A boarding announcement for his flight. He stood up from his seat as the blanketing echo of many small conversations ricocheted around the high-ceilinged terminal, Trans World. A great white puff through which sailed both swallows and the underside of modernity. Even if the association was not direct. Because TWA was not Oscar Niemeyer but Saarinen. Still, its melted meringue lines told him Brasília equaled death, a nasty little message, private, from the terminal to Sandro.

“Stupidest people on earth,” his father said of the rubber tappers in the Amazon, who made him rich, whose slavery paid for the stunning paean to modernism like the one he was in, the terminal. So dumb and uncivilized that they had weighted their souls with stones. An act whose grave sophistication still impressed Sandro. It suggested they understood what was at stake, how fragile presence, true and felt and lived presence, really was.