Disneylândia
By Alexi LeFevre
Copyright © 2015 Alexi LeFevre
Guilherme dos Santos’s son was born while he was on the road. He had hesitated before leaving, suspecting that his wife, with a stomach as round and full as a pumpkin, might not manage until he returned. When he did finally come back, he spent two weeks with his son and baptized him before leaving again for more work. At nights, he parked his truck alongside the empty stretches of single-lane road that ran, like a single undulating wave, up and down the hills of the Brazilian countryside, the sertão. The infinite sky, with its clear stars that diminished the sense of place of a man, caused Guilherme dos Santos to weep. But then the reality and necessity of his duties came creeping back, after awhile, and the dull exhaustion of loneliness would eventually put him to sleep. This was the extent of the poor man’s life until his death, which also occurred on the road.
The room was a still canopy of silhouettes and sweaty poverty. The desperate, waning night hung over the bed of Oswaldo dos Santos when he awoke at half after four. He sat up and the blanket gathered around the matted hair of his belly. He looked around: the flat darkness of the small room he shared with his wife; the faint outlines of two old and mediocre chairs; the cramped floor space made worse by piles of collected dirty clothes waiting to be hand-washed in the bathtub. The bedroom was separated from the living room by an open doorway and on the balcony a metal rack rested with drying undergarments, bras, panties, t-shirts, underwear, the entire familial intimacy of the dos Santos clan. In the darkness, the rack looked like the skin-clad skeleton of a short, wide draft animal. It struck him that the one thing all poor people have in common is too many clothes hanging around. But when he tried to throw the useless stuff out, Mariana said that they would never know when they might need it. What if the weather changes, she would ask him.
He blinked several times. He sucked in air through his nose like a loaded ox preparing itself for movement. Today would be a tiring day, just like many others, and he very briefly thought of ways to speed up his progress. He pulled the blanket off his legs quietly and slapped his feet against the wooden floor. On the way to the bathroom he performed a daily ritual of silent arithmetic. Three hundred twenty reals for the visa, two thousand one hundred fifty four for the ticket, according to the last quote from the travel agent. An additional eight thousand four hundred, more or less, for the hotels and food expenses. The cost of modern-day luxury could drive a man insane. His daily intake from his fares was a small percentage of what they would ultimately need. But he tried to keep his mind from this thought as he closed the bathroom door, turned on the light and looked in the mirror.
He thought with a surprising lack of bitterness that all poor people are also fat. His stomach bulged and sagged under its own weight. Mariana had told him he looked fine and with no other recourse, he believed this. He looked at his suffocating cheeks and lined neck, which were slightly pockmarked and frequently unshaven. His hair was thick, matted, and graying, like the top of a brush used to clean cast-iron pots. His chest was broad but not muscular, and his arms and hands were broad and clumsy and had a strange shine, as if he had been handling cooking grease. And yet, the two dark, deep-set eyes under the heavy brow were young and full of joy, because Oswaldo dos Santos did not fully appreciate how much poverty had already aged him.
In the living room, he paused at the front door. Noticeable through the crowded darkness, amongst the silhouettes of cracked chairs, the worn table where they ate, and the heat-colored stove in the kitchen, was the slender and childish shape of Juliana sleeping on the mattress near the couch. An orange streetlight outside the living room window colored her face. Her posture, lying on her back with one arm fallen across her chest and the other flipped back behind her head, made her look like a passed-out Carnival reveler, drunk, inanimate, androgynous, gone to the world. He wanted to smooth her hair, or maybe lay on another blanket, but she had school and needed sleep. Before he left, a look of desperation passed over his ruddy features.
