2

Twelve days later we were in Brazil. O Festival da Aranha—the Spider Festival—was an all-weekend affair, so we decided to do it last. Our flight arrived in Rio de Janeiro Friday afternoon, and we spent that evening and most of Saturday enjoying Rio’s offerings. A bus would take us to Tago and the Spider Festival later Saturday afternoon, then back to Rio early Monday morning for the flight home.

Rio de Janeiro was splendid, if in shambles. The remnants of its own carnival festival littered the streets, rendering it a city of motley tatters, a sad sort of vision to support a poignant atmosphere of loss. It was back to the misery of life for the residents, while the tourists that had come behind the carnival-goers seemed to linger rather than to explore. Kristin and I paid the mood of the place little heed in the beginning, eagerly going from sight to sight, basking in the warm air as we ate ice cream or perused the dime wares of the under-animated vendors. I even found myself trying to cheer up some of the beggars, scam artists, and olivers as they sluggishly ran their angles.

Yet in spite of the general torpor, the place was jammed with people, and with the teeming mob—undead waltz, notwithstanding—came the inevitable irritations. Going through the motions necessarily included the pushing and shoving, the waits, the difficulty finding empty tables or benches, all the little inconveniences that acted as attrition on the spirit. The noise was perhaps the worst. At first lively and affirming, it gradually fused into that unpleasant din associated with densely populated tourist destinations. Even Kristin, normally charmed by the whole array of sensory material new places offered, commented on the clamor as we roamed the main square, where a chorus of ragged orphan lads competed with a jungle-beat band for pocket change.

I think this was when I first noticed the change in Kristin. The signs had been there, I realized upon reflection, but I’d been so wrapped up in seeing to her fun, I’d missed the hint of falseness about her reactions. On the plane she had seemed a bit preoccupied, but I had chalked it up to the wears of pre-trip excitement, and the long flight itself. Upon arrival her mood had discernibly improved, but in a somewhat superficial way, as if she was seeing to my fun.

It wasn’t until we were seated at an outdoor café for lunch Saturday afternoon, that it all came together sufficiently to warrant inquiry. I did so carefully, now beginning to feel the stirrings of foreboding.

“You don’t seem yourself, sweetheart. Tired?”

She answered too quickly; covering, I sensed.

“I’m fine, Dad. Okay, Juneau to Rio de Janeiro is kind of a culture shock, but that’s all it is.”

I hadn’t asked if there was more. Rather, I’d been purposely casual. She was being defensive, which increased my worry. I watched her for a moment, not looking for clues, but contemplating how to best approach eliciting the thing without appearing suspicious or invasive. I settled on economy.

“Well, I’m here if you need an ear. You know that,” I said it dismissively, but with a tone that I hoped conveyed that fathers are not easily fooled.

The waiter’s arrival saved us from the uncomfortable silence settling over the table. He was a personable fellow, quite unperturbed by his lethargic surroundings. In English he asked if we we’d visited Corcovado and the statue of Christ the Redeemer, and we told him that was our next stop. The weather was nice, wasn’t it? Yes, wonderful. Would the young lady like an adult beverage, too? Wine perhaps? Shh, we won’t tell anybody.

I let Kristin know I approved by lifting a brow and glancing her way. I had let her have a glass of white wine on our trip to France in the fall and thought it might ease the mood now. She held my gaze for perhaps two seconds, then her beautiful brown eyes grew teary and she looked away, blinking in cadence with my suddenly fluttering heart.

“None for her,” I told the perplexed waiter.

To this day I don’t know how I knew. She’d never given me reason to believe she strayed in any way from what responsible parents consider acceptable conduct. I would soon learn that she’d gone through a drinking phase her mother had effectively hidden from me, knowing I wasn’t likely to learn on my own because when Kristin was with me we were always doing things together and she wasn’t out with friends. But at the time my ignorance was intact.

That aside, Kristin put up a damned convincing front. I cannot imagine the worry, embarrassment, and guilt she must have been going through, particularly considering the strength of our relationship. I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been maintaining her composure. She did, though. Even when it came out, she did. There were tears, sure, but when the words came, she held my eye and uttered them clearly and concisely, as if the whole world depended on her ability to do so. And maybe it did. While I knew what was about to leave her mouth, I would never have presumed to know the sort of responsibility that rested on her.

