Brazil

by John Updike

  He dropped his knapsack with its array of straps to the ground. While Chiquinho’s eyes were focused on the glinting, gently waving little blade, Tristão’s other hand gripped his brother’s skinny throat to hold his head still. He rested the edge of the blade on Chiquinho’s cheek. His movements tense and calibrated, he let the blade’s upper corner puncture the skin and then drew the edge down the chalky flesh into where day-old whiskers made their prickly shadow. The gash, five or so centimeters long, leaped up smoothly, emitting a thin sheet of red; something rasped in the dryness of Chiquinho’s throat. His Adam’s apple tried to work its way around Tristão’s stern grip. Tristão moved the blade across his brother’s hypnotized gaze as if to transfer it to the other cheek, but read a glaze of pacification in Chiquinho’s eyes.

  “Show that to the Big Boys, to prove how you struggled,” Tristão suggested. “See, I have done you a kindness, in return for the many you have shown me.”

  xii. The Bus Terminal

  THUS TRISTÃO made his escape, though barefoot and in swimming shorts, and the T-shirt so tattered and faded that its advertisement for a restaurant in Leblon was all but illegible. He did not feel that the rhythm of this bloody fraternal encounter permitted a return to his room to retrieve the clothes in which he had planned to set off to work—the slacks and the flowing silk shirt Isabel had bought for him on their honeymoon. Chiquinho might recover from the shock of his wound and set up an obstructing cry. Better to abandon the clothes to their next wearer and trot smoothly down the street, taking care not to cut his feet on the abundant broken glass.

  He counted the cross-streets and after ten of them he slowed to a walk, panting, his back sweating beneath the straps of the knapsack. Tonight was already tomorrow. The buses had stopped running. The sidewalks abraded the soles of his feet, which had grown soft after two years in shoes; and São Paulo cement was not the sand of Rio’s beaches. He threaded his way out of Moóca north into middle-class neighborhoods where the suspicious gaze of block watchmen urged him to move on, even when they spared him insults. The intenser glow of the sky in the west told him where the heart of the city lay. On a high overpass, vaulting the ravine of the Rio Anhangabahu and approaching the Avenida do Estado, Tristão walked above the green acreage of the Parque Dom Pedro Segundo, the treetops frozen and scrabbled like hardened wax. Crossing into the Sé district, he was greeted by a quickened pace of life: boîtes and bars emitted the monotonous bliss of pulsating music.

  As he moved north, toward the Estação da Luz, girls in high white boots and very small shorts stood chattering with men whose glances kept darting here and there, alert for any crack in the wall of life where a weed of opportunity might bloom. One of the booted raparigas, her color that of sanded and oiled cedar wood, approached him, poor as he must appear; so great and cheerful was her shamelessness, the tops of her breasts bared in their taut blouse to the dark gooseflesh of her areolae, that his poor yam made a start at stiffening. Usually at this hour his consciousness was buried in a chronic nightmare of turning bolts that would not turn, while fragments of Oscar grinned at him as in a broken mirror.

  “You like me, I know,” the girl said. “My name is Odete.”

  “I like you, but my heart is pledged to another, whom I am on my way to rescue from the Big Boys.”

  “If she loves you in turn, she would not mind if you let me blow you, for a mere ten new cruzeiros.”

  The sum was about the price of a small shrimp pie, an empadinha de camarão, which he also craved. “But where would we go together?” he asked.

  “A block from here is a clean hotel, where they know me and charge an honest rate, for working men.” This girl sensed that there was more to him than bare feet and a torn T-shirt. In the hotel, she said he was too big for her mouth, so he must fuck her, for only ten more new cruzeiros, plus the price of the condom. Tristão puritanically resisted the condom, but Odete said it was for his good and not hers, since bad girls like her did not have long lives. There were many diseases, and drug addiction went with the late hours and the stress, and furthermore there were sick men who killed whores for sport.

  “Then why …?” he began to ask.

  “Live my life at all?” When she smiled, her lips peeled back upon her teeth like a fruit splitting to reveal its little round seeds. “Better a short life than none. Even the longest life feels too short on the deathbed.”

