Dr. Mané Pena (recently conferred an honorary degree by the Matacão University) walked barefoot away from the podium and sat down amid a chorus of cheers and lingering applause. Mané’s insistence that he owed all of his fame to his secretary, Carlos, was taken as so much false modesty. He was known throughout the world as the Father of Featherology. Thanks to Carlos, Mané Pena was the author and coauthor of numerous books and articles on featherology, none of which he himself could read, including the introduction to the famous ten-volume, leather-bound Encyclopedia of Feathers. His videotaped courses in featherology were translated into several languages and distributed to schools all over the world. He had been interviewed nationally and internationally. He was considered the foremost authority on feathers, corresponding with researchers from all over the world, heading seminars and commissions, directing the university research institute, dedicating his life to feathers. For reasons Mané Pena could not explain, his life had changed.
Mané’s wife Angustia and the younger of their many children had long since moved back to the small town where Angustia had been born. One day, Dona Angustia got tired of feather talk, the buzzer on Mané’s fancy watch, autograph parties for books she could not read, photographs of old Mané on the Matacão at sunset and the constant crowd of pushy interviewers and researchers. She was afraid of the telephone machine and always spoke before the beep. She was embarrassed to answer questions in interviews, pulling at the hems of her short cotton-print dresses and curling her toes into the rubber thongs to hide her rough feet. Mané Pena had stepped, barefoot, into a strange world where Angustia could not follow. She wondered where the old Mané Pena had disappeared to, longed for the old days when she could send one of their youngsters to the open café to fetch her husband for dinner. She took the embroidered lace towels off the tables and the TV, hauled off the sofa she had brought with her from her first marriage, packed the young ones up and left.
The older children had already slipped off one by one to a variety of jobs in distant cities in Brazil. Mané Pena rarely saw any of his family anymore. He missed the little ones, Beto and Marina, and all the grandchildren who once drifted in and out of his house. He missed talking to the youngsters. “Is this Junior’s boy?” he would enjoy guessing with Angustia. Or “This one looks like Toninho did when he was a kid, eh Gustinha!” He liked his children best when they were young, their hands small, their feet bare and padding around the house, scurrying in bands to greet him in the streets. But now they were all gone. Even Chico Paco, who could understand Mané’s predicament, did not come around after Angustia and the family had left. It was not the same, not the same full house of poor but generous people who shared everything they had. And, too, Chico Paco was now so busy with Radio Chico.
Mané Pena whisked a feather over his ear philosophically and pressed the buttons on the remote control for his color TV. This, he was told, was the price one paid for progress, for dedication to an ideal. He fastforwarded to lecture no.7, in which he heard himself describe the invisible lines connecting points on the earlobe to all life. There was once a point on his lobe that attached him to Angustia and points attaching him to every member in his family. He had explained that the feather had a way of sorting these lines out, of untangling the confusion in a big family. Now there was nothing connecting him to any of them. It was as if these buttons on his remote control had suddenly been reprogrammed to bring up a whole new set of programs, as if his TV were suddenly made to pick up signals from some foreign country like the United States. All the old shows he loved so well, all the old soap operas, everything had suddenly been made to come out somehow differently. Everything was so much finer; nobody picked their teeth or squatted at the crossroads to contemplate the right way. Everything seemed to work; all time was taken up with a purpose. And yet, Mané missed the old jokes, the old characters, the simple plate piled high with rice and beans and manioc. He was sad, but he had been told that history would exonerate him in the end. By then he would be dead, but in the meantime, he consoled himself with the company of his color TV, which for the moment still brought him the same old programs every day.
Mané Pena talked to Chico Paco on the phone. “Well, my son. How are you?”
“Gilberto and my mother are here now, you know.”
“Gilberto? Your friend who was cured by the miracle?”
“The same.”
“You sound tired.”
“They’re driving me crazy.”
“Is that a fact?”
“It’s not that I’m not happy they are here. I had prayed to Saint George for them to come.”
“I remember. This Gilberto can walk now, can’t he?”
“That’s the problem. Gilberto can walk, climb, jump, run, crawl. He’s like a baby—no, more like a monkey. He gets into everything. Yesterday I found him crawling up the side of our building.”
Mané thought about this. “He must be like me. You won’t find me in one of those metal boxes that go up and down.”
“Elevators? No, Mané, he loves elevators. The second day he was here, he rode up and down all day. All day!”
“What about your mother?”
“I had to build her a clay stove.”
“Gustinha used to swear by them.”
“I had to build the clay stove in my apartment, Mané.”
“I don’t know how you can live in that beehive.”
“They bring up wood every day for the stove.”
“If you didn’t live on top of that beehive, I’d come eat your mother’s cooking,” laughed Mané Pena.