“Dad, I’m pregnant.”

The impact of the spoken admission was only partially absorbed by my foreknowledge. The implications reared now, as the words hung suspended in space and time, an imprint upon our particular thread of human genealogy. She was fourteen. He, whoever the hell he was, was almost assuredly a nonfactor in terms of the road ahead. Brutal choices were on the horizon. Would Felicia and I let the choices be hers? Dare we do otherwise? Was she ready to raise a child if that was her decision? Money was not an issue, but would she miss the vital years of learning financial independence by relying on us? She was a responsible and intelligent girl, but she was also a girl, and prone to the ways of youth. For instance, she was something of an emulator rather than one to draw her own path. It was her sister who had first taken a stab at the goth thing. And Kathy, too, who’d first picked up skis. That said, while her sister had been off to the next thing before the previous one had been given a fair chance, Kristin was a finisher. Sure, goth was still out with the jury, but that was more a consequence of her having entered into the pursuit after her sister’s passing, as a sort of tribute. In other endeavors—projects at school, her writings (like dad, like daughter), so forth—she was consistently committed.

All this went through my mind in a moment’s time. When my response to her revelation came, it came without forethought, and I will forever be proud of it.

“Kristin, I love you. I will always love you, no matter what. We will see this thing through together. All the emotions you are feeling . . . don’t let me, or your mother, be the cause of any of them. I love you with all my heart and without conditions.”

I started to rise, but before I was out of my chair she was in my arms.

***

We wrapped up our Rio de Janeiro tour, both of us perhaps praying for guidance as we stood beneath the towering O Cristo Redentor in the caress of the Atlantic wind, then went on as scheduled to Rio Tago for the Spider Festival. What else were we to do? Allow ourselves to be absorbed into the wandering ghost throng in Rio until someone tapped us and said, ‘Chin up, next year will be here before you know it’? The fact was, next year would come, with or without a new baby in the family, and with it would come the laughter and festivity that counterbalances the unavoidable suffering and loss of the human condition. For me, yes, there was a vacancy. Yes, there was the feeling that I had been victimized by my own daughter. But these things go along with being emotional creatures. Holes fill. Reason cleans up after emotion. The rollercoaster rolls on.

We did of course discuss the matter, mostly on the way down to Rio Tago. Kristin was in better spirits by then, the enormous load of confession having been removed. It felt strange talking about it, at times like I was detached from myself, listening to my own words as if in a dream. The only time I’d felt similarly was after Kathy’s death, when Felicia and I actually discussed the tragedy for the first time. Like that instance, the unreality here was rooted in shadowy, amorphous things. The impregnator—as I would continue to think of him—was, as expected, a memory. Or a half memory. He probably hadn’t been real at the time, the drink having flowed liberally that night. More than that, he was a stranger. That she saw him every day at school did not diminish the fact. It might as well have been the deity at whose symbolic feet we had stood only a couple hours before who had caused Kristin to be with child. Only there was no pedestal here, just a forgotten girl in a world of forgotten girls. Even the embryo inside her had no proportions. It had seeped through her molecules from another sphere, to be referred to by a neutral pronoun until another stranger designated a gender.

Felicia knew about the pregnancy. The two of them had found out since my return from Europe. Kristin, who had been late on her periods before, had been blissfully ignorant to the possibility before Dr. Whittler, the family physician, suggested a test. After the drunken night, she’d vaguely remembered an unrolled condom lying on a bed that was not her own, and maybe that picture, cushioned in youthful naïveté, had left the impression of safety. I know now that her mother had not been so oblivious and had taken her in under the pretense of checking out the menstrual problem in general. Kristin was six weeks along now, with the baby due in late summer.

I didn’t talk to her about decisions, except to say there would be tough ones in the future. That conversation was for next weekend, when her mother and I sat down with her somewhere and informed her of the consequences, so far as we knew them, of each of her options and at least gave her the foundation she would need to make her own choices. For my part, I had already decided not to encourage her in any direction, and I planned to advise her mother, for what it was worth, to do accordingly.

