Away from Home (37 page)

When they came out of the movie it was almost dark. Bert and Hector Adolpho crossed the village square to the bar. On a high tree a loud-speaker was playing tinny-sounding radio music, the music of the evening promenade. The young were out walking, the pretty girls, the unmarried men, the chaperones. Around and around the square in the casual watchful promenade, with nothing else to do—and nothing that seemed more important than this prelude to pairing. In the bar Bert and Hector Adolpho drank beer and watched the people outside in the square and talked quietly of the mine, each pretending there was no point in being elated so far in advance. Tomorrow they would know more.… But Bert knew that Hector Adolpho already knew. He did not need Bert to corroborate his judgment. If there were emeralds, this man knew it.

Bert felt a secret pride that he had been chosen to give his opinion. It meant a great deal, not only professionally but because it was a sign of friendship. This man was not asking; he was showing.

They decided to meet at five-thirty in the morning in the hotel dining room for breakfast and leave at six. Bert would have been willing to go even earlier. It was a nine-hour trip by jeep over rough jungle roads to get to the location of the emerald mine. Nine hours today, but perhaps several years from now the road would be opened wide and there might even be a town.

They shook hands warmly at the top of the ramp that led to Hector Adolpho’s room. “Until tomorrow.”

It was only nine o’clock, but Bert felt tired and good. The beer on top of the aftereffects of the Scotch had made him sleepy. Through his open windows he could hear the loud-speaker with its scratchy music, far away and somehow pleasant. He took off all his clothes and got into bed naked. The mattress smelled of mildew, but the sheets were clean and smelled faintly of soap. He put citronella on his arms and face to chase the mosquitoes, and turned off the light. The scent of citronella always brought back his childhood—summer camp. He slept, still hearing the music faintly in his dream.

He dreamed of the mine, of tomorrow, of great mountains of emeralds, green as grass, Kelly green, shiny and already cut. Strangely, it was not the Brazilian emerald mine at all, but the stone quarry where he had hiked as a boy at camp. The great piles of stone were no longer granite, gray, but emeralds and green. No one seemed aware of it. He was the only one who knew and he wanted to tell someone, his counselor. His counselor was handing around a bottle of citronella to chase off the mosquitoes, because it was evening and they were going to sleep at the quarry that night under the stars, with sleeping bags. When Bert tapped his counselor on the arm, the man turned around and his face was the face of Hector Adolpho, tanned, lined, handsome and shrewd. Bert smiled at him, suddenly stupid with adolescent admiration. If Hector Adolpho didn’t notice the emeralds, who was
he
to say anything?”

“I thought I would help you,” Bert said in the dream. “Is there anything
I
can do?”

The face of Hector Adolpho disappeared and so did the emeralds; the boys were all sitting on the floor of the quarry where the ground was flat, and someone had lighted a campfire. There were about a dozen boys, all singing. The black sky was dotted with lonely stars. It was a foreign-sounding song, and somehow he didn’t know the words, so he moved his lips and pretended. They were all happy and sleepy and very good friends, so no one seemed to care. They swayed to the tune of the song and watched the hot fire. Bert knew that the summer was almost over, this was the last hike of the season, the long three-day hike, and he felt nostalgia and sadness filling his throat so that he could not sing any more. I’m going to come back every year, he thought loyally. Every year until I’m too old, and then I’ll be a counselor. I’ll never leave my friends. I want to stay here forever. But even saying that resolutely to himself, he knew it would not come true. It would all vanish, all of it, the night, the campfire, the friends who swore to remember. All this good feeling would be gone. The gang would be gone. It made him sad, as if he had no human insides at all but only something bitter and black.

The tiny alarm on his wristwatch went off like the buzzing of a hornet. At first Bert did not know where he was; then he sat up in bed and looked around, shaking off his dream. The huge wooden dresser loomed up at him, then the dark square of the opened window, lightening now to gray. It was five minutes to five in the morning and he was in the hotel. He found an opened pack of cigarettes in the pocket of his shirt and lighted one, and then dressed. He washed in the bathroom down the hall but did not bother to shave. When he went down to the dining room at five-thirty the sky outside was already blue.

