With a terrible shriek, Lourdes nearly flung herself out the window, but she could not see her son below. She ran hysterically out of the apartment, down the corridor, banging on all elevator buttons and on the elevator doors themselves. By the time she had herself fallen by elevator fourteen floors, gathering apartment tenants at every stop, a tremendous crowd of people ran with her from the elevator, clinging to their pounding hearts and their soundless screams with their bare hands, anticipating a mother’s horror.
But Rubens’s body was not to be found. Lourdes ran with the crowd up and down the parking lot at the back of the apartment house. Curious tenants were coming from their cars. A boy? Fallen from the fourteenth floor? Everyone looked up at the open window with the pigeon cages and shrugged. This woman had gone crazy. But Tania Aparecida’s corpulent mother had seen the boy fall too. She screeched incoherently from the Djapan’s back porch and waved a poor pigeon, captured tightly in her fat hands, at the confused and excited crowd in the parking lot: “The truck!” she managed to scream. “The boy fell into the truck!”
Everyone clambered down the driveway in search of a truck. They screamed at and surrounded every truck double-parked along the street. They ran into the refrigerated compartment of a meat truck and searched between the giant cuts of bloody meat, causing the meat man in his blood-stained white apron to topple over in the street with a one-hundred-kilo side of beef. They climbed up the sides of a watermelon truck and accidentally pushed the carefully balanced load of ripe melons onto the sidewalk. Watermelons rolled out into the street and smashed against passing cars. People ran out of the tenements and grabbed the melons. The driver came out of the local grocery and was waving his fists at everyone. The people lined up in front of Kazumasa’s so-called charity foundation office stretched their necks to see what the commotion was all about. People stepped in and out of the line, afraid to lose their places. The entire street became a live wire of conflicting information. The story of Rubens falling out of the fourteenth floor into a passing truck was so absurd that people tended to believe the other stories about a man’s body being found frozen in the meat truck or about the driver giving the watermelons away because their price wasn’t worth the cost of transporting them.
Amidst all this, Lourdes ran to the front of Kazumasa’s charity line and burst into his office. Lourdes did not need to say a thing. Kazumasa could see the terror in her eyes. He ran with her to the end of the street, jumping over the watermelons, but not knowing why they were running. “Rubens!” she gasped. “Rubens!”
Beyond the intersection—hundreds of cars and trucks passing from every direction—I could see Gislaine calmly weaving her way home from the subway with an empty pigeon cage, but Rubens and his pigeon, whose cage had also fallen with the boy, were by now speeding away atop a truck filled with bolts of old cloth and bags of sewing remnants. It was one of those open trucks, newly painted dark blue with scrawling designs (probably of Portuguese origin) along its sides and an inscription along the back: “Carrego tudo no meu peito aquilo que Deus manda de cima.” (I bear in my breast all that God sends from above.)
Lourdes knelt down right there on that busy intersection. Kazumasa, who was always trying to do what was right, knelt down too, without question. Lourdes rocked back and forth as if in a trance, praying for her son, praying. Kazumasa could not understand, but I could hear her praying to a distant and magical place, to the small shrine of Saint George on the Matacão and the angel who had built that shrine, Chico Paco: “Please bring my son Rubens back to me alive. Please, by the grace of God, by the footsteps of the angel, Chico Paco. I will give Chico Paco a good pair of boots this time, and he will make a pilgrimage from this very intersection to the great Matacão and make your glory even greater. I promise it. I promise it.”
Hiroshi and Kazumasa ran around the city, in and out of every police station and morgue, pulling strings and making promises to anyone who might be able to find the boy. They did not have hopes of finding Rubens alive. It was a long fall. They were searching for the body of a dead boy with withered legs.
But it was the pigeon who saved Rubens.
Rubens was awakened from the shock of his fall by the driver of the truck. The driver had not believed the nonsense of a boy falling from an apartment window with a pigeon. He angrily told Rubens that he wasn’t taking any hitchhikers and that Rubens could get off. When Rubens didn’t move, the driver swung the child, who clutched desperately to his pigeon cage, onto the crumbling edge of the asphalt road and drove away.
