Public rapture over the love affair of J.B. and Michelle Mabelle seemed for the moment to raise a transparent but impenetrable barrier of Matacão plastic between the couple and what environmentalists were generally calling the rape of Mother Nature. As with all such charismatic people, the media surrounded J.B. and Michelle like adoring handmaidens and makeup artists, transforming warmongers into peacemakers, criminals into saints, the inept into the apt, the empty into the full. How, for example, could an ornithologist, a French ornithologist at that, who kept an aviary of tropical and rare birds inside her apartment, who trekked daily into the forest to look for new species, be anything but a lover of birds? When Michelle Mabelle tearfully told reporters of her anger over the illegal sale of rare feathers, everyone agreed that she was concerned. “Buyers must take the care and time,” Michelle emphasized in her melodic voice, “to discover the origin of their feathers. They should use a respected brand like GGG, which only deals in the legal farming of feathers and supports serious scientific research and the preservation and study of all birds. Since GGG committed itself to generous grants to ornithologists all over the world, hundreds of new species have been identified! To other such illegal feathers, you must just say, ‘Non!’”
Then, there was the growing concern over the mining process of Matacão plastic. The chemical runoff from GGG’s secret technique had been collected and analyzed and found to cause genetic mutations in rats after five generations. The mutations were most bizarre and grotesque. Rats were found to develop fangs and tiny horns and an eager appetite for blood. The idea of vampire rats caused a shudder of horror and speculation about a tropical Transylvania. However, some later generations were found to sport extra appendages—research that J.B. followed with particular interest. Such aberrations of the general mutation process caused by Matacão mining runoff gave J.B. reason to justify the pollutant. The GGG official write-ups stated, “GGG Enterprises has a firm policy of environmental concern. All runoff from Matacão mining is collected, encapsulated in stainless-steel containers, and sealed at strategic disposal locations. GGG’s disposal locations will not impact the social or environmental structure as they are usually spaces made vacant by the mining itself. Sophisticated collection procedures guarantee a 98.2 percent collection of runoff material. Additionally, research and development is proceeding to find methods to extract and employ the currently known benefits from runoff.”
While Michelle Mabelle bathed warmly in the public limelight, J.B. twitched uncomfortably. He was typically terse and uncommunicative, which somehow got translated as subtle and mysterious. He would not have accepted all this attention except for Michelle. He and his third arm owed everything to her, but he was now in constant fear of finding himself deposed from the top, lopped off the twenty-third floor of GGG. It had happened to Geoffrey and Georgia; it could happen to him. Having exposed his hand, as it were, there was no department, no obscure clerical or unnecessary managerial position in which to hide. He constantly dialogued with the American magpie Butch and even attempted for a time to “jus’ chill out,” as was the magpie’s usual suggestion. “I’m trying, Butch,” J.B. insisted. “I’m really trying.”
To which the magpie replied, “Love is a many-splendored thing.”
“Yeah, Butch, yeah.”
“Splendid. Splendid.”
“Yeah.”
“Love love love.”
“Yeah,” J.B. agreed. “Love love love.” What else could he do but ride those currents from obscurity to fame? As with Michelle Mabelle, everything was obscured for the moment by love. So after those initial and passionate serenades, poses, flaps, and thrusts, J.B. and Michelle Mabelle nestled comfortably in their plexiglass high-rise overlooking the Matacão, cooing contentedly among the birds, rearranging plastic objects, clips, and old 9.99 oddities. J.B. wrapped all three arms around her. She was pregnant, and it looked like triplets. Liberté. Égalité. Fraternité.
CHAPTER 25:
Radio
In order to continue the good works of Radio Chico and the Foundation for Votive Pilgrimages, listeners and supporters were urged to send their generous donations. Money was needed to send pilgrims out to the far reaches of Rondônia and Rio Grande do Sul, and pilgrims could not be expected to arrive at the Matacão again without food, clothing, and shelter. In return for subscribing to the foundation, supporters received a newsletter and a small replica of the statue of Saint George originally sent by Dona Maria Creuza—God rest her soul—with Chico Paco to the Matacão.
