One evening after a visit by her uncle had ended in a flight back to Rio, her father, about to fly off himself, to Bogotá for a four-day economic conference, asked her into his study. Uneasily he offered her a choice of a brandy, white-wine spritzer, suco, or Tab.
“No cachaça?” she asked, thinking of Ursula’s shack with its sweet stink of fermented cane and pungent inchoate womanliness.
Her father permitted himself a snobbish shudder.
“Brandy, then.”
Reluctantly he poured the French elixir. When the neck of the Cognac bottle had ceased its polite expostulations, he cleared his own throat and said, “Isabel, my paternal duty compels me to raise a delicate issue.” The lights in his study were set at a low level, for reading, and his forehead seemed to topple forward in the raking shadows. “It concerns my brother. I cannot help but notice that an exceptional state of affection and familiarity exists between the two of you.”
Isabel winced at the harsh taste of the brandy, and pointed out, “Ever since my mother died and you drowned your grief in a torrent of work and travel, my uncle has stood in the place of a father to me.”
“Yes. I regret that it had to be so. To you I tender my belated and futile but sincere apologies. How can I justify myself? Your presence, perhaps, pained me, reminding me as it did of your mother, or of the procreative urge which had led to her miserable dying.”
Isabel shrugged. “You did your best, Father, I am sure. The arrangement had its psychological advantages. It placed you beyond the reach of disillusion on my part. Each flying visit on your way through Rio, each week of shared vacation in Petrópolis or Patagonia or Miami Beach was magical to me, and had you been more available the magic would have worn thin. Children need physical affection, but are not choosy as to the source. Aunt Luna was friendly when not distracted by her social schedule, or rendered half-insane by one of her crash diets, and there were maids, cooks, nuns at school who all spared me a caress, or a smile, or a meaningful word. I was seen, I felt, as a precious child, well-favored. Always, in the background, like a massive sheltering wall, stood your high reputation.”
Her father again allowed himself a shudder. When he closed his eyelids, the fine vein-webbed skin just below them twitched, like the nictitating membrane of a frog. “A sad childhood, as you describe it.”
“It takes a sad childhood,” she offered, “to make us eager to be adult.”
“My brother—” he resumed, and interrupted himself. “Speak frankly to me, even if I have never earned your trust. Did my brother, as you remember, ever abuse the closeness in which your mother’s death and my ambition placed the two of you? Did he ever, I mean to say”—more hesitation, more facial quivering in the shadows—“trespass beyond the bounds of an uncle in his physical relation with you?”
He had touched her in her one remaining site of innocence.
Isabel was sickened by the question, it demanded so great a shift in her conception of her rearing and her sexual progress. She blushed, and a rosy veil seemed simultaneously to have suffused her childhood, obscuring its details. All she could see was the apartment, the view from its windows of similar windows and apartment houses and a sparkling slice of ocean, and not the inhabitants within, those many years she lived with her uncle. “He gave me avuncular hugs,” she graspingly recalled, “and the quality of these became more courtly and gingerly once I—once I had matured. At times, he would come into my bedroom to kiss me good night, though no longer with a book of Babar or Tintin to read aloud, which he used to do, when I was a child, with a wonderful expressiveness and animation. Now he would merely sit, on the chair beside my bed; he would be silent, and seemed weary, and I sometimes felt, girlish though I was, that I was providing him something that Aunt Luna could not, though I did nothing. And then of course they separated, and Uncle would be out at strange hours, often several nights at a time, and I was enrolled with the nuns, so our contacts became rarer, and less comfortable when they did occur. Yes, I loved him, and he me, but I think you underrate, Father, the quality of the Leme blood, if you imagine your own brother capable of any physical trespass. He was totally honorable in his fulfillment of the guardianship your personal ambition and distraction placed upon him.”
And yet, even as she enunciated her uncle’s stout defense, sealing off the issue forever, she felt something stir amid the rosy vagueness of her early memories—some touch, or probe, or quickening, that memory would not allow her to recover. How frightening, she thought, that one does not merely grow and enlarge one’s experience, but one loses earlier selves. We move forward into darkness, and darkness closes behind.
