by John Updike
She had long since realized that a price for the intensity of their love was sterility. Their spiritual ardor burned away the natural consequences of physical union. Whether he with other women might have become a father—or indeed was, and that somewhere in some jungle or other a little brown Tristão was padding, with bright frog-eyes, through the sensitive early years of his life—interested her rather abstractly, as belonging to some other story. In the story which was hers, in the life given to her to live, and which was now rushing on, it seemed to her, at a terrifying pace, she found herself touched by a certain pity for Tristão, a sense of him as her victim, as if it had been she, not he, who had made the approach on Copacabana Beach. She had worn a pale two-piece suit, daring for the times, that made her look naked from a distance. Certainly it was she who had conspired with a magician to turn him white, so he could be accepted by her father and give her a comfortable life. You are in no danger from me, he had assured her on the beach, though he radiated menace, and a desperate freedom. But had he been in danger from her? The very docility with which he put on his gray suit each morning and drove his gray, second-hand Mercedes-Benz out through the expanding maze of the city to the plant in São Bernardo afflicted her with guilt, so that she sometimes asked him, abruptly of an evening, when they had returned from a dinner party or an opera:
“Do you miss it, the freedom and excitement of the old days, before you met me?”
Pausing in removing his pleated shirt, placing the cufflinks and tieclip in the small bureau drawer where such things were kept, he gave the question his usual heartbreaking solemn attention. “It was the life of a street dog,” he said. “I would have been killed, by the police or another street dog, within a few years. With you in my life, there was hope, and a goal. I did not even mind the backbreaking years in the mine, when I had you to return to. Remember, how I would sit outside as darkness came and chip the rocks and pan for the pieces of gold, while you inside made our meal, or cleaned up afterwards, and settled our children into bed? I have never been happier, Isabel.”
“Oh, don’t, Tristão!” she cried, tears having started to her eyes, erupting as violently as semen. “Don’t make me better than I am! I have made you into an artificial man! Your work now—honestly, isn’t it meaningless and dreadful? Don’t you hate me, honestly?”
His voice remained soft, withheld a bit from passion, perhaps delicately to punish her. “No, my work is very interesting. It deals with men—men and women, of course I mean, though women with corporate power are still rare—who must be brought into a singleness of purpose, to make a future world. We are seeing the end of slaves and masters in Brazil, and I, who have little competence, can help here, having been both. As to hating you, it would cancel my life to hate you. The Amazon would flow backward to the Andes were I to hate you. You are my love-slave, my blue-eyed negrinha.”
And he stepped closer, there in their bedroom with its cushions and curtains and framed photographs of themselves on vacation and their children in school uniforms, and stood where she was sitting on her satin-covered dressing-table stool so she could see the bulge his yam was making behind his fly, and sense its warmth, and touch its hardness with her fingertips, and then with her lips, through the tuxedo’s black cloth. They rarely made love any more, like a rich couple that rarely resorts to visiting their safe-deposit box; but when they did, their treasure was still there, and never quite the same, as if the box had been shaken in their absence.
Her life was constantly busy, and yet its content could hardly be described. She gave orders to the help, and gave affection to the children when they were presented to her, in their school uniforms or pajamas. She planned Tristão’s evening meals, and saw that the lazy, sluttish maids—one after another, all nordestinas—did not outrageously neglect the housekeeping, or screw the garden boy in the potting shed. Isabel shopped for clothes, at Fiorucci and Huis Clos, and planned the trips she and Tristão would take to foreign cities. She, too, played tennis, though it was the chatty, catty luncheons with her female companions afterwards that were the point of the sport—around umbrellaed outdoor tables, in sweated-up whites, with cotton cardigans draped around their shoulders becomingly, showing off their bare arms.
