This is the manusript of the author's memoirs of a year he spent on a small farm in Minas Gerais, Brazil. It will be published by Academy Chicago Publishers in the fall of 1999. The working title is A Year in Minas. Copyright: 1998 Glenn Alan Cheney
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A good deal of my job as a PR account executive in New York involved riding herd on useless projects. The whole job was useless. America and the world could have gotten along fine without my cog in the works. What did I do? I kept the name of my clients in the media. One was a big Japanese consumer products firm. One was the same ad and PR firm I worked for. Toward what purpose did I spend my days and earn my checks? I was never really sure. Did the world need those names in the media? Did the world need the products so little that it needed constant reminder of their existence?
Apparently so. One could probably draw an inverse relationship between the value of a thing and the amount spent to persuade people to buy it. If people ever figured that out, it would be the end of advertising. And if I had ever uttered such an idea in that company, it would have been the end of me. I was overwhelmingly aware that the year was 1984 and that I was working in a Ministry of Truth. My role in the world was to perpetuate the power of a less than benevolent Big Brother. Just as in Orwell's world, no one recognized the grand design. Everyone loved Big Brother. His face was on TV in blaring thirty-second bursts every ten or fifteen minutes. You couldn't help but love him and want to acquire him.
On one particular Friday, Big Brother had given me several herds to ride toward simultaneous culmination. Somehow I blew the day away mooing around with a client and a ghost writer out west in New Jersey. Not until three o'clock did I assume the saddle behind my desk heaped high with signs of cattle.
Where to start? The International Herald Tribune needed a certain article I'd written under the name of one Jon, our VP in charge of all European offices. Jon was to leave for Brussels that afternoon. I'd given him my draft the day before, and he was to have left it on my desk by morning. A pink note atop my pile says he sent it (from our central office five blocks up the avenue). My secretary swears it never arrived. Because everyone is afraid of being associated with anything that might be accused of being an idea, this article has to get final approval from a certain Bob. Bob, apparently, has better judgment than Jon, who apparently has neither judgment nor ideas, which is why he had me write the article. Bob, however, is on vacation until Monday. Jon is in a meeting. The article is due in the Trib office in Paris on Wednesday of next week. This is on a Friday in the days before fax machines.
So I call Norman, Jon and Bob's boss. Norman has not read the article I left with him the day before. He lost it. He's five blocks up the avenue and he wants the article now.
But I can't go now because I have two photoboards that have to be dealt with. They display memorable shots from two of our agency's most creative commercials. They are supposed to be delivered to Art Directions magazine no later than today. A pink note on my desk asks where they are. I know where they are. They're still at the photo studio that is hard at work on the job. I call. They swear they'll be done by five o'clock. Each board costs $410 plus tax, but they're worthless if not at Art Directions by 5:00 along with relevant data attached, data currently in scribbled note form somewhere on my desk, at least in theory.
Also somewhere on my desk is a twenty-page article on cable TV in Europe, which I wrote under the name of one Tony, head of our London office. TV/Radio Age is going to print the article but a pink note says the editor called to ask about the photo of Tony and of cable TV in Europe that Tony was to contribute to the article. The editor needs the photos Monday morning or else. Where are they? Only Tony knows, and Tony is in London, where it's nine-thirty at night. Should I try to call him or should I worry about the photos for Ad World magazine?
The day before, Ad World had interviewed two of our Danes and an Israeli, Shmuel. The editor has already written the article on them and their respective advertising practices, which I have vigorously promoted as very creative. The editor will run both articles in her October issue - a real feather in my featherless cap - provided I supply copies of "interesting" Danish ads and a photo of Shmuel. I have one photo of Shmuel on my desk, but the interesting Danish ads are five blocks up the avenue in the hands of one Donna, underling of Norman. But a pink note says Donna can't find the interesting ads. Last she saw of them, they were in my hands. Where are they and how am I going to get black-and-white prints made by Tuesday?
A note arrives attached to a proof sheet of photos of Shmuel. The author of the note, Ginny, must have an eight-by-ten glossy of Shmuel before he leaves for Tel Aviv at noon on Monday.
Is this more important than my monthly eight-page Computer Products News, a draft of which my client in New Jersey wants in the mail today? The artwork sits on my desk awaiting approval from the client's Harry. Harry has a copy of it in New Jersey right now and leaves for Japan on Tuesday . He must take printed copies of the newsletter. A multi-million-dollar project depends on this. I researched and wrote this eight-page blockbuster of deep insight in four days. People have been approving it for three weeks, and they want to see the final artwork before it goes to press.
As I paw together the newsletter artwork, a long-buried back-burner project peeks out from below. By Thursday I have to write a twenty-page press kit announcing six-book series on baby care which will, according to the news release I'm supposed to write, blow Dr. Spock out of the water. The project pile consists of not only the six books but a hundred pages of background material. I must ingest and regurgitate it all in a form that very precisely says nothing yet will whip the press into a frenzy. But not today.
I call Harry to see whether he wants to approve the newsletter artwork or explain why not to the folks in Tokyo. My theory of draft approval holds true once again: no draft will be approved until the last minute, at which time any draft, no matter how bad or vapid, will be approved. Harry approves but wants the pages rearranged so his pet peripheral is on page one. I call the printer and tell him to come get his artwork. My secretary, Friday night heavy on her mind, packages the artwork and leaves it on the front desk for messenger pick-up.
I call Norman in search of Jon. Norman knows the whereabouts of neither Jon nor the Trib article, but he is sitting with one Jan (pronounced "yawn"), who happens to be leaving for Paris in about an hour. Jan can take a copy of the unapproved article and have it re-typed in perfect English with the changes that I'll telex to him after I talk with Jon. All I have to do is get a copy to Norman. But since his office, five blocks up the avenue, is not connected to mine by telex, it is much, much further than Paris.
I call my photographer to tell him I need glossies of Shmuel by noon Monday. But he's not in. His assistant photographer, José, says no problem. José's name is mud around the agency ever since he came in to take a quick photo of Norman. It was a last-minute passport shot so Norman could fly to some faraway land. José showed up in sneakers, and Norman got miffed. Furious memos were exchanged. José got off with a warning.
I call the photoboard studio. The photoboards will be ready "before five o'clock," but that leaves the problem of getting hold of them and attaching the relevant information and shipping it all to Art Directions within the next hour. We decide I'll send the information from here to the magazine, and the studio will ship the boards directly there. I will call the magazine to explain this and to make damned sure the right information gets attached to the right photoboard. One board is a French commercial for Tang. The other is an Argentinian commercial for wine. God help Western Civilization if this gets screwed up.
I take a big swallow of spit and call Tony at home in London. Where are the photos of him and cable TV in Europe? He says he mailed them on Tuesday so they should be there by now. To make sure we have them, he will send them by courier ($300) on Monday morning, which, if I count my time zones correctly, is really Sunday night.
I call Donna. Still no sign of the interesting Danish ads for Ad World. She is still looking but swears they were in my hands when she last saw them. Have I checked my pockets?
The printer calls. His messenger came to our office and at the front desk picked up a package addressed to one La Salle. I've never heard of a La Salle, so we decide I should send a messenger to pick up the right package at the front desk, if it isn't in the hands of La Salle.
I call TV/Radio Age to tell the editor his photos of Tony and cable TV in Europe will be in his hands on Monday, but he's on another line. I promise his assistant I'll call back if I remember.
Don, the ghost writer I was just with in New Jersey, calls to say he is returning my call. I, however, have not called him recently. We say, "Well, okay." Don is writing a comprehensive history of the typewriter for my client. It was due two weeks ago but he's barely up to Pearl Harbor, which was the subject of our meeting in New Jersey. The client is Japanese. Could we make it D-Day instead? Don says he doesn't need these problems. He has recently adopted a homeless kitten named Numbskull. Numbskull has an eye infection.
Norman calls. Where's the article for Jan to take to Paris? Coming right up, I say. I make four copies to throw around Norman's department so that next time someone will have a copy. I sprint-march five blocks up the avenue in time to hand it to Jan and see him lay it beside the briefcase he's about to carry to Paris. Where is Jon, the alleged author of this vapid tome? He's in the building I just left, five blocks down the avenue. I am to call l him in Brussels on Monday to tell him his article is in Paris. If he has a copy of it, he should call Jan with any changes. If he does not have a copy, would he be content to read his article in the next issue of the Trib?
I dash down the hall to Donna's office. She's gone. I poke around until I find the interesting Danish ads, in the form of slides, under "Denmark" in her photo cabinet. Holding them up to the light, I realize that someone has to translate the ads by Tuesday. Who knows Danish? I quickly learn three words. One is "Avis," another "history," and third looks to mean "ketchup." These are all in the same slide. I don't need a translator to know it's an interesting Danish ad. I drop the slides in my pocket, take an elevator to earth and stagger hard toward the subway train and home.
During all this, in plain sight behind the pile on my desk, there stood a five-by-seven glossy of a little banana farm in Brazil. I owned that farm. I'd bought it two years before during a two-week vacation. Ten thousand dollars for ten acres with a waterfall, a swimming pool, a fish pond, two rustic houses, and all the bananas you can eat. It's sitting there waiting for me to make my move.
Last I heard, it hadn't rained there for three months, and our caretaker has been drinking heavily of the same stuff that led me to take a long shot on banana futures. Embryonic bananas are dying on the stalk. My brother-in-law Públio, a Brazilian who just graduated from metallurgy school, writes to ask if I want to go into the frozen food business with him or do I think I can survive on bananas and chinchilla skins. He accuses his mother of negativism with regard to these and other sure-fire joint ventures he's already working on, including a Christian-Marxist convention center down near the fish pond, which, he feels, would be more cost-effective as a frog tank. There is nothing to worry about, he says. He's had a man-to-man with the caretaker, who says that unless there's a drought, it always rains in September.
My wife, Suerda, works in a Brazilian bank on Fifth Avenue. She's reasonably happy there, within a quick stroll to Tiffany's, Bloomingdale's, the Helmsley Hotel, and much else that is good about the world That haughty avenue is the locus of her universe, an impressive attainment for a girl who once lived in a hamlet called Pretty Spotted Calf. You can find that place 18 kilometers from a paved highway six kilometers from a truck stop that has electricity that is 50 kilometers from a town that is a twelve-hour bus ride from the state capital which itself barely deserves the rank of cowtown, albeit a big one.
Well, okay, she didn't actually live there. Her grandmother lived there, and her mother had, too, as a child. Suerda had often visted. It was a glorious place for a kid to spend a vacation, all horses, wellwater, outhouses, country folk, kerosene lamplight, wood-fueled ovens. Her memories were so fine that she wanted to return to that life. For a while we had toyed with moving to Pretty Spotted Calf and taking over some of the family property there. We eventually reached the more reasonable compromise, a small farm a quarter mile form a paved road thee kilometers from the former capital of Brazil and two hours from the capital of the state. The farm had electricity and the town of Mariana had a university. It wasn't Fifth Avenue, but it wasn't Pretty Spotted Calf, either. Closer to the latter by almost a hundred years, it seemed ideally located, at least to me. Big Brother would never find me there.
I quit just after Christmas, collecting two weeks of vacation pay and a couple of holidays. Nobody in the office seemed surprised. At some point I had leaked about the meaning of the photo on my desk. I guess everybody knows that people like me do things like this as soon as they put a year's vacation pay in the bank. The person who replaced me was the person who I once heard say, about a certain meeting, "If I would of known, I would of went." It was a fine lap in which to leave the task of blowing Dr. Spock out of the water.
Our plan was to live poor but well. Instead of our young Ian being raised in an apartment in Queens, he'd have the countryside. Instead of spending most of his waking hours in the care of a babysitter, he'd have both parents at home. We'd raise a lot of our food, sell the occasional banana and jar of honey, maybe get into some esoteric agricultural product like silkworms or escargot. The little university in Mariana had said they'd be hiring four English teachers over the next couple of years, and I'd be more than welcome with my Master's degree, seven published books, and several years of experience at teaching English as a Second Language. Suerda had yet to see the place I'd bought, but her mother had approved it, and both of them approved of the idea.
But when I came home from my last dat at work, thenight of the company Christmas party, I found Suerda in bed, blubbering into her pillow. I was less than ideally sober, havingnot only tanked up at the party but also stopped at a bar for a quick hit of whisky. Suerda, shuddering with suppressed sobs, managed to say that we were doing something very stupid. Here we had good jobs in New York and we were giving it all up . It wasn't going to work. Why was I making us do this?
I didn't like hearing this. I'd just quit my job, and neither I nor my attitude would be welcome back. We'd already sold just about everything we couldn't carry. hip-deep in our decision, we could not turn back. Inthemost comforting words I could find - and I suppose their whiskiness didn't help - I told her it was too late to turn back. I went right on to remind her that she always did this. She escorted me into a decision, then backed off and blamed it on me. But this time I didn't care. I'd beenlooking at the picture on my desk for too long. We were going to do it. We had to.
We had sent our essentials ahead by boat - an IBM clone, some simple farm equipment, the stereo, maple syrup, twenty Persian carpets, and other things you couldn't buy in Brazil - by boat. Suerda was to stay for three more months to sock a few more dollars in the bank and collect some vested interest. I flew ahead with Ian, who was not quite yet two years old, and a malamute named Scoggin. Ian claimed squatter's rights to a patch of 747 floor space and slept across two continents and an ocean. I paced the whole way, back and forth from the smoking section to a spot on the floor near Ian. I was denied my rightful seat by an overfed lady from Argentina who had fallen asleep and toppled over. Still, a Varig 747 is a big improvement over the old Conestoga wagon. By sunrise we were in Brazil, blinking in the summer sun of Brazil.
Customs was a breeze through bureaucracy. Miraculously, I had all the requisite papers, from chest X-ray for me to "proof of sanity" papers for the dog. They kept asking for more and more papers. I got all sweated up as I pulled them from the innards of still-cool suitcases into the damp heat of the Rio airport. I bribed everybody with imported chocolate chip cookies while I searched myself for all the unexpected proofs and papers and photos and forms. Since I was immigrating and could bring in all the goods I wanted, they didn't feel the need to search my camera bag to see if I had an Italian queen bees in there. With the dour, cock-hipped attitude of someone resigned to an eighteen-hour bummer on barbituates, the mighty Scoggs held forth in his $75 cage.
From Rio we flew inland for an hour to the new international airport at Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. The airport is a vast concrete monument to the generosity and gullibility of foreign banks. The "international" aspect never developed. The lights are turned off at that end of the building. The airport was built to handle heavy traffic, but ours was the only plane on the runway, and it didn't stay long.
Iani, the older of my two brothers-in-law, picked us up. He had a friend with him, a language freak who wanted to practice his English. He had a joke about the fool who exchanged a Rolls Royce for a burro. It took me half the hour-long ride to town to figure out he meant me, trading a job in New York for a hardscrabble farm in Minas Gerais.
Scoggin rode the whole way with his nose out the window, sucking up the smell of fuel alcohol and wood smoke. The alcohol powers cars. Made from distilled sugar cane juice, it's the same stuff that powers drunks. I, personally, can't get enough of the stuff. It's too bad they mix a little gasoline into the fuel that you buy at the gas station to keep people from drinking it. The potable stuff is called cachaça and pinga and lots of other things. You can buy it in a store, but that stuff's always pretty hard to swallow. But when you get da roça, ("off the farm"), it's quite good. Also quite cheap. Three dollars gets you a jug called a "galão."
Scoggs quickly set various records in the in-laws' apartment. He was the first malamute, first of any dog, first quadruped and first non-human, non-insect animal to enter this sterile household in this sterile upper-middle-class neighborhood in the capital of Minas Gerais. At lunch on the first day I was entertained with the question, "Do dogs sleep?" This came from Públio, a Christian-Marxist Rosacrucian metallurgist who claims to know all the technology involved in raising chinchillas and frogs.
He had reason to wonder. The Scoggs had not yet evinced his remarkable capabilities in this area. Best he'd managed so far was to lie down for four seconds and slurp spit. Then he'd get back up and pant around, dripping dime-sized spots all over the parquet floors. This was no place for a dog bred in Alaska and born on the northern end of the Androscoggin River in Vermont.
Mentally, I, too, was dripping at the tongue and panting for the chance to pee on something green. For some reason I expected things here to move as fast as they had in New York. I expected to be settled into my farm in a matter of hours. But four days later, I still hadn't seen the place. The hold-up was the bees. The queens I'd brought, on Públio's advice, looked ill upon arrival. I suppose if we looked close enough we could see their little tongues hanging out. Públio's pseudo-savoir-faire almost put an end to them. His solution to sluggish bees was to take them out of their special little candy-filled boxes, where they have the company of drones, and put them in a big cardboard box with holes punched in it. He dropped in a couple of flowers to cheer them up. The flowers wilted; the drones died; the queens collapsed. On the advice of his horse-sense mother, Gracinha, his brother, Iani, drove me and the bees to an expert on the outskirts of town. The expert, who is also a car mechanic, is transferring them to nucleus hives which we will take to the farm in Mariana as soon as the Italian queens are accepted into the crowd of Mestizos. The Mestizos are the famous killer bees tempered a bit by strains of Italian lingering from way back. The theory is, if we install a fertilized Italian queen, the next generation of workers will be nice and friendly.
Why I brought these queens from the U.S. I do not know, except that Públio said I should. It turned out one could buy fertilized Italian queens in Brazil for a quarter the cost and a tenth the trouble. Having discovered this, I'm glad I neglected to bring the eighteen-pound stud meat frog he suggested.
Suerda called, crying, to tell us not to let Ian sleep uncovered, crawl around the streets, eat fromthe gutter, bathe alone, etc. I didn't tell her about the diaper problem. For that week and several to come, the family never managed to find cloth diapers. I don't know why not. Gracinha kept promising to but not delivering. The best she could come up with was some squares of gauze that did no more than serve the function of a sieve. I had a couple of diapers I'd brought, but they were always wet because the rain never stopped. I kept running to the pharmacy to buy very expensive disposable diapers.
Scoggin and Ian both go berserk when I leave the apartment without them. Scoggin paws at the door, scraping the paint. Ian puts the top of his head against the wall and lets gobs of tears drip straight down into a puddle.
Bad news came one day at lunch. Someone casually dropped mention that a kid had found a nice nugget of gold on our land. This was not a total surprise. The farm is just over the mountain from the little city of Ouro Preto, which in the seventeenth century was the largest city in the Americas. Ouro Preto's success was built on gold. The town's name means Black Gold, so named for the iron ore so common in the area. In fact, the long, high ridge that rises behind our farm looks like solid iron. Apparently some of the iron is gold, too. A stream tumbles off the ridge in a steep, narrow gulch until it reaches the edge of our land. From there it winds along our border. That's where the kid found the gold. Apparently the heavy rains washed it down from the ridge. So now raggedy prospectors, called garimpeiros, are sniffing at our gates, as it were. I don't like this. The local saying is that the heavy metals, gold and lead, attract. They don't mean lead poisoning. They mean bullets.
And garimpeiros aren't the only ones sniffing around. Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD), the local mining company (and also the world's largest) has been showing interest in the ridge. I don't know how interested, and no one at the lunch table seemed to think this worth much mention. Gracinha suggested maybe we think about selling the farm before Vale opens a mine nearby. The mere possibility put murderous thoughts in my head. Shoveling rice, collards and black beans into my mouth, I considered some very creative and satisfying ways that I might contribute a little heavy metal to the situation. I'd get a machine gun. I'd hide in a cave behind the waterfall. I'd wage war against the world's largest mining company until I brought it to its knees and got my farm back and an apology for the inconvenience.
I'm a writer. I get to indulge in fantasies like that. It's my job. Like any good writer or fantasizer, I can see my dreams as if they're really happening, as if I'm really part of them. As I imagine doing a Rambo on CVRD, my heart beat speeds up and my eyes shift around. I have trouble swallowing food right. I don't notice what's going on around me unless somebody snaps me out of it. My single-handed guerrilla war turns into a national revolution of the poor and down-trodden with yours truly the spiritual leader. That'll teach anybody to mess with my farm.
I saw The Wizard of Oz on TV with subtitles. It certainly reminds one of the beauty of one's language to see "If ever-o-ever a Wiz there was, the Wizard of Oz is One because" translated as "He's a good magician." The Lion's one-line wish for "duh noive" comes out as mere "Couragem." The Portuguese word for the Wizard's "savoir-faire" is "know-how," pronounced quite the same as it is in English. Then he flies off in his balloon and the situation looks hopeless. But the Good Witch's bubble comes floating in, and I know what's due to happen next. Dorothy's going to click her ruby heels together and say "There's no place like home, there's no place like home," and then wake up. Everybody will tell her tell her it was only a dream and she will tell them, "No! No! It was a real place! It was real! I was there!"
But I don't want to hear that. I want to go to bed. I roll the window open so I can hear the rain. Along with that sound comes the tumescent chugging of a Carnaval "school" warming up for the big event just a few weeks away. Twenty or fifty people are out there in the rain, thumping on drums, shaking their tambourines, blowing their whistles, rapping on percussion instruments that date back to primeval Africa. It sounds like an inebriated locomotive. I'm glad they're half a mile away. If they weren't, I'd have to listen to everybody complain about it. I fall asleep twitching my toes to the pulsating racket, floating in it, carried away like the Wizard in his big balloon.
It was ten days before I finally got to my farm. I was practically wimpering with frustration by that time. Nobody seemed to understand that I'd been looking at a photo of the place for over a year, that the expectation was all that kept me going through the insanity and mundanity of the public relations business. For over a year I'd been collecting information about farm equipment, organic farming, the pros and cons of various crops and animals, how-to's of every sort.
Under the pressure of such expectations, ten days was a long, long time to spend in an apartment that didn't have a single plant in it. The dog wanted to go out. The boy wanted to go out. The rain never let up for more than an hour. The in-law's kept asking me things like was I sure I wanted to be a farmer and did I think Suerda was going to like the house. My father-in-law, somewhat off his rocker at the age of seventy-three, sat around in his wrinkled suit all day thinking up questions like "Which state in your country has the most scorpions?" and "How much does an apartment cost in a city like Minneapolis?" From years ago, I knew enough not to invest serious thought in answers. With all confidence I told him Texas had the most scorpions, and an apartment in a nice neighborhood in Minneapolis could be had for fifty grand.
Finally, faced with the alternatives of getting out of there or damaging the walls with my head, I announced I was going to my farm. Even though I didn't quite remember how to get to the place, I'd take a bus to Mariana and figure something out. Gracinha then agreed to go with me. Ian was a good boy on the two-hour bus trip, and in Mariana we found a taxi to take us the three miles outside of town. The farm was right where I remembered leaving it. We turned left onto a dirt trail just after a big, black boulder. Over the next quarter mile, we had to cross two streams, one hip-deep to a hubcap and as wide as the car was long. The other was half as wide and deep, and there began my land.
Brazilians laughed when I used the word fazenda for the place. A fazenda normally connotes thousands of acres. What they called my place was a sitio, which is related to the word "site." It's common for a city dweller of rural root to have a sitio outside of town, a small house with a few acres around it, a hobby farm. But I would sooner plunge a butcher knife through my heart than admit I had a hobby farm. I had a fazenda. Never mind if it couldn't support a lone cow. For someone who'd just done two years in an apartment in Queens, I had vast acreage. How many acres? I didn't really know. Figuring acreage is a confusing thing in Minas Gerais. They deal with a unit called an alqueiri, which can have any of various measurements. There are big alqueiris and small ones, São Paulo ones and Mineiro ones. I could never get a majority vote on how many hectares an alqueiri should have. (A hectare is about 2.5 acres.) A book would tell you 4.84 or 2.42 hectares, or maybe 27,225 square meters, but few people could agree on that, which meant that when somebody told me I had so many alqueiris, I never knew just what they meant. Real estate agents are especially bad at this. Being lousy at mathematics, I can't convert hectares into acres with any certainty. Not that any of this matters. If perchance a piece of land has been surveyed, one never knows if the surveyor was paid off to make the place look smaller to save taxes, or larger, to make the land worth more. So never mind how much land I had. It was more than I'd ever had before, more than I'd ever dreamed of having.
As far was quality goes, I had a kingdom, an Eden of fountain and fruit. The stream that ran along the lower edge of the property tumbled down from a mountain of iron, gold, mica, granite and other minerals. The lower third of the land was flat. A pipe tapped the stream water to feed a concrete swimming pool. Water fed from the pool into a fish pond and trickled from there across the lower third. Fruit trees in this section included orange, tangerine, two kinds of lime, lemon, guava, mango, papaya and avocado. Among the berry tries were a powerfully flavored pitanga, an addictively delicious grape-sized thing called jabuticaba, and what I believe were mulberries.
And of course banana. The former owner had big dreams of making a killing in bananas. He had them planted everywhere. I was told there were three thousand of them. Unfortunately, as I was to learn, he planted the kind that grew fastest, not the kind that people wanted to buy.
Near the road (or trail, depending on how high the median weeds were), near where the stream crossed, was a small uninhabited house of mud-and-stick walls and moldy clay roof tiles. A hundred yards up from that was the gate to the farm. The driveway, bordered by very tall, straight eucalyptus, ran a few hundred yards across the side of a hill. As one drove up, the pool, pond, and stream were down on the left, and the main house stood high on the right overlooking it all. The hill was really just a big bump on the side of the steep, high ridge above it.
The taxi driver said he knew the place and the former owner, a painter with a reputation for insanity or even, in some people's opinion, stupidity. Our driver met him late one night after his caretaker, our very own Zé Maria de Morais, had arrived in town breathless from having run the whole way. He needed a taxi. His boss had gotten drunk and dived into the pool to sober up. But earlier that day, Zé, in a rare burst of initiative, had drained the pool of all but an inch of water.
The house could pass for rustic. The floors were concrete, the walls a poor quality of brick painted white, the ceiling a mat of woven strips of a bamboo called taquara. The windows were quaint colonial style: just framed holes in the wall with heavy shutters to close them. The bathroom had the kind of basic toilet and sink you'd find in your basic Texaco station. The kitchen could qualify as worse if your tastes leaned toward luxury and style. It had a gas stove, a big white enamel sink, and the typical mineiro wood stove - a wait-high brick rectangle with a trench down the middle. One made one's cooking fire in the trench and set pots into a grill that had round holes in it. For some reason, most of the smoke followed the trench to a clay pipe at the far end. The smoke that escaped just wafted up to sift through the clay tiles of the roof. No matter which way your tastes lean, this fogão de lenha made much better food than the gas stove. Even rich people would tell you this. Not that they'd gather firewood orput up with smoke in their kitchens, but they'd be glad to go to somebody's grandmother's house and have rice and beans cooked the right way.
Gracinha took to this wood stove like an old ball player slipping on a mitt. She was raised in Pretty Spotted Calf. Her father had settled the place, turning barren outback into productive cattle land. Once when I was there with her, we were on a rise overlooking a vast valley. I asked her how far her family's land went. She waved he arm across the entire fifty-mile landscape and said "All of it." But by that time, it was all bush country again. A few relatives remained but barely eked a living out of it. That place had inspired Suerda to abandon the fruits of Fifth Avenue. In its more glorious days, the couple hundred people of Pretty Spotted Calf had lived well, albeit without the world's flashier products. Pantries held unlimited stocks of homemade preserves. Every visit, evenby a neighbor, brought a table of candied oranges, fresh cheesebread, butter and milk from a family cow. Every lunch was a feast of rice, beans, collards, sausage, beef, corn and everything else a hungry cowboy could wolf down. The slaughter of a pig called for a special banquet. On holidays, people danced in thelight of bonfires and kerosene lamps. Grandmother had herbs to cure anything, from a bad coughs to snake bites. In the morning, they drank brandy-laced milk still warm and frothy from the udder.
So the smell of a wood stove was home to her, and so was the land. After ordering Zé to start hoeing down the weeds, she set to showing me how to farm semi-tropical land. The garden had to be planted in raised beds. You could plant a pineapple anywhere by breaking off shoots that grow from adult plants, picking off their lower scales to expose the little white roots, and sticking them in little holes in the ground. If you've got a little 10-10-10 fertilizer, mix it with the soil you pat around the base. She showed me the various types of weeds to pull up. She told me not to walk around in sandals because of the snakes, and not to pick up rocks or logs without being ready to drop them if I saw a spider or scorpion underneath. I was more likely to find the latter in the cool, dry months: June, July and August. I'd find them in the house, too; it would be wise to shower with sandals on.
Here's what I learned about bananas: They aren't trees; they're stalks, like celery. You let them grow in sets of three generations: the twenty-foot-tall so-called grandmother, which is about to bear fruit; the mother, due to bear in six months to a year, depending on the type of banana; and the granddaughter, who's just a couple of feet tall. More will sprout from roots, but you have to dig them up. If you stick them in the ground elsewhere, they'll probably grow.
Banana leaves starting to turn brown - the ones lowest on the stalk - need to be sliced off. The stems are stringy, so you can't tear them off without injuring the trunk. You slice them, upward, with a machete. Pigs will eat these leaves, but they can get busha, which, according to my dictionary, means "plug," which can kill a pig. This does not happen to rabbits, so feed the leaves to them. But don't feed wet leaves (or wet anything) to a guinea pig or it will die.
Lopping off the phallic purple thing dangling from the bottom of bunch of bananas will help them fatten up. If God gave this purple thing and purpose, Dona Gracinha hasn't heard about it.
Cut the bunch from the stalk when they are ripe. Zé Maria will know when this moment arrives. Use a small knife to cut each "hand" of bananas from the stalk. Pile them up on the floor and cover them with a newspaper until they ripen. They bruise just as easily green as ripe. To keep from bruising them when you cut them off, cut them so they fall into a drum of water.
Once you've cut the bunch from the stalk, use your machete to hack a deep wound down low in the trunk. Let the sap dribble out for a while. It will leave nutriments for the mother and granddaughter, who have just moved up a rank. Then cut the stalk down. With three whacks of a sharp machete you can fell a stalk as thick as a telephone pole. If you want to prevent a certain bug from attacking your crop, slice part of the trunk in half the long way, lay it open, and dribble a certain poison on it. Lay the rest of the trunk in such a position that it will stop some of the rainwater flowing down hill past the plant. To fertilize a banana plant, use your heel to dig a shallow half moon on the uphill side and sprinkle in some 10-10-10.
Eat bananas only before lunch. If you eat them in the afternoon, you will get sick. If you eat them at night, you will die.
Speaking of death, I didn't like the talk about scorpions lurking wherever it might be cool and dark. Scorpions were not part of my master plan at all. I had a two year old who, like his father, was drawn to the underside of things. He got so dirty so fast we had no choice but to let him run around half-naked, then completely naked except for a pair of bright red rubber boots. His clothes hung all over the bathroom, wet until the end of the rainy season. Every few hours we'd hose him down, which, of course, he loved.
In fact, he loved everything about this farm. He loved the dirt, the pond, the fire in the kitchen, his red boots, the hammock on the porch. He'd never seen a body of water before, but when I carried him to the pond, he was reaching for a rock before I set him down. He knew just what to do with it - something the richest man in New York cannot do in his backyard yet undoubtedly would if given the chance. Kerplop: the miraculous movement of a splash, the famous ripples spreading across the sheen of water. The boy had no pants but he looked awful happy. He had a purpose in life that went on beyond dirt. I don't know if it's genetic necessity or the happenstance of cosmic balance, but it seems foreordained that boys be attracted to the opposites of water and filth.
At night it got dark. That would seem rather self-evident to anyone who had not been living in New York, where the nighttime sky is the color of pus. When I carried Ian outside that first clear night, he literally gasped with surprise when he saw the blaze of the Milky Way stretched across the center of the sky. His arm and index finger shot straight up in the air so I'd be sure to see it, too. I'd seen it before, but not recently, and never at the end of a finger the size of an elbow macaroni. I'd forgotten the scintillating intensity of galaxies in a black sky. The clarity at that altitude - Mariana is about 3,000 feet above sea level - made light years look within reach. I felt frustrated not to be able to go up there for a closer look. As usual, the spectacle inspired musings on the vastness of the universe, the pettiness of all below. It's hard to get a handle on infinity, but it's also hard to see yourself as a speck of dust when you've got a two year old in your arms and a few thousand fruit trees to your name.
