The best were our night exchanges with Ulrich at the bar, where a local thumper extracted from a keyboard, with feeling, "La Comparsita" and "El Choclo" (the real name of which is known in Russia as "The Argentine Tango"), but failed miserably with "Colonel Bogey." The reason—his southern, different, sentimental (though not devoid of brutality) temperament: no knack for cold negation. During one of our conversations—about the devil knows what—Karl Krauss, I think—my Nordic charge—well, let's call her Stella Polaris—joined us, and ten minutes later, not getting the drift and raving mad because of that, started gushing something for which I nearly punched her in the nose. It's illuminating to watch a little beast wake up in a person, a beast dormant under normal circumstances. With Stella, it was evidently a skunk, and it was extremely absorbing to watch the little weasel rouse itself inside a creature who, just one hour before, had been rustling thoroughly documented papers and uttering Latinate sentences into a mike, urbi et orbi. I recall a charming straw-colored dress with a dark blue pattern on it, and a bright red gown in the morning—and the rabid hatred of an animal that begins to realize that it is an animal at 2 a.m. Well, it wouldn't be evolution if it didn't swing back and forth. The tango's twangs, a few couples whispering in the dark, sweet schnapps, and a puzzled look on Ulrich's face. The rascal was no doubt pondering where it would be better to land now—in his salvaged marriage, or with Samantha, who had a natural crush on the educated European.
At the conclusion of the big event, the city fathers threw a reception with liquor and petits fours at the Cultural Center, which, for all its avant-garde architecture, was light- years away from Rio. On the way there, and even more so in the chartered bus on the way back, the polygon slowly began changing its contours, thanks to M.S., who proved to be a true ethnographer, laying siege to one of the local interpreter girls. Then delegates started leaving. The Nordic Star betook herself to the Land of Silver, and I arrived in the lobby too late to say goodbye to her. The triangle (Ulrich, his spouse, and S.) were heading for Bahia, and then up the Amazon River, and from there—to Cuzco. The intoxicated Germans went homeward, and I, without a buck, clutching at my chest, with a broken pulse, to my own place of residence. The night before, the Portuguese guy (who had dragged us to some local ritual that he tried to sell as voodoo but that in efl'ect was a regular pagan version of mass purification in a working-class—and nightmarish at that—neigh- borhood: clotted vegetation, monotonous wailing from a catatonic choir, and all this in a school auditorium, with holy lithographs, warm Coca-Cola, horrible sore-barnacled dogs, and no cab in sight for return), with his skinny, tall, and jealous wife, went to some peninsula known to him only, since he spoke the local tongue, where healers do miracles restoring potency. Though every country is nothing but a continuation of space, there is in these Third World places a certain specific despair, their own particular hopelessness; the mass debilitation carried out in other parts by state security is ensured here by poverty.
What it boils down to is that I didn't see the place. I wonder whether I even saw what I remember myself looking at. Cardiac cases perhaps shouldn't be allowed to travel by air precisely for this reason: their perceptive ability is clouded as it is by their internal state. To say the least, their focus is elsewhere. But who can resist a round-trip offer, especially if the destination is exotic. On the other hand, a round trip is an awful psychological trap: the return portion robs you of any chance of psychological investment in the place. The best outcome of such travel is a snapshot of your sweet self against some corny backdrop, and indeed Stella Polaris and I took several pictures of each other in the Botanical Garden. Still, the camera was hers. \Vhich spares me at least one more, albeit small, indignity, removing thus one more, perhaps the last, proof of my ever having been to Brazil.
Have I? \Vas I really there? In the end, I think I should say yes—if only because it makes no difference whatsoever whether I was there or not, and it's always better to admit your own insignificance than to deny it. There are no objective criteria to judge the value of one's life, to begin with; but nothing diminishes it more than its exposure to extraordinary vistas and big crowds. In short, to space. In the end, perhaps that's why one travels, why one rubs one's pupils, shoulders, and navels against strangers. Perhaps the name of the whole game is humility, and fatigue setting into the bone is that virtue's true voice. At any rate, this is the voice
78 I J 0 s E p H B R 0 D s K Y
that tells me that I've been to Brazil. There is no other trace. Even those four hundred bucks are by now all spent by the thief; even the Annamite writers in Australia have gotten used to the legitimacy of their gatherings and have by now, I imagine, the appropriate stationery. It's strange to partake in something that results in the uncertainty of recollection, but to ask for more would be pure hubris.
Likewise, nothing of value escaped from under my pen: no immortal lyric. One wishes one could produce something on the spot, like a journalist or a painter, but one is seldom that lucky, and I wasn't. Behind nulla deis sine linea looms the realization that one has gobbled up at lunch more than one earns in a week. The solution lies in inventing an idiom that would allow production on a daily basis (like Berryman's Dream Songs or Lowell's History), though there is the threat of becoming a chatterbox. Well, guilt is a better vehicle in this business of scribbling than confidence. And, I guess, a better tenor, too. In any case, among the notes that survived the trip there are several stanzas of a Rio Samba: doggerel, really, but some rhymes aren't so bad:
Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.
Grow a mustache and change your bio.
Here the rich get richer, the poor get poorer,
here each old man is a Stunnbahnfuhrer.
Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.
There is no other city with such brio.
There are phones by Siemens, and even Jews
drive around like crazy in VWs.
Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.
Here Urania rules and no trace of Clio.
Buildings ape Corbusier's beehive-cum-waffle, though this time you can't blame this on the Luftwaffe.
Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.
Here every bird sings "O sole mio."
So do fish when caught, so do proud snow geese
in midwinter here, in Portuguese.
Come to Rio, oh come to Rio.
It's the Third World all right, so they still read Leo
Trotsky, Guevara, and other sirens;
still, the backwardness spares them the missile silos.
Come to Rio, oh come to Rio. If you come in duo, you may leave in trio. If you come alone, you'll leave with a zero in your thoughts as valuable as one cruzeiro.