Many listeners supported the foundation by housing and feeding pilgrims whose travels they followed closely through the radio’s constant updates. As a pilgrim approached some town or village, Radio Chico would receive dozens of calls offering some form of assistance to the weary pilgrim. In more than one case, pilgrims were feted by entire towns, greeted by mayors, some approving priests, and not a few of the so-called beatified. Pilgrims were known to have spent several weeks in welcoming towns, until a stern telephone call from Chico Paco or a confused plea by the blessed urged them on toward their destination.
Occasionally the foundation was forced to send a second pilgrim to take the place of the original. One pilgrim had a sudden heart attack on the road and died. Another was almost killed by a speeding car. One pilgrim fell in love with a lonely widow who had offered her home as shelter. A few offered no reason for quitting other than that the scenery or the company in one place was too attractive to continue on. The foundation frowned upon such irresponsibility, was forced to draw up stringent rules and standards for pilgrims, and began to withhold favors until pilgrimages to the Matacão were actually completed. Despite the possibility of losing one’s surrogate pilgrim before even reaching the Matacao, people continued to call upon the foundation for help. The foundation, at least, had a reputation for replacing lax or unpromising pilgrims, and people enjoyed the assurance that, eventually, their votive requests would be kept. Also, people knew and believed that Chico Paco kept his promises, and that despite human failure, foundation pilgrimages were stamped with Chico’s approval.
Thus, Chico Paco and his pilgrims were deluged every day by new requests. To sift through and filter out the lesser requests from the honest and truly urgent pleas was now a massive job for which dozens of workers were required. The radio station was inundated by paperwork and swamped with telephone calls. Not only had the pilgrimages become an institution in themselves, Radio Chico was now a bustling entity with new and popular programs, eager sponsors, and thousands of new listeners every day. There were bills to be paid, accounting to oversee, meetings to attend, newsletters to edit, plans to develop. Then, too, there were religious leaders to see or placate, some of them irate, some oozing with religious unction, some looking for an eight o’clock spot. Overnight, Chico Paco was faced with an operation that was bursting at the seams, expanding in every direction without control.
Becoming an evangelical radio institution was the sort of coming of age that a cartoon character or a kid whose face appears on a cereal box must experience. Chico Paco would forever, even if he grew to be a very old and decrepit man, be the boyish young angel of everyone’s dream pilgrimage. Maybe it was because his voice over the radio—the single identifiable characteristic by which thousands of people could immediately identify Chico Paco—never changed and the photographs the institution sent out of Chico Paco over the years were always the same. Meanwhile, the young fisherman from the coastal village of multicolored sands had grown to be a man. Pilgrimages and food had filled out the long, thin frame and thickened the growth of blonde hair on his face. His eyes, however, were still the same iridescent green, the same mysterious color; they did not betray the changes within the man. Chico Paco had learned to be verbal and vocal on the radio. He had learned the happy banter of the disc jockey, casting his voice into a sea of invisible waves, hooking and drawing in thousands of people in distant places. “That’s true, Brother So-and-So,” he would say with his nowcharacteristic drawl. “We mus
t thank the Lord for miracles by keeping our promises to Him.” The exhilaration and momentum of what seemed to be a great religious movement buoyed Chico Paco. People followed because he was an identifiable banner, different from the others, his bleached hair in a sea of black and brown. For one brief moment, Chico Paco was exactly the figure soon to be congealed in people’s minds—a young fisherman with a simple heart and boyish honesty, the twinkle of promises in his eyes.
But Gilberto had come to the Matacão. And so had Chico Paco’s mother, Dona Feliz. It was through these two people that Chico Paco could see the changes in himself—through Gilberto, the possible extremities of these changes, and through his mother, the distance of his old life. The Matacão was as strange a place to Gilberto and Dona Feliz as it was to Chico Paco, but while Gilberto grasped at every new sensation like a baby learning to walk, Dona Feliz installed herself in this new world as if it did not exist. She wandered barefoot around her son’s carpeted apartment (almost as if she had never left her home on the beach), cooked the foods Chico Paco loved on a clay wood-burning stove (which he had especially installed in a modern kitchen for her), and continued to wash clothing by hand at the river. She claimed it was the only way to get clothing really clean. Every day, a taxi waited for Chico Paco’s mother to descend the elevator of the apartment house and drove the woman with her basket of dirty clothing down to the river. The driver waited while she squatted at the river’s edge, slipped a bar of coconut soap from her pocket, and spent much of the morning pounding and slapping the wash on the smooth rocks. Chico Paco’s mother kept the floors swept, but she had never known glass windows, bathtubs, toilets, or sinks in her old mud shack on the beach and, consequently, never washed them. Chico Paco had a maid come in occasionally to scrub down the the bathrooms, wash the windows, dust the furniture, and run the vacuum cleaner over the rugs—the noise of which always sent Chico Paco’s mother cowering into a safe closet.