Her father’s face in the warping light seemed to melt with sadness, becoming ever more shapeless and sluglike as he contemplated his daughter with gray-blue eyes several shades lighter than her own. He was thinking, Isabel could not know, of a certain rapariga, a black girl who sold sex and loved cachaça, a self-destructive girl with a small oval head and slender shameless body, to whom he used to resort chronically, in the gay Rio days before he married, and who became pregnant, by what man among her multitudes it could not be known. She disappeared from his life to bear the child, and now gazing at Isabel he wondered if his daughter had not somewhere in Brazil a gray-eyed brother, carrying in him to no purpose the proud Leme blood.
xi. The Factory
MEANWHILE, Tristão had acquired, thanks to diplomatic pressure from above, a job at a fusca factory. The cars, little Volkswagen “beetles” painted the shades of tan and brown that gave them the name fusca in Brazil, were manufactured in a giant shed whose northern end, like a hungry mouth, took in Volkswagen parts and whose southern end, like a tireless anus, emitted the completed fuscas. Inside, beneath a heaven consisting of a flat steel roof underpinned by diagonal braces and clattering, squealing tracks for the transport of heavy constituents like engines and chassis, the racket of assembly was so incessant and loud that Tristão feared he would lose not only his ear for forró music but all capacity for the enjoyment of life. The machines made machines of men.
His first assigned task had been the sweeping up of loose screws, Styrofoam food containers, slivers of metal, and oil spills—the sticky secretions of a giant industrial beast. Then he was promoted to the position of right-handed bolter—at first, of the bearing-retaining bolts for the rear brake plates (sixteen millimeters, tightening to a foot-pound torque of forty-three), and then, at the beginning of his second year, of engine-mounting bolts, which were seventeen millimeters in diameter but were tightened to a torque of only twenty-two. Their lesser torque and more accessible angle reduced the ache at the base of his neck and beneath his right shoulder blade at the end of an eight-hour day. At night, lying down to sleep, he felt as if someone were probing this spot with an awl; slowly the necessary muscles compensated and the ache sealed over. He marvelled at the look of his hands, each little muscle overdeveloped to bulging, and a slab of callus across the palm where the torque wrench was gripped.
His bolting partner, the second year, was a good-natured, left-handed cafuzo from Maranhão named Oscar. As they functioned all day in symmetry, turning and tightening the six bolts (four major and two minor) that held the plucky little engine to the fusca’s compartment brace, Oscar’s broad flat face, in which genes fetched by slaving ship from Africa met Asian genes transported on foot from Siberia to the sweltering Amazon, became more familiar to Tristão than his own. When he looked into the clouded mirror in the workers’ washroom, the face there seemed a mirage, a mistake—too dark, too high-browed, too thick-lipped, too intensely staring. Oscar had a wide space between his two front teeth, so that in the mirror Tristão’s two incisors looked painfully wedged together, so accustomed had he grown to the gap in Oscar’s mischievous, companionable smile.
Sometimes, to relieve their boredom, they would bolt in an engine upside down, and if the workers further along the line, who made the cable and hose connections, coöperated in the jest, the hardy little automobile, at the far south
ern end of the factory, would actually propel itself and its driver the few hundred yards to the parking lot where shipping was staged. The Volkswagen was a great-hearted machine, Oscar explained, designed by a famous sorcerer called Hitler to take the German masses to a place called Valhalla.
Had their prank been discovered, Tristão and Oscar would have been fired and jailed for sabotage. Under the military government, the vocabulary of wartime colored the language of the state. Tristão would have welcomed release from his job but dreaded prison, as removing him still further from Isabel. He had not yet surrendered his dream of love. Nor had he lived utterly chaste: Chiquinho’s neighborhood, interconnected by wandering children, provided a number of willing big sisters, and even at the plant, for all the tyrannical rigor of the regulations which the government and the sindicatos in collusion perpetrated, contacts could be made, and even consummated, in the coffee breaks and during trips to the washroom. Nevertheless, he had remained chaste in his soul, that spiritual organ where his life cried out for its eternal shape.
