Memoir From Antproof Case (2 page)

That each and every one of them stinks of coffee never fails to enrage me. They don't understand the evil of coffee, the horror, and what will become of them if they drink it. Their mouths drop open in astonishment and fear as my eyes narrow, my face tenses, and I run them through mental exercises that make their stomach-burning rope-climbs seem like relaxing on a couch.

Marlise says never to talk about coffee. She says that I must simply not mention it, that I can't change the world. Indeed, the former commandante took me aside years ago and told me that if I ever brought up the subject again or threatened instructors or cadets who drink coffee, I would be dismissed.
I
wouldn't have to drink coffee, he said, but I hadn't the right to prevent others from doing so. After all, this was Brazil, and who was I to prohibit the entire Brazilian navy from partaking of so innocent a pleasure as coffee drinking?

"It isn't a pleasure," I snapped. "It's a sin. It's the devil's nectar. It's filthy and unhealthy and it enslaves half the world."

I didn't go on, as I might have. I restrained myself because I knew it was hopeless, but my eyes narrowed with rage and I had the fey look of psychosis that I get when I smell brewing coffee, so he said, "Look. The guns of the Brazilian navy will be turned against you if you persist in overthrowing coffee urns and thrashing stewards. We're serious. Leave us alone."

Another reason I moved to Niterói is that here one finds less coffee than in Rio proper. It's ubiquitous even here, of course, but Niterói has less of everything. In addition, with more open spaces and far less urban density than in, say, Ipanema, I don't have to adhere to my formerly elaborate pathways, crossing and recrossing streets like a hyperthyroidic shuttlecock and shunning certain routes altogether, to avoid expresso bars with good streetward ventilation, roasting emporiums, and other dens of coffee sympathizers, apologists, hacks, flacks, and geeks. In Niterói it is possible to smell a sea breeze that carries neither suntan lotion nor the stench of caffeine. Are you thinking that caffeine is odorless? Ask a dog. Be warned, however, that the dogs here speak only Portuguese.

Portuguese is a magnificent language—intimate, sensual, and fun. The great poets make it sound like a musical incantation of slurred elisions and rhythmic dissolves, and day-to-day, corrupted, vital, and undisciplined, it is ideal for the dissolute life of a modern city, though what it gains in humor and intimacy it loses in precision and resolution. In fact, it is, when compared to English, almost like baby language.

Do not misinterpret me. I love baby language, for babies, but among adults it can be rather annoying, especially if you have been here thirty years with not a day of relief, having arrived fully formed and mature, and having come, as I did, from a place where language is not a perfumed cushion but a tightly strung bow that sends sharp arrows to the heart of everything.

The language of my boyhood was the language of ice and steel. It had the strong and lovely cadence of engines in a trance. The song of the world in snow, it was woefully inadequate for conveying material ecstasy, but more than enough for the expression of spiritual triumph.

In my classes we never get to that kind of distinction, for the cadets are neither sufficiently advanced nor interested enough to go beyond their requirements. They must be able to converse on board ship and to read the naval and scientific literature that pertains to their specialty. This covers a wide range, and I merely introduce them to the possibilities, hoping that by dint of their effort or as a gift of natural talent they will become fluent in and appreciative of English.

But it does come as a shock to them. They shiver through my class and find no comfort in their ancient wooden chairs. As the sun streams in through the window or a tropical rain falls outside, I bring them to an altitude of 1500 feet in the Hudson Highlands in the winds of March, which pops their ears, dries them out, and shuts them up.

I tell them, "You, you idiots! You are trapped in the last outpost of Antarctic France, and I, I am the polar bear!" Long before I brought it up, they began to call me the polar bear. I have white hair, a white mustache, a white suit, and blue eyes. In Rio something like me belongs in the air-conditioned part of the zoo. My friends are the penguins. Penguins don't drink coffee, no animals do, except for some domesticated types addicted by their degenerate owners either as a joke or as an effect of the addict's need to propagate addiction. I would rather kiss a dog on the lips than the most beautiful woman in the world if she is a coffee drinker, and I have. This sacrifice was to demonstrate the strength of my convictions, and thereby enlighten a group of addicts, but it didn't work. I kissed the dog, they kissed the woman, they all went away, and the dog ran after them.

