The Correspondence Read online

  Every day after practice I had feijoada and collard greens for lunch, and in the evenings, after more practice, I went out with Jamie and his colleagues to fancy restaurants. One night a long blond New Zealander in a short black dress asked me why, if I wasn’t an epidemiologist, was I sitting next to her at a table of epidemiologists while taciturn gauchos fed us heaps of meat shaved from skewers. I made my usual mistake of telling the truth.

  “Really,” she said. “And when I was a little girl I wanted to be a Brazilian ballerina. Do you hear this? He says he’s doing something called Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Go on, you’re just ashamed to be an epidemiologist, like all the rest of us. Now tell me another one,” she said, moving closer and putting her hand on my arm, but I didn’t know another one. It still wasn’t altogether clear to me what epidemiology was. An accordion wheezed. On a stage in the center of the restaurant, men began to dance with knives.

  Back home in the States, I had a whanging bruise in my ear. I had tendinitis in both wrists and a sprained thumb. I had a broken toe, the first of many: you just buddy it up, taping it to its intact neighbor, and you go about your business. My neck sounded like a marimba.

  This hurts, that hurts, perhaps you should consult your gynecologist. My girlfriend said, “I have no pity for you. None. What happened to the bookish layabout I fell in love with?”

  My friends at the gym weren’t interested, either, and I didn’t plan to inform them. It was rare to hear a fighter, especially a professional, admit to pain.

  “How was it last weekend?” I asked Jim.

  “Great, man. I murdered him.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Brutal. No chance. Stoppage at a minute fifty. It was a slaughter.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “I guess,” Jim said. “I broke the bone of his nose with my elbow until it was sticking out of his face.”

  “Right on. How’s your elbow?”

  “It’s fine, man. But you know what? My hand really stings.”

  He showed me a minuscule scratch on his knuckles. The lion, victorious, had earned the right to complain of a thorn in his paw.

  January 2009. A talented young man from our gym got signed to the Ultimate Fighting Championship, that mixed-martial-arts program you can see on your television, and he won his first fight. Later he won his second, then his third, then his fourth. Have you ever seen that show? It began to dawn on me how fortunate I had been to have survived for a year.

  After an hour of circuit training, an hour of drills, and an hour of sparring, the owner of the gym came over and slapped me on my back. “Nice work, professor,” he said. “Everyone else here today is a professional fighter.” Nice work: I had a pair of bloody slashes from inadvertent elbows, one across my cheek, the other from my lower lip to my chin, God only knows what an intentional elbow might have done. I was ugly but I wasn’t crippled, and it was in this way that I began to train more with the mixed-martial-arts pros.

  “You don’t look like such a hairy guy,” one of them said, “but you take your shirt off and it’s all Teen Wolf. I’m the same way if I don’t shave it.”

  “You trying to tell me you shave your chest?”

  “Got to shave that shit,” he said, smiling. But I wasn’t going to shave my chest.

  What I liked best about the MMA guys was that they tended to forget we were at grappling practice. Somebody would get on top of me and get enthusiastic about his position of advantage and start punching me in the face, bare-knuckled. “Oh, hey, sorry, man,” he’d say, coming to his senses after I’d eaten a couple of swats, and I’d say it’s okay, forget about it, let’s keep going. But almost nobody really likes getting hit in the face. After one practice I touched my nose and it made a little skutching sound.

  “What is it now?” my doctor said.

  “I want you to tell me if my nose is broken.”

  “It’s broken,” she said without looking up from her clipboard.

  “But it’s still straight.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “But it doesn’t hurt. I mean, it hurts, but not a lot.”

  “Uh-huh.” She put her hand on my face. “How about this?”

  “No.”

  “And this?”

  “Gaah. Aaah.”

  “X-ray is down the hall,” she said.

  I filled half a dozen surgical gloves with tap water and froze them into V-shaped ice packs to balance on the bridge of my nose.

  “You are mentally ill,” my girlfriend said.

