by John Updike
Tristão, listening, grew restless; he had little to contribute. Their world had not been his world. In São Paulo, he had created a past, and among their friends could reminisce to the depth of twelve years. But now, except when Uncle Donaciano turned and made a deliberate effort to include him in a general topic (“And what do you in industry think will come of the newest price freeze?” “Are you younger men as alarmed as I at the prospect of free elections for President?”), Tristão had little to do but puff on a Cuban cigar and slump deeper into his creaking leather armchair and stretch out his legs, trying to suppress their tremors of muscular agitation. In his enforced idleless he studied Isabel, dewy-faced, lost in her dream of childhood, imagining an idyll for herself. She had taken off her shoes and bared her feet, her elegant two-tone Negro feet, and tucked them up beneath her on the curvaceous crimson sofa. Tristão felt the warmth between her and her uncle as oppressive, as subtly noxious, like the cigar smoke. This had been her world, an enchanted world. What had she wanted of me? he smokily wondered. Nothing but his yam. The yam of a stranger. To do nature’s dirty work.
At last their host, his striped hair standing up in loose feathers, doddered toward bed, and the couple made their way to their own bedroom, on the duplex’s second floor, beyond her old girlhood room, which Maria during her brief tenure as wife had turned into storage space. Their windows were splashed to the top with Rio’s champagne lights. Tristão said, “My love, would you mind if I took a walk? I am a bit sick on the cigar. I am not used to cigars, or to so much dinner conversation.”
“We bored you, I know, darling. Forgive us. My uncle will not be with us forever, and it amuses him to think of the old days. He is afraid of the future. He is sure that, if there is a popular election, the Communists will win. The Communists or some idiotic television personality. He is a poor frightened old man.” Sensing that in some way she had offended Tristão, Isabel moved across the bedroom to him; her green sheath dress was off, and her white underwear made two violent interruptions of her skin. “He is the only person I know now,” she told him, in a throaty seductive voice, “who remembers me as I was, when I was … innocent.”
“He knows,” Tristão told her. “He knows that I in my gray suit am the same black trash he forbade his niece to go with twenty-two years ago. He knows, but can’t do anything about it.”
“He doesn’t want to do anything about it,” Isabel told Tristão, caressing his face, trying to rub the crease of anger from his tall forehead with her thumb. “He sees I am happy, and that is all he wants.” Tristão’s fine straight oak-colored hair was thinning back, making his brow even higher. Tenderly she stroked his bared temples.
Her insistent attempt to soothe him irritated him, and he snapped his head to shake off her hand. Her hand bore on its third finger the substitute DAR ring her father had succeeded in obtaining from Washington, as he had promised; but it was not as good, as well-engraved and antique as the ring he had stolen from the blue-haired gringa in Cinelândia, and this, too, irritated him. “Not just your uncle was infatuated with the past. You, too, were overjoyed to remember what was, all that luxury built on misery. You sank into it, out of my reach.”
“But I have returned, Tristão,” she said. “I am within your reach.” Steadily watching his offended face—as if, unwatched, he might strike her—she bent over to slip off her underpants, one leg at a time. Her expression was that of a spying black girl, with widened eye whites, who is frightened yet about to laugh, if she receives the smallest permission. But for her pale eyes she looked, with her watchful monkey face, her bushy hair, like one of the ragged playmates he had known back in the favela, the one he had liked most, Esmeralda. He gave a small smile of permission, and Isabel laughed, and straightened her body from its careful crouch. Her triangle of glistening black hair showed that her skin was merely brown, pale by contrast. Her navel was like the dimple in the underside of a brown bowl, with two thick handles—her hips, curved outward like great roasted cashews. When he put his hand on her rump here, his hand was, he saw, another shade of brown, tanned from tennis and wind-surfing. The hair on its back had a coppery tinge.
“I enjoyed watching you and your uncle,” he told her, in a voice fallen wearily into its manly timbre. “There is true affection between you, based on blood and shared memories. I am not in the least angry. I am melancholy, being so close to my old home.…”
“Tristão. There is nothing there. The favela was razed, to make a botanical garden and a tourist outlook.”
