The Fugitivities, стр. 65
After dinner Euclides produced a bottle of clear cachaça and held forth on his two favorite subjects, politics and the past. He described his efforts to promote land reform laws that would eventually allow Orígenes to own a portion of the land that he had worked his whole life. But he explained that there were complications in the contracts of land ownership and inheritance that he had so far not been able to overcome. A second story was about his father, whom he referred to as Francesca’s grandfather. The old man had been an important figure in the movement, and fairly radical. The military chief in charge of her grandfather’s region had leftist sympathies. He arranged for sentences to be lightened or commuted. He wanted order, but he wanted his orders executed cleanly, without blood. So, at first, her grandfather was placed under house arrest.
“I could tell you a thousand stories about that time,” Euclides said proudly. “The greatest stories are all from those days. How he fooled the guards to attend secret meetings using coded language on the telephone, signals and messages passed in toothpaste…It became almost like a game. But eventually the leadership changed and sometime around ’78 they decided a heavier hand was necessary. A new station chief was brought in from Brasília. They started to torture people. He would never talk about it, but I know from people who went in with him, the ones who came out…They strapped him to a bed frame in a basement of the police station. They brought in a little generator and a voltmeter. Then they taped electrodes to his testicles. My father was tortured like this. You have to understand, when you go through something like that…you never forget.”
Euclides was a man who took great pride in telling tales the way they should be told, at length and with notable digression, with recurring motifs and luminous surprises. But women always had the best stories, he said. Best because they were all true. They were the only ones who ever knew the truth, and who could still remember the stories of their mothers and hand them down in ways that allowed their truth to pass on—just enough truth, passed down through the generations so that the crookedness of men would never completely triumph.
After she had put Paolina to bed, Francesca joined Jonah for a cigarette on the veranda. Octavio was exhausted and had decided to turn in; he agreed to keep an eye on Paolina, who was still whimpering a little.
They sat smoking under the moths gathered along the sides of the house and over the screen door. The view on a clear night up in the Serra do Mar was sublime. Francesca moved away from the lights of the house and Jonah followed her. The grass was cool and dry underfoot. When they were far away enough, she motioned for him to sit down with her. Orion was lifting a leg over the ridgeline. Cool air passed over their bodies, and in the dark, he felt her hand feeling its way to his and then up to his arm. But she wasn’t pulling him to her. It was more, he realized, that she was holding onto him, almost for support. She spoke very slowly. “I am thinking…he will go away again…you too…and…I will be in pain when he goes…I’m afraid for this.”
Jonah thought on this carefully. “Yeah, I gotta go sooner or later—probably sooner—but Octavio, I don’t know…I can’t speak for him.” He watched her face, gazing out into the inky darkness of the valley below them.
“I have already had some man leaving me. I want to be happy…and Paolina…I don’t want her to see always men coming and going.” She dropped her head for a moment, but she raised it again. He couldn’t tell if she was crying.
“I think it would be better if I left Porto Alegre,” Jonah said.
She seemed to think on this gravely. And then said, “But then he will go with you…you will leave me both alone.”
“No, it doesn’t have to be that way,” he insisted. “I just think it’s probably best for me to give you space to be together, if that’s what you want.”
There was no reply to this, and they stayed that way a long time staring into the starry night, until with a start she leaned over, kissed him softly on the cheek, brushed his face with her hand, and walked back to the house without waiting for him to follow.
17
When Jonah awoke, he could hear Octavio singing Spanish in the shower. He found Francesca and Paolina in the kitchen making breakfast together and talking. They had been out that morning in the orchards and they had gathered a bowl of black marbles that turned out to be jaboticaba berries. There was a glowing force that radiated in Francesca when she was caring for her daughter. He was struck by her fearlessness, if that’s what it was—some deeply humane folly. Parenting was the most common activity in the entire world, happening all the time, and yet he couldn’t fathom how or where a human got the courage and the mental resiliency to keep track of all the possible risks, monitor and arrange for every contingency and danger, know how to do what Francesca did every day.
Jonah thought of his own mother and father. They hadn’t spoken since he had left New York. He knew his email inbox was full of pleading emails from his mother, and threatening emails from his father, demanding to know his whereabouts. But he never responded. He simply read