Memoir From Antproof Case (51 page)

Despite all this I was sure that everything would be all right, that my childhood was not suddenly about to end, and by the time I opened our front door my agonies had begun to subside. Apart from clothes soaked with coffee, I was at least half presentable. If the men were there, I would give them back their money and apologize for the rest. Such things happen. They would think I was an honest boy who had tried hard and met with a painful accident.

But they were not in the parlor, and the house was still. I called out. "Mama?" I asked, and no one answered. "Mama?" I said again, my voice shaking.

The whole world changed for me when I saw that the dining room table had been overturned, and that everything that had been on it—food, dishes, cutlery, water, candles, bread—lay on the floor.

I went into the kitchen, where my mother and father lay a few feet from one another in death.

I called to them quietly, but they did not move. Their eyes
were open. My father held a kitchen knife that was stained with blood. He had fought. And yet his expression was one of contentment. And my mother's, as I might have predicted, was one of anguish.

She had a small bullet hole in the back of her head. She had been executed. My father, too, had a small-caliber bullet hole, at the temple, but he had also been shot in several places with a .45, and the blood on the floor was his. It must have been his assailants', too, for the knife blade had not a spot of silver upon it.

All I said was, "Oh oh oh," over and over again. Then I stopped. Tears poured from my eyes, but I remained perfectly silent. I lay down between them, in my father's blood. I put my hands on their bodies, and felt with my fingertips that at least they were there, that I could still touch them. And then I closed my eyes. As I fell asleep, I was certain that I would join them, and of course some day I will.

(If you have not done so already,
please return the previous pages to the antproof case.)

 

A
S A CHILD
I often heard the expression "the resilience of the human spirit," and it was my luck to understand it as the
Brazilians
of the human spirit. This misconception instilled in me an almost theological awe for a people that I might otherwise perceive as hopeless and dissolute. Though they are prodigal, undisciplined, and morally blowzy, because of an accident at an early age and because I heed those voices that I first heard, I cannot help but see their redemptive side.

While the snow fell and the fire burned, my mother spoke from the semidarkness, commanding me never to underestimate the Brazilians of the human spirit. "When you are a man," she said, "you'll face many tests that now you cannot even imagine, and you will pass each one if you have faith at the outset in the magnificent Brazilians of the human spirit."

Who choreographs these Brazilians that swarm and strive in their millions, sexualizing the esplanades like grunion, obsessed with vanity and passion, swirling through the days and nights like so many Paolos and Francescas, driven as obviously as puppets. You see them on land, in the water, and in the air, twisting in lazy switchbacks in the blue after sailing off the Gavea under hang gliders.

The reckless among the hang glider pilots wear neither clothes nor helmets, just the sock that passes for a loincloth on the South Atlantic beaches, and to see them flying naked and by the score in the sunlit sky is to see an invasion of angels, for to glide properly they must stretch and extend their limbs like figures in Renaissance paintings—dancers, angels, recumbent gods. Who has choreographed this extraordinary flight? Chance? It would seem to me that in this world the virtuoso mixing of the colors alone would tend to rule out bangs and booms and other 'singularities,' although I know that, these days, if people believe in something, just as often as not they believe in a boom. "The boom is my shepherd, I shall not want...."

I was raised on a bay of the Hudson that by historical and natural accident was a refuge for eagles. As the nation lamented that they were lost, I used to see them many times a day, and I thought they were as common as gulls. Inter alia, I learned to sense the presence of an eagle when I could not see him, in the broken patterns of common birds that flew in groups. Sometimes extremely subtle variations served to announce that presence. Their unity and surety would shatter and their wings would tense, ready to be pulled tight to the body for rolling and diving in evasion. Sometimes they passed over the trees in an even pattern against the clouds, like the spots of an ermine coat or the fleurs-de-lys of wallpaper, and then their ordered formation would explode into chaos, a sorrowful sight and a fine lesson.

