by John Updike
“Tristão brought me. My family wants to part us.”
“Smart folks. You two pure crazy,” Ursula said, yet not taking her curdled eyes from the face of the fair intruder, trying to fathom what advantage to herself might come of this visitation.
“We love one another,” Isabel announced. “We want to live together forever.”
Tristão’s mother did not smile; her sullen features in fact sank a little deeper into anger. “Lucky if love lasts as long as a fuck,” she said. “Trash of mine got no right to go loving any fucking body.”
“He is beautiful,” Isabel told the woman, of her own son. “I feel incomplete when I am not with him. I cannot eat, I cannot sleep. Last night, I slept like a baby.” More than a baby, she thought to herself: like a fetus. “I love you, Ursula,” she dared confide, “for bringing a boy—a man—so beautiful into this world.” She was determined to lift that sludgy brown face up from hostile stupidity and to win its acknowledgment of the wonder of her and Tristão’s love.
“Porra!” the woman obscenely exclaimed, yet grinning. As if to quench the grin, with its pathetic toothless gaps, her lips tugged at the unlabelled bottle lying in the confusion next to her pallet. When Ursula’s eyelids closed, beauty swept back across her face, the beauty Tristão had, of an eclipsed sun. Though her body had become obese, a mere absorbant mass, her head was oval and petite, under a nest of unravelling corn rows. On her face an erratic pattern of scars—not symmetrical and meaningful, like Maria’s—testified to old beatings and injuries.
Tristão, who had been hiding from this confrontation between Ursula and Isabel, in the section of the shanty beyond the rough wood pillar that held up the roof of overlapped zinc sheets and divided the space into a suggestion of rooms, now came forward. “We will not stay here, Mother. It is too disgusting.”
Disturbed perhaps by the reverberating male voice, the sleeping small man rolled onto his back, displaying a saliva-webbed open mouth; Ursula with her free arm twisted his head back to her breast, where with a slurping noise he became still again. “Trash with high ideas the ones that disgust me. How much you think her rich folks pay to have her back?”
“Plenty, I am sure,” said Euclides, who had been speaking with the girl tending the cooking fire. Of Isabel he asked, “Where is your friend Eudóxia? She and I had a good long talk walking the beach all the way to the Leme end and back, on Catholic communalism versus Marxism. Both, we concluded, were quixotic.”
“Her family have taken her to the mountains,” Isabel told him. “She is a typical bourgeois girl, full of bold chatter but with no courage for life.”
Euclides squinted and said, “Too much courage becomes the love of death.”
“We love one another,” Tristão continued to his mother. “My plan is to take the train to São Paulo and find work in the auto plant, with the help of my brother Chiquinho there. Mother, I need to know his whereabouts.”
This was first that Isabel had heard of a third brother. The mother of them all looked blank, but then slit her eyes as if to declare cunning. “Another trash,” she said. “Never sends a penny home, and a rich man by now, making those fuscas everybody drives. If the medicine man give me a decent potion, none of you trash be burdening Mother Earth.”
The girl by the tin-can cookstove asked now, “Do we feed her? The batter only made eight cakes.”
“Give her mine,” Tristão said.
“No, you need your strength,” Isabel said, though in fact she was faint with hunger. This lightness in the head, this incessant salivating—did the poor live with these sensations all the time? She counted the people in the shack, and there were six, including the man still asleep.
Tristão saw the darting of her eyes and read her thoughts. He explained, “There is also Granny.”
Out of the tangle of mats and bags and shadows in the far section of the shack a sweetly smiling assemblage of dark rags and bones had lifted up; an elderly emaciated woman wearing a turquoise bandana wrapped as a turban shuffled forward, touching the patchwork walls for guidance. Her eyes had no irises; she was blind. Her skin was cracked like black earth after a long drought.
“Is this your mother?” Isabel asked Ursula. Though the other woman gave her no encouragement, Isabel felt impelled to draw close to her, as a potential instructress in this new art of womanhood.