We had chosen to live in Mariana for several reasons. One was that this town and its neighbor, Ouro Preto, are among the most beautiful in the world. Both have been largely preserved as they have been for centuries. Mariana is a national monument; Ouro Preto is a national and, as declared by UNESCO, a world monument. Both are towns of cobblestone, plastered pau-a-pique mud-and-stick buildings, and ancient cathedrals. Chique basement restaurants ssport original slave shackles still embedded in their rock walls.
The politicalpattern of modern Brazil took form in Ouro Preto in the eighteenth century. Slaves made up the vast majority of the region's population. A few Portuguese lorded over them, using them as mining machinery to gouge gold from the rocky hills. Apparently few slave slived more than a few years after arriving. It was cheaper to bring in new ones than to properly feed and house the ones already in use. Far less free and well treated than their more fortunate brethren in North American. Fueled on sugar cane juice, they worked and slept in chains. The gold went back to Portugal. Unlike theNorthAmerican colonialists, the Portuguese crossed the ocean only to exploit the land, get rich quick and return to Europe. When, in 16--, a young man known as Tiradentes (the name means "Pull-tooth." He was anitinterant dentist.) suggested that Brazil was not Portugual and that Brazilian miners not be required to sell their gold to the crown, he was drawn, quartered and beheaded. As a warning to others, the Porutugese displayed his severed head on a pole in the central plaza of Ouro Preto. Though theevent came to nothing, Tiradentes Day is the biggest patriotic holiday. Brazil did't become independent until 18--, and then not by any national effort but simply by the good graces of the Portuguese King -- , who simply handed the country its indepedence because he liked the place. Ouro Preto retained its reputation as the cradle of revolution. During the military rule that began in 1964, the town, heavily populated by college students, was especially active in protest, however ineffective.
I liked that. Until Belo Horizonte was planned and built to be the capital of Minas Gerais ("General Mines") in the late eighteenth century, Ouro Preto was the state capital. I saw the state as the New England of Brazil. It was a elatively cool, mountainous state of rocky land and dairy farms, a place famous for its conservative, indepndent, taciturn, tight-fisted people. I figured I'd fit into a place like that quite well.
Besides, Ouro Preto was the prettiest city I'd ever seen. Unmarred by billboards or gas stations, it looked quite like it did a hundred years ago. Cobblestones were the only pavement. Magnificent baroque churches, built on the wealth of gold two or three hundred years ago, rose among houses built before the American Revolution. It struck me as a kind of Williamsburg where people really lived. Appropriately enough, the town was the site of a federal university of mining, minerology and metallurgy.
I especially liked the fact that Mariana, a small version of Ouro Preto, had a college, the Instituto de Ciências Humanas e Sociais, which was part of Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto. Having opened just a couple of years earlier, ICHS was scheduled to need English teachers in the upcoming semesters. I was a natch for the job. The director, a middle-aged priest known as the Cônego, had written to me to express his delight at my joining his faculty. So of course I was very surprised to hear him now ask me if I'd revalidated my diploma.
Gracinha and Ian - he in her lap - and I were sitting in the Cônego's office in the centuries-old former monastery of the school. Like most old Brazilian buildings, the ceiling was high, the walls of unadorned plaster, the floors of bare wood. Nothing broke or absorbed sound, so the Cônego's voice, though thin and dry, boomed against itself like a song in a shower stall. I couldn't quite understand him, couldn't quite believe he was telling me that foreign diplomas are not "valid" in Brazil. Qualifications have little to do with applying for a job. One needs the right papers, and a valid diploma is one of them. In fact, the word "qualificaçoes" refers to one's papers, not one's abilities.
A valid diploma isn't all I need in the package of red tape. I need proof of sanity, which means I have to pay a doctor to verify that I can touch my toes, stand on one foot , and survive a blood pressure test. I have to produce proof of residence. This item is merely evidence that I live somewhere. A specific address is not part of it. But the chief of police says that recent "debureaucratization" has eliminated the need to ever produce such proof. In fact he says it's against the law for him to provide one. We return to the Cônego and tell him that, but he says that as long as the item is on the list of requisite documents, I have to produce it. So we go back to the police station and hand over a "fee" and get a note that says I do indeed have a spot on Earth. The note says nothing about the waterfall, the fruit trees, the gold.
But this is nothing compared with the bureaucracy needed to revalidate a diploma. The purpose of revalidation is to ensure that all diplomas are equal. For my B.A. in Philosophy to equal a Brazilian diploma in philosophy, I have to have taken the exact same required courses. This includes so many credits in Portuguese literature, so many in physical education, so many in Studies of Contemporary Brazilian Problems. My course in "Ancient Philosophy" does not substitute the required "Greek Philosophy." The head of the philosophy department of the federal university in Belo Horizonte, a sympathetic woman who called the process "Kafkaesque," counted up what I lacked and figured it would take me three years of full-time study to get my undergraduate diploma. The whole process could take a decade. She knew of a case involving an actual nun with two Ph.D.s and assorted master's degrees who spent a number of years trying to get something revalidated so she could teach.
On top of this, there's the paperwork. I needed a copy of all diplomas I have ever received, and translations by a certified translator, of which there are two among the three million inhabitants of Belo Horizonte. (Of those two, only one knows English; the other is more useful because rather than translate things, he just takes a bribe and lets you translate as you feel fit.) I need stamped originals plus official translations of all transcripts. I need a translation of all course descriptions for courses I've taken, and of course the English originals from the school catalogues from the years when I took the courses. I need copies and translations of every page in my passport, including the blank ones. I'd need notarized copies of my federal identification card. I need a stamped original of my birth certificate. I need proof of marriage. Someone told me that even someone coming from Portugal would need all these translations, from Portuguese to Portuguese, because translations were required for all foreign documents.
I need to have this package ready in about two weeks. As in most bureaucracies, there is an obstacle to every possible step forward but a possible way around every obstacle. My first attempt is to the dean of the federal university in Ouro Preto. He turns out to be a semi-illiterate fellow, a political appointee in leather jacket, tight pants and a little mustache that must drive the little girlies right out of their minds. His only diploma is from a public high school. I very stupidly present him with a full set of my published books before hearing that he can do nothing for me. He doesn't even seem to want the books. The way he holds them I can tell he doesn't think they're worth the bother of carrying home.
Gracinha, good mother-in-law that she is, tells me not to worry. In Brazil they have something called a jeitinho - "a little way" - a quasi-corrupt form of Yankee ingenuity. When you meet the impossible obstacle - and Brazil seems to be founded on them - you will always find a way around. The jeitinho often involves a friend who knows the right person in the government, or a "tip" to the right bureaucrat.
I have one ally in this and other ventures - Lázaro de Francisco, a professor of philosophy at ICHS. He owns a sitio just up the road from my farm. He sees me as his ally, too. He has dreams of living on his land with his wife and son, who happen to be the same age as my wife and son. I'll be his only neighbor who knows how to read. I'll also be his ally at ICHS, which apparently is viciously political, with students, faculty and maintenance workers all voting on such matters as the appointment of department heads. He warns me not to expect much support from the faculty. Neither they nor the Cônego have much need for anyone who has ideas about quality education or who might be more qualified than they. But, he says, if I keep looking, I'll find the chink in their wall of obstacles. Ultimately, all I'm looking for is the simple act of whacking the back of my diploma with the right stamp. Ultimately, someone will do that.
Lázaro knows how to look like a Marxist - a good idea if you want to secure popularity among the students. Behind his thin beard and unkempt appearance, he's a closet entrepreneur. He told me of a "close encounter of the third kind" when a young man walked into his office to announce, "As a representative of Communism International, I would like to inform you that we support you and your activities for the party." Whoa! thought he. There's such a thing as being too Marxist. He had the kid sit down and listen to a little dialectical transcendentalism. He piled it up deep and long and pointlessly enough for the kid to know better than to bring up that topic again. Normally Lázaro is Marxist only to the point of remembering to relate Socrates or Kant to Marxist philosophy. All he really has to do, he says, is toss out the word "dialectics." Nobody knows what it means; they just want to hear it now and then. It puts dimension in the class.
Lázaro's political position was beautifully illustrated the time I found him sitting shirtless in the shade of a mango tree beside the stream near my farm. He was reading Mao's Little Red Book while half a dozen peasant kids washed his red Ford station wagon. He came up to the house and we talked of how to make money raising rabbits, bees, escargot, mushrooms, and other things no on else was doing. He predicted the eventual economic collapse of Brazil. Under the corrosive elements of bureaucracy and corruption, the system would unravel and disintegrate like a flawed argument. The survivors would be those with land, the ability to grow food, and friends among the peasantry.
* * *
I bought a brown square-back Volkswagen in Belo at a weekly event called Catalão. Originally that was just the name of the Volkswagen dealer on Avenida Catalão. But clever entrepreneurs figured out that people go to buy Volkswagens because they don't want to spend much money. So guys would park their used cars near the dealer and wait for customers to come by. Pretty soon it's the place to peddle your car on Sundays. The VW dealer no longer bothers to open on that day. The whole avenue, including the median strip, is lined with cars backing and filling, honking, testing brakes, racing engines, flipping windshield wipers, sealing deals with a beer, sincere reiterations of honesty, and a promise to appear at such-and-such a bank the next morning for an exchange of documents and cash. Streets kids offer to hold parking spots, wash cars, push-start the feeble, sell beer and popsicles out of isoprene coolers, fetch cigarettes. The barzinhos do a fine business with an exceptionally fast turnover. A couple of gas stations make piles of dough doing quick inspections. The air is thick and slimy with the smell of fuel alcohol and exhaust.
Iani took me there. His sisters squawked at him to not let me get ripped off. We liked the looks of a Willy's Jeep, but the steering was so shot I couldn't turn around. Iani warned me that the owner was from Rio, a carioca, and thus suspect in any kind of deal. He could tell by the tan - the sun hadn't shined in Belo for three months - and by the attitude. Mineiros don't wear gold chains and flowery shirts and talk with a slur that sounds like slippers scuffing down the sidewalk. Mineiros don't talk and talk and talk, and their eyes don't twinkle. They're slow to make a deal, hard put to part with words. "We talk little and listen a lot," says Iani. He also warns me that cars from Rio are corroded with sea salt.
We close in on a 1972 square-back called a Variant. At the equivalent of $320, it's about the cheapest car with less than twenty years on it and no visible rust. It runs on gasoline, not alcohol, which is seen as a plus in a used car. (New cars that run on alcohol get a tax break.) The owner puts plenty of words into his description of the car, but he doesn't wink and compare it to a woman. He's a scrubby-looking guy, short, dark and several days unshaven. His car drives all right but I don't have the language to haggle. Neither does Iani. The owner has the stubbornness that mineiros are famous for. He actually has me worried that I might not get to buy his car. The rain is to his advantage. I want to take ownership of my car and get out of there. We pay the equivalent of $315. Before we leave, he takes a siphon and a liter container of gasoline from the trunk. It was the gas he needed to drive back home. Iani and I figure this out about three blocks down the road when the tank runs dry.
I spent the next day in a live version of a recurring dream. In the dream, I have some simple task to perform, something I want to do very much. But an obstacle crops up, and to get around it, I have to perform some relatively minor but thoroughly essential task. But there's an obstacle to that, too, and another task to perform. By the end of the night, I am trying to re-alphabetize a scrambled phone book so I can call the doctor who can restore life to my asphixiated son.
So went my day. I was trying to register my new car. Thanks to the recent debureaucratization program, this was supposed to be possible in half a day without a despachante - a kind of pseudo-sub-paralegal individual who knows what forms to fill out and where to get them and in what order. His office will have a typewriter on which the forms can be filled out.
But to go to the motor vehicle department, I have to change the brake pads on Iani's Passat, which is a VW Scirocco, I believe. It so happens I know how to do this. I can do most of the job with my Swiss Army knife, but eventually I get to the point where I need a wrench. When I ask Iani for one, he looks as if I've just asked for a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Iani, despite his general intelligence, doesn't know a tool from a hole in the ground. He thinks his father has one, though, so I go over there. The girls suspect the family owns one, but if so, it's locked in a certain closet, and the key is in the pocket of their father, and he's at the dentist.
So I leave Iani's car up on a jack and take a bus to the transportation department. Never mind the rigmarole there. I stand in line after line to pick up forms, hand in forms, get forms approved. I have to go across the street to a bank to pay the fees, and there's a big line over there. Some of the people in the line are despachantes with sheaves of documents and individual fees to pay. It takes a long time. I think of a new rule for dealing with just about anything in Brazil: Never leave home without a book.
I wanted to get out of town and back to my farm. It didn't matter that it was about to rain, I hadn't eaten all day, and my car suddenly seemed to need a new battery. My bees were ready and my dog was climbing the walls, so I threw hives and dog and assorted possessions (but not Ian) into the car and took off. I picked up a hitch-hiker to help push if I ever shut down the engine. That happened just once, when some kind of a tax inspector pulled me over to see what all the junk was I had in the back of the car. When I told him bees, he left quick.
It was a long drive. The windshield wipers barely worked, the window fogged inside and out, the hole in the muffler got worse with every kilometer, and the alignment, perhaps of the car frame, was so far off I had to struggle to hold the car on the road. The headlights were so dim I couldn't tell if they were on. The steering wheel was a tiny thing no bigger than a dinner plate, and the dozen or so tiny bolts that held it on kept vibrating loose.
I lived to reach Mariana but faced a life-and-death situation at the first stream I had to cross. It was swollen with rain. The guy who had owned the farm before me, the one who dived into the empty swimming pool, was drunk another time and tried to cross the stream when the water was high. It swept his car fifty meters closer to the ocean, where it lodged in some brush. Zé had to spend the night in it to keep robbers away. I knew this as I paused at the edge of the muddy swirl. Was I going to spend the night in a hot, humid car with a hot, humid dog? Was a foot and a half of water going to stop me from reaching my farm? Of course not. I plowed through, emerging just a few feet downstream from where I'd started.
The house was locked, and my key, a rusty old skeleton, didn't work. It didn't seem to be the right key at all. Zé had another key. I hollered and hollered down toward his house at the end of the driveway. I honked my horn, but all I got was a low moan in the rain. Resigning myself to ending a hard day thoroughly wet, I walked down to his house and banged on the door. No one responded. I ran back up to the house, fiddled with the lock, tried all the windows. Zé had secured the place well. Now what? It didn't make sense that Zé wasn't home. Where would he and wife and three kids go? They probably hadn't been not home for fifteen years. I ran back down and banged hard on their door. Zé finally woke up. When he came up to the house and tried my key, it worked perfectly. It's a matter of applying a little jeitinho. Maybe the best translation for that word is jiggle.
* * *
Scoggs and I led a primitive, hand-to-mouth life. We cooked from dented aluminum pots with no lids and a frying pan with no handle. I drank from a single glass. Scoggs ate boiled pig feed. The bed was a ratty mattress over slats of wood that moved in the night. Bugs crawled and flew everywhere. Dampness nurtured fungi-algae growths on the walls. I found tiny mushrooms growing from the primordial depths of the shower drain. We had no radio or clock or even a book. We didn't know the time for days. We even lost track of the days. It didn't matter. All I did was work until I was too hungry or tired to go on. I couldn't go three steps in any direction without finding a hose that needed mending, a banana leaf to lop off, a pineapple to plant, a weed to pull, a rock to move, a bug to step on, some rotten guava to gather and heave into the pond for the fish. E.B. White was right when he said farming is twenty percent agriculture and eighty percent fixing what's busted.
Rain dripped through the tile roof. A tile was either cracked or out of position. I climbed up into the jungle of cobwebs to find the guilty one. The beams that held up the taquara were unshaven eucalyptus trunks that bent as I crept along them. The space up there was crisscross-crossed by extension cord wire taped and tied together at crazy intersections. But it was hard to find the leak after the rain had stopped, and I wasn't about to go up there when lightning might strike. I adjusted a tile that looked out of place, but adjusting one meant adjusting the ones above and below it. By the time I finished, I'd adjusted most of the roof. But with the next downpour, the leak was worse.
Having no radio or stereo in the house, I found my mind replaying songs both big and small in remarkable detail. They appeared unbidden and at random, some welcome, some not. It was miraculous to have Beethoven's Ninth, The Gates of Kiev or Yo-Yo Ma's Bach solos filling my head. Sometimes, though, it was some stupid show tune or patriotic folk song haling back to the third grade. Zé must have thought me nuts as I went around whistling, humming, finger-tapping, teeth-clicking, head-swaying to The 1812 Overture or Fool on the Hill.
I had water problems all over the place. One was the 500 liter tank that perched on the wall that divided the kitchen from the bathroom. It filled awfully slowly - not a problem of water supply but of noise. A single flush of the toilet would leave it trickling all night. That's a lot of noise when the only other sound is the whir of bugs and the distant rush of a waterfall. So I climbed up above the ceiling again to have a look. I ended up yanking out the incoming hose and the valve it was attached to, releasing a stream of water into the kitchen. I patched it by wrapping the plastic of a milk sack - milk comes in plastic sacks - around the hose and fastening the plastic down with a strip of wire. I jammed it back into the hole where the water was coming out, and it seemed to hold.
I felt myself quite the master plumber. I knew my water system from beginning to end. It started at the stream just below the waterfall. Some of the water thundered into a gulch of lush vegetation, eventually to follow the border of my land. But some of the water was channeled off to follow the path along the side of the hill above the gulch. This fed into a shallow concrete reservoir the size of a parking space. A three-inch-wide hose ran down from the reservoir to a gravity pump.
What a miraculous device, the gravity pump. It looks like a cross between a fire hydrant and the Fatboy bomb they dropped on Hiroshima, but actually it's the long-sought perpetual motion machine. Somehow, without electricity, it feeds water uphill to a big concrete tank on the hill above the house, well above the reservoir where the system started. Day and night the little pump goes clip-clop-clip-clop-clip-clop, ejaculating spurts of water into the tank three hundred yards away. But things could go wrong with this pump. A couple of things had to adjusted just right. The feed hose had to pack solid pressure. The local word for such a pump is carneiro, which means sheep. They call it this for its stupidity, though I'm not sure if it's stupid for working non-stop without complaint or for no reason simply refusing to work.
When that pump didn't work, we could use an electric pump, though it didn't work very well either. No one knew exactly how to do it. You had to prime it with water, but for some mysterious reason, sometimes it did a marvelous job of shooting a powerful stream of water into the tank, and sometimes it just wouldn't pump anything. Often as not, the pressure would burst a hose. Zé or I would have to find a strip of rubber from an inner tube and wire it around the hole. Sometimes we had to cut out a section and fit a new piece in, softening the rubber with a burning banana leaf and cramming it into the adjacent section. I couldn't help but wish some bizarre circumstance would plop me back on Third Avenue in New York at the moment a piece of hose bursts in my old office. I'd save the day. I'd say, "Quick, somebody get me a dry banana leaf and old inner tube."
Scoggin went nuts with liberty. This was a big change from the apartment and sidewalks in Queens. He had a lot to smell, all of it new. He never stopped moving. Like R.L. Stevenson's mysterious night rider, by he goes by at the gallop and then, by he comes back at the gallop again. He galloped over to a neighbor's place and killed a couple of chickens. Then he gave a couple of cows some exercise. Everybody's afraid of him. The dogs around here aren't very big, and a malamute looks enough like a wolf to make people worry. This, of course, is just what he's for. I wish he'd get serious about the garimpeiros mucking around in the stream. But he's more interested in a filthy little wench of mixed breed named Picuinha, which means Pesky, which she is. So are her fleas. She looks like a degenerated, inbred beagle, but something about her seems pampered and princess-ish. I try to keep her outside, but she manages to sneak in and sleep on the couch, where she seems to think she belongs. It hurts to chase her out. I don't know why I bother. The couch belongs outside, too.
Right outside my kitchen door is a tree with limes that are orange inside. They make an excellent juice. I squeeze a half into a glass of water, mix in some sugar, and drink it on the porch while I cool off and maybe have a smoke. I drink ten or twenty glasses a day. The water comes from a clay pot they call a filter. You pour water in the top section and it soaks through a porous cylinder to dribble into the lower section. The clay being semi-porous, a constant evaporation cools the water inside to something slightly below room temperature. It's a perfect temperature for water, and good water it is, full of untold minerals, especially iron. I've had some breathtaking bowel movements, hard as rock. I take this as a sign of good health attributable to good water.
I took my spade and yellow bucket up the mountain in search of dung where cattle roam. I filled it in no time but abandoned it to go exploring. Typical of most mountains, this one had no precise top, just a succession of parallel ridges rolling into the distance. I got pretty high up, high enough to see how our little farm would look in an aerial photograph.
Among the scrub brush lay patches of rock that seem poured, like lava. I found what looked like gold and diamonds though no doubt they were pyrite and quartz. I found two caves big enough to stand up in. Neither had the inevitable cigarette butts or beer cans you'd find anywhere in North America. I'd think that I had discovered them except that the hills around there were well combed by Portuguese goldseekers and their slaves. In fact, I found stone walls that may have been built by slaves before Mayflower hoisted sail. I found holes that were probably mines. I looked hard for nuggets they may have left behind but found none. I got a nice bucket of dung, though, which is exactly what I wanted. It makes me feel revalidated.
In the Belo Horizonte bus station I wrote the following letter to my brother, Ralph.
Dear Ralph,
Five years ago you received letter written from this same table at the Belo bus station and I walked away with sticky elbows. Nothing has changed. The table has been washed during this past half decade, but not all the way down to its enamel. Unlike most bar tables in this country, this one says neither Brahma nor Antarctica, the two big beer companies. It's red but for the rusted inscriptions left by Rodrigo and Mariguela, who were once and perhaps still are in love. I wonder where their sticky elbows are now. Maybe they became busboy and waitress and are hereabouts, jealously waiting to get their sacred table back. Maybe they took a bus to a place far away. Maybe they took separate buses. Can it be that they really did what they inscribed what they did? Can it be that this is why the table is sticky?
Outside, rain on and off, day after day. The same, no doubt, on the farm to which I'm bound. Nice weather for bananas and pineapples, nice excuse to take a nap in the afternoon. I hurt my back again, not bad but it hurts to lean over. I doubt I could raise a bucket of dung much higher than where the cow left it. From now on I may have to collect dung before it hits the ground. I already have a nice yellow bucket and pair of green track shoes for this.
So many poor people here. At almost every traffic light a child or a mother with a baby or a raggedy cripple on crutches approaches to ask for change. I should give more, but I don't. I myself am becoming pretty poor pretty fast. A beer costs only a quarter, but that's twenty-five cents more than I've made over the past few weeks. This coming weekend the in-laws are coming to help me find a place to sell my bananas, my only salable asset.
Sexy women here, Ralph. Not always beautiful but always sexy in their sashay, their short skirts, tight pants, T-shirts, attitudes. No wonder population growth and homeless children are a problem.
The clock on the wall says I have half an hour until the bus leaves. But is the clock right? Even close? You have to watch out for such things around here. Ignorance and apathy abound. Nobody would care about a clock. As Iani tells me, there is no law here. Forget suing anybody. Three days late with your phone bill because you found a mistake in it? Tough luck. They come into your home and yank it. You're out the thousand dollars it cost to buy the number.
The clock seems to be working. I'll give it a ten-minute leeway and go seek my bus, the Pasarro Verde with the green bird on the side. Then, if the roads are not washed out (nobody is sure), I'll be in Mariana in two hours. Once there, I have to hope my car, which does not lock, is still in the central plaza. I have to get it rolling downhill because the battery, or maybe the starter, is dead. In the rain with a bum back, this won't be easy or fun. Next trick will be to get it down my mud road and across two streams.
The Scoggs has been tied to the front porch for four days, necessary because he kills chickens. The last time, I tied a dead rooster to his neck and let it hang there. He sulked for the first day, but by the second, when it slipped down around his waist, he made like he didn't notice. I'd promised him a full three days of this olfactory extravaganza but then got to worrying about maggots. He's on parole now.
He killed a mouse, too. I cornered the beast behind the bathroom door, then pointed him out to my protector. He gave it a couple of ginger chomps and the little bugger fell to the floor feet up, dead of internal bleeding. No muss, no fuss, and the Mighty Scoggs has something to write home about.
Here's everything I know about Zé Maria de Moraes, my hired hand. First of all, he comes with the farm. The previous owner, in a moment of drunken beneficence, gave Zé's woman, Iracema, the house she was living in and the land immediately around it. It's just up the road from our gate, between our farm and that of our neighbor, Artúr, who lives in town, where he operates a boarding house and sells tanks of cooking gas on the side.
Zé is fifty-two and says he can read "a little." His family is an agreement of convenience. Iracema is a widow who had three boys when her husband died. She ranks among the most ignorant people in the world. She can count, but only a little. She doesn't know enough about money to make change. Her heart is as benevolent as her teeth are bad.
Zé's first woman, an actual wife, up and left him because he's a no-good bum who drinks too much. He favors the sweet jurubeba wine because cachaça hurts his liver. He has blue eyes and smokes a kind of tobacco that comes in a thick, oily rope, You buy it by the centimeter. A piece the length of your finger will last you a lifetime, albeit a short one. Mix its smoke with a little cachaça and sweat and you've got the essence of the Brazil hinterland. It drives bees crazy and helps control the birth rate by rendering women frigid at fifty yards. Zé rolls his tobacco in corn husk, news print, notebook paper, or anything else that burns. That explains half the smile he smiled when I gave him a Manhattan phone book. The other half was for far more appropriate usage.
A few years ago, Zé moved in with Iracema and her two boys. At the time, he was the only one capable of bringing in at least a little cash. Iracema was living in other the little house on our land. It was infested with scorpions. Good mother that she is, she'd search the house each night before bed and swat the scorpions off the walls, sometimes four or five a night.
Since Zé is still technically married to his previous woman, he is under no legal obligation to support or stay with Iracema or her children, including one he fathered and another on the way, a round lump like a bowling ball rolling back and forth under his woman's tattered dress. Iracema told my mother-in-law, Gracinha, that she's torn between fear that Zé will abandon them and fear that he will hang around forever. Iracema's in a tough spot.
But she's a tough woman. I've seen her trotting barefoot and pregnant the three miles to town alongside a mule laden with firewood she herself had collected and cut. Shaped like peasant women everywhere, she's a stout of a structure built of fat and gristle. I doubt she has ever owned (or wanted to own) a pair of shoes. I stole a jack-in-the-box from Ian to give to her two youngest. She was thoroughly amazed by it, giggling as she tried to operate the little crank, flinching timidly as she thought the Jack was about to pop up. From what I could see, that store-bought toy was the only item in the house not a shade of green, brown or gray. To the kids, and probably to their mother as well, the bright pinks and blues must seem magical, other-worldly. They did to me when I was a child. I doubt Ian will miss his jack-in-the-box and I bet little Gabriel and Rosamaria will never forget it. It's the kind of thing that would appear in the lead paragraph of the autobiography that one of these kids might write if, by some miracle, they learned to read and somehow found their way from the outskirts of Mariana to the circus of Manhattan and made the mental connection between the cranked-up harlequin and Time Square.
But they won't learn to read and write. Oh, I'll try to teach them, and maybe if they hang around Ian they will see the value of staying in school. But their youngest older brother, Miguel, is a more likely model. He's eleven and just dropped out of school so he can operate a hoe for Lázaro and Artúr. He's just not interested in literacy. I guess he figures that if he hasn't learned to read yet, he isn't likely to.
Same goes for the six kids of the widow who lives in the little mud house down the road near the stream. They're all as black as native Africans. Her kids go to school every day. I see them going and often give them a ride. But I asked the oldest if he wanted to sell bananas for me at one hundred cruzeiros apiece, a price I set more for simplicity than for profit. I gave him a quiz before I gave him the bananas. If one banana costs a hundred, how much for two? He got that one right. How much for seven? Well, that was a different story. This skinny twelve year old huffed and puffed and thought and pawed the ground with his bare toes but just couldn't dope it out. I gave him the bananas and will accept half of whatever he brings me.
As far as I can tell, these peasants sense a class separation and know which class they belong to. They refer to themselves as poor and accept it as inevitable and unalterable and not wholly undesirable. We note, however, that Zé buys lottery tickets.
Here's my address:
O Americano
Sitio Canela
Post Restante
Mariana, MG
"O Americano" means "The American," which is what they call me because they can't even pronounce "Glenn." "Sitio" means "small farm." "Canela" means "Cinnamon," but, like all the condos called "Oakdale Meadows" though there's no oak, no dale and no meadows, Sitio Canela has no cinnamon. "Post Restante" means I have to go to the post office to pick up my mail.
According to the Estado de Minas, which undoubtedly ranks among the world's most useless newspapers, rains have left nine thousand people homeless since I stepped off the plane from New York and ended a long dry spell that stunted the growth of most of my banana plants. Many of these homeless are dead, too, buried in mud slides that sweep entire neighborhoods from the sides of hills. I saw it happen on television. A boulder the shape of the Nimitz suddenly smeared several dozen shacks down the side of a mountain in Rio de Janeiro.
When it rains hard on my farm in Mariana, water cascades off the ridge behind the house. Since the ridge is almost solid stone, little soaks in. A downpour of half an hour sets off a spectacular show of frothy plumes and cascades. They swarm together and turn right down a gulch just before the house, thundering by with unbelievable turbulence. The brown froth billows higher than the banks. This same water flows into the stream I have to drive across to get to the highway. For several hours after a storm, I'm stuck home.
I bought a refrigerator in early January, but by mid-February, I still didn't have it. The truck didn't dare go down the mud road. It's a wise truck. My VW has gotten stuck several times. I make it up to the highway by the grace of the widow's kids who live near the stream. They yank up grass and rocks to throw in the ruts my wheels dig out. While I race the engine, slip the clutch and wrestle with the steering wheel, they push and direct me until I'm on my way. When I come back, I bring bread for them and enough food to hold me for several days. I eat a lot of collards, which is about the only thing growing in the garden. For some reason Zé planted a quarter of the garden with collards and left the rest of the area neatly delineated in raised, weeded, barren beds. The garden also featurs four pinetrees planted by my all-knowing brother-in-law, Públio.
I count myself among the nine thousand homeless because I have to commute into Belo to see Ian and take care of things. Since it's cheaper to take a bus than drive, I leave my car parked in front of Artúr's boarding house. I back the car up against a tree so nobody can open the back, which does not lock. I chow down on the "plate of the day" - rice, beans, sliver of beef, corn meal paste, minuscule salad, glass of water - at the little bar at the Mariana bus station.
In Belo I sell another hundred U.S. dollars on the "parallel" (i.e. black) market and go look into the complexities of buying a duty-free pick-up truck, which is my right since I'm an immigrant. It took me several tours of the state bureaucracy just to confirm that I can do this but that nobody has any idea how to go about it.
So I slouch around Belo in wet shoes and mildewed clothes with missing buttons and odd stains of farm work. My finicky umbrella wobbles on its pole like something from a circus act. I'm homeless in that I have two homes and can't manage to settle in either. My dog resides in Mariana, tied to a porch railing. My son resides in Belo Horizonte under the excessive and fattening attentions of his grandmother and a flock of aunts. In less than a month he has dropped what little English he had mastered and picked up Portuguese. To my unease, however, he speaks it like Brazilian women - kind of whiney, as if permanently on the verge of getting pissed off. I don't like this, his living in an apartment and away from me. Contrary to the whole point of our being here, he's wallowing in a wealth of stylish clothes, soda pop, television and toys. Of course what he really wants is his Papai and a pond to throw rocks in. He seems to have only the vaguest of memories of his mother. When he hears her voice on the phone, his eyes seem to focus on an invisible memory he can't quite identify. I wonder what would happen inside him if she never showed up. I wonder what would happen inside me.
With my limited supply of clothes split between homes, and all of it damp, I'm always making underwear last one more day, buying another pen and another notebook because I have always left the other at the other house. My hip pocket is always full of compressed sweat-damp letters awaiting a trip to the post office. My back is always sore from switching beds. Something's out of line in my spine. If I touch my chin to my chest, my right calf and buttock hurt. I have to keep my chin up whether I want to or not.