They had gone, once when in Ipanema, to the shop of Apollonio de Todi, but the crystal candlestick, as far as the imperfect records showed, had never been hocked for redemption. Keep my gift, if you prefer, and light a candle against our return some dark night.
“And if you did find them,” she added cautiously, “they would not know you.”
“Yes,” he sighed. “How sensible you are, Isabel, when it comes to my past and not your own. But you must let me have a little walk around the block. My calves are cramping, my head is stuffy. I will be back in a matter of minutes. Compose yourself for sleep, my dearest. I will take a key, and if you are not still awake, I will slip into your dreams. I will be naked.”
She came closer and on tiptoe pushed her warm lips up into his. “Go out. But be careful,” she said, seriously.
He was surprised. Careful in his own city? How old had he become? She was forty, he forty-one. Looking back at her, as she slipped off her brassiere and jokingly posed for him beside their wide white bed in the jaunty posture of a naked boîte dancer, he remembered her asking once, You still like me? The sight of her sucked at him powerfully, but he went out the door.
xxx. The Beach Again
THE AIR IN THE TROPICS suggests, during the day, that nothing can be accomplished, that decay and lassitude are man’s lot. But at night the air feels full of excitement and potential action. Some humid perfumed promise waits in it to be realized.
The old Japanese behind the desk of green marble nodded deferentially as the gentleman passed in his silvery-gray suit. Tristão pushed open the transparent door, and salt air like the kiss of a spirit greeted his nostrils. He walked toward the distant music from the nightclubs and strip joints along Copacabana Beach. The shops of Ipanema were shuttered; the doormen of the apartment buildings stood behind their transparent doors like visitors to an aquarium through whose murky waters Tristão swam. A few restaurants were lit up for business, and the automatic tellers of the banks glowed sleeplessly, but there was little foot traffic to go with the swish of automobiles, though it was not quite midnight. On the Copacabana side of the fort, there was more light, more activity, at the mouths of the great hotels, where tourists came and went in taxis yellow and green like parakeets and store windows illumined from underneath the gems and minerals—tourmaline and amethyst, topaz and rubellite—culled from the mountains of the Minas Gerais.
At outdoor tables a mixture of the poor and rich, the bought and the buyers, waited for the night’s transaction, while chattering over their sweet intense coffees as if life and time demanded no reckoning. Along these tables he and Euclides used to cruise, skimming tips from the saucers, and looking for a dangling purse whose leather straps might be slashed in a second. Up the shadowy side streets off Avenida Atlântica, the drunken tourists, stumbling downstairs warm with a sense of well-being after half an hour with a mulatta whore, were as easy to tumble and shear as stunned sheep.
Now he himself, striding along in his gray suit unaccompanied, caused young women wearing costumes of a toylike frivolity and skimpiness to float forward as if magnetized, and a man or two as well, in jeans as tight as paint and with a face painted almost as carefully and ornately as that of an Indian. Tristão strode undeviatingly on the tessellated sidewalk of wavy black-and-white stripes; the night air, its kiss and shiver of excitement, the snatches of samba and forró and hilarity drifting entwined with the fragrances of coffee and beer and cheap perfume, was all he wanted, to clear his head of
the stale smoke of Isabel’s past, the smoldering truth that there was more of her than he ever could possess. And the realization, which had helped to depress him back in the apartment, that his attempt to possess her had twisted his life into a shape there was no changing, ever—a guilty shape, somehow, stained with murder and desertion.
He wanted his head to be cleared of such muddled, useless thoughts. Tristão, too, craved the old innocence. He had crossed the avenida and stepped from the sidewalk into the sand. He sat on a bench, removed his black laced shoes and silk ribbed socks, and hid them in a patch of beach-pea near the bench. How marvellous it was that these small clumps of beach-pea and sea-grape grew here, in 1988 as in 1966, despite all the feet that had passed this way.
