In the days that followed our descent with Lourdes from that fourteenth-floor window, the results of all Kazumasa’s gambling became evident. Kazumasa’s cousin, Hiroshi, came over and spoke excitedly with Lourdes and Kazumasa. Kazumasa had single-handedly won the national sports lottery and the national numbers lottery, not to mention the numerous illegal lotteries that Lourdes had had him bet on. Kazumasa’s total winnings seemed to rise with each passing moment, and Kazumasa’s cousin feverishly took Kazumasa in taxis everywhere to deposit the money. It all seemed to be an incredible dream.
In a country where the disparity between wealth and poverty is great, the news of instant wealth spread in and out of every obscure crevice of that massive and unexplored land. Kazumasa became a household name, like a character in a nightly soap opera, on the tip of every Brazilian tongue. The media milked his story for everything it was worth, from the story of his boyhood on the shores of the Japan Sea to weird speculations about the nature and uncanny accuracy of the pigeon messages and their possible connection to me, Kazumasa’s ball. When the hysteria surrounding the amassing of the greatest fortune ever obtained through the lotteries and the fear of me, Kazumasa’s personal satellite, had undergone the natural process of sedimentation, Kazumasa himself emerged, a simple and solitary Japanese immigrant with a shy smile and a growing desire to experience more of life. Brazilians from everywhere flocked enthusiastically to Kazumasa, adorning him with offers of friendship, both sincere and laced with greed.
I continued to be eyed with extreme curiosity. Most people were sure that I undoubtedly had something mystical, magical, or electronic to do with Kazumasa’s enormous fortune. A recent graduate of electronic engineering in the southern state of Santa Catarina had happened to make an electronic replica of me (a flattering representation, I might say), which was cleverly attached to one’s head by a thin wire and a transparent headband and operated by a tiny battery wired into the inside of the band. When looking at the wearer of this contraption head-on, it did indeed appear as if a ball were spinning free in the air. The graduate student had contrived the replica as part of his costume at Carnival, but a friend immediately recognized the gadget as their ticket to riches. Together, they began to produce the headbands with the electronic whizzing ball by the hundreds and, later, by the thousands. Soon the lottery shops were filled with people wearing artificial spinning satellites, circling numbers with abandon and indefatigable self-assurance. Of course, when the artificial balls did not produce instant riches, many abandoned the strange headgear, but others, like Kazumasa, found a inexpressible comfort in the ball, a relationship, I can assure you, unmatched by human or animal counterparts.
In the meantime, there was all the money and the problem—if such be a problem—of what to do with so much money. Everyone seems to have an idea of what he or she would do with sudden wealth, but Kazumasa was a true exception. What does a man with a ball need with money? Some people must have realized the value of a ball like me because in a questionnaire asking what you would do if you had won Kazumasa’s great wealth, 10 percent of those questioned said they would buy a ball like me.
Kazumasa had Hiroshi and Lourdes read the answers on the questionnaire and listened carefully to every sort of suggestion. There were, of course, the extravagant cars and the mansions with a hundred maids just like Lourdes. Then there were the great causes and small causes, businesses and hotels, plantations as large as the island of Shikoku, great poverty, great politics, great futures. Kazumasa muddled through all these suggestions, nodding and scratching his head in confusion.
“Karaoke bars,” suggested Hiroshi. “How about it? You and me, Kazumasa. Open karaoke bars all over Brazil. You’d like karaoke bars.”
“Okay,” nodded Kazumasa, happy for this suggestion.
“Okay? Just like that?” asked Hiroshi. “It was just an idea off the top of my head.”
“Okay. Okay,” Kazumasa waved his cousin off maybe because it was just the beginning. “Lourdes, what do you want?”
Lourdes swallowed. “It’s not for me to say, Seu Kazumasa.”
“I remember what you said that day we went to buy the tickets,” prompted Kazumasa. “About Rubens.”
“Rubens? A wheelchair?” Lourdes gasped and glowed with delight. “You would give him a wheelchair?”
“Wheelchair? More than a wheelchair,” said Kazumasa. “Maybe we can find a way for Rubens to walk again.”
“But it is only a dream,” Lourdes protested and hoped all at once.
“Maybe we can take him to a specialist,” suggested Hiroshi. “Maybe there is a cure.”
“Yes,” Kazumasa and I nodded. Then Kazumasa walked over to our old window site and looked down at the Djapan’s back porch. “And,” he said, nodding in the general direction, “Hiroshi, you give money to the pigeon couple. Buy more pigeons.”
Hiroshi nodded, “Sure.”
