Brazil

by John Updike

  The elevator, faced with doors of a silvery metal patterned like cloth in triangles, slid upward: a knife slithering from its sheath. There was a brief corridor, its striped walls a subdued version of the fruity golden color of her crumpled beach dress. A door of red brazilwood, waxed to a shine, of many raised panels yielded to her little key, no bigger than his razor blade. Inside, there reigned a silence of expensive surfaces—vases and carpets and fringed pillows and the gilded leather backs of books. He had never been in such a space; he felt his breath and freedom of movement taken from him. “Whose home is this?”

  “My uncle Donaciano’s,” the girl said. “Don’t worry, you won’t have to meet him. He works all day, in the Centro. Or else he plays golf and has drinks with his business friends. Drinking with his friends is in fact his work. I will tell the servant to bring us something to drink, too. Or perhaps you would like something to eat.”

  “Oh, no, senhorita; I am not hungry. A glass of water or a little suco is all I need.” His mouth had gone very dry, as he looked around. So much here to steal! He and Euclides could live for a month on one silver cigarette box, on two crystal candlesticks. The paintings, of squares and circles and furious slashes, could not be worth much, except perhaps to the painter at the moment of painting, but the backs of the books held letters of gold. He marvelled at the height of the bookshelves, which ascended to the height of a palm tree. This room of the apartment had inner balconies on two walls and for a ceiling a domed rose of frosted glass petals, from whose center hung, on a chain as long as that of a holy light in a church, a chandelier with arms like brass S’s. Indoors, to Tristão, meant the sunless cave of a shanty; here there was so much light he felt he was outdoors, only sheltered, so no wind blew, in a radiant stillness of which he was now part.

  Isabel called in a flat voice, “Maria.”

  The thickset, youngish maid who came, in no great hurry, as if from many rooms away, glanced at Tristão contemptuously, and with a little flare of terror in her sunken eyes. Her cheeks were puffy, with an Indian puffiness, or as if she had been beaten, and bore pockmarks. Her mix of blood had turned her skin a sullen snuff color. She would have read his thieving thoughts, and thought herself above them. As if living in the homes of the rich, and parading in the clean clothes they have provided, was not in itself a form of thievery.

  “Maria,” said Isabel, in a voice trying to be neither harsh nor timid, “two vitaminas, with banana or avocado if there is some. That will do me, but something for my friend, some of whatever you have made for your own lunch? This is my friend Tristão.” To him she said, “A sandwich?”

  “It is not at all necessary, I swear,” the boy protested, with that gallantry presaged by the rampartlike quality of his brow, the prominent bright eyes, the distances behind his face.

  Yet when the food came—warmed-up acarajé, with its fried balls of vatapá, shrimp, and peppers—he ate like a wolf. He had trained his hunger to lie low, but food maddened it, and he left nothing on his plate, not even a smear. She slid toward him on the low marquetry table her own half-eaten plate. He devoured this, too.

  “Coffee?” Maria asked, when she came and cleared. She gave off less hatred, and a faint scent of conspiracy, like the dendê oil with which all cooking from the north is flavored. Perhaps this curious household, of a girl and her uncle, already contained something amiss, of which the maid disapproved. She was open, as the lowly are, to mischief and change; the world does not exist for them like a precious relic under glass, to be preserved forever.

  “Yes, and then leave us alone,” Isabel said. She had removed her little hat, and her long blond glimmering hair heightened her nakedness and gave him back that feeling of blindness when he had just emerged dazzled from the sea.

  “You like me?” she asked, averting her eyes and blushing.

  “Yes. More than that.”

  “You think I am a flirt? A bad girl?”

  “I think you are rich,” he replied, looking around, “and being rich makes people strange. Rich people do what they want, and so they do not know the price of things.”

  “But I am not rich,” Isabel said, with a new note of grievance and petulance. “My uncle is rich, and my father, too, off in Brasília, but I have nothing of my own—they hold me like a pampered slave, to be given when the nuns have graduated me to some boy who will grow into a man like them, sleek and polite and uncaring.”

