by John Updike
In another two hours, squinting as if into a furnace, Tristão had carved away enough matrix above and below to pick the nugget free. For a nugget it was, a rough yet silky chunk of gold, the essence of wealth, in his palm, far heavier than a comparable piece of stone. Perhaps ten centimeters by four, and eighty grams by weight, it had the beginnings of a shape—a kind of belly, a division of what might have become legs, a faceless head. It was an idol; it was sacred. It had little craters, like the moon. He moved it from one hand to the other, agitated; he tried to hide its glittering from even the square of the sky above. If any of the thousands of men humming around him knew of this, he would be killed for it. His head buzzed; his breathing was as rapid and shallow as that of a bird; he sank to his knees and thanked God and His spirits. The hand that shapes destinies had again reached down and touched his life.
The work uniform of Serra do Buraco consisted of shorts, T-shirt, sunhat of straw or polyester, and high-topped basketball shoes, for all the climbing up and down that had to be done—Tristão’s new cowboy boots had proved to be impractical, as too slippery-soled and chafing, and his tennis shoes from the bus terminal too flimsy. Also, the men wore pouches cinched around their waists, in which flecks of gold accumulated until there were enough to be melted down and converted to money and deposited in the coöperative bank. Tristão feared that his nugget would bulge his pouch too much; instead he jumbled it with other rocks in his sixty-pound sack and trudged home under the load as if toward one more night of pulverizing, panning, eating rice and beans, putting the children to sleep, bathing in Isabel’s dirty water, and collapsing.
When he dumped open the sack in Isabel’s sight, for an annihilating second he feared the nugget had vanished. It had sunk to the bottom, by dint of its weight, and looked much like the other, valueless fragments of the mountain. But its weight betrayed it, and he brought it forth. A few vigorous rubs of his thumb removed enough silica dust to reveal the raw gold’s lustre.
“We are rich,” he told his wife. “You no longer need to leave our home in the day to be with the manicurists. Perhaps we can buy a farm in Paraná, or a small house by the sea in Espírito Santo.”
“My father might find us then,” she said.
“What do we care? We have given him grandchildren. Have I not proved these years to be a loyal husband?”
She smiled at his naïveté. Just as she had insisted on loving his worthless mother, so he harbored, between fits of hatred, a pathetic hope that her ruthless father would relent and become the father he had never had. “He is not so easily assuaged, Tristão. The notion that he is acting as a parent, not only for himself but for my dead mother, makes him fanatic. He wants the best for me. You are the best, but he cannot see it; he sees with the old eyes, the eyes of the white poderosos, the eyes of the old slavers and plantation masters.”
“How drearily you talk, Isabelinha—as if the past is still the present. The manicurists have made you cynical; they have made you sour. When God bestows a gift, it is blasphemous to regard it with suspicion. Embrace me: our years here have borne their fruit, their treasure!”
In his exuberance, wishing to embrace Isabel, he gave the nugget to little Azor to hold. The toddler dropped it on his own bare toes, and burst into wails that set his sister to sobbing sympathetically in her crib—an old crate for pickax handles, lifted up on bricks, away from snakes and fire ants.
Isabel held her sobbing son in her arms and said to Tristão, “These have been hard years, and something of our love has suffered, but we have been safe here, and hidden. I fear this nugget will drag us into the light.”
“You worry too much, my darling; it is your bourgeois blood. Tomorrow, I will take the nugget to the coöperative assayer. If his price seems to me too modest, there are independent gold traders who rove the workings—they are able to offer more, since they evade the government’s eight percent by smuggling the gold across the Bolivian border, with the connivance of the Indians.” Such lore was commonplace in the human beehive of the Serra do Buraco: as gold lived in minute flecks and veins within the vast mass of stone, so it lived in the talk and thought of the miners.
But Isabel’s forebodings were correct. Though Tristão managed to carry his nugget undetected to the assayer’s office, from there word spread quickly of the magnificent find.
