“The feather,” Mané had explained on national television in his thick accent, “was my own discovery, my own invention,” if it could be called that. The reporter strained at Mané’s dialect as if it were another language. No, he did not know if the Indians used the feather for the same purposes, but his great-great-grandmother, they said, was Indian. Even so, he was the first in his family to use the feather, and besides, all his folk said he was crazy. Only the wife and the third daughter believed in him at first. No, there was no particular kind of feather that he used. This was up to individual taste. He himself preferred the feathers of the parrot, but he had been given the wing feather from a very rare tanager by a man who regularly traded with the Indians. In fact, Mané had a rather big collection of rare feathers. The television cameras cut to a scan of his collection, set in empty coke bottles and porcelain vases and strewn over an embroidered and hand-laced cloth on the TV set. The cameras also scanned Mané Pena, who appeared aged according to one standard and youthful according to another, the grizzled gray pepper of his unshaven face, his dark leathery skin and bare feet, the faded Hawaiian shirt splattered with Aloha. Mané produced a small, rare, light-blue tanager feather and demonstrated its use, sliding it over his right ear. The reporter herself requested that Mané demonstrate the feather on her own ear and also complained of an ache in her shoulder. Mané grinned through his missing teeth and nodded authoritatively, carefully rubbing the soft down over the tip of the reporter’s ear. There, on national television, the camera got a rather titillating close-up of the reporter’s diamond earring and of the feather’s point between Mané’s leather fingers poking lightly on her lobe. The reporter exclaimed with surprise that the ache in her shoulder was gone, completely gone!
Mané grinned again and shrugged. No, he did not know anything about Chinese acupuncture. He had never heard of any such thing. He had figured out the sensitive points in the ear himself. Someone had told him about some doctors in São Paulo who poke your body with needles, but he thought that was unnecessary. He frowned in disgust. The feather was, after all, natural, easy to acquire, and above all, it felt good. Mané said he had seen the feather cure everything from seizures to alcoholism. He was beginning to warm up to the interview and started to give an animated account of a little neighbor girl who had asthma, his voice rising and twanging in regional tones. But the reporter smiled, flexed her new shoulder in wonder, and said, “This is Silvia Lopes on the Matacão for National TV.”
Kazumasa saw this on television, but could make little of it. “Ma-ta-kao,” he repeated, practicing the pronunciation as diligently as if the documentary had been a language lesson. “Ma-ta-kao.”
His maid, Lourdes, came from the kitchen with a small dish of carmelized flan and a demitasse of coffee. She put the dessert on the table and nodded at the television, “There’s something about that place, that Matacão, Seu Kazumasa. I just know it. That old man and his magic feather. It’s the Matacão.”
Kazumasa and I nodded, but Kazumasa did not understand everything. Contrary to what you might imagine, I had no way of enlightening Kazumasa. It was one of those situations often described in children’s television dramas where the pet is obviously more perceptive than the master. But who was I—a ball—to say?
“Good,” Kazumasa smiled appreciatively at Lourdes, taking a spoonful of the dessert and letting the delicate custard slide down his throat.
While Kazumasa still struggled like an infant with this new language and his new surroundings, there were others, like our maid Lourdes, who made the connection between the Matacão and the strange magic of Mané’s feather.
Far away, in another town on the coast of Ceará, a youth named Chico Paco watched the same TV report with extreme interest. The Matacão, Chico Paco was sure, was a divine place. It was the only possible reason why the feather could have even been discovered by Mané Pena.
Chico Paco thought about old Mané Pena and the feather and the Matacão and walked to the edge of his land and looked over the multicolored sands lifted in great changing dunes, a characteristic of this part of the coast. In his town, there had been a mother who had sent the colored sand in a tiny bottle to her homesick son in São Paulo. It had brought happiness to him in the distant urban metropolis. A young talented boy had then gotten the idea of pouring the colored sand in bottles in such a way as to create pictures. Chico Paco remembered the first pictures in the bottles—the scenes of his home, mud huts, coconut trees, and grazing cattle. One day, a tourist brought a picture of the Mona Lisa and asked the boy to duplicate it in a sand bottle, and he did. After that, the boy left the town and went away to be famous, sand-bottling every sort of picture from the president of the Republic to the great Pelé. Someone said he no longer used real sand but some synthetic stuff dyed in every color you could imagine. Someone said he was even making sand pictures in bottles of fine crystal and mixing the sand with gold and silver dust.
Chico Paco shrugged. He, too, would miss the beautiful multicolored sands, that rainbow of changing layers strewn before the azure waves, the salty wind at his back as his jangada—a flat raft with sail—thrust itself out to sea, but like the talented sand-bottling youth before him, Chico Paco had a separate destiny.
Chico Paco was nineteen, a thin bony youth with deep green, iridescent eyes and dark lashes set in a gentle face. Despite his youth, he was already a strong fisherman like his father before him. His hair, bleached yellow and orange under the constant sun, could perhaps be traced back to the old Dutch conquerors of that part of the country. Chico Paco had never been away from his home, but now the Matacão seemed to be calling from the great forest. The opportunity to leave home came sooner than he expected.
