by John Updike
Ana Vitória protested, “Why set ‘whores’ in such a string of pejorative terms? The whore is a woman, trading a woman’s assets in a certain type of market situation. Your queens of society, your Princess Graces of Monaco, trade under different conditions. There is no sexual morality. The phrase is an oxymoron. Women must survive.”
“Exactly!” cried Nestor, in a tone of triumph, like the military seizing upon chaos to impose itself.
“Exactly, exactly,” echoed Clarice across the table, a single broad plank of purpleheart, or pau roxo, sticky with ice cream rubbed into the grain, and striped all along the edges with cigarette burns. She spoke in a throaty voice to Nestor: “As you say, anarchy is the only honest condition—the human race without romanticism, without capitalism, without Marxist bullshit.”
Nestor looked foolish at the compliment, his acne-dotted jaw going slack, as if his prick were being sucked. Isabel closed her eyes and pictured his wormy white organ and shuddered.
“And Isabel—do you agree?” Sylvio asked her, thinking perhaps that such reëvaluation of all values brought his conquest of her closer.
“Ana says only ‘survive.’ I say ‘live,’ ” said Isabel, sounding naïve to herself, and blushing a little. There was a fever in her veins she could not bring these others to share.
Sylvio, his broad face eager and wary like that of Tristão’s brother Euclides on the beach that day, had an announcement to make, in a voice so hushed and charged that even the cigarette smoke seemed to freeze in attention. “This Thursday. A university-wide student protest. Scheduled for noon. We will march up the Eixo Rodoviário to the cathedral and continue toward the presidential palace until the police open fire. We want casualties, to the point of international scandal. Television cameramen will be there, we have been promised. It is timed to coincide with worker strikes in all the textile and paper-products plants. It will be beautiful—we will slay the beast with our deaths. Those who survive will rally afterwards on the golf course.”
Ana Vitória’s pinched, determined voice was saying, with the dryness of pages turning, “Student protest is the opposite of worker protest: it is the attempt of the ruling class’s younger generation to maintain power, disguised as revolution.”
“Brazil is not too romantic but not romantic enough,” Nestor was expounding, under the goad of Clarice’s longing for him. “It is the most pragmatic nation on the continent. Who have our revolutionaries been? A dentist who wrote bad poems, and an Emperor’s regent son looking to keep his job!”
“Isabel,” yet another voice was pronouncing, in a tone both shy and demanding. “Isabel.”
She opened her eyes and saw Tristão standing there, at the end of the plank of scarred purpleheart, a tall black boy saddled with an orange knapsack and wearing a T-shirt so faded and tattered its legend could scarcely be read. For a flashlit moment, in the glare of her friends’ startled stares, she doubted that she knew him. Her first emotion was fright. “How did you find me?” she asked him.
Her accusatory tone made him smile. In the slow ease with which he bared his perfect teeth, the strong square taken-for-granted teeth of youth, she knew him again, as an amplifier of her best and deepest self. His brow, also squarecut, was taller than she had remembered, like a rampart erected above the deep-set eyes swimming sadly in their own inky darkness. “I smelled you out,” he explained in a voice whose sombre clothy texture, with its Carioca softness, exerted a spell of silence upon her sharply talkative companions. The lovable shape of his nose, flattened as if to give its nostrils a greater grip on the air and its fragrances, made his hyperbole plausible.
His voice had set off vibrations within her: she felt transposed—harpsichord music now scored for string quartet. His smile went diminuendo, turning grave as he explained, “Virgílio heard from César that you were a student at the university here. When I got off the bus, after a journey of fifteen hours, I asked where the students might gather. This is the twelfth place I have searched. You do not seem pleased to see me. You are no longer a girl of eighteen.”
“I am pleased,” Isabel told him. “Excuse me,” she said to Sylvio, who sat between her and freedom, on the outside of the booth.
He asked her, “Are you in trouble? Who is this riffraff?”
