Memoir From Antproof Case (4 page)

When Funio was four years old he thought that license plates were price tags, and he was amazed that they seemed to vary nonsensically. I was taken aback one day when we were driving to São Conrado and he asked why the Volkswagen ahead of us was more than three times as expensive as a Rolls Royce. "It isn't," I said.

"But look at the price tags!" he chirped.

When it hit me that he could do long division both instantly and accurately, I began to ask him questions. Just before we walked onto the beach I asked him one that I'll never forget. "Funio," I said, "let us say that the number of letters in your name is
X,
the number of letters in Mama's first name is
Y
, and that
X
plus
Y
minus
Z
equals ten."

"
Z equals two,
" he said, as if to say, "What else, stupid?"

When he was five he wanted to run the checkbook, so we taught him double-entry accounting, which he mastered without a hitch. Last year he began to correct some of the papers and exams from the naval academy—as he is perfectly bilingual.

What is to become of such a child? We have made him promise not to accelerate his progress in school, to hold himself in check at least until he goes to university, so he can be a child. He is socially and emotionally a child, and one grows not only according to the pace of one's intellect but in the cultivation of one's heart and soul. Not that they have been too far outdistanced by his mind—they haven't, but the lessons of the spirit take longer, and because they are often received like blows, they tempt the weak and cowardly into imagining that they can be manipulated like an algebraic quantity, or rushed, or controlled, when they can only be endured.

He does merely perfectly at school, and when they try to accelerate him he clams up. In class he daydreams and does problems in his head. At home he reads history, novels, the encyclopedia, and of late he has become interested in economics, to which he was led by his interest in statistics.

And he is a little thing, as dark as a Sicilian, with enormous eyes and his mother's Chiclet-sized glacially white teeth, but his are configured differently, the two upper front teeth being inappropriately massive, except perhaps for a chipmunk.

His school uniform seems like part of him. Except when he was a baby, he has never appeared in anything but blue shorts and a white shirt. He swims in the shorts, I suppose, because he sees that I swim in my khaki shorts, and he knows the story of how I went down in the sea.

Perhaps it is justice, or a miracle, that he can absorb anything I tell him, for I love him above all, and I cannot last long. When he was a baby, I took him on my walks, I carried him up the mountain, and at the top we went to the place where I always go, where I held him on my lap and we watched the sea below, the tiny whitecaps moving just above the power of light to resolve them, at least to my worn eyes. I have told him much that I assumed he could not understand, but I think that, somehow, he did.

One thing, however, that he cannot know, because he cannot feel it, is the fleetingness of the moment. When we go to the beach, I have an open heart for the ocean, as I always have, but now, even as we are thrown by the waves and tossed forward in the sun, I rise from the scene and look upon it with affection, as if I am gone or hearing the story of others. And I remember how my own father held me, in the ocean, in an age that now belongs mainly to history, and will, with the passing of my generation, revert to it entirely. I would be lost and entranced with that recollection did not the ocean insist on slapping me in the face with its endlessly rocking foam and if the wind did not roar above the water. Funio is tossed on the waves even more easily than I, and after he goes under, he pops up like a cork.

I would not have lasted a minute in this place were it not for the Atlantic. It is the same ocean in which I learned to ride the waves at Amagansett, in 1910, when I was six years old. Well before I fled the United States, that area had become a fashionable extension of Southampton, but when I was a boy it was still a whaling village, and the most fashionable thing for many miles around was an encampment of United States Marines who had yet to hear the words
Belleau Wood.

The waves are a difficult place in which to feel pride or distraction, for they speak intimately and are buoyant with the promise of eternity. I still swim four times a week. Each day after my Alaskan immersion in the naval academy's powerful air-conditioning, I go briefly to Flamengo, and on Saturdays Marlise, Funio, and I go to a more splendid beach—to São Conrado, or to a cove on the coast, where the waves are clear and the distant water is green.