Chico Paco lived next door to Dona Maria Creuza and her grandson, Gilberto. Chico Paco and Gilberto had grown up and played together from childhood. They had learned about life together, and at one time, both had had dreams of going to the city together. But Gilberto had contracted a strange disease and become an invalid.
Before setting out toward the beach with his line and buoys every morning, Chico Paco carried Gilberto into the early morning sun, leaving him to sit under the veranda, occupied, as most of the women of the village, in the art of weaving lace. From time to time, Gilberto looked up from his handiwork to gaze at the changing shadows of the banana trees and speculate on the occasional passerby trudging along the path to or from the plaza. Gilberto waited for Chico Paco to return from the sea in the early afternoons, bringing in a string of fish—budião and badejo—plus something special for Gilberto and Dona Maria Crueza’s dinner, maybe a lobster, a small bass, or a long sea eel. In the evenings, Chico Paco would hoist Gilberto onto his back and carry him over to watch the big outdoor television in the plaza with the rest of the town. They would share a beer at the bar or buy popsicles, exchange jokes and gossip, predict the outcome of the prime-time soap opera.
During the day, Gilberto worked bent over a small pillow of pins and thread, tossing the ends of the balls of thread skillfully so as to weave a long, narrow, and complex piece of finery. Dona Maria Creuza would take the lace ribbon, wound around pieces of cardboard, and dicker the price in the plaza. When the lace ribbon reached its final destination—the trim on a woman’s blouse or negligee or the delicate border of a fine linen tablecloth—it had been bought for a hundred times the money Dona Maria Creuza had received for it. Gilberto knew nothing of the price of his lace, which was as ephemeral as the changing shadows of the banana tree and the foam at the edges of the land where he was born and had always lived. Now an invalid, he did not even hope to wander any further.
Dona Maria Creuza, too, had seen the stories told on television about the Matacão. She had held a rosary in one hand and had placed her other hand on her television and prayed to the small saddled figure of Saint George. She had wept and begged and promised and prostrated herself to ask for a miracle: that her grandson, Gilberto, might once again walk. The miracle that occurred was almost more than her heart could bear. Looking up from her tears staining the earthen floor, she saw two bony feet grasping the ground with their toes. Gilberto balanced breathlessly in the doorway and stumbled into his grandmother’s arms.
News of the miracle spread through the sleepy beach town in the same way a cool breeze caresses the sweaty foreheads and cheeks of people hiding from the scalding sun. It was murmured and whispered with wonder from house to house and bar to bar. Maria Creuza’s Gilberto could walk again.
As Dona Maria Creuza explained the event again and again to everyone who came to hear, it was apparent that there was one small but essential detail that needed attention. Maria Creuza had promised Saint George that if her prayers were granted, she herself would walk barefooted to the Matacão and erect a small shrine in his honor. How did such a woman at her age suppose that she could accomplish such a promise? It was at least 1,500 miles to the Matacão, and Maria Creuza was nearly seventy years old. Certainly, Gilberto, although cured, could not expect to make such a trip in her place. He was much too weak. He might now be able to walk, but he would certainly die in fullfilling the very promise that had been his salvation. The ways of the Lord were unfathomable, but there were limits to human possibility.
Chico Paco heard the news as he dragged his jangada to high land and felt his heart leap to see Gilberto’s thin, trembling, but indeed, standing figure outlined at the head of the dune before his house. “Chiquinho!” Gilberto was yelling. “Chiquinho! Look at me! Look at me!”
Chico Paco felt the sand kicked up from his heels pelt his back, as he pranced up the dunes to Gilberto’s outstretched arms. Chico Paco grabbed Gilberto, hoisting him aloft as usual, and galloped down into the sea, throwing and catching Gilberto in the waves until the sun set.
It was Chico Paco who, without a second thought, volunteered his two healthy legs and promised to take Dona Maria Creuza’s place, to make the long trip to the Matacão on bare feet to erect a shrine to Saint George and to give praise and thanks for the miracle of Gilberto’s recovery. Chico Paco promised to do this because of his love for his childhood friend Gilberto, and because somehow, this miracle must also be meant for Chico Paco himself.
Within a week, Chico Paco, armed with the handwritten prayers of Dona Maria Creuza on small pieces of tablet paper, a rosary, a locket of Gilberto’s hair, a small statue of Saint George, and Maria Creuza’s hard-earned savings, kissed his own mother good-bye and turned the green iridescence of his eyes toward the Matacão, leaving the prints of his bare feet over the multicolored sands.
Just as Chico Paco set forward on his journey, Kazumasa and I were on a rickety train somewhere in the state of Minas Gerais coming out of a long tunnel, old Mané Pena was carving a foot-worm out of the sole of his foot, and Batista and Tania Aparecida were rolling away from their early morning lovemaking. I know these things for a fact. I also know, to make the picture complete, that at that very moment, there was also a certain American in New York, by the name of Jonathan B. Tweep, pensively studying newspaper ads in the last car of a subway train. Well, I am full of such coincidental information, and international at that! But to continue . . .