A drunkard stumbled from the bar where the truck had stopped. “Where is this place?” Rubens asked the drunkard without fear. “Where are we?”
The drunkard swung around. “Godforsaken place. You don’t know this hellhole they call Freguesia do Ó?” The drunkard made a rude circle with his fingers. He made a fist at the trucks and automobiles rumbling by, one after another. “Know what’s good for them. Don’t stop here!”
It seemed to Rubens that a cloud of black oil and rubber soot never ceased to churn around the drunkard. Rubens fumbled for the small pencil he kept in his pocket. He snatched a dirty gum wrapper from the ground and scribbled the name of the place on the wrapper. The wrapper went into the pigeon’s carrier tube.
“Mighty fine bird you got there,” snarled the drunkard, coming closer, but the pigeon flapped its blue-gray wings in a sudden flurry, dispersing the putrid fumes of the drunkard’s dissipation, sailed up and, circling its lost owner, was gone.
Well, that was how Rubens came back to Lourdes’s arms alive, but there was also the small question of the promise made to Saint George on the busy intersection of that São Paulo street. Lourdes wrote a simple letter addressed to “the Angel Chico Paco, in care of the shrine of Saint George, the Matacão.” She enclosed a small photo of Rubens, glued the envelope closed, licked the stamp, and kissed the whole thing with another prayer.
Meanwhile, back near the Matacão, the angel Chico Paco was toying with the idea of returning to his home on the multicolored dunes of the northeastern coast. He missed his mother and Gilberto. The Matacão was amazing and sacred and stretched into the horizon in one smooth shiny immensity, but it was still not like the sea. He missed the salty spray of warm tropical waters and the cool breeze running through the coconut palms and the thatched roof of his mother’s house. On the Matacão, the wet air often stood still, a great cooking sauna, and everything—people and animals and even the thousands of species of insects—seemed paralyzed by the dense atmosphere. When it rained, Chico Paco would race with the children out to the Matacão to listen to the drops spatter against the smooth surface and to slide with wild abandon across the slippery surface of that tropical skating rink. At least it was wet then, but it was still not the sea.
When Lourdes’s letter arrived, Chico Paco’s first impulse was to toss it into a pile of others he had received. He had accumulated a small pile of fan letters containing requests that he walk for some miracle or other, like he had done for Gilberto. In the evening, he read these letters to Mané Pena and Angustia, who could not themselves read. Mané and Angustia both nodded: “There’s great work for you out there. Great work.”
But Chico Paco thought the idea of complying with any one of these requests more than absurd.
Mané insisted, “What about that one there? It says that the man had a sick mule, and he prayed to Saint George and promised that he’d get you,” Mané pointed at Chico Paco, “You to walk from where was it? to the Matacão. And, poof, his mule stood up and hoed an entire field. If that isn’t a miracle . . .”
Angustia agreed. “God has chosen you, son.”
Chico Paco shook his golden head and laughed. “I’m just an ordinary man. Saint George did this, not me.”
“No one is arguing that. But it’s you that has to keep the promise. You’re the key!” insisted Mané, rubbing his ear with his feather to help him think this matter through.
But Chico Paco could not see this reasoning until he opened Lourdes’s letter and the photograph of Rubens fluttered from the pages. Chico Paco dropped to his knees and stared into that face—the dark mischievous eyes and unkempt crop of dark brown hair of a common Brazilian boy—the very face that returned night after night, imposing its memory until the dream stared back, a living reality.
The next day, Chico Paco bid Mané Pena good-bye from the dusty window of an old bus. Mané Pena handed him a handful of feathers. “For the trip,” he insisted. “Seven days they say. Rainy season. Could be more. These buses get stuck. You have to all get out and push.”
Chico Paco nodded. Going by bus to São Paulo was the easy part.
Mané Pena continued, “They say São Paulo is a big city. I seen it on TV. It don’t all fit into one TV screen. It’s that big.”