Thus my confusion at seeing Baixinho grinning merrily in the center of the group waiting to greet me. When I finally stepped outside, a shout went up. Money started moving among the fists, stopping me in my tracks—which only seemed to increase the laughter. A droplet hit my ear. Then I saw that standing to my left, next to the doorway, on a stump, was the impish Edgar, pissing over my head. The question of whether or not a small boy could piss over a tall man was, I then realized, the basis for my enthusiastic reception on the morning of the big churrasco. And Baixinho was apparently a winner.
The horse-mounted guests, small as cloves in the distance, had begun to appear in the afternoon. The ones coming by car from São Borja appeared comparatively instantaneously. The sides and joints staked around the bed of fragrant coals under a coverlet of ash had been brushed all morning with bouquets of sage dipped in cans of salt water. Lambs and suckling pigs were added later. Delicacies requiring the least amount of cooking time were brought to the fire last.
One long table was covered with side dishes and bowls of farofa, the toasted manioc flour in which Brazilians love to dredge their meat. There were salads of potatoes and other tubers in mayonnaise whisked from the eggs of guinea hens. Beer flowed from a keg into the pewter mug of the ranch manager, into pitchers for the tables, and, finally, into the cowboys’ cups. Soda cans glittered as inappropriately in the gorgeous setting as the mayor’s wife’s ice-pink lipstick and overabundantly packed white-plastic Cacharel miniskirt.
“Seu Bill [Mr. Bill],” said Aristeu, the magnificent captain of the gauchos, who was drinking wine rather than beer. He offered me a cup. The beverage was poured from basket-girded jugs into the traditional Portuguese porcelain mugs called canecas. It was the perfect wine for the occasion.
Perhaps a 1970 Château Margaux would have been as good with the roasted, smoked, seasoned, and farofa-upholstered flesh of an unborn calf. (I apologize, especially to you mothers, but the truth is that this barbaric delicacy is delicious.) But neither could have been any better than what was in my cup. I was drinking the original South American wine.
“What is this?” I asked Aristeu.
“Wine,” he replied.
When I asked more sophisticated, or anyway urbanized, guests what wine it was, they didn’t get much more specific.
“It’s the wine that comes from here,” explained the mayor of São Borja.
“Do you know the name of the grape?”
“It was the one brought by the Portuguese, the bandeirantes, in the sixteenth century. I think it is called Isabella.”
It was as marvelous as the indigo-eyed fox, the cowboys, the landscape, and the food. And, being wine, it was not without a touch of mischief, like the laughing boy, Edgar.
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