Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

by Karen Tei Yamashita

  There were odd theories about the Matacão, as it became known—that it was the earth’s mantle rising to the surface or the injection of a cement layer by a powerful multinational. It was indeed strange that the Matacão was made of some sort of impenetrable material; had a slick, shiny surface; and seemed to glow in the dark on moonlit nights.

  Mané, having discovered the feather, was more fortunate than others who farmed the area and who subsequently lost everything. He had put it this way: “We thought when we came here that we’d farm virgin soil, but her tubes had been tied long ago.”

  Mané and others did not have much choice. He and his family accepted the government’s offer to live in low-cost, riverside condominiums built on the edges of the Matacão, but the government condemned those buildings just five years after they were built, and a private real estate company came in and bulldozed them under, replacing them with American franchises wedged between and under exclusive penthouses with heliports and hotels. Tourists stomped over the Matacão, billed as one of the wonders of the world, and it was considered chic to get a tan on the field.

  That was when Mané’s feather started to take hold. By now, Mané, his wife and all those children were living in a shack built of construction residue and making a living working on the bulldozing and construction sites along the Matacão. His wife did hand-laundering for hotel guests, while the older children slipped off one by one to odd jobs nearby and as far away as Manaus and Rio de Janeiro.

  In the evenings, Mané would wash up and lounge around the street bars, sitting at a table in one of the sidewalk cafes, stroking his ear with his feather and cracking jokes with the other old-timers. The others teased him, calling him “Mané feather,” but the feather, he claimed, was better than smoking or drinking. Of course, it was not as good as sex, but what feather could compete with that? It had worked wonders on his sleepless children and was completely natural. It was like those copper bracelets everyone used for rheumatoid arthritis: if it didn’t help, it sure didn’t hurt.

  The second time the national network people came by, having pulled out their decade-old tapes on the same geographical area for a historic foothold of some purposeful and continuing saga, old Mané was again a poor, barefoot regional type on national television with another uncredited statement, this time about the feather, which again would change his life forever. To have one’s life changed forever, three times, amounted in Mané’s mind to being like one of those actors on TV who slipped from soap opera to soap opera and channel to channel, being reincarnated into some new character each time. One story had nothing to do with the other except that the actor was the same. The disjunction of each stage in Mané’s life seemed as divisible as the Matacão and as incomprehensible as the magic of the feather. Still, the feather, Mané concluded, was the only tangible evidence of coherence. Like the remote control and the buttons on his new TV, it made things happen.

  CHAPTER 4:

  GGG

  Meanwhile, far away in New York, I could also see that the great mechanisms of the business world were churning furiously on the twenty-third floor of a smoked-glass high-rise. The conference room for nonsmoking executives was buzzing symphonically. On the other side of the corridor, the conference room for smoking executives was dangerously close to setting off the overhead fire alarm and sprinklers. Nonsmoking and smoking executives communicated between conference rooms via closed-circuit TV. Unknown to anyone, an inconspicuous cable had been hooked by a courier in the interoffice mail run to a private television in the basement. The janitors and the mail couriers drank cokes and ate chocolate chip cookies during quarterly reports and cheered on the opposing teams—smokers VS. nonsmokers.

  On the street below, union members paced the street in front of the revolving glass doors with the inevitable signs. A bouquet of helium balloons with the messages “Unfair to Employees” and “Strike!” and “Equal Pay for Equal Mentality” floated in a mass up to the windows of the twenty-third-floor conference rooms. The strikers cheered hysterically. In the basement, the couriers and janitors saw the balloons and cheered too.

  Secretaries and administrative assistants rushed to and fro over the spongy carpets outside the president’s office, exchanging copies of the same memos and drawing breaths of impatience while queuing up before copy machines. Several fights had already stirred the last hours before lunch break, when certain secretaries had had the audacity to cut in line to make urgent copies for their own files. Consequently, the human resources department was in an additional upheaval, trying to handle the delinquent employees while preparing the paperwork for reopening negotiations with the union after the inevitable and eventual loss of zeal by union members in the hullabaloo over the strike.

  Research marketers on the tenth floor were busily putting together their new packaging proposal, along with smaller, sample giveaways and a sleek new brochure. In another room, a couple of managers were editing a series of one-minute commercials, while an assistant anxiously pressed the fast-forward button.

  A few floors down, dressmakers were hemming gowns on models, while a designer swept around with a clipboard and made monosyllabic comments and gave orders. A woman in tricolor hair coaxed the models to sashay into line and hurried them up the elevator to do their show for the board of directors during dessert.

  The accounting department was busily printing checks and sifting through and stamping invoices. Their computer spreadsheets had fiscal plans for the next ten years, and the director of fiscal management was wiping coffee off the FY2002 spreads.

  The research and development department was deep in conference over a five-year proposal to move into accessory areas—everything from clothing to cars—that would enhance and complete the desired look. The department had drawn up graphs to show where and when infiltration into the domestic and international markets could be expected to peak.

