Brazil

by John Updike

  Tristão glanced toward Isabel for guidance and, seeing little there, just the wine of love sparkling in her gray-blue eyes, told him, “When I was a worker, I did not strike. I could not in truth tell who was a head of the sindicato and who was a plant boss. I only knew that my back hurt, and theirs did not.”

  “Exactly! Evolution, not revolution, don’t you think? Change for the better, of course, for all classes, but at a pace that does not destroy the old matrix, yes?”

  “Yes. Preserve the matrix.”

  “What the young call ‘the system,’ in quotes, like tongs picking up something distasteful. But what is the system but what has evolved, what has emerged from the struggles of men, each man seeking his own self-interest, and by maximizing his own self-interest thus maximizing the glory of the nation?” And he told a long story about himself as a young man, when his wife—God rest her breathtakingly beautiful soul—was still alive, and Isabel was an infant, and how they came to Brasília when it was just a wilderness, an ancient dream sustained by a few dedicated men.…

  Isabel let her attention wander, since she had heard the story before, or stories like it. She stood up, the stem of the wineglass like a silver wand in her hand, and the cigarette in her other hand a wand of air, of spirit and sensation. She moved to the windows and looked out upon the cubes of Brasília glowing in the velvet night that had descended. The glowing parallelepipeds, the arrowing expressways, the parabolic monuments to the national history of strife and struggle, all seemed projections of her own inner life, her ability to conceptualize and to love, which was itself a concept. These two men at her back loved her, and when she heard her father’s story finally reach its point and Tristão bring forth an appreciative laugh, she turned triumphantly, her abdomen buzzing with its butterflies, to face their double blast of adoration.

  But they were ignoring her, excluding her. Tristão was telling, in courteous turn, a story of his own, about the difficulties of discriminating, when he was the bouncer and the doorman for the Mato Grosso Elétrico, between women and transvestites, and his fear that by mistake he would exclude all the real women, who did not look as much like women as the men in drag. And then there had been a dwarf transvestite, and the whole political question of how many dwarfs a night should one admit, or, rather, how many could one exclude, since on the one hand the short people of Bunda da Fronteira formed one of the community’s most prickly and vociferous special-interest groups, and on the other hand the normal-sized discotheque customers complained of tripping over them on the dance floor.

  Their laughter and talk, male laughter and male talk, tumbled on as their wills playfully wrestled; the whimsical servant brought her a second glass of wine, her father a second gimlet, Tristão a second vitamina. The wine began to press on her bladder; the city lights and the nostalgia of being back in Brasília and the strangeness of hearing her father and lover laugh together pressed on her corneas, forming tears. She moved across the living room, catching a glimpse of herself in a piece of mirror tall and slender like one of the sides of the two skyscrapers that housed the Congresso Nacional. She held herself, in her voluminous garb, with her slender neck very straight, as if she were carrying a pot on her head. Shadowy troughs in the shimmering cloth appeared to reverse the colors on the glossy ridges. She was satisfied that she looked, on the verge of thirty, magnificent.

  The two men were aware of her, as the magnet that had brought them together. As soon as she was out of earshot in the bathroom Tristão said to Salomão, in a low deliberate voice, “I have described myself as single-minded—that single-mindedness, I want to assure you, is consecrated to your daughter’s welfare and happiness.”

  The older, shorter man blinked, and nodded in gratitude for the affirmation. “As you heard me say, she has had strange tastes in male companionship. Like so many warm-hearted young women who have always enjoyed comfort, she lacks understanding of practical limits, of the parameters of the Brazilian matrix.”

  “She is perhaps wiser now than the college girl you last knew. Tell me, if I may ask—”

  “Yes, my dear fellow?” his host said, since Tristão had hesitated.

  “Do you see—how can I say?—any physical difference in her?”

  Salomão blinked but said nothing.

