Lourdes was beside herself with worry and guilt. “Maybe it was wrong to come here, to leave the children like that. Poor Tia Carolina. It’s not her fault. What will I do? What will I do? My poor babies. My poor babies,” she sobbed.
Hiroshi tried to console Lourdes. “Be calm. Be calm. We will find a way.”
“Do you think they are well? Do you think they are a—, a—” Lourdes gasped at her worst fears.
“Of course they are alive! Of course! Put this out of your mind!” Hiroshi paced about. “If only those scoundrels would take money. I could unload that GGG stock on them.”
Lourdes shook her head. It was a terrible dilemma: her children for the man she loved, Kazumasa. But where was Kazumasa? If he only knew what had happened, he would turn himself in in exchange for Rubens and Gislaine. He would do it in a moment, without a second thought. Lourdes shuddered. It was a horrible choice. Everything was lost. If she lost her children, she would not care for anything again in this world. And if she lost Kazumasa forever, it would be the same.
“We have to find Kazumasa,” said Hiroshi. “I have sent detectives out everywhere, but whoever is hiding him has managed to make him invisible. I can’t understand it,” Hiroshi threw up his arms. “How do you make a Japanese with a ball invisible?”
“Every other day the radio station gets calls,” said Lourdes.
“Yes, but he can’t be everywhere!”
“We have to keep trying,” insisted Lourdes. “The people who subscribe to the foundation are loyal to Chico Paco. Let them be our eyes. Let the radio be our voice. Let the votive telephone operators be our ears!”
Hiroshi thought Lourdes was beginning to sound like Chico Paco over the radio, but he said nothing. Hiroshi knew now that Lourdes did not love him, but he looked fondly at her tear-stained face. He wished that he could be the one to kiss her fears away, and he envied Kazumasa, wherever that fool cousin of his might be. Hiroshi thought of his own choice to stay in Brazil, to become a Brazilian. He remembered the salty breeze on the beach of Ipanema and smiled to himself. In those days, he had nothing but a soft spot in his heart for this country. He thought about how so many things had changed since Kazumasa had also arrived in Brazil. He thought about his karaoke business and about Kazumasa’s endless wealth. Hiroshi bowed his head. It was all his fault; he had betrayed Kazumasa’s trust. If Hiroshi could not find Kazumasa to confess everything, he would never be the same, and those first beautiful days—when the warm sea had churned the white sands over and over, scrubbing away his shedding skin to reveal the new—would all come to mean nothing.
Lourdes ran to the radio station. The message was sent out everywhere. “Kazumasa! The Japanese with the ball! Call Radio Chico! Call Radio Chico! Call R-A-D-I-O C-H-I-C-O!”
The death of the two feather cultists, remembered by most people via an award-winning color photo spread of their lifeless bodies, their outstretched arms clutching bunches of feathers, had sent out a wave of speculation concerning the darker side of the feather. The photograph of the dead feather worshipers had captured the gruesome tragedy in an extraordinary metaphor of flight; several filters and some fancy developing techniques had produced a representation in which the bodies seemed to be floating through a shiny mercuric matter, which was, anyway, the steellike surface of the Matacão.
It was revealed that the feather worshipers, prior to flight, had attained a trancelike state which resembled the hallucinations of the old LSD trips, similar to those described by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test or to those induced by peyote buttons and described by Carlos Castenada during his discipleship with the Yaqui Indian sage, Don Juan. However, in subsequent interviews with cultists, even those former cultists who claimed to have been deprogrammed, no one would admit that these so-called flights had not actually been real. Everyone who had attained this privileged nirvana were adamant in their claim of having experienced actual, physical flight. When questioned by the prosecutor why no one, neither the air force nor air traffic controllers scanning the Brazilian skies, had picked up any evidence of flying human beings in the atmosphere, all the witnesses asserted that flight could only be accomplished by birds whose forms they had naturally taken. What then had occurred to the two people whose bodies were found spread-eagled on the Matacao? These people, said the chiefs of feather worship, had been abandoned by the very birds that must carry them in flight. It was a clear sign of revenge, a message to the human animal that the destruction of so many beautiful birds without proper ritual and payment to their spirits would no longer be tolerated. The judge, like most people, looked askance at this testimony and sent the chiefs of feather worship to jail for their roles in these deaths.
