Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  But one day, the national rail system was dismantled, and the private sector scrambled with contracts and bids to take over portions of that lucrative travel business. At the same time, someone invented an odd-looking device, a sort of electronic box with a ball attached to it by a rod. The box had an LCD digital window which displayed positive and negative readings as the ball balanced delicately. This electronic gadget was sold with a five-year parts warranty and a renewable repair policy—all considerably cheaper than hiring the services of Kazumasa Ishimaru.

  The Tokyo City Circular Railway Service, however, took Kazumasa on at a considerable cut in pay, and Kazumasa was relegated to making a continuous circular tour of Tokyo, which he repeated every hour.

  One day, Kazumasa and his ball descended from the Tokyo Yamanote circular with a dizzy unfulfilled feeling of repetition. To be a bobbing horse on a merry-go-round was, Kazumasa thought, a better situation than this circular tour of Tokyo. He knew by memory every stop on the line from Shinjuku to Shinjuku, and he even knew many of the people who made these stops. The recorded high-pitched voice of the woman saying, “Wasuremono nai de . . .” and the crowds pressing upon him and his ball, sardines-in-a-can fashion, had never really bothered him, but now he felt weary, and his ball, too, seemed to hang sadly over his nose. It was time for a change.

  Well, by now, perhaps, you may have realized that I was that very ball, that tiny satellite whizzing inches from Kazumasa’s forehead. Growing up in Japan was for Kazumasa and me a rather predictable existence, compared to the life we would share from that time on. While I could not, of course, control the events that were to come, I could see all the innocent people we would eventually meet. All of them had a past and stories to tell. I knew their stories as you will also know them. There was old Mané Pena, the feather guru, and the American, Jonathan B. Tweep. There was the man they called the angel, Chico Paco, and there was the pigeon couple, Batista and Tania Aparecida. But I am getting ahead of myself.

  CHAPTER 2:

  Batista and Tania Aparecida Djapan

  Change came to Kazumasa Ishimaru as suddenly as I had come into his life. Kazumasa realized that as long as he had me for a companion, he would never be alone in life. He would always share the adventure of life with his ball, and with that strong sense of support, Kazumasa stepped away from all his years with the Japanese railroads and took the first flight out of Haneda for what he believed might be a distant but familiar place, São Paulo, Brazil.

  Kazumasa had seen an NHK documentary about the Japanese in Brazil. Most of the Japanese who had immigrated there seemed to live in a quaint clump in an urban setting much like Tokyo. Then there were those who lived in the countryside growing Chinese cabbage, daikon, and tea. But it was not just the idea of gravitating toward other Japanese outside of Japan nor even that he had seen just about everything there was to see in Japan. Something drew Kazumasa and me irresistibly to Brazil.

  Kazumasa had a cousin who had been traveling in South America after passing his college examinations and before entering college. This cousin had stopped in Rio de Janeiro with his backpack and sat out on the beach at Ipanema. He sat there all morning and afternoon and evening, the balmy breeze caressing his thick hair and the sand and salt air peppering his face and arms. The bronzed women and men sauntered by, wet, warm, and carefree, and Kazumasa’s cousin began to weep. He sent his regrets to the University of Keio and never returned to Japan.

  Kazumasa’s mother kept in touch with her nephew in Brazil because Brazil seemed to be the sort of place that might absorb someone who was different. Not that her son Kazumasa had not done extremely well for himself in Japan. Kazumasa was, after all, the man who had saved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives by his painstaking and accurate calculations of track deterioration. But Kazumasa’s mother worried about her son’s happiness, about arranging a happy marriage, about the future and the nature of true happiness. While others in the family sneered at her nephew’s decision to abandon his studies at Keio for an uncertain future in Brazil, Kazumasa’s mother privately praised his courage. It was she who noticed me hanging sadly over Kazumasa’s nose and realized that her son’s possibilities for happiness in Japan had exhausted the limits of those tiny islands. “Your cousin Hiroshi, remember?” She pulled the address out of a small notebook. “He lives in São Paulo now. Go see him.”