  Tristão pursued awkwardly, “Is her complexion, to be specific, as you remember it? Though I scolded her, she did not always, in our travels, wear a hat in the sun.”

  The diplomat lifted the heels of his slippers a fraction, broadened his shoulders, and let a twitch of his features forecast the momentousness of what he was about to assert. He spoke as carefully as if the words were memorized, or in a foreign language he had but lately learned. “To a father, a daughter is always perfection. I find Isabel as enchanting as I did when I first saw her, in her sainted mother’s arms. Do not worry overmuch about protecting her from the sun; she takes a tan well. Her mother was an Andrade Guimarães, and it was said that the Andrade Guimarãeses, back in Portugal, had acquired a drop of Moorish blood.” He held the other man’s eyes with his own. “Do you not join me in finding my daughter perfection?”

  This man, Tristão noticed, had a meaty upper lip, like Isabel’s, and like hers ridged in the middle, but slightly off-center in his case, making his mouth look scarred and quizzical. Tristão said firmly, “Sir, I do. I also loved Isabel at first sight, and each day since that glimpse she has given fresh cause for my love to increase. She is not merely beautiful but brave, and not only brave but resourceful. I have found my fate and the purpose of my life, in loving her. She is perfection.”

  Salomão heard a grim undertone as the young husband pronounced these insistences, but ascribed it to the well-known melancholy of the Portuguese race; no less an authority than Gilberto Freyre assures us that, had not the early colonizers imported Africans to cheer up their settlements, the whole Brazilian enterprise might have withered of sheer gloom. And yet the Africans themselves suffered such homesick sorrow in the New World that a word was coined for it, banzo, a kind of black saudade.

  Isabel returned from the gleaming grotto of the bathroom, her femininity renewed by gushes of liquids and sprinklings of perfume. She extended a still-moist hand to each man—her father, her lover. “I see no ring,” her father said, holding her gift for examination. “Have you children no use for the rites of our spiritual mother the Church?”

  “There was a ring,” she told him. “A very precious ring, which I traded away, in a moment I beg both of you not to find foolish. It was a beautiful ring that Tristão had given me; it had letters that spelled DAR. We never knew what they might have stood for.”

  “If I may hazard a guess,” her father ventured, “the ring came from one of the most sacred and arcane institutions of the ianques—an association of venerated daughters of the soldiers who fought in their uncouth revolution. It would be an epic achievement to wangle one. But I have still some few friends in Washington, as long as Henry Kissinger serves the present President—I will try, I will try.”

  The fussy, whimsical, mock-modest repetition signalled, for Tristão and Isabel smilingly to appreciate, that he would succeed. Thus Salomão bestowed upon the couple his long-withheld blessing.

  xxviii. São Paulo Again

  YES, they lived happily then, in São Paulo, first in an apartment in Higienópolis, and then in a house in the Jardim América district, off the Rua Groenlândia, for a dozen years in all. The Leme brothers succeeded in obtaining for Tristão a position in middle management, not at the fusca plant where he had tightened engine-mounting bolts opposite gap-toothed Oscar—for fuscas were no longer made—but at a textile mill in São Bernardo, one of the so-called ABCD cities, industrial satellites of São Paulo.

  The mill was a single vast room where giant looms kept up a clatter which pressed on Tristão’s ears with a million small concussions; each noise was smaller than the clashes of metal on metal in the fusca factory, but there were many more of them. At first, he tried to understand the intri
cacies—the warp, the weft, the batten and its beating-in, the ways in which twill differed from plain weave, or tabby, and how variations in lifting the threads of the warp with the heddles produced satin and damask, warp-pile velvet and weft-pile corduroy, and the truly dizzying operation whereby many spinning cones of thread, drawn by a mechanical drawboy controlled by punched cards, could be woven to make elaborately figured fabrics.