Virgílio, the leaner and younger of the gunmen, had guarded Tristão closely at first, greeting him at the factory gate after work, accompanying him throughout the evening’s little recreations, and sleeping in the same room, his cot barring the door. But during the long hours while Tristão was at the factory, Virgílio had become involved with a soccer team in Moóca, the Tiradentes. Their practice sessions sometimes stretched into the late afternoons, and their away games would absent him well into the evening, and then overnight, and then for several nights at a time. Chiquinho, Polidora, and Tristão speculated that he had become involved with a woman—for there were many girls shamelessly eager to attach themselves to a soccer star, let alone one who packed a gun—or else that he had been reassigned to a more urgent case by the shadowy poderosos, the Big Boys.
But Chiquinho warned, “Do not think, brother, that because Virgílio has become delinquent you can therefore escape in pursuit of your romantic madness. The Big Boys know where I live, and if you escape their vigilance they will take vengeance upon me and my innocent family. Little Esperança or Pacheco could be dumped with her or his throat slit in my front yard. Polidora might be kidnapped and gang-raped. I do not speak of myself—I appeal to your decency as an uncle, and as a brother-in-law.”
“Where was your decency as a brother, my brother, when you betrayed me into the hands of my enemies?”
Chiquinho’s chalky-brown arms flopped about awkwardly, disavowingly. “Any enemy of your folly is my friend. I acted to save you from your sexual obsession, at the request of our blessed mother.”
Tristão laughed at this absurd lie. “My mother took a shine to Isabel.”
“Not so—she detests her, as one of the oppressor class, and condescending besides. The shine runs only one way, for reasons of perverse upper-class psychology. I observed the girl when she was here—she was fearless, as only the unreachably rich can be. The reactionaries, at least, respect the poor enough to fear them. But forget this blond piece of fluff, just as she no doubt has forgotten you. Have not Polidora and I fed you, day after day? Are you not now better off than when you came to us, two years ago? You have a marketable skill, and savings in the bank, in an economy enjoying unprecedented growth—over ten percent a year!”
Tristão marvelled that his brother, like him the son of a black mother, could mouth so earnestly the pap of the white establishment. We enslave ourselves for crumbs—for the mere image and rumor of crumbs. Tristão, even while submitting to his brother’s abraço of repledged fraternity, was resolving to escape.
He went to his bank and withdrew his cruzeiros—enough to last him several weeks, if he lived modestly, and travelled on the cheapest conveyances. One night, with Virgílio safely off in Espírito Santo playing in some intra-regional semifinals, he waited for the noises of the cranky, sleep-resisting children to die down behind the wall of his barred cell of a bedroom, and for the murmur of Chiquinho and Polidora processing the day’s events—her neighborhood gossip, his professional difficulties as head of the lab-cleaning team—to give way to an intertwined sighing and snoring. It had been interesting for Tristão, after the cachaça-soaked chaos and squalor of his mother’s shack, to observe an aspiring lower-middle-class marriage. Chiquinho and Polidora seemed to him a couple crouching as they moved down a narrow corridor, with flaking paint and leaking walls, bumping their heads every time they tried to straighten up, never coming to the large room they envisioned, with its airy high ceiling and its tall windows open to a view of the world. Instead, they had this long apprehensive creep together under flickering light bulbs, while their bones turned brittle, their skin shrivelled, and their hair fell out. Tristão, once he rejoined himself with Isabel, would be exempt forever from such a living death. She was his eternal life.
