Brazil Read online

  Books by John Updike

  POEMS

  The Carpentered Hen (1958) • Telephone Poles (1963) • Midpoint (1969) • Tossing and Turning (1977) • Facing Nature (1985) • Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993) • Americana (2001) • Endpoint (2009)

  NOVELS

  The Poorhouse Fair (1959) • Rabbit, Run (1960) • The Centaur (1963) • Of the Farm (1965) • Couples (1968) • Rabbit Redux (1971) • A Month of Sundays (1975) • Marry Me (1976) • The Coup (1978) • Rabbit Is Rich (1981) • The Witches of Eastwick (1984) • Roger’s Version (1986) • S. (1988) • Rabbit at Rest (1990) • Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) • Brazil (1994) • In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) • Toward the End of Time (1997) • Gertrude and Claudius (2000) • Seek My Face (2002) • Villages (2004) • Terrorist (2006) • The Widows of Eastwick (2008)

  SHORT STORIES

  The Same Door (1959) • Pigeon Feathers (1962) • Olinger Stories (a selection, 1964) • The Music School (1966) • Bech: A Book (1970) • Museums and Women (1972) • Problems (1979) • Too Far to Go (a selection, 1979) • Bech Is Back (1982) • Trust Me (1987) • The Afterlife (1994) • Bech at Bay (1998) • Licks of Love (2000) • The Complete Henry Bech (2001) • The Early Stories: 1953–1975 (2003) • My Father’s Tears (2009) • The Maples Stories (2009)

  ESSAYS AND CRITICISM

  Assorted Prose (1965) • Picked-Up Pieces (1975) • Hugging the Shore (1983) • Just Looking (1989) • Odd Jobs (1991) • Golf Dreams (1996) • More Matter (1999) • Still Looking (2005) • Due Considerations (2007) • Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu (2010) • Higher Gossip (2011) • Always Looking (2012)

  PLAY

  Buchanan Dying (1974)

  MEMOIRS

  Self-Consciousness (1989)

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  The Magic Flute (1962) • The Ring (1964) • A Child’s Calendar (1965) • Bottom’s Dream (1969) • A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects (1996)

  Brazil is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2012 Random House Trade Paperbacks Edition

  Copyright © 1994 by John Updike

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks,

  an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon

  are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States

  by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1994.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64589-4

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  I. The Beach

  II. The Apartment

  III. Uncle Donaciano

  IV. The Shanty

  V. The Candlestick

  VI. São Paulo

  VII. Chiquinho

  VIII. The Ranch House

  IX. Brasília

  X. The Two Brothers

  XI. The Factory

  XII. The Bus Terminal

  XIII. The Ice-Cream Parlor

  XIV. Under the Stars

  XV. Goiás

  XVI. The Mine

  XVII. The Nugget

  XVIII. The Mato Grosso

  XIX. The Raid

  XX. Alone Together

  XXI. The Rescue

  XXII. The Encampment

  XXIII. The Mesa

  XXIV. The Encampment Again

  XXV. Alone Together Again

  XXVI. The Mato Grosso Again

  XXVII. Brasília Again

  XXVIII. São Paulo Again

  XXIX. The Apartment Again

  XXX. The Beach Again

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Thou know’st ’tis common; all that live must die, Passing through nature to eternity.

  —THE QUEEN, in Hamlet

  Welcome, Brazilian brother—thy ample place is ready; A loving hand—a smile from the north—a sunny instant hail!

  —WALT WHITMAN, “A Christmas Greeting”

  i. The Beach

  BLACK is a shade of brown. So is white, if you look. On Copacabana, the most democratic, crowded, and dangerous of Rio de Janeiro’s beaches, all colors merge into one joyous, sun-stunned flesh-color, coating the sand with a second, living skin.