In Brazil one must go to the post office to send one's mail because one never knows what the current postage rates are. Inflation raises them every week or so. Once I got there after a big increase but before the new stamps of higher denomination came in. They weighed my letter and handed me a lot of stamps. I stuck them all over the front of the envelope. Only the address showed through. Trouble was, all the stamps made it weigh more, so I had to add a couple zillion more cruzeiros' worth on the back.
I've already figured out that bananas aren't going to support the family as well as I'd planned. We have about a hundred dollars worth just about ready for market. Though Públio had told me he knew of a truck that would come buy up bananas whenever I had any, it turns out that, rather predictably to anyone with a mite of brains, the truck won't come for any less than a ton. Unlike other crops, bananas don't all get ripe at the same time of year. You get a bunch one week, then a another bunch the next. I suppose the folks at Chiquita know how to solve this problem but I doubt they're going to tell me. My guess is that the first step is to buy a small Central American country and plant the whole thing at the same time.
Públio says the real money's in frog legs. I foresee marketing problems, but Públio says he knows a restaurant in São Paulo that will buy all the fresh legs we bring them. He has not yet explained how to get the legs 1,800 miles south of here fresh. Seems to me the only way is to herd them. I'm all for the adventure, but the paperwork scares me. It was hard enough just getting the right forms filled out to move a refrigerator from Belo to here. I was lucky to get my two beehives here without the papers that would explain their existence. I can just see me up to my ass in amphibians when I pull up to a military weigh-station to say, "Frogs? What frogs?"
Zé and I hired a guy named Leiôncio to help us dredge the fish pond and raise its banks so it looks less like a puddle. What work! I made the mistake of trying to help. I later heard that one should never try to help hired workers. They lose respect for you. They come to depend on you to do things. Somehow they end up making you feel guilty for not doing their work. That, of course, is just how I felt. I've never had hired hands before. I always was one.
Leiôncio has done time in jail. When I was told this, for some reason I pictured a massive penitentiary, but it turned out his sentences involved just a few overnighters in the local hoosgow. His crime: stealing chickens. Zé didn't like working with him. He told me that if we let him sniff around now, he'd be back to steal what he saw. Leiôncio has a hair lip and a stutter, and something tells me he's a cachaçeiro, a drunk of the lowest kind. I seem to recall having stepped over him on the sidewalk in town. But he worked as hard as Zé and came back the next day for more. I declined because I found out he was charging me twice what alcoholic ex-chicken thieves are supposed to get for a day's work.
Zé found a customer for my bananas. Having had no other offers, I sell them to a little saloon-cum-grocery in the raunchier part of town. Zé buys his supplies there and tanks up on jurubeba every chance he gets. The owner is some kind of distant relative, so Zé gets credit. I get about a penny a banana, but I have to count each and every one and stack them under the counter. The customers, none of them especially sober, seem to think it quite the sight to see a gringo hustling back and forth from car to counter, jumping around like a mosquito, tallying up fourteen hundred bananas. The keeper of the place passes them around liberally. Everyone compliments me on their sweetness. I notice that Brazilians don't peel their bananas down as they eat them. They peel the whole banana at once, then take bites from it. They eat their bananas with a certain air of assessment, though maybe this is just because I'm there. It's quite a sight, a bunch of grubby drunks slouching against a bar, holding bananas up to the light and discussing their preferences.
* * *
I am not easily terrorized. I've sailed south across the Caribbean with Colombian smugglers in a very old boat. I paddled a tiny inflatable raft down New York's turbulent East River in the middle of the night uner a barrage of firecrackers, Roman candlefire and whistling rockets taht explode in the air. I've calmly negotiated with someone threatening me with a knife. I've slept in places no human should ever have to go. None of this really scared me.
What scares me, what literally has me cowering with fear, are some of the thunderstorms that pass over my house. I've never seen such violence in the air. The storms come up fast, heaving up from behind the mountain above the house. The winds rip the asbestos roof from the carport, topple banana plants, bend the eucalyptus almost in half. Hail makes the roof roar like an oncoming train, and chips of ice sweep under the roof tiles and shower down in the kitchen - a blizzard in a tropical storm. Lightning hits the utility pole behind the house again and again and again. Each time, laser-blue sparks stab out from all the outlets in the house. For some reason the boom comes only seconds later, a pounding haymaker that knocks dead bugs from the rafters. They look electrocuted. I can't stay in the house when it threatens me like this. The tiny bolts shooting from the walls, the crack of a rifle shot, the explosion of thunder - it's too much beyond my understanding and out of my control. I huddle against the wall on the front porch, quivering in the shrapnel of hail and rain, holding my dog against my chest, feeling like a coward in combat.
The storms put brown not only in my pants but also in my water supply. It washes down from an expanding patch on the hill that rises on the other side of the stream. A new field? No. Farmers around here don't work that fast just to put seed in the ground. Nor do they cheer periodically. I met some geology students from the school of mining in Ouro Preto hiking down from the work site on the hill. They said some garimpeiros were sifting out two or three grams of gold each week. The rains wash the soil through a sluice . Eventually, the soil, and no doubt some mercury, ends up in the stream and my drinking water.
I came across a neighbor fooling around with a gold pan in the stream at the corner of my property where the stream first crosses the road. His kid was wading around with a shovel while he swirled gravel and sand in his pan. "Looking for gold?" I asked, hoping the subject of dead chickens wouldn't come up.
"No, no," he said. "Just washing a few things."
The only thing he was washing is his feet. He just doesn't want me chasing him from my stream. But as far as I'm concerned, he can have all the gold he can find. The fact is, it ain't much. Once somebody showed me a fleck of gold he'd just separated in his pan. I could see the individual grains of black sand but not the fleck of gold. You'd have to collect an awful lot of those flecks before you had enough to weigh. Some kids on the other side of the highway, in a low, tree-shaded area I tend to think of as "The Dell," tried to cheat by filing shavings from a brass water faucet. Of course when the gold dealer in town dissolved it in mercury, the brass was left behind, and when the mercury was burned off, there was no gold. I felt sorry for the boys. It sounded like the kind of plot I'd come up with and get caught at.
It's interesting how much energy these peasants put into gathering gold, an essentially nonproductive activity. If they put that energy into growing crops, they'd probably be better off. What I wonder is how much of the world's economic activity is dedicated to related nonproductive activities. The very foundation of the world's economy is that element Au, yet, as has been plenty pointed out for ages, it has little intrinsic value. Nonetheless, people live for it, kill for it, and those that have it have control over the people with crops.
So I don't traipse after gold. My current project is chickens. I've already bought chicken wire. Zé and his boy, Miguel, are nailing it up around a pavilion-like structure that long ago housed these very same animals. I suppose I'm guilty of encouraging child labor, but another way of thinking about it is that as long as Miguel isn't going back to school, it's probably best that he work with his father and learn the slave trade.
My other big hope for the future is bees. The hives with my two surviving Italian queens have been very quiet. Lázaro says it's because of the rain. Bees don't fly around in the rain. Also, they tend to get cold, especially if their roof blows off in a storm. When they're cold, they stay home, huddled up and eating honey. I'd be doing them a big favor if I made a sugar syrup and set it in a special holder that fits into the opening at the front of the hive. This might also keep a disgruntled faction from rebelling and flying off in search of drier quarters. African bees - the famous killer bees - are especially apt to do this. In fact, as soon as the rains stop I can catch roving swarms just by leaving empty hives here and there. Rubbing the hives with lemon grass and bee's wax will prove especially attractive.
Lázaro also suggests I get into rabbits. If I start with a dozen today, I'll have seven hundred by Christmas. Rabbits eat collards and banana leaves, two of my most successful crops. They also eat any old slops you give them, just like pigs. They can be used in their entirety. Their meat fetches a good price. You can make all kinds of things from their skins. You can throw their guts to the fish and their dung to the crops in the garden.
What's the best way to skin a rabbit? First you euthanize the furry little guy. Then put the nozzle of a bicycle pump in his mouth and pump until the skin separates from the rest of the rabbit. No one knows exactly how many times to pump, though, and I'm afraid that if one popped on me I'd be reduced to blithering vegetarianism.
As for the euthanization process, it's most easily done with from two hundred yards with a scoped rifle. If you're heartless, however, you can just pick tone up by his back legs. When he arches his back, give him a little karate chop in the neck and you've got a dead rabbit. Lázaro says he does this without qualm, and of course he has his philosophical justification: we give the rabbits life, we give them food and protection and even love, and then we give them the best of all ends: painless, productive and quick. Where on Earth are people treated half so well?
It's far more fun to kill bugs, especially ants, buzz bombs and ankle flies. Ants are everywhere. It's reason for concern. You can't draw a square meter anywhere that hasn't got at least one ant in it. I read once that the weight of all the ants and termites in Amazonia exceeds that of all other animals there combined. What would we do if they ever got organized?
I've got plenty of them right here on Sitio Canela. They range in size from almost microscopic to massive black meat-eaters. The latter tend to inhabit fallen banana stalks, but they'll latch onto an animal as well. As I tread around in my sandals, I'll often hear them galloping around in panic before I actually feel their little teeth sink into my toes and see them chomping down do hard it looks like they're standing on their heads. The pain lasts longer than that of a bee sting.
Once I saw a flow of ants. It looked like a long black snake across the driveway, but it was an unbelievable rush of tiny ants scurrying from one hold to another. They passed for twenty minutes. I never imagined a single colony could have so many individuals. It had to measure in the multiple millions. The endless rushing flow reminded me of the escalators I used to ride out of Grand Central Station.
If buzz-bombs have another name, I don't know it. These odd bugs, half the size of a ping-pong ball, tend to suddenly rise up in the house, buzzing like a nearby chain saw. Despite all the noise, they float across the room as lackadaisical as a withered helium balloon in a slight breeze. They float until they hit something, then fall to the floor like a rock. I'm always afraid I'm going to step on one of these guys, or they'll drift into my hair and get stuck. So when one floats by, I leap up and smack it with a book. Gracinha's bilingual Old Testament makes an especially satisfying racket for this game. The batted buzz-bomb sails across the room, clicks against a wall and falls down dead.
Ah, if only ankle flies were so easy to nail. These guys are agents of the devil himself. I should admire their courage, skill and persistence, but I don't. I hate them. I'll take killer bees over ankle flies any day. A bee will sting you once and die. An ankle fly stays with you all day. Even as you sleep at night, you know he's out there, waiting. He assumes spiritual form and invades your dreams. When you start cutting banana leaves early in the morning, your personal ankle fly starts orbiting. He orbits and orbits as the sun rises higher and the sweat-salt starts to build up in the hollow behind the outside knob of your ankle. Then he attacks. It's not a stinging attack or a dive for a quick bite. It's more insidious, like something the Chinese would think up. Just as you realize you no longer have a dull buzz circling your head, you sense the gluey weight of a fat, black fly in your anklepit. You twitch your foot, then shake it, then shake it hard. The fly remains. Rather than drop your machete and bend down, you reach around with your other foot. Your big toe pushes the fly from your ankle.
End of problem? No. In fact, you may not yet have realized that this fly is with you for the day. You may not even have realized that it happened. But the second landing is a bit more irritating. You shake your foot again, maybe give it a good stomp, too. Then you again send your other foot in to do the job. This time the ankle fly shoots off into a quick ellipse but zips back within two seconds, lays hold of the exact same spot. You stomp, twitch, wiggle, then finally drop your machete (or hoe or shovel or bail of barbed wire) and take a vicious swipe at your ankle. Your hand gets there a good four seconds too late. By the time you smack yourself, your fly's in orbit around your head. You swear at it, call it something very, very bad. Then you go back to work. So does the fly. You dance the whole day through until finally the heat of the sun meets your swelling obsession to be free of this beast, and you swing your machete (or hoe or shovel or bail of barbed wire) against your ankle, drawing blood and a short, inward prayer. The pain goes straight to your scalp like one of those carnival muscle-testers with a gong on top. You sink into babbling idiocy. You limp home and sleep for eighteen hours straight. The clinic in Mariana is full of ankle fly victims, their legs festering with wounds. You see them limping despondently down the street, standing on one foot in the bars, leaning against the counter, looking down into their shots of cachaça. They always look a little ashamed. Their stories are always the same.
* * *
Scoggin took an ominous step over the line that separates civility from barbarity. While I was in Belo, he murdered two dogs, each on its own turf. One was Artúr's, the other Zé's. Due to the great amount of noise involved, there were plenty of witnesses. The bodies of the victims, according to Zé, looked as if they'd been mutilated with a knife.
This isn't chickens. This is a dog killing dogs. That isn't done. As I've heard in biology, sociology and philosophy classes, man is the only animal that kills its own kind. But Scoggs hunted these dogs down, one after the other, and tore them apart. I can only conclude that he was temporarily (I hope) insane. I guess a combination of factors drove him over the edge. The principal, predictably, was a widely sought bitch in heat, a variation of the same phenomenon that has led to countless murders among humans and even changed the course of history. On top of that, Scoggs was probably hungry because Zé probably forgot to feed him. On top of that, it wasn't good old Gravy Train but rather boiled corn mash. I'd like to think cultural confusion also figured in. Do dogs in rural Brazil operate under the same instinctual operatives as dogs from New York? I doubt it. Miscommunication broke down into fear, which became defensive, which became offensive.
Now two dogs lie dead, and I'm not sure what to do about it. Neither page of the Mariana phone book lists a dog psychologist. I looked for everything from mutt to shrink. The closest I came was a hardware store that sells Bonzo dog food at prohibitive prices. What worries me is that it could just as easily have been a kid. The local mothers were worried about this before, and now they're terrified. They think Scoggin is a wolf; for all I know, he is. We found him on the north bank of the Androscoggin River, not far from the Canadian border. He was at a house that said "Free Puppies" out front. Nobody was home. A mother malamute was tied up near a bunch of puppies, the father long gone. Now Scoggin's a malamute half-breed in semi-tropical Brazil and I don't know what to do with him. During the night, restless with worry, I decide that if there's one more incident involving so much as a chicken, he's a dead dog. I will not hesitate.
Within a couple of days, Lázaro arrives with his
station wagon packed with temptation. Someone has been stealing the rabbits
and chickens from his sitio. Since he doesn't live there, he figures they'll
be safer with me. We strike a deal: I'll provide room and board and protection
for the surviving chattel in exchange for half of their eggs and offspring
and an option to buy. So now I have fourteen hens and a perfectly delighted
rooster in the coop that Zé nailed up. Nine rabbits share a store-bought
cage. I feel like we're making progress. I feel like I have a farm.
Suerda arrived in Brazil in March, three days before Ian's second birthday. On the way into town from the airport she remembered why she had left her country in the first place. She hated the place. She hated the poverty, the filth, the slow, slovenly people, the third-worldness of it all. Coming down the highway from the airport into town, seeing the raggedy brown people waiting for buses, the mangy sway-backed mares seemingly abandoned on the banks of the road, the low, functional, concrete buildings of mechanics, tire repairers, plumbers and such, she knew she'd made a big mistake in exchanging Fifth Avenue for this.
In no hurry to see her dream house, she rallied her sisters and mother to prepare Ian's birthday party. Children's parties are big events in middle-to-upper-class Brazil. Whole families attend. Sometimes the event takes place at a rented party house. Each kid gets a bag of goodies, and all the daddies get beer. The sweets, like most Brazilian foods, are homemade and hard to concoct. If your maid won't do it, you probably have to send out to have it done. Ian got stuffed into a little blue and white seersucker suit with a red bowtie. He got the hang of parties right off the bat.
The next day, I hurried back to the farm. Suerda and mother followed by bus a few days later. The former had nothing good to say about anything. She detested Mariana, remembering, with all due verbosity, how much she hated "the interior." People were slow and stupid, streets dusty, stores thinly stocked with the cheap, low-quality products made only for the hoi poloi.
She hated the farm, too. Her first words upon entering the house were, "You are out of your mind." With horror her eyes roamed the bamboo ceiling, whitewashed walls and concrete floor. She was expecting something different altogether and mad as hell with what she got. She converted her misery into words, pointing out each and every defect and shortcoming, painting a verbal panorama of Death Valley. She didn't want to see the land or waterfall. She didn't want to know about the chickens or rabbits. She'd seen enough. Her life savings had been spent on a corner of hell. The only question now was how to get out of it.
I, of course, saw it as a piece of Eden. It certainly seemed a thousand times better than where we'd lived in New York, a small apartment on a roaring, treeless street. I'm not sure what got miscommunicated. Her mother had more than approved of the place and the plan that went with it. She had seen the photographs. Our situation, however poor, seemed a lot better than what it would have been in Pretty Spotted Calf, the place we'd originally dreamed of moving. In my opinion, we had a perfect piece of land and a house that could be fixed up or just knocked down and rebuilt. It wasn't a Fifth Avenue penthouse, but what penthouse has a waterfall?
To her, we had a disagreement about a house. To me, we had a disagreement on a fundamental issue. I thought poverty, was aprt and parcel of the plan. I thought the electricity was a luxurious extra she'd appreciate. I didn't know she wanted electricity so she could plug in the pump on a Jacuzzi. I thoguht simplicity was the point of the whole move, not its main obstacle.
Among the things she didn't like was the way her brother, Públio, put his food on his plate that day at lunchtime. It is normal for Brazilians - Mineiros, anyway - to be a bit picky about how their food is arranged on their plate. The typical meal consists of a pile of rice, a pile of black or brown beans, some collards, a piece of beef, pork, chicken or sausage, a few spoonfuls of manioc flour, and perhaps a fried egg or two. Everybody likes this piled up just so. Some like the beans on the bottom and the collards to the side. Some want the collards overlapping the beans on top of the rice and the manioc flour overlapping the other side. Everybody's got his or her own way. I've seen the laziest of men sit drinking beer while their woman spends an hour or two preparing lunch. They rise only to "make their plates" because they'd enver be able to explain how to do it right. It turned out Públio couldn't do it right, not even for himself. He piled his food high, then stirred it, first clockwise, then counterclockwise, into a mass of even consistency. His big sister didn't like this. She bitched at him and told to eat like a human, not a pig. They got in a medium-sized argument which Públio ended by abandoning his plate. He grabbed his satchel of clothes and walked away.
This left her free to focus in on me and my flaws. I suffered through lunch but then slipped outside to plant peas where she couldn't find me. I planted them all over the place, slamming the heavy peasant's hoe into the ground once for each of the several thousand peas I had. I kept it up for hours, trying to drive away thoughts of suicide and murder. I knew how Brazilian woman get what they want. The direct translation of the phrase they use is "to make a campaign." They see it as a long-term project. After centuries without civil or financial rights in a world run by men primarily concerned with their own pleasures and pursuits, the woman's weapon is her sex and her ability to complain. Through sex she wangles a marriage and for a few years can use it to manipulate her husband to some degree. Eventually, however, he will find a girlfriend, and his wife will have to draw another weapon. She will compain loud enough for the neighbors to hear and constantly enough, repetitiously enough, again and again, over and over and then all over again, ceaselessly, redundantly, stacking up layer over layer of complaint interwoven with updates, reviews and reiterations until the man sees it's easier to give in than to hold out.
I had learned long before to simply give in before Suerda finished her first sentence of complaint. I simply agreed to just about everything that didn't have long-term consequences, to do whatever asked, to deny her the pleasure of conquest while I avoided the headaches of resistance. I made it firm if unspoken policy. I learned this from a biography of Gandhi that'd I written (and dedicated to Gracinha) a few years before. Passive resistance. It takes longer, but if you're good at suffering, it works.
But my farm would be different. Here I stood firm. This was everything I wanted in life. I would never again live in an apartment. I would not go get some stupid, pointless job. Hoeing and hoeing and hoeing, I decided it would not be a bad deal to have the pleasure of such a farm balancing a few years of complaint. This was life. Things balance out.
By the time I decided that, the repeated effort of lifting the hoe while bending over had ripped something in my back. I could barely straighten up. Pain shot up my spine and down my left leg to my foot. I could do nothing but lay down in bed and practice suffering the onslaughts I expected to withstand for the next few years. She was going full blazes, alternately crying and hammering at me with her list of complaints and the logical reasons why this was a stupid situation - matters which, as far as I could see, should have been obvious while we were in New York.
Ian was more of my persuasion than hers. I saw what it means for a face to light up when I presented him with a cage full of rabbits. His mother and maid will never have any idea how much a boy learns by wiggling his fingers into rabbit fur. They'll never know how much his IQ increased when all by himself he learned Valuable Lesson No. 18,942 - Don't put your fingers in the electric pump. A sliver of his flesh is in there now; the pump is a little bit his.
The next night I drove everybody to the bus station. As we left it, Suerda and Ian would stay in Belo until we figured out what to do. Ian would be raised by Alvina, their dumb but good-hearted maid. They would visit the farm on weekends. I'd finish the courses I'd started a ICHS. We'd keep trying to revalidate my diploma. We'd see what happened. As the bus pulled away from the station, Ian was slapping at the window and crying, "Papai! Papai!" Behind him, his mother sat unlooking, her nose rasied slightly in an air of festering miffedness.
On the way home from the station I gave a ride to a bum with a gun, the foul Leiôncio, neighbor and free-lance slave-cum-chicken-thief. He was in the raunchy little bar at the outskirts of town, the last place to buy a pack of Hollywood cigarettes. Everybody in the place was six shits to the wind. Leiôncio, so drunk he was swaying, asked if I could buy him a quick cachacinha. I begged off. Rain was pouring down outside. I had to leave before the stream got too deep. When he asked me for a ride out toward Canela, I couldn't say no. But just before we left, he turned to mumble something to his sloping amigos at the bar. Then, barely able to stay on his feet, he pulled up his shirt to show them something. It wasn't his navel. It was a chrome revolver stuck in the front of his shorts.
Who needs aerobic exercise when just stopping for a pack of smokes can get the blood pumping hard? Did I really want a drunk thief with a gun in my rickety VW down a long, rainy road into darkness? The answer is no. But I didn't want to say that to said drunk thief. If Valuable Lesson No. 94, 877 is Don't pick up armed drunks, some subsequent lesson no doubt tells us not to get in an argument with one. Nor should one insult or argue with anyone who lives within pot-shot distance of one's house.
Among the many problems my car has is a tendency for the headlights to go out when I hit a bump. The road out of town was a moon-face of craters dug up by dump trucks full of bauxite clay splashing through the puddles of torrential rain. This time, this once, the headlights did not go out, not even a little, so when Leiôncio suddenly snapped out of an apparent nap to ask me if I believed in God, I thought it an appropriate time to renew my faith in He-Who-Keeps-Headlights-On. And it was those very same lights that suddenly illuminated three young boys - kids from my neck of Canela - dashing along the side of the road in the rain, heads under shirts, thumbs in the air. Balancing child sacrifice against prospective witnesses, I picked them up. No doubt they will report to all of Canela that they saw me out drinking with Leiôncio. At the turn-off to the farm, they got out, saying the traditional "God help you" that peasants use to say thanks. And I guess this time He did. We got across the stream and I politely turned down Leiôncio's offer to come home with me for a drink. He politely bid me good-night and headed up the wet, unlit path toward wherever it is he lives.
There are those, including the devoutly Christian Gracinha, who tell me I should keep a gun about the house. Besides the suicidal depression of being too poor to live with my son and too stupid to know what to do with my wife, there are situations like the one with Leiôncio. A gun in that situation would have been handy. But since I didn't have one, my brain kicked into gear and I worked things out. I didn't panic. It was similar to a situation a few years earlier, when I picked up a hitch-hiker who, like Leiôncio, turned out to be pretty dumb and slightly drunk. He eventually got around to pulling a knife on me, the long, thin kind you use to carve roast beef. Not having the option to shoot him, I talked to him. He eventually apologized and put his knife away.
Besides, I've got it all figured out. If somebody tries to break in at night, I've got windows on all sides of the house. I can jump out any one of them and disappear among my three thousand banana plants. I can run right down to Zé's house and let him shoot the guy.
* * *
March 11, 1985
Dear Ralph,
There's no point in trying to keep it a secret, no point in pretending that I can deny what I did. It's even pointless to express my regrets and pointless even to feel them.
Today I shot Scoggin.
We went berserk, Ralph. I told you about how he tore apart two dogs on their own turf. This morning, early, he broke the nylon rope which I foolishly thought would tether him for the rest of his life. He then clawed through the chicken wire of my new coop, slaughtered fourteen of fifteen chickens and bit off the ear of a bunny in a wire cage. Then, bloodthirsty, he rampaged around the neighboring farms killing every chicken in sight. So I did what I told myself I'd do if he went nuts again.
I wasn't the only one with this intention. Everybody around here wanted him dead or gone. I owe people more chickens than I can afford for months to come, and the people with the dead dogs cannot be repaid for the horror of seeing their pets, however mangy, mangled by a marauding malamute. Zé's woman, Iracema, was one of them. She cried for three days and since then has not let her two year old and one year old play outdoors.
So when Zé reported the massacre to me, I didn't bother rubbing Scoggin's face in it. I just asked Zé if I could borrow his gun, a cantankerous single-shot .22 rifle. Half the time it doesn't even shoot. He lent me that and, just in case, a small, double-barreled thing like a derringer. Then he backed off among the banana trees to look at the ground between his feet.
I had Scoggs lie down in front of me. He obliged to the extent of groveling at my feet the way he always did when he knew he was guilty of something. I aimed the rifle down at the point between his eyebrows. But the hammer just clicked down. I had to reload and recock a couple of time. I kept saying, "Lie down, lie down. Stay!" By the time it got the rifle to go off, Scoggin moved and the bullet went into his eye. In the time it took a bullet to go bang, I knew I was adding one more stupid decision to a lifelong list.
My best friend in the world didn't fall down dead like he was supposed to. He took off, spurting blood, yelping in the horror of betrayal and the pain of a slug in the cerebellum. The noise was unbelievable and indescribable, closer to that of a donkey than a dog. I took off after him, shouting his name without having any idea what I wanted him to do or what I would do. I hollered for Zé to reload the damned rifle. By the time he caught up with me, Scoggin had lost enough blood and consciousness to collapse into the damp earth among the banana plants. When Zé arrived with the rifle and his one other bullet, I put a shot into the back of Scoggin's head. I guess that killed him, but his remaining eye was still open and his leg muscles still twitching the way a dog does in a dream. His tail wagged around and around, down across the dirt, up in an arc through the air, around and around as if making a final appeal for forgiveness for something wrong he'd done. My mental tail was doing the same. As his soul wrenched out of his body, I put my hand on his ribs and told him, a dead dog, that I was sorry. Zé arrived with a shovel and started to dig. I said no, let me, but he said no, let him. For a second, we both had our hands on the shovel. When he saw my teary eyes, he let go. I dug a nice deep one and rolled in the best malamute that ever walked the earth. With funereal seriousness and sincerity, Zé said the variation of what everybody says at the site of a grave: "He was a good dog." It only made me wonder what they'll say at the site of my grave. Probably something like "What an idiot. What a fool."
I suppose I could have given him to someone, but to what end? He couldn't be trusted around children or allowed loose. If I gave him to someone in the city, a woman or child couldn't walk him. He was too strong. To give him to somebody in the country would be to condemn him to a life at the end of a short tether, his function only to bark at trespassers. I had no idea who to give him to or what to do with him. He had to die.
Or maybe he didn't. Maybe I was the one who went berserk. I cracked under too many problems. Scoggin was one of the big ones, but I really wanted to kill half a dozen people, especially one, who have been making life harder than it has to be.
Don't think sleeping is any easier without a dog woofing and growling in the night. Last night, after entertaining myself with replays of the big event, I suddenly and audibly remembered that in a couple of weeks our ship will arrive. In it is the drawing [our artist brother] Burke drew. I will have to put it on the wall and for the rest of my life see his passive, lazy-necked pose, cock-eared and alert while hovering on the edge of sleep.
Also last night I dreamed I heard Picuinha, the little mutt that came with the farm, yapping and yapping. Then I woke up and heard her yapping and yapping. I coaxed the filthy little thing into the house and let her sleep in the ratty armchair that Scoggs was always denied.
I feel like everyone in Mariana knows. When I went to pick up my mail, people seemed to talk to me differently. I sensed them behind my back saying, "He killed his own dog."
In bouts of justification, I tell myself that people kill people all the time. If this, what I feel, is the result of killing a dog, what happens to warriors during war? It finally occurs to me that I've never killed anything larger than an overfed roach. I never knew what "kill" meant. Remember how we used to play war with our plastic machine guns and rocket-shootin' bazooka, mowing down Japs and Krauts wholesale? And how often have I thought with vague seriousness that I would like to kill some pest who was making my life less than perfect? how often have I thought of killing myself? I've had kung-fu/super-hero/Sergeant Saunders fantasies of heroic, invincible bloodletting in which no one, least of all me, got hurt. Now I have a vague but palpable idea how it feels to have a bullet in the brain. The very idea of it feels like a bullet. Fatal visions have been rendered sensible to touch, and all it cost me was a dog.
* * *
I signed up for three courses at ICHS. If perchance I went ahead with the legal route of diploma revalidation, I'd need the credits. I also wanted to start being a part of the place. I also wanted the dirt-cheap lunches and dinners that students were entitled to. Tuition cost me about four dollars and fifty cents for the three courses, and meals were about a nickel. I signed up for Portuguese, Didactics, and Teaching English as a Foreign Language.
At first it felt good to have a notebook under my arm, a pen in my pocket, a seat in a classroom. I was in my place a good ten minutes early. Few people were in the building yet. In fact by starting time, no one had arrived. For twenty minutes I sat there thinking, "Oh well, that's Brazil." I checked my schedule several times, checked it against a schedule posted on the wall. I was in the right place on the right day at the right time. Where was everybody?
I found the Cônego's secretary clacking away at her manual typewriter. She didn't know where everybody was either. She hadn't even given it a second thought. She flagged down a passing professor. He seemed to think the schedule had been changed. Classes were to start on a different day. Then the secretary remembered something to that effect, though she wasn't sure. She suggested I come back the next day, or maybe the next week.
So goes higher education in Brazil, though I suspect ICHS was an extreme. By the end of the semester, exactly half of the classes were canceled for one reason or another. No announcements were ever made, no notices posted. Everything traveled by word of mouth, which meant rumors not only prevailed but often determined what happened. People were always asking each other if there were to be classes on such-and-such a day. No one ever seemed to know, but everyone seemed to suspect. Classes could be canceled for odd holidays, heavy rain, school elections, political discussions (called debates), professor illness (an endemic problem), or because everyone assumed no one would be coming. If a holiday fell on a given Thursday or Friday, it was assumed no one would attend on Tuesday or Wednesday, which meant Monday was trashed, too, which made it a long weekend, which meant no one would attend the previous Friday, either, or the Thursday before that, and ranks would be thin that whole week.
Not that absentees missed much. Classes didn't follow the professor-gives-lecture format I was used to. Typically the professor would show up fifteen or twenty minutes late, accompanied by a gaggle of students. The conversation seemed go on during the two-hour session. Sometimes the professor would get around to introducing a topic by explaining why it was so important, but he or she never went into details. My professor of Portuguese used his first class to give us a walking tour of the campus. Homework, one of our three graded assignments for the semester, was to write an essay about it. I raised my hand to ask how many pages. The class answered with the kind of laughter that seemed to say "Isn't he cute." Ten or twelve lines, the professor said, would be sufficient.
A class could also be interrupted indefinitely for an announcement. A student would come in to give the details of an upcoming debate or party or vote. The party might be a dance, or it might be the Marxist Party, which was essentially the same thing, though the pun doesn't hold out in Portuguese. Marxism is strictly a social phenomenon. One must be a Marxist for the same reasons one must wear blue jeans and T-shirts splattered with nonsense written in English. It's chique. These Marxists are not guerrillas. They are just as bourgeoisie as can be. As long as they're on their daddies' dole, they'll speak mightily of dialectics and international exploitation of the worker. As soon as Daddy sets them up in business, however, they'll understand the glories of capitalism and the dialectical benefits of exploiting workers who don't deserve living wages because they don't know squat and aren't willing to learn.
So except for the food, which was easy if not especially good, my first semester was a waste. Not knowing the criteria for passing, I went to every the class unless the rain raised the creek too high.