The wall near his head now vibrated with the sound of oblivious breathing. The neighborhood about the little ranch house was still but for the yowling of mating cats and the humming of stolen electricity in the illegally installed transformers. Stealthily, barefoot on the tile, wearing some old swimming shorts and his LONE STAR T-shirt, which did him for pajamas, he packed the bulk of his wardrobe and his paltry few possessions in a new bag, a knapsack of luminous orange canvas, which he had purchased and smuggled underneath his bed. His plan was to hide the bag beneath a stunted jelly palm that grew in the corner of Chiquinho’s tiny lot. The palm’s orange fruit and low broad branches made it an ideally secretive accomplice. He would leave for the fusca factory early in the morning, while the children were still badgering Polidora for breakfast, like tiny sharks taking bites out of a larger, dying shark, and while Chiquinho was having his compulsory morning shower, since even a fleck of human dander could play havoc with the computer chips. Unseen, Tristão would retrieve the knapsack at the corner and slip it onto his back and be off to Brasília. The money he had withdrawn from his bank was bundled and tucked into the knapsack; now in the dead of night he stepped outside to hide its orange bulk beneath the little jelly palm.
But his brother was not asleep, for no sooner had the aluminum screen door, with its stamped waffle pattern in imitation of woven cane, clicked shut behind Tristão, than Chiquinho, a gray shadow naked but for boxer shorts, was beside him on the small cement porch. He had come around from the back door. His hand on Tristão’s arm was like one of the metal hands that lifted large parts in the fusca factory. “You cannot leave.”
“Why not?”
“Polidora and I need the rent the Big Boys pay for you. Your departure will disgrace us.”
“You have already disgraced yourself, by taking money from your brother’s abductors.”
“Where else, in Brazil, will money come from but from the poderosos? They will kill you, for going against them.”
“To die is not the worst thing a man can do. To live defeated, that is the worst. Life without Isabel to me is no life.”
“She will have forgotten you.”
“If so, then I will be the wiser for knowing it.”
“The Big Boys will blame me. They will take their revenge on my family.”
“We have had this conversation before.”
Their voices were urgent, but soft, out here among the yowling of the cats. To avoid waking the family asleep inside the house, the brothers had moved to the little yard, with its threadbare grass and packed red earth, littered with Esperança’s and Pacheco’s cheap plastic toys. Chiquinho’s hand stayed on Tristão’s arm like a shackle. Tristão moved to shake it off, but gently as yet. “Tell them you could not help but let me go,” he told his brother. “It is the truth. It was not your job to hold me, it was Virgílio’s.”
“The truth is no help to men like us. People are killed in Brazil for telling the truth.” In the streetlight his brother’s face, thrust unnaturally close to make its whispers heard, seemed the color of buffed metal, bolted tight upon its own fanatic self-interest. But such grand talk of “men like us,” what did it have to do with Tristão and
his need for Isabel—her white beauty that slipped through a darkened room like a viscid oil, the lubricated two valves that welcomed his aching yam below? He tried to pull his arm free, harder. The two brothers began to wrestle, with silenced grunts, there on the little plot of scratchy grass, on the empty blue-lit street. The stuffed knapsack was an encumbrance, and Chiquinho in his financial panic had the bony strength of a demon. But Tristão’s own muscles, hardened by two years of bolt-tightening in a repetitive pattern that forced itself upon him even in the rhythms of sleep, like a template, tensed and twisted his brother’s brittle arm with his free hand until Chiquinho whimpered and backed away. Still Chiquinho held a position of combat, his long arms out like those of a beach crab standing on its tail in self-defense, and would have flung himself again upon his brother had not the one-edged razor blade, emblazoned Gem, materialized in Tristão’s fingers. He kept it in his shorts at night, in case Virgílio returned from soccer—as had happened once or twice, after a losing match—in a drunken, petulant, assaultive mood. It was the work of a split second for two thin quick fingers to fish Gem out. The blade made him a new creature, with a single waving tentacle. “Careful,” he warned, waving his tentacle slowly in the light, so his brother could see the glinting edge. He felt magically concentrated in that merciless honed edge, much as, two years ago, the gray guns of the two hirelings had refocused the ranch-house living room, redrawn its lines.