The office, with the coöperative bank and the government taxation office, occupied the only cement-block structure in the sprawling wooden town. Topped by the starry Brazilian flag, it stood directly adjacent to the mortuary, which was freshly supplied each day with the products of knife-fights, mining accidents, pulmonary disease, and the banditry that plagued the roads in and out of the Serra do Boraco. The assayer, a thin yellow man wearing a black suit and a celluloid collar and speaking Portuguese with the effete lisp of the old country, clucked his tongue appreciatively and, after consulting his scales and explaining that an exact valuation could be given only after melting and purification, lisped a sum in hundreds of thousands of new cruzeiros. “What ith more, thir, the value will go up, ath that of the crutheiro fallth.” Tristão pondered the nugget; its physical aspect overnight had changed from that of a humanoid idol to that of a craggy potato, its eyes the little pockmarks that suggested a rock from the moon. He left it in the care of the bank, accepting the receipt with a suspicion that he would never see the heavenly nugget, his message from beyond, again.
It had poured during the night; the slopes and foot-worn ledges of the quarry were melting underfoot. As he approached the area of his claim, he saw a cluster of men gathered; the neglected claims around his were being suddenly worked. Brown backs bent busily into the ore made potent by rumor, and two of the Gonzaga brothers were climbing out of Tristão’s own claim. Before he could challenge them, they challenged him.
“You bandit!” the older, shorter of the two, named Aquiles, cried. “We have looked and measured, and you had burrowed and dug over into our claim! That nugget is ours!”
“Poachers like you,” said the younger and taller, Ismael, “should be strung up and dismembered as an example to all garimpeiros!”
“I was well within the walls of my own claim,” Tristão insisted, though, recalling the glint, the frantic sideways picking, and the sensation of reaching into an unchaste intimacy, he wondered if in truth he had trespassed. The evidence was indeterminate, for not even he could now say from what exact spot in the gouged earth the nugget had come.
“We will summon surveyors,” Aquiles frantically threatened, “and policemen, and lawyers!”
They did sue him, and the suit, which dragged on for months, attracted the attention of the national press. The nugget, repeatedly fetched from its place in the bank’s safe to be photographed, was the biggest and purest ever unearthed in the Serra do Buraco, though not so large as some of the golden boulders found in the Australian hinterland in 1851. A new surge of greed and hope excited Brazil, through its news media. A reporter from O Globo came and photographed Tristão and Isabel in their shack: Isabel bathing in her zinc tub, billowing suds concealing all but her naked shoulders and arms and a gleaming length of calf and her coyly arched bare foot; Tristão holding his pale plump son and red-tinted infant daughter in his arms, his eyes gleaming like bubbles of black glass beneath his nobly high forehead as he warily stared into the camera’s depths.
The photographer, a squat and rumpled middle-aged man with several spare cameras hung about his neck and many quips designed to induce a smile, and the reporter, an intelligent and progressive young woman with net-stockinged legs as slim as switches, had been so disarming and companionable it would have violated all rules of backlands hospitality not to have entertained them and posed as they wished. The invaders seemed, for the hour they were in the shack, family—citified kin impulsively come to Goiás to bestow the largesse of urban charm—rather than the tip of a widening wedge of impersonal exposure. Isabel, true, did have the wit to evade the reporter’s direct questions about her parentage, and Tristão’
s street-boy cunning led him to lie about his family, of whom he was ashamed; but the photographs, in black and white, spoke worlds. Tristão and Isabel, staring out from within their flashlit hovel on page three of O Globo, became one more of those couples whose stunned, wizened physiognomies and pathetically shabby surroundings are lifted by some curious stroke of fortune up from the mass of untold poverty into the light, like hooked fish. Miners Dispute Discovery of Huge Nugget, the headlines ran. Vagrant Couple Balked on Verge of Riches. Others newspaper reporters followed, and Tristão was courteous to them all; this invasion might bring danger, his hopeful spirit reasoned, or it might bring breakthrough.
One day he returned from work in the dusk and found a silvery shadow, a man in a gray suit, sitting in one of the shack’s two chairs. His first thought, shameful, was that Isabel was doing her business in their home now; but then he saw that the man, with his sad expression and grizzled temples and carefully trimmed mustache, was César. Isabel was standing, frightened, by the stove, with fat Azor on her hip, and her hair loose to her waist. Cordélia was in her crib, sobbing in her sleep. “My friend, I have found you again,” César said, casually displaying his gray gun, pointing it not at Tristão but, more politely, to one side. “In the bosom of another family—one of your own engendering, this time. My heartiest congratulations.”