  “My mother,” Tristão felt compelled to tell her, “is a whore.”

  Odete’s plucked eyebrows made perfect arcs of surprise above her cinnamon-brown eyes. “And do you hate her for that?”

  With no love proclaimed between them, this girl was easier to talk to than Isabel. “I feel nothing about that,” he confessed. “That is what she has taught me—to feel nothing for her.”

  “Ah, we always feel something for our mothers,” Odete said. “We fool ourselves, that it is nothing.”

  He wanted to describe to her how Isabel had pretended to feel love for his unlovable mother, but this seemed too complicated to explain, and an imposition and defilement all around. By now, even though he had not yet fucked her, Tristão felt a little bored by this encounter. These girls who kept appearing in his life, willing to fuck, suggested to him how precarious and arbitrary was the perfect love he and Isabel shared. Love was everywhere, he perceived, and it solved no problems. In fact, it created problems. The men who strode the noon streets of São Paulo excitedly conducting business were not awake at three in the morning conducting love. Tristão trembled within, to see how tenuous was his life’s grip on any pattern, beyond that of a steady decay from birth to death; he clung to Isabel’s image, as the one shining thread in his dark future.

  Nevertheless, he fucked Odete, at first with her on all fours, at her suggestion, her buttocks raised like smooth oiled arcs of cedar wood, and then with her riding him, he half-propped up on pillows against the padded headboard—stained by many greasy heads—so his lips grazed her left nipple in its circle of dark gooseflesh each time her breast bounced past; she rose and fell, cylinder to his piston. He was slow to come in the clammy embrace of the condom, and when he did, writhing and whimpering, she smiled in professional satisfaction. As she lifted herself from his detumescing prick, there came a small sucking sound from around a corner of dense curly hair dusted with red, as was the hair of his head.

  Unlike Isabel, Odete was built close to the ground, with thick legs and an abdomen that in a few years would sway like a hammock. Her smile of satisfaction was swallowed now by determined efficiency; if she got back outside, on the Avenida Cásper Libero, she might land another customer before dawn.

  As he paid her, he asked, “Could you tell me, before we part, where I might buy a pair of shoes at this hour? As you can see, I can afford them—I merely left my former residence in haste. And a small shrimp pie—the hour is approaching of my usual breakfast.” Why did Tristão feel shy with this stocky whore, now that they were dressed? He felt she needed fewer illusions than he to live—that in this dirty world she was streamlined, a fish in water, where he had to make his way cumbersomely knobbed and hobbled by a sense of mission, of superior destiny.

  “Shrimp pie, I can point you toward a little place, off the Jardim da Luz, but for shoes, you may have to wait until morning. Do you still like me? Do you think the one you love would mind, that you fucked me and played with my nipples?”

  “She would keep it in proportion,” Tristão estimated. “Like you, she is a realist.”

  After Tristão and Odete parted forever, and he found a bright-lit triangular store where the sleepy clerk had no empadinhas de camarão but empadinhas de galinha instead, and stale at that, he carried his knapsack north, through the district of Bom Retiro, with its shuttered shops illegibly lettered in a crumbling, fading alphabet of letters shaped like flames, to the bus terminal in front of the Sorocabana Train Station. Its portals poured sickly electric light out into the dawn. Within, hundreds of sleepers lay stretched on the floor with their bundles
, their caged parrots and pigs muzzled with strips of checkered cloth. The terminal was like a snout, smelling of the vast back country, thrust to the edge of the metropolis. The musty dankness of human sleep rose heavily from the floor. Loose chickens roosted on the backs of molded-plastic chairs where drunkards nodded off, their heads doing a twitchy dance. The caipiras, the hicks, had filled the nooks behind stairways and banks of lockers and lined the terminal’s walls with improvised shelters; what looked at a glance like corners full of trash turned out to be people sleeping in a huddle, layered over with cardboard and plastic garbage bags to give a semblance of shelter from the glaring, flickering lights. Now, as morning light crept into the terminal, caged roosters began to crow and small children, clad in rags that came no lower than the inverted navels of their swollen bellies, toddled back and forth looking for places to peepee, blinking in bewilderment as to why they had been born.

