The Fugitivities, стр. 48

had worn one around campus, as he recalled, a sign of alternativeness balanced out by pastel monochromes from American Apparel. Her place in Rio was really a studio, which meant the guests would sleep in a corner that Barthes had padded with some blankets and sleeping bags. Octavio noted that her minimal adornments to her pad reminded him of the tribal-patterned accent pillows and throws she had used to disguise the institutional prefab of her dorm room. Barthes said something sharp in Portuguese that Jonah didn’t understand. Somewhere along the line, she had acquired a confidence that Octavio hadn’t counted on, one that could not be reconciled with the geeky moniker he had pinned on her.

—

Back home, she was Maggie Reynolds from Newton, Massachusetts. But in Rio de Janeiro, she went by her middle name, Grace, converted locally to Gracia. She seemed not entirely displeased to have Octavio and Jonah visit. Aside from the ex-boyfriend situation. The history with Octavio—or what remained of that history—was likely to prove “complicated.” Already, they were reprising a familiar game with each other, their banter sandpapery, with quips and ripostes over small talk that were clearly arbitrating much else besides.

The studio room only had one window and it faced the favela of Chapéu Mangueira. During the day, music and the sound of construction work on a little botequim, a bodega that sold dry goods and fresh tropical fruit, came up from the bottom of the hill. The first time Jonah heard gunfire he almost convinced himself it was a firecracker. But the report was too acute, and it happened too regularly, rhythmically even, so that eventually you could even decode warning shots: a sharp pop with a loud echo shattering the night, then one shot in reply, then silence.

Barthes was always up at dawn and heading out to far-flung corners of the city for her work. Octavio and Jonah would wake closer to noon, and usually began the day by roaming in search of a place to eat. At first it was difficult to get around, on account of the complexity of the bus system and the perilous street traffic. But once they learned how to give and receive the thumbs-up, a gesture of subtle significance and usage, everything else about the city became strangely logical. In Laranjeiras they spent an afternoon going down the menu of one of the thousands of juice bars, many of which offered fruits they had never heard of before.

Barthes only worked three days a week, so on her days off she showed the boys around the city. Octavio refused categorically to be taken anywhere “touristic,” nixing the Sugarloaf, the Christ Redeemer, and the grand beach at Copacabana. This was agreeable to Barthes, and she walked them instead through random commercial shopping centers, and through the dense streets and public squares behind the old theater in the city center. They were a trio now—a bande à part, Jonah thought—living beyond the reach of family, of internships and institutions, beyond responsibility. That was how he wanted to see it.

One day they took a commuter bus out across a long causeway to Niterói, a neighborhood on the eastern shore of Guanabara Bay. Octavio and Barthes sat next to each other, arguing; really Octavio was arguing while Barthes looked away furtively in despair. Jonah sat behind them gazing out over the traffic and the fast-food chains and the ocean. He was keenly aware that things were not as simple as Octavio had claimed they would be. Like all ex-lovers, these two were united in an unhappy need to pluck at the strings of the other’s desire. Octavio was constantly teasing, but Barthes parried handily. It looked like no matter which way things went, Jonah was going to be left holding the candlestick, as the French liked to say, a result he had dimly predicted without ever resolving what to do when it came up.

The beach at Niterói faced back toward the city, so you could make out all the different neighborhoods with their cream-colored high-rises tucked between the green mountains, and the reddish bric-a-brac of the favelas atop the green. Octavio spread himself facedown in the sand while Barthes installed herself on a beach towel and opened a tome on microcredit financing in the developing world. Jonah had with him a pocket-size volume of poems in Portuguese by João Cabral de Melo Neto that he had picked up in a bookstore in Centro.

He was fairly sure that the poem that had caught his eye when he was browsing, and that he now turned to again, was about the world coming to an end. Melo Neto said the world would end in a melancholy of indifferent men reading newspapers. One line was clear to him: “the final poem nobody would write.” But what was the final poem? Was it the melancholy world itself? Was it the words in the newspapers read by indifferent men? Was it some other poem entirely, one written for whatever people were left, who didn’t read newspapers but still wanted to get the news from poetry? Perhaps the world ended within the poem and the reader was one of the melancholy men waiting for something that has already happened?

When his eyes tired of the page he watched the ocean. A Petrobras supertanker showed its stenciled letters against a block of orange rust. Octavio ran down to the water and dove in, his body splitting the blue like a porpoise. Barthes applied sunscreen. After a moment, she looked over and pointed the bottle in Jonah’s direction.

“No thanks, I’m good for now.”

“No, dummy, on me. Get my back.”

She presented herself to his touch and pulled down her straps. As he was finishing, a group of European-looking young women set up their towels and beach chairs nearby. Reclining on his side, ostensibly keeping his eyes on the book lying on the towel, Jonah tried to identify what language they were speaking, but their voices were carried downwind and he couldn’t make