  The shuttle, that carried the weft threads back and forth under the lifted warps that formed the shed, was the basic awkwardness, he perceived, for at the heart of the weaving there must be this moment of suspension when the shuttle flies, or its flying is imitated by rapiers, by dummy-shuttles, and even by jets of air or water that propel the thread from one edge, called a selvage, of the cloth to the other, making a “pick.” Just so, at the heart of our lives lies a supernatural leap, an oscillating unlikelihood. Miraculously, the looms clanked and clattered, repeating the shedding, the picking, and the beating-in with a merciless speed that yet did not snap threads: there was no resistance in the material universe to an inhuman acceleration. The human attendants of the machines, indeed, looked grotesquely lackadaisical and soft, like wet clay dropped here and there, idle spectators who would suddenly spring into action at the depletion of a bright-colored cone or glistening heavy shuttle. The workers, mostly women, wore kerchiefs to keep their long hair from becoming entangled with the machines, which in a flicker of mindless operation would pull their scalps loose from their skulls. Some of these women had Indian blood; others had come with the Japanese immigration, or the Italian before it, or among those varied Middle Eastern peoples lumped as turcos, Turks.

  And then there was another giant room of the factory, in which the altogether different operation of knitting was carried on by machines built on quite different principles, needles being the fundamental unit, ingeniously bent needles of two types: spring beard and latch, the latch having a tiny pivot closing the needle’s loop and permitting the stitch to be cast off. The needles in a variety of gauges ranging from the size of a pencil to that of a mouse whisker were arrayed in bars or circles, cylinders or plates, controlled by moving cams that imitated the motion of knitting over and over and over, gnashing like piranhas, producing sheets or tubes of knitted fabric as coarse as ski sweaters or as seductively filmy as pantyhose. Tristão’s attempt at understanding the details of manufacture gave him terrible, million-toothed dreams and lasted but a few weeks; then he perceived that his role was to understand merely his relation to the men above him in the management chain, and those below him, and to fit himself into the organizational motions. Together, like a dim-witted animal that nevertheless knows enough to move toward food, the factory and its employees lumbered toward market; meanwhile, the government heavily rode the animal’s back and inflation shackled its feet. Some of the managers interfaced with the market—the fashion experts, the advertising men, the wholesalers, the retailers’ representatives—and others with the government, as it extracted its taxes, fine-tuned its price controls, imposed its safety and pollution regulations, accepted its bribes. Still others interfaced with the engineers and the machinery, which needed to be repaired, re-evaluated, and replaced with ever newer, more computerized and robotic equipment. Tristão, as it evolved, interfaced with the workers and their unions.

  He had a certain social blankness, with his high solemn brow and unexpectedly dark eyes—the irises melting sorrowfully into the pupils—and a cautious dignity that fit him to the position. Though he was white, claro—almost unnaturally so, as if his skin had never seen the sun, or had been bleached by fiat—he lacked the upper-class Paulista accent that the workers and their leaders instinctively hated. He had none of the prissy, languid arrogance of the filhos do poder; he seemed, actually, to be the son of no one, and he attended earnestly and carefully to the workers’ complaints and the labor unions’ schemes for rectification of inequities and elimination of bottlenecks as if striving to puzzle through a maze where he lacked the guidance of prejudice. The whole legitimate modern world seemed something of a puzzle to him, that he must work through step by step. He was patient. He never condescended. Though he grasped, as if once one of them, the harsh monotony of work on the factory floor, he did not attempt, in the fascist manner ascendant during the military rule, to usurp the leadership of the rank and file. He kept on his silvery-gray suit and snow-white collar, visibly a company man, yet rose in prestige with the workers as—beginning with the sit-down strike of a bus factory in 1978 that spread to seventy-eight thousand metalworkers—waves of strikes and defiances effected a revolution in wage increases, safety regulations, health benefits, and employee rights. Mass assemblies thundered their votes in soccer stadiums; union offices moved out from under the wing of government and corporate collusion into the Cathedral of São Bernardo, at the invitation of the newly reform-minded Church. The ultimate bastion against Communism is a bourgeoisfied worker class, and Tristão, whose own bourgeoisfication had about it something skin-deep, served as a kind of enzyme in the process. His neutrality of bearing and accent was like that of an actor on television, which was reassuring to workers who, at even the most abject level of poverty, lived more and more within television’s soap operas, newscasts, and quiz shows.