I am not the only English instructor. No. The other one is an Egyptian Copt, in appearance the black Albert Einstein, who goes by the name of Nestor B. Watoon. Nestor B. Watoon learned English from a Pakistani in the Berlitz school in Addis Ababa.

I know this because Watoon has to tell me everything, because he is my slave. No way in the world exists for him to keep his job without my continual intervention. He is known among his students for going to the bathroom ten times an hour. They expect it whenever he stands up.

"I be right back, a big promise," he says, and hops away. Of course, he doesn't go to the bathroom, he runs to my office to find out how to say something in English. Then he darts back, after asking, for example, "How you say the plural of goose?"

He has become my slave in return for my constant availability, on account of which I must stagger my class and office hours to accommodate his schedule. Watoon survives by doing what I tell him. He stopped drinking coffee years ago. He runs errands. He supplied my lightweight bulletproof vest. If he dies, life will be very difficult for me. If I die first, he goes to the poor house.

Without Nestor B. Watoon, the cadets of the Brazilian naval academy would not think that popcorn is a fruit. They would not have the opportunity of following in the footsteps of a young lieutenant who, attending an official funeral, approached the official widow, made a sad bow, and said, "
Bon appétit.
" They would not think that the opposite of cool was "worm," or that "turban" engines come in several "virgins."

The defining moment of Nestor's life came when he accompanied an American carrier group for several days' patrol in the South Atlantic—I stayed behind, fearing arrest on the high seas. It broke my heart not to be able to sail with my compatriots, and to its everlasting mortification the Brazilian navy had to send Nestor Watoon in my place.

The Americans seem to have enjoyed his company. I don't know what he did, though I can imagine. The cruise lasted only a short time, but the damage is to posterity, for Nestor took a notebook, and no matter what I say he will not correct or vary the usages he picked up. This book has become his bible, and its phrases will reverberate in joint exercises and in the careers of various naval attachés, tarring the Brazilian navy perhaps for centuries.

In the Watoon holy book it is written, for example, that the English for
Russian admirals
is "shit-eating wussies." He was cordially received by all hands, as attested to by his entry,
"Expression of general approval—yaw mutha." And since it is not unknown in this country for military men to rise to high political position, I can imagine a future exchange, long after I am dead, in which the American secretary of state requests Brazil to lower a tariff, and his Brazilian counterpart politely replies, "Suck my ass." His students slavishly imitate him, believing it is true when he tells them that he speaks the King's English. What king?

I cannot pretend to be unmoved by the purity and innocence of the youthful naval cadets. They are the sons I never had, as is Funio. In observing them I often feel that I am watching a film in a darkened theater. There before me, as in a dream, the characters move silently, laughing, or their eyes sparkling with anger and animation. Sometimes in films you see the characters without hearing what they say, with music the only commentary. This I find most touching, for in my detachment I am sometimes closer to them than I would be in life. The audience watches from the darkness as if it has died and is revisiting all that it knew of life from a perspective even more benevolent than that of the disinterestedness of age. When your chances have run out and your prospects disappeared, and you are alone in the dark, looking back, you live life to the fullest and the clearest, and this is when, belatedly, you really know love.

My cadets are far from this now, but the years will quiet them. They will be lost in making love, like Paolo and Francesca, for what seems like eternity. They will ride waves, stage coups or fight them, and raise children. They will struggle for fortune like salmon struggling against a snow-swollen river. They will know failure and triumph intertwining, locked in a braid of life and death. But eventually they will sit in a quiet room and understand that the bright days and fiercely contested struggles have been solely for the purpose of bringing them to this poignant and tender silence.