To Isabel’s ears, Sylvio’s voice sounded blanched. She heard the fear tightening it, pitching it high, though he had just boasted of marching into the guns of the military, to make a splash of news with his and their blood. She steeled herself, explaining firmly, “He is my friend.” She could not quite bring herself to say, He is my husband.
Clarice was exchanging conspiratorial glances with Nestor across the table, and beside him Ana Vitória stared stiffly ahead, as if waiting for Marxism to tell her what to do. Sylvio, petulantly declining to rise, turned his thighs sideways so Isabel could ease past him, her ass in its denim miniskirt an inch from his face. Nestor’s acne-dotted cheeks looked slapped, so reddened had they been by this sudden embarrassment, this irruption into their student life.
“Ciao, guys,” Isabel said to them all.
“Ciao,” they said back, in a limp, jarring chord.
“Adeus,” Tristão pronounced, more formally, with a dismissive bow.
Cradling her heavy botany text against her taut breasts, she followed him through walls of blue smoke to the out-of-doors. The fresh air, the night sky, his muscular dark presence—this was ice cream of another kind, a deliciousness in the dimension not of the mouth and tongue and throat but of the organs lower down, intimately linked to the soul and its aura. A rip in his T-shirt at his shoulder revealed a triangular patch darker than varnished purpleheart, and she remembered how touchingly susceptible to scars was black skin, which unlike white skin never forgives, remembering each scratch and blister with a forever dulled gray like that of chalk on an imperfectly washed blackboard.
xiv. Under the Stars
OUTSIDE ON THE SIDEWALK, Brasília’s urban illuminations pushed back against the overarching emptiness. Restaurants serving watery canja de galinha and bars emitting the harsh judgmental laughter of youth threw squares of light onto the sidewalk; overhead, lit rectangular windows mounted as if to outswarm and smother the stars. Isabel wore a little rose-colored short-sleeved jersey and had tied around her waist, in case the night turned cool, a sweatshirt imprinted with the Catedral Nacional’s crown of thorns; as she quickened her steps to match Tristão’s stride, the swinging sweatshirt gave her hips a heedless, challenging sway. His raw white tennis sneakers flickered ahead of them, in and out of puddles of electric light. Other pedestrians glanced briefly in their direction; they were a mismatched couple but Brazil had been populated by mismatched couples.
Beginning to breathe hard, she dared touch his arm, as if to slow his pace; her hand jumped back, startled by the iron hardness of his biceps. Yes, he was older, his muscles more knotted, his face a bit leaner, with, she noticed from the side, the faintest crease at the corner of his lips, where none had existed before. She felt lifted up, exalted, but also hurried, as if time had turned a corner and was rolling downhill.
“Yes, I have been working,” he told her. “For two years they had me turning engine-brace bolts in the fusca factory, until I was turning them in my dreams. I wanted to dream of you, Isabel, but I was losing your face, your voice, day by day, night after night. I rebelled, and cut my brother’s face to get away.”
“And now you see me,” Isabel said, feigning a jaunty gaiety, resting her white hand on his iron arm and turning him, with his orange knapsack behind him like a hump, to walk more slowly toward where the lights were thinning, as the Eixo Rodoviário Norte gently turned. “You still like me?”
Her dear convex monkey face, bright with the pallor of student sleeplessness, had a certain faint fragility now, as if the sadness of life were slowly draining it of juice. “Touch me and see,” he told her.
“Here on the street? You are crazy, Tristão.” Yet the idea moistened the crotch of her bikini underpants, be
neath her denim skirt.
“Are you ashamed to be with me? I fled my brother’s house in the clothes I generally sleep in. That accounts for my shabbiness. Actually, I have resources—two years’ worth of savings in my knapsack.”
“Never will I not love being with you,” she said, and as they strolled side by side she brushed her other hand across the fly of his shorts, where his yam had awakened.
“We must fuck, and talk,” he told her.
“Yes. Keep walking, my husband. Soon there will be a place.”