“And where is Virgílio?” Tristão asked. “Does he still play right forward for the Moóca Tiradentes?”
César wearily smiled. “Since you gave him the slip, Virgílio has been … reassigned.”
“Why do you persecute us? We do not disturb anyone, here.”
“That is not exactly true, my friend. For all its lamentable lack of discipline, Brazil is not yet altogether without standards, without traditions, without order. You disturb my excellent employer, for one.”
César, who fancied himself a courtier in the service of Isabel’s family, must have been chatting, in his false-fatherly tone, with her for some time, for he was unduly relaxed—a little languid and foppish, his gun idly pointing toward the clay floor. He did not expect that Tristão would hurl, with the strength acquired of backbreaking daily labor, the sixty-pound sack of ore straight at him, striking him in the face and toppling him backward in the chair, a fragile construction of primavera wood.
In a lunge, while Isabel screamed and Azor laughed at the excitement, Tristão was kneeling on César’s chest and had, with a decisive staccato stroke, smashed the side of his head with the largest of the rocks that had spilled. The older man’s grimacing face relaxed, and his eyelids quiveringly closed. His gray temple was now bloodied. He had grown too old for his line of work.
Tristão gave Isabel César’s gun and told her, “We must leave. You gather our possessions and ready our children; I will hide the body.”
“He is still alive,” Isabel protested.
“Yes,” Tristão said merely, with some of the silenced César’s melancholy, the superior melancholy of those who have the upper hand. The man was heavy, heavier than three sacks of stone put together, but Tristão, in contact again with his veering fate, feeling the exalted calm of an adrenal rush, lifted the body easily onto his shoulders.
It had become night outside, with as yet no moon and few stars. Cicadas shrilled. Across the little creek, a few yards upstream from their shack, a bridge of slippery stepping-stones had been created; on the other side, in the thicket of riverside vegetation, lay a snaky path where, as the darkness thickened, a man could walk unobserved. The garimpeiros and their dependents came here to do their natural business, and more than once Tristão’s foot slipped on a soft unseen human turd, whose hardened skin, thus broken, released a pungence that followed him for many strides. Along with the slithery caresses of palm fronds and wands, the shiny round leaves of a bush whose name he did not know brushed his skin with a gently slicing touch. When he blundered off the path, thorns scratched him. He became afraid that César would awake and condemn him to another tussle. His shoulder muscles, hardened as they were, began to throb; but the greenery thinned, the moon had come out, and his environment was more visible. Now Tristão could see, in illumined silhouette, like a distant castle, the coöperative crushing mills where the bags of ore were pulverized and amalgamated with mercury, and then with cyanide, chemically sucking up the atoms of gold. Tons and tons of slag had formed, on the hollow back of Serra do Buraco, a second mountain, and it was down the powdery gray slopes of that avalanche of waste, of digested and excreted stone, that Tristão carried the unconscious César. No one came here, into the precipitous valleys of this man-made wilderness. Even serpents and fire ants shunned it.
In a remote hollow whitened by the strengthened moonlight, Tristão dumped down his burden; in his coma César groaned, even this groan conveying, uncannily, the man’s personal accent, the half-humorous paternal dignity with which he masked his enforcer’s bite. Tristão gently twisted the ponderous, dignified skull, using the mass of gray hair as a handle, so the bulge of César’s jugular vein cast a shadow in the moonlight, in the soft place behind the jaw, under the crescent of shadow cast by the earlobe. Beneath the vein, Tristão knew, crept its brighter, redder brother, the carotid artery. Removing his single-edge razor, the faithful Gem, from the pocket inside his shorts where it slept, just under his belt, he slit, as deep as the blade would go, the bulge horizontally, and then, since the flow of blood, though great, was not as great as he had pictured, he added a vertical stroke above it, not realizing until afterwards that he had signed his crime with a T.
