Brazil

by John Updike

  With all this false paternity ringing in her ears, which were still unpopped from the airplane flight, Isabel went to bed in the chamber at the end of a long, gently curved hall. The room, furnished with a narrow bed and a bare desk, was “hers,” though she had spent in her eighteen years not a hundred nights in it. Her father, who had just that day flown in from Dublin, was of course asleep. She could picture him, motionless as a doll in his black eye-mask. Years of jet travel had taught him how to sleep at will. He looked forward to conferring with his daughter in the morning, at breakfast at nine-thirty, the tall servant, a pardo whose complexion bore a lugubrious touch of green, explained. A chubby short woman, perhaps the servant’s wife, in a maid’s uniform of starched blue, asked her if senhora required anything—a vitamina, a sleeping pill, another blanket. The couple—one lean, one fat, and both of them obsequious yet watchful—reminded Isabel of treacherous Chiquinho and Polidora and she wearily brushed them aside, wishing to be alone with her sorrow, to taste its bitterness and assess its limits.

  She perceived that her rebellion had won her new respect and consideration from those who held power over her life. Thus the world’s authorities betray their basic fragility and cowardice, she reflected, slipping herself naked into the prim, virginal bed. She was too weary to search out a nightie in her baggage. Her nakedness felt like a defiance of the rectilinear city about her, Brazil’s heart’s prison, and a rejoining of her body to Tristão’s blackness. She wished to pray for his safety, but in thinking of a God she could only think of him, the black gaze of longing and potential command Tristão had first fastened upon her, on the radiant beach.

  Her father, whose given name was Salomão, was older than Uncle Donaciano, and more powerful, yet smaller, with a bulging forehead that leaned forward anxiously from his balding head, as though he were melting. At breakfast he wore a maroon silk bathrobe over his gray-striped trousers, and slippers over black ribbed socks that would soon be enclosed in the narrow polished shoes of a diplomat and politician. Isabel perceived that she was just an appointment within his day, to be followed by others. Already he was engrossed in the stack of newspapers by his plate, in a number of languages; he stood to greet her with an air of having been interrupted.

  “My beautiful errant child,” he said, as if stating the meeting’s topic. He bestowed upon each of her cheeks and then her lips a kiss whose coolness had since childhood seemed to her tinged, like luggage stored in the unheated hold of an airplane, with the extra-terrestrial cold of the stratosphere. Always in her memories he had been coming to her from a great global distance; the apartment, though so laterally vast as to never (unlike Uncle Donaciano’s) feel crowded with acquisitions, abounded with souvenirs of his travels and posts: a seven-foot-square Tibetan thang-ka, its cosmic tree glinting with spidery lines of gold paint on a ground of pre-Creational purple and green, hung behind a Louis XV marquetry coiffeuse supporting a Ch’ing famille-noire vase and a Dogon wooden ancestor figure from Mali. Uncle Donaciano’s high-ceilinged Rio apartment held big slashing abstract canvases in the current mode; her father favored small engraved prints of historic scenes and edifices, or duo-chrome Japanese prints whose formality of composition denied the violence of their subject matter.

  He sat down opposite her at the low breakfast table, whose inlay contained an oversized chessboard. He opened the meeting: “I hope you slept well.”

  She could see he was determined to give her all the respect and intensity of attention that a fellow diplomat would have received. Nevertheless, his eyes did keep nervously flicking to the top newspaper on his pile, whose headlines told of riot, tactical war, and impending revolution throughout the globe. “I fell asleep promptly, Father, since I was exhausted from the journey your henchman forced upon me. But I awoke at four in the morning, not knowing where I was and then terrified at the realization that I could not get out—that I was being held captive. I nearly screamed with panic. I thought of jumping to my death, but of course the modernistic windows do not open.” She dug into her new-moon-shaped slice of honeydew melon, having already consumed a buttered roll and three crackling pieces of bacon. She no longer had a virgin’s picky appetite.

  “And then,” her father asked, “did you stay awake?”

  “No,” she sullenly confessed. “I fell back asleep for an hour or two.”

  “Well, then,” he said, somewhat triumphantly, and eyed the top newspaper again. “We adjust to circumstances quickly, so quickly the spirit thinks the body is a traitor.”