However, some people began to wonder when new instances of human death were discovered. These bodies, different from the first two, were found a great distance from the Matacão, as far as two or three hundred miles, clutching similar bunches of feathers, their heads buried in nose-dives into the muddy pasture of some poor farmer or skidding across an abandoned highway, all of them a great distance from any tall buildings or cliffs from which they could have leapt or been pushed off. One body was found impaled on the dry branches of a dead tree. Another was discovered by Indians in the deeper regions of the forest. Strangely, the cause of death was always found to be the impact of an immovable object, in this case the earth, meeting that delicate fleshy mass of falling organs, blood, and bones. Some coroners simply called the cause of death “gravity.”
The chiefs of feather worship spoke from prison, crying out that their followers were dying for the sake of birds. All of the bodies discovered were identified as having been members of the feather-worshiping cults. However, one of the names on the list of dead struck the attention of Mané Pena. “Camilo Santos,” Mané Pena murmured in disbelief.
Camilo was a young man who did errands for J.B. Tweep in the offices of GGG. Mané Pena had gotten Camilo the job as a favor for Camilo’s father, one of Mané’s old-time cronies. Mané had not known that Camilo was involved in feather worship. He had always supposed Camilo to be one of those simple feather enthusiasts who used feathers occasionally. Upon further investigation, Mané Pena discovered that Camilo’s body had been found, unlike the others, without the accompanying bunches of feathers, and no one could trace Camilo’s activities to any secret feather worshiping. This raised the horrifying possibility in Mané Pena’s mind that the simple feather user might in fact, unknowingly, be in danger of taking flight. Mané Pena spent sleepless nights pondering the possibility, reworking every piece of evidence surrounding Camilo’s death. For the moment, he kept these thoughts to himself, tortured by the possibility that all his work might suddenly come crashing down. Cause of death: gravity.
For the moment, however, Mané Pena’s worries regarding the feather and flight were overshadowed by another much graver malady. Government officials and the press had generally disregarded the public health reports and outcries regarding the growing number of cases of what seemed to be typhus in and around the Matacao. As is often the case, news of what public health officials were now calling a major epidemic had been relegated to information of minor interest as long as the epidemic remained with the poor and destitute. Even when middle-class families were stricken with the disease, people generally thought that those affected had not taken the proper precautions with their domestic help. But when the hospitals began filling up and, in fact, overflowing with people from the loftiest places in the social pyramid, there was an outcry against any former generalizations regarding the natural selection of the species, especially when the statistics counted more rich people with the disease than poor. This disease, like other diseases, was indiscriminate in its choices; it afflicted rich and poor, young and old, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, clean and dirty, wise and stupid, optimist and pessimist, innocent and cynic, powerful and peon, beatified and atheist, philanthropist and criminal, rational and mad, peaceful and warlike, complex and simple, activist and indifferent, ingenue and pervert, heterosexual and homosexual, and everyone else in between.
Everyone knew someone or had someone in their immediate family with the disease. Soon, everyone on and around the Matacão could recognize the first symptoms of the disease—the red rash that began to cover the neck and ears and the menacing headache that soon overcame the afflicted with such intensity that people were often seen rolling in the streets with their hands pressed to their heads. Then, there was the high unabated fever that racked the body, sending its victims alternately into stupor and delirium. The end was almost inevitable. Nine out of ten people died. There was no cure. This particular strain of typhus did not seem to succumb to any of the normal procedures or recognized remedies. The typical vaccines were pronounced useless. Antibiotics such as Aureomycin, Chloromycetin, and Terramycin and even para-aminobenzoic acid were of no avail. Everything attempted was a mere placebo on a rotting wound. Epidemiologists were dumbfounded by this tide of horror, the prospect of burying hundreds of new victims every day, limited hospital facilities, dying people lying in cots and on mats or on the cold floors in the corridors and on the steps of all the hospitals, incinerators burning day and night to destroy the old clothes and bedclothes of the dead. A cloud of doom settled over the Matacão. People huddled fearfully within their houses, staring at the ghostly visions of their televisions in the dark, watching the figure of death strut and reel and carouse across the screen.
