Since the second front seat, next to the pilot, was so much more desirable than any of the four seats behind it, Jack and Maria Elena had worked it out that one of them would ride up front on the way out each day and the other on the way back. Today, Jack had chosen the first half of the trip, so now he was the one who climbed up the two toeholds and crawled over the pilot’s forward-folded seat into the back. Then the pilot unfolded his seat into normal position and helped Maria Elena climb up. She slid across to the passenger side, stowing the pilot’s fumetti in the pocket beneath the window beside her.
The pilot took his position at the wheel and, after a brisk series of preparations, started the single engine, turned the small plane around in a bumpy circle, walked it halfway back up the field, and swept it around again to face the light wind. Over by the church, under the tree, Father Tomaz watched; probably hoping they were on their way to God instead of Brasilia. The pilot started them forward and they jounced and hopped down the field, the wings waggling as though they’d fall off, the small wheel in the pilot’s hands shaking like a ribbon tied to a high-speed fan, until all at once the wheels lifted clear of the hard ground and the plane became graceful, coherent, almost alive.
There was no door on Maria Elena’s side, which was why she and Jack had had to climb over the pilot’s seat, but the window had a flap in the lower half, like a deux-chevaux, that she could open with her elbow to look down directly at the receding ground, becoming aware for the first time just how large the graveyard was on the other side of the church. And how small so many of the graves. It was human instinct, when something was trying to exterminate the species, to reproduce faster and faster. Particularly when the killer was mostly killing children.
The noise inside the plane was at a level where conversation was possible but not easy, so usually they didn’t talk much, particularly on the flight back, after the long dry interview in two languages. Today, though, after about five minutes, the new pilot frowned at her and said, “Why do I know you from someplace?”
This still happened sometimes. People still remembered Maria Elena, the pop star, the rising talent who had shone so brightly and so briefly and then disappeared. She had used only her first names, Maria Elena, and the people had cried them out at the concerts — “Maria Elena! Maria Elena!” — as though she were a soccer star.
Ah, but that was then. When someone remembered now, or thought they did, she denied it. What was the point in rehashing that painful history? They would want to know why, with her fame still growing, with her record albums topping the charts, with her career on the brink of the international — she had even recorded one album in Spanish — she had so abruptly disappeared.
And how could she talk about such things? That her body was foul, her children dead, her husband recoiling from her in disgust. That she could no longer sing, that the music was no longer in her. And that when she had tried to use her celebrity for something that really mattered, to protest the destruction of the land and the people on it, the media had closed against her, shutting her out, more interested in jobs than health, caring more about their wallets than their children.
So when this new pilot asked why he knew her, she offered him a small and distancing smile, as though he were merely flirting, and said, “I can’t think of any reason,” and turned away to look out her window at the ground bumping by far below.
That stopped the conversation, but only for a few minutes. Then, when she incautiously looked again in his direction he grinned at her under his bandit moustache and said, “Not such a good priest down there, huh?”
Maria Elena looked at him in surprise. “You could tell that from way over by the plane?”
“I could tell that from the sky,” he said, and laughed.
“He thinks God wants all this misery,” she said. “Why should God want it?”
“Who benefits?” said the pilot, raising one brown stubby finger in a parody of the pedantic teacher. “That is always the question to ask, when you want to know what is really going on. Who benefits from the docility of the people? Does God?”
“The owners of the factory,” Maria Elena said.
“Not God?” It was as though he was teasing her.
Jack, in the isolation of the seat behind them and not understanding Portuguese, couldn’t take part in the conversation. It was up to Maria Elena by herself. Earnestly, she said, “God made us. He loves us. He doesn’t want us to be tortured. It doesn’t benefit Him if the people don’t fight back when the factory kills their children. It benefits the owners.”
“The owners.” He seemed doubtful. “Who do you mean, exactly?”
“We all know them,” she said, with contempt. “They live in Rio, with their ocean views, they come to Brasilia surrounded by lawyers to testify that the factories are cleaner than last year. Always cleaner, cleaner. We show the true statistics, their lawyers make the statistics lie.”
“But they aren’t the real owners,” the pilot said. “Don’t you know that? Those people are the board. They only run the company. The real owners are the stockholders.”
“More of the same,” Maria Elena said.
“Not exactly.” The pilot seemed to find all this amusing in some way. “The stockholders never come to Brasilia to testify, they never have to lie even once to anybody. Never even come to Brazil. Do you think they ever breathe this air? Maybe once, at Carnival.”
Frowning, Maria Elena said, “The company is Brazilian. Isn’t it?”
“The subsidiary is Brazilian. That’s the company you know about. But the main company is far from here. The stockholders don’t live in Brazil.”
“Where do they live?” I’ll go there, Maria Elena thought. With photos, with statistics. How dare they not be part of what they’ve done? How dare they not even have to lie?
“Where do they live?” The pilot looked down at the copper-colored river they would follow for the next quarter hour. “Some in Britain,” he said. “Some in Germany, Italy, Guatemala, Switzerland, Kuwait, Japan. But most in the United States.”
“The United States.”
“The multinational corporation is responsible to no country,” the pilot told her, “but it was an American idea.”
“They couldn’t do this in America. That’s why they come here.”
“Well, of course,” the pilot said, and laughed.
They flew for a while in silence, Maria Elena full of her own thoughts. The lives destroyed — her own life destroyed — and she could never even see the people who did it. The people who benefit. This was the place where they did the bad things, but they themselves were far away, unreachable. Her occasional dreams of righting wrongs, saving those who had not as yet been polluted, were even more idle than she’d thought. There was nothing to be accomplished here, in Brazil, if the decisions were being made seven thousand miles to the north, by people who never came here, perhaps didn’t entirely understand the results of their decisions, had never been faced with the end reality of what they did.