“My mother, I had no fucking mother,” came the answer in a mumbled monotone. “Old Granny say she the mother of my mother, back in Bahia, but who can prove? She stays here, she has nowhere else to go, everybody comes here, crowding in to be supported by my cunt. My poor cunt worn out by penniless trash like this.” She angrily snapped her side, so the man clinging there was jarred loose, onto his back again. His eyes slightly opened, like the eyes of a lizard when it flicks its tongue. “Nothing in his pockets but his balls,” Ursula told Isabel, and, as if sensing her need for instruction: “Always make ’em pay before you do a fucking thing, and up the ass is extra, because it hurts.”
Granny made seven. There would still be one spare angu cake, Isabel was calculating. She and Tristão could split it. Her hunger was like a solid object viewed through the transparent veil of the life around her. The very walls of the shack, with their fuzzy blue shards of daylight, felt transparent, as the sounds of the stirring favela, and the roar of Rio traffic far below, and the vertical pressure of the morning sun, intensified. In the corner out of which Granny in her torço had emerged, two other bodies, those of a stocky man and woman past first youth but not yet old, rose up and groped through the smoky doorway to the out-of-doors, each deftly lifting a cake from the stove as they went.
Isabel marvelled at how many people she had slept so soundly among. These poor, like animals, had developed a tactful politics of space. The whole shack, now that she could gauge its dimensions, was no bigger than her uncle’s master bathroom, without its massive sunken tub, the lavender toilet with its padded seat, the matching bidet, the two basins side by side before a single huge mirror, the two cabinets (one for medicine and one for Aunt Luna’s deserted cosmetics), the clothes hamper, the towel racks, the heated towel rack rounded at the top like a church window, the separate shower stall with frosted glass and a tiled floor you stepped down onto, the closet where Maria kept stacks of folded towels of all sizes—like fuzzy stairs, it had seemed to her as a little girl. When she grew up, she would climb those stairs and become a housewife like Aunt Luna, only with even more towels, and nappier ones, and a husband even handsomer than Uncle Donaciano.
v. The Candlestick
A FIGHT was brewing; Euclides, who had seemed such an amiable broad-faced pup on the beach, was insisting to his brother that their possession, in a sense, of this pale rich girl must somehow turn them a profit. Tristão had taken up the two duffel bags, both under one arm to leave his right hand free. His hand rested on the belt of his shorts, near where Isabel knew his razor blade lived. “She is mine,” Tristão was saying. “I have promised her no harm would come to her. You heard me promise.”
“I heard you, but I myself promised nothing. I merely watched you strut into folly. Luckily for us, she proved as great a fool as you. A note to her father will produce millions. Tens of millions.”
“When I meet her father, it will be as two gentlemen, not as a thief and his victim, not as a beggar and a prince.”
“Tristão, you always dreamed too much. You always believed in spirits, in fairy tales. You believe your life is a story, to be told in another world. You think there are recording angels up above dipping their pens in liquid gold. There is nothing, in truth, but dirt, and hunger, and finally death. At least share the contents of these bags with your family.”
“They hold only my woman’s clothes. Isabel is my family now. Our mother calls us trash and would have killed us in her womb had she had the science. You, I called you my brother, we were partners in crime, but now that I have a treasure, you wish to rob me.”
“I wish you merely to share, you fatuous scrotum. Ma
ke your mother rich, so she can close up her cunt.”
“Riches do not produce that result, you insignificant rat-turd. You squinting little slimy frog-pecker. Our mother is a whore. Whoring is all she knows, whoring is her happiness.” Sensing that Euclides was enough enraged to attack, Tristão dared look toward his mother with only a split second’s sideways glance, to see if he had insulted her.
“Kill him,” she advised the air, in her floating, pinga-betranced, omnipresent voice. “Kill each other and erase a poor nigger woman’s natural mistakes.”
“Who are we?” the man attached to her side asked, awakening and staring at the ceiling through a thunderous headache. Perhaps he had meant to ask another question.
