Brazil

by John Updike

  From her dead white mother Isabel had inherited mostly an empty flirtatiousness, and perhaps a fear of childbirth. Now a different inheritance had descended, and a strength not merely passive; black, she found in herself a store of reckless anger, and became, when darkness enclosed the rustling straw pallet she and Tristão shared, something of a bully, a rough tease. His whiteness glimmered in the shadows of the hut, whose roof admitted only a few splinters of moonlight; she played at dodging him, invisible as she was now. In the dark she presented him with unexpected portions of her body, and bit his shoulder and clawed at his back, a departure from the timid reverence with which she had handled his body before. She had known there would be a new sadism between them, but had not expected it to come from herself. He—and this fed her anger—felt often preoccupied, as he lay beside or strove above her; she was no longer the color of something he was travelling toward, but of something he had left behind. His yam was satisfying but no longer, quite, alarming; perhaps it was a new juiciness in herself that diminished, not exactly its size, but its elemental essence, its lovable brute being. His prick had shed since she first saw it in Uncle Donaciano’s apartment its primordial monstrosity, its amphibious reptilian look of a reality far older than human minds. Being a white woman fucked by a black man is more delicious, she had sadly to conclude, than a black woman being fucked by a white man. The former, to a descendant of the masters of colonial Brazil, had the exaltation of blasphemy, the excitement of a political defiance; the latter transaction savored of mundane business. No wonder Brazil’s slave women had swung their hips in their bell-shaped skirts, and twirled their fringed parasols, and borne their generations of mulattos like a guild of seasoned experts. Fucking was no big deal, or, rather, it was part of a bigger deal: perhaps this was a common female realization, but slave women could come to it easier than the frail, cossetted, priest-dominated little mistress captive in the big house, who never saw her husband naked and modestly accepted his organ—the fecundating instrument, often, of her death—through a hole in the nuptial counterpane.

  Yet, if faintly hardened in her sexuality, Isabel found a new excitement, lying beneath Tristão’s preoccupied thrusts, in trying to connect herself with a nervous network more angular than before, less rounded by perennial hopelessness. To lift herself up into this system, to be not left behind—these were Isabel’s own neural ambitions, exciting her to a passion that left her fingermarks still red on his white back the next morning. She was fighting for her life, where formerly she had been fighting merely for pleasure, and for freedom from her father.

  The sexual world, being the underside of the real world, is to an extent an inversion of it. An underdog, he had been “top” before; now it was she who dominated and demanded. To use the terminology in which she and Eudóxia in their girlhoods had gossipped about the nuns, she was the cock and he the hen. “You are my slave,” she said.

  “Yes, mistress.”

  “Lick me there or I will beat you.” She brandished a piece of the frail spear José had cut in two with his broadsword. When Tristão had obeyed for many minutes, and she had come to her climax, she said, “I think I will beat you anyway.”

  He loved her more than ever—he was dizzy with his new love of her, which was confused with love of his white self. Their new relation gave at last full scope to his instinctive chivalry. He, too, had felt the something brutish in his former appeal to her. He had not been insensitive to the burden her loss of social position placed on his shoulders—the flattering wreath of martyrdom it enabled her to wear—or to the indignities of her whoredom at the mine and her concubinage at the camp. Had he not been black, would she have been so casually and serenely unfaithful? True, she could justly blame his poverty and helplessness as leaving her no choice; but had she not taken a certain relish in her degradation, because the blame was his? She had used him to become shameless, denying him the luxury of shame. She had led him through the expensive streets of Ipanema and through a subsequent maze he could never have entered without her. She had condescended to him, and it was her love therefore which had shone the brighter, with the greater heat of self-sacrifice.