For now, my daughter and I had an event to attend, and oh what a strange and sinister affair it would turn out to be.

***

If Rio Tago—a small city with a population of fifty thousand—had another identity, it was lost amid the garish and absurd splendor of O Festival da Aranha, by far the most bizarre of the four events on which my travel piece focused. The spider motif was varied and prevalent with the grisly decorations assuming every incarnation the imagination could pull out of papier-mâché, wire, wood, resin, rubber, foil, foliage, what have you. The theme, however, wasn’t restricted to spiders. All things creepy or hideous were welcome. Cockroaches out of Damnation Alley, rats out of H.G. Wells, scorpions with canine heads, beetles with equine penises, mosquitoes with red bulbs for eyes, piranhas with goatees . . . these were but a few of the grossly exaggerated specimens on display. That the subjects be animal in nature seemed to be the only criterion, though a loosely interpreted one (not to be missed: exhibits H-4, the Venus flytrap with a serpentine head and an Austin Powers wig; and J-12, the plywood gorgon from whose lustily painted body protruded two ample, scarlet-nippled balloons which the girls fondled with as much alacrity as the boys).

And all this just the décor.

The costumes that walked among the fixtures were outrageous. From the humorous to the horrific, the skin-tight to the sweeping, they covered every conceivable thread of the spectrum and then some. Some fitted multiple people, as with those Chinese dragons or the caterpillar-like spectacles you see in Venice’s carnival parade. Some fanned from the owners’ heads in tribal glory, boasting lizard-king collars spoked with ceremonial knives, stick-framed sorcerer-god mantels laced with feathers. Others sported elongated arms reminiscent of that elephantine-headed butler in Monty Python (and indeed one appeared to have been designed after that very character). Still others included tall stilts as their owners stalked scissors-like among the crowd. I’d seen costumes similar to these latter ones before, prowling the hotel lobby at a horror convention I was invited to after making an appearance on the paperback bestseller list with a dark departure from my normal outdoor-adventure type material. They were no less disturbing here than they had been there.

It wouldn’t be entirely accurate to describe the mood of the congested crowd as festive. While there was plenty of merrymaking, the laughter had a cackling flavor to it, just a touch of madness or perversion, as though affected by the props and costumery in more than a superficial way. The revelers were creepers and crawlers themselves, peeping around corners, prowling and leering as they tossed back their beverages. With all the Brazilian women in attendance—and they were well and alluringly represented—it was Kristin who seemed to stand out the most to the male faction. In addition to looking older than her years, my daughter has an exotic quality to her features, especially around the eyes, which tilt slightly upward, and the mouth, which, though quick to smile, is somewhat fuller and more pouty than a dad would like. Blame part of this on the fact that Felicia is African American while I have enough Native American in my blood to distinguish me from the next Caucasian. The rest? Bad luck. Whatever details went into final makeup, genetics had dealt Kristin a slightly different hand than her identical, who, a lovely girl in her own right, had possessed less pronounced physical qualities.

At any rate, the result was a father’s and his daughter’s cross to bear in a place like this. I’d gotten used to it over the couple of years since Kristin’s pubescence, but I’m not sure she had. She tried to play ignorant to wandering eyes, but I could sometimes see the strain on her self-esteem. Tonight, however, she just seemed to shrug off outright lecherous behavior with the ease of brushing snowflakes from her shoulder. The one time I made to defend her—this after a tongue actually lolled from the head of an issuer of a stream of Portuguese that needed no interpreting—she took my arm and gracefully led me away from a potential scene.

The Spider Festival. Pageant out of a deranged god’s nightmare. Inspiration, I thought, for another literary departure from the normal Barry Ocason fare. That idea would shrivel up soon enough as I learned just how much fodder, just how extreme a departure this place presented.