  “I fell asleep,” she said, “by imagining that I was back in the arms of my husband, where I belong.”

  “Just as you belong in the Hotel Amour, running up extravagant bills and corrupting the bellhop. You have had a little holiday, my Isabel, and I have been constrained to bring you back to real life.” Yet he spoke, she was almost sorry to observe, with a certain tentative delicacy, his eyes darting down to seize the morsel of another headline, his lips wincing back at the end of a sentence, exposing a child’s small round teeth, yellow with age. Her father, she dared see for the first time in her life, had been a small and delicate boy, easy to bully, pedantic in his plans for revenge. Earthly power was his revenge, and it was proving hollow.

  “Brasília is scarcely real life,” she told him, “nor have you been a very real father to me. You have been to me a hazy, unapproachable star, which is perhaps what a father should be, but now I must be allowed to transfer my affections to a man who has burst upon me like the sun.”

  Her father’s thin eyelids fluttered in a pained manner. He had developed a tic in the translucent bluish skin beneath one eye, and a pulse in the hollow of his temple. His gaze, when he could lift it from the newspaper to her face, had something of the slumping heaviness of his pallid brow. Compared with Tristão, her father seemed unformed—the skin thin and colorless as if interrupted in its development, the eyes a weak watery gray-blue, the skull clothed not in an impervious cap of tight oily circlets but in lank parallel strands that let the infantile scalp show through, the neckless square body shaped for nothing but sitting in a chair. Yet he spoke with an unabashed precision and authority, as if all his manliness had gone into his voice. “Do you remember,” he asked her, “your visit to the Othon Palace, the lady who accompanied us?”

  “She tried to be a mother to me,” Isabel recalled, “and I resented it. It was a false attempt.”

  “I, too, felt the falsity of her attempt to endear herself to my daughter, and it helped end our romance. Everything can be forgiven of a woman but awkwardness; that clings to the mind.”

  His Portuguese, compared with that of Tristão or Uncle Donaciano, had a flavorless neutrality, it seemed to Isabel. He knew so many other languages that his mind was always translating; his tongue had no home.

  “She to me,” he continued, “had been a revelation. Four years had passed since your dear mother’s death; except for periodic visits to raparigas—a matter solely of physical hygiene—I had lived chaste, first out of decent observance of mourning, then out of habit. Eulália—that was her name, in case you have forgotten—Eulália transformed me into what I had never been with your mother, for all her virtues: a sensual man. For the first time, I saw that the old Church was right and the Protestants and Platonists were wrong—we are our bodies, and resurrection is the only answer. Eulália resurrected me. She created me, in the way that you feel this boy has created you. In sad truth, he has exploited you—your sexual innocence, your bourgeois boredom, your youthful idealism, your Brazilian romanticism. Just so, Eulália exploited me—my easily flattered virility, my accustomed habits of cohabitation, the dependence on women that a mother’s weakling child develops. Only when I saw her seek to seduce my eight-year-old daughter, and clumsily fail through overacting, did I begin to awaken—for love is a dream, Isabel, as all but the dreamers can see. It is the anesthetic Nature employs to extract babies from us. And when, as in your ineffable mother’s case, the operation proves fatal, what does Nature do? She shr
ugs and walks away. Nature doesn’t care, my darling, about us; therefore we must care about ourselves. You will not throw away your life on a black slum boy. You will not see Tristão again. You will stay here in Brasília and live with me; you will be in every night by midnight. You will attend the university a few blocks from where we sit now. Since our new government in 1965 was constrained to close it and cleanse both faculty and student body of radical undesirables, the university curriculum may be mediocre in its specifics but is sound in its overall values. Protests and nihilism are kept to a minimum—a far cry from the hotbeds of anarchy and sedition in the coastal cities. Perhaps you will meet in one of your classes a charming general’s son.”

  “And what if I refuse to go? What if I run away?”

