by John Updike
Yet in the city of Goiânia, which they reached in six hours, a remorseless geometry of street plan—circular streets, numbered and unnamed—kept delivering them back to the bus terminal on the Avenida Anhanguera. Erratic sleep and meals were catching up to Tristão. Isabel had packed many of her clothes and treasures in the two blue suitcases, and his back beneath the orange knapsack ached; she seemed a heavy jewel hung around his neck. Copper-colored ranch-hands dazed by cachaça stared on the street at a girl so white with a man so black. Indian blood strengthened away from the coast. Tristão felt conspicuous, and Goiânia felt enough like Brasília—another abstract design imposed by planners upon an unresisting emptiness—for Isabel’s father to seem dangerously close.
The young couple was starving, yet the restaurants they approached frightened them off with bursts of rough male laughter from within, and the gnashing of spurs on wooden floors, and gusts of the strong smells of barbecued beef and cheap pinga. At last they found, on the Avenida Presidente Vargas, a restaurant, Restaurante Dourado, specializing in fish of the nearby rivers and lakes. The proprietor was a Ukrainian, with a bald head and several steel teeth. He took a shine to his newest customers, exotics like himself. The dourado is especially tasty, he told them, with a sauce of puréed banana mixed with grated onion and lemon peel. For dessert, he recommended the rare fruit called mari-mari, and sat down at their table long enough to explain how he had come here. It was a tangled tale, involving an ancient war: he had been captured when the Germans invaded, and been compelled to enlist in the special troops that manned some prison camps of obscure purpose. He had fled when the Russians invaded Poland, knowing they would execute him as a traitor and war criminal. “I had witnessed too much history,” he said. He had found his way to Brazil. “It is a happy country,” he told them. “It has deep pockets and a short memory.” When he laughed, his old-fashioned teeth flashed like a drawerful of knives.
No longer hungry, their vitality reasserted, Tristão and Isabel wandered into a store on a curved street called Rua 82 and bought themselves both some cowboy boots, with pointed toes and elaborate stitching. Taking the hospitable restaurant as an omen, they boarded a night bus north, toward Goiás Velho and the Dourada Range.
The lovers awoke from a tormented, jostled sleep to find themselves in a screaming gear. The bus was climbing, on a road that had become a wide dirt track, in the feeble first light of morning; branches of thorny brush raked the bus on both sides. The land was no longer fenced, so that the bus had to stop for wandering zebus, with their drooping ears and absurd humps. For one stretch the bus was trapped behind an ox-cart heaped high with unshucked corn cobs and guided by a barefoot boy of perhaps ten, equipped with a switch and a hat of disintegrating straw. Dawn revealed here and there the white walls of one-story ranchos tucked into the hillside, and unpainted shacks still higher up, where only the smallest cleared patch, dotted with irregular plantings of manioc and beans, indicated human effort pitched against the palms, creeping vines, and thorny quipás and opuntias. Up and down, but more up than down, the bus rocked, and Isabel’s head rested with despair’s leaden heaviness on Tristão’s shoulder. Before noon they came to a town by a mountain creek; it consisted of little more than a tavern, a store, and a church with a sealed door.
“Where are we?” Tristão asked the driver as the passengers all, as if at a signal only he had failed to hear, filed out of the bus onto the slippery blue cobbles of the tilted town plaza.
“Curva do Francês,” replied the driver. “There is no more road from here.”
The other passengers were melting away. Some had been met, and reconstituted couples, having embraced and shared out the mountain of bundles which one of the pairing had brought from afar, receded together down a path halfheartedly sketched on the wilderness, to an unseen home. Isabel, groggy and nauseated from the long ride, felt stunned by the abyss of their situation. Tristão’s heart had clamped shut on the necessity that he be brave on behalf of them both. He must protect the stolen luxuries concealed in their luggage, and his packet of cruzeiros. Perhaps, this far into the hinterland, inflation would not reach.
