by John Updike
“What bounds are there, in Brazil?” she asked her uncle. “I thought this was a country where each man made himself, regardless of color.”
“I do not speak of color. I am color-blind, like our constitution, in tune with the national temperament we inherited from the grand-spirited sugar planters. This is not South Africa, thank God, or the United States. But a man cannot make himself out of thin air, he must have materials.”
“Which are in the hands of very few, where they have always been,” said Isabel, drawing with impatient vigor on one of her uncle’s tinted English cigarettes.
Uncle Donaciano rooted his ebony-and-ivory cigarette holder—empty, since he was trying to stop smoking, and used the holder to pacify his habit—deeper in the side of his mouth, giving his lips a sage and sinister twist. His lips were thin but ruddy, as if freshly scrubbed. “The hands of the many would tear everything up,” he explained. “Even so, the Rio of my youth has been turned into one big slum. So beautiful it was, so amusing—the tram along the Botanical Garden, the cable car to Santa Teresa, the Casino where Bing Crosby would come and sing. So quaint and charming, like an exotic piece of Venetian glass, unique. Now, in the shell of its beauty, it has gone rotten. There is no air, there is no silence. All the time, traffic noise and music, the music of the brainless samba; everywhere, the stink of human secretions. Everywhere, bodum.”
“We do not stink, you and I? We secrete nothing?” Puffs of smoke kept coming from Isabel’s mouth with the syllables, like puffs of anger.
Donaciano appraised her, trying to muster uncle-love back into his sneering features. He removed the empty cigarette holder from his lips. His long smooth brow—tanned a constant butternut-brown under a carefully controlled regimen of sunbathing—furrowed as if mechanically crimped as he leaned, with new urgency and frankness, toward her. “You have used the boy. I would not have advised it, but yes, you are right, some of one’s life cannot be lived by the advice of elders. Some steps must be taken defiantly, against the grain. There is no growth without a bursting, without pain; primitive peoples in their wisdom place pain at the center of initiation. All right, my dear, you have been initiated. You went to the beach and picked up a tool with which to mutilate yourself. You have become, with this living tool you used, a woman. You have done it out of my sight, and this was considerate, and proper. But a lasting attachment will take place in my sight, in the sight of society, in the sight of your distinguished father. Even, if you believe anything of what the nuns have told you, in the sight of your dear mother, our lovely lost Cordélia, gazing with tears down from Heaven.”
Isabel shifted on the sumptuous crimson sofa—its ribbed velvet whispering against the underside of her thighs—and stubbed out her cigarette; she did not want her mother spying on her. She did not want another woman inside her life. Her mother had died attempting to give birth to a brother: Isabel had never forgiven her for this double betrayal, though she often compared photographs of her mother—misted and dulled, all of them, by the fact of her death—with her own face in the mirror. Her mother had been darker than she, more typically Brazilian in her beauty. Isabel’s blondness had come from her father’s side, the Lemes.
“So,” Uncle Donaciano was concluding. “You will no longer see this moleque. After Carnaval, you will begin your studies at the university, our illustrious Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. While in attendance there, I expect, you will entertain fashionably leftist fantasies and engage in anti-government protests, demanding land reform and the cessation of atrocities against the Amazonian Indians; while engaging in such quixotic agitation, you may fall in love with a fellow protester who will become, upon graduation, despite his youthful scruples, a member of the professional class and perhaps even a member of the government, which by then, perhaps, the military will have freed to resume its civilian guise. Or—don’t interrupt yet, dearest; I know how distrustfully your generation views suitable marriages, though, believe me, suitability remains when attraction fades—you may choose to become yourself a lawyer, a doctor, a Petrobras executive. Such opportunities now exist, for women, in Brazil, though very grudgingly. Women must still do battle against our worthy forefathers’ conception of women as ornaments and breeders. Nevertheless, if you are willing to forgo motherhood and the traditional amenities of homemaking, you may enter upon the power game. Ah, believe me, my darling niece, it is a boring game, once the rules are learned, and the first few tricks are played.”
He sighed; as was the way with Uncle Donaciano, boredom was draining the energy from his words; after fifteen minutes, everything bored him. That is how we shall brush him aside, Isabel said to herself. The young are not so easily bored.