This looseness of organization and standards was typical everywhere in Brazil, from government to state-owned companies. Part of the problem in education was the "democratization" of the university. Students, faculty and employees, including the security guard, the cafeteria ladies and the guys fixing the roof, all had the right to vote to choose heads of departments and the director. I think they could even vote to fire a professor, though no one was sure about this, and it had never been done. I believe everyone understood an unwritten rule: if the students didn't complain about the lack of educational offerings, the professors wouldn't flunk anybody. It didn't matter that the consequent diplomas meant nothing. In Brazilian society, "it's who you know, not what you know." Your actual education has little to do with your success in life. It's more important to maximize your enjoyment of youth, something college should enhance, not encumber.
* * *
A boy from up the highway let me test drive a couple of goats. One was pregnant, the other a male kid. Zé, it turns out, doesn't know beans about goats. That, of course, makes two of us. We knew we wouldn't get any milk out of the kid, but we weren't sure whether the mother-to-be was at peak production or trough. The boy who owns them had a way of saying both and getting me to believe him. Lázaro tells me a reasonable goat gives three liters in a day. The most we can squeeze out of this one is less than a liter. Three is a desired minimum because that's how much you need to make your basic lump of cheese. You can't save milk for three days for your cheese. You need it all fresh on the day you make it.
It doesn't take us long to see that a liter of milk isn't worth the trouble. We try tethering the goats here and there, but they always get loose and disappear into the brush on the mountain. One thing Zé knows about goats is that they die easily. You can't leave them out in the rain. The rain isn't constant anymore, but showers blow in two or three times a day. Even if a few serious clouds blows in, Zé has to run find the goats and tie them in the chicken coop. This goes on for a week before I realize that the owner of these fine animals is just trying to sell me his problems. Zé hog-ties both goats and rolls them into the back of the car. I drive them back where they belong and roll them out.
Give me rabbits any day. The nine that Lázaro gave me grew from small bunnies to medium size rabbits. They were going stir crazy in their little wire cage so I set myself to building a cage. It became a monstrously complex project. Having never in my life successfully built anything, I worked under the fear that my efforts would result in embarrassment and a pile of scrap wood. My only hope was that Brazil, and especially Mariana, and especially the Canela side of Mariana, had standards low enough to meet my capabilities.
Having lots of bamboo, that's what I worked with. I lashed a rectangle of vertical poles to the beams of the former-chicken coop/goat barn pavilion. Then I wired horizontal lengths around the vertical supports as if making a double-layered table. This was a two-story cage. I planned to house guinea pigs upstairs. I made the floors of carefully spaced rods of bamboo. I cut them with the saw of my Swiss army knife, the perfect tool for this job. I could buzz through a piece of bamboo in about ten seconds, though after a few hundred pieces, I got a blister on my thumb.
Since bamboo cracks if you nail it, I had to wire everything into position. I used my machete to split each section lengthwise. I got the whole floor secured with one long piece of wire but then realized that I hadn't spaced it properly. You have to leave gaps big enough for rabbit dung to fall through yet small enough for a rabbit not to get his or her hoof stuck. The wise cage-builder will roll dried rabbit droppings here and there to make sure it fits through. I left smaller gaps for the guinea pigs on the second floor. Below them I set a sheet of asbestos roofing to catch their drips and droppings and roll them aside. Zé helped me wrap chicken wire around the whole thing.
The back of the cage faced the mountain, which is where most of the wind came from, so we needed a solid windbreak. We used the plywood door that had separated my kitchen from the living room. I assigned Zé the job of building doors for the cage. He fashioned hinged from strips of old shoe leather. It opened and closed just like a regular door, and all you had to do to keep it shut was lean a stick against it.
Twenty feet long and ten feet high, it qualified as something more than a cage. I think it was a hutch, and surely among the world's most impressive. It looked like something that Tarzan would live in. If the design held up, we'd expand it to hold the crowd of thousands we expected by the end of the year. We inserted our seven founding fathers (of whom an indeterminable number were female, we hoped) and lavished them with banana leaves and lemon grass. The rabbits tucked into it as if they knew their purpose in life. Everybody looked delighted, even the one with only half an ear.
* * *
The rains continued all through March, when rain doesn't normally fall. Still no refrigerator. Very often I had to leave my brown car in the brown mud on the far side of the stream and walk home in the rain. Sometimes the one-log bridge was under a few inches of rushing water, too. Crossing wasn't as thrilling as riding a New York subway at night, but I liked the challenge of knowing that my life depended on how well my toes gripped the log, not how well someone else's brain gripped sanity. I've crossed this log in darkness broken only by flashes of lightning. The bamboo railing only serves as a reference for balance; it wouldn't hold me if I slipped.
Sometimes I wondered if I'd notice if I fell in. I was wet, and everything else was wet, for so long that I became at one with water. My bed sheets felt like newspaper that's been left outdoors all winter. Wet spots on the floor never seemed to dry. Sometimes it was hard to tell if it was a wet spot or a puddle. The leaking roof couldn't be fixed until after the rains because clay tiles break easily when wet. I was very glad Suerda is in Belo so I didn't have to hear about what I can perfectly well see.
The rain took its toll on my bees. I opened a hive and found almost nobody at home except a large roach-like creature, some white moths and a handful of lethargic bees. I couldn't tell if they were survivors of the original Africans or newborn Italians. I couldn't find the queen or any eggs. Lázaro suggested that the queen and everyone else may have flown the coop in search of drier quarters. The moths may have had something to do with it. They were probably the type born of a certain larva that grows inside the combs of wax. Those who remained had probably hatched since then. The fact that they hadn't attacked me would indicate they were Italians. Not that it mattered. If my queen was gone, the swarm was as good as dead. My second hive didn't look much better, though I did see the queen creeping around.
But not to dismay. After the rains, the wild bees swarm. All we have to do is leave hives here and there. The bees will find them and move right in. They won't be smiling Italians, however. They'll be Africans - the killer bees so often featured in the supermarket magazine racks. But that's good. They're aggressive enough to fend off the killer moths.
* * *
I went to Belo to see my boy and do my family duty. Suerda agreed to shop for some antique furniture so her hellhole in the country would look more like the homes in Country Living. A couple of rustic cabinets and a coffee table did the trick. She felt much better about our situation. Also, she'd found a job managing a small company that made high-fashioned designer clothes and sold them in a boutique. A friend let her rent an apartment for the next year while she pulled her life together. She agreed to have a contractor look at our house and see what could be done to it.
While I was there, a friend of ours from New York, Maria, showed up. She'd made a move quite like ours but to a greater extreme. She left her job as a systems analyst on the eighty-ninth floor of the World Trade Center and moved to fifty acres of cliffside on the mountain range that divides the states of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. Her plan: to breed akitas - beautiful dogs with fluffy hair like a husky's, a face like a bear's, and a tail that curls around in a complete circle. She'd brought a male and two females from the States.
Of Yugoslavian and Italian parents who had immigrated to Brazil, Maria had sharp, crystalline blue eyes and a quick intelligence. She was always very much against the neurotic consumerist fever of the United States, as was I. Brazil wasn't any different in that respect, but here it was possible to escape. Her land was a five mile walk uphill from a town no one has ever heard of. The land had no house when she bought it. For several months she and her akitas lived among four walls of sewn-together plastic gunny sacks nailed to poles. There was no roof. At five thousand feet above sea level, the winds were hard and cold. She slept in two sleeping bags. I suspect she had a dog in there with her.
She tried to build her own house but finally had to hire some men to come in and do it. Now she was clearing the land, hacking down plants and digging up roots, gradually planting things. First thing: marijuana. She didn't exactly say so, but I believe that was the cash crop she was living off. Maria liked to stay high.
Like me, Maria had an old Volkswagen. Hers, which she borrowed from her sister, runs on either gasoline or cooking gas - a nice deal if you don't get caught. She and I also share the opinion that upper-middle-class Brazilians - her sister, for example, and my wife - don't respect the idea of somebody seeking poverty. The Brazilian ideal is the comfortable apartment in a big city. Movement in the other direction is seen as perverse. The Brazilian culture frowns on individualism. When one's pioneering plans don't go right, people are quick to say, "Não te falei?" It means I told you so , except it's not seen as impolite. People say it with pride and righteousness.
Maria had returned to Brazil with new insight into the relationship between Brazilians and their dogs. Brazilians keep their dogs tied outdoors all the time. Maria considers a dog a part of the family who has every right to sleep on the furniture. To prevent cruelty to animals who have been nurtured under her wing, she refuses to sell her akita puppies though they are worth a thousand dollars each. She keeps them all. Though she's borrowing money from her sister to buy herself food, she has nine big dogs and more on the way.
Maria may have lucked out with her little real estate investment. Today she's five miles from the nearest place with electricity, but in a few years, that place will be under water. A dam is being built at the end of the valley. Soon it will be a vast lake. Maria will have waterfront property, a lake all to herself. She's not sure when this will happen, but when it does, she plans to pay back a lot of the não te falei's she's heard.
Maria wanted to see our farm so we all went out there for the weekend. Maria liked it. She envied my waterfall. I envied her knowledge. She pointed out particular long, straight tree that's hollow and can be used as irrigation pipe. She knew how to twist the bark of a particular vine into strong cord. With the strength of her own arms she uprooted a dead tree and carried down the mountain to the house for firewood. She broke it to stove length by swinging against another tree. Suerda tried to use an ax against one of the logs but it just looked like she was teaching it a lesson. She had Zé finish the job and stoke the fire in the kitchen. She told me again how it reminded her of her grandmother's farm.
I didn't risk telling her what seemed perfectly obvious, that the have the better side of Grandmother's life, we needed to have the harder side as well. To suggest the unrequested would be to spark an an argument. I just kept agreeing and waiting to put her on the bus back to Belo. But of course when I do that, I also have to peel away my son, who cries at the separation. I'm told that during the week he's cantankerous and weepy and always asking for his Papai. Suerda reports this as if on the blade of a dagger. The situation is my fault, she says. When will I realize that and face up to what I must do?
A couple of government agronomists came to take a tour of our place and tell us how to be better farmers. They told us we have to use a soup spoon to scrape the fungus from the trunks of our fruit trees, mix tons of organic material into the rocky soil of the upper acreage, install a new piece in the damned gravity pump, wage war against ants and scorpions, graft orange branches to our lime trees to created a delicious new fruit, build a pig pen over the pond so the dung nurtures microorganisms in the water, raise chickens because corn is cheap around there (preferably free range chickens because their eggs are worth more), and keep going with the bees because their production isn't tied to the size of the farm - "they graze in other people's pastures."
These agronomists also confirmed what we all suspected: that kids raised in the country are healthier, mentally and physically, than those raised in the city. I like to think Ian is evidence of this though he's not often here. He never gets sick and shows no signs of neurosis. He eats like a workhorse, moves his little bowels all over the place and tells us about it. He falls down like a sack of cement, skins his knees so bad they bleed, and only says, "Caiu" (he fell) without a tear. He knows how to grab a bunny by the scruff of its belly and learn it some respect. He's a walking compost heap. The agronomist says it's probably easiest to stop washing him and just keep him weeded until he sprouts something edible. We'd plant him with corn if he'd hold still for the tiller.
This farm came with a couch and armchair, both torn, sprung, wobbly, creaky, barely better than the concrete floor and certainly more dangerous. Suerda wanted them fixed. She and her sisters and mother were going to spend Semana Santa - Easter week - on the farm, and they wanted something they could sit on without hurting themselves. A little storefront operation in town offered reupholstery. The guy came out to Canela and looked the pieces and said that yes, he could fix them up nice and have them done by Maundy Thursday. He drove off with them, and I promised to deliver some fabric for the cover. As it turned out, he had the fabric on Monday but we wouldn't see the furniture until November.
* * *
Late March, 1985
Dear Ralph,
Regarding your letter, I think most people and dogs and a lot of other things are a lot more than molecules. While I have come to trust my error-prone senses, my weakness and everyone else's is the inability to see what is not molecular. Blowing away one's dog is more than rearranging his molecules, though God knows that happens, too. But something non-molecular is rendered non-existent. Soul or no soul, a certain relationship is not there anymore. It's gone. Real gone.
While metaphysics is certainly something to think about, a more difficult study is that of relationships, and not just interpersonal ones. The digital, objective study of molecules will never approach the accuracy, thoroughness and reality of analogic, subjective relationships. How odd that there is no special word to describe the study of relationships.
Let's take Iani, my employed brother-in-law. He's an electrical engineer. Always has been. He's been working for the state-owned electric company since he got out of college ten years ago. He 's been adding up electricity for a decade but has admitted to me he doesn't really know what the stuff is.
In contract, Públio, my unemployed brother-in-law, is a metallurgist. He's never worked with electricity and probably couldn't put batteries in a flashlight without hurting himself or damaging the flashlight. I offer my flashlight as proof of this. But he's quite sure he can prove what electricity is, in essence. Challenged to the task, he showed me a formula that proved it quite clearly. This is the same guy who once showed me a formula that proved the existence of God. I've still got it around here somewhere. I use it as proof of Públio.
How does this relate to relationships? I'm too tired to explain. I spent all day shoveling molecules, rearranging them into what I perceive to be a garden. Superficially, Iani and Públio have different metaphysical perceptions of electricity. But the former has dealt with its relationships, physical and otherwise. And he has a detected a certain gap between what is obviously existent (as evidenced by its perceptible effects) and what is obviously not there because if it is, well, let's have a look at it.
Ian, not yet a yard tall, has better sensory perception that I, but I can perceive more, or so says Kant. Kant says perception involves a certain degree of interpretation. I can "see" danger, "foresee" consequences. I can perceive, in other words, the non-molecular stuff that the eyes and nose can't pick up.
Obviously, among all the possible non-molecular things that can be perceived, I can handle only an infinitesimal portion of the total. The snapping of my fingers sends shock waves rippling through the cosmos, or so I've been told. Exactly how this happens, and to what effect, I cannot know. How the death of the Scoggs affects life on Uranus I cannot guess. Those, of course, are extreme and bizarre examples. More down to earth, how will the death of Scoggs affect my dreams tonight or a decision I make ten years from now? Damned if I know. And just as I cannot perceive these realities, I can likewise be dead wrong about perceptions that are not purely sensible. While I might be worrying about whether this proverbial table exists, I can also worry about whether perceived dangers or love or importance or discomfort exist.
I've come to trust my five senses less, to admit, at least,
that they always fall short and too often fail. What I'm currently concerned
w
Just before Semana Santa I parked my car near the bus station directly in front of a sign with an E on it, which stands for Estacionar, which means "Park." I had some time to kill so I walked on down to the upholstery guy to confirm he'd have my couch ready by Maundy Thursday, then set up camp at a little aluminum table in the bus station barzinho. It's a Saturday afternoon. Buses are as scarce as toilet seats. I look over the salgados in the glass cases on the counter: greasy pastels (flaky pastry with cheese or ground meat inside - not bad when fresh but not holding up well under the pressure of time), kibe (football-shaped things made of ground meat and some kind of grain), coxinhas (chicken croquets), and linguiça (very greasy sausage of dubious content). The glass case is heated mildly by three bottles of malageta peppers in vinegar. Coca-Cola and Hollywood cigarette and Brahma beer posters abound, all in red and white, festooning the place in the garish color of communism and commercialism. Little aluminum bags of potato chips pegged to a string above the bar add an air of felicity. For the young at heart and durable of tooth, bins of candy, homemade and factory manufactured, surround the cashier's booth, which stands raised and rounded like the bridge of a ship. The commander enthroned therein is the lady who no doubt hung the Pope John Paul calendar on the wall last year. She is white, low-slung, bottom-heavy, seeming to serve no purpose or hold no goal beyond taking in the cruzeiros and issuing chits scribbled with the names of junk foods. Attending her is a gaunt, muscular black woman with bloodshot eyes.
I order a meia cerveja - "half a beer" - at the booth. Half a beer is a 300 ml bottle, about twelve ounces. The lady says, "All we have is Brahma." I thought that unbidden response would make a great ad for the main competition, Antarctica beer, which I consider the better of the two, though not by much. Neither is very good though either will suffice on a hot Saturday afternoon. I agree to the Brahma and pay sixteen hundred cruzeiros. I hand my chit to the black woman. She gives it a glance, scuffs to the horizontal stainless steel refrigerator, uncaps a bottle and sets it on the counter beside a glass, the short, vertical-ribbed kind holding beer at every bar in the country.
This woman is no mulatta. She's as black as any African. Her nose is flat and flared, her lips broad. She has the arms of a basketball player and the strong, veined hands of a spermaceti kneader, hands that have never known the feeling of a ten percent tip. I bet she does laundry on the side. She wears brown cloth around the top of her head, golden earrings, a navy blue T-shirt that says "The London Gun Club," faded blue jeans and a transparent full-length plastic apron. She dispatches anarchic armies of flies hither an thither with vague sweeps of her graceful arms. As the occasional lethargic customer saunters in, she opens cokes, pours cachaça, plucks up the deadly salgados. When things slow down, she goes backstage to blow her nose in two wet honks, a finger to each nostril.
I took a bottle of beer for the bus trip into Belo, where Suerda and I launched into further battle toward getting my diploma revalidated. For a small fortune, we got all the necessary papers translated. The officialness of them was verified by a gold sticker pasting down a red ribbon all squeezed against the paper by an official raised seal. Despite the gilded falderol, no one would ever read these papers. They just had to be supplied as part of the paperwork. Once someone verified that I had proffered them, I could take them home and throw them away.
Gracinha and I went to the main office of the main campus of the Federal University of Minas Gerais to plead our case. Mirabilis dictu, a telex had come in from Brasilia that very same day proclaiming that any director of any university may revalidate a diploma. There was no need to go through the Ministry of Education. Suddenly, all I had to do was show this telex to the Cônego at ICHS and my problems were solved. I thought how quickly I could end Brazil's problem with bureaucracy if I had a telex machine.
We went to the farm the day before Semana Santa was to start. Suerda had visions of a pleasant, problem-free week in the country. To ensure this, she brought her mother, two sisters, and her maid. A third sister, Cleusa, was to come on a bus that night. .
Alas, when our bus pulled into Mariana, I saw that my car was not undr the E sign where I'd left it. We asked around until we found someone who remembered the police hot-wiring it and taking it away. Suerda was spitting mad. This was not part of her plans at all. Without a car, we'd have no way to get back into town from the farm, unable to go fetch whatever ingredient of a good time we might have forgotten.
We all trooped down to the police station. The car had to be "liberated" that day or not until after the holiday. The problem was that I did not have the appropriate documents. The registration was back in Belo, and I didn't really have a driver's license. I had an international license of very dubious validity, including an expiration date long since dead. The only person who might approve liberation of the car was the chief, and he was out to lunch. We had to wait around for over an hour, enough time for Ian develop a fever and evacuate his little bowels on the floor. His Aunt Stefánia, who is mentally ill, wondered off and got lost a couple of time. Suerda maintained a steady, ongoing report of everything she saw as objectionable about this situation.
She was right, of course. I shouldn't have parked under the E sign. I shouldn't operate a car without its documentation. I shouldn't drive without a license. Nor, as long as we're on the topic, should I neglect the feelings of others, think only of myself, do things without thinking, continue my life with the sole purpose of making life complicated for others. She didn'texctly say so, but maybe I should reconsider my urge to exist, indeed my verycompetence at the game of existence. I am not good at it. Left to my own devices, I would certainly soon concoct my own demise.
But I'm not sure why she feels so obligated to push me in that direction so hard, to pound me so hard with reiterated evidence of my lack of competence and worth. Does this hint at someinsecurity inside her? I would guess so. She similarly berates everyone in her life, from siblings to the woman she works for. She must dominate them all, verbalizing their weaknesses, to unfurl their ignorance, telling them she told them so. But it's all a wall around a soul in fear of something.
The chief wouldn't release the car without the documents. We did manage to persuade him to let us bring the documents later that night and present them to the jailer on duty. We phoned Cleusa in Belo and told her to look around for the registration. Then we took a taxi out to the farm. We got the biggest taxi in town so we could pick up our reupholstered couch, but it wasn't ready yet.
That night I walked the two miles into town to meet Cleusa's bus. I seriously considered what I'd do if I couldn't return to the farm with a car. The most painless way out would be to walk into the hills and never return. In my pocket I had a carefully doctored international license minus the pages with the expiration date and where it said it was not valid in Brazil. Cleusa arrived on time and she had the registration and other documents. She also had her auburn hair, blue eyes and tightest of jeans. The midnight jailer gave the documents a cursory glance and then helped us push-start the car.
* * *
Dear Ralph,
I spent today fiddling with life. I turned over the dirt in a new garden near the stream. The soil was moist and dark, unlike the sandy mineral soil on the hill near the house. I transplanted lettuce, eggplant, green peppers and my Swiss Army knife. I heard an avocado drop, hunted it down and took it home as proof of something. I found two limes on the ground. I collected fallen and rotten guava and heaved them to the fish. I also heaved them some collards. They love collards. They chase it all over the pond. The leaves, as broad as books, scoot across the water like skittish rafts.
I collected medium-sized rocks and made a little half-hearted dam across the little canal that feeds the ponds, not to stop the water but to aerate it as it tumbles by. Over a smoke and lemonade I weighed the possibility of digging a detour for this little stream because the agronomist told me I have too much water flowing into and out of the pond, which is not conducive to the growth of what he called plankton. This detour will take too much digging, I decided, and besides, most of the water that leaves the pond does by subterranean leakage, which cannot be shut off. I also threw three small oranges to the fish and tomorrow will heave them some dung.
Today I overturned two piles of dung, the better to ferment them for the making of compost. I made two liters of limeade to drink while turning the dirt in the new garden and losing my Swiss Army knife. I eliminated a banana plant that had wandered into this garden, and carefully uprooted a smaller one to give to Lázaro. I transplanted a little tree of unknown breed, putting it where in ten or fifteen years it will hide my garden from thieves but not shade it from the sun. I contemplated a big old mango tree and couldn't decide if I'd rather have shade and mangoes or wood and vegetables. I picked some strange corrugated berries from a tree and tasted it one. Not bad at all. Would make a good juice, thought I.
I ate three bananas that we bought at the market because I had sold all my ripe ones. I heard a complete report on the economic absurdity of this. For lunch I ate a nice fish that Suerda made, and also some rice, black beans and tomatoes. In the afternoon we had cafe com leite and corn bread, which is what we'd had for breakfast. For dinner we had nothing. Too tired.
I stuck a thermometer up Ian's little butt and got a reading of 103 Fahrenheit. I washed the thermometer with soap and water and dipped it in alcohol. I ordered him dressed in warmer clothes and shoes. Tonight he will sleep in the bed with me so I can keep him covered, for he is an active sleeper who wrestles with blankets as if drowning in phlegm.
I read part of a story by Saul Bellow but couldn't keep my eyes open. I lay down on the bed but was ordered to get my filthy body away. I lay out in the hammock on the porch but was soon ordered to get up and drink coffee. I took a shower and scrubbed myself good. Everything came clean but my feet, which are taking on the hue and heft of peasant dogs. I put on some clean pants and, later, when I could do so without feeling guilty, a clean shirt.
Then the water tank on the hill above the house went dry. I heard out Suerda's opinion on this and how ti related to parking under E signs and our lack of livingroom furniture. I futzed with the gravity pump, fiddled with a critical screw on the electric pump, checked two hundred yards of hose for leaks. The problem was in the water flow to the pumps, not from. I had to walk way up to the tank above the house, then back down to the pumps, then up to the reservoir where it all comes from. I did a little proctological examination of the hoses coming out of the reservoir, then got both pumps running. It all would have been a lot easier with I'd had my Swiss Army knife. Later I turned off the electric pump but left the gravity pump going, clip-clop clip-clop clip-clop, all night long.
In celebration of Christ's rising, I drank a beer by the swimming pool and discussed Stefánia's mental problems with Cleusa. We saw no hope. Drugs, therapy, hypnotism, prayer, spiritualism and berating have had no effect. She prattles on as she has prattled for fifteen years now, always talking about her childhood in Itajubá, where she was head of her class and considered a beauty. But something went haywire in her head and how she's just barely rational now. Just prattles on and on, defending herself and cutting down childhood friends whom she has not seen since high school, repeating and repeating the same things over periods of months and even years.
I went up to the waterfall to pull up some bamboo roots for replanting in more useful places. This would have been a lot easier if I'd had my knife. I groped among the pebbles in search of topaz and gold. I found three crystal-clear crystals - probably quartz, but I put them in my mouth anyway. (I had no pockets, which is how I lost my knife; I'd just tucked it under my waistband.) I heaved some big flat rocks to the place where the water spills out from the pool under the waterfall to flow into the reservoir. For absolutely no practical reason at all I made the dam a little higher, a little neater. Everyone who comes here starts to do this shortly after arriving. They do it because it's so simple to see how to go about it, because the rocks are so perfect for building a dam. Everybody says it's to make the pool deeper, but another three inches makes no difference. Knee-deep or thigh-deep is all, and the pool congests with mud
I stuck the bamboo in the canal that feeds off the stream to bypass the swimming pool and trickle on down to the fish pond. I'll leave them there until they sprout roots. I went up to the house to spit my topazian candidates into an empty mayonnaise jar and put the jar where Suerda won't find it because I know she'll call the hope stupid, which I already know and don't mind. She was cooking fish. She said, "Try it and see if it's done." I did. It was. We ate. Except her. She doesn't eat fish. Doesn't even like to smell itcooking. Making it was a sacrifice, typical of the pattern of her miserable life.
We walked down to Artúr's farm to get facts. He'd been sleeping. He could recommend no good carpenter or roof-fixer but told me that my fish, which are tilápia , do indeed like to eat rotten guava. (Someone had told me rotten guava will kill a tilápia.) Artúr confirmed that Zé is a pretty slow worker but all caretakers are. At least he's honest, Artúr said, so we should be satisfied. We went out to his barn, where I left a calf lick my fingers. Ian kept his fingers to himself. Why take chances, right?
I hummed the one-note samba most of the day. I decided, at last, that the first music I will hear when our ship comes in will be Yo-Yo Ma's Bach cello solos.
I made dog food for Scoggin's widow - cornmeal boiled until firm. She didn't eat it but will by morning.
I felt Ian's forehead and cheek a hundred times and wrung out his pants just as often. I wound up his toy train a thousand times and set it on the concrete floor to let it run across the room and into something. I counted his fingers and toes out loud. I asked him his name and how old he is. When I ask him in English, he says "Two." When I ask in Portuguese, he says, "Dois." It's amazing. He's a portable computer in moist diapers.
His mother was asleep so I marched him up to the filthy, dangerous chicken coop to see the rabbits and fix the cage again. Two rabbits were loose so I chased them all around. The strategy is to keep them running until they are tired. This takes about fifteen minutes and says a lot for my lungs. When I caught one of them by a back leg, it cried like a baby in a house afire. I tossed everybody a couple of cobs of crappy corn, two banana leaves and a wad of grass. I should have fed them more and now they're out there hungry in the dark. I remember now that I left my machete out there, too, stuck in a beam. I will probably forget this before morning just as I have forgotten where I left my knife.
I did a lot of other stuff, little stuff. I fingered the branches of baby trees I've planted, looking for signs of ants in the night and death on nigh. (The nice things about planting trees in the tropics is that you can see progress, in inches, every month, every week, sometimes.) I tried to memorize where I saw ant hills because it's a constant battle. You have to sprinkle special poison pellets around their holes for them to carry home like manna fallen from heaven. I feel this will teach them a lesson. It's a lesson for us all. I cut a section of a trunk of a banana tree for me to sit on and smoke and drink lemonade between bouts with my hoe. I saw a lot of ripe red coffee beans to collect tomorrow. I retraced twelve miles of my steps in search of my knife. I squatted and shat behind a jabuticaba tree, wiped fruitlessly with an impermeable piece of banana leaf, then washed my little hiney in the little canal that comes down from the fish pond. Later, I peed near the waterfall as I always must when I get within earshot. I threw a little mud on a place where water has broken through the canal that feeds the reservoir. I poked my nose into brushy areas in search of marijuana but no, nowhere. I contemplated suicide and dreamed about how to spend my $2.5 million advance on the novel I'm going to write just as soon as the ship arrives with my typewriter. I weeded among my baby eucalyptus trees. I stuck a couple of poles in the ground and wire-lashed a cross-pole between them to support the furtherance of a vine plant that they tell me will bear maracujá - passion fruit. I tasted an odd little hot pepper that grows in unbidden abundance, then cooled my mouth with a banana. I said, "Son of a bitch, son of a bitch," hundreds of times regarding the loss of my knife. I threw corn to the one chicken my dog did not kill and which has never, ever laid an egg. I noted healthy activity around one beehive and ignored the other, which I know is dying. I kept a weather-eye on the sky. I noted the moon rise. I saw my sister-in-law, who's in law school, look at it and say, "Isn't that a beautiful sunset." Her big sister, the one I married, said, "No, that's the moon...isn't it?" She looked at me to confirm this. Not willing to risk commitment, I said, "How can you tell?" and she said, "Tcht."
I didn't do much real wondering except on such practical matters as Where's that knife? Where's that avocado? What's that corrugated berry? Do eggplants and green peppers get along in the same patch? Do rotten guavas kill fish? What's that little round pepper taste like? What's it going to be like, sitting behind a table on the sidewalk in town selling bananas beside an array of illiterate women in rags? How high can a fever go before it's too bad for a two-year-old and where do I find a doctor on Good Friday? Who stole my notebook from my car while it was parked at the bus station? Why? How much air do fish need in their water to breathe easy? Where are the leaks in the swimming pool, the fish pond, the roof, the hoses, the rabbit hutch? When is a pile of fermenting dung ready for the compost heap? How and where shall I make compost boxes? How do you tell if a little boy has a cold or tuberculosis? Is this baby bamboo the yellow kind or the thick, straight green kind or the kind you can weave into mats? Where'd that rabbit disappear to and how did he get out of his cage? Where can I borrow a rooster, or are roosters rented in some way? Should I build a second hen house on the lower forty so the chickens will eat all the ants in the vicinity? Will my electric chipper/shredder be able to gobble big banana leaves? How might I build a huge wheelbarrow? How might I fix the rusty little one I have? How fast does bamboo rot?
P.S. - I found my knife. It was behind the toilet.
* * *
On January 15, 1985, the Congress of Brazil elected Tancredo Neves president. He was to be the first civilian president since -- in 1964. The election was seen as somewhat of a miracle. The military party held a mandated majority in the congress. Over their twenty years of rule, they reaped bountiful personal fortunes. Tancredo had held congressional office and resisted acceptance of the military during its reign. A quintessential Mineiro - tight-lipped, serious, sly - he resisted cautiously, never making enough waves to get anyone mad. It took him twenty years, but he managed to weave enough political bonds to get himself elected president. Some of the military-backed sleazebags, seeing their imminent fall from graces, voted for Tancredo in exchange for promises and favors we can only imagine.
The country had great hopes in this grandfatherly man of short stature and cutely pointed nose. Although he could barely see over the microphones that surrounded his face during interviews, he was going to stop the inflation, behead the bureaucracy, weed out the corruption, and hoist Brazil into first-world status.
Tancredo took office on March 15. Twelve hours later, he temporarily resigned his post to attend to a health problem. This was not entirely surprising. Elected presidents of Brazil tend to meet untimely deaths. Since the country established itself as a democracy in 18--, JK was the only elected president to serve his entire term. he lived long eough to die in a suspicious car accident a few years later.
Tancredo's vice president, José Sarney, a former buddy of the military, temporarily assumed the office of president. Tancredo was subjected to surgery after surgery, each leading to further complications. Fifteen percent of deaths in Brazilian hospitals are due to infections contracted therein, and Tancredo was no exception. It was suggested that he be sent to the United States for treatment, but the idea was rejected as politically ridiculous. (Meanwhile, the former president, -- , a crude general who once headed the Brazilian intelligence agency, was sent to Cincinnati for a bypass operation. Pundits suggested that Tancredo go instead and that -- face his fate on an operating table in his beloved homeland.)
Tancredo died on Tiradentes Day - patriotic equivalent of the Fourth of July - twenty minutes before Suerda and I boarded a bus to Rio. We had to go there to bail out our worldly goods, which had arrived but were impounded at customs pending three thousand dollar's worth of palm grease.