  His textile factory emerged from the strikes of 1980 with worker-management relations intact; it had become clear that the old class wars, which had driven capitalism like an engine overheated to the point of explosion, must give way, on a globe dominated by Japanese and German methodology, to arrangements of mutual dependency and satisfaction between government, industry, and the populace. Tancredo Neves’ brilliant defeat, in 1985, of the military rulers in the electoral college, and then his stunning death the night before his inauguration, passed in Tristão’s clattering, shuttling world with scarcely a dropped stitch. As the years wore on, Tristão ever more patiently (and, it must be confessed, absent-mindedly) sat listening to the voice of the workers with the healing tact and non-committal silence of a Freudian psychiatrist, whose patient, never cured, is nevertheless enabled to limp forward under the load of daily woe. Tristão prospered in his job. He took up the status-appropriate activities—tennis, jogging, squash, wind-surfing—and excelled in all, with his limber grace and latent ferocity. He even seduced a few of his middle-management colleagues’ wives, when it became clear that this, too, was a game.

  Yet he never really felt at home in São Paulo. Except in his daily commute to the industrial belt, and the routes to certain favored restaurants and their beach house in Ubatuba, he was forever getting lost, finding himself going around on the same viaduct, or circling the same neighborhood, or one that looked exactly like it. He could not shake the impression, received on his first visit nearly twenty years before, that the city had no limits, no shape, compared with Rio, where the beaches and the breadloaf mountains pinch the streets to a series of dainty waists, and a horizon of untamed nature—bare mountaintop, sun-battered sea—is always in view. When he and Isabel, as their status befitted, travelled to Paris and Rome, New York and Tokyo, Buenos Aires and Mexico City, it all seemed to him, aside from the unmistakable difference between the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum, more São Paulo, more cement-gray people-sprawl, eating up the planet. He thought back nostalgically upon the emptiness of the Mato Grosso, when he and Isabel had first traversed it, with its faint woody tang of some spiritual heartwood, and the flocks of flamingos rising in billows beneath the eastward-drifting outpouring of blue-bottomed clouds, and the upside-down silhouettes of the pinheiros beckoning them, from a far rosy cliff, to that night’s campsite. He thought of how in their worst extremity her pale body alone had sustained him, with the food of love.

  Isabel, patterning herself after spotty girlish memories of her mother and her dashing aunt Luna, went through the motions of being a young housewife of the middle class. To be of the middle class in Brazil is to enjoy what, in countries where wealth is more equitably distributed, would be an aristocratic life-style. Servants are c
heaper than appliances, and Isabel had from the start a combination maid and cook, and then employed, when they moved from the Higienópolis apartment to the house off the Rua Groenlândia, a woman to take care of the children. There were three—Bartolomeu, the offspring of the religious pardovasco, with Ethiopian eyes and a skin but one shade lighter than her own, and three years later the twins, Aluísio and Afrodísia, non-identical, but born of the same gush of sperm late at night, between bouts of the lambada at the Som de Cristal, in a broom closet on the way to the ladies’ room, out of a man she hardly knew, a business contact of Tristão’s at the textile plant, a supplier of polyester thread, and saturnine enough, though racially mostly white, with his tennis tan and brassy big predatory features, to appeal to her. For a few minutes she thought he was a bandeirante and she was back in the Mato Grosso. After this indiscretion reaped its alarming double harvest—neither non-identical twin showing a glimmer of Tristão’s natural dignity or a wisp of his straight fair hair—Isabel began to practice birth control, by sleeping with no one but her husband.