  When Dennis saw the tape over my nose, he smiled and said, “What’s that, a target?”

  Shoulder-stability push-ups on and off the medicine ball. High knees and sprawl drills. Honeymooners: “Shut up, pick up, stand up, run up. Now drop him and submit him,” our coach said, “you know, just like your wedding night.” Skip-step knees into the heavy bag. Farmer’s walks. Dummy slams. Kettlebell swings. Medicine-ball Russian twists. Dead-hang knee raises. Mountain climbers. Planks and side planks. Into the weighted harness to run sled dogs, dragging the coach. Fireman’s carries. Muay Thai clinch drills. V-sits, hitting the heavy bag, hitting the focus mitts, leg sparring with shin guards.

  And there are also many other things, which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.

  You learn a lot about yourself when you train to failure, when you go out to the edge of your ability, wherever that is.

  “I can’t finish, Mark,” I said.

  “Shut up, Dave. You can. Never can’t.”

  “I have to throw up.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I have to shit.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I’m going to shit.”

  “Not during my drill, you aren’t. Finish my drill.”

  I finished and staggered to the bathroom, where only I was surprised to find that I had no urge whatsoever. “And these last ten, they better than first ones,” our coach yelled at me. “Can you make me to understand this, David? How you try to show I can’t do no more, then five more best, then ten more better? Don’t stop, go. And don’t be mad at me right now. Okay, David and Andre. Andre, kill him, please. Joey, you come here. Oh my God, Joey, you just twenty years old. How you going to be when you thirty, man, you dead already.”

  I was becoming hard to live with. One night in bed my girlfriend said, “Honey, don’t do any of that jiu-jitsu crap to me.” It’s tough to spend much time rolling around on the floor with a bunch of sweaty guys without admitting that sex and violence are drawn from the same well. Remember what you told that kid on the playground: I’m going to fuck you up.

  I kept getting skin infections. Ringworm (tinea corporis) sounds revolting, but it was an easy home cure with topical ketoconazole. Flat warts (verruca plana, a human-papillomavirus subtype) had to be removed with liquid-nitrogen-induced surgical frostbite. That hurt, and was expensive, and left nasty purple-and-brown scars on my forearms.

  I was smelly and tired. “Get me some paper towels, will you?” my girlfriend said. I went into the closet and came back with a gallon of water. “Paper towels, honey.” I put the water away and came back with a different gallon. “Honey, I need those paper towels.” I put that gallon away and returned with a roll of paper towels and a third gallon of water. “Now can you open them for me?” I opened the water and took a drink.

  I couldn’t pay attention to anything without some relation, however tangential, to Brazil. I read Skidmore’s Brazil: Five Centuries of Change and Eakin’s Brazil: The Once and Future Country. I read Levine’s The History of Brazil and Burns’s A History of Brazil and MacLachlan’s A History of Modern Brazil. I read Rubem Fonseca’s High Art and Caio Fernando Abreu’s Whatever Happened to Dulce Veiga? and Patrícia Melo’s The Killer and began to recognize a subgenre of Brazilian literature: the noir novel where people smoke cigarettes, talk about Roland Barthes, and now and then stick the handle of a hunting knife up somebody’s beh
ind. I ripped through Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s jagged Zero. I endured Antônio Callado’s pious Quarup. I read most of Ivan Ǎngelo’s The Celebration. I couldn’t finish João Guimarães Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands although it was good—God knows I tried. I reread Machado de Assis, author of Quincas Borba: Philosopher or Dog? and Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. I read Appleby’s biography of Heitor Villa-Lobos. I read the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. I read Peter Robb’s A Death in Brazil and Peter Fleming’s wonderful Brazilian Adventure.

  Yo soy aficionado a leer, aunque sean los papeles rotos de las calles—I am very fond of reading, writes Cervantes, even torn papers in the streets.

  For many years I had loved João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s brilliant Sergeant Getúlio, a novel so good it shouldn’t be buried in a long list. I read it again.