  The research theorists had prepared extensive personality breakdowns of potential buyers, their attitudes, credit histories, morals, and life philosophies. These theorists had also formulated a new philosophical makeup for potential users based on a combination of computerized biorhythms and earlier editions of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care.

  The commissary was shuttling crepe pans and peach brandy up to both conference rooms, and employees enrolled in the aerobics program were rushing to the showers from the badminton courts. A phys-ed instructor employed by the company was hustling in the 12:30 bunch for stretching and muscle toning. A sign said, “PHYSICAL EXERCISE FOR GOOD MENTAL EXERCISE. —GGG Fit Employee Program.”

  All in all, it was a normal day at GGG. Except for the strike, the secretaries’ tussle, and the board of directors’ luncheon on the twenty-third floor, business went on quite as usual. GGG was one of those business miracles springing from a small one-computer office with two pushbutton phones into a multimillion-dollar operation with one hundred thousand employees in branch offices across the nation, all this in a period of five years. The founding couple, Georgia and Geoffrey Gamble, had already been kicked out of their own business in a simple vote of stockholders and upheld by the board of directors. The chairman of the board looked sympathetically at Georgia and Geoff: “I’m sorry, it’s just gotten bigger than you can handle. That’s the way of the free market, you know.”

  Georgia and Geoff Gamble were hardly surprised by the decision. Georgia adjusted her Dior spectacles, and Geoff pushed his hands into the pockets of his tweed coat and smiled blandly. GGG had certainly surpassed their mad brainstorm over albacore at a sushi bar one afternoon in 1990. Georgia had even predicted their forced resignation, but Geoff had sneered at the time. Even so, Geoff had, early on, decided to keep in the pocket of his tweeds a single card, to which he now turned with a vengeance. Georgia looked at Geoff significantly, and the couple took the elevator down twenty-three floors to the revolving glass doors. By the time they reached the bottom, the computer had already deleted their names from the company hierarchy. However, the card in Geoff’s pocket
was not only deleted but irretrievable, and, although its absence could not destroy GGG, it could wreak its own particular havoc. It was more than the missing microchip in a personal computer—it was the pea under twenty-three mattresses in the bed of a princess, the missing product.

  The marvelous thing about the card in Geoff’s pocket was that GGG had gotten along without it since the very beginning. In fact, according to Georgia’s calculations, GGG could probably go on almost forever without it. That had been the very brilliance of GGG’s conception. Geoff tore the card in half and tossed it into a nearby gutter; it was gone forever.

  Meanwhile, on the third floor, in one small understaffed department, cryptically titled development resources research and viability, a single director and his clerks waded through papers and filed everything in steel cabinets, which were in turn locked in an enormous walk-in vault. Monthly, a manager would wade through the files and remove those containing discarded or rejected subjects and shred them.

  There was a second vault with boxes and boxes of junk—everything from silver-plated hole-punchers to quartz shopping-list calculators. At this point, most of the objects were small enough to put in a handbag. The viability commission, an outgrowth of development resources research and viability, had narrowed down product viability to handbag size, and the clerks had had to get the maintenance men to remove the large equipment, such as personal copy machines and chairs with heated seats. The department director was relieved because his request for warehouse space had been denied in the last fiscal budget, and he did not relish the idea of giving up his office space for storage.

  Actually, he was not yet aware of the commission’s plans to remove even things like the silver-plated hole-punchers because of the price of silver on the international market and costly overhead for insurance and freight. Every week the commission had some new strictures on product viability. They had finally, after five years, however, narrowed the retail price to $9.99 with latitude for inflation. At $9.99, silver-plated hole-punchers were out.

  CHAPTER 5:

  Chico Paco

  “The feather,” Mané had explained on national television in his thick accent, “was my own discovery, my own invention,” if it could be called that. The reporter strained at Mané’s dialect as if it were another language. No, he did not know if the Indians used the feather for the same purposes, but his great-great-grandmother, they said, was Indian. Even so, he was the first in his family to use the feather, and besides, all his folk said he was crazy. Only the wife and the third daughter believed in him at first. No, there was no particular kind of feather that he used. This was up to individual taste. He himself preferred the feathers of the parrot, but he had been given the wing feather from a very rare tanager by a man who regularly traded with the Indians. In fact, Mané had a rather big collection of rare feathers. The television cameras cut to a scan of his collection, set in empty coke bottles and porcelain vases and strewn over an embroidered and hand-laced cloth on the TV set. The cameras also scanned Mané Pena, who appeared aged according to one standard and youthful according to another, the grizzled gray pepper of his unshaven face, his dark leathery skin and bare feet, the faded Hawaiian shirt splattered with Aloha. Mané produced a small, rare, light-blue tanager feather and demonstrated its use, sliding it over his right ear. The reporter herself requested that Mané demonstrate the feather on her own ear and also complained of an ache in her shoulder. Mané grinned through his missing teeth and nodded authoritatively, carefully rubbing the soft down over the tip of the reporter’s ear. There, on national television, the camera got a rather titillating close-up of the reporter’s diamond earring and of the feather’s point between Mané’s leather fingers poking lightly on her lobe. The reporter exclaimed with surprise that the ache in her shoulder was gone, completely gone!