They ate sliced rolls with jam, and coffee with condensed milk, and took along a package of food and several bottles of beer and soda for the trip. Hector Adolpho was wide awake; he said he had been up since four.

The two of them took turns driving the jeep. The jungle seemed tamer on either side of them, conquered and familiar. It was not the jungle Bert had looked down on from the plane, and yet a short time ago it had been exactly like it. “Look at this road, that jungle,” Bert said. “Eventually man conquers everything.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” Hector Adolpho said.

After an hour and a half of driving they passed the road that led to the amethyst mine, but they kept going and did not turn off. There would be plenty of time for that in a day or two, on the way back. Amethysts were only bread and butter now. The sun was very bright.

They reached the new pit at a little after three in the afternoon. It was a deep, narrow valley, over a quarter of a mile long. The land around it had been cleared and was flat and treeless. Dusty and ugly—and beautiful. There were Brazilian and Indian workers and guards, but the digging had been halted just at the point when Hector Adolpho’s assistant had told him he suspected the existence of something entirely different from what they were looking for. They greeted the men casually, as if this were only an inspection trip. Bert climbed down into the pit and felt his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. He had been stiff from the long hours in the jeep but now his tiredness vanished. His breath came in gasps that hurt his chest. Even his eyeballs felt dry, painful to move from side to side. His hands were trembling.

His sharp tools were attached to his belt. On the wall of the pit there was a serpentine vein of black mica, a yard wide—the biotite in which emerald crystals should be embedded. He hacked at it, going deeper. As he chipped into the formation there were crystals embedded—greenish—bigger and greener as he cut deeper into the vein. He chipped off a tiny piece of one and kept it in his closed hand as he climbed back up the side of the pit.

“It’s very hot here,” Hector Adolpho said, taking his arm. “Let’s have a beer in the shade.”

They walked back to the jeep, the dust stirring around their heavy boots. Bert opened his hand and looked at the tiny bit of greenish mineral.

“Well?”

“It’s emerald,” he said. “You can test it, but I’m sure now.”

“Yes. I am too.”

They looked at each other for a moment and neither spoke. Bert moved the piece of rough emerald between his thumb and finger, feeling it, looking at it. Deeper into the vein the emeralds would be loose, lying in caves of white powdery-looking albite, gem-quality stones, valuable, hard and bright. He looked at Hector Adolpho.

“This must be a secret,” Hector Adolpho said. “Don’t tell anyone. No one.”

Bert nodded. “No one. You can rely on me. Besides—” he smiled—“who could I possibly tell?”

CHAPTER 18

Four hours by car from the city of Rio de Janeiro, toward the city of São Paulo, there are miles and miles of highway cutting through the rich hills and leaving gashed red earth on either side, land so rich it seems to bleed like a living thing. The green grows above the red earth, thick and moist, and far away the hills dip into purple shadows. The sky is very blue, flat, with long white clouds that look dry in the bright light of the sun. It was eleven o’clock in the morning.

Helen sat next to Sergio in his car and they did not speak often. He held her hand. There were very few other cars on the highway, and once the Rio-São Paulo bus, the
Cometa
, came streaking by, honking, and disappeared over the next hill. Sergio drove steadily, and fast, but completely effortlessly. He had made the trip many times. Every once in a while he glanced at Helen to make sure she was all right.

“I feel as if you belong to me,” he said. “Isn’t that strange? Do you feel that way too?”

“Yes.”

“Right now I adore you more than anyone else in the world. There
is
no one else in the world. Whenever you and I are together, and alone, from now on, it will always be this way, but every time it will be better and better.”

She said it to him now for the first time. “I love you.”

“I haven’t even made love to you yet.”

“I know.”

“That’s strange too, not to touch you for such a long time, and to want to so much.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. I was afraid to before. Now I want you to.”