  Tristão at last found, in the maze of the building, the place to buy a ticket to Brasília. The counter would open in two hours and the line was already long. In the line, travelling salesmen in rumpled suits and students in sandals and pony-tails and Che Guevara sweatshirts mingled with poor caboclos and sertanejos from the hinterland, dressed in what seemed pajamas stiff with yellow dust, who had been attracted to São Paulo like starving dogs to the depleted carcass of an ox. Even these looked down upon the black boy in bare feet and old swimming shorts, and several cut ahead of him in line, until Tristão flashed, with a curt word or two, his warrior mettle.

  He tucked the ticket to Brasília into the inner pocket with his razor blade, and found a sports shop just opening on another floor of the terminal where, for three times what it had cost to sleep with Odete, he bought a pair of white canvas tennis sneakers. They looked on the stems of his slender ankles like clumsy levers, like glaring boats, but were blessedly comfortable, with spongy soles. The bus trip to Brasília took fifteen hours, and he had to stand in the aisle as far as Belo Horizonte.

  xiii. The Ice-Cream Parlor

  ISABEL AND HER FRIENDS would often spend evenings at an ice-cream parlor, the Sorveteria Jânio Quadros, named after a President who had melted away. Some Brazilian Presidents quit in a huff, some shot themselves to show their love for their country, some were replaced by the military to please the United States—only Kubitschek, in Isabel’s lifetime, had served a full term, and he had saddled the country with Brasília and inflation as his memorial. Posters of Brigitte Bardot and Fidel Castro were up on the walls of the ice-cream parlor; tall booths gave each group of four or five or (squeezed) six or seven in a booth the feeling of conspiratorial privacy. The blue smoke of cigarettes—Continental, Hollywood, Luís XV were the common brands—hung as thick as the smell of sleep and urine in the bus terminal that Tristão had traversed eighteen hours ago. A marble counter up front bristled with the chrome apparatus—the nozzles and pumps, the knobs and flexible tubing—needed for the production of sodas, sundaes, and espresso coffee, tarry and bitter as Brazilians like it.

  “Sartre is a one-eyed clown and pedophile,” one of Isabel’s university friends, Sylvio, was saying this night, “but Cohn-Bendit will bring de Gaulle down, just as Jerry Rubin brought Johnson down, and Dubček will destroy Brezhnev.” The globe was in turmoil, beyond the borders of Brazil, and it seemed youth was taking over, and Isabel’s circle of the sons and daughters of the elite were as excited as soccer fans in the stands as the tide on the field turned. Sylvio, whose father was a great fazendeiro in Bahia, showed his radicalism by having shifted his brand of cigarettes from the costly Minister to Mistura Fina, the rasping cigarettes of the workers.

  “Brezhnev will never permit Socialism to have a human face,” argued Nestor Villar from his side of the smoky booth. Thin and ascetic, he was the son of a colonel, and claimed to be an anarchist, far beyond the futile pieties of the left wing. “If Socialism were to take on a human face, it would vanish—hup, poof! The dictatorship of the proletariat cannot afford to have its subjects be human—it must have robots on the bottom, and monsters on top.” Saliva welled in the corners of his lips as he spoke, making disgusting white bubbles. Isabel had slept with Nestor a few times, several terms ago, but his penis was thin, with sad blue veins and an alarming bright-pink scrotum, and needed from her too much undignified labor to make it stand. She had broken the relationship off, on the excuse of his political views. For he had imbibed more of his father’s fascism than he knew, and his supposed anarchy lay adjacent to militaristic crackdown. Anarchy, Isabel had told him, merely means for you doing away with the feeble restraints to exploitation and pillage that already exist; if there is one nation on earth that does not need an ideal of anarchy, it is anarchic Brazil, whose national flag so wistfully inscribes order and progress across the southern sky.

  “In the United States,” Sylvio went on, studying Isabel’s face through the haze of smoke, the fumes of coffee, and the sour-milk scent of ice cream melting in heavy glass dishes shaped like caravels, “the blacks have reduced Washington to rubble in the wake of Martin King’s assassination. In Chicago and Baltimore, too. The end is near for the lily-white imperialists of the North.”