  “Where is your mother? What does she say of your future?”

  “My mother is dead. The baby brother she was making for me strangled on the cord on the way out and tore up her uterus in his dying fury. Or so I was told. I was four when it happened.”

  “How sad, Isabel.” Though he had heard Eudóxia use her name in their chatter, he had not pronounced it before. “You have no mother, and I have no father.”

  “Where is your father?”

  Tristão shrugged. “Dead, perhaps. Vanished, certainly. My mother has had many men and is not certain who he was. I am nineteen, it would be twenty years ago. She drinks much cachaça and cares about nothing.” Still, once she had got him the medicine he needed. She had suckled him, and picked lice from his head, and inspected his turds for worms.

  To call him back to her, Isabel announced, “I am eighteen, still.”

  He smiled and dared reach out and touch her luminous hair, full of many little lights like Rio at night seen from Sugar Loaf. “I am glad. I would not want you to be older as well as richer.”

  She accepted his touch without flinching but did not answer his smile with another. “This ring you gave me.” She held up her hand with the brass oval upon the thickest finger. “I must give you something now.”

  “It is not necessary.”

  “The gift I have in mind would also be a gift to myself. It is time. It is the time in my life.”

  She stood and pushed upward at his lips with her own, less a kiss than an imitation of kisses seen in magazines or television. Her life up to now had been a matter of studying other people’s stories; now she was creating her own story. She led him to a spiral staircase, of metal painted a dusty pink, that led to the second floor. Her body as it twistingly ascended above him was broken into many foreshortened slices, triangles of flesh flickering half-eclipsed among the triangles of the spiral stairs. Trailing a finger experimentally along the railing, as if across a surface of water, Isabel moved down the corridor suspended here at the height of the snaky-armed chandelier, and thence to a room that was hers, still full of girlhood’s stuffed animals, with posters on the wall of long-haired singers from England. The pressure on Tristão’s lungs here seemed less thunderous, as if between these childish walls the wind of money did not blow so fiercely. The little pale pieces of Isabel’s bathing suit came off with a shrug and a squirm, a casual accustomed dance of her slender body, done with a half-defiant, half-questioning smirk on her brave monkey face. She appeared little more naked now than before. He had never before seen a pubic bush like hers, so transparent and uncurly. Her nipples, in disks of skin faint brown in color, were stiffened by their exposure to the air and to his seeing. “We must get clean,” she told him, firmly.

  The shower knobs within the marble cubicle were numerous, and produced various kinds of spray—a bouquet of fine needles, or a battering of coarser strings of water in the rhythm of a rapid pulse. Standing with her in the warming waterfall, soaping her skin so its yielding silk was overlaid with a white grease, and then letting her soap him in turn, he felt his cashew become a banana, and then a rippled yam, bursting with weight. She soaped him there seriously, bending her oval head into the pounding water to see better the swollen veins, the purple-black skin, the violet heart-shaped one-eyed glans. As she inspected, the partings of her hair showed her scalp to be pink—not white, as he had expected. When the shower was over, she said, still looking, her fingers tracing one vein, “So that’s what it is. I like it. It is ugly but innocent, like a toad.”

  “Never before?” he asked, embarrassed, gr
ateful to be momentarily concealed in the powdery blanket of a vast white towel that she produced from a bathroom closet. In the mirrors everywhere in this room he saw himself cut into slices of white and black. His face seemed a stern warrior’s, photographed simultaneously from many angles.

  “No, never. Does that frighten you, Tristão?”

  Yes, it did, for if she was a virgin, fucking her became religious, a kind of eternal incrimination. But his blood, helplessly pounding in the yam he carried before him, wrapped in his robelike towel, drew him after this apparition, who wore her own towel high, like a cape, exposing her lower portion, her tight seesawing buttocks. As she bent over at the bathroom’s marble threshold to pick up his little black bathing suit for him, where he had dropped it, her white buttocks parted, showing a vertical brown lining between them, a permanent stain of skin around her anus, slightly disgusting him.

