Where was Tania Aparecida now, Batista asked himself. Was it Rome she had written on the pigeon express message? Zurich? Amsterdam? He could not remember. Where was she when he needed her? Who was she with? What was she up to? She sent him packages from everywhere she went, trinkets and souvenirs, things, she said, that had reminded her of him: a postcard of Au Pigeon Voyageur in Lille, France, monument to the twenty thousand pigeons killed in action during World War I; a painted porcelain Hummell doll with a dove on his finger; a Donald Duck hat; a photographic encyclopedia of birds; a stuffed replica from the Smithsonian of Cher Ami; the famous homer who in 1918 saved the “Lost Battalion”; and so forth. The packages came daily, but Batista had lost the desire to figure out what about the presents reminded Tania Aparecida of him. He threw the unopened packages in a pile angrily. When was that woman coming back?
Djapan Pigeon Communications International, he mumbled to himself. Thanks to Tania Aparecida, they were an international communications system, but being able to communicate for free with Tania Aparecida over thousands of miles seemed a lousy trade-off to having her right there in bed with him. How she missed her dear Batista—that message had traveled along the distant pigeon routes, but there she was, still out there somewhere in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America.
Batista was alternately consumed with jealousy and depressed with his inability to treat their separation with nonchalance. He imagined Tania Aparecida in every sort of situation of infidelity. He tossed in his bed at night with visions of Tania Aparecida in the arms of another man or even several men. He envisioned her escorted into fancy hotels and restaurants, drinking expensive wines out of stemmed crystal glasses, flaunting her hips or exposing her legs, making seductive passes, her brown eyes narrowing under their thick lashes. He imagined the men of every race, creed, religion, and color running their foreign tongues up and down the curve of her neck and touching all those secret places only he was supposed to know. The blood rushed to Batista’s head at the very thought. He flushed purple and spit venom, but Tania Aparecida did not return. There was always one more place to see, one more deal to close, one more client to keep at bay. “I’ll be home by your birthday, darling,” Tania Aparecida would promise, only to break her promise and send him a singing telegram in her stead. “That woman can go to hell!” Batista screamed at the poor baritone who choked on the word happy and ran off in a fright, forgetting to deliver the bouquet of flowers that went with the telegram.
Tania Aparecida’s international life was a whirlwind of meetings and deals. How little did she realize that her first meeting, when she had put on her very best dress and shoes and persuaded that cute old man Carlos Rodrigues of the Pomba Soap Company that Djapan Pigeon Enterprises could put his company on the map—that meeting would be the prototype for all future encounters. Now she had a dress for every sort of client and situation.
As Batista had long known, Tania Aparecida had a phenomenal head for figures, and she never forgot a face or a name. A captivating smile, a quick mind for details, a voice full of charm and resonance—Tania Aparecida herself was a woman few could forget. “If only they’d run that country the way this woman runs her business!”
“Pigeons are very clean and quiet,” Tania Aparecida would say. “You can keep them practically anywhere. Djapan Enterprises will provide you with a starting couple or a larger brood, if you like. We show you how to build your roosts, and we start you with a three-month supply of our famous feed. Once your brood is established, which doesn’t take very long at all, you are ready to make them available for our communications network. Then, we provide you with messenger tubes, sample greeting messages, and a map of our network posts. The larger your brood, of course, the more messages you will be able to handle, but we believe it is best to start out small. So you begin with one network post, exchanging your birds back and forth. As you become more comfortable with our network, you can grow with us and add on more network posts.” Tania Aparecida was able to convey this information with such charm that people everywhere seriously considered starting a network post in the same manner that they might consider buying Tupperware.
“Now, we have a starting fee, the amount depending on how large a brood you are willing to start with. If you have a large area and more capital, you can use our Plan B or C, but most people start with a couple and Plan A, and they can grow from there. Some clients do not want to get too big, and they simply limit their messages. Djapan is very flexible that way. We work with a lot of mothers who are busy at home with their children and who can make a little extra money on the side. I know one woman, Dona Clara in Campo Verde, who buys all her groceries from her profits in the network.” People always liked Tania Aparecida’s personal way of talking. They all thought of Dona Clara and her six children and how the network was feeding her family.