What caused this was the 19 Persian rugs, none of which were ours. They'd been ordered by various rich people hoping to take advantage of our right, as immigrants, to bring our possessions without paying duty. We were supposed to make a bit of profit in this deal. We also had a computer, one of the world's first portables, albeit a forty-pound sluggard with the brains of a pocket calculator. But 256K of RAM was enough to make it an unwanted immigrant in Brazil. Normally, such a first-world wizard could not be imported at all. It would compete unfairly with Brazil's nascent electronics industry. It was unclear whether we had the right to bring one in as a personal possession - unclear enough for a customs official to have reason to ask for a tip, or so we were told. The alternative was to let him take it home for himself.
With all of Brazil in mourning over the loss of their last hope (not to mention the subsequent inauguration of a president who had always been supported by the military, reputed a half-witted shit-kicker from an outback state in the northeast), government offices were quickly shutting down for a vacation expected to last at least a week. We met with the agent who represented Global Van Lines, an overweight Swiss with shifty blue eyes.
The problem was that we had no way of knowing whether this was a standard bribe situation or a scam he had set up. For all we knew he was keeping half or even all. Suerda had arranged for the owners of the carpets to chip in and also to contribute some political pressure. But with Tancredo dead and the government in unknown torrents of turmoil, the political pressure never showed up. We were playing poker with someone who did all the dealing. He strongly advised against going down to the customs house to resolve the problem ourselves. Supposedly he had already negotiated the price as low as it would go. Our presence at customs could cause big, big problems. He wouldn't be responsible for what happened after that.
We had to clear the matter up that day or cool our heels in Rio for a week. We also had to clear it up right or lose everything we owned, not to mention the carpets of the rich and powerful. As slow-witted as any other banana farmer, I saw no way out. We agreed to deposit money in his bank account in Belo and mail him the receipt. He would make the payment at customs and ship us our stuff. Of course we'd have no proof of anything. He'd still hold all the cards. I wasn't worried, though. If anything else went wrong, I'd borrow Zé's .22 and come shoot the guy in the eye.
As it turned out, he shipped the stuff, but it was C.O.D.. Fortunately, the truck driver couldn't read. He went back to Rio with nothing but our signature.
* * *
Once I had my typewriter I got right to work on my novel. In a matter of hours I got my protagonist a job as a doctor in a doll hospital, annihilated Jerusalem with a hydrogen bomb, set fire to a toll booth on Interstate 95, and wrote a sex scene without using any dirty words. My first line is "I've seen what fungus can do to shoes." I found my inspiration under my bed, where my brother-in-law, Públio, had left a pair of cheap boots. My outline was plotted to bring about the end of the world. Within my first ten pages we were well on our way. It was to be a novel in which self-deception is the primary motivation behind everything. An unloving mother believes herself motherly, a mayor believes himself a big-time tyrant, a husband and wife believe their doll a daughter, a woman believes herself a doll, a society believes itself immortal. By Chapter 29, however, doom would be written in the sky, literally.
I wrote at night, listening to Yo-Yo Ma, Copeland, Beethoven, Souza and Scott Joplin. I had to listen through earphones because the stereo had stayed with Suerda in Belo. All I had was the tape deck. Swelled with emotion as the great music marched on, I chain-smoked and drank cachaça mixed with lime and honey until I had trouble typing straight. It was a fun way to write. The effects of the alcohol didn't linger to morning. I guess it was the exercise, the honey, and all the good water I was drinking.
I got my cachaça at the little grocery/bar where Zé bought his supplies. Somehow the owner always had the good, pure, cheap stuff off somebody's farm, not out of a factory. I brought my own jug. He filled it from a big jerry can, pouring it through a funnel so rusty it leaked. If I didn't have a plug, he'd whittle one from a corn cob or twist up a sheet of the newspapers he used to wrap such things as sugar, tobacco, detergent, beans, and noodles. Every time I went to Belo I took a couple of liters for people who appreciated the good stuff. The semi-inebriated buckeroos who hung around the grocery assumed I was drinking a jug every week or two. For this they gave me respect, and I accepted it.
Here's everything I know about cachaça: It's made from the fermented juice squeezed from sugar cane. The cane squeezer is powered by water, steam, mules or slaves. The juice, called garapa or caldo de cana, is best fermented in an oak trough. A hunk of dried cow manure is the best way to get the fermentation underway. It takes a wise cachaçeiro to know when the stuff is ready to be distilled. The distillation process is just like any other. When the alcohol comes out, it drips. The word for drip in Portuguese is pinga, which is another word for cachaça.
The good stuff comes from a farm, not a factory. The factories just mix up batches from several farms, ruining it. The good stuff tends to be a bit yellow and have flecks of manure at the bottom. The very best of the good stuff spends a few months or even years in an oak barrel. Sometimes it gets so good you can drink it without closing your eyes.
Cachaça is not sipped or drunk chilled. You gulp two or three fingers of it from a tumbler. You should drink it before tucking into lunch. It helps you eat more. But don't drink it after lunch.
The best way to drink cachaça, if you ask me, is to first cut a lime in half five times and put the pieces into a cup. Sprinkle unrefined sugar on it, then grind it good with a pestle, putting on lots of pressure to get the flavor from the lime skin. Mix the consequent juice with the cachaça and there you have a caipirinha, which means "little peasant." For an extra-special little peasant, mix in some killer bee honey. I drink little peasants with killer bee honey well into the night. They give me joy.
Cachaça is used for a number of remedies. You can cure a cough by soaking a cloth in cachaça and tying it around your neck. Or you can drink a little with some honey and lime mixed in. You can also treat leprosy with it, but no one can agree on the details of the process. You can use it to cure a scorpion wound by catching the little son-of-a-bitch and slipping him, live, into an empty bottle. Then drip cachaça onto him until he dies. Then drink the cachaça. This last bit of lore sounds too much like a computer manual; it tells you what to do but now how. It leaves out the part about getting a live scorpion into a bottle.
You can also use cachaça as an all-purpose household cleanser. It's cheaper than the store-bought stuff but is basically the same thing. It's also the same thing cars run on.
I could barely afford the $2.20 for a jug. Having blown several months' worth of savings on that bribe in Rio, I was on a starvation budget. Anything I wanted to spend I had to earn myself - a principle I couldn't argue with. So I put up a Bananas For Sale sign at ICHS and arranged some private English classes there at bargain-basement prices. I rented Zé to Lázaro for a couple of days so I'd have enough for his month's salary. I ate rice and beans and whatever was in the garden - mostly radishes, collards, and tomatoes. I ran out of gas a couple of times because I could never afford more than a couple of liters at a time. My only footwear was a pair of sandals made from a tire. My shoes had disappeared in Belo, probably stolen by Públio, who was mad over my giving his fungi-ridden boots to Zé, the ones that inspired my novel.
I soon had lots of honey, too. As the weather cooled in May, swarms went out looking for a place to live. I offered a few choice properties and soon had five hives full. These were very valuable additions to my capital assets. A liter of honey sells for about five dollars - a lot of money in a country where a big bottle of beer costs under half a dollar and a banana runs for a penny. A hive of good killer bees can produce ten or twenty liters in a few months. The honey is surely among the best in the world. It bears little resemblance to honey I've had in the States, maybe because it is in no way processed. More likely it's because the bees glean the nectar from the general flora of the forest, not a monoculture of clover or alfalfa. They must draw nectar from hundreds of species of plants.
But they're bastards to deal with. They really do get hellbent on killing you. I dress in a heavy canvas suit and try to cinch it closed at ankles and wrists. But a few of the little darlings always get and there's nothing to do about it but wait. If you go smacking at them, you're likely to jostle the face mask and let in more. You can't open the suit to let them out because thirty thousand of their brethren are out there zipping around like kamikazes in tiny-weeny F-16's. When they sting either flesh or canvas, they release a certain smell as the stingers are ripped form their abdomens. They associate the smell with danger, so the frenzy feeds itself. Naturally I associate the smell with pain, and the sensation builds up into a suppressed panic, which bees can smell. I gradually become aware that I am surrounded by tens of thousands of individuals who are willing to die for the eternal bliss of killing me. The humming intensifies, getting louder and more desperate as I pump more and more smoke into the hive, work faster and faster, more carelessly, even viciously, with hatred. They are death crawling up the outside of my face mask and batting around inside the mask, slamming their stingers into me point blank at high speed, up my nostrils, into my ears. Death stings me in little doses.
Once I was carrying a super full of honey and combs away from a hive. It was heavy, so I had it up on my shoulders. The position stretched the canvas tight across my back. Suddenly a wave of pain dug into me - uncountable hundreds or thousands of simultaneous stings. I abandoned the super and headed for the Bee Emergency Back-up System. Stefánia and Cleusa were sunning themselves there after a refreshing dip but took off when they heard me coming. I leaped in feet-first. The pain was taking my breath away, but I had to stay in there, fully dressed and up to my eyeglasses in cold water, for twenty minutes while bees zinged around my head. When they finally cleared away, I had to climb out of the pool while wearing at least a hundred pounds of wet canvas. I made it up to the house, then collapsed on the bed and slept for four hours.
I went to a Rotary meeting with the poet who manages the Mariana branch of Banco do Brasil, Gabriel. Suerda said I should pursue friendship with him because I might need a banker some day. I let her believe that's why we're friends. The truth is, it's because I might need a poet. He's about the only real intellectual in town. (He confirms what I've suspected: most of the professors at ICHS are fakes, having gotten their degrees at places like ICHS.) He has a book of poetry under his belt, and a couple of prizes for it. He and his wife and small kid live in an apartment right over the bank, which is a slow, two-roomed office dealing mostly in petty cash. When Gabriel isn't writing poetry or managing the bank, he's secretary of the Mariana Rotarians. He invited me to the meeting, and I agreed to go for much the same reasons I crossed the Sahara desert: to see what there was to see and say that I'd seen it.
I shook hands with a couple of cops, a barber, a plumber, a priest, an assistant bank manager, and, fatefully, the director of maintenance at the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce hematite mine just up the highway from Canela. An aficionado of the English language, he suggested I come teach at the mine. They needed to know English because they did a lot of work with the Chinese and Japanese. I said I most certainly would like to. Then we all drank beer and took quick snorts of cachaça in a nook where the women couldn't see us. I filled out a visitor's card that needed to know my name, address, my mother's maiden name and why I was staying at this hotel. I knew my name but didn't really have an address since Canela is more of a place you can just give directions to. The blank wanting to know my purpose there was not big enough for even the briefest gist of my intent.
Before dinner, visitors were announced and asked to rise for all due adulation. Dinner was "American style," which is to say a smorgasbord. We went through a ritual involving the flags of Brazil, Minas Gerais and Mariana. They played a very scratchy rendition of the Brazilian national anthem on a very scratchy old plastic record player. To recognize the song you'd have to know how it went. It's a great anthem, very Brazilian in its sudden ups and downs and shifts in key. It's by no means a samba but a very exuberant march. The beats at the close of each stanza seem designed for the words " 'cause-the...gang's...all...here!" Of course those aren't the words. It's something to do with the blue sky, verdant hills, freedom, fertility and such. I've only heard it sung right once. It was when Tancredo died. A pop singer named Fa-Fá de Belém, previously known mostly for her plethora of breast, sang it slowly, with feeling. It wasn't a march, then; it was a love song. The whole country wept, even me. If she'd sung it that way ten years earlier, she would have had her fingernails ripped out.
Gabriel gushed apology for not having an American flag in honor of their guest. Everyone grew rueful over this until someone remembered that in the back of the storage room they had a flag of Camden, New Jersey. Some roaming Rotarian had left as a tribute. Gabriel pointed out that it was, in a manner of speaking, an American flag. I agreed and gave it a perfunctory cub-scout salute but didn't get into the Pledge of Allegiance or anything.
I came away with an appointment for an interview at CVRD, the name of the director of yet another mine a little further up the road, and news of a possible gold mine on the mountain behind my house.
* * *
Dear Ralph,
I came to a philosophical conclusion today and was going to tell you about it but have forgotten what it was. I was in bed at the time, mid-afternoon, lying on my back, blankets to my chin, looking down past the ridges of my feet and on out the glassless window at the low, dreary clouds that moved south to north with alarming velocity. They seemed to be reinforcements rushing to the northeast of Brazil, where all the clouds are raining now. Several states there, after no rain for five years, are now under several feet of water. What little I understood from a crackling radio report mentioned yellow fever, malaria and half a million homeless.
So that's one of the places we'll go as son as I have enough money to keep us in hotels and beer for a couple of months. Get out your fancy atlas and find Belo and follow the train north to Montes Claros, Monte Azul, Salvador. From there we go by bus to Recife at the tip of the bulge toward Africa. From there we can explore the flooded outback, the region of Brazil that is still in the nineteenth century. Then it's northward to Belem at the mouth of the Amazon. It's easy to get chicken boats up to Manaus and then on to Iquitos, Peru. I assume we can get to the coast from there. From Lima we can take trucks to Cuzco and from there walk the Inca trail to Machu Picchu. Then Titicaca and La Paz, where we can pick up the Death Train to Corumbá on the border of Brazil. There we can get another Death Train - I bet you didn't know there were two - across Mato Grosso to Camp Grande, then catch the train to Ponta Porã on the border of Paraguay. I already know how to sneak across the border there, so don't worry about it. It's just a matter of walking across the street. Then on to Asuncion, then back to Brazil via Foz de Iquaçu and home again just in time for a divorce.
While I'm writing the novel that will pay for all this, you be studying Portuguese and Spanish and sewing secret pockets in the cuffs of your pants. Do some research on Ubanda and Candomblé, which are bastardizations of Catholicism crossed with African religions. They are rife in Bahia, but I can take you to an Ubanda shop near the Belo bus station. There you can buy your "Catch-love" soap, your medicinal herbs, your Black Magi key chain, your incense to attract money, your candles to ward off pesky demons, your trinkets for pulling off voodooistic acts of vengeance and desire, your statues of African gods for covering your ass from a multitude of disasters. Some of these gods carry Catholic aliases, a trick of the slaves that allowed them to practice their religion without getting crucified. Among them are Iemanjá; Goddess of Waters and Seas, alias Our Lady of Sant'Anna; Xango Djacuta, God of Thunders; Iansá, Goddess of Winds, alias Santa Barbara; Nana-buruque, Goddess of Waterfalls and Rapids, Alias Our Lady of the Glory; Oxum, Goddess of Rivers, alias Our Lady of Conception; Xangô, God of Thunder; alias St. Jerónimo; Ogum, God of War, alias St. George; Axossi, God of Hunters, alias St. Sebatian; Ibeji, God of Children, alias Cosme and Damian; Omulu, God of the Dead, alias St. Lázaro. And that ain't all. You'll find a host of other gods and demi-gods, spirits good and bad, down at fine Ubanda shops everywhere.
Sincerely,
* * *
Flush with cash from my work as an hematite miner, I bought a wee little pig. It wasn't much bigger than a football. I bought it off the kid who tried to sell me goats. He's always got his finger in something. For a while it was puppies; now it's pigs. The price left me barely enough to buy the twelve foot plank I needed for the floor of a sty. The rest of it we made from real wood. Zé and I and his son, Miguel, tromped into the woods at Lázaro's place to fell a bunch of wrist-thick trees and a couple of thicker ones. My Hudson's Bay Ax was widely admired for its form and lightness, not to mention the word "Colins" on its head - same name engraved on fine machetes.
We built the sty over the pond so the dung would fall into the water and encourage plankton for the fish. Zé drained the pond enough to dig post holes for the thicker trees. The thinner were trimmed and nailed up as wall railings. It was a fine contraption. The pig looked bewildered but not entirely uncomfortable. We heaved her some rotten fruit and she dug right in. It occurred to me that with the act of slopping my pig, I expended virtually all my swine-related savoir-faire. All else I knew was that they don't oink, aren't pink, don't have curly tails, like to build houses of straw or sticks, their ears are no good for making silk purses, and one should never buy one in a poke. If a poke is a gunny sack, I've already made my first mistake.
Lázaro and Públio are still after me to get into frogs. Lázaro lent me a book about it. It was a lot more interesting than studying for an exam in didactics. I ate up new knowledge like buttered popcorn. The word for pollywog is girino. In California there is a school that teaches frogs to jump. Geese are suggested for protection of the frog pond but Dobermans are will also do the trick. It takes five to seven bull frogs to make a single shoe, though the book didn't say how long it would take them. The word for frog is rã, which is pronounced like saying "Ha" through your nose and mouth equally - basically making a noise like a frog. The title of the book is "A Rã, which means "The Frog" and is a joy to say. Sapo, which means frog in Spanish, means toad in Portuguese. Sapos are held to be poisonous to the touch, a fact I got not from the book but from people who have toad stories to tell. A frog's favorite food are, in order of preference, pollywogs (which pretty much demolishes the theory of evolution, if you ask me), goldfish, insects, and cow lungs, though the latter will not effectively increase a frog's weight. Snakes eat frogs, but ducks and geese eat snakes, but ducks also eat frogs. You best bet is a good goose and a high fence. You can sex your goldfish by noting their size (males are larger) or by pressing a certain spot on their tummies and seeing if milky liquid or red liquid squirts out. Swedes consume 1,800 tons of frog meat a year. Thirty-two percent of frogs imported into the U.S. come from Bangladesh. Many frog livers end up in paté. Somebody in Brazil has raised a seventeen-pound frog and it's still eating. Frogs lose their appetites in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
My sister, Bonnie, who lives in Australia, wrote to ask me what to do with a guinea pig that has fallen into disuse among her children. I had a book that listed a number of things to do with a guinea pig, but all of them called for a dead guinea pig. I suggested she feed it some fresh, wet lettuce.
Because fresh, wet lettuce really does kill a guinea pig. I know because I got some guinea pigs and Zé fed them a similar poison, fresh, wet collards. Every day for three days a guinea pig went belly up. Now we know, but it's too late.
* * *
One day a fat, fuzzy, round spider bit Lázaro' big toe. He'd stuck his bare foot into a boot without thumping it out first. It must have been a horrible way to die. Lázaro thought he was going to die, too. As pain pulsed up his leg, he wiped up the remains of the spider in a wad of industrial strength toilet paper, eased himself into his car and headed for the hospital with one of his slaves. But he started to feel dizzy and feared he wouldn't make it before passing out. Since his slave couldn't drive, he stopped at the road to my farm and sent the boy to fetch me. But the boy ran into Miguel and told him the story. Miguel ran on until he met Zé and told him the story. The story that arrived at my doorstep was that Lázaro didn't feel like driving into town so he wanted me to come get him. I thought this odd, especially since from my front porch I could see Lázaro's big red station wagon down at the highway, honking like mad. With my binoculars I could see him sitting in the passenger's eat, elbow out the window. I didn't feel like going into town just then, but Zé kept insisting that I hurry. So I changed clothes, combed my hair, sprayed on some deodorant, locked up all the windows, collected the books and papers I'd need for that night's classes, and finally set out for the highway. Just as I got to the road, Lázaro took off, but I whistled and shouted until he stopped. I ran up to the car. He explained and showed me his foot. Aranha. I understood. As I sped toward town, I understood more. Lázaro wasn't entirely sure he was going to survive. "Better go faster," he said between his teeth. We went slightly out of our way to pick up a friend of his, a young pharmacist who had some pull at the hospital. Certainly I would be no help in the red tape department. I would have gotten frustrated and eventually tried to punch my way in.
But it wasn't all that complicated once Lázaro said he'd pay cash rather than use the government health plan. He hopped down the hall and up onto an examining table, pulling his heavy toe after him. The doctor - the only one on duty - arrived and looked at the remains of the spider. He didn't recognize the spider except that it wasn't a black widow. If he'd known what kind it was, he could have given Lázaro serum if he'd had any, which he didn't. All they could do was see how far up the leg the rain would rise. So far, it hurt up to his thigh.
As Lázaro lay groaning and half-laughing, a nurse/nun told a story about a little girl in Ouro Preto who'd had to have her arm amputated after he parents tried to cure her spider bite with the power of prayer. Lázaro, noting that the hospital wasn't offering even that, asked if he could at least pick which leg they sawed off.
The pain crept further up his leg, ever closer to his groin. The doctor finally decided to inject a painkiller. It would have to go straight into his toe. Two nurses held him down as the doctor crammed the needle in under his toenail. I've never seen anyone suffer such agony. I felt faint and had to lean against the wall, then sink down closer to the floor to get my head between my knees.
Lázaro's wife came to Mariana on a bus and drove him home in the station wagon. They gave me possession of an old VW bug with a dead battery that Lázaro had kicking around Mariana for no real reason. I'd never known he had it. Apparently it was too rickety to trust up the winding road to Ouro Preto or the hole-ridden road to the farm. But it was good enough to get me up to ICHS to break the news. Lázaro's classes were canceled, and of course most others, in all due respect, were, too. The evening was dedicated to extemporaneous lectures on spider and scorpion awareness. Thump your boots before you put them on. Don't walk around barefoot. Don't leave your clothes on the floor or hanging on the wall. Be extra careful in the shower. If you really must pick up a rock, do so with the intention of dropping it fast. Size has nothing to do with potency. The really big ones don't bite. A French teacher once had one in her bathroom as big as a dinner plate.
So now I'm worried about spiders. They abound. Here and there on the walls of the house are little circles of legs where I have smacked them with my Firestone sandal. And as of next month, June, it's scorpion season. Things will really be jumping around the old homestead.
How about rabid, blood-sucking bats? Should I be worrying about them? The answer is yes. I've heard they're raising hell in the northern part of the state, sinking their teeth into the necks of cattle and pigs and hanging there all night. They're around Mariana, too. Lázaro has shown me scars on the necks of his pigs. He thinks that's why they aren't gaining weight. He says if we were raising frogs, we wouldn't have this problem. I say yeah, sure, but we'd have other problems. Snakes or something. He says, well what do you want? This is Earth. Be glad scorpions don't breed like cockroaches. Be glad they don't fly.
I report none of this to Suerda. She'd just try to convince me that snakes, deadly spiders, scorpion seasons, killer toads and rabid vampires awere reasons not to live on a farm in beautiful, historic Mariana. Then I would try to convince her that apartments are deathtraps that held people prisoners until they died. I simply can'tunderstand why a person would want to live in a city. I thought people lived in cities because they had to. I can't understand that, and I can't understand her. Nor she me. So why are we married?
It got cold in June, down around forty, I reckon, maybe lower. At night my breath came out in frosty clouds. It might not seem bad compared to the New England winters I grew up with, but the outdoor temperature is always about the same as that indoors. If it's forty degrees outside, it's forty degrees in the bathroom when you shower. Warm clothes are hard to find. I had to ask several people before I found one who knew the word for scarf. (It sounds almost exactly like "catch-a-cold.") The only way to get one is to find an old person who knows how to knit. The literal translation of ear muffs is "those - things - that - cover - your- ears - like - this."
Incredibly, a few people own such things. I had to read a term paper in front of a class full of kids in overcoats and ear muffs, everybody shivering and wishing I'd read faster. It wasn't a long essay because the Mariana has run out of paper. Not even the papelarias have it. When a shipment comes in to the university, they use it to fill the copier. If you want typing paper, you have to run off copies of a blank sheet. So my essay was pretty short. No one asked any questions, which means either they didn't understand or they just wanted to go home. Both are credible. I do terrible things to Portuguese grammar, having learned a lot of from Zé, who doesn't do a real good job himself. I probably sound like a hillbilly. At home, typing into the night, I try to hold Picuinha in my lap to warm my hands on her belly, but she won't sit still. She's functionally illiterate but knows that anything as loud as an IBM Selectric is trouble. I have to whistle for her when my fingers get too cold to type. Maybe I should tie a guinea pig to the back of each hand so I look like something a Brazilian would say a Brazilian would do rather than build a fireplace, which is something this American should do and most certainly never will. I have not fixed the roof yet although it has stopped raining and the tiles can be adjusted without breaking. But why fix a roof if it's not raining?
I'm not the first to say a disparaging thing about Brazilians. (And I do so without seriousness.) No one puts down Brazilians more than Brazilians. They make constant jokes about how their people are crap, how nobody does anything right, how the country deserves what it has: poverty, unemployment, epidemics, shortages, the largest foreign debt of any third world nation, inflation that the government is pretending will reach only two hundred percent this year though by June 1 it's more than halfway there and speeding up. Brazilians consider themselves - or rather, everyone except their immediate selves - mutts, a pathetic crossbreed of Portuguese and Africans. Many times I've heard them say, "If only we had been colonized by the Dutch," which in fact, they were for a while. I've even heard it said - and not by an expert - that even Brazilian slaves were inferior to the slaves of North America. Proof of this, I was told, is that jazz is superior to samba. Why jazz should be considered superior to samba, I do not know. It seems to me that jazz would be taken as superior only because it comes from North America, where everything is assumed to be superior. So the problem of Brazilian self-respect seems to be one of attitude.
They blame their situation on the Portuguese style of colonization, which was to exploit the colonies for the betterment of the mother country. Construction, long-term development and settlement were not part of the plan. It's interesting that Portuguese has just one word for "explore" and "exploit." They also have just one word for "hope for,": "expect," and "wait for." I find that a very Catholic attitude.
In apparent contrast to this is a general feeling of something like patriotism. A certain oft-sung joke sums it up. It involves a conversation between God and an angel shortly after the creation of the earth. The angel looks over God's work and says, "But you've given Brazil everything: a year-round growing season, more fruit than anywhere on Earth, more rivers than in any other land, a coast longer than all of Europe's, fertile soil, bountiful minerals...is this your idea of Heaven on Earth?
"Not at all," says God. "Just wait till you see the people I put there."
That Brazilians say such things about themselves actually speaks well for them. Their disparagements are expressions of frustration with their government and with the inability of the lower class to raise itself up. The blame, if you ask me, falls far more on the former. The politicians are disgustingly corrupt. While the country lies stranded in impoverishment, the elected leaders consume vast amounts of public funds, freely using the government treasury for campaign expenses. Each sets up his Tren da Alegria - literally his "Happy Train" - a long line of friends and family members given well paying no-work jobs in the bureaucracy. Very little trickles down to the poor. The public schools are a disgrace. Teachers are paid no more than illiterate farm workers. Often a politician up for election will build a lot of schools but never put up the funds for staff and equipment. I've seen newspaper photographs of a classroom full of children standing at their desks because they have no chairs. In Rio, a recent mayor wanted to deliver thehundreds of schools he had promised, so he had some slapped together of sheet metal. In the sun, they became unihabitable ovens. In Minas Gerais, state legislators allow themselves to retire on full pension after serving just one two-year term. The governor who would take office in 1986, a porcine son-of-a-bitch so fat he can hardly see out his flabby little eye sockets, helped himself to several animals from the zoo so he could have them on his farm.
So the poor remain illiterate and incapable of moving up. Since voting is mandatory, their vast numbers determine the winners, and the winners are the ones with money to spend on television commercials and public works projects of high visibility but very low quality. Typically a governor will lay in an asphalt highway right before elections. But it isn't built with any consideration for drainage or foundation. It has to last only a few weeks. Basically, a bulldozer plows through the brush followed by an asphalter. It's a fine-looking road. The peasants adore it. They vote for the government party, but two years later, their road is rubble.
This attitude is not true of the middle-class professionals that I knew. Most want to use their skills and see them produce something. Not unlike the American middle class, they see themselves supporting the contry. The unwashed masses, maybe 80 percent of the country, are incapable of supporting themselves in any economy other than agrarian. The rich control the government and don't pay taxes. This is the bounty endowed to Brazil.
* * *
Suerda, son and maid came to visit. To my utter amazement, she loved my little pig. But it was a peasant pig of unknown breed and suspect sanitation - not good enough for the breeder of fine pigs-cum-boutique manager. She wanted quality pigs, and somehow she knew how to go about finding them. We stuffed Ian into a warm suit and packed him, along with Zé and the maid, into the car. In town we circled in on a grizzled, sharp-eyed man named Lico who deals in pigs. He's building a regular little supermarket in Mariana right across the street from Zé's grubby little grocery/bar. Zé commutes between the grocery-bar and the car while Suerda negotiates with Lico on the sidewalk. Ian and I, with our smell of dollars, stay out of sight. The negotiations get confused by a guy who comes along with two goats he desperately needs to unload. They're good-looking goats, but we've come for pigs. Lico will sell us some for seven thousand cruzeiros per kilo. I say okay as long as they're small.
He says the pigs are right there in Mariana, we could come pick them up right now. I say fine, as long as we're back by one-forty-five so we can put the maid on the bus to Belo for her day off.
Right there in Mariana means on the other side of a mountain. Lico said my car wouldn't make it. We have to take his truck, a Jeep pick-up with a tarp over the back, covered-wagon style. Zé gets to wait for us in the bar. The maid gets to wait with him. Ian and I get to sit in the back of the truck with a goat and a couple of hired-hands. Suerda sits up front with Lico to milk him for tips on the care and feeding of swine.
It's more fun in back. As the truck growls up a dirt trail, we have a good time bouncing around. The goat takes a major leak on the floor and Ian tells me, in vulgar terms in two languages, what the goat is doing. I praise the b'jeezes out of him and make him say "goat" twenty times in English. The hired hands, illiterate peasants, catch on. Within a few kilometers we're all speaking English.
Up front Suerda is learning learned that all the land we're belongs to Lico. Atop a mountain once removed from Mariana we stop to check out some grimy guys loading charcoal into a truck with slat walls fifteen feet high. Three mud brick charcoal cookers shed heat and wisps of wood smoke. Charcoal cookers look like muddy igloos chopped out of the side of a hill. Inside, logs and sticks burn in the absence of air until only carbon is left. The consequent charcoal looks like blackened firewood.
In the cold, clear air I could put out my hand and feel two sources of heat: the sun and the domes. While Lico and his hired hands tried to catch three loose goats by clucking through the bushes with bags of salt, I walked around the edge of the hill behind the domes. Ian, on the ground down below, face framed by the hood over his head, watched silently, curiously. He pointed out the big dirty truck, the big pile of dirty black sticks beside it, the smoke coming from the domes, the goats in the bushes. He's a born teacher; he loves to point things out and gurgle spit about them.
Lico told us that this charcoal production pays a 1,600 percent profit. All you have to do is own several square kilometers of forest, find somebody who knows how to make charcoal, and tell him to do it. Pay him slave wages and there's your profit. I suppose the same is true of starting up a steel mill or a chemical factory. I even know writers who get away with it. They know they can hire a writer for less than the cost of a good typist.
Fifteen minutes further up the trail we come to a clearing with a nice little house in it. Sometimes Lico stays here if he doesn't feel like driving home after a hard day of pig and charcoal business. A hundred yards away is a long, low concrete structure where the pigs lie. Near it is a pau-a-pique house where a black family lives, the caretakers. Running a pig operation, says Lico, is just a matter of buying a few starter pigs, building a concrete structure to keep them in, and hiring a family to live there and lord over the beasts for twenty bucks a month.
He's got some mighty big pigs in that concrete structure - fat, squinty-eyed, flabby-jowled bankers, Republicans, dictators, southern cops. Some of them can't even stand up. They make the kind of sounds I make after a big feijoada, deep, helpless grunts of exhausted contentment. These guys are ready to become feijoada, the black bean stew that is cooked for hours with the raunchiest parts of the pig: ears, tail, hooves, intestinal sausage, smoked meat.
But we came for piglets. Suerda casts her knowing eye across the crowd and spots a couple of good candidates. The caretaker isn't around, but his woman, tall, low-breasted, tough-calved, takes competent charge. She wades into the throng and scoops up the indicated pigs, carries them out, one at a time, in her arms like babies. Lico ties their ankles and rolls them into the truck.
On the way back to town, we all sit up front. Lico, a born preacher of free enterprise and perhaps a born liar as well, tells us that chickens are the best thing to raise for money, that he has built a house for each of his sons, that he is building what will be the largest supermarket in Mariana, three stories high. We learn that we should not trust agro-engineers with all their big hoopty-doo theories, that the truth is found through practice. We learned what a success Lico is, all the money he's making. Suerda presses him for all the prices and profit margins of everything he mentions. Personally, I think he's lying about a lot of it, but Suerda is eating it up, or at least pretending to. By her questions I can see she's getting ideas. She's seeing how we can make money off our little farm. I don't interrupt.