His plan had been to bury the body in the powdery mining refuse, but as long as the blood was pumping, the heart was functioning, and it seemed an obscenity to bury César alive. Like a dog frantically shovelling with its forefeet, Tristão covered the gray suit with gray dust, but he let the head remain in the air, sticking up on the slope like a boulder, or like a shattered statue’s handsome head.
xviii. The Mato Grosso
RETURNING to the shack, wearied to his bones by the guilt and labor of his deed, Tristão found instead of rest an atmosphere of necessary action. His family stood ready to depart, their few portable belongings bundled at their feet. His orange knapsack had been stuffed with spare clothes, and their lighter cooking utensils wrapped in blankets and mosquito netting. In the fluttering light of the shack’s kerosene lamp, even the baby was wide-eyed and solemn, her cries hushed by the danger in the air. The old Tupi woman, Kupehaki, had got wind of their departure and had appeared; speaking harshly and rapidly, they sought to argue her out of accompanying them, but she gave no sign of hearing. She remained an arm’s length from Isabel’s shoulder, moving when she did, swaying when she swayed, even sympathetically slumping when Isabel slumped in fear and despair. She had attached herself to them and could not be detached. The old Tupi had brought with her a long wickerwork basket, a tubular creel, worn down her back and supported by a thick band across her forehead, and in fact would be useful, they decided, even if she only travelled with them a little way at the start.
The five set off at last in single file across the polluted stream, and down the path away from the crusher and the slag heap, into a valley uninhabited except by the bandits who preyed on the gold traders and the supply caravans of loaded oxen and mules. The mechanical hum of the mountain, which persisted until midnight, faded behind them; the sounds of the mining town died but for the howl of a dog and a burst of especially loud laughter or expostulation. To Tristão it seemed that their path, widening and narrowing among the jagged black shadows of vegetation, glowed blue underfoot, as his eyes adjusted to the night. In the blue light César’s blood had sprung out purple. Isabel carried little sleeping Cordélia, with her bobbing bald head, in a striped sling, at her breasts.
Tristão at first carried Azor on his shoulders, the child’s hands feebly but tenaciously gripping his bearer’s head of stiff, stone-dust-impregnated hair. When Tristão felt the grip relax and the child topple into sleep, he took him into his arms, marvelling at how heavy he h
ad become, in less than two years’ time. In his knapsack he carried, along with spare clothes, César’s revolver, loaded with its six bullets, and the cowboy boots, and the folded belt-bag with a crumb or two of gold in its seams; his heavy mining tools, rounded with use, had been left behind, without regret. We shed skins in life, to keep living.
Kupehaki, her head bent forward against the pull of the tipóia, the headband, carried in her creel a few cooking pots, a tin box of matches, some hooks and lines for fishing, the bejewelled Portuguese cross, and, snatched from the shack’s larder, three days’ meagre supply of powdered milk, dried beans, xarque, maté leaves, and sour, hardened cakes of manioc pulp. She and Isabel alternated carrying on their heads the bulky but not heavy bundle of netting and blankets, with an old ox-hide that, spread on the ground, suppressed biting ants and poisonous, earth-dwelling spiders.
They camped that first terrified night on a ledge not two miles from the mine, the adults taking turns keeping awake, while their fire sputtered and the darkness around them crackled and seethed with unknown creatures or spirits. Even the trees seemed to have voices, and a predatory purpose in the reach of their limbs. All night, anguished voices cried out, as murder threaded its way through the darkness. Yet the mist-colored dawn discovered the homeless travellers intact, free to clear their throats and eyes of sleep’s phlegmy residue and to shoulder the burden of survival. Avoiding the travelled trails, they made their way down through the scree-strewn valleys of the Dourados, travelling always from the sunrise toward the sunset, toward the interminable rolling plateau of the Mato Grosso. The sky became enormous, as if God had breathed a sigh of relief and given up the intense labor of Creation, contenting Himself with a few tangles of low thorns, mixtures of cactus and brush, and tall grass, and occasionally an unimpressive forest. The most conspicuous tree of the mato was the Brazilian pine, shaped like an upside-down cone, each dark branch reaching out over the lower until a precisely layered pyramid seemed to be standing on its point. Kupehaki showed them how, in the rotting bark of these giants when they fell, succulent white worms called coró could be dug out, and, if no fire was convenient, eaten unroasted and wriggling; once squeamishness was overcome, they tasted like coconut butter.