“I smell a stranger in this house,” Granny announced, in an old-fashioned Portuguese redolent of colonial Bahia, with its courtesies and barbarities.
“Seven persons, six cakes left,” the girl by the stove announced.
“Take mine,” Ursula told Isabel. “My teeth are fit only to drink with.”
“Oh!” Isabel exclaimed in surprise. Politeness urged that she refuse, but larger imperatives overruled. “How kind of you! I will not refuse. Thank you, Ursula, with all my heart.” It took her a moment to eat the angu cake, hot from the old oil-drum lid. When had food ever tasted so good to her, so instant in its union with her essence, the burning within her nerves and veins? Gliding a few steps forward, she unzipped the lumpier duffel bag under Tristão’s arm. “In exchange, and in acknowledgment of your hospitality, I have something to give you.” She had quickly decided what she would give Ursula: one of the crystal candlesticks. This would leave the other in her possession, as a bond, a pledge. When she held out the intricately faceted object, a beam of sunshine from a gap in the wall set off a froth of rainbows, skimming about the room like iridescent dragonflies obedient to the twist of her wrist and the tremor of her fingers. “It came, I believe, from Sweden, a land of snow and ice. Please accept it, Mother, and allow me to give you that name, since though you were not mine you are mother to the person dearest on earth to me, and whose life has merged with my own.”
The woman drunkenly sunk on her bed hesitated, her curdled eyes bothered by the precious object’s brilliance. “Trash,” she at last pronounced. “We sell it, the fuzz trace it, hoosegow for everybody. This girl try to kill her boy friend’s mama.”
“Take it to the store of Apollonio de Todi, in Ipanema,” Isabel said. “He will give fair value, and hold it for redemption. Mention the name Leme.”
“Granny, do you smell a trap?” Euclides asked the old blind seer. To the others he said, “In my opinion, my brother’s pride and conceit are bringing complications upon those of us who wish only to live humbly, beneath the notice of the powerful, stealing and whoring no more than we must to stay alive.”
Tristão produced, with a silent flicker, the razor blade and held it against his brother’s broad and sallow cheek. “You deserve another face,” he said, “for spitting on this lavish offering from my wife.”
In Brazil, one says “wife” and “husband” not after some stilted legal ceremony but when one’s heart feels married. That ceremonious feeling had come to Tristão and Isabel after one night spent together in the utter darkness of Ursula’s shanty.
Euclides said carefully, holding his face motionless, “We are unaccustomed to such gifts. Beasts such as we are generally safe from the operations of bourgeois guilt. Marx says that sickly philanthropy is worse than blunt, healthy oppression, which at least alerts the working class to the war that exists. Forgive us, Isabel, if we are rude.”
“Pretend that you have stolen the candlestick,” Isabel told him lightly, “if that will ease your sense of honor.” She realized that rivalry existed between the half-brothers, and jealousy in her behalf, in part because Eudóxia had eluded this nearsighted, philosophical child of poverty, and fraternal reciprocity had been broken. “Euclides, forgive me for taking Tristão from you.”
On the beach, we seem each free, naked and idle and absolute, but in fact no one is free of the costume of circumstance; we are all twigs of one bush or another, and to gain a wife means to lose a brother. “Embrace,” she told the brothers, and told her lover, “We must go.” To Ursula she added, “Keep my gift, if you prefer, and light a candle against our return some dark night.”
“Too damn much pussy in Brazil,” Ursula mumbled, as if to explain their poverty, and their shameful willingness to accept this payment for hospitality.
No one obstructed the couple’s leaving of the shack, though Granny, annoyed with being ignored, set up a small commotion of prophecy. “Bad luck, bad luck,” Granny was shrieking. “I smell bad luck coming. It smells like flowers, it smells like the forest. The old forest, it is coming back, it will eat all the poor! Oxalá, have mercy!”