Back in town we learn that the easiest way to weigh a pig in a grocery store is to first put it in a burlap bag, then lay it on the meat scale. The pig makes a lot of noise over this. Women crowded around the meat counter get out of the way. They all look to the scale to see the results. It matters to them how much a pig weighs, even if it's somebody else's. Back at the car, we settle up in cash. Forty-seven kilos of pig-on-the-hoof costs about fifty dollars.
The bottle of cachaça that Zé bought at his grocery/bar cost about thirty-five cents. It's transfer to Zé's gross assets means that the pigs will get less than the best of care during their orientation this afternoon. Rather than try to guide Zé's drinking habit, I will let him tie one on, then tomorrow capitalize on his guilt.
I have early opportunity to do so. Suerda gets twenty seconds into a shower that night when the water tank in the house runs dry. She's soaking wet and shivering cold. I grope through the dark to the cistern behind the house. Empty. I can hear the gravity pump clip-clopping, but no water arrives. I stick a half-dead flashlight in my mouth and stumble through the dark to start the electric pump. The cistern it draws water from, however, is dry, so I have to grope up through brush to the reservoir. It's very, very full. Wondering if scorpions swim, I fish around in the water until I feet a plastic bag that got stuck in the hose that feeds the cistern for the electric pump.
Getting the pump running is tricky on a warm afternoon and excruciating on a cold night. It involves lots of spraying water, barked knuckles and minor electric shocks. I got the son-of-a-bitch running, but on the way up to the house I heard the soft roar of water spraying from a cracked hose. The crack was in a section halfway down the side of a deep gulch - good job for a caretaker with a hangover.
I arrive at the house a cold wet failure. Suerda, shivering in a towel, expresses her disappointment. We discuss it. She points out that everything, absolutely everything is broken, everything went wrong. She asks me how I explain this to my family back in the States. I tell her I make it look like fun, which I think it is. She disagrees at length. I suffer in silence as she slides into a second and third recapitulations of problems and how she feels about them. I suffer it for as long as I can before I finally say, "Okay, okay, whatever you want to do is okay."
This is the breaking point she's been working toward. Now that she has me here she can lay out our plans for the future. I will move back to Belo. We can visit the farm on weekends. She'll let me pursue a Ph.D. or something. I don't have to worry about making a lot of money, just enough to pay the condo fee at an apartment that her mother happens to have bought for us.
To me this looks a lot like the last step in a grand plan, but I don't see what there is to do about it. I'm an idiot in a chess game with a wiz. Or maybe it's poker against a shark. At stake is a two-year-old. The only way he's going to get to live with both his mother and his father is if his father ditches his dream and moves back to the city and into the city life.
As Suerda leaves on the bus for Belo, my boy on her lap screams "Papai! Papai!" and bangs on the window with his little fists.
The plan is for me to finish my courses at ICHS, which end in July. Suerda is to find out about Ph.D. programs and for her mother to kick out the tenants in the apartment she bought. I already have a job to do in July: write a fashion catalogue for the boutique. I mollify my sadness with the following points:
1. Most people never get five months of a satisfying life, and I've already had five and a half.
2. A Ph.D. couldn't hurt.
3. I'd rather live with Ian than with three little pigs.
4. Who am I to think I get to be happy?
Shortly after the decision to can the farm I was handed a six-month contract to teach English for three hours every day at the CVRD mine. This was much more than the two hours a week I'd been teaching. The deal included lunch. I also got a job at another mine, owned by Samarco, a consortium of Brazilian, American, Australian, Japanese and European corporations who never saw the place. A Samarco car picked me up on the highway just after sunrise each morning. I spoke English at Samarco until eleven o'clock. Then a CVRD car took me over a couple of mountains to the mine called Timbopeba. I ate lunch there - CVRD is a state-owned company, so the food is much better - and spoke English until two-fifteen. I got home by three. I was a farmer until dinner, then a student until ten or eleven.
My pay as a miner was pretty decent though not especially stable or endowed with benefits. The money was reason enough to stay in Mariana until the end of the year.
It's also enough reason to buy a new car. The driver at Suerda's boutique, Hélio, knew of a good 1976 Chevy station wagon for sale by a friend of his. Hélio's a wheeler-dealer getting by on his very quick wits and endless energy. A former interstate truck driver turned father of more kids than I can count, he's virtually illiterate but extremely capable. He can fix an electrical system, mess with cement, lay bricks, paint, fix cars, build a house, see a fight coming before the first bit of spittle sees daylight. He's lined up quite the car deal, and it seems to be more in favor of us than his friend. We'll unload a terminally ill VW squareback and a few million in cash in exchange for an unrusted car with a V-6 converted to run on alcohol, new radials, sun-roof, the works. The engine purrs right along once you get it running, which takes a while with alcohol, especially on a cold day.
The car also has a radio.
I had to wait almost a month for this guy and his car to get back from vacation. I was afraid my VW would rust into place before the guy got back and I could drive out to the northern suburb where he has a store that sells construction materials. I took two liters of gasoline with me because, in the tradition of the country, I'm selling a gas tank of fumes and expecting to take possession of same.
Like any deal in Minas Gerais, consummation of the deal takes a lot of irrelevant talk with a lot of irrelevant people before the handshake and exchange of documents. Ian has plenty of time to stamp around in gutter water and almost fall into a twelve-foot-deep hole where they're laying in a sewer.
The radio is a beaut: stereo AM-FM with tape deck, four woofers, two tweeters, made to remove from the dash. It's worth almost as much as the rest of the car, which is fine if you've got the extra million and a half, which I don't. In fact, I'm under express orders not to buy the radio. According to Hélio, the radio is optional. According to his friend, it is not. I'm not about to lose a deal like this over a million and a half. Besides, my VW has died at the curb. To get it home I'd need to find a mechanic first. So I work out a deal by which I will pay for the radio over the next sixty days - not bad in a country where the value of a cruzeiro declines by half every couple of months. I know I'll be in trouble when I get home, but at least I don't own that damn VW any more. Speeding to get out of the neighborhood before, I soon discover that the horn blows every time I turn left. I guess if there's a sucker born every minute, sooner or later two of them are going to get together and sell each other cars.
Back at the boutique, Suerda takes time off to express her irritation in full detail. She is not going to spend the better part of a week's salary on a used radio. Furthermore, the car doesn't look to her like it was a good deal. It takes her half an hour to list the reasons why I'm going to return the radio the next day.
I drive off to her mother's house for lunch, a trip that demands seven left turns. There the family chooses up sides to argue about the radio. There are as many pros as cons. To me, the big one is that if I show my face to the new owner of my old car, I'm dead meat.
I go to register the car. This goes suspiciously smoothly for the first four hours as my pile of documents slide into and back out of little windows until it is suddenly noted that the chassis number of the car is, according to a flawless book of codes that was handed down from God Himself, the chassis number of a Chevy Opala sedan, not a Chevy Caravan wagon.
To set this straight I have to drive to a motor vehicle department on the other side of town. Driving across Belo is not easy. Knowing where a place is doesn't count. You have to know how to get there. Belo was one of the first planned cities in the world. Unfortunately, it was planned by corrupt, inebriated bureaucratic samba dancers who foresaw another century of equestrian traffic. The street layout is a neat grid, like Manhattan's, but for aesthetic reasons cris-crossed by dozens of Broadways. The consequent intersections of six one-way streets just don't work for heavy car traffic. The city government keeps changing directions of streets and closing off streets here and there. A wrong turn can lead you into a twenty-minute tour through downtown traffic.
But I make it. I explain my case and get assigned "Boy Number One" to do whatever has to be done. Boy Number One turns out to be an old man who has to make a lot of noise to get himself crumpled down under the car for a look at the chassis. He asks me if I've changed the chassis number and then if I've changed the chassis. Of course neither is the case. He tells me the idiot at the other motor vehicle department has a mother you wouldn't warm your hands on on a cold day. The number is wrong by the last two of sixteen digits. Big deal. He notes the fact in a big ledger and tells me to go handle the paperwork at a nearby building, but not that day because they don't take paperwork after 4:00.
Back at the boutique Suerda and Hélio are establishing that the radio is not worth the asking price and that therefore the exchange of cars is to be reversed and I am to go back and exchange my half-registered car for my ailing old one, which by this time has revealed some of its weaker points. (The engine, battery, starter, brakes, horn, signals and brake lights have failed to work.) If he gets his car back, he also gets the hundred and fifty thousand cruzeiros worth of fuel I've put into the tank. I'm against this deal, and so is Hélio, but maybe that's why we aren't boutique managers.
Suerda's boss, owner of the boutique and designer of its fancy clothes, sticks her head into the fray and says maybe she'd think about buying the radio if it's "cute." Hélio and I attested to unrivaled cutenes. Baby Jesus would look like a frog next to this radio. Suerda gets the idea of selling the radio at first opportunity, possibly for more than we're paying for it. So I'm able to beep my way back to the apartment, virtually certain I had a car that won't fail me, assuming that it turns out the chassis hasn't been swiped off an Opala, in which case I have no idea who owns the car, let alone the radio.
* * *
Dear Ralph,
My face has filled with pus. One miscalculated sneeze and I'll blow myself up. This would be a tragedy of unimaginable horror; the maid is on vacation.
Which is why I'm in Belo. For the duration of July, the best month of the year in Minas Gerais, when the air is crisp, the sky blue, I'm a maid. I spend my days horsing around with Ian. We go to the central market to check out the animals. We sit on a piece of cardboard and slide down a hill of grass at the university - a sport normally practiced only by the street kids who get tired of riding the back bumpers of buses. Sometimes Ian and I ride around on a city bus - make that in a city bus - and look out the window. We go to the zoo, the park, the airport. I feel pretty useless except to know I'm keeping my kid away from the TV. The big kiddie show here features a sexy fox named XuXa (pronounced Shoo-Shah). Blonde, blue-eyed, long-legged, dimple-pussed, she sings, dances, bumps and grinds to the delight of an on-stage audience of kids. She's on the air for three hours every morning. Her competition on the other channel is Bozo, whose ratings are relatively minuscule. The poor bastard's on the air live for four hours a day and nobody but nobody watches - except me, because Xuxa's cartoon interludes are the Masters of the Universe; Bozo, who works on a fraction of Xuxa's budget, shows old black-and-white Loony-Tunes, which I find endlessly fascinating.
When Ian's asleep, I try to learn how to work the goddam computer, which seems hardly worth the effort. Why not just go throw it under the wheels of a bus? There's something about the very nature of the beast that drives me on to master it, to figure it out, to go faster and faster on it, clickety- clickety- clickety- clickety- clickety- click. But there's no doubt which of us is in charge. It's not the one with a face o' pus.
I'm also here because Suerda is showing all signs of pregnancy. I'll spare you the details. Suffice it to say I don't blame the maid for taking off. Oddly, Suerda's reaction is to realize that she hates life as a boutique manager. She wants to go back to Plan A: to live the good life on a small farm in the interior. I think she assumes that will make it as easy for her to have a baby as it is for peasant women.
Zé's woman had a baby just a couple of weeks ago. Zé came knocking late in the night, gently easing me out of a dream about somebody knocking on a door. His woman was "passing poorly." Could I give him a ride into town to fetch a certain lady who know how to take care of the problem? Of course I could. Off we go. Along the way it turns out his woman's problem is that she's giving birth. We stopped in front of Lico's supermarket, and Zé hurried down an alley, soon to return with the midwife. She's a heavy-hipped woman with a kind face. Her tools of the trade - herbs, candles, icons and sacred what-nots - are wrapped in a red plaid cloth knotted on top. Back in Canela, as I help haul her corpulence out of the front seat, she says God will pay me for the ride.
I go home wondering what goes on during a birth in a home like that. Maybe Zé's boiling water on the woodstove; maybe he's sitting outside drinking cachaça. The older boys, banned from the birthing room and not likely interested in anything Zé has to say, are probably keeping to themselves somewhere. What is the midwife doing to help? What magic teas is she preparing? What Ubanda candles has she lit? How does the incense smell? Is Iracema screaming or is this easy for her?
In the morning, Zé comes to report. It's a girl, Nilsa. Perfectly healthy. His brood now numbers six. He says he has a flea in his ear. I ask him if he wants a ride to the clinic or what? He says, no, no, it means he doesn't know what to think about having another kid. Then he asks if he can borrow a few grand to pay the midwife. Of course he can. A few grand is a couple bucks. Ian cost five thousand bucks to bring into the world. His sister cost almost that much and never made it to birth despite such amenities as a major metropolitan hospital and a machine that goes beep-beep-beep. Maybe they lit the wrong kind of candles.
After my day at the mines I stop by to welcome young Nilsa to the world. Iracema is still in bed, looking about as beat as she did before the birth. Nilsa looks as peaceful and content as can be, probably because she hasn't opened her eyes yet, hasn't met her father. She's got very red feet. They look scalded, but the midwife has said everything is normal. At worst, she says, it's just a case of red feet. Iracema tickles Nilsa's tiny nose and introduces me. She asks the baby if she wants to come home with me. I thought that was cute until that night, at school, when Lázaro said she'd made the same offer to him.
Fungus moves along smartly but slowly. While not much has happened to advance the plot, there haven't been any dull moments. To bring you up to date, I had a guy dragged out of Lincoln's nostril on Mt. Rushmore by a S.N.O.T. team, had a poodle raped by a coyote, set a moose loose on I-95, positioned the character of "Dad" in Kentucky whacking his (golf) balls across the continent, had the protagonist dialogue with his stomach in a fast food joint, and dealt superficially with Lao Tzu and the concept of wei wang.
* * *
I can think of few things as pitiful as loading you busted muffler into the back of your new car and push-starting the engine so you can drive to the mechanic to have the leak in your universal plugged. This portended the spending of big monies, so I left the ailing whale with a mechanic named Calixto, who had a sense of humor and would take an out-of-town check or even a promise of one. My plan to pay for it was to sell a certain bottle of Japanese whisky that I just happened to have. It was much to good for the likes of me but it rumor of it had rung the chimes of poet/banker Gabriel. My bottle and I moseyed across town to the Banco do Brasil only to find that Gabriel was on vacation. This was good, his apartment being right over the bank. I'd much rather haggle the going price of imported hootch there than over the shoulders of a teller and somebody with money problems.
Negotiations took two hours, what with the state of contemporary Brazilian poetry, the smell of rain in the air and neither one of us really caring about the price of the whisky. It was eventually determined that a bottle of Suntory is worth a quarter million easy, enough to plug a universal joint and get a welding job on the muffler and enough courage to ask the price of a new battery, which was $314,000 two months ago. For that much I could hire one of Zé's kids to ride around with me and give me a push when I need it. It's a tough decision, one I'm not willing to make. So I figure I'll park on hills. Fortunately, Minas Gerais is full of them.
Figuring I owe Gabriel a favor, and now having enough to pay for it, I invited him and his wife and two kids, aged eight and newborn, to a churrasco (barbecue) at the farm.
Easier invited than done. Suerda, visiting for the weekend, agreed to the invitation, still believing a bank manager might be useful some day. The plan was to meet up with Gabriel and family, and the meat, at nine o'clock the next morning. Due to the inevitable delays - kids not ready, butcher too busy to cut us a hunk of beef, wives in tizzies - we didn't get their car and ours rolling in the same direction until shortly after eleven o'clock. Suerda, pregnant, hypoglycemic, had to have food by noon or she'd (and everybody else'd) get a headache. But at noon Gabriel and I were still blowing on the charcoal.
A churrasco is supposed to be an extremely laid-back affair involving little more than the swigging of cachaça and beer and the chewing of good meat sawn directly off the spit and then lowered directly into the mouth. But this time it came to include silverware and plates and a thousand trips between poolside and house. It was a venomous rush glossed over with polite formality. As if on cue for the sake of firming up the mood, clouds swirled in and the temperature dropped fifteen degrees. A waft of rain blew down, the first drops in four months. Under the bleating instructions of the commanding officer, we expressed the food, dishes, cutlery, napkins, beer bottles and general accouterments up to the porch. Gabriel and I were flicking hot charcoal into an old olive oil bucket when we realized the drops weren't going to add up to rain. We stayed put, keeping the silence to ourselves until the women and kids came back.
The little ones kept the pressure up. Ian slid excrement down his legs and into his red boots. The eight-year-old developed a fever. The one-year-old developed a chronic whine. Our maid and their maid were more obstacle than aid, standing around unsure if there were supposed to stand around us or up at the house or what. I never got around to eating because it looked like Suerda had to go to sleep real bad and our guests seemed on the verge of saying "to hell with this," after which I planned to finish the churrasco the right way - slowly, slice by slice, con mucho gusto and the occasional shot of cheap booze.
But that wasn't possible. The good-byes took over an hour. The charcoal died, and the meat from the spit, little of which had cooked, ended up in the freezer. I said the hell with it and went to sleep because when I am asleep, I am alone.
* * *
The next family visit brought Públio, the brother-in-law from hell. His latest big plan was to raise carp, which he rather predictably said tastes like chicken. But you can't raise carp with other fish. They need their own pond. Públio got us off to a good start by using his heel to outline a big circle which Zé and I could dig out to a depth of six feet. His wizardly quick mind calculated how many carp would fit in that much space, then how many would fit in a space twice as large. He kept digging in his heel and expanding our fortunes through my banana grove. By the time he was done, we were practically rich. We went up to the porch to rest our heels on the railing after all their work. We discussed how this carp pond would play a crucial role in our plans for surviving the forthcoming nuclear war. The talk got very heavy. Would the radiation reach Mariana? Should we make a lead-lined shelter up on the hill? How about the nuclear winter? How long would it last, how cold would it get in Brazil? What should we do today and what should we do on the day we got the bad news that the northern hemisphere was burning?
Públio has it all figured out. First thing, we sell all our dollars and buy canned food, matches, spaghetti, salt, cachaça, gasoline. We insulate the house with the trunks of banana plants because they're thick and easily felled. We must remember to bring a beehive into the house so at least one swarm survives. In fact, we should start stockpiling honey right away. Públio, a Rosacrucian who believes in pyramid power, parapsychology and just about everything else that smacks of weird, says one can live two years on nothing but honey. The carp, he reminds me, could mean the difference between life and death. During the nuclear winter, no matter how long it lasts, we can leave the carp frozen in the pond. We can use an ax to chop them out as we need them.
Having chopped ice before, I suggest it would be easier to drain the pond and stack the frozen fish on the porch like firewood. Públio is dead set against this. Stacked carp would be too easy to steal. He is vehement, apparently enthralled with the idea of fish suspended in ice. I agree to leave the fish in the pond if he agrees to chop them out. I've seen him use an ax. He puts one hand up at the head, the other midway down the handle, then swings without moving either hand, effecting no more than a dull thump. The most damage he can do to a piece of wood is put a dent in it. It would be a deep pleasure, certainly worth a few years of winter, to see him dressed in a catch-a-cold and one-of-those-things-that-goes-over-your-ears as he chops through six feet of ice in search of a carp.
The next question we tackle is whether to bring Zé and family into our house. We know that Suerda would never allow this, but for reasons both moral and economic, we will seize power from her and do what must be done to save out manpower for "afterwards." And consider the alternative: Zé out there with his .22 while we're tucked in our warm cabin of banana trunks, cooking carp and slurping honey.
That brings up the question of guns. Should we or should we not arm ourselves? Well of course we should, says he, what with the marauding hordes of shivering riff-raff and all. But it's not that simple, say I. How many guns will we need and who is going to shoot them and when? Are we going to defend the house and our stack of carp, or are we going to defend all of Sitio Canela, which was bought under the invalidated rules of a defunct and questionable socio-economic system? (Públio is a Christian Marxist Rosacrucian.) Would it not be wiser to recruit the peasants of Greater Canela to defend our entire territory? Should we then declare ourselves a city-state? If so, who rules? The unwashed majority or the aristocracy with the brains, the ammo, the honey and the fish? Should we make treaties with neighboring hordes or would pre-emptive strikes be more expedient? Do we march post-incendium society down the bloody path of the past or do we feed the mongrel hordes until they eat us? A lot of the answers, indeed the whole future of civilization, depend on the depth of the carp pond. Públio thinks maybe two meters isn't enough; maybe we should go down three.
Or maybe we should go swat the scorpion that has appeared on the blanket of his sister, who was fast asleep until the pandemonium broke out. The original alarm was breathtaking, a soprano falsetto worthy of fine opera or an air raid. Públio tolls everyone to stand back; there's a right way and a wrong way to kill a scorpion. The right way involves fire. Suerda's way involves a sneaker. I get to do it. The little bugger rolls over dead, his little tail laid out flat. Then we overturn the room because they say where there's one, there's more. But if there were, we didn't find them. It made for light sleeping that night.
But scorpions aren't half the problem of "foot-worms." I don't know what these guys are called in English. Maybe it's ring worm. They abound in manure and somehow penetrate the soles and toes. You don't know you have one until a few days later when you feel an itching and haul your foot up to your face. You can see a milky ring, perhaps as big as a dime, with a black dot in the center. The only way to get the bug out is with a sewing needle. If you're lucky, your mother-in-law will do this for you. The needle won't hurt much because the worm deadens the skin. But the surgeon's fingernails can kill you. It's enough to bring the twenty-third psalm to mind, especially the part about the valley of the shadow of death.
But my parasite problems are nothing compared to what's going on down at Zé's house. His littlest kids have tapeworms bad. I figured this out because they weren't gaining weight even though I made sure they got honey and milk every few days. Zé admitted that little Rosamaria was vomiting worms. Vomiting worms! Why didn't they take her and her brother to the medical post in town, where treatment is free? Well, says the mother, it's a long walk. Well, I say, I'll drive you. And I'll pay for the pills. Well, she says, you have to wait in line for a long time. Well, I said, so what, your kids have worms. Well, she says, first you have to go to town hall and fill out papers, which she can't do because she can't read. Well, I say, I'll help. Well, she says, she just doesn't know what to do. Well, I say, I'll pick you up early tomorrow morning and we'll go. Well, she says, okay, but we'll have to register the birth of little Nilsa before they'll treat her. Well, I say, okay, that sounds like a good idea, I'll pick everybody up first thing in the morning.
Which I do. Long line indeed. All over the office and down the sidewalk are pregnant women, feverish children, ankle fly victims. We wait in line to get the form to take to town hall. There we first have to get Nilsa a birth certificate. This brings up the question of fatherhood. Zé, it turns out, has refused to acknowledge the child as his. Since he isn't technically married to Iracema, he doesn't have to declare himself the father. The sweet old clerk-lady thinks this a crying shame but admits there's nothing to be done about it. It's the law and the law was written by men. The mother will just have to sign alone. But it turns out that Iracema doesn't know how to sign her name. I'm not surprised at this. She can't count to ten, either. She doesn't know the months of the year. She can't read a clock. The lady says an X will do, but Iracema doesn't know how to make an X, or at least isn't willing to take a crack at it. I wouldn't believe this except that she looks at the pen the way I'd look at a bazooka. Pens just aren't her business any more than bazookas are mine. It's one of those things you know not to touch. Worms or no worms, she won't even try.
But I'm plenty stupid enough to do it. I signed my name right on the line that says "Mãe," which, I believe, makes me the mother. It feels good, as if I've just tossed a wrench into the bureaucratic machine. In about eighteen years, when Nilsa goes to vote, the whole thing will crunch to a halt.
Back at the clinic, the doctor thumps the kids' bellies and declares that they have worms. He gives us a prescription for pills, fortified milk powder and vitamins. He tells us to arrange a cleaner water supply. Right now, I discover, it comes from the stream that goes through Artúr's cow pasture.
What cure is there for the kind of poverty that lets a mother not rid her kids of worms, that lets a father not admit his fatherhood, that lets a woman never learn how to sign her name? Free school lunches aren't going to get us through this one. The fat rascals in Brasilia aren't likely to figure anything out, let alone actually take steps to better anyone's life but their own. (The current scandal involves a former Minister of Justice caught smuggling precious stones out of Brazil and into Miami. It involved someone getting shot. Nothing will happen to the guy. In fact, he's running for Congress.)
The upper classes would hold that the lower class - that mass of over a hundred million people - is just lazy. On the surface of it, it would seem they're right. I've offered kids around here good money if they'll bring me manure from fields. I told them I'd pay so-many hundreds of cruzeiros for every bag-full they brought. I'd even supply the bags. One kid managed to put a shovel-full of manure in each of two big bags - a mere tenth of a bag-full - and I paid him for it and told him to find more. But he didn't. I told the widow who lives near the stream that I'd give her and her six malnourished kids a pair of rabbits if they built a cage. With this they could raise hundreds of rabbits. I even offered them the bamboo for the cages and Zé to help build them. But they never took me up on it. They get some kind of pension form the government and just figure that's good enough for them to get by. The kids spend their days flying kites made of garbage bags and strips of bamboo. The strings are unraveled from nylon flour sacks. The fun of the sport is to tangle the kites around the high tension wires that run high above their little mud-and-stick house. The wires are littered with the flapping wrecks of old kites.
I myself am all for spending youth at the business end of a kite line, and I don't think the fundamental cause of poverty is laziness. It's ignorance. It's not knowing anything except that failure is inevitable, that all projects are beyond one's capacity, that there is no hope except in God. Worms are part of life. Babies appear every once in a while, like the rains. God is the father of all and He's got everything under control in His mysterious way.
But I wasn't going to wait for God to raise their water supply out of the cow pasture. I bought a hundred yards of hose and helped Zé hook it up to the cistern that supplied my own water. I felt stupid for never having thought to do this before.
While we were working, Zé mentioned that he knew of a spring high on the mountain behind the house. It came from the cliff above the stream. We walked up there, clinging to grass and brush to keep from falling into the thundering gorge. The spring was just a wet spot, but when Zé dug into with his hoe, water came out. I can't imagine how he knew about this spring. It wasn't a place you'd just happen to come across.
Zé said he and Miguel could haul a few bags of cement up there and install a nice little cistern. I cheerfully supplied the cement, my blessing and a promise of a bonus at the end of the month if they managed to do it. They did. We ran a hose down to the house, bypassing the need for a pump and supplying us with water untainted with anything at all. No one lived uphill from there; no gold miners could dump mercury upstream. The water oozed directly from a mountain of minerals. It was the best I've ever drunk. We could have bottled and sold it if we'd known how. The spring was, in a sense, a gold mine, but we kept it to ourselves. If tapeworms are of the bowels of poverty, we had the elixir of intestinal wealth.
One weekend in early October somebody stole two pigs. Just returning from Belo that Sunday evening, I was unlocking the gate when Zé came trotting from his house to tell me. As he awaited my reaction to the news, his upper lip twitched. From guilt for what he'd done, I wondered, or from fear of what I'd do? But I had no reaction to offer. I didn't know how to react to stolen pigs. These were my first. The only thing worrying me was how Suerda would accept the news. She took her pigs seriously.
We went to see the remaining pig, a forty-pound female with black spots on her side. She didn't snort or squeal or put her front hooves up on the railing so I could scratch her ears. She just stood there looking up at us from the center of the sty. I asked her what'd happened, but she just stood there. When Zé heaved a bucket of water across the floor, she didn't flinch. The wave sloshed up around her ankles, collected the day's flotsam and cascaded into the pond.
What happened was, the thieves snuck in during a thunderstorm before dawn that morning. As Zé imagines it, they killed the pigs with an ax and hauled them away. Zé followed drops of blood as far as the little foot bridge over the stream that crosses the road at the edge of our property. He found pebbles turned over, twigs broken underfoot. He found the footprints of a man and the sandal of a boy. The footprints and spots of blood were covered with patches of plastic weighted down with little stones. He found a hair on the lower rung of the barbed wire where they had rolled the pigs under. It had to be a man and a boy, they had to make two trips, and they made their escape either up or down the brook. If it was down, it was somebody who lived across the highway, in the dell. If it was up, it was someone on the hill across from the farm. In either case, it was someone who knew our layout and my habit of going away for the weekend. It was also someone who knew it takes more than the axing of two pigs to wake up Zé on the Sunday morning after a Saturday night.
Miffed to the max over this invasion of his turf, Zé had spent all that day literally sniffing around Canela. Someone had tweaked his beak and was now eating pork chops and loin while his family was getting by on collards and tripe. He had his guns loaded and his other four bullets lined up on the table. When these thieves came back for the third and smallest pig, he'd take care of them. He expected that next weekend, when I left town again, but also thought they might wait until we'd fattened her up.
Having lived in New York City, my response to the theft was, Oh well, there's goes a couple of pigs; that's life. But Zé wasn't going to let this go unresolved. He insisted we go to the police. The police station is closed on Sunday, so I told him we'd go on Monday after my English classes at the mines.
Monday afternoon, on our way out to the highway, a father and mother and host of kids, most of them barefoot, flagged us down. They - sixteen of them in all - lived on the other side of Artúr's pasture. It seems someone had stolen one of their piglets.
Now I was mad. This was a peasant family, not some rich gringo who didn't need the cholesterol. The missing piglet was food stolen from the mouths of fourteen children. I promised them I'd bring the police.
At the station, Zé, nervous over his sudden importance, sputtered the story in his hinterland Portuguese. A couple of detectives listened hard but got confused as Zé unveiled all the emotions, suspicions, rumors and reputations involved, the loudness of the thunder that night, the opinions of his woman, the disappearance of a chicken last month, the sighting of the bum Leiôncio. He pulled the felonious sandal from his back pocket and handed it to them. They looked it over and went to try it on a kid named Bambolino who was in the lock-up. (It didn't fit, and, as Bambolino was quick to point out, he had an irrefutable alibi: he'd been in jail the night of the incident, to which the detectives said something that could be literally translated as "Oh, yeah.")
Too confused to get all the facts straight, the detectives asked us to go type it up so they could write it in their big, black book. I could go over to the Banco do Brazil and tell the manager they said I could use the typewriter.
I certainly didn't need their permission to use Gabriel's typewriter. Nor did I want to use the bank typewriter, a big, black Underwood of yore. At home I had a Selectric, not to mention my big fat Michaelis English-Portuguese / Portuguese-English dictionaries. I saw no hurry since the pigs were already pork and probably halfway down someone's digestive track. I wanted to write this story up in all the detail it deserved. I also wanted a haircut. Zé needed to do his monthly shopping, so I sent him off to his little grocery-bar while I hit the main plaza in the center of town. The barber shop - a dusty little place in what used to be the slave quarters of a very nice house - was closed. Maybe that was good. The barber, who sports an eight-inch rim of beard from ear to ear, takes a full hour and a half to cut someone's hair. He does a careful job of selecting precisely which hairs to cut, and often stops to settle some other business. Once he bought a little handgun from somebody, which came with a lengthy history of former use.
At the post office I picked up a letter and a two-month-old New York Times Book Review. I stopped at a little restaurant that had tablecloths to read the letter over a bottle of guaraná, a sweet, yellow, soda pop ostensibly made from butmore likely just named after a certain root reputedly good for the digestion.
By the time I arrive at Zé's grocery, he was about thirty-five percent inebriated and talking pigs to the gang. They consoled me. A theft this big was serious business, an escalation in the audacity of thieves. Never before has so much pig been stolen at once. Maybe a piglet disappears around New Year's Eve, when a pig roast is the big tradition, but never two half-grown pigs at once - more pig than anybody can eat. It was clearly a theft for money, not food. Damn thieves, they say. Nobody but bums lives out there in Canela.
Into the back of the car Zé rolls his gunny sacks of wheat flour, corn meal, industrial-strength spaghetti, sugar, salt, sausage, soy oil, stale-proof bread, black tobacco, lard, rice and black beans and then, after a full three-second hesitation, decides to go ahead and buy a bottle of cachaça. He comes out with a bottle of good-looking yellow stuff in a Campari bottle with a corn cob crammed in the top. With the pride of a good purchase, he shakes it to show me how good it is. A ring of bubbles clings to the neck. I go back into the grocery-bar and say, "I'll take a bottle of that."