“Now, we have monthly membership dues for using the network and a per-message service fee, which is charged to the customer, of course. Besides putting you on the Djapan network map, membership entitles you to our special services—our pigeon wellness hotline, veterinarians and medicines at a discount, our professional advice, and our network newsletter.”
If Batista could hear his Tania Cidinha, he might have been impressed, but he had no idea. He got the newsletter, which was now published in several languages; it amused him to read about himself, but he wondered why Tania Aparecida insisted on putting a new squab recipe in the cooking column every week. He had seen the network map grow into a mass of posts over the globe. He knew that their operation was big, but he had no real sense of it. He was too busy breeding new pigeons to cover these distances. All he knew was that Tania Aparecida was far away. It made very little difference how far. Batista’s jealous imagination could follow Tania Aparecida to the next room or to the moon.
Tania Aparecida would have laughed if she could have known Batista’s imagination, which placed her in the midst of glamour and international escapades. Tania Aparecida sold network posts all over the world in basically the same manner she had sold them in Brazil: door to door. If Batista imagined Tania Aparecida hobnobbing with men in pinstripe suits, wining and dining them, he was far removed from the reality of a pigeon communication business, which had to be built in a series of steps from one neighborhood to the next. It was something like setting up hotdog stands or small post offices everywhere. Certainly Tania Aparecida was no stranger to the big cities and grand hotels, but just as setting up a coke machine in a lobby did not require speaking with the president of the company, neither did establishing a pigeon post.
That Tania Aparecida attracted attention and admiration, there was no doubt. If people wanted to look, what was it to her? If it helped sales, then all the better. Tania Aparecida was indiscriminately charming, but there was something about her, a wanderlust, which kept her from staying anywhere long enough to form attachments, no matter how friendly or attractive the admirer. Perhaps, it was part of something the Brazilians called saudades, the bittersweet sensation of exuberant but temporary joy. To have it all the time, you have to keep moving on and savoring memories. It was something like putting a pack of misbehaving kids to bed after a very wearing day and spending the evening poring lovingly over an album of photographs of the same naughty kids. The reality of love and life with Batista was so much sweeter at a distance; Tania Aparecida could forget Batista’s insane jealousy, his volatile fits, their crazed fighting. But each time, when the memory swelled so deeply and so painfully that Tania Aparecida could only think of rushing back to Batista’s arms, an angry message would come through the network, betraying Batista’s jealousy and startling Tania Aparecida’s sense of reality. “I will teach that man a lesson,” she would say to herself.
It was possible that absence and time would make Batista forget as well. Months of absence were quickly turning into years. But people who have a propensity for jealousy are usually the sort who cannot forget, and Batista could not forget. Work was a salve, but when the evenings came, there was no work. So it was with more and more frequency that he wandered over to Hiro’s to find companionship and to sing his loneliness away. As always, the women flocked around him, dropping their eyes and their hints. Every evening, Batista strode into Hiro’s with a new determination to find some sort of revenge for Tania Aparecida’s absence. He found the most attractive woman in the nightclub and danced and drank with her all night, but that was all. He could not follow her out. Sometimes he paid the taxi driver to take off without him. Or he made a trip to the men’s room his excuse to slip out. The women talked among themselves; they badgered and laughed at him, but they could not help loving him. Later, some of them boasted having been with him; he did not contradict this. It would seem embarrassing not to have won such a claim, so after a while, all the women lied about their passionate rendezvous with Batista. Everything about Batista’s jealousy was a wild fabrication, but he could not see this.
Michelle Mabelle, who was nearing the last months of her pregnancy, still managed to find a way to get to Hiro’s with Napoleon and sing Catherine Deneuve’s old hit songs. Besides her usual repertoire of French songs, Michelle liked to sing some of the new protest songs written by members of the trialectics movement. “We shall overcome the use of one more thumb,” and so forth. Then there was a tropical bird-call song with the authentic songs of birds in their natural surrounding, which Michelle loved more than anything.
Batista noticed the French bird professor in her modified form. He noticed also that she now came alone to Hiro’s, and he wondered about this.
“I’m communing with music, you see,” she said, pointing at her large belly. “I have so much on my mind lately. It must not be good for these unborn ones to have me so pensive. Music cleanses the spirit.”
Batista did not know what Michelle Mabelle could have on her mind lately, unless it was all the controversy about the conservation of birds.