Outside, the air still bore the coolness of nighttime, but there was no breeze and as he walked up a gentle incline to the minibus stop, he broke a thin and sloppy sweat along his forehead. Over the years his chin and neck had seeped together into one fleshy and trembling suggestion of early diabetes or heart disease. Part of it was genetic, but part of it was also his habit of sitting and eating on the go. On the minibus, he was imagining the numbers in the bank account that he had opened at the Itaú near Vila Esperança just a year ago. It was the inverse side of his earlier math. He saw a tall sign for O mundo do amor, a popular novela that he and Mariana watched every Tuesday. In fact, it was on tonight. He’d have to finish his last trips by five and be sure not to accept any fares going out to Barra or the western regions.
An hour later, near the central bus station, Oswaldo dos Santos stood at the counter of the Boteco das Olimpíadas and greeted the owner, Gustavo, with handshakes and a backhanded compliment about Flamengo’s latest attacker, Thiago, who had been bought from a team in São Paulo just two months ago and opened the Brazilian Cup day before yesterday with a spectacularly poor performance. Gustavo cursed. As he poured Oswaldo dos Santos’s coffee, he lamented the days when what mattered was a player’s finesse and not his marketability. “My God, if we continue this way,” he said, we meaning Flamengo, “we’ll be picking up every son of a bitch from Europe who can’t dribble and chew gum at the same time.”
Oswaldo dos Santos took his coffee and waited for his sandwich of hot ham and cheese. He said, “You all haven’t had good management since Joel Santana, I don’t blame you for making all the wrong decisions.” He smiled as if he had just delivered a particularly witty response to a criticism. He had been born into the cult of the Club de Regatas Vasco da Gama, a superior football club by his own account. He sipped slowly from the clear plastic cup of coffee, his lips like darks swollen leeches along the plastic edge. Gustavo handed over the steaming sandwich and looked upset to be talking about football. Not necessarily about discussing it but perhaps about some other fact of football that he had recently discovered. Across from both men, the morning human silt began to walk and pace on the sidewalks and the street. A pair of municipal street cleaners gestured to one another in their neon orange uniforms. Near the exit of the bus station parking lot, an old frail black woman prepared her cart, selling hosiery, feminine hats, and other garments that professional women were not likely to leave their house without.
“We have too much money,” Gustavo said, again using we to refer to Clube de Regatas do Flamengo.
Oswaldo dos Santos rejected another cup of coffee. Time was short and he smiled as he left. The two of them had developed an agreement many years ago that made money unnecessary. Gustavo provided him with free breakfasts, and Oswaldo dos Santos occasionally gave free rides to the bar owner, or his wife, or picked up his son from the city school in Tijuca. At the municipal parking lot, he found his taxi still there and the thought came to him again that the best plan was to save up, buy the car, and start his own taxi business. He could be his own boss and avoid service and rental fees. And perhaps one day, he could hire others to do the driving and he could manage the business from home. He could buy Mariana steak and wine from Argentina and the whole family could go see the mouse for two weeks. But the sense of just how far off all of this was made him feel despondent and his shoulders slumped as he went to the TaxiCoop office and signed out his car.
“Nice day today, my son,” the old man who managed the car pool said.
Oswaldo dos Santos nodded as he signed the sheets and carefully printed his CPF number. “I’ll be done by five.”
“Five? You don’t expect to buy Juliana’s tickets with those hours, do you
?”
He did not answer and just gave a friendly, drunken smile. Inside, the car smelled as it did yesterday evening at nine-thirty, when he dropped it off in the garage. Slowly-developed back sweat, fried foods, street dust and the inescapable moist tropicality of Rio de Janeiro in the summer. He had pushed through fourteen hours the day before, starting in Centro with the morning commuters and then to the airport to pick up the foreigners and other Brazilians who were coming to Rio for business. In the afternoon he was in Copacabana and Ipanema, carrying beachgoers and white-skinned Europeans and Americans, back and forth, back and forth. This went on until the late afternoon, when he was back in Centro with the late commuters going home or back to their hotels or to the airport to catch one of the afternoon flights to São Paulo. In the summertime, seven o’clock officially separated the languid beach movements from the early evening rapidity of happy hour and dinner. This was when the sun turned the air the color of rust or the skin of an over-ripe peach, and he ended the day shuttling passengers to