Rio would be intolerable without the surf, and not just for me. The
favelas
would explode were it not for the beach, where rich and poor alike can bathe in the same ocean and receive the same blessing.

Foreigners—I'm a foreigner, but I've been here a long time—often fail to understand that the beach is Rio's cathedral and the sea its most holy sacrament. The tourists come for titillation, not realizing that the great sexual power that pervades this city is downshifted at the beach in the same way that cowboys used to check their guns at the doors of a saloon.

Until Marlise stopped me, I would correct this misconception by persuading many of the northern European women who had removed the tops of their bathing suits to replace them. To stem this barbaric practice I would approach a group of recreants (among whom were usually half a dozen young men who could have broken me like a match-stick) tap my cane on the sand, and point it at the parts that required modesty.

Sometimes they laughed, but then they would observe my wiry frame, my scars, and my narrowed, determined eyes. I think the butt of my automatic and the way my still strong hand curled around the bamboo stick may have influenced them too. And when I barked enraged commands in my raw and mysterious German, their amusement would turn to the sudden whiteness of fear. Then I would clinch it in English, because they all speak English. Taking a leaf from Watoon, I would say, "Beware, shit-eating wussies! Visigoth scum! You are as dung and vomit to your fathers, who were brave and fearsome soldiers but who were beaten to paste by the English-speaking world, by me. The power of the West is clear, and the New World will crush the recreants of the Old. Unless you want me to unleash upon your soft and decadent flesh the accumulated ferocity of the North American continent,
cover up.
"

It worked again and again, until Marlise snuck up behind me as I was confronting what turned out to have been a group of speechless Canadians. How was I to know? Perhaps they were of Teutonic stock. She marched me to a deserted section of beach, and as Funio built a castle, we had what she refers to as the definitive argument, or the earthquake, and what I refer to as nothing more than a change in the balance of power between a poor and dignified old man with only a few sad years left to him, and a huge—though still beautiful—middle-aged harpy who just happens to be, now that the old man has lost some height, a foot taller than he. The conversation was in English, because whenever something serious comes up I can no longer speak Portuguese. It went something—no, exactly—like this.

"Look, bitch," she said, narrowing her eyes and pointing her index finger like Uncle Sam, which is what I do.

"No, no," I told her. "
Bitch
is a vulgar expression for a woman. Don't use it. It's as stupid as it is ugly."

"What I say for man?"

"Woodpecker."

"Look, woodpecker," she said, "it all finish. This your invoice."

Then she lapsed into Portuguese, which I truly did not understand, and she had to return to English. After all, I taught her English.

"What you think I am, antelope?" she asked indignantly.

"No," I said. She was, at that moment, just a few shades of red beyond the color of antelope, but her flesh was almost as sleek and her expression very close, which is why I, on occasion, had told her that she looked like an antelope.

"Why you scare peoples on beach? How crazy you are? You shoot them because they naked?"

"Of course I wouldn't shoot them because they're naked. What's your point?"

"From now on everything change or I go, take Funio. You never see us again. Next time you walk in door, house quiet. You like farmer who chicken hit by lightnings."

"I think I understand."

"Number one, you leave peoples alone on beach. Number two, you never talk about coffee."

"I don't."

"No. You slipping."

"All right."

"You never tell Funio you stupid ideas."

"Why? He's got to know, because someday he'll wonder where he came from. He may want to be immensely wealthy."

"He happy, okay?"

"But, Marlise, happiness...."

"He already like you. He like to see girls on a bikini."

"No he doesn't. Look at him." He was surrounded by incredible pulchritude, and entirely intent on his sand castle. "Marlise, his passion is trains. He's memorized the railroad timetables for half a dozen European cities, hardly trying. What goes in, stays in. For him it's effortless. Can you imagine what he might do with...." And here I stopped for a minute, counting on my fingers, mumbling, looking up at the sky like a blind beggar.

Marlise never understood this, because she didn't know. She didn't know because I never told her. I never told her, because I knew she did not understand immense wealth. Whenever I counted on my fingers and looked skyward like a Sufi she thought I was having an attack of shell shock. She moved forward, embraced me, and cried.

