eighteen years old also, golden-skinned, with eyes of different colours, who had already stood up and turned around in order to be ready to greet her.

  Confronted by each other, the two young people could not think of a word to say. Roberto smiled upon her with the same speechless smile as Amadea’s lover had worn upon the day when he had held out his hand offering the quintessence of earth. He held out his hand to her just as the dolphin had. Venezia smiled at him in return, and shrugged her shoulders as if to say that nothing could be said. She took his proffered hand, and they sat down on the ground opposite each other.

  Roberto intended to invite her to accompany him to the feria on Saturday, but when he looked into her eyes, he was unable to look away or to speak, because he felt that he was submerged by them. She looked back into his eyes and felt the same.

 
Lost in each other’s mesmerising gaze, still holding hands, at first they were engulfed by nothingness, a kind of blackness that receded into the distance without ever diminishing, and then they began to see what neither of them had seen for a very long time. Roberto looked into her brown eyes and saw parakeets, and she looked into his and saw a piraruca swimming in the depths. He saw howler monkeys, and she saw green macaws. He saw sandbars and rubber trees, and she saw cashews and quebrachos, herons and canoes.

  Their vision blurred and was obscured by water. There was broken light refracted from above, and there were murky shapes dimly shifting, but instead of light there was now music.

  The crowd of people who gathered around in astonished curiosity said that they were singing to each other for a very long time, and that for long stretches patches of the melody seemed to be missing. They reported that they had never seen upon human faces expressions of such extraordinary beatitude, and that it was like the joy of reunited lovers after a long period of separation caused by disapproving families. They stated that the melody was quite unlike any other melody that they had ever heard, that it was an aquatic melody that smelled of trees and roots and nuts sprouting in sodden ground, that it was like flutes, and bells tolling in submerged lakes in the bell towers of inundated churches. They said that it was a very long time before any of them had realised that the couple had died upright, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, because the reverie induced by the spell of their duet lasted long after it was finished. The Alcalde of Chiriguana declared upon the Certificates of Death that they had died of sublimity, because even though he was a venial man who kept goats in the kitchen and had sold his own niece to the grocer, he had the soul of a poet who had sometimes recognised intimations of the ineffable in his own life. When they were buried together by the banks of the Mula, he said in his oration that he knew from the evidence all about the lethality of visions of perfect beauty, and of everything else connected with the remembrance of paradise.

  THE MAN WHO SENT TWO DEAD FISH TO THE PRESIDENT

  There seems to be no escape from people called ‘Joao’. It is not just that in Brazilian novels the hero is always called ‘Joao’ and that many of the authors seem to have that name as well, it is also the case that in some places no man seems to have any other name, so that one has to qualify one’s references with helpful additions, such as ‘You know, the one who got bitten by an alligator’ or ‘Joao who fell in love with the transvestite in Rio, and didn’t discover the truth until they went to bed’. Anyone who has ever been to the Island of Kerkire and discovered that all the men are called ‘Spiro’ will understand what I mean by saying that the name ‘Joao’ has a kind of tiresome inevitability about it that makes one feel a deep weariness.

  It is therefore with an implicit apology that I have to admit that this story is about Joao, the one who lived next to the river and had a gift for veridical dreams.

  He lived in a wooden hut on stilts that was designed to keep him dry in the rainy season when the waters rose dramatically in minutes and stayed that way for months until they began to recede almost as swiftly. Ever since the logging had begun he had been having difficulties because stray logs would float down the river and knock against the stilts of the hut. One day he had awoken at dawn to find that he had managed to sleep through a collision that had left his hut at an angle of forty-five degrees. He had had to leave it that way until the waters went down and he could sink new piles into the forest floor. As an afterthought he had built a strong palisade to keep errant logs away in the future. He had noticed that over the years the floods had been getting more violent and the waters more stained, which was because the trees that used to transpire the water and break its flow were no longer there, and the topsoil of the cattle farms was simply being carried away to the sea, leaving the land perpetually useless.

  Like many people of his name, Joao was a very large and hairy individual who would have reminded people of a bear, if they had ever seen a picture of one. His chest was phenomenal in circumference, and beneath it there hung a capacious belly as rounded as a tumulus and as tight as a drum. His legs were reminiscent of temple pillars, and so hirsute that when he emerged from the water after catching turtles, it looked as though he had a three-toed sloth hanging from either side of his torso in place of the usual ambulatory apparatus. He had a round and flat face adorned with a wild black beard that could never be brought to order, through which could be discerned a sensual pair of lips and an oddly plump nose, so marked with blackheads that it looked like a lump of pale pumice. His eyes were ebony brown, and had the habit of flickering from side to side when he spoke, an effect that other people found hypnotic and very attractive. It seems that he had never learned that most people when they converse fix their gaze on only one eye of their interlocutor, and so he skipped from one eye to the other, as though he were rummaging in the other’s soul for an interpretation of their psyche.

