Away from Home (36 page)

After the first two years the autumn-morning streets did not have that same new feeling about them, except on certain mornings when something about the angle of sunlight striking a windowpane or the sweet bite of the air reminded him of how he had felt every day. Then he would walk a little faster and hold his head up, breathing deeply and even smiling. It was still his city; he still had freedom and the future. Less frequently too, then, he would think of Helen as he had left her in their apartment in Riverdale, but this time his mental picture would include Helen holding Julie in her arms, and Julie waving her arms and her sticky hands and smiling lovingly, and putting Pablum in Helen’s hair. I am doing it all for them, he would say then, but even then he knew in his innermost heart that this was not true. There was something almost martyrish about saying you were doing all this, giving of your youth and strength and vigor, for two other people. It sounded lofty, but it wasn’t true, nor was it even entirely right that it should be true. You could not give these innermost things, these important things, only for others. You could not give away your very life. He was doing it, Bert knew, because it was his way of life, and his reason for life, and, most of all, his
feeling
of life came from this work. He wondered sometimes why Helen did not seem to have the slightest idea of the intrinsic importance his work had for him. Sometimes when he had to stay late at the office and came home tired she would put her arms around his neck and say, “Poor thing!” as if she actually thought he had suffered. But somehow, when he tried to explain, he always discovered that it was much easier to pretend that he
had
suffered rather than to try to explain. Explanations made him lose it, made the whole idea seem rather high flown and corny. It was almost as silly as trying to explain the feeling you had when you were in bed with a girl you loved, making her happy and making yourself happy and even rather proud in the process.

Although that first, vigorous feeling which composed his happy early memory became dissipated during the years, and almost disappeared into grinding exhaustion during the years of commuting from Westport and back, when he took his family to Rio he felt again as he had on the first job. Rio was a new city, a new future, when he already had the experience to promise success in it. He would look at the suntanned faces along the streets as he left the place where he parked his car and walked to his office building, and they were entirely different-looking faces from the ones he had seen in New York. They were lethargic, cheerful, devil-may-care. He remembered a story one of his colleagues had told him about a recent revolution—that the entire revolution had been temporarily halted so everyone could go out to eat lunch.

“Oh, yes,” his Brazilian secretary had exclaimed, “I remember that! I was in a night club one night when we were having a revolution. I didn’t even know anything was happening, except that when we went out on the street we couldn’t get a taxi.”

The other American men Bert knew didn’t really take the Brazilians very seriously in business. No Brazilian was in a hurry, no one seemed afraid of what might happen if they didn’t stop to drink a
cafezenho
every time someone stepped into the office.
Cafezenho
first, business later. An executive with a mistress—whom he usually called a fiancée, even if he were married—would leave the office for an entire afternoon if the “fiancée” telephoned. Love first, business later. Even the telephone system seemed against any show of urgency. There were not enough telephone lines in Rio to service the number of telephone instruments, so from two until four in the afternoon you might have to wait over an hour to put in a business call to an office which was within walking distance. You could purchase any kind of new telephone; the modern one that was only a handle with the dial on the base, in a variety of pretty colors, but you might as well purchase a toy telephone for all the good it would do you. You can’t call today? You can call tomorrow, or after tomorrow. You Americans, the Brazilians said, are always in a hurry. That’s why you have heart attacks. We don’t have heart attacks. Liver, yes; terrible. It’s our climate. But heart attacks, ulcers—never. Those belong to the American business world.

Some American businessmen in Brazil got ulcers because they could not cope with the aggravating slowness and casualness with which they were forced to conduct important business. To Bert Sinclair, this national business apathy seemed a stroke of luck. If the others wanted to play grasshopper and sing and play all summer, then he would play ant. The morsels belonged to the provident ant, who stored them away for the harsh winter, but in Brazil it was always summer, in a way. Winter would be back home, where he would return one day, but he would return secure. These mornings, going to work, Bert often thought how content he was in this rich, fertile, growing land full of promise. It was a primitive land in many ways, with flaws and lacks you never could get used to even though you learned to tolerate them just below the threshold of irritability.