“What about the man who said he would buy a hospital bed for his invalid mother?” reflected Kazumasa. “Send him a bed. And that little girl who wants to own a bakery so her family will always have bread to eat. Buy her a bakery.” So it began. Kazumasa instinctively began to give his money away. There were countless people with interesting propositions who began to line up at our door. While crowds filled the back street awaiting the weekend pigeon messages, around the corner Kazumasa faced an ongoing stream of people hoping to find an audience with him and his ball. Kazumasa listened patiently to everyone, and everyone stared at me. He did not turn away anyone; everyone left with something. A group of boys got a soccer ball and team shirts. A man got a prosthetic leg. A young girl got dancing shoes and lessons. A boy got a clarinet. A woman got a gas stove. Kazumasa granted gift after gift like a big giveaway department store. People called him the Japanese Santa Claus. And this was fun for a while.
In the meantime, Kazumasa followed Lourdes and Rubens to doctors and specialists. Rubens was poked and prodded and tested, but all the doctors said the same thing. “Rubens’s paralysis is irreversible. There is nothing we can do for him.”
Lourdes wept, and Kazumasa felt terrible. If he could not give something special to Lourdes, what did it all mean?
Kazumasa shook his head. Every day, there were those who had wishes he could not grant because they wanted things beyond his capabilities, such as health, a lost arm, vision, hearing, babies. Kazumasa could not perform miracles. More than anything else he wanted to share the happiness he felt with others, and it pained him to see so many sick and homeless and hungry people. How many hospitals, how many soup kitchens, how many housing projects would it take? Government politicians, private foundations, and a myriad of social agencies approached Kazumasa with great plans. Kazumasa signed check after check, but still, half the people who came to see him needed the impossible.
“Only a miracle, Kazu. Only a miracle can help most of these people,” Hiroshi consoled Kazumasa gently. “What can you do about it? You have done more than anyone. Pretty soon, you will have given up most of your fortune!”
“Only a miracle,” Kazumasa agreed.
“What I want to know is when are you going to stop? You can’t keep on giving your money away like this, can you?” Hiroshi wanted to know.
“Why not?” asked Kazumasa. “Why do I need it? What is it all for anyway?”
“Your retirement? I don’t know. Don’t you want anything for yourself?”
Kazumasa had to think about this. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” he shook his head. He thought about all the things that people wanted, but he could not think of anything he, too, wanted. He went to the window and looked below on the Djapans and their pigeons. He felt he wanted something that the Djapans had, but he did not know what this might be. No, he thought, it was not pigeons.
Lourdes bit her lip. Balls don’t know much about these things, but even I realized that Lourdes liked Kazumasa very much. Kazumasa did not quite know this and would not have known what it meant anyway. In the meantime, Hiroshi was always bringing Lourdes little gifts: tapioca flour to make her coconut tapioca cakes, a ripe pineapple, embroidered handkerchiefs. Lourdes thanked him kindly, but so did Kazumasa. Lourdes sighed. This Japanese with his ball was different from other men.
As one would have suspected, but Kazumasa did not, people were likely to invent their wonderful proposals or their sad, complicated stories. In the beginning, people who might have intended to lie were forced, out of uneasiness or perhaps fear in my presence (as if a ball like me could be judgmental), to tell Kazumasa the truth. Actually, I had no way of warning Kazumasa of the truth or falseness of the people he met, but I could see that after a while, people, emboldened by the marvelous stories others recounted of the Japanese Santa Claus, had decided to test the spirit of this phenomenon. Even Kazumasa could see that some people had been through the line twice, that certain stories bore a remarkable resemblance to the current tragedy on the prime-time soap opera, that politicians were using his money for their own campaigns, that the foundations had invested the money in coffee and soybeans, that altruism had been corrupted by greed. By the time Kazumasa realized the sad truth, another year had passed, and he had spent much of his great fortune.
Batista and Tania Aparecida had accepted Kazumasa’s gift to buy some prize-winning pigeons and were busily breeding what would soon became known as the finest pigeon corps in the country. To thank Kazumasa, Batista had taken the elevator up fourteen flights with three cages of pigeon couples and personally hung them on the wall just below and outside Kazumasa’s window.
It was the invalid boy, Rubens, who took a special interest in the pigeons at the window. At Kazumasa’s invitation, he and his sister, Gislaine, had come with Lourdes to live in Kazumasa’s spacious apartment. Every day after school, Lourdes or Gislaine leaned out the window and brought up the cages for Rubens. Sometimes Rubens could not wait for anyone’s help, and Lourdes would find the boy hanging out the window from his waist and reaching for the cages himself. “Rubinho!” Lourdes would cry. “I’ve told you! You’re going to fall out of that window!” But Rubens was impatient to see the birds. He took each bird from its cage and cradled it in his lap, inspecting it carefully as Batista had taught. He moved back and forth in his wheelchair from the kitchen and interrupted Lourdes’s cooking to fill the water feeders and the small troughs with Batista’s special seed. Despite Lourdes’s protests, Rubens liked to set a pan of water on the kitchen table and watch the birds splatter about in a daily bath.