But it was no longer fashionable to be idle rich in the style of Uncle Donaciano. Men, even rich men, worked, and women younger than Isabel worked, too. Work had become chic. For her, it was a little late. Her education had been frittered away in titillating talk of revolution; the Mato Grosso had been her graduate school, teaching survival in a vanished world. A sweet silence surrounded her past; her new friends never asked her where she had gone to school, or what her life previous to marrying Tristão had been. They assumed that she had slept her way up from the slums into the upper-middle class. Her blue eyes heightened her social charm, but were not strictly needed. The Portuguese, lacking the northern European’s superstitious fear of blackness, never disowned Africa; the Brazilian disowns only the immense black poverty, and the criminality it breeds. Isabel, so lovely in her manners, so piquant in her vivacity, reassured everyone that their society was producing such ebony ornaments. She became active in charity affairs, and was often photographed in the papers, a darker set of halftone specks among the lighter. Everyone loved her—loved them both, for their essential monogamy in a world where everything stable is slipping, everything sacred is mocked, and appetite erodes everything from within, hollowing out entire corporations and companies that, like capybara corpses whose guts have been invisibly consumed by rapacious vermin, collapse with a puff of ill-smelling smoke. Inflation, resurging, approached one thousand percent; the Big Boys had sold Brazil’s future to the international banks, and had spent the money on themselves.
In these years there were for Tristão and Isabel promotions at work, renovations at home, little crises in health, an automobile accident or two, vacations, and the steady rise of Bartolomeu, Aluísio, and Afrodísia in the fashionable Catholic schools they attended. And there was a funeral: Isabel’s father died, of arteriosclerosis and myocarditis induced by overwork and the cumulative strain of all the derangements of the body incidental to his years abroad. For some years, he had not been well, in his body or his mind. His hiring a Rastafarian fool for a servant had been one of the first signs of deterioration. All the information in his top-heavy brain, the languages and protocols and subtleties of past intrigue, became scrambled toward the end. Among his effects, surprisingly, they found the gold nugget that Tristão had gouged from the Serra do Buraco and that had been last seen in the care of the coöperative bank; it had found its way into the care of the Assistant Minister of Interior Development. With it there was a confused note: Devote half the proceeds to the education of my son or if it is too late for that of my grandson Pacheco. Pacheco? The name rang a faint bell for Tristão, but he could not quite place it. Further, they needed all the money they could inherit. Salomao’s death made them less additionally rich than they had expected. Money, in the form of numbers occasionally trimmed by governmental redecimalization to counter the insatiable inflation, came and went in their bank account, and was never quite enough, or as much as their friends appeared to have. There were dental appointments, teas, dinner parties, confirmations, graduations, school soccer matches, and children’s recitals to attend. The banality, the brightly masked tedium, of bourgeois life—taletellers remain balked by it.
Though this chapter covers the greatest stretch of time, let it be no longer than it is!
xxix. The Apartment Again
AN ODD THING had happened to Uncle Donaciano. Divorce had become legal in 1977, and a decade later he had, after all those years of unacknowledged cohabitation, divorced Aunt Luna and married his housekeeper and cook, Maria. Within a year she had left him, no one could imagine why. He seemed fated to romantic failure. Isabel felt sorry for him, and her visits to her bachelor uncle, and to Rio, became more frequent.
On this fateful occasion, Isabel persuaded Tristão to come with her, in the sever
al days of vacation that the textile plant allowed after Christmas. They considered bringing along the children but agreed that Rio under its holiday sun offered pre-teens too much opportunity for mischief. Crime, vice, homelessness, and public nudity were rampant. Their children had grown to become spoiled, sheltered Paulistanos, and their sulky and rebellious presence in the apartment would be difficult for their childless, aging host.
Uncle Donaciano welcomed them warmly, gratefully—he had aged, at the blow to his pride from his second wife. His hair, slicked back to an occipital point such as can be seen on the head-crests of some tropical birds, was streaked with gray now—striped, really, with an odd regularity that seemed achieved by a mechanical vanity—and his hands shook with the effect of too many sunset gins. His charm had withered to something like a maiden aunt’s, a matter of doddery hesitations and an automatic, bemused, rather pleading habit of deference.
