Memoir From Antproof Case (30 page)

Marlise's Teuton bear sells jars of sea-green stuff that I believe is called
Zipfinster Mitgaloist Herbeschungen,
and is supposed to make you look ten years younger no matter what your age. I asked Marlise what would happen if an eight-year-old got at it, but she's not willing to consider cosmic questions. It looks exactly like the substance janitors use to keep down the dust when they sweep immense public floors. Perhaps it is. She mixes it with papaya juice, and when she drinks it Funio and I hold our breath.

Funio I love above all else. It doesn't matter that he's not biologically my son. He is my son. Though he understands the sense of everything, he cannot at his tender age understand the import. And if somehow I were able to convey to him the import of what I feel, I would be robbing him of his childhood. Above all, I want this time in his life to be unburdened, for I have never seen such a beautiful thing as childhood, and perhaps if he is not stripped of it early on, as I was, he will have the strength to live his life untormented.

So, I cannot talk to Funio, I cannot talk sanely to Marlise, and I cannot talk to anyone else. I sit in a place that has no seasons. I think about the cold air and the snow. For hours I am drawn back into a world that has vanished, that has the qualities and tenor of a dream, a world that I left behind. I watch the sun rise, I wonder when I will die, and I worry more now about things that are over than about what is yet to come.

 

A long time ago, in 1961 or 1962—before all that "Girl from Ipanema" crap—Marlise and I went on an excursion on the Rio Veloso. It's a very nice song, "The Girl from Ipanema," but I have heard it far too many times, and it's insufficient as an anthem, even for Brazil. I haven't been out of Brazil since the day I arrived like one of the rebellious angels in
Paradise Lost,
but sometimes I imagine that I can go home, and I see myself at a cocktail party in Southampton or on Beekman Place, facing an overweight woman with too much makeup, artificial birthmarks, and the idea that, even though she has not spoken one word to me, we are going to have an affair.

"Where are you from?" she asks.

"Brazil," I reply.

"Oh, 'The Girl from Ipanema!' " she exclaims.

"Only after years of surgery," I reply.

"I beg your pardon?"

"What did you do to your husband, madam? Boil him?"

"I beg your pardon?" she says for a second time.

"Aren't you a little old for infatuations, for all this boyfriend-girlfriend stuff? What I mean is, you presume quite a lot after having peeled the wrappers off ten thousand chocolate cakes, and I'll bet you drink coffee, too."

"Excuse me?" she says, and begins to sidle away, but she nakes an insulting gesture by looking heavenward with her vacant black eyes, and I pursue her through the astonished guests, denouncing her for her ignorance, her sloth, and her addiction to coffee.

What do you know, her husband, who is still alive, gallantly places himself between me and that adulterous bitch, and I'm trapped. I have no option but to overturn the bar as I lunge for a garbage can lid to use as a shield. With this defense in place, I commence my offensive. Commandeering a cane from an old man who looks remarkably like me, I push them all back, and am left alone in an apartment that doesn't belong to me.

The Rio Veloso is very beautiful, but I hate pleasure excursions. I hate pleasure. I tried to enjoy the Rio Veloso as best I could, but at that time I was fighting interior battles at increasing velocity, and the river did not engage my heart. Nor did the sun-dappled green canopy, the ecstatic birds, or the twisted coils of white smoke from the steamer that had done nothing for half a century but cut through the sweet air of the jungle, swaying the orchid-laden vines.

The engine that powered the launch reminded me of an expresso machine. With each hiss and aspiration I saw in my mind's eye little cups of coffee descending in a heavenly arc into the waiting hands of coffee's self-condemned acolytes. I went to the foredeck, trying to drown the sound of the steam with the roll of black water from the bow. The river is warm, and the water is black. Despite its weakness and lack of clarity, in the tropics the breeze is something that can almost be embraced.

Then the animal—whatever it was—reared up in the middle of the river, angry because the boat had bumped one of its calves. It raged eight feet above the water, like a broken xylophone or a poor aquatic relative of the Liberty Bell, showing its horrendous dental work and shaking its fat like a crazed Philadelphia housewife.