The gliders of São Conrado swarm in chaotic splendor. I come here to watch them against the blue sky because I have discovered that toward the end of one's life one begins to understand the idea of angels. I have for many years seen angels in the faces of children, in the lovely drawn-out cries of singers, in painting, and in poetry. But only recently have I learned that they can appear apart from perfection, that it is their fate to be scattered across the sky, their formations exploded, their hearts stopped in shock.

I station myself on the huge glacis at São Conrado, a hillside of gray rock that projects into the sea, and spend the day looking up at the hang gliders. For this I also have a practical motivation. The beach where they land is white and wide, but (even if not by Brazilian standards) it is by my standards quite crowded, and the smell of expresso wafts from the coffee carts on the esplanade.

So I have found a ledge on the hillside of rock, where I come to sit during the afternoons with a newspaper, a water bottle, and the antproof case. Although the beach nearby is covered with people like a cake sprinkled with confectioners' sugar, never have I seen a single soul on these rocks. I have only a little tree to keep me company.

Its smooth trunk is curved and weathered, hammer-forged by wind and sea. It is harder and at the same time more supple than its cousins, and is the last tree out, rooted indelibly in the rock through which, when it was very young, it was obliged to burst.

I left the garden in Niterói, for a while, at least, because I sense danger there. After weaving through the confusion of Rio, I can come here, sure that I am and will remain alone. Though I'm high in the air, the sea is so close that sometimes the wind
will carry a small particle of spray and wet my face or my page, so close that I've seen fins break the emerald surface. When I inhale I taste the minerals of the Atlantic.

I enjoy the full beating sun as never before. I don't eat when I'm here, though I do occasionally imagine dinners in intricate detail, but I need to drink, so I have a water bottle that I fill with the water I used to drink in Rome. The night that I met the great singers, I had thirsted for it on my walk from the Villa Doria to the Hassler, and had gone to the bar to get it, which is why I met them. I had drunk it during our talk, and then, the next day, I was drinking it when I saw the streetcar.

 

I am hesitant even to mention streetcars, having covered your eyes whenever one passed with boys surfing on top (now you know that I know who you are). I have tried to instill in you from an early age a natural revulsion for this practice, as it has caused the senseless death of so many children. Though I have always believed in your intelligence, adolescent boys have no probity. If you are anything like me, you will survive, but only by a hair, and, quite frankly, that makes me nervous.

You may think that shielding your eyes from boys surfing atop streetcars was manipulative. It was, and I have manipulated you in other ways, too. Perhaps by now you will have discovered that not all small boys are required to read through the Encyclopaedia Britannica volume by volume. In fact, in all of Brazil, you may have been the only boy of any size to fulfill such a requirement. Nor must other children commit to memory logarithmic tables, but I believe that someday, when others express awe at your mental agility you'll thank me.

I apologize, though not abjectly, for manipulating you, the last instance of which is your discovery of this memoir. For years I would put chocolates in the hidden drawer in the left hand cabinet of the partner's desk. You are unable to come into my study without looking in that cabinet. As that is where I will place the antproof case when I have finished my account, I trust that you will have found it.

I know to do this because when I was three or four I discovered candied fruit slices in a drawer of our china cabinet. To this day I cannot refrain from looking in drawers, even in someone else's house. I have often been embarrassed by people who put me on the spot when they see me obsessively looking in their desks.

"Excuse me," they say. "
What
(the emphasis is always on the
what)
are you doing?" They breathe lightly at the end of this question.

"Do you have any candied fruit slices?" I ask.

"No. I
don't
(emphasis always on the
don't)
have any candied fruit slices." More indignant and amazed light breathing.

"That's all right," I say, "I don't even
like
(emphasis always on the
like)
candied fruit slices." And I don't.

I've never had many friends, and this is but one reason why. Opening drawers isn't so bad, really, and, besides, I can't help it: I open my own drawers incessantly, sometimes just seconds after I've looked in them. During my years as an undergraduate I once (emphasis on the
once)
went to Thanksgiving dinner at the home of a classmate who lived in Beverly Farms. Perhaps because his father had been a member of the cabinet, there were cabinets and drawers all over the house.