  Soon after arriving in São Paulo, Kazumasa and I got a job with the São Paulo Municipal Subway System. Hiroshi had arranged the interview and had pulled some strings with somebody who knew somebody else, but considering our background and experience in the field, the São Paulo Municipal Subway System was more than fortunate to retain our services. We also began to get freelance jobs in other states to check out their railways. Once again, Kazumasa and I had the opportunity to go out on the road. Unlike Japan, Brazil was massive, inefficient, encumbered by bureaucracy, graft, and poverty. Kazumasa took me, his precision ball, into this tropical and elusive mess like a beachcomber with a metal detector on Coney Island on the Fourth of July. I did not, of course, complain. I was as oblivious to the heat, the humidity, the insects, and the stink of sweating humanity as I was to graft and poverty. And Kazumasa met this sudden change in our lives with optimism and resilience; anything was better than that circular Tokyo train.

  Kazumasa took his cue from his cousin Hiroshi, who seemed nonchalant about the mess, and calmly walked Kazumasa through the bureaucratic arrangements of renting a comfortable apartment with a maid on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise, not too far from the subway offices.

  Kazumasa was drawn to the sunlight flooding his apartment through the large windows. We stood there together in the window looking out, a prism of light spinning off my shiny surface. Kazumasa looked down at the scenes on the street and in the tenements below. The activity down there was a clutter of street people, children and dogs, women hanging wash from their windows, lovers snatching caresses in the shadows, workers restoring brick walls and tile roofs, men and women playing cards and drinking, dancing and swearing, loving and fighting. As the days passed, Kazumasa found himself observing one scene in particular—the back porch at one end of a tenement house. He found that by focusing beyond me onto the continuing saga of what he soon came to think of as “his” back porch, he began to feel a special intimacy with this new country, to share his cousin’s gentle but continuing passion.

  Kazumasa’s back porch happened to belong to Batista Djapan, who had rented the room and the porch it opened onto for the past five years. Batista worked in a document-processing service as a clerk-runner, which the Brazilians call despachante. Batista caught buses and subways and scurried all over the city with a vinyl briefcase filled with documents needing signatures on as many as ten pages of their forms. He always had a little extra money and a joke to bribe a slow bureaucrat into signing something at the bottom of the bureaucratic stack. Batista handled business for lawyers, small companies, and individuals. He knew all the side doors, how far the laws could be bent before they would break, and what anyone from a clerk to a delegado might consider enough to buy a beer. Batista considered his business a craft by which he survived, paid his rent, gave Tania Aparecida and her mother some spending money, and had a few coins for a cafézinho in the morning and a beer after work.

  Batista was a man with a joke on the tip of his tongue and a penchant for gossip; he was cynical about politics, passionate about soccer, and painfully jealous of Tania Aparecida. He could turn a phrase, sing a song, play the guitar. He was Catholic, cursed the priests, and practiced Candomblé. He was an observer of the philosophy of life in the tropics summed up by the statement “There is no sin below the equator.” Despite the scarcity of food in the cement metropolis, he continued to live as if mangoes and papayas could be had from the trees, fish from the rivers, and manioc from the red earth, all in the abundance of a continuing Eden on earth. Batista was a mellow and handsome mixture of African, Indian, and Portuguese, born on a farm near Brasilia in Goiás and raised
in the urban outskirts of São Paulo. He was childish and heroic, genuine and simple. He was the sort of man every Brazilian knew and sensed in their hearts.

  Batista’s wife, Tania Aparecida, came and went as she pleased. When she did not live with Batista, she lived with her mother a few tenements down the street. Her coming and going, however, did not please Batista, who could be seen dragging his wife home at some odd hour of the night or prodding her toward her kitchen with the end of a baguette at dinnertime. “When a man comes home at night, he should have a supper waiting! I’m nearly dead from hunger.”

  “I took Mama to the movies, poor thing. It was a scary movie. She didn’t want to be alone at night, Batista,” Tania Aparecida protested.

  “It’s your fault for taking her to the movies in the first place!”

  “Oh, Batista,” Tania Aparecida cooed. “You would have liked this movie.”

  Batista relented, “What was the movie about?”

  She grabbed the baguette and jammed it in Batista’s stomach. “So you’re hungry are you?” she taunted and scurried up the stairs.

  “Crazy woman!” Batista yelled after her.