  Now it was he who descended, to accept a nigger wench as his mate; it was he who now tasted the thrill of sexual release when the loved one is not a social and spiritual equal but a thing of flesh, imported from afar. A thing with a psychology; it is the psychology that leads our love on—twisting it, deepening it—but the thingness, like a more massive and versatile masturbator’s hand, that delivers the bliss. Her whole body seemed leaner and knobbier, its bulges and recesses more emphatic, now that she was no longer the color of clouds and crystal but that of earth, of wet smooth wood, of glistening dung. Now he could without difficulty think of Isabel as a digestive system on legs, that needed to shit and liked to run, taking a mild joy in motion and defecation much as he did. Her anus, which had slightly disgusted him before, set in its pocket of brown-tinted skin like a smear between her buttocks, a permanent stain in a silken crevice, was manifested now as a tender whorled flesh-bud hardly distinguished in its purplish tinge from the surrounding eggplant sheen. Her pubic bush, no longer lank and colorless like a wispier version of her head, was curly and oily and resiliently thick; he had only to bury his nose in it, while she kneeled straddling his face, grinning down at him between her jutting breasts, for his erection to rise like a corrugated tusk of ivory, down where her hand, reaching behind her, would playfully find it and tweak it painfully. Isabel had formerly handled him with a certain reverence; now she led him on an impudent chase, forcing him on occasion to wrestle her into submission and to experience, while she energetically writhed, cursed, and spat at his face, the criminal bliss of rape, each spurt hurting like the passage of a bullet through his urethra. There was hostility in her but he did not mind it as long as he could pin her down and fuck her with a liberated hostility of his own. Sex is a tussle our sane selves resent.

  At the end of one such violent session, she amazed him by nestling her bottom against his stomach and preparing to sleep and saying, “Maybe that is the one that will make a baby.” Thus she admitted, what her daylight self had never confessed, that they had not yet made a baby together.

  “I hope not,” he confessed in turn. “Not yet. We must escape the wilderness first.”

  “Once we are back in civilization, you will drop me. You will use me as your whore for a time but find another wife, a white wife.”

  “Never. You are my only wife.”

  “I think it’s shitty of you, frankly,” Isabel went on, “to discard me when I gave you my precious color, but that’s how men are. They use you and knock you up and don’t give a damn.”

  “Isabel, stop this talk of pregnancy. It is premature. We are not psychologically ready to be parents, we are still too much in love. I will never leave you. I love you as you are. You have all your old elegance, and something else as well. Forgive me, but I think you have become your true self. You were black all along, your whiteness was a disguise. The amusing tilt of your face and the way you arched your feet were black.”

  She pondered this awhile, until it seemed she was truly asleep, with throngs of his violent sperm climbing and kicking toward her looming lone egg; then he heard her say, in a deep voice on the edge of dreams, “I forgive you, Tristão, for being such a bastard.”

  He was keener to return to the cities than she was. His chivalry was empty without a social context. They carried the context in their heads, in their social conditioning, but he wanted the confirmation of others witnessing, of seeing his whiteness so gallantly set off, as in a tuxedo. Not that a white man and black wife would be as conspicuous and poignant in Brazil as they would be in South Africa or North America—but, still, in his envisioning mind, they would attract glances that would gauge the dizzying height of his love. Did not Portugal, here in this continental backland of brazilwood and sugar cane, make a wife of Africa but not consecrate the fact? He would be one white man who would elevate his blac
k mistress to his own level. He would, in a sense, lift his own mother up from the favela and its cachaça-soaked poverty, out of the arms of all those fleeting stepfathers, men the muddy in-between colors of the merciless bandeirantes.

  And Isabel, who had engineered this transposition, savored the revenge on her father, who in her immature, superstitious mind had spurned her offering of naming a child Salomão by letting the child be an idiot. Her father, elusive yet omnipresent, was God to her. She imagined herself rubbing her new color in his face as a defiance of the Big Boys, an identification with the masses more dramatic and indelible than any she and her fellow radicals had chattered about at the university. Yet, paradoxically (for the heart thrives on contrarieties, fattening itself on the energy of both love and hate), she imagined that her father would love her in her sensual new skin, and she would at last steal him from her pallid mother dead in Heaven.

