by John Updike
Isabel, hearing these words, was pierced by a cold dagger of realization: her girlhood was a thing of the past, she was heading into the unknown, and, if there was a legitimate claim, a process had started which might consume the prime of her life. She pushed closer to Tristão, for nebulous comfort. Though his being was focused upon proving himself to the other men, he allowed his hard-muscled arm to find its way around her waist and absent-mindedly to tighten its protection.
As it turned out, the claim was real: the all-red man’s unworked plot stood out among the others like a square pillar, high with neglect. Under the onslaught of digging, what had been a mountain was becoming a giant hole; not hundreds but thousands of men, in a bowl a half-mile across, trundled sacks of mud and pickaxed rock up crude wooden ladders leaning against the cliffs hacked out in a quarry of descending terraces. Almost every day, loose rock and eroding earth slid down upon the slaving men; every day, a garimpeiro or two died, of avalanche, disease, exhaustion, or knife-fight. Robbery and murder occurred right in the pit, as well as in the dozens of shack towns that had sprung up on the surrounding slopes—strings of hovels mixed with a few shops, mortuaries, and, incongruously, manicurists’ parlors, with numerous small cubicles for the manicure. There were no bars; alcohol was forbidden in a ten-mile region around Serra do Buraco, or the mayhem would have been far worse. The men, hardened by hauling sixty-pound sacks of stone up ladders and narrow ledges forty times a day, were possibly the best-conditioned men on earth, with chests like weight-lifters’ and legs like soccer players’. Brawling was their only pleasure, but for the lucky few whom God allowed to find a gold nugget. They had flocked to this terraced abyss of opportunity from the parched, starving northeast, the threadbare fishing villages of Bahia and Maranhão, the slums of Fortaleza and Recife, and the torpid, pestilential villages of the Amazon and its tributaries. A mining company in far-off São Paulo, with a Brazilian name but controlled by Arab and gringo money, legally owned the land, amid enormous tracts of the parched Dourada Range, but a federal judge in Brasília had ruled that no Brazilian should be deprived of the right to prospect for gold. It was a national right going back to the year 1500, when Brazil’s green shore was first sighted. The miners had established a coöperative which operated a sluice-works, a preliminary refinery polluting with mercury all the local rivers, a weighing station, and a bank.
Once he learned the ropes, and had acquired from the coöperative commissary his pickax and shovel and sledgehammer and sacks, to add to the battered, well-worn, yet still refulgent batea that the all-red man had sold them along with the claim, Tristão was happy. In the fusca plant, shorn from Isabel, he had felt crushed to the floor of an overarching clatter, a cog within the giant works, an insignificant economic integer inserted between the proprietários of the factory and the chefes of the union. Locked into place opposite Oscar’s gap-toothed flat face, he had tightened bolts until his back and shoulder muscles screamed. As each fusca moved down the belt it seemed to carry off some of his own blood in its oily, beetlelike body. Here, in the hollow mountain, atop his personal pillar of stone, breaking its stone into fragments, any one of which might contain the glint of a fortune for himself and Isabel, he felt exalted and free, a heroic figure silhouetted against the sky, contesting the elements while yet their companion.
But as the first year became the second year, and a third and fourth year followed, his pillar of unprospected stone drew level, beneath his exertions, with the terrace of worked claims around it. Then, as the workers of these other claims fell away, through death or injury or despair of ever making a strike, his five-by-five claim became a pit, gouged and hammered inch by inch into the adamant, inscrutable rock, and his once-high hopes sank to a groggy, fanatic faith in the nearly impossible.
