Brazil

by John Updike

  His room upstairs was crowded and bright, like the jungle Isabel had traversed with Ianopamoko; it was clamorously full of parrot-colored religious statues, of all the Catholic gods—Mary, the baby, crucified Jesus, St. Sebastian with his arrows, St. Catherine with her wheel, the Pope in white beanie who wore little glasses and died of hiccups—plus the orixás and exús of Candomblé, with the same little plaster heads and painted plaster stares, and beige-skinned busts of Elvis and Buddy Holly and Little Richard and other ianque rock immortals. There were even a gilded Buddha and a black-enamelled Kali, with her flaming red tongue and her necklace of skulls. This pardovasco truly lived for his religions, which offended Isabel. She distrusted the masculinity of a man who was not ready to make her his sole object of worship.

  Rather than instantly fall to lovemaking, the jeweller insisted that she listen with him to his afochê records, explaining, “Afochê is the most African of Brazilian musics, with close ties to Candomblé; it has been rejuvenated by Jamaican reggae and the Black Consciousness Movement throughout the Americas.” He gave her dope to smoke but it was not as cosmic in feeling as Tejucupapo’s yagé. Their sex, when they finally came to it, seemed perfunctory and tame compared with what she and Tristão had developed. This was not a man who loved a woman to the point of self-annihilation. She had been spoiled for any other kind. Nevertheless, she went back to the jeweller—his name was Olympio Cipóuna—several times, to his room full of the stubs of votive candles, and deposited the money she wheedled from him in a savings account, whose rate of interest was adjusted to the rate of inflation.

  The further east she and Tristão had travelled, from wilderness fit only for Indians to unfenced cattle country and on into farmland varied by pockets of government-sponsored industry, the more apparent was their need for money, for capital. They must have clothes, shoes, cruzeiros for rent and restaurants. This provincial city, named Bunda da Fronteira, not many years before still had board sidewalks and wooden false fronts and hitching posts, and every man carried a gun. Photographs of old lynchings and dance halls were displayed in the windows of Main Street barberships and on the walls of the local historical society. Indian artifacts, especially feather-work by the Erikbatsas, were on sale everywhere, for the German and Swedish tourists, who were hauled in by bus; also there were parties of Canadian fishermen organized to plunder the teeming waters of the Araguaia and Xingú rivers. Amenities were rapidly being installed, for the tourists and the local gentry. Ten-story office buildings were being constructed, with sealed windows and air-conditioning; streetlights had been installed at six intersections; faucet water was being rendered potable; and a shopping mall was taking shape on the edge of town.

  Isabel, citing her experience with the seamstress in the hinterland, in the town with steep cobbled streets, found employment in a dress shop, at first in the back rooms, pinning and sewing, and then, because of her comeliness and saucy sophistication of manner, up front, in the sales force. Tristão found work as a bouncer and front-man in a discotheque that was just starting up, called Mato Grosso Elétrico. The crucial part of the job lay not in evicting the occasional cocaine overdoser who had become too frenetic or the pusher who had become too blatant, but in judging whom, in the jostling crowds that lined up each night on the sparkling cement sidewalk, to admit. It was like composing a bouquet, a fresh salad, whose variety spelled gaiety and otherworldly carnival. A few garishly costumed, bewigged transvestites were all right, but too many would frighten off the straights; a few paunchy middle-aged pleasure-seekers were desirable, to lend weight and historical perspective to the crowd of dancers, but the youthful note must be prevalent; a tarted-up girl in a spangled miniskirt and see-through blouse was fine, unless her escort had the squat, anxious, sexless look of a pimp. To make a little paradise within, anxiety and hope of profit must be left at the door. The profiteer, the open voyeur, the too-raw aspirant to social success must be excluded. Tristão scanned the crowd of eager faces in the blanching light of the Elétrico’s flashing sign for the pure at heart. Some poor could be admitted, but not so many as to discomfort the comfortable, or give rise to social clashes and revolutionary gestures as the night’s dancing and shedding of inhibition progressed. Revolution had been left behind in the Sixties. This was the Seventies. The bacchanal must keep a flavor of apolitical innocence. Blacks, regrettably, had often to be excluded, since they showed up in numbers much greater proportionally than their representation in the population of Bunda da Fronteira, which was relatively pale. The white and branquelo customers must feel part of a multiracial society but not swamped. A discotheque is not a batuque, a Congo jamboree. It strives with its psychedelic effects to create an ecstasy free of danger and depravity, with none of vice’s sodden consequences—an aëration in which the tender shoots of mating may reach out and expand. The strobe lights, the colored lasers, the piping, uninsistently rhythmic music, the watery champagne all seek to caress the passions into courage, into a kind of plumage, rather than frighten them away. The nightly spectacle, of which Tristão with a growing skill selected the human elements, must not be a harsh spectacle, at the mercy of the most ruthlessly showy and professionally exhibitionistic. His height, his white brow, his commanding, overarching gestures indicating selections in the rear of the waiting throng, his noble reluctance to smile, either in approval or apology, made him commanding in this judgmental role, and a bit of a celebrity in after-dark Bunda da Fronteira. His employers, pock-marked mestizo gangsters personally unpresentable, valued his handsome fronting and offered to increase his salary and benefits when, after five months, he announced his determination to quit.