They were beyond most of the city lights and were passing knots of workers waiting for the buses that would take them back to their shantytowns miles into the bush; their pale shirts fell away in the darkness like whitecaps in the night ocean. Now when no headlights passed there was only the flicker of his sneakers and the sideways tossing of her imprinted sweatshirt, her long platinum hair. The sidewalk gave out. The double highway had a middle strip of grass as wide as a city block. When they walked on it she could feel through her sandals small prickings of dew descended from the inverted bowl of night ever clearer and more crystalline above them. Their pace together turned languid and halting as they paused to kiss and to stroke one another and to reach under each other’s thin clothes to seize and caress yielding skin.
Here and there in the great central highway strip were plantings, virtual groves; as they drew near to one, her botany training enabled her to recognize pacovas, wild banana trees, with their huge sheltering leaves, interspersed with Spanish bayonet in glowing lilylike blossom. The growth was dense enough for Tristão and Isabel to feel hidden, on the floor of bark mulch and dried pacova fronds. As the lovers lay there they could see far above them the black sky strewn with stars, thicker in some places than others, like desert shrubs spaced closer together in dried streambeds that had once held water. From within the grove, away from Brasília’s willed lights, the stars shone with an intensity that overruled their disorder: surely some vast miracle was being proclaimed. It needed only for her to slip the bikini panties out from under the small rough skirt and for him to discard his swimming shorts for them to become lovers once more. Her cunt was to him like cream poured upon two years of aching.
“Let us never be parted again,” he sighed, his throbs still ebbing within her.
“We will not,” she promised.
“Where can we go? Your father’s wrath will follow us everywhere.”
“It is not wrath, it is distaste, bred of his cultural conditioning. Look above us, Tristão. Vast as that sky is, so is Brazil’s hinterland. We will go west, and lose ourselves in it.”
As these two lay hidden in the ornamental planting—rendered junglelike by the irrepressible wild banana plant, whose green and pointed fruit mingled its faint sweet scent with Isabel’s stirred-up musk and Tristão’s bodum, which was strong after his day’s ordeal of travel—Brasília’s traffic rushed along both halves of the superhighway; winged angels of headlight glare visited them blindly in the undergrowth, engendering jagged, wheeling leaf-and-stem shadows and exposing to the concealed lovers’ own eyes their bare limbs and exposed soft bellies. In these washes of brightness their faces looked, each to the other, frightened. Each was trying to imagine the hinterland.
“We can live for a while on my money,” he told her, “but inflation eats at it, it will not last long.”
“I have spending money only, but I can steal some things from my father’s apartment, to sell as we go. I still have the candlestick I did not give your mother, and Uncle Donaciano’s cigarette box and little cross. I can steal what my father has kept of my mother’s jewels. They are in effect mine anyway.”
“Do not take anything of your father’s that has sentimental value,” Tristão commanded. “I hope some day to be his friend.”
She made an involuntary noise that told him this was a hopeless vision. Fright, dark and extensive like the territory to which they had committed themselves, coldly invaded his stomach; yet being with her halved the terror. Bits of Brazilian-pine bark, laid down to mulch the planting when it was new and now rotting back into nature, had stuck to her bottom during their fucking; he asked her to get up on all fours, like Odete yesterday, and brushed the embedded bits from the twin pillows of her white, white ass. He kissed the left buttock, then the right, and stuck his tongue into the tight small hole between. He had never done this before, even in the Hotel Amour. She reflexively pulled away, then, feeling serious intent in the grip of his hands on her hips, settled back into his face with its boneless prong, not wishing to sully their love with any stain of shame. What was hers was his. This was new ground for them. He inhaled, with those round apprehensive nostrils she had freshly admired tonight, the basic mystery of her shit, matter that was hers yet not her. Thus he put Odete behind him and relaxed into his fate, rejoined to Isabel’s.