But he had become animated again, by a new thought. “Or—here is an idea that makes me envious, frankly—why not go abroad? Why, after all, on this dwindling globe, must we confine ourselves to Brazil, with its atrocious history, its sordid stupid masses, its eternal underdevelopment, its samba on the edge of chaos? We are not Brazilians only—we are citizens of the planet! Go to Paris, and live under your Aunt Luna’s wing! Or, if that savors too much of clinging to the nest, take a year in London, or Rome, or even dowdy old Lisbon, where they speak Portuguese so rapidly you cannot comprehend what they say! In San Francisco, I read in the newspapers, something called flower power has come to bloom, and Los Angeles is the capital of something called the Pacific Basin!” He leaned closer toward her, cocking his long thin eyebrow, blonder than his butternut brow, in a fashion that had signalled dozens of women before her that a fascinating proposition was being eased forward. “Isabel, let me speak naughtily, in my own avuncular voice, knowing my staid brother would not approve, would certainly disapprove: if you are determined to be unconventional, become an adventuress—an actress, a singer, a phantom within that electronic world which more and more supplants the dull world of heavy elements and three dimensions! Leave us behind! Travel to the stars! A dizzying wealth of possibility remains, if you give up this, this—”
“Tristão,” Isabel interrupted, rather than hear his epithet. “My man. I would rather give up my life.”
Uncle Donaciano made a curious red mouth, quick and small, and noticed that his tall glass, which had been full of a drink as silvery as his suit, was empty. “This is gutter talk, my dear. Vulgar romanticism of the sleaziest kind, which is all that the poor have to make life tolerable. But you, and we, are privileged to be rational beings. On our ability to reason, after these dismal centuries of Iberian fantasy and mongrel greed, rests the hope of Brazil.”
Gaily Isabel laughed, knowing the pattern of her uncle’s days—the post-dawn promenade along Ipanema and Leblon beaches; the mid-morning call to his broker, a clever mulatto claro who had gone to the London School of Economics and who did all the necessary financial thinking; the mid-day lunch and siesta with one of his mistresses at one of their embowered suburban homes; and then the late afternoons on the terrace at the Jockey Club, filling himself up with gin as the sky beyond Corcovado filled up with sunset pink. Gaily she kissed his butternut-brown forehead and sauntered from the living room and up the spiral stair, believing (falsely) that her uncle had simply been going through the obligatory but empty verbal motions, to placate the family ghosts.
Since beginning to sleep with one of the poor, she felt more at ease with Maria—less afraid of her bitter Indian blood and taciturnity. “My uncle,” she sneered in the kitchen. “He forgets I am no longer a child in the care of the nuns.”
“He loves you very much and wishes only what is best for you.”
“Why do you tell him everything? I can no longer bring Tristão to my room, you are such a traitor to us.”
“I will not deceive your uncle. He is very good to me.”
“Ha!” Isabel mocked, while helping herself to a plate of caruru with which Maria had intended to feed herself. “He pays you a dog’s wage, and fucks you and beats you. I know he beats you, because I hear the noises from your room, though you n
ever cry out.”
The other woman, her broad cheekbones tidily nicked by two pairs of small diagonal scars, gave Isabel a conspiratorial glance. Her eyes were glittering slits deep-set in her puffy, reddish-brown flesh. “Your uncle is a kind man,” she said. “If he ever strikes me, it is because he is angry with himself. It is because he is furious with the stresses of being a rich man in a poor country. He is frustrated, because this country does not offer enough scope for a refined man like himself. It is being taken over by roughnecks from the sertão. I understand that it is not me he is striking. His blows are soft, like that of a kitten batting a paper ball.”
“And his fucking? Is that soft too?”
Maria made no answer; in Indian silence she reached down another plain plate from the cupboard, and divided the caruru, hot with grated malagueta peppers mixed with okra paste and dendê oil, topped by fried pieces of garoupa, into two portions, as if to say that they were equals, now that Isabel wanted to talk about fucking.
“Your uncle is a kind man,” she repeated. “But you must not push him too hard. You must go to university, and go with nice boys. Tristão is not for you. He is the sort of boy I could have had, when I was younger. A handsome street boy. He is pretty, like a bird from the jungle, but he will not make a meal. He is all beak and claws and showy feathers.”
