Brazil

by John Updike

  “They feel they are running great risk,” Ianopamoko had last explained, “and want a tribute.”

  “We have brought the cross and the cigarette box,” Isabel said. “Save the cross. Offer the box.”

  Uncle Donaciano’s ornate, engraved monogram disappeared beneath the creased umber thumb, broadened by the forest’s patient manual crafts, of their chief welcomer. He kept clicking the box open and shut, and each time it opened he followed, with a slobbery rot-flecked grin and outright astonished laughter, the zigzag flight of something invisible he fancied to have been captured within it. The gift was accepted. After this long parley, Isabel and Ianopamoko were led up the steep cliff along a slippery hairpin path, which several times wound behind a falling stream’s veil whose waywardmost spray pricked them with rainbows the size of dragonflies.

  At the top, a few domed daub-and-wattle huts, built low against the wind, huddled amid a vegetation such as Isabel had never seen—stubby, prickly, knobbed, and bejewelled forms transplanted as if from coral gardens at the bottom of a shallow sea. They had rooted themselves in the crevices of a lava surface crisscrossed by cracks. Isabel trod on this surface as across ragged stepping-stones, or loaves of bread placed on end; the stone was an ashen gray, baked in a fire more ancient than the ocean. When she lifted her eyes, she saw in the vast distance something new to her, except in books and magazines of fashion and travel: snow, a pure whiteness on the peaks of mountains rendered by distance as blue as the undersides of clouds. She had learned from the nuns enough of geography to know that these must be outriggers of the Andes, and that somewhere between them and herself Brazil at last ended.

  Though she had dwelt three years among Indians, and learned some of their language and lore, they still presented to her the opacity of moody children, an unpredictability mixed of stubborn shyness and masked desire. To those at their mercy, it seemed a small distance, which a spark could suddenly leap, from ministration to murder; a whole other world, full of psychic electricity, hung behind their almond eyes and mutilated mouths. This settlement on the mesa top was some kind of cathedral close, victualled from the grassland and forest below and centered upon the shaman in his low oval hut. Isabel associated safety with religious places; yet it was here, where an invisible system had its pivot, that she might give fatal offense. She embarked fearfully upon her first audience with the shaman.

  His hut was in texture and shape like an ovenbird’s nest, and so small she had to crouch to enter. Smoke hurt and blurred her eyes. A torpid fire, built of spindly mesa-top twigs and chunks of a moss that burned with a blue flame, slowly revealed a small naked man lying in a hammock strung up just behind the fire. His body was smooth, with a swollen belly, but his head was remarkably withered or else diminished in apparent size by his high upright headdress of parrot’s-tail feathers. His face had been plucked of hair, lashes and brows and temples, yet above his prominent ears long white wisps had been allowed to grow like fine, lank ancillary feathers. Around his ankles he wore bands of large triangular dried nuts, and in one hand he held an empty gourd the size of an ostrich egg, which he shook to emphasize points in his utterance.

  As soon as the shaman saw her, he closed his eyes and shook his maraca as if to ward off the sight. Though she had grown accustomed to going naked like the Indians, for this occasion she had tucked around her waist a kind of sarong that she had earlier fashioned—to protect her legs from thorns and stinging insects when gathering food in the wild for Antônio’s household—of the dress of navy-blue silk covered with small red flowers which she had once worn, in all innocence, to Chiquinho’s ranch house, on another occasion when she had wished to present herself favorably.

  “Maira,” the shaman saluted her. “Who are you? Why do you disturb my peace?”

  Ianopamoko translated his words into her and Isabel’s hybrid language, and often had to ask the shaman to repeat, since besides speaking a strange dialect he was toothless and wore a number of polished jadeite plugs in his lower lip, muffling his pronunciation. “Maira,” she explained to Isabel, “is their name for a prophet like the Jesus of the Portuguese. He has never seen anyone your color, with hair like sunlight. White men have not yet shown themselves in this part of the world.”

  Isabel remembered Tristão saying scornfully “your people,” which may have marked the beginning of her attempt to seek a miracle. “I am not a prophet; I am a woman reduced to desperation, come to beg for your magic,” she said.