The rushing, chuckling sound of the curving mountain creek pervaded the air, dimmed by the encroaching forest and a cloud cover that made the sun as dim as the moon—a mere fuzzy sore in the sky. The open doorway of the tavern, whose name was Flor da Vida, beckoned them to the only place of shelter and liveliness. When they entered, the handful of other customers stopped their jabber in the loud accent of the backlands, which twanged out as if to be heard above an incessant wind. A female child, with a face as round as a plate, her hair pulled so tight into braids it shone on the top of her head like a coating of lacquer, came toward them timorously.
“My wife and I are hungry,” Tristão said, even in this humble setting relishing the honor of calling Isabel his wife. It was as if his body had sprouted another, and the composite creature was clumsy but awesome, possessed of a monstrous dignity.
“What do you have for us to eat?” Isabel asked, in a woman’s voice now, graver than a girl’s, and with a determined gentleness aimed at coaxing a response from their timid waitress.
“Rice and black beans,” the child brought out, “and farinha.”
“And what are the other choices?” Tristão asked.
“Sir, there are no other choices.” The little girl then added, “There may be some dried goat meat.”
“Yes, we would like that very much,” Isabel told her. When their waitress had disappeared through a rattling swinging door beside the bar, Isabel cupped her white hand over Tristão’s on the rough table, saying, “We have come to a realm of few choices.”
“Starve or eat dried goat,” he said, with a bitter relish.
But when the food came, on plates thick as a finger, it was steaming, and surprisingly delicious. Even the stringy goat’s meat melted in their mouths. As they ate, a man approached them—a heavy short man whose red beard blended closely into the coppery red of his face. He had hair high on his cheeks and even a tuft on the tip of his nose. Without asking, the little waitress had brought them tumblers of clear pinga, and now this friendly stranger added his third glass to the table. “What brings you to Curva do Francês, in the foothills of the Douradas?” His speech was rough in timbre yet turned with care, like a ponderous country copy of baroque joinery.
“The bus stopped here,” Tristão said, touching the little metal rectangle at the belt of his shorts, for reassurance. “We had no choice, my friend.”
The all-red man smiled, his teeth uneven and rotting within his gingery beard. “The track goes on, the driver is a rogue. He has a woman in the suburbs, with whom he spends the night. The road goes on for miles, believe me.”
“There are suburbs?” Isabel asked, in her girl’s voice now; a silvery laugh escaped her.
The all-red man, blearily fixing his eyes upon her, stated, “The suburbs are extensive. Once, the parish held twenty thousand souls, not counting Tupi and Chacriabá Indians.”
“What happened?” Tristão asked.
Beneath the man’s fiery eyebrows his eyes with their pink whites rolled back and forth, as if what he revealed must not be overheard within the Flor da Vida. “The gold gave out, in less than a century.” He paused, dramatically; he wore a leather vest over a coarse shirt, both of them ruddy in color, whether through the action of dye or of local dust was not easy to discriminate. “But Curva do Francês will be a metropolis again,” he assured them. “All the plans are intact. Concentric avenues, symmetrical parks, a handsome medical commissary, to be run by the Jesuits. There is even—forgive me for tainting your ears with this, senhora—a district set aside for brothels, with entryways arranged for the privacy of the patrons.” His rolling eye rested an uncomfortably long time on Isabel, awaiting her response.
“It sounds very nice,” she said, “for those who need such services.”
Tristão touched his razor blade again and asked bluntly, “Is there any work in thi
s region for a man?”
The all-red man seemed astonished by the question. “Senhor, I beg you—look around you. What do you see at present? Shacks and thornbushes, memories and hopes. The gold, as I said, is gone. It has gone elsewhere.” Now it was Tristão to whom he gave his quizzical, eager eye.
The young hero took the bait. “Where has it gone?”
“Ah … up there.” Their informant gestured vaguely, through the drink-shop walls, toward the mountains still above them. “At Serra do Buraco. There are thousands of men, my young friend, getting rich, on the labor of their backs alone. Every day they pick up nuggets as big as my fist”—he displayed the fist, a formidable clump, sprouting hairs like rootlets on a reddish-brown tree burl—“or at least as big as the seal on the lady’s ring.” He had noticed, in the dim light of the place, the glinting oval face of the DAR ring. “Even a few nuggets the size of a match-head will buy the pretty lady dresses to last ten years. I cannot help but notice, you carry very full suitcases.”