What astonishes me more and more is that even after such moments, when the human soul is brought to its utmost purity, the play starts up again, the fight resumes, the illusions flood back. Even in an old man like me.

I cross the bay before sunrise to confront several classes of strong-hearted boys who know virtually nothing but have the energy of saber-toothed tigers. I am fully engaged but I am also watching as if from a darkened room. I am angry, and I am touched. I laugh, and I am deeply moved.

An image I see again and again lies at the heart of my artless confession if only because it is, somehow, the unadorned truth. I'm not quite sure what it means, but I cannot stop seeing it. A family is walking in the Jardim Botânico, in the depths of the trees, slowly making their way down a long sandy road that runs between ranks of impossibly high royal palms. They are alone, half in shade and half in weakening sunlight. It is not a dream, for I have seen it. Some distance behind his father and mother is a boy of three or four, walking with bare feet and wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. He pulls a plastic wagon on a white string, and all he knows is what is before him. Perhaps he is Funio and I am the father, although I think not, for the father is young, and my heart is broken because I will die when Funio is still a child.

When I came here I was already a grown man. I had long finished with being a soldier, and was just finished with being a thief. I had a mustache that was blond, not white, and I was as strong as an ape in the Bronx Zoo. The ape is an animal that you hope, as you watch it accomplishing its isometrics against the iron bars restraining it, will break through even if it means that it may turn its attention to you, because you have enough idealistic principle left, planted by nuns, priests, or rabbis, to wish for his freedom. He does deserve freedom. That we put him in a cage is beneficial to us but a rather obvious transgression of the golden rule.

I
went free. I escaped. I contradicted laws, disappointed expectations, and defied balances. I was fifty years old. Marlise was twenty, but I hadn't met her yet. I met her when she was twenty-three. She didn't know a goddamned thing, and she was so beautiful she didn't have to. Our simple appreciation of one another created a spark that in its white brilliance and its breathlessness answered riddles, settled questions, made us happy. We surrendered, one to the other, but in private, according to the rhythm of a hundred million years rather than to satisfy a semipolitical requirement, as is so often the case today with men and women.

When I arrived here I felt as if I had burst into another dimension. For years I did not long for home, because I thought I had suddenly popped into heaven. Rather than lose myself in the illusory treasures of the flesh, I fell in love with a girl thirty years my junior, and treated her with extraordinary tenderness. In those days I spent a lot of time upon the outcroppings that lead to São Conrado, watching the waves strike the base of the gray glacier of rock, feeling the wind, and eyeing the beach beyond.

Whatever brought me here may be the same thing that enables a man to look death in the face. That I was allowed to live the rest of my life was not my good fortune but rather my customary burden, something I never feared would leave me, if only because I wanted it to. Let me, however, return to specifics: I hate to look too deeply into myself, because looking too deeply into yourself makes you into a myopus.

I met Marlise when she was working as a teller of the Banco do Brazil in a branch at the bottom of the hill in Santa Teresa, where I lived, in 1957. I wanted to deposit some money and was directed to the window behind which Marlise had been imprisoned for a year. When I saw her, I dropped my deposit slip. I didn't know what to say, so I blurted out the truth. I told her that I loved her.

She thought I was crazy, and spoke to me in the effective and insulting language that banks supply to lovely female tellers for use in such circumstances.

"Marlise," I said, for her name was engraved on a block that pivoted in front of her window, "Marlise, I love you. I say so directly, because I have twenty-five or thirty years left, after fifty in which I have been a soldier, and a prisoner of war, and God knows what else, in which, like everyone, I have lost and I have loved, and I understand now that I have no time to waste, Marlise, and that, though you are young, neither do you."

It may have been the
in which
construction, it may have been a church bell that was ringing and calling to the depth of everyone's heart, even as they were standing, as I was, in a bank line. It may have been the hour, or the day, or her fervent desire, or the simple fact that I was telling the truth, but she believed me, she accepted what I said, the bell rang, she kissed me through the bars, the manager popped up like a pheasant, and we were married, quite impractically, that afternoon.