On the way out to Canela, Zé, loquacious with drink, tells me how mad he is. He's real mad. He doesn't like to see people do me bad. I'm a good man. I deserve better. He vows to kill somebody. I tell him not to kill anybody who's not armed. Zé says naw, he's just going to shoot them in the leg and then ask them what they think they're stealing. I admit that this would could be considered a self-inflicted. wound. Nobody steals pigs by accident, and everybody knows Zé has a gun and that he's a pretty vicious guy under circumstances that call manhood to question, which, of course, is what this whole business is about. The thief so foolish as to return for my third pig, or for the chickens Zé suggests we buy as bait, can call himself lucky to limp away.
Zé has two guns. One is the little, toy-like .22 rifle that I used to botch the killing of poor Scoggin. The other is a Derringer-sized item with two sets of triggers, hammers and barrels, though one side doesn't work. The barrel's just over an inch long and makes a bang that would give a pig thief something to think about. And since it runs a fifty-fifty chance of misfiring and accuracy deteriorates beyond an arm's length, the fiercest gun battle is likely to involve mostly threats, dead clicks and curses.
Zé suspects Leiõnçio, though he would normally lack the energy to make off with a pig. He specializes in chickens. There are a few other men around - some in the dell, some on the hill. It could have been any of them, too. Zé doesn't know them or their habits.
I don't sit right down to type up my report because I figure the police aren't going to do anything about it that day, but then Zé, now past the halfway point toward stone drunk, shows up to urge me on. "This is pigs," he says. "Can't wait. Let 'em get away with pigs, they'll come back for the rabbits and then your refrigerator and everything else."
So while he smokes and hawks and spits on the back porch, I muster my Portuguese and type up all the clues - the footprint, the sandal, the drops of blood, the hair on the wire, the rainstorm, the sex and estimated weight of the pigs, the end of the trail at the little bridge.
By the time we get back to the police station, the detective department is closed. We find the chief, however, out front watching the repavement of the street. Zé tells him the story and the chief agrees that something should be done but not just now because it's almost six o'clock and, in his words, "We can't go busting into people's houses after six o'clock. It would be an abuse of our power." He already has abuse of power problems, he says, and it's keeping him out of retirement. This is being caused by the "so-called" New Republic, the age of democracy brought on by the deceased ("he was lucky") Tancredo Neves. People were going to have to get used to more crime because the police can no longer just up and haul off the guys they know are guilty.
The detectives show up in a casual, off-duty way and agree that it would be better to bust into people's houses the next afternoon. We make a date to pick them up - they have no car - at two o'clock and take them out to Canela to look for clues and ask a few questions.
Don't ask me why, but at two o'clock the next day, the two detectives were sitting in the station waiting for me, and within twenty minutes we were in the car and on our way. One of them looked very pre-Republic: short, thick-legged, thick-necked, dark-skinned, crew-cut, beady-eyed and slightly mustachioed. The other looks more of the New School persuasion: younger, tauter, whiter, thinner, blue-eyed, clean-shaven, coifed, better dressed. He looks like he might have some sort of diploma in detective work. He definitely has a .38 stuck in his belt. He checks his ammo in the car. These guys know Canela and the bums who live out there. They've hauled in Leiôncio more times than they can remember. His probable accomplice, a jovial sleazebag named Sabiá, which means sparrow, or maybe thrush. If it isn't anybody else, it's these two.
We follow the trail from the sty to the bridge, uncovering new clues. At the bridge, New School pulls a short brown hair from the barbed wire on the upstream side. "This from your pig?" he asks. I bring it into focus. Sure could be, though it could have been from a whale or a bat or any other mammal. To Zé it was definitely the hair of a pig though he couldn't swear it was one of ours. We surmise the thieves headed upstream and then up the hill. "Leiôncio lives up there," says Zé. "He's going to eat lead."
We hike over to the family that lost the piglet. More clues there. Small footprints headed for the dell. The dics find it odd that a piglet be ripped off from its mother with no significant squealing. "She's a quiet pig," they say and prove it by poking her with a stick. She doesn't even snort. The father of the family sidetracks us down to a garden near Artúr's pond, where ducks have been pillaging the produce. The dics say they'll have a talk with Artúr. The father believes them.
We walk over to the dell for a look around. New School finds a tiny pebble the color of dried pig blood. We find Sabiá's mother, a bony, leathery, wispy-haired woman whose mind is on the fritz. She doesn't know where Sabiá is. She doesn't know if he still lives with her. She doesn't know who lives in her house. She doesn't know anything.
In fact, nobody knows anything, especially a chubby, smudged teen-age girl in a busting-open blouse and a pair of bright red short-shorts. The baby-fat on her bruised thighs jiggles when she walks. A rim of baby-fat squeezes out between the waist of her pants and the lower edge of her T-shirt. She chews her gum with hesitant nervousness as she reports that she's sixteen and lives with a guy named Antônio. Upon being asked, she confesses she doesn't know why she's living with a man almost twice her age, a man with a son almost as old as her. Pigs? She doesn't know anything about pigs. How can that be? "Because I don't know anything," she admits. The dics ask her to fetch Antônio, who has been in trouble before. As she runs off, Old School says, "Dirrrrr-teeeee! How can a girl be like that? Doesn't she have a father?"
We throw rocks at a ripe-looking mango until Antônio arrives, alone, eyes to the ground as if preparing alibis. He's cool in the interview. Arms crossed and head down during most of the questions, he puts a moment's thought into each answer. Yes, he's heard about the pigs. No, he has no idea who might have taken them. Sabiá and Leiôncio? After a good pause and a thoughtful, distant nod, he says he hasn't seen them in a couple of days. How about that virgin who was just out here, does she know what shame is? He doesn't know. Has she registered to vote? He doesn't know that, either. Well then what she ought to do by noon tomorrow is bring her voter's card down to the police station so they can have a look at it.
It's suspicious that no one has seen Leiôncio or Sabiá for three days. We consider hiking up the hill to look for them, but the dics decide it will be easier to wait until later tonight and just drag them out of a certain bar in town.
But we drove only a hundred yards toward town before we found the foul duo on the side of the side of the road with a bottle of cachaça wrapped in newspaper. Sabiá's too far gone to worry, but Leiôncio looks scared. He knows that when the police look in his direction, he's going to get beat up. They search him and find an eight millimeter crescent wrench stuck under his waistband. Sabiá, quick to cover, says they found it on the road just a few minutes ago. The dics ask Leiôncio just what he intended to do with such a nice new crescent wrench. Leiôncio, his stutter going full-steam, says he wasn't going to do anything with it. Then why is he carrying it around, and how about those two pigs, hmmm? He hasn't got an answer to that so the dics think maybe he ought to come down to the station. We cuff him and slide him into the back seat of my car, leaving Zé and Sabiá on the side of the road with the cachaça. Sabiá waves good-bye, revealing his green and yellow teeth. Sabiá is patriotic to his gums.
Down at the station, they direct Leiôncio into a certain room. He seems to know which wall to lean against. I start to go in, but the dics ask me to wait outside. From outside the door I hear such questions as "Tell us again about those pigs," and "did you have the crescent wrench with you when you stole them?" - pointless questions aimed at cracking open a contradiction. I hear a few muffled slaps and gut-busting ooomphs. But apparently Leiôncio's story stuck. The dics opened the door and flung him out, saying, "Naw, he didn't do it." On the way back to Canela, I apologize for taking up his time. He says, "No problem," and reiterates his honesty and his respect for me. I drop him off where we left Sabiá, but he and Zé and the bottle are gone.
The next morning, as I sat on the porch drinking my morning cafe com leite in the pre-dawn darkness, I could hear my remaining pig down at the pond. His noises weren't the usual grunts and snorts but rather the muffled whines of a pig standing alone in a sty where there used to be three, a pig who in flashes of midnight lightning saw her brother and sister axed before her eyes. I thought maybe I'd go see Lico about buying another pig, just for company.
When I got out to the highway to meet the car to the mine, I was met by a bunch of the fourteen kids whose piglet was taken. Now the piglet was back! But dead!
This was a good clue. Apparently the police had talked with the right person and he was scared. This is all I had hoped to accomplish. In the afternoon, after my mine work, I went straight into town to tell the police the latest news. On the way I stopped at Lico's supermarket to tell him all that has happened and to buy dandruff shampoo. He already knows the whole story except for this morning's development. In fact, everybody in town knows. Complete strangers stop me on the sidewalk to console me, ask the latest news and express their opinions about thieves.
It turns out the police have already heard about the return of the piglet. Somebody had walked three miles into town to tell them. The chief tells me they have assigned a third detective to the case, the father-in-law of one of the others. They also tell me that Antonio's girlfriend was seen down at the bus station with a suitcase.
I rushed out to Canela with this new tidbit, and what to my wondering eyes did appear but a pig standing in the bottom of my swimming pool.
Zé reports in. He found her there this morning, "looking confused. I said, 'Uai!' "
Uai! is what Mineiros always say when they're surprised by something or when something seems too obvious to merit repetition. In this case, Zé was surprised. I remembered the pig-noise I'd heard that morning. It wasn't a traumatized pig in mourning. It was a pig gagged with a towel in her mouth hanging upside down from a bamboo pole and being hauled up a creek bed for the second time in her life.
The next day, the family with the fourteen kids found another piglet dead about fifty feet from the sty. I fetched the pig dics again but since no one could prove that it was actual porcicide rather than, say, a mean dog, no investigations were carried out.
* * *
Dear Ralph,
This is what I did today. I got up at 5:30 a.m., took a shower, made coffee and hot milk, sawed off two slices of stale-proof bread, spread cheap margarine and honey over them, sat and ate on the veranda overlooking my pond and pair of pigs. (I'll tell you more about these pigs later.) When the national anthem came on the radio at exactly 6:00, I got my books and notes together. By the time the rooster crowed on the radio, announcing the next program, which is for farmers, I was on my way down to the highway to catch the car to the Samarco mine. The car came on time and delivered me on time, but my first student was home, hung over, so I read Dostoyevsky until 8:00, then spoke English for four hours. I got in line behind a bunch of greasy guys in the cafeteria, reading Dostoyevsky on my way forward to a cold and lousy lunch. No classes at the CVRD mine today, so I caught the bus down to the Engineer's Village at the bottom of the mountain. I bought a popsicle and ate it until the bus came to take me to Canela. Lost in thought, I pulled the signal cord a mile too soon and had to apologize to the driver. I got off the buss and at the first stream found the mother of fourteen up to her knees in water, panning for gold. I asked he to show me how. She scooped up some black sand, swirled it, dribbled in a little water form her hand, scooped up a little more sand, swirled, dribbled, repeated, and finally showed me the world's tiniest fleck of gold, a chip off a grain of sand.
I went home, changed into work clothes, drove into town to cash a check and buy nails for the roof Zé and I think we're going to fix on Saturday if it doesn't rain between now and then. Called Suerda and was informed that Ian has a fever, we are selling the farm, that I am a selfish person and inadequate father, that her life is hell and mine is full of whatever I want. I didn't really listen. I thought about murder, suicide, divorce, abandonment.
Came home and fixed the busted strap of my Firestone sandal with the blunt end of a Hudson's Bay ax and four little nails meant for a beehive. Got my hoe and went to dig holes for corn seed between two especially vicious hives of bees. Zé is afraid to go there because the bees attack anyone who smells of sweat, black tobacco and alcohol. Also anyone who thumps the ground a lot. I took stings in the neck and shoulders but got another hundred plants underway, probably the fastest-planted corn in history.
I found Zé digging in the pit that will be a carp pond. Told him the island should be a bit bigger, big enough for two people to sit with a table between them, which meant shoveling some dirt back where it had been before he dug it up. He took the news stoically, which means he probably won't do it. I told him to haul the pile of dead banana leaves out of the gully where he threw them and throw them into a gully where I wanted them. Told him to find more places to plant corn, any ol' spots here and there. Told him to rub down the swimming pool with steel wool so I can paint it and hopefully stop the leakage. We found hornets swarming on a banana plant and burned them by igniting a dead banana leaf and holding it up there. No problem. We hauled the dog Picuinha out of the empty swimming pool into which she had fallen, apparently to investigate the smell of pigs therein. I'll explain that later, too.
I counted my rabbits and found one missing. Saw it on the hillside. Called Zé. Zé called Miguel. The dog came to help. Rabbit kept ducking into a network of little caves that have eroded under boulders of pyrite. Dog kept getting stuck going in after the rabbit who had long since flushed out a different hole. Don't ask me how a dog can go one way through a hole but not back out. Something to do with velocity, I guess. Or pregnancy. (The dog, my bees, my rabbits, my wife and, I think, my pig, are pregnant.) Miguel finally flushed the rabbit out by thrusting a burning banana leaf into a cave. The rabbit made a bad decision and leaped into Miguel's arms.
I pulled up my dead tomato plants and turned over the soil, burying sawdust which I hope will reduce the nitrogen level in the soil, which I think was the cause of "black bottom" defects on my tomatoes. I threw the tomato vines on the compost heap and some rotten tomatoes to the rabbits and guinea pigs. They went ape.
That's all.
* * *
Lázaro stopped by to exchange pig data. He brought a student who'd been working on his farm. Zé and Miguel were there, too. Somehow pig stories branched off to a story of how Lázaro was bitten in the chest by a snake when he was a boy. His dog had been chasing it, and Lázaro had taken off to rescue his dog. But the snake turned on them. Lázaro, back-peddling fast, tripped over a wire and the snake got him. His parents, illiterate peasants, called in the local curandeiro - a homeopathic medicine man who knows his snake oils. He rubbed little Lázaro with some herbal creams and fed him a cachaça-based remedy. Lázaro doesn't know if the medicines worked or even if the snake was actually poisonous. But he does recall seeing little birds peck at his window that night, a hallucination caused by either the snake poison or its cure.
Pig-wise, more clues have come to light. Lázaro hires a lot of the lads who live the dell to work on his land. Three star characters are Carlinhos, Carlinhos, and Carlinhos, sons of Antônio, Sabiá and someone else, respectively. The latter Carlinhos' father is known to be respectable and honest. Antônio and his Carlinhos are known to be early risers. Sabiá and his Carlinhos cannot be roused before the sun has warmed the dell well.
It was recalled that the pigs were all stolen and/or returned at or before dawn. It was also noted that Antônio does a lot of gold panning and therefore knows his streams, and that the stream, which flows into the dell, was used for the heist and return of the pelf. On top of that, Lázaro now remembers that Antônio's Carlinhos had claimed not to know of the existence of our neighbor's piglets until he and Lázaro had walked out there from the dell one day a week ago. In fact, they had followed the exact same route that was indicated by the small footsteps leading away from the scene of the crime.
Would Antônio's Carlinhos kill a piglet out of spite? Any of the Carlinhos' would. Lázaro told me he 's seen them trap wild birds and then crush their little heads at each other in the way one might squeeze a grape to squirt it at someone.
Now get this: Antônio's Carlinhos stopped working for Lázaro, without explanation, just the day after my pigs disappeared. He just never showed up there again. Meanwhile, all the other boys never mentioned the pigs although Lázaro had gotten word via the grape vine in Ouro Preto, a good ten miles away. When he finally asked the boys if they'd heard anything about the incident, they knew it all - all except which of their neighbors had harbored a live pig for two days.
A few days later, by chance, I met one of the detectives at the bus station bar. I told him the evidence we had derived about Antônio and his Carlinhos. He said he would "appear" out our way the next day, but he didn't. I didn't press the matter. I let everybody in Canela and in Zé's grocery-bar know that we knew it was Antônio and his boy. I'm sure the culprits got the word: Don't mess with the gringo's pigs.
But just to make sure, we dismantled the sty and moved it up to a spot between Zé's house and mine. We stored the pigs in the empty swimming pool. Removing them involved a literally deafening level of squeals louder than a New York subway screeching into a station. I assume the axing of a pig would involve just as much noise. I don't know how much more Zé would need to alert him to a theft in progress.
The new sty has a hose running to it, and I plan to install an electric light to discourage thieves, assuming I can figure out a way to chain the bulb down so nobody steals it. It gives me some degree of satisfaction that my pigs have indoor plumbing and electricity, amenities lacking in Antônio's shack in the dell.
The rains let up for a few weeks in November. Hot, direct sun brought out a lot of snakes. Zé claimed to have killed a bad one with his hoe. He said he saw a jararacuçu disappear under the foundation of the little house down by the stream. Suerda, visiting one weekend with a platoon of friends and family, saw a dead one on the side of the road and let out a shriek that most people would reserve for a snake in the bed, not along the road. From what I hear, there is no snake venom available in Mariana. I'm not sure if it's a joke when I'm told the nearest supply is in Brasilia. In Mariana, the cure for a bite of a jararacuçu is amputation. So one day on the way to town when I saw an unidentifiable snake in the road, I figured what the hell and ran over it.
Coming up the long, stone stairway from the swimming pool, a hard haul I've gotten used to, I saw a tangle of orange shoe laces right where one would least expect to find them. I leaned down to see if they were really orange shoe laces. They weren't! They were a coral snake, tail a'quiver as if wishing it had a little rattle. I did an amazing levitation act, rising far further from earth than you'd think gravity would allow, then drifting several feet away before landing and breaking a sandal strap.
Yep, a coral snake, one of the world's most poisonous reptiles. Pretty little fellow, too, with bright orange, red and black bands. Though not much thicker than a thin little snake and not much longer than a shoe lace, it begged killing. I'd been considering inviting a few people over for a churrasco and wouldn't want one of them to ruin the party by dying halfway to the pool.
You can give a guy an eighty-thousand dollar education, a master's degree and everything, and still the best thing he can think to do about a snake is hit it with a stick. And if he can't find a stick, he's going to get a rock. While the fiesta-vested viper waited, I got hold of a deadly piece of hematite the size of a Neaderthal skull. I launched it from some distance away and scored a bull's-eye. The snake wiggled like mad, and I danced like mad, and my little dog barked to see such sport. I recovered my rock and heaved it again, almost straight down, smack onto the snake's back, but no cigar. The rock bounced off and the snake made it safely to a pile of dead banana leaves.
Next time I'll look for a nice long stick. Meanwhile, I focused in on a poster at the old iron mine. It said "Know Your Snakes!" It had pictures of three to choose from: the jararacuçu, the cascavel (rattlesnake) and the infamous coral. Each had a number of nicknames. I went right to the coral to be reminded of what I knew back in Boy Scouts. The coral does not bite; it chews. The coral accounts for only one percent of accidents due to snakes because of its small mouth, relatively poor venom injection system, and because it tends to stay underground. In other words you have to be a real idiot to get bit by a coral. Death to the bitten, which comes by inability to breathe, does not occur for several hours. A serum exists but you'd have to drive mighty fast to get to it in time.
Ninety percent of all snake accidents (in Brazil, I assume) are thanks to the vicious jararacuçu, a.k.a. jararaca. It lives in humid areas and hangs out under logs. It can lay in a mean case of gangrene, so tourniquets are not recommended. The jararacuçu is listed as "very aggressive" while the coral is "non-aggressive." The difference is not defined. Sounds to me like a coral will lie there like a shoe lace while you look around for a stick, and its uglier cousin might chase you for some distance.
Speaking of snakes, brother-in-law Públio has been up to his unpredictable tricks. This time he put a personal ad in a magazine. It said he was looking for a wife with a pretty stiff list of qualifications, including championship chess capabilities. (Públio himself is a champ who can play four or five games at a time without seeing the boards. He won one championship while wearing a copper pyramid on his head to focus cosmic energies, and sunglasses to ward off psychic interference.) His mail-order bride-to-be was also to have a love of culture and art, a sense of the cosmic and spiritual energies, and a desire to serve a loving, Marxist Rosacrucian entrepreneur. He described himself as a student of "rational theology" and touted a vast array of other features that seemed designed to attract women of high gullibility and questionable sanity. He got two hundred responses, mostly from bush country, including a telegram from an especially desperate young lady in Amazonia. Most of the letters were in the awkward scrawl of the semi-illiterate. Públio wants to use my computer to run off personalized form letters so he can invite them all to come shack up in Belo. His sister, my wife, is against this, as she is against anything that sounds like fun.
Públio used to study in Ouro Preto, where his younger sister Zuleide now studies. Públio left behind a legacy of pseudo-intellectual foolishness, and tales of his ventures in the world continue to return and embarrass poor Zuleide. The tales reach ICHS in Mariana. I hear them in the cafeteria. In one case, someone there who knew Públio recognized who had written that personal ad in the magazine because no one else in Brazil could possibly be responsible for such a thing. This same fellow also caught wind of a lead-lined atomic-bomb-proof shelter we were supposedly building in Canela. Why did we need such a thing? Because Canela will become a strategic target as soon as we carry out Públio's latest master plan, a soap-and-steel mill. We'll use our eucalyptus to fire the blast furnace (which really is current technology in Brazil) and use the ashes to make soap. We have a mountain of hematite behind the house. We have a railroad running not three miles from our location. We have a water supply. It's as if God created Canela and said, "Let there be a soap-and-steel mill here."
Once he arranged a husband for his sister Zuleide. This was in her freshman year at the school of mining engineering. The lucky suitor - Zuleide is known far and wide for her curvaceous voluptuousness - showed up at her sorority for reasons unknown to her. They chatted in the living room for a while. Finally he suggested they might begin making their plans. "Plans?" she asked. "Plans for what?" So he told her. The noise she then generated became part of the general legend of Públio.
Don't misunderstand. I've always liked Públio very much. I've known plenty of plain, sane people and found most of them just as dull as ditch water. I like his frenetic enthusiasm for the patently ridiculous. I don't at all like his neo-fascist-socialist political stance - he has proof that whites are mentally superior while blacks are physically superior and that therefore the mulatto, the blend of both, is the supreme race - but it's always a pleasure to hear someone coming up with something beyond the expected, as long as it doesn't involve digging a giant hole like the one Zé's been working on since winter. Since a person like Públio is necessarily incapable of acting on his ideas, I can tolerate them as long as I don't get roped into executing them.
The unexpected happened one November afternoon in the phone booth at ICHS. Suerda, in Belo, was listing for me the many reasons why we should sell the farm. (The roof leaks, no phone, no decent job for her, the land is no good for planting, Mariana is an ugly town, the farm is too far from the asphalt, Belo Horizonte is too far from the farm, and people are always stealing pigs.) This list hadn't expanded much since the last time I heard it, so I wasn't paying a lot of attention. In fact, I left the phone dangling while I took a short walk down to the drinking fountain and there on a bulletin board saw a poster that said "ENGLISH TEACHER NEEDED IN THE CONGO." The organization that needed such a teacher was a chain of private schools in Brazil owned by someone Suerda had once worked for. He was setting up a school in Congo for Brazilian construction workers who would be working on some kind of a mining project. I went back to the phone and interrupted my bride to ask her if she wanted to move to Africa, and she said, "Sure!"
And I believed it. I believed a pregnant woman who couldn't stand to live fifty miles from Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil (and didn't even want to live there or anywhere else in South America) really wanted to go live three hundred miles east of Brazzaville in an area my atlas showed as a swamp the size of Massachusetts.
Within a week her mother wanted to go, too, which meant Stefánia, who is mentally incompetent, would accompany us. So was Zuleide, who was just out of mining school and wouldn't mind working in a mine in Africa since by law she, as a female, was not allowed to work in a mine in Brazil, a law which she feels they should have told her about before the let her major in that field. Públio said he'd stay and work on the soap-and-steel mill.
But then it turned out there was another school being built in Ecuador, a lot closer to home, albeit in a small clearing in the Amazon rain forest.
That looked good to me - maybe no farm in the foothills, but certainly better than an apartment in Belo. We contacted the owner of the school and he got all excited. Suerda would administer the whole school. I would teach to my heart's content. Zuleide could indeed probably get a job at the nearby mine. We lined up an interview that was meant more to persuade us to accept the jobs than for the school to accept us. On the way into Belo I started mulling the possibility of selling the damn farm and using the well paying two-year contract with the school as a transition back to the States.
Much to everyone's surprise, it was discovered that I could not teach in a Brazilian school, not even in Ecuador, because my diploma still was not valid.
The whole incident was not without its repercussions. It seems to have established the possibility of ditching the farm and taking up something else. The pressure stepped up. The pregnancy was painful and exhausting. Ian missed me. He was cranky all the time because his father wasn't there. Why didn't I enter a Ph.D. program in Belo and give a few private English classes? We could move into a nice apartment and have a maid and everything. I shouldn't be so selfish.
* * *
Dear Ralph,
I got shafted on a dung deal yesterday. Last week I told a kid I've buy two sacks of manure form him at fifteen cents per. He delivered two big sacks. Good shit. I told him I'd buy all he had. He could make a profession out of it. Today he came up to the house to collect his six bits for the five sacks he claimed to have dumped where I told him to. I paid up and later went to see my new pile. Pretty dinky. Certainly no five sacks' worth. So I flagged him down on his way to school today and asked for an explanation. "Smaller sacks," he said. "That's all we had."
Well, I don't think the kid was pulling a fast one. He's only nine and we're buddies because I helped his family solve a crime involving pigs. No, I think this was a classic case of a dumb kid who thought I wanted a quantity of sacks of manure, not a quantity of manure. But I can't call him dumb because I, armed to the canines with diplomas, can't think of how to explain to him what he did wrong. Best I can think of is to next time offer him sacks of money in payment. Small sacks.
Carp pond's done! Boy does it work. Filled right up. Heavy rains are helping. Got little canals and dams all over the place, bringing water from afar. Pipes feed it in the right directions in the right amounts. It's quite like the way we used to spend our time at the school bus stop on rainy days, though slightly more official. The pipes are real pipes, albeit scrap, not rusted tail pipes and tin cans. The water gushes into the pond and goes around the island clockwise, carrying clumps of dried manure I threw in there to kick off an ecosystem. Now the problem is to make the island a little higher so we don't have to play chess under water. Next project: a little thatch roof in the shape of a pyramid - Públio's idea - over a soapstone chess table. I also want to get a life-size soapstone statue of St. Albuquerque, who's the patron saint of Minas Gerais, and hook him up to a hose so water spouts from his fly.
Gangs of wild parrots have been devastating my mango crop! What the hail has not knocked down the parrots are helping themselves to. This morning I took a quick count of a raucous flock and came up with an estimate of twenty-two. I've decided I'm not a mango farmer, I'm a parrot rancher.
Rain wreaks havoc, too. The thunder's so hard it makes the concrete floor shake. It's enough to give one reason to review one's religious convictions. The lights go out, sometimes only for a second, sometimes all night. The storms are numerous and localized. There is such a thing as a close miss. At this moment there are two or three. I know my friend Siru, a beekeeper, is sweating it out over in Camargo. Zuleide is praying over in Ouro Preto, just on the other side of the mountain. Yesterday at the iron mine I saw hail the size of small golf balls. l got the same storm at home, but with hail the size of large BBs. They pulverized on the roof and swept in under the tiles to come down in the kitchen as snow. I count myself among the few in the world who can stand in a blizzard in their kitchen while parrots decimate their mangos.
I put up a screen on my office window. This downeast project took me two full afternoons. It involved cutting the screen to size (one afternoon) and stapling it to the outside of the window with my desk stapler. Now I have the exquisite privilege of watching the soft white underbellies of moths as I write. This might sound to you like Saturday night in Dullsville, but it's a lot more interesting that shaking our fuzzy friends out from my pant legs, brushing them from my beard, blowing them from my nostrils, sipping them from my drink.
Trouble up on the mountain behind the house. CVRD is doing big research in hopes of finding gold. They know it's up there, and they're using dynamite to look for it. The only question is whether it's enough worth mining. If they decide to make a mine, it's adios Canela. We eat the pigs and leave. Such a shame - the death of all the life around here so somebody can lock gold in a coffer. Why don't they just estimate how much is up there - which is what they're doing right now - and then leave it there where it can't possibly be stolen? If anybody needs to know how much gold Brazil has -for some reason this is important to important people even though they can't do anything with it - they can just include the appropriate amount and not mention where it happens to be stored. See how simple economics can be?
Speaking of which, I got your letter and its lecture on the importance of simplicity. Teach me, Euthephro! I've got one of the most complex cases of simplicity going on all around me all the time. Like you'd think it would be easy to invest in five sacks of horseshit. But no. It gets all wound up in mathematical concepts. How can five be less than two? I suppose a swift kick to the kid's butt might have simplified that matter, but that would have let to complex repercussions. Simplicity is not so simple. Complexity, as you may have observed in idiots other than me, is basically simple. Or maybe it's the other way around.
Take Zé. (Please.) Except for his woman, he's the simplest person I know. I'm constantly impressed with his simplicity. Or maybe it's his simpletonicity. Suerda hates him. I love him. He's as simple as pigs and bees, which are both very complex creatures in their separate simple ways. They, like Zé, are entertaining. Pigs and bees entertain me for free, but Zé charges me minimum wage. This is a very simple concept, but the profundity of the complexities is beyond Suerda. I'm not sure how to explain what all this adds up top. It's too complex to explain to her, as if it were a conceptual problem along the lines of the sack-of-manure paradox. So see? I am wallowing in simplicity so deep I sometimes get over my head.
* * *
Now it's possums in the attic. I think. That's Lázaro's guess and it's a translation of a word that apparently also means skunks. Lázaro hasn't heard their nightly circus act, but I've described it and he thinks it's possums. I think it's gorillas. I have a ladder set up in the kitchen where it's possible to see up over the bamboo mat ceiling. Some dark night I'll catch them in flagrante. I sure hope it it's nothing with fangs or bubonic fleas.
My concern is not with the species of animal but rather with the sleep I don't get. Sometimes it's hard to assume with certainty that a noise heard during sleep is just possums because all this week soldiers have been combing the mountain behind the house. Their combs look to me like little black machine guns. They're looking for somebody who killed somebody in nearby Passagem de Minas and then beat up a girl right here in Canela and then stole a bunch of stuff. Apparently he's hiding up there in Leiôncio's neighborhood. I heard all this from the kids who wanted a replacement for the puppy I gave them. It died after discovering rat poison.
So now things that go bump in the might carry extra weight. I wake up suddenly with only the memory of a sound and try to remember if it came from inside the attic or outside the house or in the realm of dream. Then I try to remember if I locked the doors and unlocked the bedroom window (for emergency defenestration) and where I left my machete. Last week I smacked a scorpion that was crawling up the shower wall, and today, as I was leaning way down to check the drain for more, the electric shower head above me exploded in blue sparks and caught fire. I stood up so fast I almost passed out and died of smacking my head on the concrete floor. Constant adventure, the life of a banana farmer.
During a recent lull in the onslaught of life I thought of the perfect way to theft-proof pigs for the upcoming holiday season. Christmas pig theft is to Mineiros what Christmas shopping is to Americans. My trick: grease those pigs! I wonder if I can patent that idea or if it's extant technology.
I also thought of creating my own shitlist and putting Públio's name right up there at the top. This brainstorm came to me when I returned from Belo one Sunday night, walking the three miles home from the bus station. My cupboard was bare! I tromped on down to Zé's house and asked what had happened. He told me Públio had spent the weekend there with "three fat senhoras." Apparently they had helped themselves to everything immediately edible, plus a liter of hot peppers, all my ripe bananas, all my firewood, and my last bottle of honey. They stripped my lime tree of the season's last limes. There was a definite dent in my jug of cachaça, and all my dishes were piled in the sink. So I had no dinner that night, no breakfast in the morning. The next time Públio shows up, with or without fat senhoras, Zé gets to shoot him in the leg.
* * *
In mid-November my father sent me a five-by-seven color photo he took at Moosehead Lake in Maine. It was nothing spectacular unless you've been among semi-tropical vegetation for a year. It showed a hemlock, as clean and simple as a banzai. It stood posed on a point of land jutting into placid waters reflecting the deep green of the Maine woods. A few autumn leaves floated in the water. The picture gripped me. I stared at it for a long, long time. I could almost smell the pine and feel the cool air. I could imagine setting a canoe into that water and gliding off across it. My chest filled with the sensation that that was where I belonged.
Once I recognized that, it was easy to assemble the reasons to go back. I could no longer let Ian be raised by one parent and an illiterate maid. By January, he would have a brother or sister. I could no longer pretend that the farm would ever pay for itself, that Suerda would ever live here, that it would ever be the comfortable, bountiful kind of home that a farm is supposed to be if it's to be worth living on.