In his apartment, the two crystal candlesticks Isabel and Tristão had stolen so long ago had been replaced with a pair nearly identical, and the huge chandelier still hung like a vast holy spider, with curved brass S’s for legs, from the center of a domed rose of frosted glass. To Tristão, the space still had the radiant stillness of a church, but the furnishings, the fringed pillows and cloisonné vases and gold-stamped backs of never-opened books, no longer seemed fabulous but faintly shabby and dated, belonging to a bygone era of luxurious decoration. He and his São Paulo friends went in now for a rougher, squarer look, of tans and off-whites in coarse weaves, of low lamps that make circular pools of dull light—the look, in fact, of a modern office, though softer, and without quite so much gleam of plastic-encased computer gadgetry. Compared with such modular chambers, these rooms seemed to compose a latticed harem, cushioned to receive diaphanously clad female bodies that were, disappointingly, not there.
“I think, concerning Maria,” the old gentleman tried to explain, when the raspy red Argentine dinner wine and garlicky, ducky richness of pato ao tucupi had worked to loosen their tongues and create social ease, “she preferred the clear though modest wages of the servant to the larger but vaguer rewards of a wife. I urged her to spend money upon herself—her clothes, her hairdo, manicures, health spas—but she took each suggestion as a veiled implication that I found her messy, underdressed, common, and rather fat—which, in truth, I did. Nevertheless, she could have ignored my suggestions, taken them or left them, much as she took or left me before we wed. But in becoming her husband, I became somehow aggravating, as if I was now a part of herself over which she had no control, like a cancer. My smoking, upon which she had never let drop a single critical word, that time suddenly became a source of worry and pain to her, and a matter of constant nagging. She became, in truth, a nag on many matters, when she had been before so soothingly phlegmatic. The girls I hired to replace her simply could not please her; they were dishonest, sluttish, careless, designing, empty-headed—the litany was endless, none could satisfy her, I fired them one a week, it seemed. And yet, in the intervals, when Maria herself took over the duties that had been hers, she complained that her becoming my wife had made no difference, except that she no longer got paid. Even the sex between us—forgive me, Isabel, for such details, but you are an old married woman by now—became grudging and stilted on her part, where she had readily yielded before, to the most peremptory demand. It was as if, alas, the brute authority of an employer aroused her in a way the more complicated figure of a husband could not. Her note to me, on her disappearance, simply read, in her barely literate but beautifully formed hand, ‘This asks of me too much.’ ”
“Tristão and I find,” Isabel volunteered, challenged by his reference to her being an old married woman, “that it sometimes helps our sex if we pretend we have never met before, and just happen to be in the same room.”
Her uncle looked flustered and embarrassed by this detail. Teasingly, she continued to instruct him: “Women, too, resent the tyranny of sex, and the necessity to make lasting social attachments of what was meant by nature, perhaps, to be a passing fit. Women and men occupy two different realms—their mating is like the moment when a bird seizes a fish.”
“I understand,” Tristão said, more practically, “you used to beat Maria.”
“Very rarely,” the embarrassed former dandy hastened to claim. “Once or twice, possibly, in the fury of my younger days. The women I used to be entangled with were infuriating flirts, and I would bring my frustrations home to my one constant and faithful mistress.”
“It could be,” Tristão offered, “barbaric as this seems, that she took your failure to beat her, once she became your wife, as a sign of lack of affection, and the perverse behavior you describe was an attempt to provoke you into using your fists. The poor grow such thick skins, the loving touch has to be heavy.” He was thinking, Isabel lovingly perceived, of his own mother in saying this, as a way of justifying her rough treatment of him.
Before Uncle Donaciano could change the subject, Isabel took the opportunity to ask, “Aunt Luna—why did she leave you, do you think?”
A silence fell upon her uncle, making his face look more fragile than ever, and shadowy, as it had those evenings in her childhood when he would come into her room to read her a story and seal with a kiss his wish that her dreams be sweet. In the silence, Maria’s present replacement languidly brought in their dessert, fruta-do-conde with honeydew sherbet, in long-stemmed tulip glasses. “I have never understood that,” Uncle Donaciano at last confessed. “Your aunt’s defection is the failure of my life. She was past her youthful bloom, and has not found happiness away from me, my informants in Paris tell me. A few flings with married men who could not quite bear to leave their wives, and then some younger men who take advantage of her money, and now there is nothing for her, not even the Church, for she had no faith.”
