Feast Days

“So you aren’t personally implicated.”

“Don’t talk about this when Marcos is around, by the way,” he said.

“Not that any of this would be news to him.”

Iara arrived at the restaurant with tears in her eyes. I thought perhaps she had been arguing with Marcos and was trying to wipe away the evidence. But this wasn’t the case; Marcos had water in his eyes as well. They said there was a protest. They said the police had used tear gas while they were trying to cross the avenue where the protestors were marching. They said they saw a police officer swing at a young man with his truncheon. The restaurant served Lebanese food. The air was warm, an aroma of coriander and mint. The table linens were paisley. They went to the bathroom to wash the gas out of their eyes.

“What were they protesting?”

“An increase in the bus fare.”

“Was it a large increase?”

“Twenty centavos.”

“They were protesting twenty centavos?”

The avenue where the protestors were marching was named in memory of a revolt in São Paulo in 1932, against President Getúlio Vargas, who ruled without a constitution. The revolt came after popular demonstrations across the state and the killing of four student protestors; there was another avenue named in memory of the four students. A couple of decades later, Vargas, then serving a different term of office and facing a different political crisis, committed suicide in the palace bedroom in Rio de Janeiro, in his pajamas, on the day of Saint Bartholomew’s feast.

I felt pain. I tried to ignore it for a day, and then another, without admitting to myself that I knew what it was. Then it became too much, and I took a taxi to the hospital.

I had never been inside a hospital that didn’t feel like a precinct of illness, that made you forget what it was there for, but this one almost succeeded. It had many floors and many wings, like an ocean liner. It offered valet parking. At last I found the elevators—eight elevators arranged in a ring, like men standing in judgment. I was bewildered to discover they had no call buttons. A docent, seeing my confusion, ushered me to a central console, where after some discussion he entered the number of the floor I wanted; the console’s screen then told us which of the elevators would take me there; and then the button-pushing was over, as I needed only to stand in the elevator while it went automatically to my floor. It was a specific kind of inconvenient convenience: a system that seemed futuristic because, in addition to requiring a more complex internal computer, it redistributed the normal labor of elevator use—pushing buttons, choosing floors—in a novel way without eliminating any of it. The docent who loitered near the elevators was necessary to translate all that modern efficiency to the laity. It was as if the advancing edge of technology had returned us to a time when a little man sat in the elevator box and worked the controls for you. For some reason the hospital was named after Albert Einstein.