Away from Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

hand and fixed an expression of alertness on her face, and concentrated. The tall, thin man, whose name she did not know, was speaking.
    “I haven’t been here long,” he said, “but I’ve been watching the Brazilians and I know . The same kind of hate that was shown to Nixon on his Pan-American tour is here too. They hate Americans because we have money and we drive our children to school every day in cars.” He had a pinched face, lean and long and dark, and when he spoke he moved his hands nervously. He was wearing a Balinese printed sport shirt with short sleeves, open at the neck, but instead of making him look relaxed and festive it somehow only made him look more foreign and ill at ease. “You don’t believe they hate us?” he asked. “You want to know something? The other day someone came by and spit on my front lawn, just because my car was parked in front and he knew it had American diplomatic license plates.”
    The Brazilian named Nestor held his hand up in a gesture of peace. He was small and neat, with silky dark skin, and he wore a seersucker suit. “But all diplomatic license plates are the same,” he said, in almost unaccented English. “They all have a red background, and none of them indicate what country they’re from.”
    “Someone spit on my front lawn,” said the man in the Balinese shirt. “My wife saw him.”
    Nestor smiled. “That’s because Rio is full of Portuguese,” he said. “Portuguese love to spit. They spit anywhere. You might say it’s a national habit. They just go along the street and spit. Do you know, they keep chamber pots under their beds, and when the chamber pots are full they just toss the contents out the window. Whoosh—out it goes on the street, on someone’s head. Why, spitting is nothing. Sometimes people spit on my lawn too. It must have been a Portuguese. It doesn’t mean anything.”
    Trainer Wilkes leaned over and whispered in Helen’s ear. “Never mind.” He gestured at the man in the Balinese printed shirt. “You listen to him. He’s one of the brightest minds here.”
    Helen looked at the man whose lawn had been spat upon. He was evidently a diplomat of some kind, a member of the Embassy. She realized how little she knew about politics and like or dislike, or even that frightening word Hate . She had been here for almost a year and she had never seen any sign that anyone hated her because she was an American. Am I dense? she thought. There must be all sorts of dangerous undercurrents that I’ve never even dreamed of, and that even now I can’t bring myself to believe exist. Somehow, she didn’t like the man in the gay shirt. He frightened her a little; he was so intense, so sure that other people’s motives had to be bad. It was the exact opposite of the way she had always greeted life, and whenever she met someone who felt the way he did she was torn with a combination of resentment and inferiority feelings. He might be right after all, and she didn’t want him to be. I must be an ostrich, Helen thought; and yet, he’s so—what is the Brazilian word?—so antipatico .
    “I spent ten years in the States, off and on,” Nestor was saying to Bert. “There’s a restaurant in New York I used to love, El Morocco. And the Stork Club. Do you know the St. Regis Hotel?”
    “Of course,” Bert said.
    “I always used to stay there when I was in New York. Except one year when I stayed at the Plaza. I love your hansom cabs that go around the park.”
    “Oh, yes,” Bert said.
    “You know, it’s a funny thing,” Nestor said, smiling ingratiatingly. “The Plaza Hotel is the only one I ever found in New York that had adopted the civilized custom of bidets, and they don’t work!”
    “They don’t work?”
    “Never. They’ve been turned off, deliberately.” Nestor smiled again, and made a little gesture of depreciation. “I’m sure they had good reasons. Here in Brazil everyone has a bidet, but unfortunately we often don’t have