  Joao lived a life of the simplest subsistence, which meant that for most of the time he did very little. He spent a lot of the time swinging in his hammock, swatting mosquitoes and sandflies, indulging in reveries, having fantasies about all the women he had had and that he was going to have, and gilding their images so that the reality would always be somehow less real than he had imagined. Joao was rather like a cat in that he had mastered the art of doing absolutely nothing without ever being bored, an art largely lost in more civilised climes. Much of the time he made plans in his head of all the things that he was going to do one day, and this frequently gave him the comfortable feeling that he had already accomplished them. He had a dream about going to Rio, for example, where the women are obsessed with the shape of their bodies and prance around virtually naked at carnival, where everybody gets so drunk that the streets run with piss for days at a time. He had a dream about going to the goldmines and making a fortune, but he also knew that really no one ever did, and that the miners always ended up with mercury poisoning, and syphilis from the overworked camp whores. The thought of making a fortune was much pleasanter than actually having to go out and drudge for it, as far as he was concerned. It was much easier to loll in his hammock in between going out in his canoe to catch fish with fish-fuddle or a line, or to stroll through the dry bits looking for capybara to roast and fruits to cram his belly with.

  Joao was between women. His last woman had been carried away by an inexplicable fever about a year ago. He had loved her very much, so much that whilst he was with her the thought of sleeping with anyone else had been absolutely repulsive. This emotion was so unfamiliar to him that he was not only perpetually astonished by it, but was also convinced that it was in the nature of a personal message from God about the purpose of life and the meaning of love. His wife had been a small, lively woman, a mestiza who had been genetically concocted out of every possible race, and was therefore gifted with the intelligence and beauty characteristic of all such people. Joao had come out more like a white man than anything else, even though his father was black and his mother was mostly Indian, and sometimes he felt inferior to his wife, who seemed to embody more of the wide world than he did.

  Joao and his wife never had any children, which used to upset her a little, but which secretly pleased Joao because he wanted to devote his time to her exclusively and learn to relish the intensity of his love. Like most people who do very little Joao and his wife had plenty of energy for lovemaking, and there was no more delicious pleasure than to make love in the rainy season with the rain hammering relentlessly on the corrugated iron, go blissfully to sleep, and then wake up after who knows how long to make love all over again. Joao and his wife used to feel that they had been unaccountably blessed.

  Then she had gone down with the fever. It started with a dreadful shivering and trembling, and she could not tell whether she was freezing cold or desperately hot because she was both at once and by turns. Then she began to feel appallingly tired, as though she had been weighted down with hunks of lead. She took to her hammo
ck, but could not stay there because she was struck with a flux. The diarrhoea became so bad that in the end she was perpetually flowing with water and blood and was seized by excruciating stomach cramps that made her cry out and clutch at her husband’s arm, so that after she died he still had the marks of her fingernails in his flesh. She seemed to wither away before his eyes. Her skin became like dried leaves and hung about her bones like a sallow fabric. Her hair started to come out, and in the end she could not move, being forced to lie in the midst of her own bloody excrement. Joao cleaned her up the whole time, with tears flowing down his cheeks and soaking his beard as he addressed angry prayers to God and all the saints, the Virgin, and all the black-magic gods and goddesses as well. He threatened Exu the pitchfork demon with dire consequences if he did not remove the evil curse from his wife, and even made a doll of Exu and stuck his knife through its heart. Most people would not have dared to do such a foolhardy thing to Exu, but Joao was desperate, and also confident of his own spiritual power. Possibly Exu forgave him, knowing that the disease was really caused by the untreated sewage pumped into the river miles upstream at the new logging settlement. Long after his wife died, telling him in her last breath that she would love him for ever, Joao discovered that he should have treated her with a solution of salt and sugar, and he cursed himself for his ignorance. He thought that if he had learned to read and write, then she would not have died.

  Joao went to the primary school and joined the little children in the class. He was like a mountainous child amongst the little ones, repeating the alphabet, reciting from the board sentences about Lucho the Mountain Lion leaving his lumps of sugar lying on the lino, the United States is the richest country in the world, Juanito the jaguar jumps into the jungle, Bahia is where all the cacao came from, Ribeiro the writer writes about whales. Like the little children Joao frequently burst into tears, except that in his case it was not over who stole my ruler and who pinched me when you weren’t looking, miss, it was about his wife disintegrating and disappearing before his eyes, and it was about having been thrown out of the garden of love with no prospect of re-entering it. The tears frothed up from the cavernous emptiness of his stomach and the constricted ventricles of his heart, and the young teacher from Sao Paulo doing her bit for the ignorant of the interior would find herself as often putting her arm around him to shush him as she did with the little ones. She became used to finding her shirt soaked with his convulsive sobs, and philosophising with him after school about how time can heal and about how one should be grateful for what life gives and resigned about what it takes away. She was filled with admiration for the strength of his love and the rapidity of his learning, and it will surprise no one that eventually this young and idealistic middle-class girl fell in love with the bear of the backwoods and rekindled his happiness. But that is another story, and is nothing to do with how he came to send two dead fish to the President of the United States.