Brazil

by John Updike

  As they arrived at the Estação da Luz in São Paulo, a heavy thunderstorm broke, sending sheets of water running down the streets and hiding the tops of the tallest buildings in cloud. People raced from doorway to doorway with wind-tossed newspapers over their heads, and huddled in the terminal archways, emitting a damp herd smell. The terminal was all of iron, sporting lacy balconies and many Victorian girders. Already, they sensed that São Paulo had no limits; it was not pinched between the sea and the mountains like Rio, it was part of the vast planalto, a port on its edge. Cattle and coffee from the hinterland had funnelled through this place and made it rich, heartless, and enormous.

  When the rain cleared, and a weak yellow sunshine gilded the puddles and the still-running gutters, and the green telephone booths and the newspaper stands where O Globo and Folha de S. Paulo were clothespinned to lines like drying wash, they found a taxi and told the driver to take them to the only hotel of which Isabel knew, the Othon Palace, where ten years ago she had stayed for a weekend with her father. Her mother was already dead, and there had been a tall woman who had been too warm to Isabel. She had bought her candy and trinkets and given her hugs like an actress trying out for the rôle of a mother, but too glamorous and young for the part. Now, at the same hotel, Isabel proved too young for the part she wished to play, that of wife; the hotel clerk, a slender young man with big red ears and centrally parted hair slicked very close to his skull, glanced at her and then at Tristão, his thin blue cotton shirt—his best—and sun-faded shorts exposing his long black limbs, and told her they had no rooms. Isabel fought back the tears percolating in her eyes and asked where, then, could they go? The clerk seemed nice to her, though he was trying to master professional hauteur; he reminded her of some of her cousins. Sliding his milky blue eyes—with lashes almost white, like those of a pig—this way and that to make certain he was unobserved, he wrote, on a piece of Othon Palace notepaper, Hotel Amour, followed by an address he softly explained how to reach: across the Viaduto do Chá to the Avenida Ipiranga, and bear right, and then take many intricate turns. Walk rapidly, he advised, and do not talk to strangers.

  The hotel’s name was written on the dusk in flickering neon, in a careful lean script such as the nuns had tried to teach Isabel. Instead, her handwriting was upright and rounded. The hotel had been a coffee planter’s mansion, with airy vaulted chambers, now subdivided and furnished in synthetic substances from the 1950s. The bed was a blunt platform and the pictures on the wall were staring urchins with enlarged eyes, but a fan hung on a rod from the ceiling’s center turned its four lazy paddles at the flip of a switch, and there were several gilt-framed mirrors and a chest and armoires of a sweet-smelling dark wood. Isabel felt like a woman of the world, unpacking her clothes into drawers and arranging herself on the sofa and dialling room service, commanding in level tones that food and drink appear. The clerk downstairs was a fat Italo-Brazilian in a collarless shirt and had not hesitated to rent them a room, though the mulatto bellhop who had carried their duffel bag and knapsack waggled his hand until they had enlarged the tip, and audibly spat on the hall floor when he had closed the door. But the staff came to like them, as the days wore on; few guests stayed more than a hour or two. There was a small courtyard where a neglected bougainvillaea vine had grown to enormous size, and there in its shade, on a worn wooden bench where the old planter and his wife must have often rested, they took coffee, when returning at noon from shopping.

  Their packet of cruzeiros was diminishing in value, and it seemed thriftiest to spend it rapidly. They went out onto the Avenida Paulista and the Rua Augusta and bought themselves clothes suitable to city life. They ate in restaurants where elegant women sat at small tables in pairs, drinking cocktails from slender glasses and managing not to get their noses involved with the fruit slices clinging to the rim. Under the round white tables their long legs whispered in silken pantyhose, exposed up to their hips by newly fashionable miniskirts. Around them, in tall buildings of cement and glass, São Paulo was rising, manifesting the economic miracle of the generals. Emerging after eating breakfast and making love and taking a shower together which often ended in making more love, Isabel and Tristão would step onto their little balcony and be dizzyingly greeted by the chasm below, by the glittering mosaic of street noises and the wilderness of poured-concrete buildings still mottled by the previous night’s rain. The anonymous vastness of São Paulo then seemed an expectancy, a vast rapt audience cumbersomely applauding. Isabel felt within a new, operatic self, vauntingly female.