Not that he did, in all these days of patient working, fail ever to see the glint of gold. Tristão and Isabel had occupied an empty shanty with its back to a mercury-polluted creek—perhaps the very shelter the all-red man had abandoned. Each night, Tristão would bring back home a sack of the most promising rocks the day’s labor had uncovered—the palest with quartz, the most glittering with scales of pyrite, the “fool’s gold” that is sometimes true gold’s companion. These hopeful lumps he would pulverize with a hammer and steel-tipped stake while Isabel within the shack prepared the evening’s black beans and rice. At the creek’s edge he would squat, swirling the fragments in water and watching for the heavy fragments to adhere to the batea’s gentle corrugations, which radiated out from the center like the rays of a haze-entrapped sun. It was a process that never ceased to be fascinating, this waiting, beside that “babbling witch of a creek,” for “the little devils, the precious gold-mites,” to appear. As a man betranced sometimes gazes into a fire to read therein a hint of his fate—a fluttering face, a demon hand—so Tristão, evening after evening, until his eyes wept in the darkness, stared into the swirling batea. The biggest crumb of gold he ever recovered was smaller than a matchhead, but even on the strength of this meagre strike they bought some dried meat, xarque, at the commissary, to fortify their monotonous diet, and made love for the first time in weeks.
Tristão was too bone-weary, generally, to minister to Isabel. His passion now was all directed toward the imagined contours of the precious metal hidden in the maddeningly obdurate matrix of stone. The light of his adoration had left his wife’s body. Here on the sloping outskirts of Serra do Buraco, a fine dust had worked itself into her skin, accenting the creases that had appeared on her forehead, at the corners of her eyes and lips, even at the base of her throat, which had once been smooth as a flow of milk. Her youthful monkey face now exhibited a determined set to the mouth, a shadowed weariness about the eyes. When she took off her clothes to get into bed, there was still a burst of supple white glory in the cabin darkness; though his heart could still rise to it, as to the sight of a thunderhead mounting into sunlight above the mountain’s profile, his body rarely could.
“You don’t love me as before,” she naturally complained.
“I do,” he protested. “My love is like Mother Gold, immutable, though it momentarily hides.”
“Gold has become not just your mother but your wife. You work even on Sundays, and still we almost starve. What miserable flecks and grains you do find, the coöperative officials cheat you in the weighing, and you drink up half on the way home.”
It was true, cachaça was smuggled onto the mountain, and sold at an inflated price, and Tristão in his desire to be like the other garimpeiros did not always decline a glass or two. His mother’s old weakness, which he had despised, was awakening in him. When the brain was enough dulled, a luminous cave opened in life’s implacable cliff, and one could crawl in. His proud and independent spirit, which had demanded on the beach that he claim this dolly for his own, prying her loose from the matrix of other bodies, was rotting away, as his LONE STAR T-shirt had been rotted away by sun and sweat, as the pillar of his claim had slowly been chipped into nothingness by the backbreaking days.
Isabel, seeing her words whip up pain on her husband’s face, and the shadow of defeat and cowardice flit across the rampart of his brow, felt pain of her own; but she had decided that she must put distance between them, if she was to remain a person in her own right. In her first months as his bride here she had been slavish, thinking only of ministering to his comfort and pride as he adjusted to the ordeal of the pit, falling into a kind of doze when he left her alone in the shack, with the babbling of the poisoned creek behind, and the dangers of the desolate sunstruck street outside, with its single-octane gas station, its busy mortuary, its commissary selling overpriced essentials, its multiplying manicurists’ shops. She had thought of finding work, but her skills—her rich-girl social graces, her student smatterings of knowledge—were of no value here. She had but one asset, which the men of the street noisily appraised whenever she stepped outside the shack, into the blinding open, where thunderheads above the shaggy profiles of the mountains glowed brilliantly
but rarely produced rain. When the sky did come to rain, it was vicious rain, numbing, blinding sheets of it that left gulleys in the broad dirt street and brought the edges of the creek lashing and tumbling up to the sill of the back door.
Isabel had stayed inside, sleeping or reading—reading aimlessly, to satisfy a ravenous thirst for some world other than this one. Mining tools and supplies came wrapped from the coastal factories in pages of old magazines or newspapers, which held fragments of stories years out of date, with illustrations of heroines in outmoded fashions and gossipy references to popular singers and soccer stars now middle-aged or dead of debauchery. Yet the stories, which she could rarely follow to a conclusion, on the scraps of creased and wadded paper, were timeless—the same five or six basic facts of human existence endlessly revolved, like arrows the wounded animals bring back to the hunter’s hand in their corpses. Love, pregnancy, infidelity, vengeance, parting. Death—always death in these stories.