  Ianopamoko translated, and the shaman frowned, and mumbled, interrupting himself with angrily prolonged rattles of his maraca. “He says,” Ianopamoko whispered, “magic is men’s business. Women are dirt and water, men are air and fire. Women are—I am not sure of his word, I think it means ‘unclean,’ but also has a sense of ‘tricky business.’ ”

  Then she talked directly to the shaman, at some length, and explained to Isabel, “I have told him you are come for the sake of your boy-child, whose father was so old the baby was born without the heat of a normal person.”

  “No,” Isabel protested to her friend—“I have not come for the sake of Salomão, but for the sake of Tristão, my husband!”

  The shaman looked from one woman to the other, sensing their cross-purposes, and brandished his maraca indignantly, saliva gushing from one of the holes in his lip where a jade plug had fallen out. He spoke without raising his voice, compelling the women to bend forward toward his swaying hammock.

  Ianopamoko, flustered, murmured to Isabel, “He does not like me, because I am a woman of his own race. He does not say this, but I sense it. I think he says you are a man in spiritual form and so he is willing to talk with you, but only directly.”

  “Oh, but I cannot! Don’t leave me with him!”

  “Mistress, I must. I displease him. Magic cannot take place, if I am with you.” Ianopamoko had already stood, on her lovely smooth legs, while the shaman gestured and orated on, his spittle flying, his marvellously made headdress of feathers shaking. “He is calling,” Ianopamoko explained, “for cauim and petum and yagé.”

  Petum, Isabel discovered, was a strangely flavored tobacco, and cauim a kind of beer that tasted of cashews. The shaman was impressed by how manfully she, as if restored to her student days in Brasília, put away the beer, and inhaled the tobacco, from a long pipe he kept passing her. He took care, it seemed, to blow the smoke directly at her, and when it occurred to her that this was a courtesy she blew her smoke back at him. A glaze began to overlay her vision, a set of highlights shimmering here and there in the dried-mud womb of the hut, and it occurred to her that the pipe held more than tobacco. Perhaps the added ingredient was yagé. The old shaman, with his naked boyish body, his penis decorously dressed in a woven sheath, a straw thimble through which his foreskin had been pulled like a rumpled little ochre cactus-flower, said nothing, just contemplated her more and more contentedly. All this time she had been hunkering across the fire from him; her ligaments, stretched by these years among savages and bandeirantes, were comfortable thus stretched. In this position her sarong could not cover her underparts, but then why should underparts be hid? Do they not give us our most glorious moments, and guide us through life to our fates? Perhaps this was a drunken reflection.

  When the shaman at last did speak, she miraculously understood; certain of his mumbled words stood out like highlights, glimmering with meaning, and the sense of the sentence slitheringly moved through under the dark spaces between. Something in the smoke had eaten away at the boundary between their minds.

  He told her she had the heart of a man.

  “Oh, no!” she protested, and for lack of words cupped her hands beneath her naked breasts and lifted them slightly.

  He flapped his hand through the fog of smoke and with the other hand gave a desultory shake of his maraca. He said she did not want to heal her child. How could this be?

  She did not have the words to say the child repelled her, made her ashamed. Instead she imitated Salomão’s pathetic slack expressi
on, the eyes in which no spark lived. She said the word for “man”—full of sharp edges, ending in zep—and patted her chest with a flat hand and pronounced, “Tristão.”

  “Tristão fucks you,” he said, in effect.

  “Yes,” she said, “but not for three years,” and with her fingers prettily mimed a fetter about her bare ankle. “He has been made a slave by evil men,” she said, dizzily proud of the length of this utterance. “He is black.” Fearing that this was not clear, she drew his tall outline in the air, and held up a piece of charcoal from the edge of the fire. In addition she pointed up through the hut’s little smoke-hole, where a star or two glimmered in a circle of black. For it had become night. “His people come from across the great ocean, from another great island, greater than even Brazil, where the sun has made people black.”

  “Maira, what is it you want my magic to do?”

