Two days after Chico Paco left the Matacão on a slow bus headed for the great city of São Paulo, the American J.B. Tweep jetted in from New York, representing that big company that I have already described in some detail, GGG. Mané Pena thought this American was a strange sort, slightly lopsided, and that his name was funny. Mr. Tweep, Mané called him. Mr. Tweep spoke to Mané Pena through an interpreter, asking a lot of questions about feathers. He wanted to know everything: names of birds, feather size and color, methods of use, positioning of the feather on the ear, how long a particular feather was effective, historic use of the feather, how to the use the feather in conjunction with other remedies and apparatus, feather power in Indian and local folklore.
Mr. Tweep and the interpreter went with Mané Pena to one of the classy local hotels, which had a large aviary with every sort of tropical bird. He pointed out the various birds to Mr. Tweep, describing the feathers and their particular attributes. Some, Mané Pena admitted, were purely ornamental. Peacock feathers, he said, were an example. Too big and fluffy. Made you sneeze.
The next day, Mr. Tweep showed up again at the sidewalk café with his interpreter and a French bird professor (Mr. Tweep called her an ornithologist) who happened to be doing her thesis on the rare Brazilian tanager. (The Thraupidae family, she had said.) She was also studying the migration patterns of the red-eyed vireo, taking intermittent trips into the forest and banding one of the few species known to migrate to the Amazon region.
The French bird professor wore binoculars around her neck and had a talking parrot, which perched on her shoulders and seemed to go everywhere with her. Mané decided that the parrot talked in some funny language different from the one Tweep spoke. It said things like, “Bonjour, messieurs-dames!” and sang a tune the bird professor called “the Marseillaise.” Mané kept staring at the parrot’s green primaries. Their particular iridescence reminded him of Chico Paco’s eyes. The self-conscious bird screeched at him angrily, “Monsieur, parlez-vous français?! Parlez-vous français?!”
The professor took careful notes on everything Mané Pena had to say about tanager feathers. Mr. Tweep also took notes and tried to record everything on a small tape recorder that kept jamming and chewing up the tape, which was strewn in garbled brown ribbons over the café table. “It’s the humidity,” Mr. Tweep fumbled in exasperation. “Nothing seems to work in this country!” The interpreter did not translate this, but it was not necessary. Both Mané and the interpreter thought nothing worked either. The interpreter had gone to pick Mr. Tweep up at the hotel, where Mr. Tweep was hopelessly yelling into a broken phone. Then there were no taxis to be found, and when at last the interpreter located one, six arrived all at once. The taxi Mr. Tweep chose broke down before they had reached Mané Pena’s outdoor café, and they were forced to walk the rest of the way.
Mr. Tweep was in a visible sweat, and at some point, Mané Pena noticed that Mr. Tweep, in his excitement, was actually untangling the spaghetti of tape with two hands and thirstily gulping down a glass of Guaraná soda with a trembling third hand. Mané Pena and the professor looked on in astonishment. Americans certainly were more advanced! Mané jittered his feather back and forth over the lobe of his ear, like the bow on the strings of a violin in a high C. This was Mané’s way of absorbing shock, but the professor fumbled for her sunglasses and went crimson in confusion while the parrot sang, with a certain fervor, the Marseillaise.
As the days went on, Mané Pena grew accustomed to, and reverent around, Mr. Tweep’s third arm. He shared his experience with his old cronies at the bar, who all scooted their chairs around to Mané’s table when Mr. Tweep arrived, gripping their cold beers, to get a full sense of the phenomenon. There was, indeed, in the beginning a sort of quiet awe, rather like, Mané thought, seeing television for the first time. In the beginning, Mané and the others noticed that Mr. Tweep’s third arm had a sort of twitch or tremble to it, as if it were not quite well. Not understanding third arms, they assumed this was a normal third-arm characteristic. They discussed third arms at length. Did other Americans have three arms? How about three legs? And better yet, three penises?
The French professor and her parrot now seemed to accompany Mr. Tweep everywhere. She had the glazed look of someone with a miraculous discovery. It was announced that she had been chosen as the first recipient of the GGG Fellowship for Scientific Studies in Ornithology and the Relationship of the Feather to Human Health. She was all aflutter with talk about hummingbirds. But Mané Pena understood intuitively that her studies had moved on to topics tertiary.
