Brazil: A Novel by John Updike

Author:John Updike
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780679645894
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-04T23:00:00+00:00

xvii. The Nugget

THE THUNDEROUS HUM of the mine—the click of the picks, the hammering as deeper ladders and stouter shoring walls were assembled; the desultory conversation and singing as the men trudged in single file up the slanting muddy ledges toward the sluices and the slag heaps that spilled down the sides of Serra do Boraco like a second mountain growing beside the gutted first; the occasional flare of outcries as a fight broke out or an avalanche spilled across the terraced claims—the hum had become Tristão’s element. Away from this great inverted beehive, even to be with Isabel and the two children, he felt a bit attenuated, lopsided, and guilty, as if he were betraying his true wife, the temptress gold. This sensation, at the mine, of his true self closing around him strengthened when he was actually in his shaft, the deep neat hole, five feet square, which he had picked and shovelled into the rock of the mountain.

The claim adjacent to his on the left, idle for a year, had been taken over by a set of brothers and cousins from the state of Alagoas, the Gonzagas, and the team they formed was rapidly digging down, overtaking Tristão’s solitary progress, exposing his shaft to air and sun. But there were still seven or eight vertical feet of enclosed rock in which he could lose himself, where the hum dwindled to a faraway murmur and the sky shrank to a tidy blue square overhead, crossed by clouds like actors in a drama seen through a gap in the curtains. His privacy suggested the terrible solitude of the grave yet had something erotic about it; it was not cooler in the depths of his claim but slightly warmer, as if he were slowly approaching one of nature’s hotly guarded secrets.

For some days he had been following a twisting stretch of pallor down the leftward wall, a ruddy pallor of the type thought most promising, for gold was generally found in association with her brothers, copper and lead. When the earth blushes, the miners said, gold was about to bare herself, gold in her naked shining.

His pick attacked the rock, solid blow after blow. Its two points were equally dull, polished by wear; he had worn out three such picks in his three years here. With an awkward effort Tristão was swinging sideways, since the vein of ruddy pallor was turning inward, away from him; it felt as if the point of his pick were pursuing the curve of a woman’s body around a kind of corner, into her semi-seen, furry, rousing cranny. He was getting an erection, as sometimes happened in the privacy of his claim. The sexual energy he could not muster at night, with Isabel, overtook him in the middle of the day, as he plied his pick against the rock. Sometimes he even masturbated, with the sky’s square eye staring above him, imagining always, however, the body of his wife—yet himself with his spurting yam not her husband but one of her brutal customers, spitting upon her breasts when he was done.

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