Brazil

by John Updike

  Chiquinho made some ungainly hand-flapping gestures across his chest, indicating his tattered shirt. It was a white shirt, short-sleeved, of the type that engineers wear, even to the plastic protector in the pocket, but the pocket had no pens in it, and the pointed collar was frayed. “I would be ashamed to meet her, dressed as I am. You must come to see us. I, too, have a wife. Her name is Polidora. Here is my address, dear Tristão. Our street now has electricity, and the city promises sewers. Take the bus to Belém, and walk south into Moóca, as I will indicate.” He swiftly drew a map, and named the next night, adding, “There is work in São Paulo, but also there are many from the nordeste, who drive the wages down, and think nothing of cutting the throats of those who threaten them. But I will make inquiries, for our family’s sake. How does our blessed mother fare?”

  “She lives, much as ever, cursing everything.”

  Chiquinho permitted himself a smile, and a bleak nod. From the aluminum calm of his eyes Tristão gathered that the information had not been news, and his asking had been a mere formality. As they parted, Chiquinho emphasized, “Polidora and I will expect the two of you. Do not leave your wife behind.”

  It had been uncanny, their meeting so opportunely, in a section, Campos Elíseos, where Chiquinho must have rare occasion to walk. Still, Tristão accepted gratefully, and turned back into the hotel to tell Isabel that their true life together—their life in the real world, and not this rented chamber—was beginning. In their idleness she had become addicted to the afternoon soap operas on the radio, and to the dubbed broadcasts of such imported television shows as “I Love Lucy.” Like Tristão, she was putting on weight.

  viii. The Ranch House

  WITH THE LAST OF THEIR MONEY they took a taxi, following Chiquinho’s directions, through a flat neighborhood that had recently been a coffee plantation but that now boasted electric wires and street signs. Though the ground underfoot was unpaved and littered with industry’s glinting detritus, and the sky overhead was smudged by smoke, the houses had yards and verandas and several rooms, spreading sideways beneath roofs of red tile. Chiquinho at the door seemed more brittle than ever, his smile of greeting a tight gash in his face, and his head precarious on his thin neck. His wife, Polidora, like a ball of freshly baked bread, was round and spongy and a toasty golden brown; her hair was rinsed with henna and had been teased and baked into a stiff beehive. She had round eager eyes but as if to match Chiquinho’s cautious squint kept her lids half lowered. Her doughy features gleamed with a sweat that Tristão blamed upon the beauty and prestige of her female guest; she greeted Isabel with an excessively familiar embrace and then pulled her, not relinquishing her adhesive grip on the girl’s slim white hand, into a larger room beyond the tiled entrance hall, Tristão following as Chiquinho’s bony arm interlocked purposefully with his. In this second room two men in silvery-gray suits rose and showed the guests their guns.

  Tristão thought of the razor blade but realized he had not even that. He kept it generally in the little change pocket of the bell-bottomed denims he and Isabel had bought for him at a store called Polychrome, but this evening, dressing in the hotel, they had decided such informal trousers might seem disrespectful to such a petit bourgeois as his brother had apparently become, and he had opted instead for a flowing silk shirt, with white French cuffs on mauve sleeves, and cream-colored linen slacks, with tasselled loafers. So he had no razor blade. But what could a razor blade do against two guns?

  The older of the two men, a heavy handsome man who had grown gray and melancholy in the service of the rich, gestured with his gray barrel for them to sit on the sofa, a plaid Hide-a-Bed set against a yellow wall decorated with two plaster parrots, gaudily enamelled bas-reliefs of a piece with the rounded plaster frames. The parrots’ tails and beaks overlapped the frames—a caprice of the artist’s, asking you to consider, What is reality and what is artifice?

  On the sofa Tristão felt Isabel’s body trembling beside his like that of a woman in heat, who is gambling her life in a moment of sexual abandon. He dismissed any thought of how her body from the start had led him into embarrassment and danger, and put his arm about her, to shield her with his own body if need be. Though he, too, was trembling, his mind was immensely clear and quick, the electricity evoked by this emergency running along the forked paths of possibility. All that was now said he had understood in a flash.

  “Do not be alarmed, my friends,” said the man with the handsomely grayed temples, and a measured gray mustache. “We are here only to escort the young lady to her father in Brasília. There is a plane from Congonhas at a little after ten; there is plenty of time. We thought you might be fashionably late. Let’s all have a drink.”