Isabel flicked back her hair so it did not trail into the forkful of okra paste she was bringing to her mouth and then, when she had swallowed, held her face with her chin thrust out in a brave, experimental way. She knew that defiance became her, accenting the pert thrust of her face. “We sought each other out,” she said, “on the beach, among multitudes. We will never let each other go. What can my uncle do about it? Nothing. I am eighteen. These are not the old days when young virgins could be penned up in the big house in their alcovas, smothered in lace and black taffeta, peering fearfully out through lattice windows, waiting to be bred like pigeons.”
Maria said, “He can have you taken to Brasília, to live with your father. No one escapes from Brasília; it is surrounded by wilderness, I have heard, and has a giant moat.”
Isabel hopped from the kitchen stool as if the seat were hot; she moved rapidly about the kitchen as if every surface were hot, to be touched only for an instant. “Did he say that? Is that what he told you, Maria? To Brasília to live with my father? Tell me!” Any threat of going to Brasília terrified a true Carioca.
Within Maria’s silence a stubborn battle of loyalties was being waged: to her employer and lover on the one hand, and on the other to this young sister in suffering, captive to the power of love, the slavery that sex brings to women, though Isabel innocently proclaimed herself free. “I know nothing for certain, little mistress,” Maria said at last. “But he and his brother converse on the telephone. I think, if you do not give up this boy, do not expect to spend Carnaval this year in Rio.”
iv. The Shanty
THE INTERIOR of the shanty Tristão’s mother occupied was here and there pierced by bright shards of light leaked between sheets of zinc overhead and the pieces of painted wood and printed cardboard that composed the walls. The blue brightness thus admitted in these sharp splinters penetrated but a little way into the dense atmosphere, an air thick not only with the smoke of tobacco and cooking fires but with the dust of the earth floor and of the friable materials, constantly renewed by layers of theft and appropriation, that held off the weather—the baking sun, the pounding rain, the ocean wind on moonless nights. The shack was bathed in nature, for it perched on one of the highest and steepest slopes of the Morro do Babilônia, and when its inhabitants groped out past the curtain of rotting rags that hung in the place of a door, a cruelly splendiferous view of the sun-hammered sea, with its sailboats and islands, opened before their wincing eyes.
Isabel, who had arrived in darkness and not yet dared thrust her head into the sunlight, was struck by the fluidity of this hazy space, in which she still did not know how many people, besides herself and Tristão and Tristão’s mother, were present. The rooms were somehow several, at different levels; she had already visited one that served as bathroom, its floor a yielding piece of plywood above a dazzling slide of naked orange earth where excrement and urine flowed down out of sight, into another squatter’s terrain. Tristão’s mother’s voice, slurred and heavy, emanated from no distinct spot, but from a corner, the darkest and most weather-tight, where the floor became uneven, showing pale profiles of swells and depressions such as dawn light etches on a far mountain range.
His mother’s name, Isabel had learned, was Ursula. Ursula Raposo. The woman had been awakened, last night, by their breathless entry. It had been a long scramble up the slope of the Morro do Babilônia. After the moon-blanched zigzags of the mountain streets, the inside of the shack was as dark as a bottle of ink. A match had flared, come close enough to Isabel’s face to singe her long eyelashes, and been blown out, in a gust of breath sweetly rank with the fumes of sugar-cane liquor.
“This white girl somebody’s,” the voice attached to the match and the foul breath had said. “How come you steal her?”
“Not steal, Mother. Rescue. Her uncle was about to send her to her father. She doesn’t want to go. She wants to be with me. We love each other. Her name is Isabel.” All this Tristão whispered, urgently, inches from Isabel’s ear.
The darkness grunted, and then suddenly rustled, making a breeze of motion. From a flat soggy sound close by her head Isabel gathered that Tristão had been struck by a fist. “You bring me money?”
“A little, Mother. Enough for a week’s cachaça.”