Her clothes began to give out. The two heavy blue suitcases were now limp with vacuity; the larger of them held only the begemmed old-fashioned cross she had stolen from Uncle Donacianco’s apartment, the monogrammed cigarette case, and a fuzzy toy capybara she had loved as a very little girl, calling him Azor and holding him against her breastless chest as she slept. Now this toy was stiff and dull with the ubiquitous siliceous dust from the incessantly stirred mine hole. The dresses and blouses and tight smart jeans she had not worn into rags she had sold to the manicurists, to put rice and black beans and farinha upon their table. For Tristão in her eyes had become an engine of muscle she must keep fed or their progress through life would grind to a halt.
By the time there were no more clothes to sell, she had become friends enough with the manicurists for them to show her how to earn money. It was surprisingly easy, once you learned to keep a part of yourself out of the way, high on a mental shelf. The little male drama of rise and fall was touching, despite the men’s ability to kill you with their hands, if the evil mood took them. But hers was the woman’s power to forestall the evil mood. Hers was the power to take all they could give, between her legs.
When Tristão came home and found on the table not simply rice and beans but bacon and a sizzling pan of that succulent freshwater fish called dourado, with pineapple and pitanga for dessert, he looked at her for a long minute—the whites of his shining onyx eyes chafed pink by quarry dust like those of the all-red man—and deliberately did not ask what vein of gold she had struck. She despised him for this, this mute acceptance, but also loved him for his realism, his stoic tact. Romanticism is what brings a couple together, but realism is what sees them through. He dropped his sack of promising ore to the earth floor unpanned this evening and sat himself at the unusually loaded table with the constrained formality of a king whose sceptre is hollow. All evening, it seemed to her, he moved around her with a wary delicacy, as if her flesh had been changed to a crystalline substance. As she drifted off to sleep on their pallet of maize husks she felt him touch her back and shoulders with the experimental lightness owed to a virgin’s body.
He became more affectionate, in an impotent way. Isabel frequently sensed him glancing at her in the candlelight of their shack at night, and heard a careful slow melody in his voice, as he recounted the details of his day in the mine-pit. It seemed to her now that there were more people in the room than the two of them. Or was it that her memories were thronged with other men—their cries, their grips, their bodies in so many different tints of skin, tones of muscle, smells, kinds of hair, forms of orgasm muffled within her? With her unexplained surplus of cruzeiros she bought a long zinc bathtub, and Tristão each night, in what became a ceremony, would fetch buckets of water from the creek, which they would heat on their kerosene stove. She would descend into the long trough of steaming water and stay until it felt cool around her, and the sight of her immersed body, her skin tinted pewter and her pubic hair lifting and drifting like seaweed, numbed her memory; then her husband, gray with stone dust, would rewarm the tub with a fresh bucket and bathe himself back to shining blackness in the water she had dirtied. In that way they made themselves clean and languorous for bed; they drifted off with feeble fond touches like two drowning persons parting in the sea.
Even in the days when their lovemaking had been vigorous and incessant, Isabel had not become pregnant. In their second year at the Serra do Boraco, she was, and the shack shook and trembled with nature’s miraculous upheaval. She vomited at dawn each day for weeks, and then grew big and torpid, so swollen and taut and shiny in her belly that Tristão felt dizzy with love of her, this inexorable doubling of her. The baby came (her waters broke at midnight, and the first squall came just as dawn’s gray revealed, in the shack, the edges of things) and was a boy, with wrinkled blue palms like flowers just unfolded and genitals like a bud still packed tight. She timidly suggested naming him Salomão, after her father, but Tristão, roused from his gold-betranced passivity, objected with passionate gestures, saying that her father was his deadly enemy. Since he had no known father, he accepted her second suggestion, the name Azor, after the toy stuffed capybara she had loved as a girl.
“Our baby seems very pale,” he observed one day.
“All babies begin pale,” she told him. “The midwife says their melanin is all in a little pocket at the base of their spines. Then it travels out, to the rest of their skin.”
