Man Who Was Late (16 page)
Authors: Louis Begley
The sun had declined in the direction of the mountain. Ben looked out the window at the huge rectangular pool, now partly shaded, and beyond, toward the bay. Between the wing of the hotel and the new apartment building facing it he could see only a slice of deep blue. It occurred to him that he could think about Véronique only a little bit at a time, like Swann’s father about his beloved late wife. Possibly, he could not remain angry very long either. There were huge beach towels in the bathroom scrolled with the name of the hotel. He went down to the pool. In the area still in the sun, on deck chairs, around little tables, sat or reclined men and women with bodies the color of ancient gold, darker than the chains on their necks and wrists. Their stomachs were incredibly flat. Self-control, constant exercise, or secret successes of Brazilian plastic surgery? Gentle voices in incessant talk surrounded him—Ben thought it was like an aviary with no roof where the birds had been taught to speak Russian. That was the true sound of Carioca Portuguese. A solitary, elderly figure was doing exquisitely slow laps up and down the pool. Ben
found a chair for his towel, made the diving board thump, and swam until his eyes could no longer bear the sting of the chlorine.
He did not call Véronique or Paris at dawn. Having taken a new sort of sleeping pill recently prescribed by his doctor for travel insomnia, he slept without dreaming. Then, rested but feeling somehow disconnected from his surroundings and from the task at hand, he read over his notes. The coffee tasted bitter. Once more, he confirmed his dislike for papaya. On the other hand, the guava jelly and white cheese, those staples of a Brazilian morning, began to make him feel that he might yet recover the alacrity of spirit and cheer of mind he badly needed. In
O Globo
he parsed out a description of Willy Brandt kneeling at the monument to the dead of the Warsaw ghetto, visibly overcome by emotion. A well-done background paragraph in the article discussed the recent recognition of the Oder-Neisse line, the burning of the ghetto in 1943, the ultimate destruction of Warsaw a little over a year later, and the extraordinary care with which Poles had rebuilt their capital. Always when he found himself in a strange city, Ben skimmed the pages of the telephone directory, looking for his own name and other surprises. The Rio book listed many Jewish names, extravagantly spelled. Feinbaum from Galicia had become Vainboim. Others retained special, Polish transliterations: Bernsztajn instead of the banal Bernstein; Grynszpan, Lakman, Szpigel, others. They were presumably the clever ones who had smelled a rat in ’36 or ’37 and hightailed it to the land of the coffee bean and moon-shaped beaches—and their happy descendants. It was nice that they too had
O Globo
to cheer them at breakfast.
He shook himself and summoned the lawyers. At eleven, they were still arguing in his living room. He was glad to leave them there. They would find it easier to see the matter his way once he was out the door.
The group was assembled by the time he came downstairs—the Japanese in greater number than he might have wished; van Oppers, the head of the Belgian consortium; and Rawlson, representing the American team and the senior of his Chicago lawyers, both grim and concentrated, breast pockets bulging with ballpoint pens and mechanical pencils. Carvalho, the manager of Rawlson’s Rio subsidiary, resplendent in hand-stitched gabardine, was busy giving directions to the drivers. Ben, van Oppers, and Mr. Nagao got into the same car. Mr. Yoshida, still surprised to have arrived in Rio on a different flight than Ben’s, was not sure what he should do. Ben advised him to hang back. Attending the meeting could only lead to overly hasty arrangements. He should come to the celebratory lunch, if there was to be one.
When your turn comes, don’t make an opening statement, he advised Mr. Nagao, just tell the minister how honored you are to be included in the meeting. Let Fritzler and the minister do the talking, as they must if we wait long enough. They won’t be able to tolerate the silence. Then, when the World Bank’s flank is exposed, I will explain that the Belgian and Japanese groups are prepared to trust everybody—the Bank, Rawlson, the Brazilian side—that thanks to the cooperation of Japanese city banks, present even now in Rio though not at the meeting, the funds to build this project have been committed, the market is waiting for the product, but that the funds will remain blocked unless everyone agrees to a simple,
workable scheme. This scheme I have right here, written out on one page. You will see: once the minister feels frustrated enough it won’t even be necessary to convince him. The Bank will suddenly see that the meeting is almost over and it has no proposal of its own on the table. That’s when they will accept ours, rather than have every journalist in Brazil write that the World Bank’s representatives sabotaged the Pedra Branca project. McNamara wouldn’t be amused. Let time and inertia work for us.