  “I would spit in the glass offered me by my Judas of a brother,” Tristão said. Directly of Chiquinho he demanded, “How can you justify to yourself this betrayal?”

  Chiquinho worked his arms about on his chest as if brushing away flies without using his hands. “This relationship is degrading to you, brother. You have lost your edge; you look soft and sleek, like a kept man. Better I betray you than this platinum girl. The rich always retreat back into their own. The little money her people have spared me for my collaboration will finance my education; I will become a certified electrical engineer!”

  Isabel’s dear monkey face was twisted by the torque between indignation and tears; yet her body beside Tristão’s on the plaid sofa was, under his arm, oddly limp. Something in her had relaxed. Our deep selves welcome our catastrophes. Her own education was moving beyond sexual stunts and daytime soap operas. “How did you know about us?” she softly asked Chiquinho. “Was it Ursula?”

  Tristão grieved for her, for he knew that in deciding to love his unlovable mother Isabel had set herself a task precious in its perversity. Loving his mother was her invention, the first vulnerable offspring of their marriage.

  “Ah, no, miss,” Chiquinho responded, as if mercifully. “Our blessed mother lives beneath the level of electronics, of communication with the unseen. Since at the age of fourteen the idea of selling her own body was thrust upon her, she has had no further profitable ideas. It was Euclides who warned me, via our not always undependable post, that Tristão would be coming to São Paulo with a treasure. At first I waited for him to find me, but the city’s vastness defeated him. So I found him. The Othon Palace was suggested as a possibility, and the clerk there was helpful. He remembered the two of you. He asked me to assure you that the reason you were turned away was not racial prejudice on his part, but respect for the feelings of the other guests, many of whom come from abroad, from less tolerant societies.”

  “What will happen to Tristão?” Isabel asked, with a gasp of panic that left her mouth open, displaying her pearly teeth, her velvet tongue. Her mind, accustomed to the logic of wealth and power, had grasped more quickly than Tristão the crux his own person posed: Left free, he would make trouble. He might seek out his wife in Brasília, he might try to abduct her back, he might even—grotesque thought!—go to the police. Sensing her panic, Tristão now saw that the surest way to end Isabel’s attachment was to kill him. As if an electric current had been switched on, or one of those sudden and terrific thunderstorms of São Paulo had darkened the air so that everything appeared in negative, with shadows white and plaster walls black, he saw how completely the quiet presence of the two guns had altered the room. Death, that unthinkable remoteness, had been brought abruptly near, a pace or two away, giving everything a papery, permeable texture. All the lines in the room, from the shadowy corners to the seams of the plaid sofa and the hexagonal floor tiles the color of Chiquinho’s skin, were aligned on a new perspective; a solemnity had been introduced in which everyone spoke softly, and everyday gestures were performed with a sleepwalking stateliness. Polidora brought in a tray of drinks—tall pastel sucos for those who wished no alcohol, and for the others caipirinhas blended of cachaça, lime, sugar, and crushed ice. Isabel took a caipirinha, to quell her emotions; Tristão, a suco,
in case an opportunity arose for clear wits. A warm smell of stewing beef swam out from the kitchen.

  The younger gunman, who lacked a mustache and silvery temples, answered Isabel comfortingly, “He will become my friend. César will accompany the young lady to Brasília, and I will stay here with the young man, whose mind at first will naturally be bewitched by thoughts of rescue and vengeance. This is an ample house; we can all be happy here, for a week or two, until the young lady is safely restored to her father’s influence. My name is Virgílio,” he added, to the couple on the sofa, with a small bow that did not lower the level angle of his gun barrel.

  Polidora protested, “Sir, we have two children sleeping here.”

  “Madame, you will be paid.”

  Isabel burst out, “I will never be restored to my father’s influence! I am a woman now, with my own rôle in the world. My entire life, since my mother died when I was four, has been spent without a father—he left me in the care of his foppish brother!”

  César, scandalized, was moved to defend his employer, and perhaps all those men, of whom he was one, of graying middle years, who understandably could not meet all the demands converging upon them. “Miss Isabel, your father is an important man, who has given his life to the government of the country.”

  “Then why does nothing seem governed? The poor remain poor, and the rich rule with guns.” As if fulfilling her uncle’s prophecy of her radicalism, she rebelliously stood and taunted the gunmen: “Why should I do what you say? You would never harm me—my father would have your hides.”