  Mané grinned again and shrugged. No, he did not know anything about Chinese acupuncture. He had never heard of any such thing. He had figured out the sensitive points in the ear himself. Someone had told him about some doctors in São Paulo who poke your body with needles, but he thought that was unnecessary. He frowned in disgust. The feather was, after all, natural, easy to acquire, and above all, it felt good. Mané said he had seen the feather cure everything from seizures to alcoholism. He was beginning to warm up to the interview and started to give an animated account of a little neighbor girl who had asthma, his voice rising and twanging in regional tones. But the reporter smiled, flexed her new shoulder in wonder, and said, “This is Silvia Lopes on the Matacão for National TV.”

  Kazumasa saw this on television, but could make little of it. “Ma-ta-kao,” he repeated, practicing the pronunciation as diligently as if the documentary had been a language lesson. “Ma-ta-kao.”

  His maid, Lourdes, came from the kitchen with a small dish of carmelized flan and a demitasse of coffee. She put the dessert on the table and nodded at the television, “There’s something about that place, that Matacão, Seu Kazumasa. I just know it. That old man and his magic feather. It’s the Matacão.”

  Kazumasa and I nodded, but Kazumasa did not understand everything. Contrary to what you might imagine, I had no way of enlightening Kazumasa. It was one of those situations often described in children’s television dramas where the pet is obviously more perceptive than the master. But who was I—a ball—to say?

  “Good,” Kazumasa smiled appreciatively at Lourdes, taking a spoonful of the dessert and letting the delicate custard slide down his throat.

  While Kazumasa still struggled like an infant with this new language and his new surroundings, there were others, like our maid Lourdes, who made the connection between the Matacão and the strange magic of Mané’s feather.

  Far away, in another town on the coast of Ceará, a youth named Chico Paco watched the same TV report with extreme interest. The Matacão, Chico Paco was sure, was a divine place. It was the only possible reason why the feather could have even been discovered by Mané Pena.

  Chico Paco thought about old Mané Pena and the feather and the Matacão and walked to the edge of his land and looked over the multicolored sands lifted in great changing dunes, a characteristic of this part of the coast. In his town, there had been a mother who had sent the colored sand in a tiny bottle to her homesick son in São Paulo. It had brought happiness to him in the distant urban metropolis. A young talented boy had then gotten the idea of pouring the colored sand in bottles in such a way as to create pictures. Chico Paco remembered the first pictures in the bottles—the scenes of his home, mud huts, coconut trees, and grazing cattle. One day, a tourist brought a picture of the Mona Lisa and asked the boy to duplicate it in a sand bottle, and he did. After that, the boy left the town and went away to be famous, sand-bottling every sort of picture from the president of the Republic to the great Pelé. Someone said he no longer used real sand but some synthetic stuff dyed in every color you could imagine. Someone said he was even making sand pictures in bottles of fine crystal and mixing the sand with gold and silver dust.

  Chico Paco shrugged. He, too, would miss the beautiful multicolored sands, that rainbow of changing layers strewn before the azure waves, the salty wind at his back as his jangada—a flat raft with sail—thrust itself out to sea, but like the talented sand-bottling youth before him, Chico Paco had a separate destiny.

  Chico Paco was nineteen, a thin bony youth with deep green, iridescent eyes and dark lashes set in a gentle face. Despite his youth, he was already a strong fisherman like his father before him. His hair, bleached yellow and orange under the constant sun, could perhaps be traced back to the old Dutch conquerors of that part of the country. Chico Paco had never been away from his home, but now the Matacão seemed to be calling from the great forest. The opportunity to leave home came sooner than he expected.

  Chico Paco lived next door to Dona Maria Creuza and her grandson, Gilberto. Chico Paco and Gilberto had grown up and played together from childhood. They had learned about life together, and at one time, both had had dreams of goin
g to the city together. But Gilberto had contracted a strange disease and become an invalid.

  Before setting out toward the beach with his line and buoys every morning, Chico Paco carried Gilberto into the early morning sun, leaving him to sit under the veranda, occupied, as most of the women of the village, in the art of weaving lace. From time to time, Gilberto looked up from his handiwork to gaze at the changing shadows of the banana trees and speculate on the occasional passerby trudging along the path to or from the plaza. Gilberto waited for Chico Paco to return from the sea in the early afternoons, bringing in a string of fish—budião and badejo—plus something special for Gilberto and Dona Maria Crueza’s dinner, maybe a lobster, a small bass, or a long sea eel. In the evenings, Chico Paco would hoist Gilberto onto his back and carry him over to watch the big outdoor television in the plaza with the rest of the town. They would share a beer at the bar or buy popsicles, exchange jokes and gossip, predict the outcome of the prime-time soap opera.