Brazil

by John Updike

  The magician spoke to Ianopamoko, so rapidly that Isabel could not follow, and both Indians laughed, in their childish way, averting their faces to hide the membranes of their mouths.

  Ianopamoko in her gentle voice interpreted: “He says the past cannot be changed, and the past and the future are like the roots and the branches of one solid tree. He says magic is good only for the fruit, in the moment that it is falling.”

  Watching with his inflamed eyes the women’s faces, Tejucupapo held aloft the maraca in his left hand, and let it drop, with a harsh clash of dry seeds within, into his right. So quickly, his gesture said, does life pass, in its momentary potential of being swerved by magic.

  xxiv. The Encampment Again

  DURING their seventeen days returning, through the selva that lavished its fruits and nuts upon them, and whose faint paths the two women traced in a green gloom amid the cries of monkeys and parrots, of barking toucans with their preposterously big beaks and hissing hoatzins with their curious clawed wings, the Indian maid was tremulously affectionate, clasping black, lithe Isabel to her with a new fury, a fury born of foreboding.

  Ianopamoko seemed to have grown smaller, frailer, more wistfully feminine, with her graceful thin limbs and waistless brown torso. Isabel at times grew weary of playing the man with her, though there was an exhilaration in being distinctly the stronger, and in striding ahead, tireless in her new skin, swinging a long light spear the mesa tribesmen had given her in farewell, while Ianopamoko followed behind, carrying their few belongings and rations in a basket down her back.

  When they came after the sixteenth day to their river, the bandeirantes’ encampment on the far side seemed ominously quiet. Where there had been shelters, now only a few ruins could be seen through the foliage, their upright support posts charred. It was late afternoon, and soon dark. A single torch wobbled back and forth in the gloom, and a shout or two drifted across the silently sliding river. The little dugout canoe they had stolen to make their escape was still where they had hidden it, in a thicket of low-growing palms, and Ianopamoko, resuming leadership, insisted they drift in it downstream, beyond where the cultivated fields gave out, and only there cross over. Then, in the morning, she would creep through the fields and reconnoiter. Isabel must stay behind. “My people will protect me. They know me,” she said, “and they no longer would know you.”

  “But Antônio will be furious with you, for running away. I had planned to protect you, to defend you from him.” Her plan had been to explain their excursion to the shaman as an attempt to relieve the idiocy of their son, and to pretend to detect, in the days thereafter, signs of intelligence and energy.

  Ianopamoko touched Isabel’s upper arm, and ran her fingers down it, to remind her of her skin. “Dearest mistress, I fear now a defense from you would carry no weight. You forget how your exterior has been changed. Their first thought on seeing you will be to make you a slave, if not to slay you as a demon. What the eaters of armadillo entrails do not understand, they need to kill. It is the narrowness of their Christian universe that gives them their terrible heat and power. Tonight we will sleep together, and then, in early morning, I will see what has happened to the encampment.” The tenderness of the sepia maiden—her own interwoven patterns of painted lace faded during the long journey—drifted across Isabel’s body all night, like a soft rain tapping among leaves.

  When the dawn awoke her, she was covered with dew, and Ianopamoko was gone. When the sun stood at its midmorning height, Ianopamoko had still not returned. Isabel crept forward cautiously, carrying her spear, along the edges of the fields of manioc and black beans, coming round to where the long hut had stood, and where now there were only ashes and char, scattered palm fronds and calabashes, and the hovering sweet stench of death. Several bodies of Indians, hacked by swords and torn by animals, had been lying on the ground long enough to seem scarcely human, dried-up like xarque; on the packed, swept earth between the long pavilion and Antônio’s house, Isabel found the fresh corpse of Ianopamoko, her slender arms sliced from her torso. The lake of red in which the dismembered body lay was still partly liquid, an open-hearted hibiscus red empurpled by its reflection of the sky. Who would have thought Ianopamoko’s little body had had so much blood in it? A swirling, churning cloud of sand-flies and eye-lickers, their massed triumphant buzzing loud as a chant, was feeding on the coagulating lake; the insects kept lifting and settling on Ianopamoko’s dainty flat features, including the open eyes, in patterns like quickly shifting lace.