  As she explained, the shaman’s browless eyes widened and his toothless jaw opened, at first in incomprehension and then in comprehension.

  He said, as far as she could understand, “Magic is a way of adjusting Nature. Nothing can be created, only Monan can create, and he long ago grew tired of creating, because he saw what a mess men had made of his world. Magic can merely transpose and substitute, as with the counters of a game. When something here is placed there, something there must be placed here. For every gain, there is a sacrifice, somewhere else. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “Are you willing to sacrifice for this Tristão?”

  “I already have. I have lost my world. I have lost my father.”

  “Are you willing to change your self?”

  “Yes, if he will still love me.”

  “He will still fuck you, but not in the same way. When we disturb Nature with magic, nothing stays the same. Things shift.” His eyes had narrowed again, and looked blazingly red, with the smoke and the cauim.

  “I am willing. I am eager.”

  “Then we will begin tomorrow, Maira. What we do we must do in the daylight, over six days.” His mouth seemed to be moving behind his meanings, which arrived in her mind while his mouth was still closed. “How will you pay me?” he asked.

  “When I left my home, I gave up much property. All I have left is a little cross covered with jewels. A cross is the symbol of our God. It means both agonizing death and endless life. In this sign my people are conquering the world.” With the charcoal she drew a cross in her white palm and held it for him to see. The shaman closed his tired sore eyes, as if shutting out bad luck. “It is worth many cruzeiros,” Isabel told him.

  “What is a cruzeiro?”

  She could not explain. “Paper that we use for trading instead of shells and resin.”

  “I will take that.” He pointed at her ring, the ring that said DAR.

  “No, please—Tristão gave it to me, to pledge himself to me!”

  “Then it is good. It holds both of your spirits.” He reached out his hand, the hammock swaying in recoil, and made the clenching and unclenching gesture of a fist that needed no mediating drug to interpret as “give me.”

  Heartsick, she slipped off the inscribed ring and set it in the shaman’s cupped hand. His palm felt feverish, like that of her children when the germs of colds or measles or whooping cough had entered them, and the cells of their bodies were doing battle. As if a tooth had been knocked from her face, she knew she would never get back what she had just surrendered. Life robs us of ourselves, piece by small piece. What is eventually left is someone else.

  “For the treatment to take hold, you must know my name. My name is Tejucupapo.”

  “Tejucupapo.”

  “The treatment will change you.”

  “I am in your hands, Tejucupapo.”

  “You have a man’s big spirit. A warrior’s fury to live. Not like that dirt with you. She will soon die.”

  “Oh, no—not dear Ianopamoko! She has been so beautifully kind to me!”

  Tejucupapo said gruffly, his plugs jostling against his lower gums, “It gives her sensual pleasure, to be kind. To surrender herself to you. She is pleasing herself that way. She senses the man in you, and—” In effect, he told her, “You fuck her.” And he spat, massively, so the sluggish fire whimpered and sang out a thin high note.

  Yet Ianopamoko was enlisted in the magical treatments, which involved painting Isabel over her entire body with the black dye called genipapo. It could not be broadly scrubbed on but had to be painstakingly applied in those lacy designs, of dotted lines and S-curves, that only Indian women know how to inscribe, with the proper secret symmetry and in the propitious order. As Ianopamoko worked, covering Isabel’s radiant white skin, young girls from the mesa community assisted her, using little brushes made from capybara bristles pinched in sticks of split bamboo. Tejucupapo blew warm petum smoke over the designs, sinking them deeper, giving them the indelible impress of Monan’s creation. Isabel suppressed laughter, feeling the brushes caress her so meticulously, and feeling the warm clouds of Tejucupapo’s smoky breath blow into even her most intimate crevices.

  Thus tickled, she marvelled at seeing Ianopamoko’s cheeks gleaming with tears, like the face of the mesa itself. Ianopamoko had loved her as she was. In the nights, Isabel tried to convey to her companion that she had not changed within, and made love more insistently than before, with a masculine roughness, for the dainty Indian woman was less easily led to a shudder than before. Isabel’s uncanny whiteness had been part of her charm for Ianopamoko, she realized, and felt insulted. Only Tristão loved the self within her outward selves.