  One day not long after Christmas Day years ago, when the military was in power in far-off Brasília, the beach felt blinding, what with the noon glare, the teeming bodies, and the salt that Tristão brought back in his eyes from the breakers beyond the sandbar. So strongly did the December sun strike down that small circular rainbows had kept appearing in the spray of the breakers, out there beyond the bar, all about the boy’s sparkling head, like spirits. Nevertheless, returning to the threadbare T-shirt that served him also for a towel, he spotted the pale girl in a pale two-piece bathing suit, standing erect back where the crowd thinned. Beyond her were the open spaces for volleyball and the sidewalk of the Avenida Atlântica, with its undulating tessellated stripes.

  She was with another girl, shorter and darker, who was anointing her back with lotion; the cool touches made the first, pale girl arch her spine inward, thrusting her breasts in one direction and in the other the sleek semi-circles of her already greased hips. It was not so much the pallor of her skin that had drawn Tristão’s stinging eyes. Very white foreign women, Canadians and Danes, came to this celebrated beach, and German and Polish Brazilians from São Paulo and the South. It was not her whiteness but the challenging effect of her little suit’s blending with her skin in an impression of total public nudity.

  Not total: she wore a black straw hat, with a flat crown, rolled-up brim, and glossy dark ribbon. The sort of hat, Tristão thought, an upper-class girl from Leblon would wear to the funeral of her father.

  “An angel or a whore?” he inquired of his half-brother Euclides.

  Euclides was shortsighted and where he could not see he hid his confusion behind philosophical questions. “Why cannot a girl be both?” he asked.

  “This dolly, I think she was made for me,” said Tristão, impulsively, out of those inner depths where his fate was being fashioned in sudden clumsy strokes that carried away, all at once, whole pieces of his life. He believed in spirits, and in fate. He was nineteen, and not an abandonado, for he had a mother, but his mother was a whore, and even worse than a whore, for she drunkenly slept with men without money, and bred tadpole children like a human swamp of forgetfulness and casual desire. He and Euclides had been born a year apart; neither knew any more about their fathers than the disparate genetic evidence on their faces. They had spent enough time in school to learn to read street signs and advertisements and no more; they worked as a team, stealing and robbing when their hunger became great, and were as afraid of the gangs that wished to absorb them as of the military police. These gangs were children, as merciless and innocent as packs of wolves. Rio in those years had less traffic and violence and poverty and crime than now, but to those alive then it seemed noisy and violent and poor and criminal enough. For some time Tristão had been feeling he had outgrown crime and must seek a way into the upper world from which advertisements and television and airplanes come. This distant pale girl, the spirits now assured him, was the appointed way.

  His wet and sandy T-shirt in his hand, he picked his way through the other near-naked bodies toward hers, which she held more stiffly, in the knowledge that she was
being hunted. His T-shirt, a sun-faded orange, said LONE STAR, advertising a restaurant in Leblon for gringos. Within his black swimming trunks, so tight they showed the compacted bulk of his genitals, he carried, in the little pocket for change or a key, a single-edged razor blade called Gem, sheathed in a scrap of thick leather he had carefully slit. His blue rubber sandals from Taiwan he had tucked beneath a clump of beach-pea at the edge of the sidewalk.

  And, he thought, he had yet another possession: a ring yanked from the finger of an elderly tourist gringa, a ring brassy in color, with the letters DAR on a small oval seal, letters that seemed endlessly curious to him because they meant “to give.” Now he thought to give this ring to the pale beauty, who proudly radiated fear and defiance from her skin as he drew near. Though she seemed tall from afar, Tristão was a hand’s breadth taller. A smell from her skin—sun lotion or a secretion sprung by her surprise and fear—brought back to him an odor from the swamp of his mother, a soft mild medicinal smell dating from a time when he had been sick with fever or worms, before drink had so thoroughly rotted her system, so that she still functioned, in the windowless dark of their favela shanty, as a source of mercy, a coherent pressure of concern. She must have begged the medicine from the mission doctor at the base of the hill, where the rich people’s homes began on the other side of the trolley tracks. His mother would then have been nearly a girl herself, almost as firm in body as this one, though without such slender bones, and he, he would have been a miniature of himself, his feet and hands fat on their backs like small loaves of bread rising, and eyes bursting like black bubbles from his skull, but it was beyond memory, the moment that had planted this delicate mild smell, which felt stretched within him like a sleepy cry; he was awakening, here in this sunny salt atmosphere, windward from the fair dolly’s body.