  “Of all God’s wonders, a nigger wench!” an archaic baritone thundered behind her in Portuguese. Isabel turned to see José Peixoto, his hatless face frenzied and sunburned, approaching her with an uplifted broadsword. His padded escaupil seemed to be falling apart, spitting fragments of twilled cotton; he had lost enough weight, and been aged enough by recent experiences, to resemble his older brother. She lifted her spear but he flicked at it with the sword, cutting it in two, so close to her face she felt the stir of air.

  “How came thee here?” he asked her. “Art thou yet another who conspires in my foul brother’s treachery? Black as the milk of Hottentots, yet thine eyes an uncanny blue. Thou devil, there is something ladylike and familiar in thy gaze. Pity! Merda! The cursed Indians, we hack them and hack them, and still they come on—they’ve unleashed among us their friends the fiends of Hell, though we sought only their own eternal welfare, the God-damned bugres!” He was drunk, she realized, on fatigue and despair if not cachaça. The blood of his Carijó mother had not been enough to defend him against the terrors of the wilderness, faced alone. He mused aloud like a man for whom a spell has lifted, revealing a darker spell. He focused upon Isabel blearily, and decided, “Negrinha, ye might bring a milreis in Bahia, but everything living has become mine enemy. Before I clear my mind of thy riddle, though, thou’l’t serve as well as any to ease an aching groin.” Holding the ponderous sword still high in his right hand, with his left he fumbled at the buckle belting in his leather breeches.

  Isabel tried to speak, but terror stopped her windpipe. A deathly stench blew from José’s mouth as he drew closer and assured her, “By the sweet Mother of Christ, make a move and I’ll cut off yer arms to calm ye, like I did that other witch. Thou’l’t go to Hell with a brimming cunt at least, and bear a stout Christian to fart in Satan’s face!”

  Her heart pounding enough to break its frail cage, Isabel hung undecided between submitting and then seeking escape in the likely moment of relaxation afterwards, or trying to dart out from under the shadow of José’s broadsword now. Heavy as a machete, it would take a moment to descend. The brute’s buckle was undone and he had exposed a nub of dirty gray flesh, as pudgy and short as poor little Salomão’s, and far from erect. A flicker of embarrassment crossed his murderous face. “Down on it, filth!” he said.

  The smell of extremely stale cheese arose from his genitals. She willed herself to kneel; before her trembling knees could take up the command, a tall bearded white man appeared behind José and with a swift whistle of air and a crisp crunch of sliced bone buried a long-handled tool in the bandeirante’s skull. José fell at her feet, flipping in a last convulsion like a fish hooked onto the sand. The weapon that had slain him she recognized as the rusty adze used to hollow canoes, but her pale savior, with his slender frame, tall forehead, and melancholy brown eyes, was a stranger to her. Or was he? His beard was fleecy but the lips within it had a determined rueful set she knew well.

  “Tristão,” she softly cried. In the effort not to faint, Isabel now did drop to her knees.

  The white man said, “You foul black whore—you were about to blow the bastard,” and slapped her, hard, so that she fell to the sand beside the bandeirante’s body. Inches from her eyes, José’s scarlet brains, lumpy like rice pudding soaked in beet juice, were leaking from the terrible rent in his skull. His pupils were rolled upward in the manner of the crucifix that had hung above Antônio’s bed. Already, flies had begun to swarm. As soon as they s
ettled, their little rotating heads busily bobbed, drinking the fresh corpse’s undefended liquids.

  Wracked by extremes of emotion—disgust, terror, amazement, relief—Isabel began to weep. She felt the other’s gaze upon her, as last night she had felt Ianopamoko’s caresses, like rain.

  “How did you know my name?” Her lover’s voice had become slightly higher, less granular and curvaceous, with the careless flatness of a white voice, which expects to be listened to. He tried to apologize for the slap. “Submitting to his vileness would have bought you a further five minutes of life at best. Better to die unpolluted. When are you people going to learn some pride? The Indian maid spat in his face, rather than submit.”