***

With the exception perhaps of the Vampire Ball, which was held indoors in the Heidelberg Castle, the Spider Festival was not as widely known as the other events I’d covered. To this American, anyway. Other than my experience as a travel writer, I had no real basis for this assumption, being a complete stranger to this part of the world. Still, the fact that I’d never heard of the festival before I happened upon a brochure while waiting around in an airport for a flight said something for its obscurity on the world scene. As such, it was more accessible to the writer. I’d been able to schedule a meeting with the directors of the event and of city planning, respectively, as well as the mayor. I’d spoken to Mayor Ferez on the phone after the city planner had offered me up the chain, and the mayor had obviously been excited about the prospect of his little corner of devildom getting space in a 2,000,000-circulation mag like The Worldly Traveler. Now that I’d seen the aftermath of carnival in Rio de Janeiro, I wondered why he didn’t just ride around Mother Rio’s streets with a bullhorn promising the undead mortality again.

We met at the steps of the church of São José, from which point they led us on a brief tour of the city center, with a walk along the Tago River promenade, before we sat down to a casual dinner and interview. The only questions I’d come up with that I thought might produce interesting answers involved the roots of the festival and why it was occurring more than two weeks after the rest of the world celebrated carnival. Having now experienced the event as a spectator, I was fascinated by what a dark and grotesque affair it was and planned to probe in that direction. It surprised me somewhat when they had ready answers for all questions.

A priest at São José had found the particular spider from which the event had evolved, hanging from the hammer of the bell in the church tower. Though the creature, according to the account, was at least two inches long, it hung from a single silken thread, the red and yellow markings on its back catching the sun as it stirred in the light breeze coming through the windows. The priest was so impressed that a thing so reviled could be so beautiful that he kept it as a sort of church mascot and a testament to the complexity of God’s designs. It was given a terrarium in which to live out its days in the reliquary, where it was regularly fed insects that a visitor, if lucky, might see cocooned in bright silk or fed upon at the leisure of this not so lesser of God’s creatures. By the time the spider went to arachnid heaven, some months after its capture, it had become something of a regional celebrity. The Spider Festival was born out of its death.

That the event’s dates coincided at all with carnival’s was pure coincidence. While the latter’s changed, the former’s always surrounded March 13th, the anniversary of the death of Glória, as the priest had named the spider. Because the two occurred in the same season, carnival had inevitably saturated Rio Tago’s event, so that it became rather the after-hours club to the main parties, which usually took place in February. Instead of resisting this as some towns might’ve, Tago had milked its circumstantial affiliation with carnival for all the tourist traffic it could get, and eventually the unique origins of the Spider Festival were lost except to those locals who cared enough to remember.

Ferez’s after-hours club comparison provided a good segue to the unprepared questions, which the mayor fielded with a voyeur’s relish. It was a dark event, yes, he said. But wasn’t the spider so? Wasn’t she among the most darkly beautiful of creatures? When I pressed for more, suggesting that on top of being a horror show his festival had a carnal feel to it, he was more thoughtful though no less forthcoming with his answer. Pushing aside a fatty portion of his steak, he admitted that the event had become corrupted over the decades, but he felt this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“Nature itself is carnal, and this festival, being the spider’s after all, only exemplifies nature.”

While he would prefer I choose adjectives other than ‘dark’ and ‘sinister’ and ‘carnal,’ he had no problem with the world knowing that Rio Tago’s event celebrated the whole range of human nature. I asked if he realized what he was potentially inviting upon his town, and he was as generic on that as he’d been with his less than adequate explanation as to Festival da Aranha’s character.

“We invite all interested persons,” he said with an inclusive sweep of his hand. “If the Spider Festival is attractive to them, then they are attractive to us. Rio Tago does not select visitors according to their tastes or the desires of their souls.”

As a writer, I liked the answer, which I scribbled in my notebook. I told the mayor I didn’t know if the magazine would run it, but with his permission I wanted to use his quote in exactly the context in which it was given, as an answer to the specific question about what he was inviting upon himself. As I took his naughty grin as an affirmative, I recalled another interviewed mayor who had defended, to the media, advertisements aimed at college students that touted under-twenty-one drinking in the Florida spring break paradise under his watch. A random thought, really, as the similarities between the two situations were slight. While both mayors promoted their parties for the good of the economy (and quite possibly that of the revelers, too), I suspected in Mayor Ferez’s case . . . well, let us just say, to be kind, that Kristin’s admirers weren’t limited to the peasantry.