  Against some resistance of his sea-wrinkled wet skin, he pulled the ring from his little finger, where it fit tightly. The old gringa, with curly blue hair, had worn it where a wedding band would go, on the opposing hand. He had caught her beneath a broken streetlight in Cinelândia while her husband was engrossed in the advertisements for a nightclub show around the corner, photographs of mulatta showgirls. When he held his razor blade against her cheek she went limp as a whore herself, the old blue-haired gringa, a few years from the grave yet terrified of a scratch on her wrinkled face. While Euclides slit the straps on her purse Tristão pulled off her brassy ring, their hands entwined for a moment like those of lovers. Now he held out the ring to the strange girl. Her face in the shade of the black hat had a monkeyish look, an outward curve of the face over the strong teeth that seemed a smile even when her lips were, as now, unsmiling. Her lips were full, the upper especially.

  “May I make you this trivial present, senhorita?”

  “Why would you do that, senhor?” This courtliness of address, too, felt like a smile, though the moment was tense and her squat companion looked alarmed, putting a hand across her breasts in their bathing-suit bra as if they were treasures that might be stolen. But they were brown bags of fat, of no value above the common value, not worth the smallest deviation of Tristão’s steady gaze.

  “Because you are beautiful and, what is rarer, not ashamed of your beauty.”

  “It is not the modern style, to be ashamed.”

  “Yet many of your sex still are. Like your friend here, who covers her heavy jugs.” The lesser girl’s eyes flashed, but, with a glance toward Euclides, her indignation collapsed, and she giggled. Tristão felt a slight squirm of disgust at the complicitous, surrendering sound. The female need to surrender always troubled his warrior spirit. Euclides moved a half-step closer on the sand, accepting the space surrendered. He had a frowning broad face, relentless and puzzled and clay-colored. His father must have been part Indian, whereas Tristão’s had boasted pure African blood, as pure as blood can be in Brazil.

  The shining white girl kept her chin high, stating to Tristão, “It is dangerous to be beautiful—that is how women have learned shame.”

  “You are in no danger from me, I swear. I will do you no harm.” The pledge sounded solemn, the boy’s voice experimentally dipping into a manly timbre. Now she studied his face: the full Negro features were carved on a frame that had never known gluttony, with a childish shine to the prominent eyes, a rampartlike erectness to the bony brow, and a coppery tinge to his crown of tightly kinked hair, the merest dusting, that yet made some filaments burn red in the sun’s white fire. There was a fanaticism in the face, and distance, but toward her no harm, as he said.

  Lightly she reached out to touch the ring. “To give,” she read, and playfully stiffened her pale hand so he could place it on a finger. The third finger, where the gringa had worn it, was too slender; only the biggest, the central finger, offered the necessary resistance. She held it out in the sun, so its oval face flashed, toward her companion. “You like it, Eudóxia?”

  Eudóxia was horrified by the contact. “Give it back, Isabel! These are bad boys, street boys. No doubt it was stolen.”

  Euclides squinted at Eudóxia, as if straining to see her bunched, voluble features and her middling color, which was close to his own, a terra cotta, and said, “The world itself is stolen goods. All property is theft, and those who have stolen most of it make the laws for the rest of us.”

  “These are good boys,” Isabel reassured her companion. “How can it harm us if we let them lie with us while we sun and talk? We are bored with ourselves, you and I. We have nothing they can steal, but our towels and our clothes. They can tell us of their lives. Or they can tell us lies—it will be equally amusing.”