  Serving Tristão financially with money stolen from her uncle, she became obsessed with serving him physically. His penis, so little when limp, a baby in its bonnet of foreskin, frightened her when it became a yam, stiff and thick with a lavender knob and purple-black ripples of gristle and veins. She would master this monster with her fragile white body. The extremity of pleasure she would give him would measure the limits of her womanhood. They watched pornographic films on the hotel’s pay channel and she studiously imitated what the women did there. Mouths she had known about but she could not at first believe that women’s bottoms could be used the way they were in these movies. Up the ass is extra, Ursula had said. Tristão found the practice disgusting but she insisted. After a while, yes, she felt something beyond the pain, an illumination of her depths. This, too, was part of her being, a boundary probed. Submission was a darkness from which she re-emerged purified.

  “I am your slave,” she told her lover. “Use me. Whip me if it pleases you. Beat me, even. Only, do not break my teeth.”

  “Dearest, please.” Tristão almost simpered. He was becoming a little plump, and effeminate in his gestures. He wore pajamas of figured silk from a store in Consolação called Krishna. “I have no desire to hurt you. The men who hurt women are those too cowardly to do battle with other men.”

  “Tie me up. Blindfold me. Then touch me lightly, lightly, and then be rough. I crave a world in which only you exist, all around me, like the air I am constantly eating.”

  “Darling, really,” her knight tut-tutted, reluctantly accepting all the sexual favors she thought up for him. She rode his yam backwards, tongued his anus, swallowed his sperm. After seeing several such scenes on the blue pay channel, she decided it would fulfill Tristão to have her in conjunction with another man, for two men to communicate with each other through her body. She chose the bellhop who had spat in the hall, a brown broad-faced boy who reminded her of Euclides. His almond-shaped eyes made shy contact with hers, for a questioning half-second, whenever she passed through the lobby. Blushing as she described what she wanted, she bribed him from the diminishing little packet of cruzeiros. Tristão was appalled when she described her plan five minutes before the embarrassed boy, out of his uniform and in a touchingly clean shirt and pair of polyester slacks, appeared at their door.

  She feared Tristão would toss the boy out but, gallantly obedient to her in all things, he allowed the tableau to take place, and played his rôle in it. In mirrors arranged along the floor, Isabel saw her whiteness wedged between brown and black, a human bridge receiving traffic in two directions. But even at the technically triumphant moment of double climax, the stranger’s throbs muffled in her vagina and Tristão sourly exploding in her face, she felt the experiment to be a mistake. Some boundaries were not purely her own. The boy, both shamefaced and faintly swaggering, waited an awkward moment as if for his tip, or an invitation to return, and then left, feeling the danger in Tristão’s glance. He had been her first other man.

  Tristão was magnificently haughty in the wake of this tableau she had staged, and not all of her tears and frantic excuses could bring down the tower he had become. Outside their windows, night enveloped São Paulo’s infinite buildings, and only a few wan lights came on in the windows, as if every room held a quarrelling, sorrowing couple like themselves.

  “You dirtied me,” he said. “You would never have played the whore like that with a husband from your own set. You think because
I am black and come from the favela I have no shame, no civilization.”

  “I was trying to please you,” Isabel sobbed. “I can see on television what men like. I was trying to enrich our love, with the presence of a witness. Do you not think I felt degraded? I hated feeling him in me. But your pleasure is my pleasure, Tristão.”

  “That gave me little pleasure,” he said stonily, having propped himself up in their bed on all the pillows, his and hers. He wore only the bottoms of his silk pajamas, like a woman in harem pants. “It was you who had the pleasure of being a slut. You let yourself sink into the warm shit, porra at both ends.”

  “Sim! Sim!” she cried, letting herself be knocked flat as if by a revelation onto the bed beside him. She showed the extreme of her self-abnegation by not asking for her head even a corner of one of his many pillows, instead lying level like a corpse on the mortuary slab. “I am a slut, worse than your mother, who has the excuse of poverty.”