Although she never quite got used to the vacuum cleaner, Chico Paco’s mother did adapt to some novelties of the modern world. She agreed to empty all the toilet bowls and bathtubs of dirt, thus giving up her bathroom flower and vegetable gardens. It had seemed like such a good idea with the added convenience of an easy water source. But she would not give up raising chickens on the twentieth floor. Although she attempted to confine them to the kitchen and service areas, occasionally Chico Paco would wake to the sound of a rooster crowing off the end of his bed or be surprised by an entire family of newborn chicks bedded down in the disarray of shoes and strewn clothing in a dark closet, the frantic mother hen clucking angrily at the closed door.
Gilberto, on the other hand, adapted easily to this new life, probably because, having been an invalid for so many years, taking his first steps coincided with his discovery of the world. Like a curious and rambunctious toddler, Gilberto got into everything. Chico Paco would find Gilberto on a ladder in the kitchen exploring the exhaust system over the clay stove, straddling the railing of the balcony that extended over the Matacão twenty floors below, or swimming in the bathtub while the water sloshed over the edge of the tub. Chico Paco’s heart would always leap when he saw Gilberto up to some mischief. He scolded Gilberto like that mother hen and rebuked him with the suggestion that he, Chico Paco, should have stayed home on the beach instead of making that pilgrimage to the Matacão for such a fool.
But Chico Paco could not mean this, for the exhilaration and imagination with which Gilberto ran after life charmed Chico Paco, and he forgave Gilberto every sort of madcap mischief because he loved Gilberto as much as his own life. In truth, he could not be without Gilberto. As soon as Gilberto arrived on the Matacão, Chico Paco felt both the calming sense of the familiar and the giddiness of an old friendship. Gilberto, like the newborn child he was, had run to the comfort of Chico Paco’s eager arms. The two men cavorted together as in childhood, trying to make up for the lost time of Gilberto’s illness.
When Gilberto had exhausted the possibilities of his apartment surroundings, he began to look elsewhere. “Paquinho, I saw a woman driving a red car with no top. Can you imagine? Her hair was blowing in the wind, and she was going so fast. I want a car just like hers. Please, Paquinho!”
“Do you know how to drive? Do you?”
“If you want to turn this way, you turn the wheel this way. If you want to turn that way, you turn the wheel that way. What’s the secret?”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Paquinho, can you imagine all the pilgrims with little red cars? They would arrive at the Matacão in no time!”
When Chico Paco refused to get a little red sportscar for Gilberto, Gilberto discovered some way to get it himself. It was the same with a score of other whims and toys: a pair of roller skates, an iceboat, a motorcycle, a dune buggy, and a skateboard. Inevitably, Gilberto would crash or tumble in his escapades, and Chico Paco would find himself running out of his radio shows to find that Gilberto had scraped his knee or bumped his head. “What are you trying to do?” he screamed at Gilberto. “You want to be paralyzed all over again?”
“Don’t get so upset, Paquinho. It won’t happen again, I promise you. I was almost getting it, really I was.”
Chico Paco did not know whether to laugh or to cry. He could not chain Gilberto down. Chico Paco was witnessing the miracle that had brought him to the Matacão. After Gilberto could walk, he wanted to run. And then he wanted to run faster and faster and faster. Chico Paco could not deny Gilberto his new liberty. So when Gilberto began to insist on an idea to create an amusement park, Chico Paco listened with the mixed emotions of amusement, love, and terror. Gilberto had seen these parks on television and thought that they were wonderful. “They have trains that go so fast that when they go upside down, the people don’t fall out.”
Chico Paco tried to ignore Gilberto’s wild idea to build a roller coaster, hoping that some other toy might placate him. But he was mistaken and, as before, unable to circumscribe Gilberto’s activities in any way. When J.B. Tweep gave him an enthusiastic response—“This amusement park idea is just the sort of project GGG would be interested in. It’s the perfect way to introduce the new technology of Matacão plastic to the world”—Chico Paco realized that Gilberto would accept no limits to his love for movement and speed.