When the couple emerged from the pacova grove, Brasília’s abstract lights seemed dim on the horizon—tattered punch-cards dwarfed by the stars’ voluptuous spillage. Walking toward the capital on the dark median strip, Isabel and Tristão agreed to meet at the bus terminal at seven, to catch a bus to Goiânia.
xv. Goiás
THE BUS was a lumbering, creaking box whose lime-green paint was all but covered by red dust and dried mud. It was full at first, but emptied rapidly as they slipped away from Brasília’s fragile modernity and the ring of shantytowns that had grown up during its pellmell construction and had never—contrary to the plans—dispersed. Soon the passengers were few and they had left the Federal District and were in true country, campo cerrado, rolling ranchland broken by scraggly low forests and fields turning brown in this second month of the dry season. Isabel with her new botanical knowledge identified tobacco and beans, cotton and corn. The harvested stalks looked desolate; there is a melancholy, a stupidity to rural landscape that numbed the citified hearts of the young couple—a yawning repetitiveness, as of a man who knows only a few words but will not stop talking. Where there were no fields, scatterings of black cattle scarcely distinguishable from clumps of thorny bush dotted an unfenced parched savanna stretching toward bluish mountain ridges. The land had once been more productive, perhaps; the road passed through towns emptied like cracked jugs, with collapsed mansions of whose walled gardens the wild scrub had reclaimed possession.
The couple held hands stickily in the growing heat, dozing alternately. Tristão had spent the night stretched on a bench in the bus terminal, fearful of being robbed, his arms entwined with his knapsack straps, his bundle of cruzeiros tucked against his lower belly, behind the pocket of his bathing shorts where the razor blade waited to be unsheathed. The terminal lights were bright and a small local group seemed to use it as a gaming club, slapping down domino tiles and shrieking as they rolled the dice, playing bozó. He had slept for ten minutes at a time and kept waking as the straps cut off circulation in his arms. Isabel had lain awake, in her bleak room at the end of the gently curved hall, listening to the tall thin manservant and his fat wife slowly settle to sleep. She stared at the angles of the room she had adorned with a college student’s posters and records and books, books whose broad spines stared back at her in the moonlight, reproaching her with desertion. At five she rose and stealthily packed in two blue suitcases, made her way down the hall, and trusted that the security man in the lobby would be stretched out behind his desk asleep. With her heavy two suitcases on the streets she looked like one more hopeful immigrant to the capital, come to find government work, rather than a fleeing child of privilege. She took a taxi to the bus terminal, where she shared with Tristão a cheap breakfast of coffee and pupunha and bread and cheese. This time as a couple, they promised each other, they would be more economical than in São Paulo.
The bus would jerk them both awake when it creaked and wallowed to a stop in a town where the single church wore its lonely stark cross atop a scrolling false front upon whose shoulders chipped stone saints gesticulated. The patchy storefront beside the bus stop bore no new posters, onl
y a pastel quilt of faded old ones; the only sign of commerce came from a crone selling ears of baked corn from a charcoal brazier in a hot angle of sun by a whitewashed wall. Her dirty dress sported a lace halter but on her head perched a plastic hat with a sun-bill and the name of a beer, Brahma. The clay roof tiles of this town looked cracked and knocked askew by the weight of the indifferent sky above, its blue as crude as freshly applied paint.
Moving inland, they seemed to move backwards in time. Fewer automobiles contended with the bus for the narrowing road. Men and women bounced along the shoulder on donkeys with giant eyelashes like those of dolls. The automobiles presented the square silhouettes, the running board and arched two-dimensional fender, of an earlier era, before Brazil had its own industries, when cars, already much travelled and often repaired, came second-hand from North America. In the middle distance a slat-sided truck spearheaded a widening plume of ochre dust, and cowboys, vaqueiros dressed all in leather, dustily blended with their horses and herds. The landscape itself, where wire-fenced fields did not interrupt the onrolling dry uplands, was itself like a tawny hide, repellent to scratches and water, full of scars and pale scuff-marks. Tristão and Isabel looked eagerly out at the monotonous sights of Goiás, but after a while, their eyes stinging, they returned their attention to each other. Their stomachs growled, with hunger and with fear of what they had taken upon themselves.
“It is all owned, by cattle and their owners,” Tristão observed. “I see no place for us, vast as this land is.”
“We have only travelled a few miles,” Isabel reassured him. “Brazil is endless, with endless opportunities.”