  Batista and Tania Aparecida were passionately in love, but they were also always fighting. They had no children, and Batista continually accused Tania Aparecida of never being home long enough to have children in the first place.

  Every day, Kazumasa and I peered down from our window on the fourteenth floor to observe Batista’s life. We saw Tania Aparecida in the afternoons, washing bundles of clothing and hanging them to dry on the lines on the sunny veranda. We saw Batista struggle out on Sunday mornings, heavy with a hangover and cursing his team and that idiot player Pedro-Paulo who overshot the goal on an easy penalty kick. We saw Batista and Tania Aparecida dance on the veranda at night and scream at each other in the morning. We saw Tania’s corpulent mother hit Batista on the head with the side of her bag. We saw everything—the friends, the good times and the bad—but one day Kazumasa and I saw Batista arrive, balancing his vinyl briefcase on his head and carefully carrying in the palms of his hands a single pigeon.

  Batista had found the wounded pigeon on the sidewalk as he stepped off the bus on his way home. The pigeon trembled helplessly as people scurried in both directions without noticing the gray thing on the pavement. Batista instinctively scooped the pigeon up from the ground just before a bicycle would have pressed its delicate head into the concrete.

  At home, Batista examined the pigeon carefully, taped its ailing foot, and tucked it into bed in a box in a warm place above his refrigerator. In the morning, he remembered to buy a bag of birdseed and to invest in a small cage. As the days passed, the pigeon grew stronger, hopped around Batista’s veranda, and took short running flights to the window sill. Soon it was strong enough to fly again, but it did not leave Batista’s veranda.

  After a while, Tania Aparecida would come to take down her wash only to find that the pigeon had managed to seat itself on the clothesline and oblige her labor by soiling her clean sheets. “If you don’t put that pigeon away, I’m going to cook it for dinner!” she would yell at Batista, but Tania Aparecida did not mean it. She had noticed a change in Batista since the pigeon had come to live with them. Batista no longer tarried so long in the bar after work, but hurried back to their veranda to look after the pigeon. He was always occupied now with the pigeon, giving it a bath, grooming it, mixing some new concoction of vitamins and meal for its supper.

  “Isn’t this the most beautiful pigeon you have ever seen?” he boasted to Tania Aparecida as if it were his own child. That was it. Tania Aparecida brushed aside a tear. The pigeon was the child they could never seem to have. What a difference a simple bird made to their lives now.

  As the days passed, Batista became more and more involved in caring for his pigeon. He wandered into bookstores looking for books about pigeons. He spent evenings in the city library reading everything he could find about pigeons. He searched out and spoke with other people who cared for pigeons, observed their methods, and listened to their ideas. He became so immersed in the study of pigeons that Tania Aparecida, who had welcomed the change in him, began to have feelings of envy. Occasionally Batista remembered his old habit of dragging Tania Aparecida home from her mother’s, but now he seemed to do it as an afterthought, without the old conviction. Batista, once an avid conversationalist about soccer and women and politics, could now only think, live, and talk about pigeons.

  One day, it became more than Tania Aparecida could take. Batista had forgotten her birthday and spent the day with a fellow pigeon enthusiast. Tania Aparecida stomped down the steps of the veranda with Batista’s pigeon in a cage. She took the pigeon on a bus to the end of the line in Santo Amaro and tossed the pigeon out of the cage. That was the end of her competition, she thought crossly. She was ready to have the old Batista back.

  Tania Aparecida took the long bus trip home with a muddled sense of relief and fear. By the time she got off the bus and walked up the stairs to the veranda, she was remorseful. It was only a poor pigeon after all. She met Batista at the bottom of the steps and cried out her apologies. She had really meant no harm. She had been jealous.

  Batista looked quizzically at Tania Aparecida and led her up the stairs to the sunny veranda, where the pigeon was flapping around in a pan of bath water after a long flight from Santo Amaro. The sputtering water around the pigeon seemed to bathe it in a soft mist of colored light. It looked at Tania Aparecida forgivingly, nodding its head from side to side. She wrapped her arms around Batista and wept with shame.