To his bare soles the sand felt tepid on top and cool beneath a thin skin of sun-warmed grains. On the stretches of illuminated beach several soccer games were being played by the spindly, agitated silhouettes of abandoned children. Tristão moved down toward the shadows where the sea, cresting and collapsing, made lines of foam. The sea’s incessant rhythmic noise, its moist breathing while it slept, overlaid the tinnier sounds of traffic and music, without quite drowning them out.
The Southern Cross, like an imperfect kite, small and fragile and lacking a center star, hung low in the moonless sky. Overhead, where the night glow of Copacabana permitted them to prick through, other stars upheld their random rigid patterns, their ancient phosphorescence. In the small waves collapsing at Tristão’s feet, a less steady phosphorescence winked and slid under, as the beach blotted the wave. These lights were like spirits, they were spirits, it seemed to Tristão, alive as was he. He walked along through the wavering ghost of sliding foam, feeling the saturated sand suck at his bare feet, sinking deeper or less deep, the odd tongue of water licking his ankles—all sensations from childhood, when this beach and the view from the shack were the only luxuries of his life.
Then, in a place where the lights of the bustling beachfront were especially distant, so that to his expanded pupils the wavering foam had an intimate brilliance of its own, a human shadow was in front of him, and two more were behind. A medium-sized knife reflected starlight on its flat side. “Your watch,” a boy’s fragile, panicky voice said, in English, adding, to be safe, “Ihr Armbanduhr.”
“Don’t be a pentelho,” Tristão told the sudden presence. “I am one of you.”
His deep and easy Carioca accent made his assailant falter, but not change attack. “Your watch, your wallet, credit cards, cuff links, everything, quickly,” the boy said, adding as if to keep his childish voice from rising out of control, “You filho da puta!”
“You mean to insult me, but you speak simply the truth,” Tristão told him. “Go home to your own whorish mamas, and I will not hurt you.” His adult voice trembled, as the adrenaline of combat rushed to his chest. He felt the point of a second knife between his shoulder blades, and the hand of a third boy, quick and silent as a gecko on the wall, crept into his coat’s breast pocket and lifted out the billfold. This impudent delicacy, as if one of the children he had never had were playing with Papa’s clothes, both tickled and enraged Tristão. A car on the distant avenue turned around, and by the flick of its headlights he saw the face of the shadow before him—the glinting face, glazed by a betranced nervous tension, of a young black male. Tristão even could read the boy’s dark T-shirt, which in white letters proclaimed BLACK HOLE, a new nightclub somewhere. “You want my watch? Here is my watch.” Holding his hands high, like a xangô dancer, Tristão stripped off the flexible band, let them see that it was a Rolex, the heavy wrist-band alternating gold and platinum, and flipped it into the sea, the firmament of phosphorescence.
“Porra!” exclaimed the boy in front of him, in simple wonder.
The knife at Tristão’s back had felt dull, like a stick or a knuckle, but it slipped through his coat and skin as easily as a razor, painlessly in the first instant, then with a burning that rapidly swelled, into an insult too severe to bear. He reached toward his belt for his razor, but there was no razor, Gem had been his friend in another life, and he laughed, wanting to explain this and so much else to the boys, who could have been his sons, but who, frenzied with the terror and magnitude of what they were doing, but all striking to express their solidarity, slashed and stabbed at the crouching, toppling white man, as a lesson to all such white men who think they still can own the world. There were sounds, here where the sea noisily sighed, as victim and murderers grunted with effort, and metal struck bone.
Tristão’s body fell into a surge of foam, which rapidly receded, tumbling him over once and no more. The boys, frantically thinking to hide his body in the sea, attempted to kick and drag him into the next wave, but, still alive, he grabbed the ankle of one in a grip as powerful as a torque wrench, and the child, only twelve, screamed as if seized by a ghost. Then he was released. He and his friends fled, their bare feet making frantic spurts of sand, and scattered, each melting down a different corridor of darkness across the hustling Avenida Atlântica.
Tristão, feeling the warm, pulsing saltwater replace his outflowing blood, fainted and died. His body slopped back and forth between the wrack and a sandbar five meters away, which refused to let him be carried toward the horizon, but held him, there where the desultory breakers hit with enough force to make spray in the moonlight; the foaming water kept fondly slinging him, in his gray suit blackened by the wet, up to the line of wrack, and tumbling him back again.