In the long pause, Tristão, to be polite, said, in his serious, businesslike voice, “Faith is necessary. Otherwise, there are too many decisions, and each one seems too important.”
But Uncle Donaciano continued to gaze at Isabel; his face, refined and fatigued, seemed pitted with shadows of undeclared yearning, as on those nights when he would tuck her in. He continued, “There were two romantic failures of my life. The second was that your mother never treated me with a particle more than the proper courtesy a woman owed her brother-in-law.”
“Perhaps the one failure explains the other,” Isabel pointed out. “Aunt Luna sensed your love of my mother.”
But no, here, at this so obvious gate of truth, the old man balked, and he shook his head obstinately. “No. She never knew. I scarcely knew myself.”
“Oh, do tell me about my mother!” Isabel cried, with a vivacity that irritated Tristão. He saw in her too much red wine, and a giddiness at being away from her children for a night or two, and a girlish wish to flatter her uncle by travelling with him back into the past. She held her mouth open as if to display to her uncle her arched, velvety tongue. “Am I like her?”
Steadily, sadly, Donaciano gazed at his niece, with her majestic sheaf of frizzy hair and her gold-hoop earrings and her slender black arms—an iridescent brown, the color of burnt sugar—glittering halfway to her elbows with bangles. Her dress was an armless and unbelted jade-green sheath that concealed and flattered her body. She had gained weight, but no more than five pounds. “You are her essence, crossed with the Leme determination,” he stated. “She was the kind of woman who was fit only to lie about in a harem. The Andrade Guimarãeses had Moorish blood, it was said. She could do nothing—not cook an egg, not write a letter, not organize a party. She could do nothing to help your father’s career. She could not even, the second time, manage the labor of childbirth. Even when she was alive, Isabel, she left your mothering up to the servants, and to Luna. When my wife was around you, she was very affectionate. In your decisiveness and nervous temper, you take after Luna; but in your voluptuous essence, you are the ineffable Cordélia.”
With an impulsiveness she was sure her hu
sband would find lovable, Isabel reached out across the corner of the dining table—to be shared by both men, she had been seated at the head—and seized Tristão’s pale hand in her fingers, which by candlelight seemed as dark, below their pale nails, as the tarry sweet cafezinhos that had been served in little upright cups. “Hear that, Tristão? We are alike in having bad mothers!”
“My mother was not bad. She did her best, given the limits of her oppressed condition,” he said sullenly.
She would not be denied a reconnection with him. She felt him sliding away, but would not have it. “See! We share that, too. We loved them! We loved our bad mothers!”
Uncle Donaciano, his thin mustache eclipsed by the rim of his lifted coffee cup, glanced from one to the other of his young guests, sensing their tiny struggle, here in this setting more congenial to one than the other. He said peaceably, “We are all children of the Earth, and she is a bad mother, it could be said. It is our triumph to love her, to love existence.”
They sat up late, Isabel and her uncle reminiscing about her mother, about the days when Rio was like a glass of Venetian crystal, about the trips to Petrópolis to escape the summer heat. Petrópolis! The splendid imperial gardens where Dom Pedro himself once strolled with the Empress Teresa Christine and their headstrong daughter, the famous Isabel, who defiantly danced with the mulatto engineer André Rebouças and as Princess Regent decreed the end of slavery. Ah, the city’s canals and bridges, squares and parks, virtually European in their finish and charm; the Gothic cathedral and the precise copy of London’s Crystal Palace; the mountain vistas from the restaurant, including a threadlike waterfall! Eagerly Isabel remembered with her uncle’s help those enchanted days of family holiday, when her father sat beside her at the snowy tablecloth and gaunt, amusing Aunt Luna showed her which forks to use. She had been a precious girl in starched voile ruffles, surrounded by bowing waiters and distant music and a glittering, flowery, watery matrix: Brazil, a Europe without strain, without guilt. Ah, the day the tent blew down in the hotel garden; the day Senhora Wanderley’s white poodle bit the barbecue cook; the day Marlene Dietrich and an entourage of local Krauts dined at La Belle Meunière!