  Then, as she shook and folded his bathing trunks, to hang them neatly up, she exclaimed in surprise. The razor blade in its little pocket had slipped from its crude sheath and nicked her thumb. She showed him the white skin with its whorl of texture, the sluggish leak of jewel-bright red. This, too, frightened him, as a prophecy: he would bring her pain.

  Yet, sucking her thumb with a hurt expression, blotting its wound on a corner of her vast towel, she continued her drift toward her girlhood bed, a narrow bed covered in a light quilt whose delicate shade of green Tristão had seen in the favela on china pitchers and chamber pots, a line of delicate scum below the rim. Above the brass rails of the headboard hung a little oily picture of the Virgin, wearing a halo like a sunhat tipped back, an unnaturally solemn and big baby in her lap, making an awkward gesture with its fat fingers. Isabel, her monkey face grave and determined, lifted the image off the wall and placed it under the bed. As she lay down naked on top of the quilt, some glass-eyed animals were displaced; she stuffed them into one of several shelves beside the bed, each shelf once painted a different color of the rainbow, to amuse a child. She did these things quickly, expertly, and flopped herself back strictly in the middle of her little bed, leaving nowhere for him to lie but on top of her. Yet when he obediently did she pressed his chest with her fingertips as if to hold him off, to stay this moment. Her eyes, their gray-blue composed of hundreds of fragile threads, stared up into his almost with anger. “I had not thought it would be so big,” she admitted.

  “We need do nothing now. We can simply hold one another, and stroke one another, and tell of our histories. We can meet again tomorrow.”

  “No. If we wait, it will not happen. This is our time.”

  “We can meet again tomorrow, at the beach.”

  “We will lose courage. Other people will interfere.”

  Uncertainly, studying his face for direction, she spread her white legs.

  She asked, “You have had many girls?”

  He nodded, ashamed that not all had been girls, that in the beginning there had been women twice his age, old drunken women, friends of his mother’s, throwing him this scrap of themselves like food to an amusing little pig.

  “Then have you any advice for me?”

  His glans, like a violet heart ripped from a creature the size of a rabbit, rested on the transparently furred curve of her mons veneris. Usually, the woman he was with took it in her hand and guided it in. This girl lifted her buttocks awkwardly, and looked into his eyes for guidance. She saw his dark irises melting into the black of his dilated pupils. He dipped his voice into the manly timbre again, saying, “My advice is to let yourself sink to the point where my pleasure and yours are the same. It will not be easy, the first time. It will hurt.” His breath smelled of spicy acarajé.

  With his own hand he explored below, found the place where her lips had begun stickily to part, and did the guiding. A little later, as if doubting his own advice, he asked, “Does it hurt?”

  Isabel had stiffened beneath him in the effort of overriding her flesh’s instinctive rejection. A sudden warm sweat had arisen all across her pale skin. Her chin jerked back and forth as if no other part of her impaled body dared move. He, too, was sweating, with worry, at her virginal tightness; it was a burden, being a lover and not a pet pig gobbling a wet scrap. Yet beyond the dark wall they were facing was a paradise, he knew.

  “Shall I stop? I could come out.”

  Furiously her chin now snapped back and forth, saying no. “For God’s sake, do it,” she said nevertheless.

  He drove hard into the darkness, each thrust deepening the shade of red behind his clamped eyelids. Within himself, in a place beyond the seat of hunger, a constricted passageway was trying to accommodate a rush of light, a choking, chilling, building pressure that made his heels dance as its verge was approached and, through an upward loop of world-blotting sensation, vaulted over. The convulsions of his coming startled her out of her own body; tenderly, wonderingly, her white hands flitted on his arched black back, seeking to heal the great rending he had enjoyed in her gummy depths, in the web of her silken limbs. His panting ebbed; his voice became reasonable, considerate: “Did it hurt?”

  “Yes. Oh God yes. Just like the nuns said it would, for the sin of Eve.” Yet her legs, her arms, tightened their embrace of him, as his chivalrous impulse to relieve her body of his weight communicated itself.