Isabel, who had sunk rapidly into sleep beneath the weight of the red wine, woke from a dream in which her children, the dead or disappeared three mingled with the pampered three back in São Paulo, had been besieging her, needing something—breakfast, clean clothes to wear to school, money for cassette tapes—that she was too paralyzed to provide. She hung in the midst of their strained faces feeling a gathering dread. In her dream they were all the same age, as high as her waist, though some had never reached that height, and others had grown beyond it. The unbearable pressure of their demands snapped her body’s peace; she awoke, and her dread attached to the vacancy beside her in the bed, where Tristão had promised to be, naked. The space, explored first by a tentative, flirtatious foot and then by a groping, panicked hand, was cool and unwrinkled.
She rose and wrapped a long white chenille robe, which had belonged to Aunt Luna and still hung in the guest bathroom, around her own nakedness and searched the apartment. She walked the balcony and pushed open the doors and looked down to see if her husband was curled on the sofa. The clocks said five-fifteen. She telephoned the desk downstairs; the sleepy Japanese said the gentleman had gone out a little before midnight but had not returned. She knocked at her uncle’s door. He was impossible to rouse; he took pills and wore earplugs and an eye mask. Isabel went in and reached into his bed’s warmth and shook him awake. At first, he was disposed to dismiss Tristão’s absence as a male peccadillo, to be cleared up by a sheepish morning return and a cleansing marital brawl, but her tears and wailing, with an unanswerable force of premonition behind them, led him at last to call the police.
The police of Rio are overworked, and paid in money whose worth constantly erodes. As with police the world over, proximity to corruption has corrupted them; the endless poor exasperate them; in the favelas they have surrendered the enforcement of order to the drug dealers. They are overwhelmed by our propensity for sin and disorder, by the falling away of religious restraints. And yet there was a man on duty, who after a weary time away from the phone returned to say that no one answering Tristão’s description existed on their records of the night. He, too, was inclined to take lightly a case of a wandering husband, but consented, upon being repeatedly reassured of Uncle Donaciano’s importance and high connections, to send an officer. Isabel could not wait. Pausing only to put on tan sandals, naked beneath her robe, she strode as if with a sleepwalker’s blind determination the transverse blocks to Copacabana, while her uncle, who had thrown on suit trousers and a white shirt without a tie,
pantingly tried to keep up with her and to talk reason and hope.
But there was a stony beseeching hollowness within Isabel that knew how to satisfy itself; she must move forward until this terrible mortar within her found its pestle.
The nocturnal scurry of the boîtes was breaking up, the revellers emerging into the open with slackened faces and flimsy spangled costumes and ears ringing with spent ecstasies. A few taxis were moving, their headlights looking increasingly dim and unnecessary. A few early runners were already out, in jogging suits against the morning chill. Night’s indistinct clouds now had clear blue shapes—rounded castles, a line of horse heads cut off at the shoulders—against a sky not yet rose but a paling gray-brown beyond the humped islands, the sword-sharp horizon.
Yes, he would have walked here, this sand where their youthful footprints were lost among millions of others, and hid his shoes where she now found them, hidden in a tuft of beach-pea. He would have walked along the sea’s waving skirts like a boy, thinking of himself as he had been, before she had imposed a miracle upon him. From afar she saw, like a clump of kelp, a dark interruption in the pale highway of sea foam and tilted soaked beach reflecting, with a glaze of saturation that came and went like breath’s mist, the brightening sky. She did not halt, nor did she run toward the kelplike interruption, but took off her sandals and strode in what she imagined as Tristão’s deep, spongy steps, though they had been utterly erased.
He was face down, his flawless teeth bared in a little polite snarl, his hand curled near his chin in the childish way he had when he slept. His eyes, half-open, with his irises lifted out of sight beneath his lids, had the lustre of shell fragments that are washed up on shore. His bare feet, as the water tirelessly broke and swirled around them, had dug their toes into the sand, his ankles locked at right angles in death. Fidelity, his stiff body said, clinging there to the beach.