by John Updike
Uncle Donaciano caught up to her, and a chubby, very young policeman was with him. A crowd collected in the dawn light: dancers and waiters and taxi drivers and pleasure girls done for the night, bankers and boutique owners and housewives beginning their day with a run along Copacabana. A forest of thin brown legs had sprouted. A wrinkled old vendor, his unshaven bristle white against the burnt hide of his face, had already manned his sidewalk stand and was selling coconut milk and Coca-Cola and yesterday’s cold empadinhas to those with appetites. One black boy, with buglike eyes, brought Tristão’s emptied billfold, from where it had been dropped along the curb, and looked to the policeman, and then to Isabel, and lastly to Uncle Donaciano for his reward. Receiving a pastel sheaf of cruzeiros, he scampered away, sand flying like wings at his heels. The murderers had superstitiously left in the billfold a photograph of teen-aged Isabel and Tristão with their heads together in a booth on Corcovado, and a St. Christopher medal thin as a razor blade. Had she given it to him, in her girlish piety, those ardent furtive first weeks? In the air there were questions, expressions of interest and sorrow, and a general expectation, focused on Isabel; the crowd waited to hear her wail and keen, giving memorable expression to her grief. Yet the feelings inside her were of a severe formality, like pieces of antique carving, worn and chipped but still testifying to an established symmetry.
She remembered a story she had once read, in the early days at the Serra do Buraco, before she became involved with the manicurists and had borne Azor and Cordélia. To fill her lonely days in the miner’s shack she perused the pieces of narrative, crumpled and greasy, in which the tools and supplies came packed to the mountain, mostly concerning the amorous adventures and scandals of the famous. One of them told of a woman, long ago, who, her lover dead, lay down beside him and willed herself to die, and did. She did die, to show her love.
The body of Tristão had been dragged higher on the sand, to wait for the ambulance. Sand grains adhered to the corneas of his open eyes, and sugared his grimacing lips. She lay down beside him and kissed his eyes, his lips. A bitter seaweedy taste already flavored his skin. The crowd sensed the grand thing she was attempting, and grew reverentially hushed. Only her uncle marred the hush, crying out, “For God’s sake, Isabel!” in sheer embarrassment at this vulgar display of Brazilian romanticism.
She inched her body higher and opened her robe so Tristão’s marble face rested against her warm bosom, and curled one arm around him in his dank, drying suit, and asked her heart to stop. She waited to ride her lover’s body like that of a dolphin into the submarine realm of death. She knew what a man about to fuck feels, his soul stretched to enter a voluptuous darkness.
But the rising sun continued to redden her shut lids, and the chemicals within her continued their fathomless commerce, and the crowd grew bored. There would be no miracle today. Eyes still shut, Isabel could hear people resuming conversations and drifting off; a distant ambulance, like an evil clown with its self-important, popping bleat, pierced the hum of humankind to come for Tristão, the piece of litter he had become. The spirit is strong, but blind matter is stronger. Having absorbed this desolating truth, the dark-eyed widow staggered to her feet, tightened her robe about her nakedness, and let her uncle lead her home.
Afterword
TWO great books have gone into the making of this small one: Rebellion in the Backlands [Os Sertões], by Euclides da Cunha (translated by Samuel Putnam), and Tristes Tropiques, by Claude Lévi-Strauss (translated by John Russell). Through the Brazilian Wilderness, by Theodore Roosevelt, is perhaps not a great book, but I found it entertaining and informative. Also useful were Red Gold, by John Hemming; The Masters and the Slaves, by Gilberto Freyre (translated by Samuel Putnam); Brazil, by Elizabeth Bishop and the editors of Life; and two guidebooks to the country, in the Real Guide and Lonely Planet series, by many youthful, venturesome contributors. Joseph Bédier’s The Romance of Tristan and Iseult (translated by Hilaire Belloc and Paul Rosenfeld) gave me my tone and basic situation. And I took courage and local color from the truly Brazilian fiction of Joachim Machado de Assis, Graciliano Ramos, Clarice Lispector, Rubem Fonseca, Ana Miranda, Jorge Amado, and Nélida Piñon. Thanks to Luiz Schwarcz and his colleagues at Companhia Das Letras in São Paulo, many errors and implausibilities were corrected; if many remain, the fault is mine.
J. U.
JOHN UPDIKE was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.