  And I read Clarice Lispector. Here’s a thing that happens sometimes. Karen says, “But don’t you like any female writers?” and you say, “I don’t keep score,” and she says, “Let’s give it a try.” “Natalia Ginzburg is a good writer,” you say, and she says, “Natalia Ginzburg is a man.” You say, “I like Dubravka Ugrešić,” and she says, “Man.” You say, “I guess Flannery O’Connor is a man, too,” and she groans and looks out the window. Doris Lessing, Marguerite Yourcenar, Jean Rhys, Patricia Highsmith, Joan Didion, Iris Murdoch—until you say, “Listen, if all women are men, then no, I can’t think of any female writers I like.”

  And now it’s time to have an argument. That’s a thing that happens, sometimes.

  You say, “What about Clarice Lispector?” and she says, “Who’s Clarice Lispector?”

  I’d wanted to be a writer for a long time, almost thirty years. A writer, what a dream. I spent my twenty-seventh summer in Kentucky working as a night watchman doing twelve-hour shifts, eating fried mushrooms from the Moby Dick across the street before it closed at 8:00 p.m., nine hours to go, downing pseudoephedrine bronchodilators to stay awake, drinking King Cobra to manage the consequent anxiety, smoking Macanudos and banging away on my portable typewriter in the back room of the flower-and-fruit market I was protecting from no one but an occasional stray dog until the bar across the street disgorged its staggering belligerents at three the next morning, and they weren’t much of a threat: I told them to fuck off, and they fucked off. All I did was sleep and tell people to fuck off, perhaps identifying my vocation, and I saved a lot of money that summer.

  Then I moved to Boston and met some professional writers, and developed a more realistic idea of what I’d gotten myself into. I had always assumed that a writer had adventures and met other people, and then told a story about what had happened, or else just made the whole thing up, or both. Now it looked like what a professional writer did was pontificate, you know, like the Pope, about social justice and foreign affairs and the Internet and the energy crisis. But I had formed myself on the Ruskin model. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way”: thus John Ruskin, who was terrified of pubic hair.

  Above all, a professional writer had the correct opinions, and I couldn’t figure out what they were. I was asked to write something for The New Republic, and I sent my copy and never heard from them again. I was asked to write something for the London Review of Books, and that was bought but it never ran. I was asked to write something for GQ, but I couldn’t make that happen, either.

  I was ruining big chances left and right, and it was nobody’s fault but mine, and I was twenty-eight years old, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, and soon all I wanted to do was beat the shit out of somebody.

  I wanted to beat the shit out of somebody, or else I wanted the shit beaten out of me, apparently either one was fine, and a good thing too, because it turned out there was plenty of that to go around: the beating of shit out of me, is what I mean.

  Fighting was an adequate substitute for writing. I got in a couple of fights, under controlled circumstances, almost every day, sometimes before breakfast. A fight is a story. It offers the shaped comfort of narrative: a beginning, first this happened, and a middle, then this happened because of that—and, if it is not interrupted, an end.

  June 2009. As the third tournament approached, I realized I was going to have to cut some pounds to make my weight class. I had been on the “seafood diet”: whenever you see food, you eat it.

  “Honey, I can’t stand this,” my girlfriend said. “You’re so irritable when you’re hungry. I’m going to stay in New York until it’s over.” She went south and I went feral. I skipped meals and I skipped rope, and at last I sweated my way back to 155, where I wanted to be. I drove to Rhode Island for the prefight weigh-ins, after which I drank two Gatorades and half a gallon of water and peed right there in the parking lot next to my car like the drunken idiot I had once been: drunken no more, fossilized idiot part remarkably intact. Next, standing there in the smell of my own urine, I ate a cold sausage pizza, then two bananas, then a bagful of roasted almonds. On the way back, I ate half a loaf of bread and drank the other half of the gallon of water. At home, I ate a big steak salad and the other half of the loaf of bread and some chocolate cake and ice cream. And the next morning I weighed 163 pounds.