J.B. Tweep had been, with the dissolution of the development resources research and viability department, transferred to the GGG International research and funding division and sent on assignment to the Matacão, where he was busy collecting data on the 9.99 selection of the feather. J.B. had never been to a foreign country and was initially alarmed at what he felt to be a sudden listlessness in his third arm. Upon examining himself in the hotel mirror, he actually thought his third arm might be atrophying in this hot tropical weather. And it exasperated him that things did not seem to work in this country. There was no organization. And they didn’t use plastic clips; the metal ones absorbed the humidity and rusted onto his papers. How could a third arm survive in such a place anyway? By the time he had located Mané Pena and exposed himself to the natives and the French ornithologist in an untypical show of ineptitude, J.B. was beginning to have serious doubts about his effectiveness in the Third World. J.B. would have left Brazil then and there, but the Matacão, like GGG, had a way of recycling everything.
J.B. Tweep, after he had begun to feel a sort of revival in his third arm (reasons for which I will explain later), went about with his usual trialectic efficiency to build GGG Enterprises’ international research and funding division into a major division, with the major investment and budgetary considerations it truly deserved. Suddenly, for reasons that, as I’ve said before, were known only to the original founders Georgia and Geoffrey Gamble, a tremendous and, since Brazil’s debtor-nation IMF agreements, unheard-of amount of capital poured from the U.S. GGG Enterprises into its Brazilian counterpart on the Matacão. This capital was likened to amounts loaned Brazil for Itaipú, the largest dam in the world, or Angra dos Reis, a nuclear-powered reactor that never worked. Anxious to duplicate GGG’s New York offices on the Matacão, J.B. made a trialectic decision to import an entire building, all twenty-three floors, to the luxurious Matacão Row, overlooking the Matacão itself. J.B. had no time for the handmade mortar-and-block construction, which would have provided jobs for and fed hundreds of people for several years. He wanted GGG’s presence to be felt immediately. After all, he reflected, there were historic precedents for such a grandiose move: the grand opera house imported in every detail from the iron fixtures to the parquet floors from England to Manaus on the Amazon River; or Ludwig’s ship, which sailed from Japan down the Amazon River to dock as a great factory in the dense tropical forest for the purpose of churning everything into tons of useful paper. J.B. simply had a twenty-three-floor office building constructed in Florida and flown in piece by piece, office by office, secretary by secretary, manager by manager. He even had the human resources department, complete with red-haired Texas-accented clones, recloned and flown in. Except for the fact that power failures were frequent and caused chaos close to hysteria (human resources had several ongoing seminars to help shocked employees: “Working in the Third World,” “Controlling Emotions in Dysfunctional Elevators and/or Dark Copy Rooms,” “What to Do When the Air Conditioning Fails” and “Sexism in a Friendly Country”), everything seemed to fall into place. And, if you have the strange sensation that all of this happened just like that, it did.
With a bustling, twenty-three-floor office building to back him up, J.B. Tweep became nothing less than a king and nothing more than a CEO. Of course, he would not think of appointing himself CEO of GGG. He continued to manipulate everything via memos while promoting and demoting himself to the various departments that might need his three-armed expertise. Titles meant nothing to J.B., and as Mané Pena had said of the angel Chico Paco, J.B. Tweep had great work to do.
Everyone got an office at GGG. The French bird professor got an office, of course. Even Mané Pena became what he heard was called a “consultant.” “This sort of work,” he explained to Angustia, “is like when the TV people came and asked about why we couldn’t grow anything, and I told them that her,” he pointed at the earth, “tubes were tied. It’s like that. Telling people things they already know.”
Angustia remembered. “Imagine. I was more fertile than this piece of land. Twenty-six children. God works in strange ways.”
“Angustia,” Mané looked at his wife meaningfully, “I don’t know if this Matacão isn’t fertile. I mean it is a strange place. Fertile not for manioc or tomatoes, but fertile in a different way. Do you see what I mean?”
“Either a place is fertile or it isn’t,” sneered Angustia.
“But don’t you see? It grows a different kind of thing. Buildings for example. It grows buildings!”