Rather than bite the boat in half, it retreated to the bank and had a tantrum; screaming, weeping, its head resting sideways on a downed coconut log. I had never seen anything like it. Brazil is not supposed to have hippos, but sometimes animals escape from zoos, or children bring them home as pets and dump them in the sewers, where they grow to enormous size.

Marlise didn't see it. She was in the bathroom having a cup of coffee (she travels with powerful mints, and often disappears for five or ten minutes at a time). When I questioned the other passengers, hoping to share my astonishment, I discovered that very few were aware of it at all. It appears, in fact, that I may have been the only one who actually saw it.

At the navigable head of the Rio Veloso, within striking distance of the immense falls, is a little colonial town without a single slab of precast concrete, a single automobile, or one neon sign. On the night of our arrival we stayed in a small pension overlooking the river, exercising the springs on the bed until they turned red. Someone in the room below came up and banged on our door. "Turn off that goddamned machine!" he screamed. "I haven't been able to sleep for four hours! What do you have there, an air conditioner run by kangaroos on a treadmill?"

"It's a cement mixer."

"In a hotel room?"

"We're building an addition."

"At night?"

"'Round the clock."

"Are you the foreman?"

"Yes."

"Open the door, I want to speak with you. Where are you from, anyway?" (He heard my accent.)

"I'm an Eskimo, and I can't open the door."

"Why not?"

"My wife is not dressed."

"Your wife? What's your wife doing there?"

"She's helping me."

"Without clothes?"

"It's for a nudist colony."

It went on like this for some time. He asked excited questions, and I supplied calm answers.

The next day, we made the hike up to the falls, arriving exhausted and dripping wet. From a platform just beyond the arc of the mist we looked over the pool where the water hesitated, came to a boil, settled down, and then began to flow downriver once again. The air was cool and fresh. If you bent your head you could see the river far above, hurtling into space in complete surprise, falling through the air in twisting sheets, unfurling like a stricken acrobat at his last, leaving a train of weightless drops, spreading a frigid white curtain in the air, and then crashing into the pool, where it died and was instantly reborn as aerated black water flowing to the sea.

I tried to explain to Marlise what it was like to fall, and she said, "How you know?" I told her about suspension at the top of a great arc, how the quick light of an explosion fills your eyes before the sound or shock, and how, in the interval, in an instant, you are paralyzed with love that seems like the opening of eternity.

She's a very practical person, one of those people for whom death means nothing except paperwork.

"How you know? You died once?"

"I was
killed,
" I said.

"And you come back?"

"Yes. I came back, and I have been alive two hundred times ever since."

She thought I was crazy, but so do many people. They simply do not know what it is like to touch heaven and then to be thrown back. The world looks very different after such an encounter, and, to be frank, I know that many of the people who think I am crazy are, in fact, crazy themselves, and that I am not the least bit crazy.

I bent back and stared at the river standing in the air like the light-filled plume of a rocket. The sun filtered through the mist and touched our faces, rainbows crossed above us like vines, and the ground thundered under the onslaught of the water as it had for a million years.

 

That night, with the pleasurable exhaustion that follows physical exertion, Marlise and I wandered the few streets. In the plaza, she made me sit for a portrait. I was young enough then neither to have whitened nor to have compacted upon myself, and my eyes were not hollow.

I don't like sitting for portraits, and never did. Constance once commissioned a life-sized, dark, heroic, Sargentesque portrait by Buckman Wilgis, for which I dressed in a black suit and yellow tie. Even though she paid him half a million dollars, at the beginning of her coffee drinking she stuck pins into it.

The sketch done on the trip to the Rio Veloso is in charcoal, a singularly inappropriate medium for the Brazilian universe of pastel, but the artist rightly took me for an American and wanted to catch my sinew and my anger, which she did, although she did not understand for even the smallest part of a second even the smallest part of my joy.

Perhaps because of the Berlin Crisis, or the beginning of the buildup in Vietnam, she inquired of my military history. "Yes, I've been in the army," I told her.