  Fed thus by their new conceptions of themselves, whose ramifying permutations whipped their nervous systems into a continual stir, they made so much love that the Indians, stealing cassava roots from the untended fields, would point to the house and say, “The rocks are clashing,” referring to a myth whereby one of the twin sons of Maira-Monan, Arikut, the bad and reckless brother, is crushed between clashing rocks but brought to life again by his twin, Tamendonar, the good and peaceful brother.

  Because her lips and breasts and the insides of her thighs were being abraded by his beard, Tristão shaved it off, with the single-edged razor blade, Gem, who, now rusted and dulled, had accompanied him these more than nine years since he had first seen Isabel. Two in the fusca factory, four in the mine, three as a slave here along this river without a name.

  Beardless again, he looked younger; his cheeks had thinned beneath the fleece.

  Now that he was white, Isabel felt herself often moved by a fragility that had not existed in the black man, or that she had not been able to see, through his skin. He could be clumsy now, and hesitant, as well as brave, and loyal. This vulnerability excited her, as poor limp dull-eyed Salomão in her arms never had. There was something prim and self-repressed, now, in Tristão that it amused her to startle, flaunting before him an increased sexual aggression. Her clitoris felt longer and firmer than before, a tense shaft of cartilage tipped by a supersensitive hard pea she drove into his face or pubic bone as a man thrusts, without consideration of the other, so that his upper lip fell tinglingly asleep under the pressure, and appeared bruised and swollen afterwards. She would make herself pay for this coarse dominance by inciting him to buggery and spankings, since pain from his direction brought again into relief that inner shape of love she was always in danger of losing in the vagueness and muck of the psyche. This shape tasted like vanilla when she was a tiny girl and the cook in the kitchen would give her a lick of the stirring spoon. It smelled like coconut shreds in an infant’s nostrils. This keenness of sweet sensation was always threatening to dull. Only new identities and contortions kept it honed. Perversity, like chastity, is a way of showing human dominance over this bestial drive. Reluctantly but then with some fervor, Tristão joined her in sexual theatrics, tying her wrists with lianas, placing José’s broadsword between them on the pallet as they slept, bringing his old iron foot-fetter into play as he had his way with his helpless slave. He bit her shoulders and as if with fanged open jaws sucked the soft trough at the base of her throat. The delicate membranes of his glans, scarcely changed in tint from the days when he was a black man, still blood-stuffed and hot like a heart torn from a rabbit, demanded the membranes of her mouth. The contrast of the lovers’ colors was less acute than that of their genitals, two exotic flowers so contrarily evolved. Up, down, aggressive, passive, dominant, submissive, hostile, tender—Tristão and Isabel oscillated luxuriously among contrarieties, and gave each other the gifts of physical exhaustion and of a drowsy oneness with the universe.

  xxvi. The Mato Grosso Again

  AT LAST the time came to dig up the manioc roots, crush them into powder, bake them into salty cakes, and depart. Fearing the Guaicuru, they tried to stay north of their former route, steering now by the rising sun. In this season it rained, briefly but intensely, in early morning and again in late afternoon, as evening approached. The downpours blinded them but soon lifted, all the surfaces of leaf and land steaming with mist and glistening like their healthy, hopeful skins.

  Perhaps it was their new route, but the vast barren upland seemed to be tamer than before, when Kupehaki had led them through it. In the second week of walking, Isabel gave up her wistful, unrealistic hope of encountering Guaicuru horsemen and, with them, Azor and Cordélia, in Indian beads and painted undress but alive. In the third week, she and Tristão began to come upon farms—single low white-washed, red-roofed ranchos where a single couple, a gaunt mameluco in baggy peon’s clothes and a shy barefoot Tupi wife kept house with their chickens and pigs and ragged children and managed a few acres of tobacco and corn, cotton and soybean, fenced off with dry thornbush from the wild pigs and rich men’s cattle that roamed the chapadões. Poor as they were, and perched on the edge of ruin by the next drought, the farmers would spare Tristão and Isabel some rice and beans and pinga and lend them a night’s shelter of a shed, where their luxurious bed would be heaps of unhusked ears of corn, yielding under every motion of their bodies and collapsing their lovemaking into giggles, there being no purchase for the necessary friction.