Despite his amazement at the Matacão’s ability to grow buildings, Mané Pena did not like to venture much inside the GGG offices. He did not like to ride the elevators; he could feel the whirring of the machinery on the balls of his bare feet and feared his toes would get stuck in the automatic doors. He preferred to walk up the stairwells, SO J.B. kindly sent a memo out to put Mané’s office on the first floor. J.B.’s memo provided Mané with a computer and a secretary and an expense account. Mané Pena padded in barefoot to the offices once or twice to look at his desk, the ample supply of plastic clips, and the computer, and to meet the secretary, but he could not think of anything else to do there. Occasionally he charged a beer or a cup of coffee in the coffee shop on the first floor and returned to his outdoor café table in the old section of town to banter with his cronies. If J.B. wanted to talk to Mané, he had to go down to that outdoor bar. J.B. tried to make Mané wear a pager or walk around with a mobile phone, but these things invariably got lost or broken. For a while, Mané’s cronies in the bar put money in a jar and passed around the pager every day, wearing it conspicuously on the belts of their pants. If the pager went off while a crony was wearing it, he got the winnings in the jar.
Still, Mané Pena was an enormous help to J.B. and GGG Enterprises. Consulting with Mané Pena and the French ornithologist, J.B. began narrowing down his selections and closing contracts with key feather distributors. The value of a feather depended, of course, on the availability of the source. The rarer the bird, the more expensive the feather. J.B. wanted to limit the selection to parrots, whose availability was generally good. Although Mané Pena praised the attributes of the common pigeon feather, J.B. knew that parrots had the reputation of being exotic and that the colors of these birds would give the accessories and design department, as well as the publicity department, a lot of room for imagination. The value of feathers was rising with this new demand, but J.B. could still cut a deal to get high-quality double-A parrot feathers in blue, green, red, and yellow for $150 a kilo. J.B. wanted to close a series of five-year deals to beat the rising prices, but no one was willing to extend themselves for longer than a few months. Feather distributors could see the future heaped in gold feathers, speculating that it could be the biggest rush on Brazilian resources since gold was discovered in Serra Pelada back in the eighties.
As J.B. sent his high priority dispatches back to New York, the export-import department and the legal research department were preparing paperwork, looking up customs regulations and discovering loopholes through which feathers might make their entry into the American market-place. GGG lobbyists were busy in Washington and in Brasilia, feting politicians and handing out expensive feathers. GGG had already made some initial thrusts into the marketplace with enormous success. People were beginning to talk about “The Feather,” and GGG was touting it like a sensation akin to Coca-Cola. GGG public relations people were promoting their product as one of those projected to become a part of American life, like coffee and orange juice at breakfast or potato chips and dip. Talkshow researchers were trying to line up guests with some knowledge or experience in feathers, and a few magazines were beginning to develop feature articles.
Back on the Matacão, the creative center of this brainstorm, it was becoming commonplace to see people walking and talking with feathers slipped comfortably above or behind their ears. Some people carried feathers in their pockets or purses. Others had small feather-carrying cases. It was not unusual to see people in bars, offering each other feathers and casually stroking their ears with them while carrying on animated conversations. The tourists who came to visit the Matacão were easily drawn to the use of the feather. They spent a great deal of time selecting from feathers under glass cases, asking about the birds from which the feathers originated and the type of feather best suited for their particular ailment or temperament.
Mané Pena, now the feather guru, was so frequently accosted by feather enthusiasts and salespersons about the nature of the feather and its proper uses that he was finally summoned to give classes and lectures at the local college. Lectures were not, after all, difficult for Mané Pena—he divided his knowledge into a series of topics and simply chose one to talk about for an hour. In the beginning, he likened being at a podium to his sidewalk café table. He sprinkled his lectures with anecdotes: every sort of story from the one about the girl with hiccups to the man with a twitch in his eye.
“Some say they feel funny holding this feather,” Mané pointed out. “But it’s no more funny than some people sucking the smoke of charred leaves. And you talk about pollution of the earth—what’s more polluting than a plantation of tobacco?”
Mané Pena had a way of putting together information that people found ingenious. “There’s a guy I heard about says we got sensibilities from way back before we were ever born. I mean back generations and generations. So take this other theory I heard about the dinosaurs, that these dinosaurs been changing and changing every generation until now they’re birds. Think about it. Bird sensibilities coming from way back millions of years. Now, that’s a power.”
And Mané had answers for his skeptics. “Well, they say I’m a primitive. But you suck smoke—that is primitive. After all, you can see smoke. Look at TV—they say the pictures are sent through the air by invisible waves.” Mané pointed at the feather. “Principle’s the same here—invisible waves, a force you can’t see.”
After outsiders got used to Mané’s regional tongue and accepted his bare feet, they began to feel that there was really no other way of talking about feathers. Everyone raved over Mané’s charm and erudition disguised by his humble appearance, the bare feet and those foreign university T-shirts he liked to wear. This was, someone said, science in the guise of folklore.