After-Music

Mario

 M a r i o How did he get in Portuguese 202? He’s from Brazil, he speaks Portuguese— a Brazilian kind of Portuguese, folding in some rainy toucan calls. Do you object? Well, he makes the rest of us seem . . . But he charms us. The syllables run like vines in a baffling forest where we’ve never been. His eyes look down from the canopy. When he’s called to the blackboard, his letters have curious tails, like fibery strands of meaning coming loose. He sits at one side toward the back, looks out at the starlings bobbing and strutting on the grass. What birds is he imagining? His eyes settle on us, one by one, a tuft of jungle feathers landing on a branch. We come to class early, wanting to feel the humidity change when Mario walks in.  Don’t listen to Mario, the professor says. But we do, his talk throatier, slurred, faint drums and hungry insects underneath the ornate Lisbon churches in the text, the situation at the travel desk, the doctor’s office. Mario is what we came for, we now believe. We lose verbs and pronouns somewhere in the underbrush. We may fail the course. Students. Students. The language has rules, conventions, idioms. Mario does not resist. He studies, takes the tests. But we can’t seem to hold on to the bank. We slip into some tributary of the amazon, slow swirls and eddies, silt of a continent drifting toward the sea, and in our ears Mario’s dark Portuguese, snakes tangled in tree roots, bats dodging and dipping, now that it’s nightfall, out of the cave of his mouth. ...