  As they made their way east, the farms increased, in number and prosperity, and gave rise to dusty small towns, where the couple was able to recoup their resources by finding work. It was assumed that Isabel, being a Negress, knew how to do laundry; she lugged the soiled sheets and pantaloons of the local mayor and cattle dealer and the muslin chemises of their overweight wives to the town’s trickling river and beat them clean against the flat rocks with the help of a yellow lye soap that turned her fingernails punky and her fingertips as rough as sandstone. For Tristão, with his commanding stare and broad shoulders and impressive white brow, more elevated jobs appeared—he would be entrusted, some days after his idle but dignified presence had been first observed, by the local lawyer with hand-delivering a message to a client a mile away, or be enlisted by the local hardware merchant to handle the barrels and sacks and iron tools in his emporium’s back room and then, on evidence of Tristão’s literacy and the air of honesty and uprightness he radiated, be allowed a position among the front shelves and bins, the scales and the till. A seamstress, taking pity on Isabel’s cracked and splitting hands, invited her to do stitching, where the stitches would not show, and soon where they did show, for the nuns’ lessons in domestic skills had been methodical and thorough, and the seamstress wondered how this indigent black girl, this mere moleca, had acquired such facility and impish mannerliness. This all happened in a small town on the slopes of the Serra do Tombador, with zigzag streets whose sidewalks rose in steps, flanking a central gutter of cobblestones for carts to crawl up and sewage to run down.

  Elsewhere, in towns further to the east, Tristão won employment with a blacksmith and, in yet another, as an auto mechanic, automobiles slowly replacing horse-drawn conveyances on the dusty roads of the backlands. Wherever they worked, the couple in their liveliness and grace attracted kindness, and were more than once offered opportunities to settle permanently, with pleasant enough provincial prospects, for growth was clearly the destiny of the sertão. For a while, reviving the muscles hardened in the gold mine, Tristão worked on a road crew laying the crushed stone of a new highway into this vast region of underdevelopment and promise. “Roads are the future of Brazil,” their foreman would intone each day, like the priest of a fledgling religion meant to compensate them for their aching backs and modest wages, paid in a currency that, the more civilized the environs became, was all the faster eroded by inflation and high prices.

  When they came to actual cities, they began to have city adventures. Isabel found a store selling jewelry and silver whose proprietor was able to appreciate the fine q
uality of Uncle Donaciano’s begemmed antique cross. Other dealers had been bored by the antique holy object, but this one’s eyes lit up. He was a pardovasco, the son of a Negro and a mulatto, dark like an Ethiopian, with slanted eyes and a receding hairline. He struck up a collusion with her, against the invisible owners of the establishment, who he claimed were Japanese agri-industrialists in far-off Rio Grande do Sul, and offered her a price—ten thousand cruzeiros—that was absurdly generous, he swore, for such a common item as a cross from the colonial era. “But I confess it—I am not merely a dispassionate student of religions, I am an ardent devotee of several. You have found out my weakness, little lady.” He furthermore suggested that during the day’s long lunch break, between one and four-thirty, she might join him in his room upstairs.

  “How much am I worth to you?” she asked, with an easy bluntness she wouldn’t have managed in her old skin.

  “I will give you a delicious lunch,” the jeweller promised, “and play you my records of the newest afochê songs from Bahia.”

  “I am hard up,” she told him brazenly, meaning both she was short of money and sexually excited by him. Isabel did feel, after so long copulating with a white man, and twisting herself in knots around his curious white psychology, she owed herself a simple session with a man nearly as black as herself. She said, “One hundred cruzeiros. I think I must be worth as much as one hundredth of that trinket. Its arms do not move; it hears prayers but does not answer them. I will answer all your prayers, if they are not too indecent.”

  He professed astonishment and indignation and eventually reduced her to eighty-five, which he would add to the price of the purchased object, thus transferring the cost of his tryst to the distant agri-industrialists.