We went upstairs to tell his father, who was sitting on his bed trying to pull off riding boots, that a snake was in the coal bin. Wouldn't you know, I went over and yanked open a dresser drawer, and it was just my luck to discover an inflatable sex doll. Of course, I didn't know what it was, so I pulled it out and asked, "What is this?"

My friend came over to examine it. "It's an inflatable sex doll, Dad. Whose is it?"

"I don't think it's your mother's," I said.

"No, you little son of a bitch," I was told. "It's not my wife's, but since you made it your business perhaps you ought to know that she has one, too, and that mine and hers are having an affair."

"Oh," I said.

"Why don't you keep it?" he asked bitterly.

"She's not my type."

Our Thanksgiving dinner was rather awkward.

Streetcars. If it hadn't been for a streetcar I wouldn't be here and you would probably be living in a
favela.

Which might not be so bad. It all depends on how you take it. The truth is that the most wonderful times of my life have been when I was utterly impoverished, at least when I was young. Young people of character have no need for money. It's only when age knocks the joy from you that you need cash and coin to prop up your failing ability to thrive. When I think back to the times I have most loved, I realize that it was always when I was whittled down to nothing that the world seemed most colorful and full. At the field in Monastir I owned a few uniforms, two books, and a pistol. Every day I risked my life and every day I returned to a meal and a tent. But I lived in the clouds. Use riches only to increase vitality, for the moment you lean back on them you are lost.

Streetcars. I see men in suits, riding to work in air-conditioned limousines. There they sit, bound by ties, belts, and their own constrictive dignity. I also see people riding the Santa Teresa trolley as it crosses the Lapa Aqueduct. You've seen it, too. There they are, seventy feet in the air, hanging off the side of a creaking, dilapidated, saffron-colored claptrap as it hurtles across the void to the beat of African music.

The Santa Teresa trolley is life in the sun, it is motion, music, risk, and color. And the air-conditioned black cars are nothing more than coffins. Is that what people strive for? Is that their dream? To take themselves from a windy trolley flying above Santa Teresa in the sun and air and put themselves in a black casket stalled in a traffic jam on the Assemblêia?

I have everlasting affection for streetcars, not least because the sight of one awakened me from my long dream. It was in Rome, the day of the evening train to Paris, the day the desk clerk said, "Min-er-al wa-ter, min-er-al wa-ter, pistachios, miner-al wa-ter, min-er-al wa-ter...."

By some miracle, I had already decided to rob Stillman and Chase. The three singers had been the agents of my resolution, and the desk clerk's min-er-al wa-ter aria had been the beginning of its confirmation.

Dazed by my own decision, I began my walk through Rome. Knowing that I would have dinner at my favorite restaurant in a quarter south of the station, and that I would then make my way through a mild evening to the absolute privacy of my compartment, where I would sleep under a lustrous Scotch-plaid blanket as Alpine air chilled the room and the train pushed through the night over rivers that were explosively fresh and cool, I refrained from eating during the day. The Trattoria Minerva was so good that I didn't want to burden it with frivolous competition. It was a neighborhood restaurant unmentioned in the tourism guides. The windows and doors had white curtains stretched over them, cold dishes were laid out on a table near a fireplace, and the food was inimitable. I, who for years had an investment banker's expense account, have never had better.
I wonder if it's still there. I can't direct you to it—I'd have to walk there to find it—and I can't go there myself. First there is a matter of the law, and second there is a matter far more serious than the law. If you are reading this, I'm dead. Dead people don't go to restaurants (except in New York).

I walked all day through Rome, twenty miles through museums, churches, palaces, and piazzas upon which hundreds of the world's greatest artists and tens of thousands of its greatest artisans had worked for thousands of years. Every now and then, Brazil goes through a science-fiction mania, and during the last decade or so many of the movies that fuel the craze have had an obligatory three or four minutes of breaking through the time warp and exiting the universe. In the canon of these movies, the tunnel that leads to the other side of everything is a lava lamp gone berserk, and in these scenes, which are about as theological as Hollywood can get, I always feel as if I've been sucked into a tornado along with ten million bowls of lobster Cantonese.