  “You think I am shit, because of my color. Like the mincing clerk at the Othon Palace. You think I come from depths where order and honor never penetrate. But hopes of order and honor are everywhere—the spirits bring them. We all know what order and decency and honor are, though we never see them.”

  “Let me lick you everywhere on your angelic body, Tristão. Tell me what to do to win back, I dare not say your love, but permission to continue as your slave.” She lifted herself up from the bed enough to flutter her tongue on one of his nipples. The dear little useless nub stiffened, despite his lordly fury.

  “Our lot is cast together,” he said, as if pronouncing his own death sentence, and hit her, with a flat hand knocking her face away from his chest. “You gave that clod your cunt; suppose you become pregnant by him?”

  “I didn’t think. I wanted him where I could not see him, and you where I could see and taste everything.”

  “Then taste this,” he said, and hit her again, but with an open hand, to leave no mark, unlike those women against whose cheeks he leaned his razor blade. As he had promised, he would do her no harm. That night he did beat her, but judiciously, on the upper arms and buttocks, and fucked her, alternatingly, as she clung to his hardness in its renewed convulsions of masculine vitality.

  “If I made a mistake,” she at last dared plead, during this long night of their mutual deepening, one into the other, “it was out of love for you, Tristão. I do not know any more how to be selfish.”

  He snorted in the dark, jolting her head where it lay on his breast. “For a man to love, to surrender his defenses in the war of all against all, that is unselfish,” he told her. “For a woman to love is selfish; it is her nature to love, giving and receiving is all one to her, as the in and out of screwing is all one to a man. Loving is necessary to her, as hating is necessary to a man.”

  Humble and clinging in the dark (which yet in the high-ceilinged hotel room was not absolute, light leaking into it from circumambient São Paulo, as a television screen continues to glow when switched off), her bruises smarting on her body like a hot-lipped beast’s kisses, she thought, God, can it be true, this flowing outward of love like milk through each pore is what we have instead of a man’s passing bliss of ejaculation, his brief and viscid coming that makes him whimper as if wounded? It was brief and pointed compared with a woman’s unstoppable outflow. This giving, this shedding, this vapor of love arising from the lake of herself was as well a voluptuous feeding, for love takes all the beloved’s details into itself, as the fabled cannibals of the Amazon eat one another’s brains. Just saying his name, sinking her voice into the nasal sound at the end, gave Isabel voluptuous pleasure. During this long night in which she scarcely slept, awakened more than once by Tristão’s renewed vigor of outrage, which pumped his sperm into her to pursue and kill that of the other man, she learned, with the gloating greed with which young lovers accumulate their lessons, this: the soft low flame she had lit within him, which illumined her face and name even in his sleep, could not be blown out, merely made to shudder, like a votive candle when a church door is opened at the far end of the nave, by whatever events overtook her resilient, flexible body. Someday soon he himself, she silently predicted, would suggest having the bellhop in their room with them again.

  vii. Chiquinho

  TRISTÃO began to feel queasy, as if he was living on a diet of sweets. He would be glad when the packet of cruzeiros was used up and he and Isabel would be cast upon the world, with him as defender. In preparation for that day, he intensified his search for his brother Chiquinho. He had been given no address, and the city was a great maze, without an ocean or mountains to orient oneself by. Vast neighborhoods held only Japanese, and others Italians; there were even neighborhoods for Jews and Arabs, with signs in unreadable alphabets. There were fewer black people than in Rio, and the climate was harsher, unsoftened by the sea; violent thunderstorms and spasms of wind swept in from the ocean of land to the west. Tristão no longer felt like a roving predator on his own territory, though he robbed a few conspicuously ripe white people with his razor blade, to keep in practice. He felt shy, clumsy, potentially a prey of the immense forces gathered here.