  As it evolved, Tristão and Euclides told almost nothing of their lives, of which they were ashamed: a mother who was not a mother, a home that was not a home. They had no lives, just a constant scurry and hustle, propelled by their empty stomachs. Instead, the girls, talking as if only to each other, displayed their luxurious, lightweight lives as if revealing silken underwear. They described the nuns at the school they attended together—those who were so like men as to have mustaches, those who were thought to be lesbians enjoying a mock marriage, those who were “cocks” and those who were “chickens,” those who sought to seduce their pupils, those who were love-slaves to priests, those who paid the gardeners to fuck them, those who covered the walls of their cells with pictures of the Pope and masturbated with his sour-mouthed, worried image in their eyes. It was all as in a book, a book of sex, verbal embroidery wrought with the nimble fingers of girls in a sewing circle, their giggling glinting through their embroidery like a silver thread. Tristão and Euclides, who lived in a world where sex was a common staple, like red beans or farinha, worth no more than a few tattered cruzeiros tossed on a wine-stained wooden table, and who had lost their virginities when not yet in their teens, were thick-tongued but enchanted as the girls spun their fantastic suppositions, amusing each other to the point of tears.

  In evoking the cloistered school they had mentioned an illegal radio one of the nuns had confiscated, and this gave Tristão the opportunity to interpose his knowledge of samba and choro, forró and bossa nova, and the stars—Caetano, Gil, and Chico—each form of music generated; the entire electronic heaven above them, wherein singers and soap-opera actors, soccer stars and the superrich floated like spangled angels, descended and became a common ground. Sparks of love and hate, emphatic adolescent opinions, flew rapidly among the four of them, equal in their infinite distance from this world, as they were equal in having bodies—four limbs, two eyes, one continuous skin. Like pious peasants of the Old World, they believed that this heaven, which sent them its news on invisible waves, directed its smiling, soulful face toward them personally, just as the impalpable dome of blue sky above is centered precisely upon each upward gazer.

  The heat of the beach baked them from beneath; a potent lassitude slowly extinguished their conversation. When Euclides and Eudóxia, rising in hesitant unison, went down to the water to swim, a taut silence reigned between the other tw
o. Isabel reached toward his palm, the color of silver polish, with the hand that glinted with the stolen oval ring. “Would you like to come with me?”

  “Yes, always,” Tristão said.

  “Then do.”

  “Now?”

  “Now is the time,” she said, her blue-gray eyes gazing into his, her plump upper lip puckered in solemn thought, “for us.”

  ii. The Apartment

  ISABEL carried a gauzy beach dress, the orange-yellow of a maracujá, but chose to leave the beach not wearing it, slipping on only sandals of thin white leather to walk along the famous sidewalk of sinuous black-and-white stripes beside the Avenida Atlântica. She cradled her dress and her towel crumpled in her crooked left arm, so that at least one passerby glanced down expecting to see a brightly swaddled baby. Her dark straw hat, dyed as if with the juice of genipapo berries, floated ahead of Tristão like a flying saucer, the trailing ends of its black ribbon fluttering. She moved more swiftly, with a more athletic gait, than he had expected, causing him to stumble and skip-step at her side, catching up. His own sense of decorum had led him to slip on the sandy shirt saying LONE STAR; his tattered blue rubber sandals, retrieved from the struggling little bush, flopped loosely.

  The pale girl, appearing all the taller for the length of bare legs, strode as if with a sleepwalker’s blind determination, or as if one hesitation might undo her resolve; she walked south, toward the fort, and then turned right on a street that led over to Ipanema—Avenida Rainha Elisabete or Rua Joaquim Nabuco, he was too distracted and fearful to notice. There, in the shadows of the buildings and trees, among the shops and restaurants and the glass-and-aluminum fronts of banks, with doormen and security guards standing erect in uniform, her near-nudity glowed eerily, and drew more glances. Tristão drew protectively closer, although her betranced imperviousness, which had turned her hand icy to his touch, made him feel clumsy and extraneous. In this world of apartment houses and guarded streets she was his leader; she turned at a numbered maroon canopy into a dark foyer, where a Japanese behind a tall desk of black marble veined with green blinked to show surprise but gave her a small key and buzzed a button that caused an inner glass door to slide open. Passing through this doorway, Tristão felt himself X-rayed, the razor blade in his narrow damp black trunks tingling, and also his penis, its shrunken curve like that of a cashew.