  He and Isabel had by now accumulated enough money and clothes and city wisdom to depart, not by bus but by DC-7—a hop of less than an hour—for Brasília.

  Their journey from the encampment had taken the better part of a year.

  xxvii. Brasília Again

  EIGHT YEARS had passed since Isabel had been a student here at the university and she and Tristão had lain together amid the wild banana trees and Spanish bayonet on one of the capital’s vast median strips. Her father was no longer Ambassador to Afghanistan, where King Muhammad Zahir Shah had been deposed by a group of young military officers increasingly subject to Soviet influence. Islamic militance was on the rise and trouble was brewing in central Asia; Salomão was glad to leave. Now he served the Big Boys as Assistant Minister of Interior Development, with a suite of offices in the marble stretches of the Palácio do Planalto. He sounded, when he picked up the phone, older to Isabel, his old paternal force and majesty dwindled—or was it that she had been seasoned in hardship and love and had grown to adulthood? She was now twenty-nine, and had noticed a few white circlets as she tended her sizable Afro. In certain lights the backs of her hands looked ropey, and the skin beneath her chin a trifle loose. Her father did not argue or resist when she firmly told him, “Daddy, I am well, no thanks to you. I want to visit you, and for you at last to meet my companheiro, my dear husband.”

  His silence was not long, and may have been merely a diplomat’s attempt to find appropriate phrasing. “My darling, nothing could please me more. I have missed you, and spent many a sleepless night churning with anxiety over your whereabouts and welfare. After the life of a miner’s wife at the Serra do Buraco, of which rumors reached me halfway around the world, you disappeared from the face of the earth!”

  “We never left Brazil,” she said coldly.

  “Your voice has changed. Was it always so … throaty?”

  “People change, Father. Children grow up. This is my voice now. Would tomorrow at six fit into your busy schedule? Do not trouble yourself to give us dinner. Tea or cocktails will suffice—perhaps more than suffice.”

  If she was curt, it was partly because Tristão was lying on the hotel bed, listening. When she hung up, he said, “This is the man who kidnapped us, and sent an assassin to kill me; now I am supposed politely to meet him?”

  “It’s a different you now,”
she said. “And Daddy sounded different, too. Older. Sadder. I believe he did miss me, actually. He never had time, before, to be a father.”

  She put on as many dresses as before going to Chiquinho’s house in Moóca ten years ago, at last settling for an ankle-length unbelted gown of splashy silk, in peacock colors, with voluminous split sleeves that displayed elegantly the black of her slender arms. Such a garb formerly would have made her look quite washed out.

  Her father’s apartment, in the white-sided, curved, glass-balconied skyscraper on the Eixo Rodoviário Norte, seemed less grand than it had when she had lived here as an impressionable college girl. The serving couple—the man tall and lugubrious and greenish, the woman chubby and brown—whom she had grown to know and depend upon for companionship during her father’s frequent absences, had been replaced by a single manservant, a nimble slight freckled fellow with orange hair done up in Rastafarian dreadlocks, like a basket of tangled yarn on his head. He admitted Tristão and Isabel to the foyer with an impertinent bow. As they waited for her father to appear, Isabel realized that the apartment was in fact smaller—that it was not the same apartment. The Tibetan thang-ka, the Louis XV coiffeuse with its black Ch’ing vase, the Japanese prints and carved Dogon figures were still here, along with a lambskin rug and a massive peened copper pot that must come from Afghanistan, but more crowded together, without the lavish surrounding space that, before, had given their beauty the breathlessness of isolation. Now this gathering of objects had the hectic clamor of a party too large for its space. The long corridor down which she had dragged herself and her books to her room night after night was no longer there, and the living-room windows looked not toward Lake Paranoá but, less scenically, toward the Rodoferroviária.