“We are seeking a new home,” Tristão told him, glancing at Isabel to see if this had been too much to say.
“Why would that be?” asked the all-red man, glowing with his pleasure in this conversation. “From the look of your lady, and the fine dress she is wearing, her last home was a comfortable one.”
“There is more than one type of comfort, senhor,” Isabel told him, her womanly voice stiffened to force its way into the conversation. Tristão was grateful, fearful that he alone might botch the shadowy negotiation afoot.
The man smiled so agreeably that his red lips showed their wet pink inner sides within his frothy beard. He addressed her as if challenged: “And you have found an unsurpassable kind of comfort in the arms of your black buck, yes?”
To Tristão’s surprise, she coolly said, “Yes.”
It alarmed him, to see the womanliness he had given her now part of her, hers to bestow on other men if she wished.
“I rejoice for you, senhora,” came the level answer, as the stranger’s shaggy brows lowered over his glittering bloodshot eyes. “In Curva do Francês, we do not underrate the body and its needs.”
Tristão intervened: “How does one apply for work in this mine? In São Paulo, I worked assembling fuscas—my responsibility was to bolt the left side of the engine support into place.”
“Ah,” said the man, impressed; his bristling red eyebrows lifted and doubled the number of furrows in his coppery forehead. “I have heard they make carriages in São Paulo. The Paulistas are a clever race, but ruthless. You did well to escape them, my black friend. They think of nothing but acquiring slaves. At Serra do Buraco, you will not be working for others; you will be a garimpeiro—a self-employed miner, an independent entrepreneur. All the gold you find within your claim will be yours, minus a mere eight percent to the government, and reasonable fees to the miners’ coöperative, which maintains order, keeps impeccable records, and operates the sluices and pulverizing mechanisms. You must not imagine that gold walks directly from the earth onto your lady’s fingers. There are many steps, many stages and challenges to the Brazilian genius for organization. The bits of gold are like lice in Mother Earth’s tangled hair—they hide, they wriggle away! But gold’s heaviness betrays him; when you swirl away the lighter minerals, the dirt and mere silica, there the little critters are, still stuck in the bottom of the pan! You must have a miner’s pan, a batea, for the coöperative allows each garimpeiro to take back to his shack the most promising lumps of ore, and there in the evening, my friend, as you squat your aching muscles down in the mud beside that babbling witch of a mountain creek, they emerge like glowworms—they can’t climb over the batea’s riffles, the little devils, the precious gold-mites! Again and again, I have seen a poor camarada, owning nothing more than the rags on his back, become overnight as rich as one of Dom Pedro Segundo’s appointed lords!”
It seemed strange, to hear of Dom Pedro’s lords as if they were living. Still, Tristão asked, “And how does one apply for this work?”
The red eyebrows shot up again, so far they revealed rings of pallor around the man’s weary, pinga-fuddled eyes. “One does not apply—stop thinking like a slave! One goes and claims! All one needs to become rich is a pickax, a hammer, a shovel, a batea, and a claim.”
“How does one make a claim?” Isabel asked. For she had learned, in the years of watching Uncle Donaciano languidly manage his wealth, that nothing comes without a price, and there are few things that have no price.
“Why, one buys it!” came the answer. “One buys a claim from a garimpeiro who, like myself, has made his fortune and, ere the woes of old age close over him, wishes to enjoy it. But be confident that, though with a few turns of the shovel I have secured all my comforts right up to a burnished coffin of purpleheart and brass, there is plenty left in this claim, enough to support a prince and princess of Araby! There is no claim at Serra do Buraco like it; it happens to fall where an ancient volcano caused a vein of lead and a gust of the purest blue fire to come together, creating a veritable fountain of gold, a frozen throat in the earth like that of the Earth-Mother singing her most exalted note! Here. Behold.”
And from the back of his tall right boot he took a folded paper, bent like a shoehorn to the curve of his heel and smelling of leather-cloistered feet. It was a map, brown and brittle and smudged, so often folded and unfolded that its creases, when the paper was spread on the table, admitted a grid of light. The map showed a vast checkerboard of numbered squares, with one of them so often indicated by a stabbing finger that its number had been rubbed out. “There she is—my lovely. As giving as a cunt, pardon the expression.”