Rubens also liked to follow the news about pigeons. He had asked Lourdes to frame the glossy cover of the second quarterly issue of Pigeon Illustrated, on which Batista and Tania Aparecida’s prizewinner was proudly featured. In the most recent issue of the National Pigeon Society newsletter Columbidae, there was a feature article in which Batista was quoted at length about grooming techniques, birdseed mix, flight training, and homing patterns. Rubens followed all this avidly. Batista was now considered a new authority in the field, and every boy in the neighborhood was proud to say he knew Batista personally. Rubens was even prouder because he had been given pigeons whose lineage could be traced to the original pigeon that Batista had saved from being pressed between the heavy tire of a three-speed bike and a concrete overpass. And, more importantly, this pigeon had brought the message home about the Japanese with the ball.
The weekend pigeon messages continued with much fanfare. No one doubted the story that Kazumasa’s great fortune was prophesied by Batista’s pigeon message, and the crowds grew and now never abandoned the streets outside the tenement.
Batista, on the other hand, was more concerned with testing his pigeons and with extending the range of their flights. The National Pigeon Society had offered to sponsor a test flight from Rio Grande do Sul to São Paulo, buying Batista and his pigeon round-trip busfare to that southernmost state of Brazil. The pigeon had returned to São Paulo, over seven hundred miles, in a national record time of thirty-eight hours. In fact, it arrived in São Paulo while Batista’s bus was changing a flat, still three hundred miles away in Santa Catarina.
Then there was the National Pigeon Society’s Racing Homers Division, whose three-hundred-and five-hundred-mile races were consistently won by Batista’s champions. Formerly an unheard-of sport, pigeon racing was suddenly followed with enormous enthusiasm by everyone from sportscasters to gamblers. Simple people on the street were soon aware of the difference between a Ptarmigan and a Belgian Voyageur. The latest results of the Belo Horizonte-São Paulo 500 race became a matter of common concern, and the announcement “Djapan’s Tropical Dream took first place by five minutes” had some obvious meaning and significance to almost everyone. The 8:00 PM soap had even introduced a popular actor in the romantic role of a pigeon fancier.
Following such pigeon news, Rubens was anxious to try his own birds in flight. He began his birds with short flights from the street, peering into the sky as his sister watched from her post at the window above. All day long, Lourdes saw her son wheeling in and out of the apartment with his pigeon cages. Rubens passed the long lines of people waiting to see Kazumasa, who at the time, held audience in a little office on the same street. Some of the people admired Rubens’s shiny new wheelchair and nodded at each other that their wait in line would not be in vain. Each day, Rubens rolled his wheelchair farther and farther away until, one day, Lourdes awaited him at the door with all the fury of a mother expecting a child many hours past his dinner. She sent neighbors and even her patron, Kazumasa, into the dark streets shouting his name. Had anyone seen a little boy on a wheel-chair with a pigeon cage in his lap? He left in the morning. Now it is almost ten in the night, and he hasn’t returned. Nossa Senhora! Where can he be?
But Rubens had simply gone a little too far and returned as unperturbed as his pigeon. The pigeon note had said as much: “Mama, I made it to the Avenida Paulista. It will take me a while to get home. Don’t worry. Your son, Rubens.”
After this, Rubens was not allowed to leave the apartment for several days. He rolled around the apartment, cleaning cages, dropping birdseed onto the carpets, and bathing his birds in Kazumasa’s bath. Still, Lourdes would not let him leave the house. “This will teach you a lesson,” she said sternly.
But Rubens had an idea. Nudging his older sister Gislaine into a corner, he convinced her to take his very best bird to the end of the subway line in Jabaquara. “You can take the subway,” he urged her. “Here is the money you need. The extra you can keep for yourself. And don’t forget to write down the time you release the bird.”
Rubens watched out the window anxiously. He saw his sister cross the overpass, headed toward the subway, and smiled. Hiroshi had given him a watch. Rubens watched the time carefully. In the late afternoon, he came reluctantly away from the window when Lourdes called him for a snack. “Cheese bread,” she said. “Your favorite.”
From the kitchen, Rubens could hear the tiny bell announcing the arrival of his bird. He wheeled out of the kitchen in a flurry, ramming his chair into the wall and checking the time on his watch. He could not wait for anyone to remove the cage from the outside wall. He hurriedly lifted himself by his arms to the window sill. Like others used to depending on the upper halves of their bodies, he had great arm and shoulder strength, even for a small boy, and these days of rolling himself around the city with his pigeons had strengthened him unusually. Misjudging this strength, Rubens shoved his body forward and slipped past the pigeon cages and out the fourteenth-floor window.
Lourdes ran from the kitchen, thinking she would scold him for marking her clean walls with his wheelchair tires, only to see Rubens’s withered legs disappear over the window sill. “Rubens!”