  “Dear Isabel,” he sighed, embarrassed for better words, and still feeling shy with her name. One task heroically performed did not entitle him to equality with this patrician beauty. When he at last was permitted to remove his penis, it was coated with her blood, and she seemed to blame him for staining the scum-green satin quilt.

  “Maria will see and tell my uncle!” she exclaimed.

  “She is his spy?”

  “They are—friends.”

  She had leaped up and brought from the bathroom a wet washcloth, with which she dabbed and scrubbed at the stain. It was an irregular stain, shaped, by his offer to stop, like a chalice, with a bowl, a base, and a thin red stem between.

  “You should have spread a towel,” he said, vexed at her appearing to blame him for her own blood, and to be rushing from their exalted moment together into details of mere housekeeping.

  She heard his offended note, and sought to mend his pride, turning from the bed and docilely pawing with the reddened washrag at what was now returning to its cashew shape. As it retracted, her virginal blood sank brownish into the wrinkled, eggplant-colored skin. Feeling the pain between her legs increase as the high drama of herself supine in defloration wore off, she impatiently pushed the wet wad into his hand.

  “Here, Tristão; it’s your mess too.”

  Though imbued with the fastidious pride of even the poorest of Brazilian men, Tristão accepted the washcloth and comprehended her mood; she was giddy with the daring of what had been done, what could never be undone. Their uncontrollable moods are the price men pay for women’s unearthly beauty and their habitual pain.

  When Tristão returned from the bathroom, wearing his damp bathing trunks, Isabel was still naked, but for the DAR ring and on her blond head a straw hat, like the black straw hat she had worn to the beach, but dyed strawberry red. The rainbow shelves along two of the four walls of her little room held a number of playful hats, along with the wealth of toys provided by an uncle who wanted to keep her forever a little girl.

  She cocked her head and posed like a boîte dancer, white buttocks outthrust and one knee bent above an arched foot up on its toes; her toes were whitened by the pressure of the pose and a drying streak of blood showed on the inside of that leg’s thigh. It was wonderful, she was thinking, to have a man see you naked, to need to have no shame in front of him. “You still like me?” she asked, with a mournful seriousness, her upcast eyes just showing beneath the impudent hat’s rim.

  “I have no choice,” he told her. “You are mine now.”

  iii. Uncle Donaciano

  “NO, I DON’T think so, my dear,” said her uncle Donaciano, his supple portliness sheathed in a gray suit that at certain angle
s of light flashed like aluminum, “I don’t think this is within the bounds, within the bounds at all, even of our permissive age, in this all-too-progressive society.”

  A month had passed. Maria had told her employer of the boy’s visit that day, and of Isabel’s constant absences at the beach—absences so long that since she returned without sunburn she and the boy must be going to the cinema together, or resorting to a by-the-hour hotel. Certainly she was not going off to be with Eudóxia; Eudóxia’s parents had taken the girl, with her three brothers, from Rio to the mountains, to escape the summer heat—to Petrópolis, where the court of Dom Pedro II had erected a palace, now the Museu Imperial, and horses and carriages were still used, along the canals and curving hillside streets of mansions, and then for some weeks to Nova Friburgo, where a colony of immigrant Swiss had once built homesick chalets. Rock climbing, tennis, boating, horse-riding, flowers in perpetual bloom: Isabel when younger had often experienced these pleasures with her uncle and his wife, elegantly slender Aunt Luna, before their unfortunate separation—their desquite, since divorce was illegal. Aunt Luna came from the thin upper crust of Salvador and now lived in Paris, from which she sent Isabel a Hermès scarf or Chanel belt each Christmas. She was the closest approximation to a mother the girl had ever known. In Petrópolis, on rare occasions, Isabel’s father would steal a weekend from his official duties and fly from Brasília. How exciting that had been, to sit beside him in the grand hotel restaurant, dressed like a real woman, preening and prim, the starched ruffle of her décolletage gently scratching her bare skin while a thin waterfall glittered between the distant green cones of two mountains in the view through the big window that gave on the blue lake where water-skiers left swerving trails of paler blue! But those pleasures had belonged to childhood, as small as the smiles in a snapshot.