The claims all measured five feet by five feet, he told them, and extended infinitely—to the center of the earth, if a man could dig that far. When they asked his price, he named a sum twice that of the cruzeiros still remaining of Tristão’s bundle.
Tristão looked toward Isabel, and she saw the eagerness in his opaque and shining eyes, and in the rampart of his forehead the pride keen to test his strength and cunning against the obduracy of the earth. Lest his eagerness betray them, she hastily informed the all-red man, in the firm, full, crisp voice of her new maturity, that though his price must be a jest they would spend the afternoon and evening in inquiries and reflection, and would consult again with him in the morning.
“By morning, another may have seized this heaven-sent opportunity,” the garimpeiro warned, but with a wink, and left them to negotiate the price of a room upstairs in the inn, with the pregnant mother of the round-faced girl. Tristão was beginning to like the feeling of the backlands, and of having a wife as a business partner.
xvi. The Mine
THEY DECIDED, whispering together till after midnight, to purchase the claim. From the time their eyes first met on the beach they had been in God’s hands and the idea of so rash a gamble appealed to both of them. Having found each other, they believed in their luck. They would become rich and at the same time hide from her father and his minions, in the remote reaches of Goiás. The all-red man accepted all that remained of Tristão’s packet of cruzeiros, plus the crystal candlestick whose mate Isabel had impulsively given two years ago to Tristão’s ungrateful mother. When this still seemed less than enough, and the man’s pink eyes threatened to turn away in the cold morning light of the inn, squinting as if to close again upon the fond vision of his “lovely,” Isabel offered him a medal she had stolen from her father’s bedroom bureau, a medal bestowed upon him by the King of Thailand for his services when he had been Brazilian Vice-Consul there. The heavy beribboned disk depicted a crowned elephant and the inscription was in a curious alphabet, which suggested magic power. The callused thumb with its spray of red hairs caressed the pleasingly contoured silken metal—a coppery color like his own—and the deal was closed. The claim, produced from the other boot, consisted of several sheets of paper folded together and hardened and yellowed in proximity to his heel. It gave Tristão a headache to try to read it, but for the
sake of form he stared for a number of minutes at its portentous litter of government seals, tiny print, and dashing official signatures.
The bus that had brought them to Curva do Francês from Goiânia was returning to the city, now that the driver had had his pleasure with his lady in the leafy suburbs. Tristão and Isabel hitched a ride to Serra do Buraco in the back of an ox-cart, open to the sky but with tall slatted sides. Four emaciated oxen pulled it along the grassy track scarcely faster than a man could walk. Their progress was generally uphill, but with a number of dips into small valleys where the track crossed dry, pebbly rivers on bridges of bending planks.
For some hours they shared the rocking vehicle, its hard floor softened by a strewing of old sugar canes, with three other passengers, mestizo garimpeiros or parasites upon the garimpeiros, who marvelled at Isabel’s bright white hair and her two blue suitcases, as weighty with her clothes as if loaded with stones. They assumed she was going to work on the mountain as a prostitute and that Tristão was a curious cross between her slave and her protector. They joked about her price, speculating that the arrival of such luxuries betokened an upturn in the luck of Serra do Buraco. Their advances became sufficiently physical—a dark hand reaching to caress the shimmering faint fur on her forearm—that Tristão seized the nearest of the three and struck him a blow in the face, as calmly as if tightening a bolt on a fusca engine support. The man mumblingly called him nigger and cur but slumped back among his two companions, caressing the bloody gum above a tooth the blow had loosened. He had lost several front teeth already, to combat or decay. “We are going to test our luck with the gods of gold,” Tristão explained, as if to apologize. He showed them the folded papers of the claim.
The man took his revenge in words, grinning, displaying the black gaps in his mouth. “Such papers are printed by the hundreds in Goiânia and Cuiabá; they are worthless,” he said. “When you get there, you will find you have no claim. The mountain is an ant-heap, crawling with rascals.”