The Matacão itself was suddenly swept clean of devotees and tourists. Instead, it was strewn with votive candles, like an enormous birthday cake, thousands of prayers to match the thousands of dying. At night, the candles flickered throughout its enormous expanse, mimicking the starry skies above. That the Matacão could be the center of so much pain and doom seemed to everyone an impossibility, an evil turn of events.
Even worse was the fact that the disease was not limited to the environs of the Matacão; there was a discernibly widening circle of affliction. At Radio Chico, where the enormous maps usually followed the routes of pilgrims approaching the Matacão, little red tacks now spotted new out-breaks of the epidemic as people telephoned in requesting votive candles for loved ones with the disease. As the little white tacks representing pilgrims seemed to inch their way toward the Matacão, the red tacks multiplied in every direction, spreading farther and farther. Chico Paco himself read the map’s demoralizing tale—the unholy war—saw the puny forces of his pilgrims amid the growing splash of typhoid death. Someone at Radio Chico calculated that the disease was spreading on the map at an average of an inch per day, which meant fifty miles per day. If things continued at this rate, the epidemic could reach as far south as Patagonia and as far north as Canada in three months!
Just as the disease would not remain with the poor, it would not be confined to the Matacão. It had become a national disaster. For the moment, most people assumed that it would confine itself to the Third World. Europeans, Asians, and Americans eager to see the Matacão simply rearranged their vacation plans that year. Wait until they find a vaccine, they thought. Epidemics, plagues, drought, famine, terrorism, war—all things that happened to other people, poor people in the Third World who cavorted with communism and the like. When we travel, we don’t drink the water, some said. Terrorists shouldn’t be negotiated with either, others said.
Mané Pena had not seen his wife, Angustia, since even before he had been granted the honorary title of doctor. The old couple now clung to each other in complete pity, weeping for an irrecoverable past and for their youngest two children, Beto and Marina, now dead and buried. Cause of death: typhus. Mané Pena had rushed to the bedside of the little ones he had been so particularly fond of only to see his wife desperately rubbing a series of feathers over their ears. “To ease the pain,” she held back her tears. “To help them to sleep.” But the feather, always useful in any of their former family crises—the time their son Edivaldo was drawn out of a violent seizure or daughter Suely was cured of thumb-sucking—was now absolutely useless. Mané watched their feverish eyes roll up under the lids, the sweat roll off their foreheads, and their small hands clutch the sheets. Mané kissed their hands and feet and moaned helplessly while Angustia continued tenaciously with the feathers. “Gustia!” Mané wailed. “It’s no use! Can’t you see?”
Angustia bit her lip till the blood ran, watching her husband crush the feathers in his hands, sweeping the little porcelain vases filled with feathers from the television in anger. The colorful feathers floated everywhere, deceitfully. Mané Pena had heard of new cases of fallen bodies, the descriptions of their deaths similar to Camilo’s, ordinary everyday feather users with no connection to the convoluted rituals of the cults. The feather was becoming, in the eyes of its inventor, a monster. And it had not curbed the terrible disease, had not even demonstrated a ray of hope, much less eased the pain of his children’s deaths. Mané Pena wept, cried out against the deception of his dubious fortune. In less than a week, he would join his buried children. Cause of death: typhus.
Dona Angustia was forced to tie Mané to the bed, and although she had closed the shutters and filled the open chinks with pieces of cloth, the neighbors could hear his continuous screams for five days and five nights. Angustia, in desperation, literally sawed at her poor husband’s ears with the powerless tanager feather. It was as if all the pain, irritation and emotions so carefully absorbed by the once-indefatigable feather had suddenly released themselves in a cursed torrent. So torn were Mané Pena’s ears that the morticians were forced to sew the old leathery ears back into place before displaying the body to the paltry remnants of Mané Pena’s family, friends, colleagues, students, and close associates. Chico Paco gazed upon his old mentor, dressed in the striped tailored suit he had worn on only two occasions—the autograph party for his autobiography and the conferring of his doctorate. Chico Paco noticed with sadness that the morticians had found a shiny pair of black shoes into which they had smashed Mané Pena’s callused feet. Former admirers and ordinary feather users, who all owed their habits to the Father of Featherology, remained in their homes, cowering, watching only one of many sad processions to the graveyard. International telegrams and cards of sympathy fluttered in, but Mané Pena’s secretary, Carlos, had already died several months before.