The Fugitivities, стр. 57

I didn’t want it to happen, I mean the confusion and neediness of it. But I’m feeling more and more that it would be better than the confusion that I feel without it. What I’m afraid of is letting myself make it that serious, of taking it there with Mariam, especially if she won’t feel the same way. I worry she won’t. I worry that she sees me as a fun thing, not a life partner. But how can anyone know? I’m ready for a change, I just don’t want to ruin what’s good about my life already. What do you think I should do? If you were here, I know we would walk through the city and talk it out. I would show you the trams rolling past Zionskirchplatz, and the little bridge in Neukölln where the swans come to sleep at night. The green water in the canals. They remind me of my Indre. If I could, I would bring you there one day and show you the bridge outside the town that my grandfather lined with dynamite in the summer of ’44. My Indre, moving so slow you can follow a leaf on foot. As I send you this letter, I think of its waters as a poem, a hymn to the globe between us. My sweet Jonah, you are always so far away. I imagine you bounding across the great southern night like Saint-Ex in his aeroplane. But I can always recognize the lonely boy that I know, the little prince who is still probably madly in love with me despite everything. Look at the two of us, in love with our idle, fickle wanderings. Sometimes I wish I could do or be one thing sincerely. Have my motion fixed in space. Like the Indre, which goes only in one direction and takes its time and knows its place and is loved for some reasons that we can say, and some that we can’t.

—A

Thick rolling forests of palms, large patches of them charred and covered in chalky stumps of ash, yielded to flatland, then badland, horizon-spanning swatches of rust-red earth stretching out to mountains that must have formed when the ocean shoved the continents apart and the land bid farewell to Angola, home of the human cargo who would journey back across the waters in chains. The wheezing bus advanced, road conditions worsening as it plunged farther south, the monotony of travel hours bleeding out.

When Jonah woke it was raining. Curtains of water swept across the windows of the bus as it sloshed through murky streets. They had arrived overnight in another distant city. He clenched his teeth and stared out the dark window. Beside him, still curdled with Barthes’s contempt, was Octavio, his body wracked by spasms of inconclusive origin.

They were in Porto Alegre, the capital of a federal state called Rio Grande do Sul. The Great Southern River. They had traveled to a city they did not know, with no plan for where to go, without a friend to call, or a reason to stay. In the fetid air of the crowded bus station they studied a cheap and poorly printed tourist map they’d bought from a black boy in a Yankees baseball cap. Octavio decided they should aim for the Albergue Rialto, located close enough to what appeared to be the city center.

At the Rialto the rates were cheap, made even more so by the favorable exchange rate, and they took a room with two cots, a sink with a mirror, and a small table desk. Most important and improbable of all, there was a “business center” in the hallway with an old desktop that provided internet for guests. The room had a window that opened onto a courtyard with some trash cans, an old wall covered in growing vines, and the hanging laundries of an adjacent apartment block.

Octavio was feverish, and for the first time during their trip Jonah began to worry about him. Even though the weather was temperate, the man was pale and sweating and refused to eat. Jonah went in search of soup and juices and when he returned some hours later, he found that Octavio had gone down the street and procured his own medicine of choice: yerba maté, or chimarrão, as they called it locally. He had bought the necessary gourd and was imbibing the stuff like a hydrating sports beverage. Having commandeered the desk, he spent hours hunched over it like a scrivener, muttering phrases that sounded like incantations in Spanish, Portuguese, and French, followed by a nasty suction upon the gourd’s metallic straw as his sallow cheeks puckered, the bitter green flowed, and his addiction grew. Octavio’s physical state, to say nothing of his mental condition, made further planning impossible, and they agreed to stay put at least until the end of the week to see if his condition improved. Jonah was concerned for him, but no matter how much he wanted to help, Octavio was verging on unbearable. He moaned and talked to himself in different languages through the night; worse still, he was constantly rising with sharp cries of pain and stumbling in the dark to urinate with loud splashy relief.

Between the two of them they had already amassed a small library of Brazilian poetry, though most of it remained unread. Jonah had hoped to practice occasional translation to acquaint himself with the words, but Octavio was becoming obsessive in his feverish way. He would lie in bed all through the morning reading slim, often incredibly rare volumes that Lazaro had recommended to him. Lazaro knew book dealers and handlers who operated from their homes, and against Jonah’s advice to remain in bed and rest, Octavio insisted on going out into the city alone to make specific purchases, as though dealing in highly sensitive contraband. He seemed to have gotten it into his head that he should have an edge on Jonah, and he made cryptic maté-fueled