  Her father’s pendulous watery gaze lifted smilingly, as if the array of breakfast glasses and dishes between them were chess pieces, and she was mated. “Then this Tristão, whom we can now identify and trace, may painlessly disappear. Not even his mother, I understand, will trouble the authorities. She is an unnatural mother, or perhaps we should say all too natural. It would be, my angel, as if you, and you alone, had dreamed of his existence.” His smiling lips were not ruddy, like Uncle Donaciano’s, but pale, like the skin that peeped through his thinning hair, and were made whiter still by the powdered sugar topping the fried bun of which he had taken a surprisingly greedy bite, rolling his eyes downward toward the newspapers as he did so.

  x. The Two Brothers

  FOR TWO YEARS Isabel attended the Universidade de Brasília, studying art history. Slides of cave drawings and cathedrals, historical tableaux and Impressionist landscapes appeared in the darkness of the lecture hall and disappeared. All were French. Art was French, and the lecturers twanged out the French nasals and the rasped r as if returning home. Oh, there were some Cambodian temples, and German woodcuts, and after 1945 one had to take some note of the New York School, but in the end it was all dim spinoff or especially ingenious savagery, compared to Chartres and Cézanne. True culture, Isabel learned, was a surprisingly local, a purely European, and mostly a French, affair. Only biology was global—billions of copulations, adding up.

  If she did “date” some of her fellow students, conservative and pusillanimous but handsome and admiring sons of the oligarchy and its servants, what of it? She was young, full of nervous energy, and on the Pill. One can be faithful in spirit, especially if at the moment of orgasm one closes one’s eyes and thinks, Tristão. Removed from her life, changeless in his absence, he had become inviolate, an untouchable piece of herself, as secret as a child’s first sexual inklings.

  Her father, observing what seemed to be her acceptance of her situation, congratulated himself on the success of his strategy. He came and went in the vast apartment like a strange slug, with his thin bluish skin, his pale-lipped smile, his balding brow toppling above the oppressive vague benevolence of his gaze, like that of the nuns who had taught her and Eudóxia at school. He had asked a year and a half’s home leave, before embarking on his new ambassadorship, to Afghanistan. At night she could hear him in his bedroom practicing Persian and Pashto—the deep, swaying, sometimes guttural voice so Islamic in its passions that she imagined him in a loose turban and flowing robe, haggling for carpets or decreeing death to blasphemers. He modestly explained that neither language was too difficult, both being branches of Indo-European. Once in a while he took her to a concert or play, in the capital’s scanty round of cultural events. But for days at a time they scarcely spoke, each preoccupied with different duties and circuits. Isabel held to her collegiate path in a kind of trance, under the spell of a vow for whose inner emblem two gray gun barrels served instead of a cross. She would not cause Tristão’s death, and held him in her heart like a prisoner safe in a locked cell.

  Only when Uncle Donaciano visited did Tristão in a sense escape, for her uncle brought with him into stark Brasília—its vacuous grid, its fake lake, its red dust devils swirling where the grass of the enormous median strips had been allowed to die—the debonair sea breath of Rio. In his ice-cream suit and two-toned wing-tip shoes and red-ribboned Panama hat, he brought her presents too young for her age—a bouquet of cunningly made cloth flowers, a pottery tricycle with lumpy wheels that actually turned, a little circus of performers made of gold wire wrapped about semi-precious gems from Minas Gerais. He wanted to keep the girl in her alive, and he embodied Rio’s childish, playful atmosphere, in which adults walk the streets in bathing suits and all year is spent constructing the quickly shattered toy of Carnaval. His soft-voiced bantering and the smell of his English Oval cigarettes in his ebony-and-ivory holder reminded her of the apartment with the snaky-armed brass chandelier and white rose of a skylight where she had first given herself to Tristão and her virgin blood had left a chalice-shaped stain on the quilted satin bedcover. Uncle Donaciano embodied love, of sorts; she twisted the DAR ring on her middle finger and asked him about Maria.

  “Ah, Maria,” he said, his eyes undercut by mauve shadows and a few strands of his graying honey-blond hair disarrayed by his aura of distingué melancholy. “Maria grows older.”

  “And less desirable?” Isabel teased him, blowing smoke upward toward her father’s low ceiling. Salomão had sensitive lungs and Isabel only smoked at the university or when Uncle Donaciano visited, with his English cigarettes in their tempting pastel-tinted papers. The settee she lounged upon was of teak and rattan, an elegant piece brought back from her father’s tour of India years ago, and not very comfortable, though padded with sequinned cushions of black and purple and pink. “Perhaps,” she said, extending her impudence, “you have used her too hard. You should make her an honest woman, as a reward for her years of service.”