"Oh," she said, as if I were a São Paulo Nazi.

"I fought the Germans," I said, with indignant pride, "for four very difficult years, in places that were sometimes colder and wetter than a Brazilian imagination can conjure."

"Oh," she said again.

"It was forty degrees below zero," I added, "a world of ice and light where you have never been and will never go." Marlise gave me a little kick, which only spurred me on. "While your father was fucking and dancing and eating fried shrimp and turning into such a soft bag of undifferentiated crap that his ethical sense became nothing more than crushed squash and coffee grounds."

Marlise tugged at my sleeve, and the artist, who by then had caught some of the flash in my eye—you Can still see it, even in charcoal—was not, like her putative father's moral sense, crushed. I learned long ago never to underestimate the strength of the native vegetation. It springs to life, swaying in the breeze, even after the hand of man has struck it down. The jewel of Rio is not the turquoise sea, but the green fuse of life. She said, "When you were in the army..."

"The Army Air Force," I interrupted.

"Yes. Did you kill anyone?"

Suddenly, I was full of love for her. I wanted to embrace her, but, as is often the case, I was forced to continue the argument.

"Yes," I answered, furthering the distance between us. "At great remove, and they were always seeds in the heart of machines of aluminum and steel, tied to their killing engines as I was tied to mine. Everything that happened, happened on a scale that I have not known since, in miles risen in minutes and fallen in seconds, in thin air and brittle temperature, at speeds that threatened to tear apart victor and vanquished alike. And those on the ground that I killed were unseen, at the base of guns spitting fire as I dived at them as if seeking my death. We all were dressed like cockroaches—in goggles, armor, and pressure suits with bladders, masks, tubes, and laces up the sides."

She seemed relieved. "You didn't ever kill a man at close range, with your hands, did you?" she asked.

I didn't answer.

 

Everything starts so far back that to explain it you must begin with the beginning of the world, but the story of how I killed the second man I killed commences for all practical purposes with Eugene B. Edgar, the most senior of the senior partners of Stillman and Chase.

In 1934 he was already older than I am now. To him, everyone was always a kid. He had lived through everything, done everything, and seen everything, but none of that mattered. What mattered was that he owned everything. He had been born just in time to lie about his age and enlist in a New York volunteer regiment during the Civil War. He exited, at age eighteen, a captain in the cavalry, having fought as a mortality-blind adolescent in half the important engagements of the war. He then lived through the gilded age with the luck of the gods and the judgment to have backed Edison, Henry Ford, and half a dozen lesser but like individuals. By the depression of the Nineties he had turned Stillman and Chase into one of the major financial houses of the world.

Then he struck. He bought everything from everyone, putting the organization at such great risk that its stock plummeted, and he bought that, too. Another few months and he would have gone under, but he had timed it just right, and when the
economic gloom lifted, Eugene B. Edgar was left in absolute control of Stillman and Chase, and Stillman and Chase was left in pivotal control of nearly everything else.

All his life he kept an eye out for the grand cycles to which most people are blind from lack not of wisdom but of courage, and in 1928 he sold out. Stillman and Chase had a rough year and a half until the stock market crashed, and there we were, sitting on a stupendous mountain of cash.

Perception swings as if in a breeze, and everyone came to value cash over equity, just as months before they had valued equity over cash. We waited, and waited, until, in 1934, Eugene B. Edgar started buying up the United States of America.

Slowly, he said. Carefully. By the time our liquidity had solidified into ownership of banks, corporations, works of art, energy rights, intellectual property, and real estate, and it appeared as if we had squandered our wealth, the wheel would turn. We would be in a position second to none.

When I pointed out to him that we had long been in a position second to none, he raised his old leathery turtle head from a starched white collar, rotated it a quarter turn both left and right, lowered it, and said, "Just multiply that by eight."

I was not a senior partner then, in fact not even a partner. I was peripheral to a cabal of sycophants that had won Eugene B. Edgar's favor and needed a person much lower than themselves to be kicked. When mules are slapped on the nose, they kick, and my job was to stand in back of them.