  Perhaps her father’s career, in the days of President Kubitschek seemingly infinite in prospect, had reached, under the succession of generals, its limit, in ambassadorships increasingly peripheral and in administrative posts that not only concerned the hinterland but partook of the hinterland’s neglect.

  Salomão Leme entered the room. He had aged, though his tiny narrow feet still twinkled in his patent-leather at-home slippers. He had put on a maroon-lapelled smoking jacket to receive them, above pin-stripe trousers with a razor-sharp crease. The thin hair on top of his skull by now was a mere halo of fuzz on the broad, faintly corrugated pate, and his pendulous gaze had grown heavier, pulling down more pronouncedly than ever the delicate colorless skin, swarming with nerves, that surrounded his eyes.

  Did she imagine it, or did a tiny muscle, below one of these gray eyes, twitch at the sight of her, after eight years? If so, his determined gaze brushed aside the irritant of surprise, his slippers continued to glide swiftly across the lambskin carpet, and the lips with which he grazed first one cheek and then the other were cool. “My beautiful child,” he said, and softly gripped her shoulders the better to stare at her defiantly up-tilted face.

  “Father, this is my husband, or fiancé, or something, Tristão Raposo.” Just seeing her father again had made her feel giddy and girlish, certain of indulgence.

  “Enchanted,” her father said, taking the younger man’s muscular pale white hand in his own, pudgier hand.

  “As am I, sir,” said Tristão, not answering with even the hint of a smile the older man’s tentative beginnings of one, which exposed—touchingly, to Isabel—her father’s small round teeth, even smaller than she remembered, and yellowed by age. These men taking each other’s measure was giving Isabel butterflies in the stomach.

  “From your accent, you are a Carioca,” her father told Tristão.

  “Born and bred, sir. My family lived on the slopes of the Morro do Babilônia. The house was not much, but we enjoyed a splendid view of the sea.”

  The diplomat said, “I no longer know Rio well, though my brother cannot be pried from the place, like a hermit crab in a discarded shell. My life in Rio ended, practically speaking, when the capital was moved to Brasília.”

  “A brave move, that did our nation proud,” said Tristão, somewhat stiffly ignoring the older man’s subtle indication that he could sit down, in one of the several cushioned chairs available.

  “And yet, I wonder,” said Salomão, seating himself in the wide-armed beige corduroy-covered one that was, Isabel knew, only his second favorite. Her father’s favorite was the red plush wing chair, worn to a salmon color on its arms and seat, which Tristão now did perch upon, with too obvious a wariness. She placed herself between them, on the long white sofa, her knees coming up to the level of the low table whose inlay contained a chessboard. A slim vase, a clean ashtray, a crystal paperweight suggested that an endgame was in progress. “The move has left our beautiful Rio,” her father sighed, “very much what the English call a ‘grass widow,’ and has heightened the people’s sense of government as something distant and fantastic, that has little to do with them.”

  “In time,” Tristão offered in consolation, “Brazil’s development will engulf the new capital, and Brasília will be in the thick of things. Men of the future will wonder, indeed, why it is situated so far to the east. In travelling through the Mato Grosso recently, Isabel and I were struck by how rapidly development is proceeding. All the idle luxuries of the modern age, including tourist buses, arriving on top of an innocent desolation.”

  “It is a dreadful headache,” the senior gentleman agreed, slapping his patent-leather-shod feet down on the white wool carpet in emphasis, “and as it happens, my headache, for I have recently become, as perhaps Isabel has informed you, Assistant Minister of Interior Development, the ‘Assistant’ being a mere euphemism—the soi-disant Minister is an unreconstituted general whose sole authentic passion is spying on the Argentines and Paraguayans to make sure they have no rocket or supersonic jet fighter in their arsenals that we do not also have. He is quite paranoid about it, and imagines that Castro is getting all sorts of wonderful Russian goodies which our alignment with the Western imperialists is denying him! Please—what can I offer you to drink?”

