Brazil

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.”