He knew just how primitive Brazil was whenever, as now, he went into the interior to the mines. Actually, as a gemologist, he need never have gone to the mines if he did not want to. He had never told Helen that. She thought he was indispensable to the mines in some way, as if he had to tell their owners whether the stones the miners hacked out of the rich earth were fabulous fortunes or useless chunks of mineral. It was in the mines that Bert felt a true resurgence of the old, autumn-morning feeling.

The mines meant more to him than he almost dared to admit to himself. Each mine was different, with its own secret wealth hidden in its dark layers. First you would strike away the earth with heavy, sharp tools, to the rock, and then reveal the first layer of mineral, the one that told you by its composition what was hiding beneath. The aquamarine, the amethyst, the citrine, or the tourmaline, clung back to back with the poor, coarse mineral, like a beautiful young Brazilian virgin with her chaperone. You would pry away a chunk of this twinned solid mineral from the side of the mine pit and then you would spit on your finger to moisten it and rub it on the stone. From the moisture a bright color would emerge. Not so pure and bright a color as would later be revealed when the stone was cut and polished as a gem, but enough to substantiate what your practiced instinct had already told you. It
was
.…

The first mine he had ever seen in Brazil had been this same amethyst mine in the State of Bahia, to which he had first been invited as a guest by a friend. It was such a richly giving mine that rough amethysts lay on the dusty ground all over the floor of the pit. Dullish purple, some as small as gems and others like chunks of coal, and some larger than your clenched fist, their octrahedron crystals so perfectly formed it seemed as if some divine stonecutter had cut them that way before he hid them in the earth for men to discover. Some of them were inferior-quality amethysts taken from nearer the surface of the pit, but even knowing that, Bert was speechless for a moment at the wonder of this profligate richness. Nearby some Brazilian workers, dirt-poor, were preparing to eat the midday meal their wives had packed for them to take to the mine. The food had been put in round tin pots, stacked one upon the other. Bert watched one man gathering rocks and bits of wood to make a fire to heat his food. And then he saw a sight he never forgot. Another miner, lazier than the first, merely squatted on the ground and scooped up a small pile of amethysts, which he used to hold up his tin pot of
feijoada
. He made the fire within this cradle of purple amethysts, as if in their abundance they had been no more than rocks.

It did something to Bert to see that. It was as if suddenly he had been shown a vision of
possibility
. Anything was possible in this land—wealth, success, valor, discovery. That was when he had begun to be drawn to the mines. The men began to know him. The owners liked him because he took a personal interest and was always available for consultation when they thought they had struck a new vein. Sometimes, so many times, you would find two different kinds of valuable gem stones in the same pit. The owners didn’t really need him, because they were usually trained minerologists themselves, but they liked to have him there because he was a specialist and so willing to go, and so
simpatico
, and eventually Bert became so
simpatico
that the owners began to think they actually did need him.
Call Bert Sinclair. What does Bert Sinclair think? Bert Sinclair, the American expert, agrees with me
. It was a good life.

A good life? It was more, much more. It was a special life. The pale, resigned faces of those men who did not like their work, who stepped toward it every morning like automatons, were something he wanted to put away from his memory forever, as if he had accidentally looked upon the faces of the dead. Someone had written once, “If you do not love your work you would do better to sit as a beggar at the gates and accept alms from those who do love their work.” It was a good thing not too many people took that advice seriously.

The plane dipped and climbed down to the tiny airfield in the Interior that was its first stop. Two men got off and another got on. The air that came through the opened door was hot and moist. Bert closed his eyes contentedly. If he could drop off to sleep, even for an hour, it would make his arrival seem sooner.

The plane put down at his stop at a little after two. A bare air-strip carved out of the jungle. A few wooden buildings, reassuring with red and white advertising signs extolling a pill for stomach acid. Bert took off his jacket, but by the time he had walked across the air strip his shirt was already sticking to his back as if he had gone swimming in it by mistake. His friend Hector Adolpho Moreiro Oliviera was at the edge of the field beside his jeep, and when he saw Bert he ran to meet him halfway.