  Donaciano blinked his weary eyes and touched his hair, tousling it further. He had accepted Isabel, conversationally, as one more of those adult women whose affection took the form of harassment. “Aunt Luna is still my wife,” he said. “When you are naughty like this,” he added, “you remind me of your mother. It is heartbreaking.”

  “Did my mother break your heart?” Isabel had long wondered if her uncle had loved his brother’s wife. On his bedroom dresser, along with the requisite studio portrait and vacation snapshots of Aunt Luna, had stood a framed photograph of Cordélia—slightly blurred, standing on some rocks, beneath a single pine, a picnic site, where a breeze was spreading her wide white ruffled skirt and full gauzy sleeves, pressing her blouse against a full bosom, the white muslin emphasizing her mother’s lovely tan, that drop of darkness which makes a true Brazilian beauty, the blurred face joyous in a half-smile, her glossy cheeks rounded, her eyelids lowered seemingly against some glare. Isabel had often stealthily studied the photograph, in Uncle Donaciano’s absence, wondering where her father had been, how far or near the rim of the camera’s field of vision. Who was making her mother laugh and lower her eyes flirtatiously? What had the voices in the air been saying? The very blurring in the photograph seemed a trace of her mother’s breath, warm on the lens.

  But these mysteries, these old romances, fade, and in the end are as depressing to youth as the photographs of old Rio with its trolley cars and passé fashions that hang on the walls of restaurants sentimental about themselves.

  “She broke the hearts of all that looked upon her,” Uncle Donaciano said. “Look at your father. He has never remarried. He is but a walking casket for the memory of your mother. Do not you, Isabel, imitate him in this folly, which has made him old before his time. Embrace life. Love many men before you die. This beach brat was but a beginning. Go to Europe. Become an opera singer.”

  “But I have no voice.”

  “Neither does Callas. What she has is presence.”

  He had, by kindness or accident, breached the forbidden, and mentioned her lover. “Speaking of beach brats, Uncle,” she lazily ventured, “what do you hear from São Paulo? Has any harm come to that poor boy whom I so wantonly invited into our shared home? Ah, I do miss our apartment. Brasília is Hell, on
ly duller than Hell must be. The city has been dropped on this hot plain like an egg to be fried.”

  His refined face, harrowed by decades of pleasure-seeking and obstinate selfishness, turned solemn. “My dearest, I hear nothing from São Paulo. It is a hell of another sort, the monstrously ugly demonstration of our futile desire to become an industrial nation, a nation like the soulless bullies north of the Equator. The world, once so green and charming—a literal paradise—is becoming infinitely ugly, Isabel; I am not sorry I will live to see little more of it.” Tugging a snuffed stub of a cigarette from his holder to replace it with another, he managed a small fatal cough, though he was little older than forty. He did look faintly dingy and frazzled, for the first time in her vision of him—the cuffs of his ice-cream pants were soiled, and a button was missing from a jacket sleeve. His lack of a wife was beginning to tell.

  It was curious for Isabel to see the two Leme brothers together; Uncle Donaciano made her father seem smaller and more gnomishly misshapen than ever, and more ruthlessly, pointlessly busy and official. Nevertheless, there was a fraternal likeness, and companionable murmurings in the library after dinner, over brandy or tall conical glasses of Cerma beer, while Isabel leafed through an album of Quattrocento paintings, all those deadly stiff madonnas and wizened baby Jesuses with buttonlike peepees—how tedious and dry what passed for learning was, how past tense, compared with what happened to her when she was with Tristão, or listening to one of those songs by Chico Buarque that slyly smuggled through the censorship lyrical hints of revolution against the military bosses, or watching one of the soap operas on television featuring actors and actresses as young as herself. This was present tense, carbonated by the future, a vague time of infinitely expansive possibilities. It was curious to look at her father and uncle together and to wonder if they had ever made a woman feel as Tristão did her. It seemed impossible, and yet there were moments when the two men abruptly broke into a cackle together, a flash of conspiratorial hilarity like a fissure reaching down to their shared boyhood, and she comprehended their fraternal maleness, their venerable complicity.