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The people who came to visit Teresa were of a lower sort than Alex's guests. No film directors and script writers, no well-known actors and dancers. These were small fry, on the fringes of theatre and television, theatre technicians, PR girls, an interpreter Teresa cultivated to learn more English from. A make-up girl had taught Teresa all she knew, and from a singer in a club sailors frequented she had learned some songs and how to play the guitar. No girls from the favela, no one who could remember Teresa as she had been, and not so long ago, either. Among these people was a young woman Teresa secretly thought of as her prize. Her name was Inez, and she was the daughter of a good family: her father was a university professor and she worked as an assistant in a scientific laboratory. Teresa had met her when a short TV film was being made about genes, inheritance — all that sort of thing — and Inez's father was consulted. Inez was attracted by the theatre as only those can be whose lives have been in a groove since birth. She saw herself as doomed to predictability.
Teresa was in awe of this clever young woman who had been educated in a way that meant her talk was always astonishing Teresa with possibilities she could never have imagined. And Inez was fascinated by Teresa. Unlike Alex, who could not respond when Teresa told him she had walked hundreds of miles to reach Rio, Inez knew very well what Teresa had escaped. She had flown over the desiccating regions where the dust clouds lay so high in the air she had scarcely been able to peer down through them to the dry rivers and villages standing to their roofs in dust. She knew about the favelas. Teresa's history filled her with pity, curiosity and uneasy guilt. It was not possible, in Rio, to escape poverty, always there, forcing itself on you at every turn of a street, in the shape of children without homes, the street gangs, who slept like abandoned bundles of old clothes on pavements, who swept down on fountains like flocks of birds, chattering and shouting, then drinking like birds with an eye always out for possible police who might lock them up or even kill them.
When Inez knew Teresa had a family in a favela, she asked if she could visit; she had always wanted to go right into a favela but was afraid, and with Teresa she would be protected. At first Teresa said no, afraid that this clever, fastidious friend might despise her, but then she said yes. She had a reason. She told Inez to wear shoes that could not be damaged, and herself put on jeans and a white shirt and flat shoes. The two young women took a taxi to where they could see the favela climbing up the hill, and then toiled up dirty paths through the shanties and shacks to the top, where they found Teresa's father asleep on a bed made of plastic strips tied to a wooden frame found on the rubbish dumps, and the mother sitting under a little porch of sacks stretched on poles, the sick little girl on her lap.
The mother's face did not relent, looking at her daughter, who handed her — without looking at her — an envelope with the money in it. She coldly greeted Inez, though she was impressed, Teresa knew, because no one could ever think of Inez as a prostitute, she was so superior. Her mother did not offer them anything, but Teresa went past the sleeping man to the shelf where water was in a plastic bottle, poured out two glasses for Inez and herself; but then there was nowhere to sit. Teresa could see Inez did not want to drink out of a glass she was bound to think of as contaminated. The two young women stood there, while the mother sat, fa
Inez was affected by the visit. She wept too, sitting with Teresa back in the flat, Ben watching. She said that she admired Teresa so much, oh, she could not bear to think of all those poor people, how clever of Teresa to have survived all that. She was sincere enough, and Teresa knew it, but she was thinking, And I have to thank you for something you'll never understand. For Inez did not know Teresa had been a prostitute; if she had, probably she would have admired Teresa and disliked her own safe life even more.
Now there was a turn of events that would not have surprised Johnston and Rita. Inez worked for a biologist, a friend of her parents, who ran a department of the laboratory. She told him about Ben, describing him as a yeti. 'Something like that, at any rate,' but no one could say what he was. 'He's a throwback,' she said. 'At least, that's what I think. You ought to have a look at him.'
Inez told Teresa that her boss — she put it like that, tactfully, not saying that she had known this 'boss' all her life, as a friend of her parents — would be interested to meet Ben. Teresa was at once on her guard. She was afraid. This immediate, honest and true reaction was swept away because of her awe at words like scientist, science: she knew nothing about all that, her education had not been much more than reading, writing and arithmetic, and a lot of religion. She knew she was ignorant, but not how ignorant: Inez's education was to her a wonder, something distant and unreachable, and she marvelled that Inez knew scientists as colleagues the way she herself knew bar girls and actresses who were more often than not out of work, and singers who were glad to sing in clubs for their suppers and perhaps a few reals more. Inez was glamorous because she worked in a laboratory, and understood the secrets of the modern world. Teresa asked what this scientist was going to do with Ben, and Inez replied, 'Just take a look at him.' Inez knew she was being deceitful, but her education had taught her that truth, scientific truth, was more important than anything else: you could say that her education had as much religion in it as Teresa's. She had a pretty good idea that 'having a look' at Ben would not be the end of it, but she felt powerful and useful, introducing this creature who was obviously a kind of scientific enigma, to someone who could solve it. She did not say any of this to Teresa, who knew she was being lied to, and that Inez's cool smiling face was suddenly that of an enemy. Their friendship died at that moment.
Teresa insisted that the meeting must be one that wouldn't frighten Ben, and so it was arranged that next Sunday Inez and her 'boss' and a few more friends, all known to Ben, would assemble. Ben was not told anyone special was coming. Meanwhile Teresa was in a seethe of anxiety, even while she assured herself that the situation could not go out of control: had she not set terms and conditions, had Inez not promised to respect them?
Teresa and her friends, with Ben, were already sitting around the table midday on Sunday when Inez arrived with Luiz Machado, a handsome urbane man of forty or so, smiling to set these people at their ease. He ran a department in the institute which investigated rainforest plants, one of many similar departments, and while something like Ben was not in his line, there was another department, 'the bad place' in fact, run by someone who would find Ben a prize. While Luiz Machado was determined not to be intimidating, it was evident he was not easy in this company. He had criticised Inez for being too friendly with Teresa and for going into the favela: she might have been killed or kidnapped, he said; and if she wanted to get herself a good husband (and he knew she did) then she should be careful: this low life she liked so much might put a discriminating suitor off.