Paulo traveled a great deal. His work as a revolutionary educator, a man who taught by learning, took him around the world. Down all the roads and throughout all the years of awards and adversity, that horse the color of light galloped tirelessly on in his memory and in his dreams.
Paulo searched everywhere for those movies from his childhood. “Tom who?” No one had a clue.
Then at last, at the age of seventy-four, he found them somewhere in New York. And he watched them once again. It was unbelievable: his faithful friend the shimmering horse was nothing at all like Tom Mix’s, not even close.
Faced with this painful revelation, Paulo murmured, “It doesn’t matter. . But it does.”
The Final Prank
The children of Brazil learned to be Brazilians and magicians from hearing or reading the stories of Monteiro Lobato. When he died, they all became orphans.
But the children of Brazil did not attend the funeral. Two adults offered eulogies, and each claimed Monteiro Lobato for his own political party: Rossini Camargo Guarnieri bid farewell to his Communist comrade, and Phebus Gicovate paid homage to his fellow Trotskyite.
As soon as the funeral speeches ended, the two squared off. They argued in the plural, as befits questions of world revolution: “Renegades!”
“Divisionists!”
“Bureaucrats!”
“Provocateurs!”
“Usurpers!”
“Traitors!”
“Murderers!”
Back and forth the charges flew, the heat of ideological debate rising until the men came to blows. Punching wildly, the two tumbled right into the open grave.
Dona Purezinha, the widow, threw up her arms and implored them to show some respect for the dead. She didn’t realize that Monteiro Lobato was dying all over again, this time from laughter. He was the one directing the brawl.
A Bottle Adrift
That morning, Jorge Perez lost his job. He was given no explanation, nothing to soften the blow. Without warning, after years at the oil refinery, he was simply given the boot.
He walked away, not knowing why or where to, obeying legs more alive than he was. At a time of day when nothing in the world casts a shadow, his legs carried him along the southern shore of Puerto Rosales.
At a bend in the river, he spied a bottle in among the bulrushes. Corked and sealed shut, it seemed a gift from God to take the edge off his gloom. But once he’d wiped off the mud, Jorge saw the bottle contained paper, not wine.
He let it drop and went on.
Then he retraced his steps.
He broke the neck of the bottle on a rock and pulled out several water-stained drawings. They were sketches of suns and seagulls, flying suns, glowing gulls. There was a letter too, come from afar on the sea, and it was addressed to The Finder of This Message:
Hi, I’m Martin.
I’m ate years old.
I like kookies, fride eggs and the color green.
I like to draw.
I want a friend on the waterway.
On the Waterfront
He seemed like a really nice kid. Though they’d only just met, the boy who sold crabs on the beach invited Caetano for a ride in his boat.
“I’d like to,” Caetano said, “but I can’t. I’ve got a lot to do. Errands…”
But they went. By boat they went to the market and the bank, the post office, and other places. All along the waterfront they entered the city from the shore, and to prolong the simple pleasure of looking at it, they took their time floating on the calm sea.
Thus was San Salvador de Bahia discovered anew. Suffering the relentless racket of the city by foot was one thing. The city by boat was truly something else. Caetano Veloso had never seen it like that, from the wet, from the quiet.
At the end of the afternoon the boat dropped Caetano off back at the beach where he’d embarked. He wanted to know the name of the boy who’d revealed this other city that the city was. Standing in his boat, his black body gleaming in the sun’s last rays, the boy said: “My name is Marco Polo. Marco Polo Mendes Pereira.”
Water
At the beginning of time, the ant’s waist was not narrow.
It’s all in Genesis, in the version that circulates by word of mouth on Colombia’s Pacific coast. The ant was round and filled with water.
But God had forgotten to water the world. Realizing his blunder, he asked for help. The ant refused.
Then God’s fingers pinched his belly.
Thus were born all the rivers and the seven seas.
Water Lords
There are companies just like the ant, only they’re much larger.
At the end of the twentieth century a water war broke out in the city of Cochabamba.
The U.S. company Bechtel took over the water system and tripled the rates overnight. Indigenous communities marched in from the valleys and blockaded the city, which also rebelled, raising barricades and burning water bills in a great bonfire in the Plaza de Armas.
The Bolivian government answered with bullets, as usual. There was a state of siege, people were killed and imprisoned, but the uprising continued day after day, night after night, for two months unstoppable, until with a final push the people of Cochabamba won back the liquid that nourishes their bodies and sustains their crops.
In the city of La Paz, however, protests failed to stop the French company Suez from taking over the water system. Rates skyrocketed, and practically no one could afford to turn on the tap. Why was consumption so low? European experts and government officials wondered. Cultural backwardness, obviously. Poor people, which means just about everybody in Bolivia, don’t know enough to bathe every day the way people have in Europe for maybe the last quarter of an hour, and they don’t realize they need to wash the cars they don’t have.
Brands
With a wave of the hand the customer declined the glass of tap water and summoned the sommelier, who read out a long list of bottled waters.
The table tried a few brands not well known in California, at about seven dollars a bottle.
While they ate, they went through several bottles. Amazonas from the Brazilian jungle was very good, and the Spanish water from the Pyrenees was excellent, but best of all was the French brand Eau de Robinet.
The robinet is where they all came from: the faucet. The bottles, with labels made up by a friendly printer, had been filled in the kitchen.
The meal was filmed by a hidden camera in a chic Los Angeles restaurant. And Penn and Teller showed it on TV.
The Fountain
In the twelfth century, when water was free like the air and unlabeled, the pope and a fly met up at a fountain.
Pope Adrian IV, the only English pontiff in the history of the Vatican, lived a hectic life due to incessant wars against William the Bad and Frederick Red Beard. Of the fly’s life, nothing is known worth mentioning.
By divine intervention or destiny’s design, their paths crossed at the fountain in the plaza of the town of Agnani, one summer noon in the year 1159.
The Holy Father, who was thirsty, opened his mouth to drink and the fly went down his throat. It was a mistake, for there was nothing of interest down there, but once inside neither the fly’s wings nor the pope’s fingers could get him out.