There was a smaller, papery rustling, and the sour-sweet cloud of alcohol, with the body-warmth attached to it, moved away, and Isabel felt her lover’s strong hand pull her lightly in a direction where she scarcely dared step, for the floor beneath her feet was uneven and littered, and the darkness still absolute. Things—scorpions, or the antennae of giant centipedes—brushed against her ankles, and once she rammed her elbow against a shaggy wood support that Tristão had slithered around, still keeping his grip on her hand. She felt in him the tension of embarrassment, having her present in his home.
“Here, Isabel,” he said; his tense grip tugged her down, into a narrow space where the bare clay was overlaid with scratchy lumps, rough bags stuffed, from their faint fragrance, with what might have been dried flowers, or the skeletons of very small and delicate dead creatures. Stretching out her own delicate bones, thinking herself as safe from pursuit now as a body in its tomb, she whimpered in an approach to pleasure.
“Quiet,” Ursula’s voice instantly snarled, right against, it seemed, Isabel’s ear, though they had groped a good distance away, through this breathing blackness burdened with other shapes and presences. Close by, soft snoring arose, or an overlay of several sets of rhythmic lungs, and Tristão’s mother began to sing, incoherently, softly, incessantly, the song going up and down but refusing to come to an end. The sound was not disagreeable, and merged with the murmur beyond the shack’s unseen walls, of conversations and foot traffic lower down in the favela, and the nocturnal rush of Rio automobiles still further down, and a tingle and throb of samba first from one direction in the city below and then from another, higher still on the mountain, as if even the angels were anticipating Carnaval.
Perilous and strange though her situation was, Isabel felt luxuriously sleepy, after the hectic escape from Ipanema and the run along Copacabana Beach and the long climb up the morro, where the favela hung like a frozen avalanche in moonlight. Tristão’s body was hard and vigilant beside hers, and he had given her, to pillow her face in, a wadded rag musky with a smell of another’s sweat; an intestinal space curved close about her, murmuring with this omnipresent drunken mother’s blood and breath.
Her lover was tense and restless, and had placed between them, with several anxious adjustments, what they had lugged up the hill, the two duffel bags containing her clothes and the expensive treasures they had stolen from Uncle Donaciano’s a
partment—the silver cigarette box, the crystal candlesticks, a begemmed gold cross once stolen from an eighteenth-century church in Minas Gerais and sold to her uncle by an antique dealer, and a cube-shaped wad, secured with many rubber bands, of ten-thousand-cruzeiro notes which they had found tucked among his perfumed pastel underwear—underwear fit for a woman, Tristão had observed in astonishment. As he anxiously pressed the bags tighter between them, the sharp edges of their booty dug into Isabel’s flesh; the jabs seemed to tell her that she had left coddled girlhood behind, she had embarked upon the path of woman, which is a path of pain. Tristão’s mother’s rambling drunken low-sung song told her the same thing. Nevertheless nothing kept her from sleeping, amid these warm entrails of squalor, while her husband (so he now seemed) turned tensely beside her, plotting their future in the inky blackness.
When she awoke, day declared itself in the blue knives of light suspended about her, each with its halo of smoke. Someone was cooking—a girl, twelve or thirteen, squatting to a fire over which was propped a round oil-drum lid, for a stovetop, near the ragged doorway for ventilation. Isabel recognized the smells as coffee and angu, corn cakes made mostly with water and salt. Other bodies were stirring; she recognized, from that day at the beach, the squat form of Euclides as it moved in the gray dawn light. He looked in her direction but did not seem to see her. Tristão showed her the room from which excrement slid down the hill. After his troubled night he seemed thinner, and older, like a piece of smoked meat, and the black of his skin duller. It saddened her to see that his acquisition of her had so soon proved a withering burden.
She now thought, in her innocence, that if she could form an alliance with his mother it would lessen his burden. Ursula was still in her bed; a little man lay beside her, on the wide and dirty, sweetly stinking straw-stuffed pallet, still unconscious, with his face pressed against her side like a dark leech. His matted hair had gray in it; his face was eclipsed by the great brown breast which sagged sideways in Ursula’s torn cotton dress. Her skin was a sludgy bistre quite without Tristão’s shimmer of African blue; the blue must come from his unknown father. The whites of Ursula’s eyes had been yellowed and curdled by drink, and some of her teeth were missing. “White girl, what you want here?” she asked, seeing Isabel standing at her feet.