  “It’s all right, Tania.” Batista was not angry. “I haven’t been able to summon the courage to do what you did. I mean,”—he kissed her lightly on the forehead—“to try the pigeon out in flight. I didn’t have enough faith that it would return. Now we know. It is a good carrier pigeon!” Batista was joyful.

  From that time on, Batista and Tania Aparecida and the pigeon went everywhere together on the weekends. He would put the pigeon in its cage, and she would would pack a lunch. They would board buses and head to the seaside or travel to the hills and fish in the streams. Sometimes they would visit Tania’s cousins in the rural interior and spend the day picking fruit and chewing sugarcane. And from every place they went, they sent the pigeon flying home to the tenement veranda in the city.

  Batista then got the idea to time the pigeon’s flights, making note of the time he let the pigeon free, while Tania’s mother and the neighborhood children waited excitedly with a watch on the veranda at home. Batista always sent a message—a riddle or joke—home with the pigeon which the children clamored around to read with laughter and wonder. As the flights became a regular event, Kazumasa could see on any Saturday or Sunday the children gather from every end of the tenement to read the notes brought by the pigeon. For some reason, no matter how simple nor how silly, the messages brought by the pigeon were more wonderful and exciting than a voice on a telephone.

  So it was that Kazumasa and I had come to live in Brazil. Kazumasa had no idea at the time how this simple pastime of staring out his window on the tenement scene below might affect his own future. These things I knew with simple clairvoyance. I also knew that strange events far to our north and deep in the Amazon Basin, events as insignificant as those in a tiny northeastern coastal town wedged tightly between multicolored dunes, and events as prestigious as those of the great economic capital of the world, New York, would each cast forth an invisible line, shall I say, leading us to a place they would all call the Matacão.

  CHAPTER 3:

  Mané da Costa Pena

  In 1992, two years after torrential rains washed away the tillable earth in one southern region of the Amazon Basin, Mané da Costa Pena discovered the feather. In the years after his discovery, the soil over his small farm and for miles in every direction was scrubbed away. It had begun with the fires, the chain saws, and the government bulldozers. Before that, Mané Pena had wandered the forest like the others—fishing, tapping rubber,
and collecting Brazil nuts. One day, in the usually dark forest, he wandered through a strange tunnel of light in which the damp forest humidity seemed to churn in changing colors. At the end of the tunnel, he found himself in this clearing where one of his rubber trees used to be, and this goverment sort hands him some papers and says, “We’ve done the clearing for you, sir. Now it’s all yours, from that tree yonder to that stick yonder.”

  “Got nothing on it,” observed Mané.

  “Couple of weeks, we’ll send an agronomist ’round. Get you started; show you how to plant. Whole new way of life, Seu Mané. Meantime, if I were you, I’d get some barbed wire, fence it properly. Congratulations. Just sign here.”

  The agronomist never did come, but the rains did and the wind and the harsh uncompromising tropical sun. Even Mané’s mud-and-thatch house was eventually washed away. What was uncovered was neither rock nor desert, as some had predicted, but an enormous impenetrable field of some unknown solid substance stretching for millions of acres in all directions. Scientists, supernaturalists, and ET enthusiasts, sporting the old Spielberg rubber masks, flooded in from every corner of the world to walk upon and tap at the smooth, hard surface formerly hidden beneath the primeval forest.

  That the primeval forest was not primeval was hardly news to old Mané. He and others had been telling tales of the impossibility of tapping underground water sources for as long as he could remember. Years ago they had even told this to TV reporters when the national network had come over to tape sections of a documentary about the Amazon. The reporters visited Mané’s poor farm—the paltry stubble of manioc in an unweeded and eroding garden—and put him and his family (his second wife and all her children and the younger ones of his previous marriage) on national television. Mané complained awkwardly to the cameras about the underground matacão, or solid plate of rock that always blocked well-diggers. Mané’s old cronies and even Mané himself laughed at the sight of his wrinkled face, eyes dancing about and peering suspiciously into the camera lens. That Mané had said all that in a regional tongue, consonants lost between a toothless grin they could all understand, on real TV seemed to settle the complaint in everyone’s minds, and the reporters, who were used to interviewing illiterate, backward, and superstitious people, filed the videotape under fantástico and let it collect dust until the late 1990s.