  The people here did not spend all morning at the beach as in Rio but instead bustled efficiently about like Europeans, selling each other things, hatching deals with the excitement of Cariocas generating a romance—men in dark suits marching three and four abreast along the sidewalks gesticulating and shrieking with the excited love they felt for one another and for the business of money. Only here and there, in the blank-faced prostitutes stalking the Rua dos Andradas on their long legs or in the candles dribbling wax at the foot of the large crude statue called African Mother near the Viaduto do Chá, did the city betray that true life, the life of ecstasy and the spirits, persisted beneath the hurry of business. Tristão bought maps of São Paulo but no two agreed; the bus routes wound about like tortured snakes, and when he emerged, sick from the twisting and swaying, he walked south when he meant to walk north. Nevertheless, leaving Isabel sleeping off the night’s love or immersed in a romantic novel, he found industrial districts—endless crowded houses little bigger than Rio’s shanties, but built of more solid materials, on rectangular lots, and drab factory buildings, buildings expressive of work yet often appearing empty and idle, as if work came in large rhythms like the weather, drought more common than flood. From behind their sealed walls he heard the sounds of machines rapidly knitting, pounding, mixing, compressing, capping. Between these buildings—irregularly placed, with some windows blackened like absent teeth—were rusting rails, of track where no trains ran, and fenced-in spaces where enigmatic stacks of concrete blocks and wooden crates were slowly weathering back into nature. At odd corners little downtowns, made of mercearias and bars, barber shops and oculists, fortune-tellers and establishments for shoe repair, clung to life, fed by a trickle of customers who, compared to the poor of Rio, seemed to Tristão disconsolate and dirty, dully dressed and grim—a proletariat. He stopped some of these people and asked if they knew a man called Chiquinho; none of them had, and laughed at Tristão for thinking that a single name could pluck a man up from the vastness of São Paulo, the greatest city in South America. Chiquinho Raposo, he said, and still they laughed. There were hundreds of Raposos, they said. They distrusted him, a Negro in fine clothes, with the Carioca accent, that turned the s sound into a soft spray, sh.

  His older brother had left the favela when he was eleven or twelve and Tristão not yet six. Tristão remembered only sadly pale eyes and a painfully thin neck. Chiquinho had moved through the shadows and stark sunlight of their existence with an air of brittle abstraction; he moved without elasticity and his hands flapped awkwardly at the end of his bony arms. No doubt he would have changed beyond recognition in thirteen years.

  But in truth he had not: Tristão recognized him without any difficulty, on the broad sidewalk outside the hotel one day. “Brother,” the tall thin man said, unsmiling. He appeared to have been waiting.

  Chiquin
ho, the chalky brown color of cheap patio tile, was decidedly paler than his brother; his father must have been a white man, or more likely a gray man, whose cold aluminum eyes gazed out through crinkled lids. Since Tristão had seen him he had gone from boyhood to manhood; there were small dry wrinkles where squinting and grimacing had stressed his skin. Even Chiquinho’s thin neck had wrinkles, like a cloth wrung dry. “Oh, how I have been looking for you!” Tristão told him, after their abraço.

  “Yes, I have been told of your inquiries,” Chiquinho said. “But I was never in the exact place where you asked. It is a miracle that we meet in such a metropolis, where hundreds arrive every day.” He spoke in a thoughtful manner that was not pleasant, his mouth moving while his gray gaze did not change.

  “Chiquinho, I am not alone. I have a wife now, a companheira, and I must have a job in the automobile factory.”

  “I am no longer making fuscas. I am into a new thing, electronics. But my education is too poor for the work, so I am stuck at the lowliest level, cleaning the factory so there is not a fleck of dirt. In the intricate thing we make, which solves all mathematical problems in a little stroke of directed lightning, a fleck of dust is like a rock in the engine of a car. Under the enlightened capitalist policies which have supplanted the dangerous socialist experiments of Quadros and Goulart, I have been privileged to head the team of cleaners, while taking night courses that educate me in the mysteries of the new technology. But why would you speak of work? You are dressed like a rich man. You reside at this hotel of hourly rates, day after day.”

  “My wife and I stole some money, but now it is all but used up. Inflation has stolen it back; that, and our self-indulgent life-style. Come, you must meet her; she is beautiful, and a saint in her devotion to me. Her name is Isabel Leme.”