I agreed to put the farm on the market. A hundred and thirty million cruzeiros would take it, pigs, bees, bugs and all. By the second week of January, when the semester was over, I would go live in an apartment again. With a little luck I might manage to schedule my work so I could see my boy now and then. I would pursue a Master's degree in, of all things, English. We would once again start saving our money to buy a little farm in Maine or Vermont. Or so she promised. I knew she'd try to veer me off toward New Jersey as soon as she got us in the vicinity.
I wallowed in the pain of the decision. I watched fruit rot on the branch. I walked right on by ripe pineapples. I let the garden go to weed. When the pigs got out, I let them wander around for a while, rooting where they pleased. I rarely saw Zé or cared how he spent his day. I gave the rabbits back to Lázaro. When the widow's kids came to ask if they could catch some fish from my pond, I told them to take all they could. Hell, they weren't my fish anymore. I sat up on the porch, drinking cachaça and watching them whip their little hooks of death across the water. Before they left, I gave them a squash the size of a watermelon.
It wasn't easy to make sense of what was happening. It all seemed unreal. I hadn't really been a banana farmer for a year. I was actually living in a loony bin where I have to learn English from a teacher who lectures in Portuguese, where I have to sell a farm so I can save money to buy a farm, where I have to move from one home to another home in preparation for a move to yet another home. Maybe I've just been dreaming this, or maybe I'm in the dream.
I know absolutely no one to whom I can talk about this. My feelings are too subtle and complex for my clumsy command of Portuguese. And Brazilians in general aren't likely to understand why anyone would do something that parts from the path of the standard. Suerda likes to tell people about the time I paddled an inflatable raft the size of a bathtub down the East River in New York in the middle of the night on the Fourth of July. I wanted to sit on the tip of Roosevelt Island and watch the fireworks, sublimely alone in the middle of the literally millions of people who lined the banks of the river. To Suerda, it was a selfish, insane and needless risk of life taken for the sick pleasure of sitting in diluted sewage while low-class types shot fireworks at me. But that's just a tiny percent of the reason I went. The total reason is large and complex beyond words. I couldn't explain it in Portuguese, or even in English, and certainly not to her.
And what can you do when you can't explain your reasons? Unarmed, you cannot argue. You surrender. You sell your farm and go back to your son. You comfort yourself with the fact that nothing really matters anymore. As long as you aren't living for anything, life is easy.
I was still living on the farm in December but came back to Belo for the Christmas season. It was a good time to arrive. Suerda was fully pregnant and her mother was very ill with problems that she'd been suffering for several years. She'd been admitted to and released from the hospital twice in as many weeks. The maid was off on a four-week vacation. A cold drizzle was falling almost constantly. Ian was going berserk with captivity and lack of attention.
Doctors were offering Gracinha two diagnoses. One was acute kidney and liver problems. The other was a degree of hypochondria. With considerable vehemence, her children were suggesting various treatments, including more medicine, less medicine, different medicine, a return to the hospital, some time alone, some time in bed, more exercise, less sympathy. It all involved a lot of noise. A girl from the pharmacy came to give her an injection but had to wait through a raucous debate before receiving permission to do what she'd come to do.
Zuleide came to spend the night because Suerda was exhausted from having stayed with her mother at the hospital during most of the week. It's a good idea for a family member to stay with a hospital patient because often there are no nurses on duty. When they are, it's good to have someone there to limit their damage. They're basically glorified maids who have learned to give injections.
Gracinha took worse during the night. Suerda got up to demand what all the moaning was about.
"Nausea," her mother said, deliriously pawing at her swollen belly. .
"Nausea where?"
"Down here."
"Are you sure?"
I can't stand stupid questions like that, so I got a book and went to read it in the maid's bedroom. While I read about a guy who mistakenly peed on a Christmas tree and suffered psychological trauma when he found out, Suerda and Zuleide debated their mother's fate. Apparently her temperature had dropped and she was sweating. Somehow Suerda knew her blood pressure had fallen too low. The prognosis was "Better Safe than Sorry," so Zuleide and I were to take Gracinha back to the hospital.
It was raining, so I l went out first to go get the car. I'd left it on the street for just such an emergency. Now we needed it in the garage because of the rain. I had no idea what time it was - somewhere between midnight and sunrise. As I left the apartment, a sleazy middle-aged guy - our neighbor, for all I knew - came out of his apartment with a sullen chick in a short skirt. We had to share the elevator. The girl, trying to avoid the guy, positioned her self against one wall facing me. The guy, trying to move in for one more smootch, positioned himself and his fat butt between her and me. She and I both felt our body space invaded.
The car barely started because alcohol-powered cars, like cats, don't like the rain or the cold. My Caravan had been sulking in the elements all night. But I got it running and into the garage and then got it turned around - no mean feat for a station wagon in a garage built for Volkswagens. Suerda and Zuleide arrived with Gracinha draped over their shoulders. We got her into the back seat, a maneuver that clearly gave her a turn for the worse. We didn't know it, but she was hemorrhaging.
Suerda stayed home and Zuleide got us to the emergency entrance at the hospital. I ran every red light, including a doozy where ten streets intersect.
One could easily mistake the emergency entrance of this hospital for the service entrance except for the lack of service. There was a sleepy guard, however, and he accepted our suggestion that a wheelchair might be in order. As I eased Gracinha out of the back seat, I saw the look in her eyes that was certainly, in retrospect, death. Next time I will know.
Providence Hospital, considered one of the better in town, had a single gum-chewing clerk/typist to fend off the hemorrhage. She was in no hurry to fill out the forms on her old manual typewriter. Zuleide fed her the requested names and numbers, spelling and enumerating each with agonizing precision. Públio arrived to pace around and say, "Oh, my God; Oh, my God," and demand to see a doctor. Apparently there was only one on duty and he was busy elsewhere.
The guard came and asked me to move my car from the emergency entrance. I tried, but the car wouldn't start. I think I flooded it. A drunk came along and insisted the problem was in the distributor. He pried the cap off and said, "Burnt points. Look."
"Burnt" was not a good description, but I granted him "worn out." He said he could fix them temporarily by prying at them with a screwdriver, which he did, viciously and without success. So he decided my problem was a flooded carburetor and that all I needed was a good push. He and Públio and the guard and I pushed the car up a ramp and into the rain and tried to jump start it in the street. No luck. I left it parked diagonally in a legal spot. After calling home for permission, I walked off into the rain to look for a cab. Since it was before dawn on a Sunday and raining, I had to walk all the way around the municipal park, which was okay because I like walking in the rain before dawn. Also, I was in no hurry to get home. When I arrived, a little before sunrise, Ian was up. We ate waffles and watched a TV show for farmers. We mooed at the cows, snorted at the pigs, buzzed at the bees, booed at the commercials. Suerda made up for lost shut-eye. Mid-morning a call came in to say the doctors were hard at work with Gracinha, but a couple of hours later Suerda's sister Cleusa called to say we should come to the hospital immediately. That's all she would say. Suerda knew what a phone call like that meant and she wasn't going ten feet from the telephone until she had the exact words. I managed to call the right public phone on the right floor of the hospital and got Zuleide the Cool-headed. She gave me the exact words.
For a terrifying two minutes it looked like I was going to also lose a wife and unborn child. In catatonic panic she screamed the usual things, and also "Now what? Now what? Now what?"
Now what indeed. This is a mighty big question that will not be fully answered for another decade or two. Part of the now what meant now what to do with Ian for the next few hours and how were we going to get to the hospital. Obviously, to me, we were going to grab Ian and a cab and be on our way. But I'm not the one to make decisions like that. To maximize efficiency, Suerda called her brother Iani's wife's cousin, who lived on the other side of town. She was to go find a cab and come pick us up in it and assume possession of Ian, though this would take at least an hour or maybe two. To hurry things up we went downstairs to wait in front of the apartment, where Suerda stomped up and down in the rain while making excremental remarks about taxis and my choice of station wagons.
Giving up on the cousin-in-law, she took a stand in the middle of an intersection until a cab with only one passenger came along and had to stop. Tears, obvious desperation, obvious pregnancy and a tale about a mother who might be about to die gained us entrance. The passenger, a lady on her way to church, was very sympathetic. The driver seemed half crazed with this long-awaited opportunity. Suerda urged him through red lights and down one-way streets in search of another cab. The driver used his CB radio to call dramatically for any cabs in the vicinity, but Suerda's arm flapping out the window worked better. A cab stopped, took us in and gave us a hair-raising ride to the hospital. We arrived two hours post-mortem.
No children were allowed upstairs so Suerda went up to Room 914-C alone. Ian and I hung out in the lobby. He had a jolly time with the benches. The cousin arrived, directed here by our apartment doorman. I explained what was going on; she understood. Fernando, a friend of Iani, arrived from upstairs to report a remarkably calm atmosphere. As instructed by Suerda, he took Ian to Iani's wife's cousins grandmother's house, and I went upstairs. It was remarkably calm. Lots of sobbing but not the frantic shouting and exhortations I'd expected. Gracinha was under a sheet on a bed. The folks tended to stay around a bench in the hall. Stefánia was more lucid than usual, but her lucidity is camouflaged with full-bodied sobs. Zuleide was glassy-eyed but under control. Cleusa and Suerda stuck to the bench, crying on each other.
In the corridor I found Públio and Iani, brothers who for the last couple of years could not occupy a room for any longer than it took Públio to leave. A couple of years earlier it had become necessary for them to sleep in the same room at their mother's house, the bedroom they had shared until they went to college. Públio could not accept this, and Iani could not accept his brother's insufferability. They fought murderously until their father cleared things up by stabbing Iani in the shoulder with a kitchen knife. The shock, the reality of the event rather than the blood, sent Iani and his mother and Stefánia-the-ever-in-tow fleeing to Iani's car, where they sat and faced that question: Now what?
I don't know how they resolved that one. Apparently it wasn't much of a stab. This family is amazing in its ways, and the post-Gracinha era holds many more arrangements in store. But the bloody altercation over sleeping space won Públio his bedroom, and Iani took a critical step out form his mother's wing, where he'd lived for all of thirty-two years. Gracinha remained married. Stefánia remained none the wiser. Iani, as full of goodness as his mother, has forgiven his father and expressed sympathy for Públio's inability to hold a job, find independence, and acknowledge responsibility. Públio, as full of piss and vinegar as his father, still considers his brother a jerk.
So December 22, 1985 brought not only death but also factions to head. Gracinha's husband (her second - her first had died shortly before Suerda's birth) geezed into the hospital lobby just as, by chance, Públio, Iani and I converged there. I held back to wonder Now what? and mutter things worthy of a Catholic under stress, but then decided to get in close to hear and maybe just break up a fight. But there was no fight. The meeting qualified as solemn. Just a couple of half-whispered words confirmed that Gracinha had died. The father used his hands to shunt the talk right into business, immediately outlining the legal steps to be taken. Iani used his hands to put a stop to such talk so soon, and Públio, apparently smelling cash, said something to the effect of "What a minute, hold on there," and Iani said to his father, "I'd like to speak with you outside," and I said, "I'm going around the corner to see about my car."
Which I was concerned about. Whatever the fate of the family, it was going to call for a lot of transportation. One ear tuned for shouting in the distance, I set the choke just the way it likes it and gave the carburetor an exact couple of squirts of gasoline from the little one-liter tank that gives the alcohol motor a swift kick first thing each morning. But not this morning. Not a sputter. I opened the distributor for another look at those points. They still didn't look especially bad, but there was no other explaining the complete lack of sputter. If nothing else, last night's drunk had destroyed them with his screwdriver. I poked around the distributor some more, letting it get good and wet inside until I noticed that the vacuum pump wasn't connected where it should be - no small observation for someone who doesn't know a distributor from a hole in the ground. I snapped the connection into place, closed the distributor, got in the car and started it right up - proof of the power of prayer even in the hands of an agnostic.
The many varieties of death and the manifold complexities of its aftermath have developed cultural webs of ritual and tradition, but none that I know of allow a graceful way to say, "Hey, I got the car started." I had to wait until Suerda asked and then I said, "It's okay."
While everyone waited in the lobby while the eye bank relieved Gracinha of he corneas, the subject of coffee came up. That week the price had risen from sixteen thousand to ninety-eight thousand cruzeiros the kilo. Fernando thought it might be a good idea to drink some no matter how dear. I agreed. Since Stefánia was becoming burdensome in her inane insistence and repetition, Suerda ordered us to take Stefánia and ourselves to the nearest barzinho. The hospital canteen was closed on Sunday for much the same reason I can't teach English in the Congo, so we decided to give my car a test run around the block to the first barzinho we came to. We made it to one, had our coffee, and then the car wouldn't start. The battery seemed dead and the carb smelled flooded. In an appropriately miserable drizzle we and a friendly cab driver pushed the car down the street and into an inclined parking lot where we could fool with it. Still no go. Suspecting that the battery was not really dead because the ignition produced no response at all in the starter, I poked around the solenoid with the screwdriver, my only tool, until I got the explosive spark I was hoping for. I'd seen someone do this before. For some reason, it made the starter work for a couple of seconds. After touching off several such sparks and trying 'er again, we got the engine running. But the accelerator had a funny feel to it. Fernando said it was normal, but still I couldn't keep the revs high enough to get up the slight hill out of the parking lot. Fernando said it was the battery, but I was tired of other people fixing my car. I nosed around the carb, feeling more like a doctor than a mechanic because I had to work with the motor running. I found where a little loop had come off a little pin at the end of the accelerator cable. I set it in place and off we went, full speed, greasy but satisfied.
During our absence, Gracinha's body had been shipped to the cemetery. Everybody went back to their homes to change clothes before heading for the wake. I took a quick shower and dressed up in my Sunday best. The car made it to the cemetery, as did everyone else, even Gracinha's husband. He didn't socialize much, just kept to the side and picked lint off his clothes until a decent period had passed. Then he went home.
Gracinha lay in the simplest of pine coffins, buried in pink and white roses, hands on her swollen belly, wrists tied with gauze. Her mouth looked wired shut with one last thing to say trapped inside. Against his mother's wishes, I lifted Ian to see. He put a finger to his lips and said, "Gramma's sleeping," and half a dozen older women broke into wet sobs.
I haven't been to many wakes but I'll bet they can be divided into two types: those where everyone says the deceased had a good and satisfying life and should have nothing to complain about, and those where they say the deceased's suffering has finally ended. The later opinion held sway at Gracinha's wake. A lot of people felt guilty, and a lot felt they could have done more to help her. Suerda wanted to strangle her step-father who had caused the lifetime of suffering. She wanted to do the same to the guy who closed the luncheonette at 5:00 for its daily mopping.
The wake was at the cemetery called Parque das Colinas - Hillside Park, which describes it pretty well. You can bury me there any day. The hillsides are not studded with tombstones. The markers are black slabs of marble laid flat on the ground. The one I stopped to read was for a child who had been born exactly a year before and had died the first week of January. "Twelve days," I thought. "How very sad."
The burial was scheduled for the next morning at ten. Throughout the wake, I tried to keep out of family matters. The politics and subtleties were far deeper than I could know. But I was worried about the midnight vigil. It wasn't clear who was going to stay Certainly not Suerda, since she was pregnant and more upset than anyone else. I left myself at everyone's disposal, but it was decided that Zuleide would stay. Since a young woman should not stay in such a place alone at night, Iani or Públio would also stay. Since Iani was needed to chauffeur people around, it boiled down to Públio. This looked like trouble to me. Twice I pulled him aside and told him not to leave Zuleide alone under any circumstances, that he could call me any time of the night and I would come relieve him. He said not to worry, but with him, one must.
Back at home, Suerda tried to sort things out. Her basic question was "Why?" and the best answer she could come up with was "It's an end to her suffering." I added that I was more concerned for her survivors. She agreed, then went to the bathroom to throw up. It was blood.
The phone rang early the next morning. It was Zuleide. She was alone at the cemetery and had been since midnight. She was okay but worried about Suerda. Suerda was worried about Zuleide and telling me once again never to trust Públio.
Hell continued at Gracinha's house. No one got any sleep because her widower was up with the relatives all night and did a lot of laughing in the same geezy cackle he used for all occasions.
At ten o'clock the pastor arrived at the cemetery, Bible in hand. He said pretty much what you'd expect, ideas jibing with what Públio, the Christian-Marxist-Rosacrucian-Spiritualist had been saying all along: there is no death, the spirit lives on, there is a heaven and Gracinha is now waiting for the rest of us to arrive. Públio nudged me with his elbow and said, "See?"
As they closed up the coffin, everyone crowded around for a last look. Ian sat on my shoulders, goading me in for a closer look at how they were screwing down the lid on his sleeping grandmother. Públio and Iani solemnly manned the screws on their respective sides. In this last opportunity to prove themselves - perhaps to her, perhaps to each other - they seemed to be racing to finish. Then each took hold of a handle toward the foot-end and helped lift the coffin onto the aluminum cart that two guys in blue jumpers and muddy black boots would pull to the gravesite. A hundred or so people followed through the sad, dripping rain. The widower was not among them.
The grave was a double-decker. They lowered the coffin in with a two-piece aluminum frame with canvas straps that were unwound with cranks. I said to the boy on my shoulders, "There goes Gramma," and he said, "Gramma's sleeping." The guys in blue jumpers lowered a concrete slab onto the tomb, then hopped down to cement it in place. Flowers were laid atop the lid. I stood stupidly wondering what stranger would occupy the upper deck. On the way home I finally figured out it was a family site and the next one in it would be one of us.
* * *
When Suerda went for a check-up two days later, Dr. Beatriz was only mildly surprised to find her blood pressure way up there. It was due, no doubt, to emotional stress. The doctor was going on vacation for the weekend. She gave Suerda some pills to help her relax and to bring the blood pressure down. She was to come back for another check-up in a week.
Over the weekend, Suerda suffered a terrible, throbbing headache and stomach ache. By six in the morning on Monday I was driving downtown to the only open pharmacy this side of Rio. I bought the wrong stuff - pills instead of drops - and hurried home with it. Suerda made do, but the pills didn't help. By eight o'clock she knew she had to go to the hospital. We drove through slow, rainy traffic to the one where Dr. Beatriz worked, but of course she was away at the beach for her Christmas vacation. A Dr. Roberto didn't get to the end of his Marlboro before he identified the problem. It was eclampsis and was likely to kill both mother and child in a matter of hours. He implied that Dr. Beatriz needn't have bothered making a follow-up appointment for Suerda; if her blood pressure came down, she wouldn't need the appointment. If it didn't come down, she'd need it even less.
We booked the best room in the hospital, a spaceous area with a bed for a visiting relative, a telephone, private bath, a little red refrigerator, and the right to expect people to jump when she barked. Not a bad deal for twelve dollars a day, including food and all the flies you can swat if you've got a fly swatter, which I didn't and couldn't find anywhere within five blocks of the place. Nor could I find an umbrella, so I came back wet. I idled away the next few hours catching the flies with my bare hand, and slamming them against the floor . When the floor got too obnoxiously littered with their little corpses, I took to tossing my prisoners out into the tepid rain.
They hooked Suerda up to an IV, but all day her headache got worse and worse. She described it by holding one hand up hear her head and opening and closing it with the rhythm of a flashing traffic light. The doctor said he would have to make a decision by five o'clock. At about that time he was beating around the bush and telling us how a Cesarean and the loss of the baby seemed the only solution. Suerda ended the debate by blacking out and going into a grotesque seizure that bent her ankles and wrists at impossible angles. It was the only time I've seen a doctor run. Then nurses ran, too, into the room and out again, shouting, wrestling to get a gurney through the door. I recognized that look of death I'd seen in her mother. It looked even worse. Her eyes rolled up all the way, and she was gagging on nothing, trembling. As the doctor and nurses did their three stooges act with the gurney, she stopped breathing, a fact I announced in perfect Portuguese. Some nurses (and I use the term loosely) attached a syringe to the IV needle and gave her a shot of something. She loosened right up.
Dr. Roberto, who likes to come right out and tell the truth as pessimistically as possible, said he'd been expecting this and had been hoping to operate before she went into convulsions, the last stage before coma and death. Now, of course, there was little need for explanation. Four of us hoisted Suerda over to the gurney. I asked if it would not be possible to save the baby. The doctor said no. Out of the question.
So I hit the bed and cried for a while and then started making the basic phone calls. In half an hour, wet people started showing up and shaking their umbrellas all over the place. I tried to explain in Portuguese what I did not originally understand in Portuguese. Zé had never taught me such words as eclampsis, toxemia, and seizure. I told them Suerda was in no danger but the baby had no hope. Everyone kept asking me why. Foolishly I took guesses at what seemed logical, which was that the fetus had died and was causing the reaction in the mother. But this was not the case.
At seven-thirty they wheeled Suerda back in, quite unconscious. They told me the baby was alive and barely kicking. It was a boy. His heart stopped just after he was untimely ripped from his dying egg. He was, at this point, thirty-one weeks into life, and I'm told you need thirty-three before your lungs work right. The difference is a long time to hold your breath when technically you won't be zero years old for another two months and you weigh only two pounds, thirteen ounces.
Nevertheless, we named him Dashiel. Iani and his wife and I dashed down stairs to see him for the three seconds between the cutting of his umbilical and his disappearance into an incubator. Imagine a scalded E.T. in a rotten mood and there you have Dashiel Albert Cheney two months shy of zip.
By the next morning he's a new man. He's gained a hundred grams, is breathing on his own, cries if you touch him, and will suck on a bottle. His reflexes are normal. Over night his chances have gone from nil to not bad.
So far, none of us has had a good look at him or even touched him. Through the observation window we can see him in his plastic igloo, but he's in a room beyond a room. I have to put my head in just the right spot and squint hard to catch a glimpse of him exercising his little lungs. They say he'll have to be in there until he weighs two kilos, which is four-point-four pounds. No one will say how long that could take.
Meanwhile, our all-important maid is on vacation. Next week, on the day Suerda is supposed to go home maybe, I'm supposed to be attending my last classes of the semester in Mariana, which would not be so important except that they bring me one semester closer to revalidation of my diploma and thus a job. I have to write a somewhat major paper and take a final exam in Portuguese syntax. I need to pay Zé his salary, which I hate to be late with although he doesn't deserve it at all. Also, I'm supposed to be teaching English at the mines until the end of January, and also I have to pack up the house there and move my stuff to the city. Damned if I know what I'm going to do with those pigs. Suerda claims to have someone in Belo who will take care of them until they are "ready," but she hasn't explained how I'm going to get them from Mariana to here.
But on my list of priorities, pigs are way down there. I've just lost a mother-in-law, came damned near losing a wife, may still lose a son; I have no job; we are going to have to move to a new apartment within a month; I am going to have to sell the farm somehow, the farm I have lived for since I bought it three years ago.
It added up to a lot of stress, and the result was that the back of my eyeball cracked open. I didn't feel it when it happened, but my vision in that eye blurred and didn't get better. At the time, I figured it was just exhaustion. Only three months later did I go see an optometrist. He peeked in through my pupil, saw the damage and immediately asked if perchance I'd been under any stress lately. It was permanent damage. For the rest of my life the vision in that eye would be about fifty percent of normal.
Suerda's brothers and sisters came and went as if a tag team. Públio and Iani managed to exchange a few civil words. The talk came around to their father. On both their parts it was negative talk just short of anger. They could see the damage he'd done to the family, the wounds they all carry. Iani admits that his father is mentally disturbed and malevolent in that illness. Despite having been stabbed by the man, Iani respects him as his father. Públio agrees that his father is not sane. I can see that Públio is uncomfortable with his broken relationship with his brother. He can see the source of it and wishes he could find a way out without losing face.
The general atmosphere was happier and more full of hope than it had been in weeks. From the ashes of despair, Dashiel rose. Things were under control enough for Iani and I to justify sneaking out for a quick beer in the nearest barzinho. We hustled through the rain to a nice grubby hole-in-the-wall. We discussed the inflation and the Brazilian hydroelectric system and then the genetic roots of the brothers Ian and Dashiel. They were Welsh, Irish, Scottish, English, French, Canadian, American, Brazilian, Scandanavian, Portuguese, German, Polish, and, presumably, a little African. It was demonstrably a good combination.
That night, January 1 - my father's birthday - Cleusa slept at the hospital. I got to go home and take a shower and have a full night's sleep without nurses snapping o the light or flies landing on my face. I got to see Ian for the first time since December 29. Since that time he'd been passed around half a dozen homes of distant cousins, gaining a few pounds along the way and leaving his wet clothes here and there to dry. He's always welcome, of course, and is even fought over. At a time like this, a kid like him gets clung to.
At four twenty in the morning, the phone rang. Through the crackle of a rain-soaked connection I heard that Suerda was doing poorly. Zuleide, alerted beforehand, showed up to assume the watch over Ian. I splashed on over to the hospital. It wasn't Suerda doing poorly, it was Dashiel. Públio arrived while I was looking through the observation window and trying to get some information.
Dashiel was brain dead but still breathing oxygen from a tube that ended at his nostril. The nurse let us in to see him up close. She explained that at about three o'clock there was a hemorrhaging in his stomach and intestines. He lost a lot of blood. His heart stopped for fifteen minutes. They massaged his heart until it started again, but after that he did not respond to any of several tests for brain function.
He was just a tiny little guy, all flabby skin and bones, his legs not much thicker than pencils, his ribs clearly outlined. He was breathing with regular determination but there was nothing in his fog-gray eyes. The nurse told us they were rushing in blood for a transfusion.
Públio and I went upstairs to comfort Suerda. I told her he was still alive. There was no hope except that he die, which is a hell of a thing to ask a mother to hope, so I left out that part. I stopped just short and let it be assumed. She understood and said it out loud.
An hour later the pediatrician (who was pregnant with twins) called me to the nursery and explained it all again. No hope, but blood was on the way. I almost didn't ask but then I did: Would it not be better to forgo the transfusion? I didn't expect this to be possible in a Catholic country, but she said that if that's what I wished, it was all right. I asked again if she was absolutely sure there was absolutely no hope of recovery. She said absolutely not. I said okay, hold the blood. It was an easy decision. I can only be grateful it was so clear-cut and obvious.
I went back to tell Suerda. We cried. A while later I was called to the nursery again. The pediatrician asked me to write down on the doctor's report that I approved of withholding the blood. I taxed my syntactical abilities to think of the grammatically and legally correct way to phrase a death sentence. I think I made it clear that I was the father and was authorizing the death. But then Públio, over at the incubator, said it might not be necessary. Dashiel seemed to have given up the struggle. The nurse put a stethoscope to his little chest. His heart was still beating, but slowly and irregularly. Públio listened. I listened. I hoped his heart would stop while I could hear it. I wanted to be there when he died, wanted to have my fingers on his cold little chest of bones. But his little heart lugged along. I went back to the doctor's clipboard, wrote my paragraph, signed it and left.
A little later Públio went back to check. He returned to report that Dashiel was breathing strong again. He started asking aloud whether I was sure I'd done the right thing, asked me what if the doctors were wrong? I had big answers to hurl at him, obvious answers, but I didn't. There was no point in saying anything just as there had been no point, now, in asking questions. I was boiling with anger at him and wishing I could write a paragraph that would do away with his life, too. Part of the reason I was mad is that I knew damned well that just about every decision I'd ever made had been wrong.
We waited a long time. I began to worry that Dashiel would not die, which would leave me with a much more difficult decision. Instead of torturing myself with the decision I had made, I tortured myself with the one I might have to make. I certainly wouldn't let a son of mine live a brain-dead life. But a little after nine o'clock, Dashiel resolved the problem himself.
We cried for a while and had hardly finished when a nurse came in and rather matter-of-factly said that they had a healthy, white, blue-eyed boy just born of a mother who didn't want him. If we wanted him, the doctors could doctor the paperwork. It was a simple matter of conjuring up the magic of bureaucracy in which reality is determined by words on paper. With a quick switcheroo of forms, Dashiel would became the deceased baby of someone we would never know, and that woman's baby would become Dashiel. It was easily done, but it had to be done right then.
The nurse stood there waiting for a decision, but it was the worst possible time to have to make a choice like that. We were both fogged over with grief. To sign away our boy and take on another felt cruel. We declined, though maybe within a few days we might not have. The nurse said "Very well," and that was the end of that.
Enter the bureaucracy. It started at the hospital records office, which was down the street. Iani and I arrived with the requisite documents. The clerks had already filled out the forms but had named the boy Mateo (Matthew), a standard practice for the deceased newborn. In fact, he had been baptized a Catholic under that name. That was neither his religion nor mine, nor was it his name, so I had them retype the long form. I carefully spelled the foreign names of his father and two grandparents. One typo could create a logjam in the flow of the bureaucratic sludge. After fussing over two calendars (1985 and 1986) and a wristwatch, they typed in his age as two days, fourteen hours and thirty minutes. The clerk misspelled Suerda's father's name and had to type the whole form over again. Iani and I proofread it, then drove downtown to the place called the Forum. The only possible translation for that would be House of Bureaucratic Matters.
While Iani looked for a puddle to park in, I went in and figured out I should be in the line under the sign that said "Obito." I held my fistful of damp documents until my turn came up. Of course I was in the wrong line. I had to go to the birth registration line first, which, upon thought, was logical. Due to circumstances, I was allowed go to the head of the line. The people behind me, seeing the Obit papers in my hand, made no protest. I sat in the chair beside the typist's desk and started to answer questions. When the lady asked my father-in-law's name, I said it and Iani spelled it. The lady typed it out. She asked for my marriage certificate. To the best of my recollection, it was in Mariana, part of my diploma revalidation package. The lady saw the Obit papers in my hand and the tears in my eyes. She asked if I remember in which House of Bureaucracy our marriage was registered. I asked her what my choices were. She listed them until I heard one I could pronounce and said that was it. She knew it was a lie but, in a rare and isolated moment of sanity in the inferno of bureaucracy, she typed it in anyway. I paid thirty thousand cruzeiros and moved over to the Obito line. The typist there noticed a discrepancy in grandfathers. I realized that on one form it was the real grandfather, Suerda's natural father, who had died before her birth. On the new birth certificate, it was her step-father. The typist looked at me for an explanation. I looked at her with the eyes of a seething murderer about to pull a knife. In fact, I had just such a weapon in my back pocket. The blade wasn't very long but it could certainly remove a liver in a matter of seconds. Intuiting this, she typed in a name, stamped the obit form, took thirty thousand and bid me go with God.
The next problem was where to bury the boy. There was a special place in town for all the little Mateos who didn't get far in life, but the family decided that the upper floor of Gracinha's duplex grave would be a better place. I don't know if I was the only one who saw that this would preclude her husband's burial there. I don't know if that decision was made consciously or even gratefully. Zuleide and Cleusa went to the cemetery to arrange the burial and a little white coffin the size of a violin case. Since all the banks were closed and we had no cash, they paid for it with a rubber check. We hung around the hospital until three o'clock, when the cemetery's VW microbus showed up on time. The driver gently tucked Dashiel into his little coffin. We took it upstairs so Suerda could have her first and last look at her son. She folded up in inexpressible agony. Dona Miquita, a grandmotherly friend of the family, stayed with her while we went to the cemetery. I rode in the back of the microbus, my arm across the coffin.
They opened the coffin again at the cemetery flower shop. It was all satiny inside with lace around the edges, everything white and little Dashiel lying there. The driver, now in charge of arranging flowers, noted quietly that he'd need extra pine bows to fill the empty space. Moving the body he gently made a nice little nest and covered the boy's head with daisies. A girl came in to see who was in such a small coffin, then called in a bunch of her friends. A dozen children crowded around to gape in awe. They came with us as a guy in a blue jumpsuit and muddy boots carried the coffin to Gracinha's newly exhumed site on the hillside. After asking permission, he hopped onto the concrete tomb and slid the coffin in through one end. As he cemented the slab in place, I said the Lord's Prayer quietly and cried, covering my face with one hand, channeling the tears to my chin. The scrape and slap of his trowel didn't stop when a shower blew down under a roll of Wagnerian thunder. Our young, unmournful spectators ran off. I put my face up into the rain and saw the swirling gray open around a pool of clear sky, baby blue. It just opened and closed like a big, slow wink.
The End
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