  He knew she liked to hear good things of blacks. She had not yet slept with him, but negotiations were under way. In the torchlit darkness of an anti-imperialist march, he would be at her side, his hand seeking the hand of hers that was not upholding a fiery placard or a candle of protest. In the warm muddle of a pot pass-around, while the bossa nova of Elis Regina or the tropicalismo of Gilberto Gil or, from a greater distance, the jazz of Coltrane or plangent Spanish of Joan Baez trickled through Isabel’s slackening brain, the lips that she found pressing on hers, while a fumbling hand parted the crevices of her clothing, belonged to Sylvio. He had greasy curly hair to his shoulders and was shorter than she, but his shortness did not preclude her sleeping with him; the moment had simply not arrived, and she did not wish it to arrive. As long as she had not slept with Sylvio, there was something in reserve, something to savor or anticipate. She had just turned twenty-one, and her life seemed to be emptying out rather than filling in. Her father had taken up his post in Afghanistan, and Uncle Donaciano came less and less to Brasília. Now that she was a complete legal woman, she interested him less; it had been only her embodiment of innocence that had fascinated him, with its possibility of violation. It was May, and winter was setting in, here on the planalto, with its starry nights that had compelled her, for the first time in her life, to add wool sweaters to her wardrobe. This term, she had shifted her field of concentration from art history to botany; still, she felt adrift, unsatisfied by her education. The acts of learning and reading—all those nagging gray rows of type, scratching her eyes, demanding she go back and forth until some kind of meaning tumbled forth in a gush like an ugly baby—did not please her; the future did not belong to written words. It belonged to music and to flowing pictures, one image sliding colorfully into another, the soap operas and football matches and reruns of last February’s Carnaval; she had installed a television set in her dormitory room, and her roommates worried about her. She was living in a dream, she would flunk out.

  Yet she lit another Hollywood cigarette and told Sylvio snappily, “The blacks will never revolt, there or here. They are too happy and good. They are too beautiful. Always it was so. The Indians died of slavery; the blacks rose above it, of their own great natures. Because they are superior, they let themselves be treated as inferior. Like the Jews, they are able to live in our hideous twentieth century—live, and not merely survive.” The mention of Jews was perhaps flirtation with Sylvio, an imperceptible bringing closer of the moment they would sleep together, for he was descended from the “new Christians” who migrated with the first Portuguese colonists, to thrive in the sugar economy, blending in without prejudice, it seemed. Yet the Jewishness was never quite forgotten, the contrast between “new” and “old” diminishing as Catholicism faded through the generations but never quite vanishing, like the stain in a threadbare tablec
loth that persists through any number of launderings, albeit as a fainter and fainter shadow.

  Clarice, Isabel’s roommate, who had slept with Sylvio and wanted to sleep with Nestor, even though Isabel in a fit of giggling indiscretion had described what it was like, drew with lazy ease on a Continental and said to her hostilely, “I think you romanticize them, darling. We all do, to spare ourselves guilt over their abysmal condition. And they conspire with us, is the insidious thing, by being so damned picturesque.”

  The other co-ed present, pedantic Ana Vitória, with her astonishing hair cut in rough clumps and dyed burnt sienna, and her tiny wire-rim eyeglasses perched on the end of her button of a nose, intervened: “So does contemporary sociology romanticize, following after Gilberto Freyre, that master of self-congratulation. If Brazilians did not romanticize, they would have to awaken to their realities, and the realities of Karl Marx.”

  “Marx himself is a romantic fool,” Nestor scoffed. “He thinks the proletariat is one big superman when in fact it is a collection of snivelling, petty-minded connivers and freeloaders. Like the capitalists, the Communists seek to paper over the oppressions and cruelties of their societies with glamorous myths. What are Castro and Mao and Ho Chi Minh but our movie stars, our Mickey Mouses and Gary Coopers on their posters? All governments seek to hide from us the truths about ourselves. Only in a state of anarchy does the truth about men emerge. We are beasts, killers, savages, whores.”