They embraced each other. Hector Adolpho was the owner of the mine, a wiry man in his early forties, taller than most Brazilian men, very tanned from the sun. He was a trained minerologist and he spoke several languages. With Bert he spoke English.

“How was the trip?”

“Good.”

“Well go to the hotel. You can wash and we’ll have lunch. The Mayor and some other friends will join us there. Are you too tired to go to the pit?”

“No,” Bert said. “I want to.”

“We found a new vein last week. That mine gives on and on. But that’s not why I wanted you to come, of course. I wanted you to see the secret. If it is what I think it is—” Hector Adolpho’s face lighted up with the hope of it and he held up his crossed fingers. “I believe,” he said. “But I want you to see too.”

He started the jeep and they drove toward the town. Neither of them said the word
emeralds
. But each of them knew, hoped, thought it, and were aware of all it could mean. There were no emerald mines in Brazil. If it were true that a new vein had revealed the companion minerals of emerald, or if any bits of emerald itself had been found, it was not only a valuable secret but a dangerous one. The vein would have to be explored further-how abundant were the emeralds, how good was their quality? It could mean a fortune, millions—dollars, not cruzeiros. When they were sure of what they had, the mine would have to be temporarily closed, sealed off, with guards and machine guns posted on top of the wall, while Hector Adolpho negotiated to buy all the surrounding land, pretending he wanted it for farming. There were rich emerald mines in Columbia, but some experts thought they were becoming exhausted. If this were so, then the discovery of an emerald mine in Brazil would be much more valuable. This new mine would be the only source of emeralds in the hemisphere; the only other place was Africa. There were economic factors: price, demand, supply. There were human factors: publicity, skepticism, belief. A small bright green stone for some lady to wear at her throat, for a ring, a gift, an eventual heirloom, for vanity, for sentiment, for lust—fortunes could be made or lost on just this.

“What are you thinking?”

Bert patted his flight bag. “I brought some Scotch.”

“Good.”

“For right away. Before lunch.”

“Better.”

They drove into the town, a dusty cluster of white-painted buildings set around a dirt-paved square, with a fountain and statue in the center of it. The town’s only hotel was a four-story wooden building with ramps instead of staircases, surrounded on three sides by a rickety veranda. Bert’s room, one of the largest, finest ones, was clean but had neither screens nor windowpanes. Flies buzzed sleepily around the flowered chintz cover on the double bed. There was a bathroom with a shower down the hall, but since only one of the other rooms was occupied the bathroom was nearly private. Bert washed his face and put on the clothes he always wore at the mines—the faded tan shirt, the khaki trousers, the leather boots—and took the bottle of Scotch downstairs with him to the bar.

He and Hector Adolpho spoke Portuguese because the Mayor and his two friends did not speak English. A waiter brought soda and doubtful ice, and they drank the Scotch at a long table in the empty room. There was an electric fan in the corner, and the barroom opened to the veranda, so it was cool. One of the Mayor’s friends was the banker, the other owned the general store. Both the bank and the store had been closed for this occasion, their doors locked and windows shuttered, while Bert answered questions about America, about business, politics, Latin-American friendship, and Marilyn Monroe. They drank several times to friendship. When they finished the Scotch the waiter brought platters of meat cooked in sauce, rice,
feijoada
, broiled filet mignon, and a bowl of raw onions and tomatoes chopped up together to put on the beef. There were white rolls and half-rancid butter, and huge steins of frosty Brazilian beer.

They finished lunch at five o’clock in the afternoon. There was one movie theater in the town, showing an American film, and none of them had seen it. It was too late to go to the amethyst mine; it would soon be dark. As they all walked across the square to the movie house the proprietor of the rival general store saw them, waved, and said he would go too. He locked his doors and ran after them, putting the key into his pocket. Sunlight made the dusty street golden, and it was quiet. A dog slept underneath a dusty tree. The owner of the filling station stood outside his establishment, looking under the hood of a 1939 Ford. Some little boys stood outside the combination bar and candy store, watching them curiously.