  She left off weeping and stared up at this man accusingly. “Tristão, how can you not know me? I let myself be made black so you could be white. A shaman did it, far to the west, where one can see mountains whose tips are all ice.”

  He squatted down to her, his yam bulging the threadbare shorts between his legs, his old beach shorts, and touched her hair, her glossy shoulder, the dip of her waist, her long smooth flank, her muscled thighs. “Isabel? Is it you?” He explored with trembling fingertips her everted full lips, the strange double edges of them, and the vertical ridge in the center of the plump upper lip, with its yielding fat-buttons and violet tinge. “It is you. Your eyes.”

  She felt in the darkness within her skull—that theatre of spirit, a mere bloody rice pudding—the warm tears wanting to begin again. “Are my eyes all you have left to love? My old cold eyes. Then so be it, Tristão. Do not love me, merely use me. I will be your slave. Already, you have begun to beat me. Already, you are too proud, too fastidious, to give my mouth a kiss. When I was your color, and you were mine, I took you, a mere street boy, a miserable moleque, to my uncle’s apartment, where there were more expensive things than you had ever seen, your eyes were like saucers, and gave you my virgin’s blood, though it hurt me, hurt me horribly, I never told you how much it hurt that day. You were too big, and rough.”

  “I did not mean to be rough. It was the clumsiness of innocence.”

  This was so honest she was compelled to answer in kind: “Perhaps you were only as rough as you had to be.”

  “We gave each other our selves,” he said. “We gave what we had to give. Where is the ring that says DAR?”

  “It was the price the shaman wanted, so you could be white, and no longer a slave.”

  Selflessly as she had acted, she yet felt afraid, telling him this. He restated, as if incredulous, “You gave away the ring with which we pledged ourselves.”

  “I did not give it away; I exchanged it for your life. Your blackness had enslaved you here, and before then had roused my guardians’ enmity.”

  He became thoughtful, touching his blond beard. “Indeed so, my dearest. You did beautifully.” He extended his hand, helping her up from the sandy earth where José’s head like a split gourd leaked its juicy contents, attracting hundreds, no, thousands, of buzzing little eye-lickers, pium flies, the winged blood-suckers called borrachudos, and sand-flies as small as grains of powder, pólvora. They moved away from this thirsty, stinging cloud, and sat together on what had been the porch of Antônio’s house. “Let me tell you my story. It was very strange,” he began, but her pride had been stung.

  “Go ahead. Hit me again, for giving away your ring. Cut off my arms, like hideous José did to dear Ianopamoko, the only friend I ever had. You were never a friend, you were only a man. A man can never be a woman’s friend, not really. She taught me what love was. You, you taught me what it was to be a slave. Beat me, leave me. I am sick of you, Tristão. Our love has put us through too much.”

  He smiled, in that confident thin-lipped way of white men, and even laughed at her, lightly. “Nonsense, Isabel. You love me. We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up, out of the dreadfulness of merely living.” He took her hand, and she felt her pulse slow, deliciously, within the careful rhythms of his voice. “Day by day, for seven days, the black went out of me, I did not know why. First I became gray, then white, as if I had never seen the sun. Your ancient fool of a so-called husband, Antônio Peixoto, ascribed it to one of the diseases that are always carrying off the slaves they capture. But then, when my health did not otherwise alter, and the other white killers superstitiously removed my shackles, he vaulted over them in superstition, and said my becoming a Christian like them was a sign from God, to pull up camp and move on. José objected that the manioc and sweet potatoes were not yet harvested, and the canoes were not all fashioned, but Antônio called him a heretic and a rebel to good King João for doubting this miraculous sign from above. My transfiguration was a sign that they would find the golden kingdom, ruled by the golden man, o dourado. The others sided with their leader and clamored to move on, and since there were canoes enough for only a few of their Indian escort, they killed the women and children, and burned the huts. During the slaughter, I pretended to join in, chasing a Caduveo girl into the forest, but then hid there, and kept watch at a distance. José had offended his brother with his doubt—perhaps trouble had been long brewing between them—for Antônio directed the other men to bind up José and abandon him in a place where there were many anthills. He came back, as you saw, as a madman. I have been watching him, these last days, forage and rage, wondering, since I am now his color, if we might strike up a partnership to escape the Mato Grosso, until today forced my hand. Something told me to save you, though from a distance you were only a struggling shadow.”