He held her hand very tightly. “We will be something together, won’t we!” he said softly. “I know it.”

She heard his faint accent that revealed itself whenever he was intense or excited and she realized again how different he was from her and from any man she had ever known, out of a completely different world. She had never wondered about his other mistresses, other affairs, and even now she did not, but there was that experience about him, that emotional intensity, which drew her to him and frightened her a little at the same time. She felt very naïve beside him, completely passive and innocent. She had never in her life gone to bed with any man but her husband, and her thoughts had never been whether or not she was a passionate woman but, rather, how she reacted in relation to Bert. She and Bert were good together—or, they
had
been. Her life was changing minute by minute now, and she did not know what she would have to think of next. She felt shy.

“When we get to the farm,” Sergio said after a while, “my father will be there. And maybe my cousin. I will be a little formal with you when they are there, but I don’t want you to mind. You will stay in the small guest house right next to my father’s house. It’s very pretty. I stayed there with my friends when I was growing up—
boys
, that is.” He smiled at her. “Not girlfriends. But later I will stay there with you.”

“Why are you taking me where your family is?” Helen asked. She looked at him, shocked, and felt so unnerved that she almost pulled her hand away from his, as if his father were already there watching them. “I thought we’d be alone.”

“It’s so beautiful there,” Sergio said. “I wanted you to see the place where I grew up. I have always loved it more than any place I have ever lived since. You don’t have to be afraid of my father. He loves life. He has a sense of humor. He’s almost seventy years old, but the only thing you’ll have to be afraid of is that he will probably try to take you away from me.”

“I’ll chance it.”

“I wanted to take you to a special place this first time,” he said. “I didn’t want to make love to you in a
garçonier
, or in a hotel room. Do you remember that hotel where we had lunch upstairs on the roof? You can walk down the stairs from there, without taking the elevator, and go right into a room. People reserve the rooms in advance, you know. In case. I couldn’t do that with you. We may have to do that some time; but later on, when we trust each other enough so that it doesn’t make any difference where we are.”

“Trust each other?”

“You think that’s a funny word to use? You think two people trust each other just because they are lovers?”

Helen smiled. “No, I guess not.”

“I know that we will make each other very happy, and also sometimes very unhappy. Whenever you love someone he has the power to make you suffer, only because you love him, not because he is better at tormenting than anyone else is.”

“I know … very well.”

“That’s why lovers don’t trust; they fear that pain. It’s so easy to give. But, even so, the ones who fear it so much they are afraid to love at all—those are the ones I feel sorry for. They might as well not be alive. Actually, they’re not alive.”

She felt he was right. She had never felt more intensely aware of everything around her, and everything inside her mind, and of her body itself, than she had ever since the morning before when she had finally decided that she and Sergio would become lovers. Even now, with him in the car that was taking them to his
fazenda
, there was an air of unreality about the whole incident, but it was an unreality she recognized from years and years ago, the unreality of first love. Why should he love me, me of all people in the world? He,
he
loves me. She was special to him and therefore special to all the world, she knew it, as if the feeling and knowledge of being loved by this special man shone out of her and made her lovely. Despite her shyness about what to do with her first lover, her first stranger, Helen felt a warm sense of security and strength. She was not even apprehensive about how to behave when she met his father. She felt that even though she would be forced to pretend and perform away from Sergio, she would only be away at arm’s length, watched and cherished and safe. She was even enjoying the idea, as a challenge.

At eleven-thirty Sergio pointed to the right side of the highway and said, “Look, the farm begins here.”

There was the flat land and the hills beyond, the trees and the blue sky, for miles and miles, exactly as it had looked for hours. “Where?”

“This is only the beginning. We will get to the house in three quarters of an hour.”

“How big is it?” Helen cried.

“Twenty thousand
alcares
—that’s about eighty thousand acres, more or less. This isn’t a very big farm; there are many much bigger.”

“It’s big enough for me,” Helen said. “I have to admit when you first said farm I pictured a few chickens, some vegetables—you know … like home.”