Outside, on a rough bench set up on the packed dirt, between milky trickles of sewage, the stocky couple was sunning. Tristão introduced them as his cousins, who in the glory days of Kubitschek had performed an onstage sex act in one of the boîtes of the Lapa district, close to the old aqueduct. Twice a night, and thrice on weekend nights, they achieved orgasm on a hotly lit stage, before a jeering, distracting audience. Suddenly, it seemed, they had become too old for this feat to be interesting to others, and now they waited here for their fortunes to turn. They had kindly, wrinkled, noninvolved faces, like those of vegetable sellers in the market, expectant and amiable but not pressingly so. Isabel wondered, with an inner shudder, if she and Tristão might end like them, all that sexual bliss vanished like rainbows in the sea-spray. As, hand in hand, they descended the steep hillside, the sea was enormous before them—a breastplate of shining metal—and they could hear all around them, operating on stolen electricity, the sequestered seductive chatter of television sets.
vi. São Paulo
THEY TOOK THE TRAIN to São Paulo. It wound southwest along the Atlantic coast. The faded plush seats could be seen to be emitting dust when the tracks curved so that shafts of sunlight slanted in through the dirty windows. Isabel was wearing her little straw hat, the black one, and the DAR ring Tristão had given her. On the left of the train streamed red-tile-roofed small fishing villages, conical old sugar mills, nodding palm trees, sickle-shaped white beaches shining in the sun as they were whetted by the rhythmic abrasion of the glittering blue sea. On the right loomed green-crowned domes of rock, upright loaves of granite. Most of Brazil is a vast, gently mountainous tableland; the coastal mountains are the legs of the table. As the train, laboring to climb the Serra do Mar and patiently stopping at stations where no one got on or got off, carried Tristão and Isabel into their future, the lovers napped, their heads resting heavily as sacks of sugar on one another’s shoulders and their hands numbly intertwined in each other’s laps. Awake, they talked of themselves. There was still so much to learn, to know.
“I loved your mother,” Isabel said, “though she did little to encourage me.” Tristão admired the way, when Isabel delivered herself of a remark meant to prompt a response, her whole face showed tension, a kind of bright brimming, as of a plump dewdrop about to break and run. Her mouth in such moments slightly pursed, so a row of tiny wrinkles broke out along her upper lip, beneath the almost invisible fuzz.
“That was beautiful of you, but she deserves no respect from either of us. She is viler than an animal, for at least an animal has motherly instincts. Birds hatch and feed their young, but my mother has no more feeling for me than for a piece of her own shit.”
“Didn’t you think she liked me? Did you see her fight back tears when I gave her the candlestick?”
“I did not see that, but the light in the shack is poor.”
“Who was the girl at the stove?”
“My sister, I think.”
“You do not know?”
“She appeared, one day.”
“Have you slept with her, ever?”
“I forget. Until I saw you on the beach, I felt nothing profound for any female.”
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br /> “You lie, Tristão. I think you have slept with her. That is why she did not want me to have any food. When was your first girl?”
“She was a woman, a woman who seemed old to me, an associate of my mother’s. She made me enter her, front and back. I was eleven. It was disgusting, horrifying. My mother watched.”
“And then? Then there were others, less disgusting?”
He resisted more talk on this topic, but finally admitted, “The girls of the favela are easy to seduce. They know their lives will be short and so they are generous and reckless.”
“Were there ever … any you especially loved?”
He thought of Esmeralda, her bushy hair, her thin dusky limbs, her streak of madness like that of a pet too stupid to be trained, and wished to hide her in the whorls of his memory, and felt guilty on this account. Isabel sensed this withholding, and was wounded by it, and as if in revenge confided to Tristão the daydreamings of her eighteen tender years about boys, sons of the friends of Uncle Donaciano and Aunt Luna, boys glimpsed across the dining room or swimming pool in the heat of January vacations in Petrópolis. He fell asleep when she was talking, his long-fingered brown-backed hands cupped in his lap, the palms the color of silver polish, with creases like engraved lines. Outside the windows, rolling miles were blanketed in the excessively bright green leaves of coffee trees.