  As she was fixed in the daze of being painted, smoking the blend of petum and yagé so she could understand the shaman’s words, he told her, between long warm exhalations of smoke, of legendary times, times when the earth was almost empty, so freshly had Monan created it. Men moved like little packs of dung-mites across the beaten floor of a longhouse thatched with stars, which burned more brightly then. Generation succeeded generation, always moving toward fresh game, toward spaces where the earth was not yet tired. The game was mighty: herds of horses with beards beneath their chins and trees of bone on their heads, and of long-haired creatures who picked up prey with their noses and whose twisted teeth crossed in front of their mouths. Fleeing always toward the horizon, the game led men across narrow land with ocean on both sides—ocean, which Monan had not made, but which was left from the rain he had used to put out the great fire of his anger with men before Irin-Magé, the father of the first Maira. These men were not exactly men but we call them men. The fire was called Tatá. The waters were called Aman Atoupave. Monan had put men on earth to praise him and to be grateful for their existence, but all they wanted to do was drink cauim and fuck. The new land was vast, but men used it up, killing game and each other and forgetting Monan. They came to another narrow place between endless blue pieces of Aman Atoupave. Men crossed over, and no one came forward to fight them. There were many tall trees in this new place. There were sloths that slumbered upside down for a man’s whole lifetime, and great armadillos with stones in their tails, and little fish in the rivers that could eat a cow before she could lift her voice in pain. Men filtered in among the trees. They hunted and fished. They hoed manioc, and brought medicine out of the trees, and wove clothes out of feathers. Here they had peace. Here they had space. Here men were happy. Monan had invented woman in an earlier place. Now in this place he bestowed his final blessing upon men: he invented the hammock. Only Tupan, thundering unseen in the sky, and Jurupari, scuttling unseen in the forest with his evil smell, reminded men of time, and of the fact that all things change.

  Each forenoon, the process was repeated, always with different designs, to cover the dwindling intervals of pale skin. After each gruelling overlay, Isabel was covered more solidly with the color of genipapo; on the seventh day she was a blackish brown, darker than coffee beans but lighter than strong coffee, everywhere but on her palms, the soles of her feet, the skin beneath her nails, and t
he insides of her eyelids. Even the lips of her vagina, she was amazed to discover, had taken the purple tinge of genipapo. Her monkey face, with its thrust-out lips and depressed nose-bridge, now owned its sly joy more fully, more openly. Her platinum hair had been rubbed, strand by strand, with black gum so often it had thickened and tightly curled. Her body in its new ebony pelt showed the knotted muscularity her labors as Antônio’s third wife had earned her—a length of curved thigh and a bulging tautness of buttock and calf and breast that pressed back against space, that wanted to stride and move, to roll. Naked, she looked less naked than before. She wore a glisten, a thin flexible layer as of metal darkened by the electroplating process. The hair that had once trailed limply down her back was now cut to make a cushion around her skull, upstanding like Tejucupapo’s headdress of papagaio feathers. She looked now more like the warrior Tejucupapo had told her her sex concealed.

  Her eyes were still gray-blue. The shaman told her, “Eyes are the window of the spirit. When your soul becomes black, then will your eyes also.”

  In parting, he warned her, “Now you must seek a protector. You are no longer Maira. Your skin is no longer magic.”

  “Your magic, Tejucupapo—are we sure it has worked … everywhere?”

  She hesitated to speak, in Ianopamoko’s presence, of the miracle she had asked for. The other woman, she knew, did not approve.

  Tejucupapo read her mind. Wearily slung in a hammock, his breath fetid with stale cauim and tobacco, he shook his maraca. “I have told you—when something there is placed here, something here must be placed there.” He seemed a sad old savage, idle and defeated.

  “Before I leave you forever, Tejucupapo, hear my last question. Your people suffer. They are robbed and raped; whole tribes die. Eventually the white man’s guns and diseases will reach even this mesa, bringing Christianity and slavery. Why does your magic, and that of all the other shamans, do nothing against this tide?”