  Courteously César agreed. “That is true. But the same does not apply to your black friend—your husband, if you will. The world would not miss him. Only you would miss him. His death would not leave even the smallest gap in the records, since he has no doubt evaded registering for the draft. And if he is not hostage enough to win your coöperation, think of our hosts”—the gun barrel twitched toward Chiquinho and Polidora, standing waiting to serve them all dinner—“and their two children. These children could return from the streets to find their parents dead, and though these deaths would be noticed, our police are overworked, and would not find the killers. Do not think these threats are bravado. Reality is, more and more, statistics, and in a country as big as Brazil we are very small statistics.”

  Now it was Chinquinho who protested: “It was my voluntary information that brought you here, and now you threaten my life!”

  Virgílio told him, “The man who betrays his own brother deserves to die.” To Tristão he added, with a smile that revealed winningly irregular teeth, overlapped like feet doing a dance step, “You see what a good and loyal friend I am already? Better sometimes a spiritual brother than a blood brother.”

  Isabel, on her feet, seemed stretched and twisted as if pulled by invisible threads; it was strange, Tristão reflected, how the two gray guns had, like pencils, redrawn the space of the room, reducing the infinitude of possibilities to a few shallow tunnels of warped choice. Their spirits had all become very thin, walking the taut wires of the situation. Isabel now said calmly, “If I am to be taken to my father, then, I must have my clothes. They are back in the hotel. There is no time to eat, if we must be at Congonhas by ten. We must go now,” she said to her new escort, the paternal, gray-suited delegate of the power that had formed her.

  “It is so,” César said, pleased. To Polidora: “Our regrets. The feijoada smells excellent; my healthy young associate will eat my share.” To Chiquinho: “You have half your reward in your pocket. The other half depends upon your continuing coöperation and hospitality.” To Tristão: “Farewell, my friend. It will be unfortunate for one of us if we ever meet again.” To Isabel: “Come, miss. As you say, the plane will not wait.”

  Isabel bent down and bestowed upon Tristão a languid kiss, soft as a cloud and warm as the kiss of the sun, that said, Keep faith.

  But could he trust her? His wife, from the back, looked uncannily at ease on the arm of her distinguished-appearing abductor. Back in the hotel, she had put on a pert, neither formal nor informal dress of small red flowers on a navy-blue ground, changing costume two or three times to find the perfect match for his slacks and casual yet French-cuffed shirt—respectfully elegant, but not overbearingly so. This was to have been their first night out together, as an established couple, visiting one of her in-laws. Perhaps they had reached too far, too fast.

  With Isabel gone, Tristão felt more his old self, and, as Polidora brought her pot of peppery feijoada to the table, all of them relaxed. Virgílio removed his gray coat and tucked his gun into his armpit holster, and Chiquinho replaced their tall glasses with bottles of Antártica beer. Tristão’s little niece and nephew, Esperança and Pacheco, came in from the dark streets—toasty-skinned, gray-eyed tots of three and five—and the importunate innocence of children infected the table with merriment. Their stares fixed upon Virgílio’s gun; its handle jutted from the holster like the rear end of an animal diving into its burrow, and, sensing their fantasy, the gunman enacted it, moving the gun in and out like a scurrying animal, miming its fright on his face, his crooked teeth chattering. “Fora! Opa! Dentro! Bom.”

  When the beer was depleted, transparent cachaça appeared, and the table of four adults overflowed with jokes against the world outside the thin walls, above the fragile roof—the others, the rich, the poderosos, the gringos, the Argentinians, the Paraguayans, the German and Japanese farmers in the Região Sul, with their ridiculous accents and insular, puritanical, work-obsessed habits. The true Brazilian, they jubilantly agreed among themselves, is an incorrigible romantic—impetuous, impractical, pleasure-loving, and yet idealistic, gallant, and vital.

  Tristão was dizzy as he went to bed. The room’s angles surged and tipped much as they had under the magnetic pressure of the guns. He was assigned the children’s room; the children were shifted to their parents’ bed. Tristão had one cot and Virgílio slept in the other, placed across the door to bar escape. The room’s only window was secured with fixed outside bars against thieves, who flocked to this neighborhood of slowly rising working-class prosperity.