  “And my son, Salomão?” Isabel asked, unable to overcome a certain shyness with this white, and newly voluble, Tristão, though at the same time her own new self gave her, in an inner place she had not begun to explore, a fresh edge. Her former advantage in the outer realm had been replaced by an intimate wordless strength or sureness she could taste like a spice that makes a bland meal palatable.

  The topic of Salomão clearly bored and discomfited this man, excited as he was by his recent deed of arms. There had always been distances behind Tristão’s face but now they were the distances of the future, a future that related to this ruined, blood-soaked encampment as a mansion relates to a hut. “Antônio took him with him,” he said. “In his fanaticism he believes the poor babe to be a kind of saint, who will lead him to Paradise for all of his sins. Salomão did not thrive under the care of Takwame and her daughters; nor did he die. But I fear for the fate of the entire expedition, Isabel. They will not get far on the river; the Indians had shown me how, in hollowing the canoes, to carve the bottom thin enough to spring leaks soon. They will never reach the Madeira.”

  “Not in those canoes, at least,” she said, granting her vanished son, a mistake of flesh barely clinging to life, the fabulous toughness of the bandeirantes, who again and again, she knew from her schooling with the nuns, had returned from impossible journeys. For her tiny whey-faced son she tried to summon a maternal mourning, a milky flow of feeling, but only produced a stringent wry relief that he was off her hands, through no fault of her own. She was free to concentrate on the loved one before her. In the clutter of civilized life she had attracted and held him; now she enjoyed this majestic solitude in which to win him to her again, by new magic, or a new coloration of the old.

  He took charge, as never before. It was as if his brain, now that he had white skin, had become a box squared off with linear possibilities—a grid of choices, alternatives, projections. Before, when they had decided to buy their stake at Serra do Buraco, or when she led him to the hotel in São Paulo and then made the decision to go with her kidnappers without futile resistance, Isabel had been Tristão’s guide in the world beyond the favela; now he boldly planned to guide her through the wilderness back to that world. He decided they were not to leave the encampment immediately, but to bury the corpses, reroof the upright log walls of Antônio’s old shelter, and wait for the
manioc and beans and sweet potatoes to mature. Then, laden with farinha Isabel had pounded and the sun had dehydrated, and with dried meat prepared from the fruits of his hunting with an old blunderbuss the bandeirantes had left behind, they would set out across the chapadões where they once, alone together, had nearly starved.

  Indians from the surrounding selva, observing the couple make thus a temporary home, and seeing the encampment subdued to a less menacing domesticity, filtered in from the edges, resumed fishing, lent assistance where asked, and pilfered remnants of the bandeirantes’ treasures; but Isabel and Tristão did not seek, in the fragments of language they had mastered, to enlist any of these indigenes in their return journey. They were anxious to test themselves again against modern times, and these dwarfish, nude, and self-mutilated inhabitants of the remote past, with their runny noses and smoke-reddened eyes and the bulbous bellies and incessant flatulence induced by intestinal parasites, seemed childish schoolmates that must be left behind, to suffer and to dwindle.

  xxv. Alone Together Again

  WHEN THE BURNED ROOF was replaced with interwoven palms, Tristão and Isabel had privacy enough to reexplore their marriage. Three years had passed since the flare-up of their sexuality, in the interval between the Guaicuru raid and the rescue by the bandeirantes, a flare-up fanned by the fevers of starvation and the romantic imminence of death. Since then, Isabel and Tristão had done nothing to earn their name as lovers. Now, slowly—her bodily rhythms seemed slowed, and his more nervous and preoccupied—they reclaimed for cultivation the muddy riverside tract of sex. Their new skins gave them a fresh opportunity for that most parlous act of love, negotiation. Who were they, these psychic shapes each to be defined by the invasion of the other? With different skins came different glands, different smells, different hair, different self-images, different histories. There was something sardonic in her sexuality now, something jaded by the experience of black female generations.