But as the days went by, and the infant grew fat on Isabel’s milk, and his rubbery limbs began to strengthen, his skin did not significantly darken in color. Tristão held the blameless blob of flesh in his arms and gazed down—Azor gurgled upward, reaching a slobbered star-shaped hand toward the familiar black face—and tried to glimpse a shadow of Africa, the faintest drop of dark blood tincturing Isabel’s whiteness. He failed. Isabel pointed to the child’s flattened nose, the small cupped ears, the square and rather stern little forehead, and claimed to see Tristão there. Her next child, a girl born fourteen months after Azor’s birth, was darker, but dark, it appeared to Tristão, with an Indian redness. The child’s hair, though black like his own, was utterly straight. He had no objection to Isabel’s naming the baby Cordélia, after her mother, whom she scarcely remembered. Isabel’s surviving two parturitions was in a sense a triumph over her mother, who had died of her second.
The arrivals filled the shack with the innocent intensity of their own needs, their tantrums and tumbles, their colic and spit-up, their hunger and excrement, affording the adults little time to doubt the course fate had chosen for them. Nature now told them why they had come together. The manicurists’ coöperative found an old woman, a toothless Tupi severed from her tribe, to take care of the children for some hours of the day, so Isabel could go back to work. The name of this addition to their household, who came at noon and left at night and would not reveal where she slept, was Kupehaki.
xvii. The Nugget
THE THUNDEROUS HUM of the mine—the click of the picks, the hammering as deeper ladders and stouter shoring walls were assembled; the desultory conversation and singing as the men trudged in single file up the slanting muddy ledges toward the sluices and the slag heaps that spilled down the sides of Serra do Boraco like a second mountain growing beside the gutted first; the occasional flare of outcries as a fight broke out or an avalanche spilled across the terraced claims—the hum had become Tristão’s element. Away from this great inverted beehive, even to be with Isabel and the two children, he felt a bit attenuated, lopsided, and guilty, as if he were betraying his true wife, the temptress gold. This sensation, at the mine, of his true self closing around him strengthened when he was actually in his shaft, the deep neat hole, five feet square, which he had picked and shovelled into the rock of the mountain.
The claim adjacent to his on the left, idle for a year, had been taken over by a set of brothers and cousins from the state of Alagoas, the Gonzagas, and the team they formed was rapidly digging down, overtaking Tristão’s solitary progress, exposing his shaft to air and sun.
But there were still seven or eight vertical feet of enclosed rock in which he could lose himself, where the hum dwindled to a faraway murmur and the sky shrank to a tidy blue square overhead, crossed by clouds like actors in a drama seen through a gap in the curtains. His privacy suggested the terrible solitude of the grave yet had something erotic about it; it was not cooler in the depths of his claim but slightly warmer, as if he were slowly approaching one of nature’s hotly guarded secrets.
For some days he had been following a twisting stretch of pallor down the leftward wall, a ruddy pallor of the type thought most promising, for gold was generally found in association with her brothers, copper and lead. When the earth blushes, the miners said, gold was about to bare herself, gold in her naked shining.
His pick attacked the rock, solid blow after blow. Its two points were equally dull, polished by wear; he had worn out three such picks in his three years here. With an awkward effort Tristão was swinging sideways, since the vein of ruddy pallor was turning inward, away from him; it felt as if the point of his pick were pursuing the curve of a woman’s body around a kind of corner, into her semi-seen, furry, rousing cranny. He was getting an erection, as sometimes happened in the privacy of his claim. The sexual energy he could not muster at night, with Isabel, overtook him in the middle of the day, as he plied his pick against the rock. Sometimes he even masturbated, with the sky’s square eye staring above him, imagining always, however, the body of his wife—yet himself with his spurting yam not her husband but one of her brutal customers, spitting upon her breasts when he was done.
His pick, slashing inward, bared a glint, or so his eyes, tormented by the dimness and by stone dust, seemed to tell him. He got down on his knees and attacked the cranny of rock, broadening the glint. Clouds, trailing gray wisps like fists loosening and unloosening, passed overhead; the hum of the vast quarry outside filtered over the rim of his private mine. When the sun slipped into the square of sky and threw its beams straight down, the captive air felt as hot as Isabel’s bathwater. But he could see better. Within an hour, while the fury of his attack piled up rubble behind him and left the skin around his scrabbling fingernails bloody, he had lifted the glinting area into low relief. The lump had a sullen reddish lustre, not silvery-scaly like pyrite, the deceiver.