  The manservant had glided in, with almost a dance step, wagging his woolly orange locks. Isabel asked him for a glass of white wine, not Chilean or Australian but not necessarily French either, and her father, expansively gesturing with his short arms, for a gimlet, very dry, with two onions, and Tristão, puritanically, for a vitamina. Isabel fought off the fluttering fear that he was keeping his head clear for a fight, and that the hand that kept drifting into his side coat pocket was fingering his razor.

  “Oh Daddy,” she gushed in her nervousness, “don’t let them develop the interior any more; it’s horrible what it’s doing to the Indians!”

  Her father turned on her his large—for such a small man—face, with its looming forehead and heavy, watery gaze, and said in a voice not so gentle as to veil totally the tone of rebuke, “We have a Bureau of Indian Affairs, Isabel, FUNAI, which receives a generous budget and more than its share of publicity. Indians, Indians, everywhere the government seeks to take a step, there they are, underfoot. Vast lands are set aside—along the Amazon, the Xingú, in the Pantanal—for them to frolic and loaf and conduct their nasty little raids on each other’s women in. But, seriously—and I appeal to Mr. Raposo in this—how can the interests of one hundred thousand throwbacks to the dawn of mankind be allowed to hamper the progress of a nation of over one hundred million! Treasure the Indians, yes! Repent of past atrocities, yes! But is one ignorant, disease-ridden Indian truly worth a thousand civilized men and women? I ask you, sir.”

  “Of course not,” Tristão answered. “But he is worth one civilized man or woman, yes? He is a Brazilian, as are we all.”

  Isabel’s father blinked, realizing that an arrow of wisdom, a polite sally, had passed through him, as he took his second sip of very dry gimlet. He smiled, with a kind of blankness Isabel had never before seen in him. “Exactly so.”

  “Daddy,” Isabel intervened. “We lived among Indians for a while, and they couldn’t have been nicer. Except for a few exceptio
ns,” she added, remembering the Guaicuru who stole away two of her children. She was beginning to feel pregnant again, she suspected by the promiscuously religious pardovasco.

  “Yes, dear, no doubt.” The polished political functionary brushed his daughter’s assertion aside. He asked Tristão, “And what took you so far afield, Mr. Raposo? Might you share with me the title of your profession?”

  “Knight errant, you could say,” Tristão offered, unsmiling, after a pause. “I have been involved in a number of fields—mining, automobile manufacture, boat manufacture, retailing, even, most recently, the music-and-entertainment industry, in a managerial capacity. I am not myself musical, or creative in any palpable way. I have always lived by my wits, and a certain dispassionate ruthlessness.”

  “Tristão!” Isabel protested, thrilled by her lover’s daring honesty.

  “Mining, automobile manufacture,” her father repeated, as if to give the phrases more weight. The sequence meant something to him, it rang a bell, which would have troubled him but for the alcohol smoothly working in his veins, and his wish that everything concerned with this encounter to go well. He was too old, too tired to want unpleasantness. He had explored the limits of power. He had seen fanatics enough in Afghanistan, in Ireland. “My daughter,” he confided, “has a taste for adventurers. In the university a few steps from where we sit, she was involved with a boy so revolutionary that only his wealthy father’s intervention and voluntary payment of a surtax upon his estates saved the young man from official discipline. And in Rio once, during the Christmas holiday, she … But I am embarrassing her. Perhaps I must blame myself. Her hot blood is inherited from me. In my dull way, Mr. Raposo, disguised in the drab motley of the negotiator and the administrator, I, too, have adventured—the trophies of my travels are all about us. Her uncle, my brother, with whom she lived for a number of years, as I am sure she has told you, is quite otherwise—a staid businessman who can hardly bear to venture from Ipanema as far as Leblon. His office, his club, his flat, his mistress’s flat … that is his round, day after day. When I beg him to visit me here, he says he is frightened of airplanes, and the altitude of Brasília thins his blood and affects his inner ear! Thins his blood! He has become an old woman. Still, like the spider motionless in the center of his web, Donaciano has many contacts. If you were looking for one more field to conquer, my young friend, and were willing to settle with Isabel in São Paulo, where all our nation’s serious business is now being done, it is possible that he and I together might arrange a position that would utilize some of your expertise. What is your view of workers’ strikes?”