Which was one reason I agreed when Kristin asked to be excused to look around a bit. If Ferez had made her uncomfortable with his less than surreptitious glances, she gave no indication of it, though she did seem to have an itch, scanning the plaza at whose corner our table stood even as she sought formal permission to detach herself from our company. I told her not to go far, to stay in the area of the square, but then you don’t have to go far in a place like Rio Tago. Particularly when your dad’s drinking beer with the wretched boys and only glancing after you every couple seconds or so.

Not that there was anything to be done when, after a short spell of no visual contact, I spotted her talking to the Monty Python elephant butler suit I’d seen earlier. Nothing, that is, other than shake off the vague sense of déjà vu the picture inspired, and increased my watchfulness as best I could without appearing paranoid or rude to my hosts. Being protective of my daughter was one thing. Behaving as though I thought their festival dangerous was quite another. Besides, wasn’t I acting like Felicia, who’d seen spooks around every corner since Kathy’s death? Was it reasonable to go looking for devils behind costumes? Did kids go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show looking for poison in the tossed food? Venice, New Orleans, their fests weren’t exactly church gatherings. The Spider Festival was a costume party. Costume parties involved masks, hidden faces, a separate world that had a disconcerting effect on the non-participant.

Instead of leaving me feeling more secure about Kristin, this train of thought led to the compelling nature of that separate hidden world and how I might apply such a notion in my piece. I found myself bringing my thoughts to the table’s company, tangenting off the current topic of conversation by asking my hosts what they thought of the stuff of my mental detour. The answers, fortunately, were less interesting than the question, which brought me back around to where I should have never left off from in the first place—Kristin.

When I looked again both she and the elephant man-thing were gone. My heart, in its independent logic, quickened its pace as I scanned the crowd. Without justification, the same sense of something being amiss that had visited me prior to Kristin revealing she was pregnant arrived, only with double force. I’d never had a panic attack, nor considered what one might feel like, but it had to be similar to what I was feeling. What really triggered it, I can’t say. As Felicia will tell you with an unpleasant twist of her lips, I’m not one to overreact or jump to conclusions. The idea that Kristin had come into direct contact with the elephant man-thing costume, whose familiarity I’d found somewhat unsettling from the start, had maybe awakened a dormant nerve. Maybe the weight of news of another daughter was causing cracks to form in my shell. Then again, maybe a father’s instinct was being tested.

As I searched for any hint of her yellow tee shirt, the sensation that I had gone through these motions before crept in again. I flashed on a family hike we’d taken on that trip to Germany. (We’d separated at a crossroads deep in the woods, Kristin and her mom going in one direction, Kathy and I in another. Why we’d split up, I couldn’t recall, though I remember it was to be a brief separation. Felicia may have wanted to check out some object of interest the wooden signs along the path referred to. After about twenty minutes or so, Kathy and I turned around and hiked back to the intersection, finding that Felicia and Kristin had not yet returned. After a full hour had passed and there was still no sign of them, I began to worry. When there is the possibility that one party is lost, the other should never put itself in a position to get lost too. That’s the first rule of hiking. If you’ve established a meeting place, you stick to it. The missing individual or individuals will find their way back eventually. In this case, though, a third party entered the picture. He was driving a ragged utility vehicle with blacked-out rear windows and came down the road that Kristin and Felicia had taken, not bothering to nod at me as he bounced past. In his dust, I stood there thinking about how far we were from the village where we’d parked, and how long my wife and daughter had been gone—it had been at least an hour and a half. A sick feeling came to me, a crawling rotten thing inside me. It was so potent, the sensation, that it squashed resistance to the notion that something terrible, something violent, had happened. Indeed, it would go down as the perfect opposite of the overwhelming relief I felt when, not five minutes later, the two of them showed up, moseying down the trail carefree as you please.

But endings weren’t always that pat. Oh no. Sometimes little girls didn’t come moseying back down the path. Sometimes little girls were in those utility vehicles with the blacked-out windows.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” I told my hosts, rose, and went into the café as though to use the restroom, only to come right back out again through the door on the connecting street.