Feast Days. Ian Mackenzie

to be studying for the university entrance exams. He was enrolled in a preparatory class, the cursinho. The exams meant everything in Brazil among a certain caste; he had failed once already. I knew, from what Claudia told me during our lessons, that Luciano’s interests in life were inchoate. She spoke as a mother, concerned. Claudia said she did not know his friends, and only a couple of years ago he didn’t behave like this. Something had changed for him. He was seventeen. I asked what signs she was seeing, what troubled her. “The books he is reading are not the books he has to read for his exams,” Claudia said.

      The boy I found wasn’t reading books at all; he was watching videos of revolutions on the other side of the world. Luciano’s hair was long, falling in rich black curls, he had dark hands. “So this is what interests you,” I said. He didn’t respond. I left him with his videos, the multiple chat windows he had open; he typed without looking at his fingers. I wasn’t alarmed. I had the sense that he was a boy, doing boy things, poking around in weird holes. Claudia was a mother. Mothers worry. An interest in videos of the Arab Spring made sense to me—a seventeen-year-old wants to see evidence of people in the world whose actions have consequences beyond a score on an exam, a status update, whose lives are not bound by the same set of rules. The bedroom smelled humidly of boy, boyhood, a sweetish smell of skin on which sweat had formed and dried and formed again, as though he hadn’t gone out in days.

      Notwithstanding my new job as an English tutor, I continued my own study of Portuguese. During our lessons Fabiana would deplore the state of Brazilian politics. It was clear to me that her disdain for the ruling party was the result of love that had soured. She was a passionate woman. She had fierce attachments to individual politicians. She wanted to love them, and when love failed, she had nowhere to turn but hate. Politics mixed with the finer points of language. She could veer from the Workers’ Party to the problem of false cognates in a single sentence. “Fui decepcionada,” she would say, meaning not that she had been deceived, but that she had been disappointed, as only a lover can be. She was fond of the language teacher’s old warning about “false friends,” an injunction I remembered from as far back as sixth-grade French. I faithfully corrected my own clients when they said they were pretending to buy birthday gifts for their wives.

      “Anyway.”

      “Anyway, what I’m hearing—you wouldn’t believe it. The money. Where it comes from, where it’s going. And everyone knows. It’s a way of life here. After a while you assume the worst.”

      “Your bank is part of this?”

      “No, I’m talking about the internal practices of other companies, their relationships with government. Governments, plural. What we do is watch what happens. Understand the lay of the land. It’s routine surveillance.”

      “So you aren’t personally implicated.”

      “Don’t talk about this when Marcos is around, by the way,” he said.

      “Not that any of this would be news to him.”

      Iara arrived at the restaurant with tears in her eyes. I thought perhaps she had been arguing with Marcos and was trying to wipe away the evidence. But this wasn’t the case; Marcos had water in his eyes as well. They said there was a protest. They said the police had used tear gas while they were trying to cross the avenue where the protestors were marching. They said they saw a police officer swing at a young man with his truncheon. The restaurant served Lebanese food. The air was warm, an aroma of coriander and mint. The table linens were paisley. They went to the bathroom to wash the gas out of their eyes.

      “What were they protesting?”

      “An increase in the bus fare.”

      “Was it a large increase?”

      “Twenty centavos.”

      “They were protesting twenty centavos?”

      The avenue where the protestors were marching was named in memory of a revolt in São Paulo in 1932, against President Getúlio Vargas, who ruled without a constitution. The revolt came after popular demonstrations across the state and the killing of four student protestors; there was another avenue named in memory of the four students. A couple of decades later, Vargas, then serving a different term of office and facing a different political crisis, committed suicide in the palace bedroom in Rio de Janeiro, in his pajamas, on the day of Saint Bartholomew’s feast.

      I felt pain. I tried to ignore it for a day, and then another, without admitting to myself that I knew what it was. Then it became too much, and I took a taxi to the hospital.

      I had never been inside a hospital that didn’t feel like a precinct of illness, that made you forget what it was there for, but this one almost succeeded. It had many floors and many wings, like an ocean liner. It offered valet parking. At last I found the elevators—eight elevators arranged in a ring, like men standing in judgment. I was bewildered to discover they had no call buttons. A docent, seeing my confusion, ushered me to a central console, where after some discussion he entered the number of the floor I wanted; the console’s screen then told us which of the elevators would take me there; and then the button-pushing was over, as I needed only to stand in the elevator while it went automatically to my floor. It was a specific kind of inconvenient convenience: a system that seemed futuristic because, in addition to requiring a more complex internal computer, it redistributed the normal labor of elevator use—pushing buttons, choosing floors—in a novel way without eliminating any of it. The docent who loitered near the elevators was necessary to translate all that modern efficiency to the laity. It was as if the advancing edge of technology had returned us to a time when a little man sat in the elevator box and worked the controls for you. For some reason the hospital was named after Albert Einstein.