"Marlise, Marlise," I told her, "I've put all my hopes in Funio. I myself will die with a wink."

Still, she had made up her mind, and she never retreats.

"You tell him nothing. You promise."

"Marlise!"

"No, no. You promise. No counting. No mumbly. No nothing."

Even a rhinoceros retreats, but not Marlise. I promised her.

I think the way she is may be related to the general character of the Brazilians. They seem always to be enough out of sync to hit the bumps rather hard. The first Brazilian woman I ever encountered was married to a senior vice president at Stillman and Chase. They were a magnificent family, with three or four children, far too genuine to be associated with Stillman and Chase, the largest and most pompous private bank in the world, and her husband, Jack, like me, had been to Harvard, had been a pilot, and had been wounded.

Until he married Maria-Bethunia he had had a shot at becoming executive vice president. His downfall came quickly, when the wives of the leading Stillman and Chase officers held an exhibition of formal portraits they had commissioned of their husbands. Their intention was to replicate the era of John Singer Sargent, and they made a very beautiful show.

Thinking to upstage everyone, as indeed she did, Maria-Bethunia flew to Vallauris to persuade Pablo Picasso to do a life-size portrait of Jack. She was a crazy Brazilian, Picasso liked her, he agreed, and he painted from a photograph. The curator of the show was electrified, and, naturally, gave the Picasso the place of honor. I suppose he was astounded that Picasso had reverted to a realistic style, but for Maria-Bethunia anything was possible. The problem was that it was a life-sized nude, and that Picasso, who was always a little funny, painted everything to the proper proportions except the genitals, which were enlarged to five or six times their normal size and totally erect.

When the exhibition opened, Jack was in Boston. He flew home after the gallery had closed, and went directly to a reception for the finance minister of the Belgian Congo. Everyone was there, with all the women stealing long glances at Jack. "Jack, was that really you?" one of them asked. Unaware of the nature of Maria-Bethunia's surprise, and assuming that he had been portrayed as in the photograph submitted to Picasso—fully dressed, smiling, with an expression of distinguished amazement and exaggerated respect—he answered, "I must have been thinking of you." He had to leave Stillman and Chase even before I did.

Like Maria-Bethunia, Marlise is so entrancing as to make the wreckage of a career or a vast change in plans seem like nothing. I promised her. Again, we embraced. The sea and the wind were all around us. And I was happy, for nothing is as beautiful as a promise right after it is made.

But many a way exists in which to go around a rhinoceros, which leads me to the far more practical subject of why I have written this, for whom, and where it is to be kept.

The most important reason will come clear to you as you read, but I have also written in protest of the sudden shock I received when I was born, a shock that would be repeated many times during my life—as I was hurled thrice from my physical position in heaven, made to discover that my first wife drank coffee, and far worse. All that I have seen broke my heart so long ago that I think of myself as a kind of museum that no one ever visits. Who would visit? The Brazilians would not quite understand my brand of broken heart. Nor would I expect them to.

For my part, I do not quite understand their disgusting public dancing and their thoughtless copulation, though I receive an occasional flash or two of the pleasure and the logic, as if I were a gunner in a pillbox who sees through his narrow firing slits the sun glinting on the sea below.

This country is not for old men, this place of green gems standing in a sapphire necklace of the sea, where flesh crowds upon flesh exactly like mackerel compressed within a net. If only Scotland had not had an extradition treaty, my life would not be perpetually assaulted by bared breasts and rum-injected coconuts (unless, of course, Scotland has changed). I was not constructed to celebrate the senses. I have never been able to celebrate anything. Nor have I wanted to, as celebration has always seemed to me to be the merely mechanical replication of a vital moment that has fled. When the war ended, for example, people danced in the streets and drank coffee. I didn't. I wept for those who had died and the families they left behind, and then I went to sleep. Only the next day did I allow myself to be enlivened by hope.