The meeting was over. The minister invited the Bank representatives and the other participants in the project to initial Ben’s paper and then he initialed it himself. An important step has been taken on the road to Brazil’s development, he declared. Ben realized that his face had turned pink with pleasure, the shade of the summer necktie he was wearing. He told me that he had wished someone who cared about who he really was had been there to see him pull it off—his mother and father were dead, but perhaps Véronique, except that she wouldn’t have been able to keep herself from giggling, or for that matter myself. Instead he posed for photographs with the minister, van Oppers, Mr. Nagao, and Rawlson, first for members of Mr. Nagao’s staff, each of whom seemed equipped with a camera, and then for journalists and a television crew. The suspense was over. After lunch, he would draft a press release; the next order of business, while the group was still assembled in Rio, was to pin down the text of the mortgage-sharing agreement and to settle on a schedule for the preparation and signing of contracts. This was lawyers’ work. He wanted it done quickly. The thought of lawyers reminded him of Paul and therefore
Véronique and caused an unpleasant contraction in his heart. For that was his other task for the afternoon: he must write to Véronique.
Undated draft of letter from Ben to Véronique (translated from the French by me):
My love,
I have had your letter since yesterday; it languished here for too many days while I was en route to Tokyo and then back to Rio, confused by these devilish changes in time zones, reluctant to call you even when the hour seemed perhaps propitious, reluctant to write. I don’t trust your concierge. She is perfectly capable of purloining mail and she may have been incited to do so. This letter will get to you quickly and safely. I am entrusting it to a charming young Frenchman who leaves for Paris tomorrow and will deliver it into the very hands of Madame Duhot. She will telephone you and make further arrangements. When you speak to her, please say how much her discretion and loyalty have meant to us.
What a brave girl you are! They might have killed and skinned you (like the poor beast you finally cornered that afternoon) after you finished your remarkable after-dinner speech—perhaps by now they have, but I rather think not. Such things are more likely done when the tribe is still gathered, an unprogrammed but logical prolongation of the rite being celebrated. That you were able to write to me
from Paris after the weekend inclines me to think they resisted—perhaps never truly felt—the urge for instant retribution and purification. On the other hand, they are deep and calculating. Possibly, they are still thinking it all over, deciding what to do. “Vengeance is a dish that’s best eaten cold.” I can’t recall who said it, perhaps it’s just a proverb, but it might have been invented with your Decazes in mind. I wrote these last sentences just to scare myself.
All this is by way of a lighthearted prologue. One more misguided attempt to be funny! You know—I cannot doubt it for a moment—I adore you, and my happiness (you have accustomed me to think that I am capable of being happy) has only you as the source. Incredible though it is, you have also accustomed me to believe that you love me. So, since Paul is not giving up (I admire him for it), you are free to choose what will follow. I have told you what I am like inside—barren, dark, and desperate—and you have had some opportunities (perhaps insufficient) to see that it is not some grotesque form of coquetry that leads me to speak of myself in such terms. Also, I am not as rich as I seem. My income is large, but I have spent my money like a man who has no accounts to render to anyone but himself, and no one’s future to care about. Such capital as I have is locked up in my firm and at the risk of its business. There will be no inheritances from parents or celibate aunts and uncles, no farms or houses in the country,
no buildings behind the Opéra slowly turning into mountains of ducats.
If we are lucky and you have custody of Laurent, he will have a stepfather to grow up with instead of a father. Will I be a good stepfather? It is certain that I like children. And, as I love you, I will probably in time become very fond of Laurent—I certainly loved the twins I always talk about when I was their stepfather. But I think that, along the way, I have lost some quality of the heart—warmth? spontaneity?—which young children need. I doubt Laurent will believe that I love him or that he will love me, and I fear the consequences. Right or wrong, my anxiety is real, and therefore you should take it into account. Whatever is to become of me, I implore you to be prudent.
I must remain here a little longer—a matter of days, I think—and then, the moment I have finished, I will hurry back, possibly via Tokyo. I suppose that by then you will, in any case, be in Verbier with Laurent. In fact, I imagine you now in the red snowsuit and helmet I have so admired in photographs, speeding past astonished mortals, the sun brilliant and high, your upturned, smiling face turning the color of honey.
Shall I add a word about the activities here? We triumphed this morning, and the minister approved everything one might have reasonably expected, and then we drank to this “white stone” project at a
lengthy, solemn lunch given at the Jockey Club. Nothing more different from the institution at rue Rabelais can be imagined: a pompous, modern office building in downtown Rio, with a branch at the racetrack near the beach at Gávea; one can even have one’s hair cut here. I was eager to leave and write this letter, but even so I could not help being amused. Brazilian, American, Belgian, and Japanese flags were everywhere—tiny ones on tables, bigger versions, like bouquets of dried flowers fastened to walls—a legion of waiters in white gloves sticking their fingers into the sauce, and heavy local red wine. The minister is like a mountain, with one of those well-massaged bodies—does he have himself worked on at this very club?—and surprisingly tiny feet and hands, pomaded hair parted in the middle, and the best black silk suit I have ever seen, with the sort of cut and detail work one has not encountered in Europe since the war. I was on the verge of asking him for the name of his tailor and then remembered I wouldn’t be here long enough to have even a first fitting. My Belgian pals lapsed into absolute mutism. Contentment? Effort of shoveling in and digesting the
feijoada completa?
