Recollections of a Right Arm: A Story

by RUBEM BRAGA

★

BY NOW I have heard the story so many times that it has become trite: “Yesterday, when we arrived at São Paulo, the weather was so bad that we couldn’t land. We spent over an hour circling in the fog because of the low ceiling.”

But I have made many landings in the past, perilous landings where there were rocks and ditches to menace a pilot already in difficulties, but landings, nevertheless. I got into the plane indifferently, and as the day was not a pleasant one, I shot only a casual glance at the city of Rio de Janeiro and immersed myself in reading whatever newspaper came to hand. Afterwards, I looked out of the window to see only ugly, menacing clouds. Actually, I had no sense of being aloft; I was thinking only of earthbound things, my own insignificant affairs. I fell into a bored somnolence until a nervous woman beside me said suddenly: “We can’t land.” The plane was already circling in a dense fog. I tried to calm the lady.

She was so worried that, although it was chilly, she started fanning herself with a magazine. I tried to convince her that she ought not to fan herself, but I soon ceased, realizing that it was better that she continue. She needed to do something, and apparently the only means she could employ at that fearful moment was to fan herself. I offered her my folded newspaper in place of the magazine, and she thanked me gratefully, as though she believed that by producing more breeze she could engage more effectively in her struggle with imminent death.

I spent nearly half an hour with the troubles of that lady. Noting that a friend of hers was sitting nearby, I offered to change places and her companion accepted. But I waited in vain for my lady to move her legs so that I could leave my seat next to the window; she finally confessed that it was better as we were, that she preferred to have a man — “a gentleman ” — at her side. This flattered my chivalrous pride: I felt useful and responsible. Because a Braga, a man of character, was there, that airplane wouldn’t dare to fall. There were, of course, a pilot, a copilot, and several other men in the plane. But I was the man beside her, the fleshand-blood man that she could touch. And it was in this man that she was placing her trust: in this person in the heavy wool suit, with the necktie, the mustache, the arm she ended by grasping. It wasn’t really my arm she was holding on to, but the arm of a man, any man, a person with mysterious attributes of strength and protection.

I called the stewardess, who tried to calm the lady with crackers, coffee, chewing gum, words of comfort, pats on the shoulder, cotton for the ears, and a smooth, firm voice that at times contained a slight tone of reproach and at others was interspersed with that set facial reassurance that is undoubtedly part of the Civil Aeronautics Code, the so-called “ceiling zero smile.”

But a stewardess isn’t very convincing, and she’s only an employee. The lady evidently considered her a sort of accomplice of the management and at bottom the party responsible for this dangerous fog. The young girl was doubtless hiding the truth and uttering hypocritical words so that she would allow herself to be killed without a struggle.

Apparently I was the only trustworthy person and the lady, who at the airport had had a rather disdainful manner, glared at the stewardess and attached herself to me. I brought myself to put my right hand upon hers, which was grasping my arm. This gesture of affectionate protection had an immediate effect; she gave a profound sigh of relief, closed her eyes, inclined her head slightly toward me, and remained immovable, calm. It was clear that my hand was protecting her against everybody and everything; she remained as though asleep.

The plane continued to circle monotonously in the heavy fog. Whenever it gave a particularly deep roll, I reassured the lady further by closing my hand lightly over hers. This seemed to help a lot.

I looked sadly out the window again, where I could see the right wing, slightly elevated, in the midst of the fog. As the lady gave me no more trouble, I recommenced thinking about myself, sad, weak subject though I might have been.

We had been over São Paulo a long time. Perhaps it was raining below; at any rate the great city, invisible though so near, was going about its business quite indifferent to the ridiculous group of men and women imprisoned up there in an airplane.

I thought about São Paulo and about the twentyyear-old boy who had arrived there one night with thirty milreis in his pocket and had gone strolling across the old Tea Viaduct without knowing a soul in the strange city. The old viaduct no longer exists, and the boy, shy and poetic, is now a sad man looking at the fog and thinking of death.

Other recollections came to me, and I remembered hearing that at the moment of death a person envisions most of the events of his past, sweet or bitter as they might have been. But the monotonous sight of that wing in the middle of the fog made me torpid, and I didn’t think of anything any more. It was as though the world outside of that fog bank had ceased to exist, and because of that I became indifferent to death. Perhaps it would amount to nothing more than a heavy shock and then all would be finished. Death ought to be like that: an immense, colorless, formless fog — for eternity.

I felt pleasure in the thought that now there wouldn’t be anything further, that it would no longer be necessary to regret, to scramble for a living, to worry; that all things and persons who had power over me and directed my pleasures and pains had ceased to be, had dissolved in that world of fog.

The lady suddenly gave a start and began to ask anxious questions. The plane was descending more and more, and still it was impossible to make out a single filing. The motor seemed to have taken on a different sound; it could have been the rattle that precedes the last agonies of death. The lady extended her right arm to grasp the back of the seat ahead, and suddenly I realized that for all her thin, rather hard face, she had a beautiful arm, symmetrical and well-muscled.

I continued to look at it carefully from the strong, smooth shoulder to the long-fingered hands, and there came over me an extraordinary longing for the earth, for human beauty, for the long and inescapable foolishness of love. No longer did I want to die, and the idea of death suddenly seemed to me so wrong, so ugly, so absurd that I was startled. Death was a dark, gray thing, without the warmth, grace, or soft strength of an arm or a leg, without the smooth radiance of a woman’s body.

Hands, hair, torso, muscles, breasts: that miracle of smooth, warm, sensitive things made to be loved. All the pleasure of life struck me, so deep a desire to live, so ardent a yearning, that I tensed my muscles, stretched out my legs, felt a pleasant warmth in my gaze. I shouldn’t die! My momentary torpor suddenly seemed a vile, sick, vicious thing, and I raised my head and looked about as if I had finally decided to take some decisive step.

My gesture seemed to disturb the lady. But looking once more through the window, I made out houses, a square patch of green and another of red earth through the irritating veil of mist. It was a quick glimpse, soon lost in the dense fog, but it gave me a deep certainty of being saved. Because the earth existed, it wasn’t a distant dream; the world wasn’t only fog, and there really were houses, trees, persons, ground — the good, solid, immovable ground — where one could lie down, where one could sleep securely and quietly, where a man could press close to a woman’s body and love her powerfully, with all his passion and all his senses, with the approval of the world.

In the airport, waiting for my baggage, I saw my seat companion nearby. She was with a man wearing glasses who, with baggage cheek in hand, was attending to the claiming of her suitcase. She said something to him, and he approached me with an expression that was intended to be cordial. He explained that he had been waiting a long time; that he could imagine how much trouble his wife, always very nervous, had given me.

“Why, not at all, sir.”

He bade me good-by as though, with the thanks circumstance had forced him to express, he had complied with an unpleasant formality due a stranger— a stranger who ought to remain a stranger.

A stranger I felt in front of that man with the half-disagreeable face. I vaguely felt that in some way I had betrayed him and that he sensed this.

While he was leaving me, the lady gave me a tiny smile. I have a romantic tendency to imagine things, and I fancied that she was careful to smile at me when the man couldn’t notice it — an extramarital smile, vaguely conspiratorial. Certainly I shall never see her again, nor do I wish to. But, for an instant, her lovely right arm was for me the talisman of life itself, and I shan’t soon forget it.

Translated by Rod Horton