Feast Days. Ian Mackenzie

herself had good, sturdy English, dry and smooth, with an accent almost like a Frenchwoman’s; it was the kind of accent that was paid for. Even her errors were perfect. Is it redundant to say that I saw price tags everywhere? I couldn’t remember if this had started because of my husband, or earlier.

      “I work in finance,” my husband would say whenever someone asked about his job. He never said, “I’m an investment banker,” let alone gave the name of his bank. He was like a doctor who says, “I work in medicine.” Like a lifeguard who says, “I work in beaches.” I came to believe he used this formulation because he liked the mystery of it; he capitalized on enigma. You either knew what he meant or you didn’t. Secrets are important to men. Every man tells himself he could have been a spy in another life.

      I was a part of this world by virtue of being my husband’s wife. It shouldn’t have been so; I never had the disposition to make money. I didn’t study the right things, I didn’t earn it—although you weren’t really supposed to ask who earned what, who deserved. Now I was used to it, more or less, but at first the transition into my husband’s world seemed sudden. It was as if I had been sucked up a column of light into the belly of the mothership, abducted into wealth. I acquired new habits, expectations of the world. We took taxis at two a.m. instead of waiting in putrid, silent tunnels for the train. We ordered wine by the bottle instead of the glass. I stopped adding up the price of a meal as I ate and instead simply enjoyed it. That’s the thing about having money: there isn’t necessarily more happiness, but there’s so much more enjoyment. I honestly hadn’t known that.

      My husband often worked late. It was both in his nature and in the nature of his work. I had never watched so much television in my life. Against my will, I learned the rules of soccer.

      The tracking software was still able to locate my husband’s phone. This was four days after the robbery. The dot hadn’t moved an inch. It was in Zona Norte, a place I wouldn’t normally visit; a place others would discourage me from visiting. I looked up the street view of the address. It appeared to be a little bar, a boteco. I imagined a fat man running a side business out of the back, phones and watches that boys stole from people like me and my husband and then brought to him. I knew it was only a matter of time before the dot vanished.

      The taxi driver was skeptical when I gave him the address but agreed to take me. Because of the distance from where I lived, he would earn a large fare.

      Avenida 23 de Maio. High concrete walls sprayed with graffiti and coated in shadow; boys on motorcycles pulsing through veins of space between cars in otherwise congealed traffic. I saw a woman on the back of a moto, one arm around the driver’s stomach, purse clutched to her side. She was dressed for work.

      I saw none of the condominiums I was used to, the towers. Instead there were little houses, aluminum fences, all of it cheaply and quickly made and now carelessly painted by sunlight.

      The boteco was on a block with a few other shops, all of them closed, almost no signs of life. “Espera,” I told the driver. He nodded; waiting meant driving me home as well, doubling the fare. It was the early afternoon, and some men sat out front, drinking beer. They sensed my strangeness at once. It was my sex, my class, my foreignness. Everything was visible on the surface. I didn’t look at the men drinking but went to the counter, a man in a white apron.

      My husband lost his phone, I said in halting Portuguese. And I believe the phone is here.

      The man stared at me without answering. I am looking for the phone of my husband, I said.

      There was a rack behind the counter where I could see cigarettes and packs of gum. He poked around, and came back with a new SIM card. He was offering to sell it to me; he thought this was what I wanted. No, I said. The phone of my husband. Do you have some phones? The phones of other people?

      I knew the men outside, the men drinking, had stopped talking in order to watch what was happening, wondering what this strange foreign woman was looking for in a place like this.

      Maybe you have the phone there, I said, pointing toward a door at the back. The man turned and looked at the door, and then he turned back to me and shook his head. I glanced outside. The taxi driver was smoking a cigarette and chatting with the men. He looked perfectly at ease with them. I knew they were asking about me, what on earth was I doing.

      I was becoming increasingly distressed. One of the men outside came in; he wanted to check on me. Senhora, can I help? What do you need?

      “Tudo bom?” the taxi driver said when I finally went back outside. “Voltar?” He was asking if I wanted to go home. I looked around at the men, the beers in their hands, all of them silent now, watching me with the stupid, unconcealed stare people use for celebrities. “Sim,” I said. I realized I was on the verge of tears.

      Later, I thought of telling my husband what I had done, but, imagining what he would say, I decided against it.

      I thought about the boys who robbed us. I had an idea of their lives. A culture of violence, alien and extreme; a world of dark streets, arbitrary punishment and deprivation, gangs, armed children, a kind of steady viscerality. No one offered them help. If they were killed, the police wouldn’t bother to find the killers. Everything around them advertised the low price of their lives. They were ragged, malnourished, they were not physically imposing young men. Even the weapon they used to rob us was cheap and makeshift—there was tape on the handle of the knife. Society didn’t protect them, and so they had no incentive to obey the boundaries society created to protect others. For them, abandonment and freedom were inseparable; by freedom, I mean the freedom they felt to violate the rules others followed. The consequences of being caught robbing us were not significantly worse than the consequences of not robbing us. If they had begged peacefully, if they had asked for charity, we wouldn’t have given them anything.

      Unemployment, if nothing else, gives you time to think.

      For instance, it is insane to walk down a city street in America and expect the homeless men there not to attack you and rob you.

      I wondered if that boy had ever used his knife on a woman whose purse he wanted. It was an enormous blade, more enormous now in memory. The fact that he had taped up the handle only made the threat seem more authentic. I felt a horizon of rage expand within me, long and bright, something like what I imagined my husband was feeling when he spoke of killing the boy who had the knife. The rage was simple, satisfying, and I savored the sensation as it melted out of me like ice.

      I couldn’t think of the boys as thieves. Jean Genet was a thief.

      Thief —from Old Saxon and Middle Dutch, and a whole gene pool of other dead tongues. I find it difficult to come across a word and not think about its origins. This ends up being debilitating, as you might imagine.