  These were the rules as announced over the loudspeaker:

  All submission techniques are legal, including heel hooks, knee locks, neck cranks, guillotine chokes, et cetera … No elbows or forearm strikes, no butting with the head, no knees to the head, no hand strikes, no kicks. No attacks to the front of the windpipe, eyes, or groin. No pushing palm or elbow directly into nose. No dropping or slamming of opponent on head … Eye gouging, fishhooking, biting, pulling hair, pinching, twisting of skin, sticking a finger into a cut of an opponent, … and putting a finger into any orifice—

  “Does that include the butthole?” Big Will said.

  —are all fouls and grounds for disqualification … Please wear clean clothing.

  I shook my opponent’s hand and dragged him to the mat into my closed guard, controlling his posture, and we got to work. I whipped one of my legs over his arm and trapped his neck and other arm in a figure-four, a too-loose triangle choke. As he struggled to stand up, I hooked his leg and swept him, rolling him over. Then, sitting on his chest, I let go of the triangle and hooked my outside leg over his face while I kept his arm, pinching it between my knees, and I leaned back and shoved my hips into his elbow, bending it the way it doesn’t go. That did the trick. He tapped. The ref stopped the fight. I let my opponent up and hugged him. I was so happy. Someone handed me a medal. I wore it.

  Later that same day, I caught a pair of losses in my gi division, one of them astonishing in its speed. “Who cares?” Dennis said. “Look around you. Who’s here? You see all those people who aren’t here? Do you know why you don’t see them? It’s because they aren’t here. But you are here. You showed up and did your work. Try to relax, man. You can’t win them all.” It was news to me that I could win any of them.

  What next? What else: I made a sickening cut to 148 to fight as a featherweight, so weak and hungry that my hair hurt, and I came in third at yet another tournament. My face looked like a sandwich someone had already eaten: everything, really, looked like food to me. I had night sweats and a nasty cough.

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” my doctor said, frowning at her stethoscope, and it turned out I did have to stop smoking in the end, if this is the end. There’s no at last, it’s not the end, there is no curtain, it does not fall.

  I took eight weeks off to squat and dead-lift heavy and eat everything that wasn’t nailed down, and I gained thirty-five pounds and had to buy new pants. Then I went back to sparring and I broke a guy’s ribs. That was nice.

  And then I did it all again, the way you find yourself eating dinner again the next night; the way you have sex, if you do, again; the way too much to drink was barely enough. It didn’t end, it doesn’t end, and if I knew what to say next, this wouldn’t be the end.
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  The angel said to Jacob, Let me go, for the day breaketh; and Jacob said, I will not let thee go except thou bless me. That was all he wanted.

  So the angel said, What is thy name? Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, and the angel blessed him. And Jacob let the angel go.

  LETTER FROM MAJORCA

  LET’S SUPPOSE YOU are a serious person, or you transmit to yourself certain conventional signals of a sort of seriousness: you reread Tacitus, you attempt to reread Proust but it can’t be done, you listen to Bartók and to Archie Shepp.

  Also: You can’t stop moving your bowels, or your body can’t. You have a body, you are a body. You don’t know what’s safe to eat these days, or when. You’re so sick that you take off your clothes when you use the bathroom, for safety’s sake. That was a hard lesson to learn.

  Let’s stop saying you.

  I had a body. It was a problem. It hurt most of the time. I dreamt of one world and woke into another. My throat hurt, my stomach hurt, I coughed, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about death. I heard its soft footfalls approaching. I had some blood tests, I took some medicine. I spent a lot of time in bed.

  At the time I’m telling you about, I was earning some money, not much, as a freelance journalist and a teacher in a university, writing about education, about gun control, about fashion or music, reviewing new novels through a haze of rage and envy, telling myself that whatever it takes means whatever it takes, doing whatever I had to do to convince myself that I was not a number-two schmuck.