The idea had so excited J.B. that he had tipped over the magnetic clip holder on his desk. He instantly committed GGG Enterprises to 50 percent of the project. “A joint venture!” J.B. announced. GGG would provide the know-how and the Matacão plastic to accomplish this dream. After all, Matacão plastic had been molded into everything imaginable, both life-size and lifelike. An entire world could be created from it.
Chico Paco commiserated with Lourdes, who he felt must understand because of her experiences with her son Rubens. “I understand,” she nodded sympathetically. “If Rubens could walk, it would be the same thing. As it is, poor thing, he fell out the window.”
“What should I do?” he asked for her advice. “I can’t lock him up.”
“This is just a phase,” she assured him. “He will get over it. It might take a scare, but he should settle down.”
Chico Paco wondered. “How is Rubens? And Gislaine? Have you heard?” he asked.
“Tia Carolina called yesterday. Gislaine, of course, is an angel—going to school, studying hard. She will be someone someday, but imagine Rubens. He ran his wheelchair down some stairs. Why he would do such a thing, I don’t know. Now one wheel is bent. What will I tell Seu Kazumasa . . . if I ever see him again?”
Chico Paco smiled. “I miss Rubens,” he said.
Lourdes sighed. She missed her children, but she had made a promise to herself, however long it might take, to find Kazumasa. Ever since Tia Carolina’s call, several months ago, asserting that Kazumasa had called home, Lourdes was sure that Kazumasa would, if he could, find a way to call Radio Chico. In her heart, Lourdes felt that Kazumasa was alive. This time, when he returned, she would let him know how she felt, would turn this Japane
se into an honest man. I myself wondered about this. My clairvoyance was somewhat limited to fact; human emotions often escaped me.
As only J.B. could promise, Chicolándia was completed in an amazingly short period of time. This was because all of the structural forms were shipped in and quickly cast near the Matacão, much in the same manner of the great, cloned GGG skyscraper on the Matacão. Everything in Chicolándia was being made of Matacão plastic, from the roller coasters to the giant palms, the drooping orchids and the buildings, whose interiors and exteriors were designed to imitate scenes from Gilberto’s favorite movies—Cabaret; Heidi; Cleopatra; Snow White; Spartacus; Hello, Dolly; Cat Ballou; Raiders of the Lost Ark; The King and I; Star Trek IV and so on. The animated animals, also constructed in the revolutionary plastic, were mistaken for real animals until people questioned their repetitive movements, their obviously benign nature, and the trade-off in smells: the warm stench of animal refuse for a sort of gassy vinyl scent. Elephants, lions, kangaroos, zebras, anteaters, camels, sloths, buffaloes, panda bears, vultures, penguins, and crocodiles—to mention only a few in an enormous variety of thudding, crawling, creeping, hanging, and flying fauna—would soon create a bizarre ecology as they tramped through a projected maze of magnificent scenes: Babylonian towers on a desert oasis, the Taj Mahal, the docks of Amsterdam, Times Square in New York City, the Miami International Airport, the French Riviera, the Las Vegas strip, Patagonia, the California gold rush, Egyptian and Peruvian pyramids, Indonesian temples, medieval castles, the Titanic, ancient Rome, mythical Greece, and the moon. Gilberto’s imagination and memory of television were endless. The former invalid, who had never known any place other than his birthplace on the multicolored dunes, and now the Matacão, could soon be suddenly anywhere both in time and space.
Chicolándia was built next to the Matacão, as if the Matacão itself were the polished road leading to that paradise of plastic delights. As everything was being assembled in its proper place, Gilberto ran around like a child, climbing into everything, chasing the animated elks through the eternally fresh jungle foliage and the monkeys around the Parthenon. He never tired of taking a miniature train through a series of tunnels; Chico Paco waited patiently while Gilberto insisted on riding one more time. “Chiquinho!” Gilberto would yell and wave as the train disappeared under the tunnel. As for the Ferris wheel, Chico Paco insisted on going up with Gilberto, fearful that he would certainly try something daring like swinging from one car to the next while the wheel churned him skyward as high as twenty-five meters. For Gilberto, who was used to the twentieth floor, twenty-five meters was nothing at all. Chico Paco inevitably gagged upon going around the twelfth time, and Gilberto sadly but obediently accompanied his friend to the ground.
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest Page 18