  It had been many weeks since Tristão had lain down without Isabel beside him. Her being had become hard to distinguish from his own. She burned inside him like a peppery lining to his stomach, a luminous longing eating him alive. Being alive, he perceived, is a relative condition, not worth everything. It was not worth Isabel’s absence—her cunt moistly enwrapping his stiff yam, her voice pattering into his half-attentive ear, the warm cloud of her lips descending upon his, saying Keep faith. She was not death but her whiteness had death’s purity. He stifled his tears, lest he wake his new roommate. He schemed, and then he dreamed.

  ix. Brasília

  SEEN AT MIDNIGHT from an airplane, Brasília’s lights trace the shape of an airplane, with long curved wings, on the vast black slate of Brazil’s interior. The city seems to float on emptiness like a constellation, and then to tilt, as if wheeling toward takeoff past your own stationary position in space. You land with a whisper, as if not on solid earth. The air in the airport is cool, and surprisingly crowded with comings and goings, late as the hour is, for this is a place where few want to be, yet where many must come.

  César directed the taxi to Isabel’s father’s apartment, on the Eixo Rodoviário Norte, in one of the great vertical slabs where government higher-ups maintained addresses. Her memories of Brasília went back to her girlhood, to overhearing Uncle Donaciano and her father quarelling over President Kubitschek’s determination to make good on his campaign vow to build an inland capital. It is an ancient Brazilian dream, her father said—as old as the dream of independence, going back to the Inconfidência Mineira. Then keep it as a dream, her uncle had responded—if we make all our dreams come true, the world will become a nightmare. The rumored event had made childish Isabel feel strange, as if her heart were being tugged off-center, or as if an earthquake had moved her beautiful Rio out to sea. Then, a year or so later, a skidding, bobbing f
light in a Piper Cub landed her, with her father, amid mountains of fresh red dirt and thousands of poor peasants from the sertão slaving like ants to effect an inscrutable plan. When she and her father returned again, skeletal buildings were up, giant yellow trucks roared back and forth importantly on unpaved roadways, and the sunken round shape of the cathedral had sprouted its crown of concrete thorns. Now the plan was realized, the stony capital was built, like a beautiful statue still waiting for life to be breathed into it. The black space of the sertão, the blank calm of the inhuman night still presided beneath and above the schematic lights, the dazzling blackboard diagram.

  The security guards at the apartment building had been forewarned of Isabel’s coming, for both of them—small, high-cheeked men, with a caboclo wiriness—were awake and wearing neat olive uniforms. Nevertheless, César insisted on accompanying Isabel into the elevator and up to the floor where her father’s vast apartment spread its wings like a miniature of the city itself. As César surrendered her and her luggage to the tall stooped servant who met them at the door, he lifted her white hand to his lips and kissed the backs of her fingers, which were curled and cold in her resentment. “Now, do as your papa says,” he affectionately advised her. “Brazil has few leaders; the Portuguese did not bring to the New World the discipline and austerity that the Spanish did. If we were not as cruel as they were, merely brutal, it was because we were too lazy to have an ideology. The Church was too lenient; even the convents were brothels.” This was the summary, as if from a professor whose time had run out, of the lecture he had been giving her in the airplane. César was a considerable self-improver: he made a point of reading at least one book per week and had taught himself a reading knowledge of Spanish, French, and English. German he had found a bit thick, as yet. He hoped, when his days as an enforcer and assassin were over—“It’s a young man’s game, miss; when you get old, you become too soft-hearted”—to buy his own limousine and become a tour guide. Not just in the cities, mind, where all the visiting businessmen care about is finding a sexy mulatta, but into the countryside, where the rich widows and Canadian schoolteachers will want to visit the picture-book towns like Ouro Prêto and Olinda, redolent of our colonial history, and the eighteenth-century churches with their soapstone carvings by Aleijadinho—“A dwarf and a cripple, miss, and his mother a black slave; who says a good man can’t get ahead in Brazil?”—and of course the fabled Amazon, the world-famous opera house in Manaus, and the vastness itself, which will become a tourist attraction in its own right, as the world runs out of space. Only Siberia and the Sahara can rival Brazilian vastness, and they have deplorable climates. That is why the government in its wisdom has settled Brasília and is pushing roads through all the virgin forest—“Roads are progress, miss, and the man who can drive them is a man of the future.”