I will never know. As Rawlson couldn’t understand a word of the minister’s English, I was left with the burden of conversation. Tonight, more conversation. I suppose I will dine with van Oppers, Nagao, and Yoshida—and however many acolytes they choose to bring along.
Now I will leave you to go for a swim in the ocean. I should have said that I will
try
to swim. The breakers look regular and friendly from a distance but close up they are probably terrifying.
Fervently and humbly I kiss you in each particular, in each part, lingering most you know where.
Ben
In fact, during that afternoon, possibly after he wrote, corrected, and copied the letter, Ben decided that he would not leave Brazil as soon as his work was done. It would have been possible to finish the matters requiring his personal attention in Rio by the next morning, if he had insisted, so that he could have caught the night flight to New York, and then, after a day spent at the office, he could have gone on to Paris. Or he could have gone to Paris via Tokyo, as he had written to Véronique that he might. But a profound, paralyzing lassitude was overtaking him, a need to yawn, stretch, and sleep. He called his friend Carvalho and asked if there was any place on the seashore near Rio where he could, for a few days, lie in the sun and swim. He didn’t want to stay in the city: the beach was too crowded, the water in front of the hotel was too rough and at times possessed a curious smell, and the pool at the Copacabana, though better than most pools, was chlorinated, boring, and for the best part of the afternoon shaded from the sun.
Carvalho thought the mountains would be better and healthier and offered to take Ben to his own place in Petrópolis, above Rio, but Ben insisted on the sea. There were two
possibilities: Cabo Frio to the north, which was newly chic and discovered by the French, but because of its vegetation would remind Ben of Montauk rather than East Hampton, or, to the south, Angra dos Reis, the domain of the middle class, where no foreigner had ever set foot. There was a small, somewhat primitive hotel Carvalho knew, accessible by car if one wanted to drive for eight hours over a winding mountain road or in less than an hour by a single-engine plane Ben could charter. The hotel had a clientele of families with children, but Carvalho thought a quiet room might be available. Ben could rent a fisherman’s motorboat and go each morning to a different, remote, and completely deserted beach. The bay, Carvalho guaranteed him, was the most beautiful in the world, almost untouched by progress. If he was willing to struggle in Spanish and Portuguese to make himself understood, that was where Ben should go. Ben agreed. Angra sounded like the realization of a forgotten dream. He asked Carvalho to help him book a room and an airplane.
Then he went swimming after all. The beach, across the street from the hotel, was still full of people. At its edge, wizened dark men sold large cloth kites the shape and color of
araras
. Clutches of them strained on strings tied to posts fixed in the sand. Other men just like them, heavy metal containers hung on each side of their bodies, walked among the supine sunbathers offering a cold
mate
drink and fruit juices. Every hundred meters or so a volleyball game of what seemed professional quality was in progress. Ben walked slowly toward the water, dazzled by the light, which he saw for the first time that day without the filter of sunglasses or
tinted windows, once more marveling at the beauty of the hoary, prehistoric shape of the Pao de Acucar beyond the huge rock at the end of the beach, beyond the laughter and talk all around him. These were the poor people. He had learned from Carvalho and others that Copacabana, now that it could be reached by bus, was the preserve of modest shop and office employees and workers and youngsters from the
favela
. Boys and girls of the middle class were to be seen at Ipanema and Leblon, perhaps the beaches beyond. The rich were in the shade of beach umbrellas at the swimming pools of the Country Club in Ipanema or the Yacht Club or perhaps the Copacabana Hotel. Living in penthouses of certain gleaming apartment buildings on avenida Atlântica, sometimes they ventured out for an early morning walk on the beach, their bodies covered against the sun. Except for a natural sallowness, the faces of the rich were as pale as Ben’s. Although no one looked at him—he felt that he was passing quite unseen—he was acutely conscious of the whiteness of his body and his floppy Brooks Brothers trunks. In France, on the Côte d’Azur and in Porquerolles, those trunks had certainly stood out, a sign of a certain elegance among the ambient bikinis. Here they connoted deprivation, absence of ease; they hung on him, he thought, like the odd-shaped, baggy clothes he had worn as a refugee. Occasionally he saw other white bodies on the sand, lying facedown, in swimming gear similar to his, angry red flush covering the shoulder blades, backs of arms, the mounds of fat pushed up by the elastic at the waist. Were they all airline stewards, he wondered, or Dutch environmentalists traveling on worldwide passes?