“She’s raising chickens, too,” sighed Chico Paco. “And she plants vegetables in the bathtub.”
“We old people are stuck in our ways,” observed Mané Pena.
“What about you, Mané?” asked Chico Paco.
“Nothing’s the same since that woman left,” Mané Pena shook his head. “I always tell them that a feather can’t replace a good woman.”
Chico Paco heard the sadness in Mané Pena’s voice. It was a sadness that he was not used to hearing from him. Mané had always been a man of balance. Chico Paco could not imagine Mané getting upset about anything. When the government handed Mané a ravaged piece of the forest, Mané signed his mark on the dotted line. One-half of his children had died at birth, but he had just sighed. When the priest came around and told him that after twenty pregnancies his wife should consider taking her temperature, he agreed. When his first wife died from meningitis and a lack of medical facilities, he bowed his head. When powdered milk mixed with an impure water source spread worms and dysentery among his grandchildren, he shook his head. When sauva ants devoured his crops, he threw up his hands. When the drought came and the sun seared the land and decimated his fields, he prayed for rain. When the rains finally came and washed the land away, Mané shrugged. What could poor people expect? He had heard that some poor people had gotten angry, formed unions, and they had been killed. It wasn’t just that rubber tapper, Mendes, back in the old days (Mané Pena had seen the movie on TV; he noticed it was dubbed); it had always been that way. Poor people survived, or they got killed. Mané Pena pressed the feather over his ear. As he had told Batista, a man needed tranquillity. But Chico Paco heard the sadness, the loneliness in Mané Pena’s voice. It was one thing to weather hardship with others, but it was another to stand alone.
Lately, however, Mané Pena had not had much time to think about being lonely. “There’s this big to-do over birds, you know,” he told Chico Paco. It was true. There was a slowly escalating hubbub from a growing group of naturalists who were contesting the use of the feather. The list of petitioners was long, everyone from the membership of the Audubon Society to groups of schoolchildren in Ranger Rick Clubs, all concerned about the preservation and protection of birds, especially those nearing extinction. There were also vegetarians in leather jackets and tree lovers with digital sketch pads, who often picketed Mané’s lectures, accosting him with wild threats, following him everywhere, holding candlelight vigils and making videos of performance-art pieces in front of his house.
Mané Pena, armed with his feather, was quite patient with all the protest. On the other hand, many Brazilians expressed indignation at the presence of these foreigners who came from big cities with high crime rates and serious drug problems and who arrived via Varig, sipping expensive wines and pecking at cold salmon on rye, to criticize a national figure raised from humble beginnings and a lucrative source of commerce for an impoverished country.
Mané Pena, however, was simple enough to recognize the moral dilemma raised by the use of the feather for human well-being and the human avarice related to the destruction of thousands of beautiful and often extremely rare birds. “They are right, you know,” Mané said to Carlos, who read the letters signed by hundreds of petitioners. “These are the ones that really get you,” he said, pointing to the packets of pencil-scrawled notes from children, accompanied by crayon drawings of birds being killed or poor featherless birds with tears dribbling to the bottom of the pages. Mané sighed.
As the Father of Featherology, Mané Pena had to take an official stand: he and his institute opposed the senseless killing of birds for their feathers for purely decorative uses, such as in costumes, in headdresses, or on hats, and supported efforts to create laws for stricter control of the commercial production of feathers. (The few Indians left living in the forest who continued to practice the ancient traditions were, of course, excluded from these restrictions.) However, Mané Pena, the official statement read, continued to support the use of feathers for the greater cause of science and human health.
For the moment, Mané Pena’s diplomacy was supported by multinationals, top-echelon executives, single parents with full-time jobs, politicians, front-line soldiers, computer programmers, advertising art directors, supermarket checkers, high-tech designers, and anyone in a position of defense, stress, wakefulness, or excitement. A novel, attractive, clean, healthy, and legal habit had been discovered which virtually replaced smoking, chewing gum, alcohol, and coffee. With a little research or the help of a feather consultant, one could discover the correct feather for one’s situation and personality. The feather, people claimed, was beneficial for every sort of situation. Couples going through divorce had given testimony to the rational and balancing effect of the feather on their emotional states. Law students claimed the feather was a tremendous aid in passing bar exams. Some people even claimed it had improved their sexual lives. Smokers were changing over to the feather in droves. Companies were sponsoring feather campaigns to encourage their employees to support a clean working environment. In some public places, one could already see signs segregating “Smokers” and “Feather Users.” Feather-vending machines were becoming commonplace and could usually be found next to the coke machines. Everywhere, people were proclaiming the wonderful effects of the feather on their working, social, and private lives.
At the same time, there was a growing cult of people who were not simply feather enthusiasts but feather worshipers. Unlike the feather user who dabbled in the feather, following Mané Pena’s famous and usually abridged Guide to the Feather and subscribing to one feather magazine or another, feather worshipers applied mystical and mythical meanings and powers to the use of the feather. There were secret chapters of feather worshipers, who initiated members into their societies, taught methods of voodoo and black magic associated with certain bird feathers and moved, in general, to control the physical and social world around them. Some former members, who claimed to have been brainwashed and subsequently deprogrammed, spoke of seances to call down the spirits of birds, the unleashing of power in certain feathers to produce hallucinations, intense training in bird language and the always dangling promise of the potential power of flight. It was discovered, in a case shrouded in mystery, that two known members of a cult had thrown themselves from the roof of a twenty-five-story condo on the Matacão. Their bodies were found plastered to the shiny surface, their hands clutching bunches of feathers. Mané Pena publicly denounced the secret feather cults as weird aberrations that had abandoned the sacred and life-giving powers of the feather in favor of unscientific pursuits and evil.
No matter what Mané Pena’s personal or official opinion regarding the use and commercialization of the feather was, it was evident to everyone that birds everywhere were in grave trouble. Although GGG Enterprises had the largest legal concession on the purchase of feathers around the Matacão, smaller entities, both legal and illegal, were already operating in the area and ripping the feathers off every sort of bird imaginable. GGG Enterprises, officially, dealt only with legal operations that farmed parrots in large quantities, but good deals on the black market were difficult to pass up. On the Matacão, it was a simple matter to make contact with an illegal dealer in rare feathers. Everyone was selling them. Depending on the feather, a dealer could get an enormous amount of money from an unsuspecting tourist. The consumer was often wise to buy from an authorized dealer who offered some sort of warranty; entire shipments of feathers were often found to be chicken feathers dipped in dye to resemble parrot plummage. Despite the risk of imitations, the black-market trade was heavily exploited; but far greater were the unknown quantities of precious feathers which took flight via various smuggling routes, across the Andes to Peru or the Guyana Highlands into Venezuela.
Those dealers who had held off from signing long-term contracts for their feathers found that their gamble had paid off. The price of feathers of all types inflated every month by 100 percent. For feathers, the sky seemed to be the limit. There was a story going around that a rare tanager feather of exquisite coloring had gone for $250,000 at a recent auction. The value of feathers created new difficulties for such places as zoos and gardens with aviaries. These public places now had to be guarded twenty-four hours a day by police. The zoo in Rio de Janeiro had already been robbed of several of its finest Amazonian birds on five different occasions. Individuals with birds had to install sophisticated electronic detection systems to protect against pilferage. Some bird owners caged their birds behind heavy iron grids to protect them both from robbers and from the savage dogs used to patrol the cages. Batista, for example, after an article restating Mané Pena’s old preference for pigeon feathers appeared, was forced to acquire fierce dogs and hire guards to protect his Djapan champions. Even dead birds were no longer safe. The natural history museums in several cities had reported the loss of many of their stuffed parrots, storks, and cockatoos.
Naturally, the success of the feather gave rise to speculation about imitations. As far as anyone could tell, dyed chicken feathers were perfectly satisfactory implements in most cases and for most purposes. It was as Mané Pena had always maintained: the feather depended on the skill of the user. Of course, there had been other discoveries about the greater energy-absorbing powers in rarer feathers, which led executives and others with high-pressure jobs to demand more expensive feathers, but most people were into feathers for appearance’s sake. Those who followed the trends, who carried feathers in order to be popular, could easily be accommodated by chicken feathers. Predictably, it was exactly these people who rejected cheaper feathers. Still, research went forward in the attempt to create a successful plastic feather that would perfectly imitate that of the rare tanager and could be mass-produced for an eager populace.
Mané Pena looked at two feathers J.B. had sent to him. One was real, the other made of Matacão plastic. He could not tell the difference. Mané scratched his head. He felt confused. He did not want to think about this problem. He looked at his television, which he never turned off anymore. He missed noise, and the noise from that machine seemed to comfort him. He stared at the TV, and then he stared at the two feathers. He pressed the buttons on his remote control. Lately he enjoyed watching himself give lectures in languages he could not understand. He liked to watch his own mouth moving with these strange noises coming out. He found it especially amusing to hear himself talk Chinese or Japanese. Often he would call Carlos, putting the receiver up to the TV and ask, “Carlos! What language am I speaking now?” Today, it was Russian or German. He stared past the feathers at himself—the same toothless grin, the same gray stubble of unshaved beard, the strange language flowing from his lips—and fell asleep.