Brasyl (12 page)

Falcon gave a courtly bow. "So, Father, I look forward to our
voyage together. We have much to explore."

The pelt of derision falling around the duelist grew thin and failed
as the spectators drifted away, the order of the enslaved day
restored. The tropical fruits, crusting in the sun, began to smell
nauseatingly and drew flies. One by one the ladies of the Pelourinho
closed up their gelosias.

Dona Maria da Maia da Garna looked again from the lemon to the
orange.

"So tell me again how a piece of clock can tell us whether the
world is pointed or flattened? Once more and I am sure I shall have
it."

Dr. Falcon sighed and again set the little lead bob swinging in its
gimbals.

The dona persisted out of politeness to her educated guest; the other
women had long since abandoned the demonstration and turned to their
own small talk, which, though they saw each other daily, never seemed
to stale. Five months Falcon had itched in social isolation in his
rotting, rack-rented casa by the ocean docks, daily applying to
bureaucrats and magistrates for a permission here, a docket there,
only to be sent away with a demand for supporting applications,
informations, and affidavits. Now the advent of a Jesuit had swept
away all obstacles; the permits and letters of comfort arrived by
special messenger that day, and the doors on polite society, barred
so firmly, swung open. He suspected that as a geographer, a
scientist, he was far less extraordinary a beast than as a Frenchman
with a facility for the art of defense.

Dona Maria had indeed hoped for an after-dinner sport; a preto Bahian
slave who knew the foot-fighting dance was ready and a space cleared
in the sugar warehouse to try the thing. Thus far the only martial
skill the Frenchman had demonstrated was a few Lyonnais wharf-side
tricks with fish knives that anyone might learn down by the Atlantic
dock. Instead she was watching a pendulum swinging
tick-tock-tick-tock while he held a lemon in his right hand and an
orange in his left.

"The attractive force—the gravitational force—that
acts upon the penndulum is directly proportional to its distance from
the center of gravity that attracts it—in this instance the
center of our Earth. My pendulum—your clock mechanism is too
crude to display the variation, alas—will thus vibrate faster
if it is closer to the center of the Earth, slower if it is farther
away."

João the foot servant stood solid as death by the dining-room
door, wearing the same stern face that he had when Dr. Falcon had
darted swift as a lizard around all the casa grande's clocks, lifting
his uncouth green glasses to leer into their faces. His eyebrows had
lifted a wrinkle as Dr. Falcon opened the case of the German
long-case, the master's prize and time-keeper for all the escapements
of the house, and deftly unhooked the pendulum mechanism.

"In this way, we have a sensitive means of determining the exact
shape of our globe, whether prolate like this lemon—greater
across its polar axis than its equatorial—or oblate, like this
orange, bulging at its girth." A titter from down the table,
Dona de Teffé, much gone on wine.

Dr. Falcon acknowledged the dona with a nod. His lips had barely
touched his glass; wine did poorly in this morbid heat, and it was
wretched Portuguese stuff. But it was pleasant, uncommon pleasant, to
dine in the company of women. Unheard-of at home; not even in Cayenne
were such liberties taken. As everyone insisted on reminding him, the
Amazon was another country, where affairs of commerce kept the
senhores and the Portuguese merchants from their city houses months
at a time.

"Yes yes. Forgive me, Doctor—I must be very stupid—this
is all fine and mathematical and scientific, I have no doubt, but
what it does not explain to me is what holds it up."

"Holds what up?" Falcon peered over his rounds of green
glass, perplexed. "The lemon. Or the orange. Now I can easily
see how it is we whirl around the sun, how this gravitational force
of yours tethers us to it; it is no different from the bolas our
vaqueiros use on our fazenda. But what I cannot understand is what
holds it all up, what keeps us from plummeting endlessly through the
void."

Falcon set down the fruit. A breath of small exasperation left his
lips. "Madam, nothing holds it up. Nothing needs to hold it up.
Gravity draws us to the center of the Earth, as it draws our Earth to
the center of the sun, but at the same time, the sun is
drawn-infinitesimally, yes, but drawn nonetheless-to the center of
our Earth. Everything attracts everything else; everything is in
motion, all together."

"I must confess I find the old way much simpler and more
satisfying." The dona skillfully quartered and peeled the orange
with a sharp little curved knife. "The mind naturally rebels
against a round Earth with everything drawn to the dark, infernal
center. It is not only against nature, it is un-Christian; surely if
we are attracted to anything, it should be upwards, to heaven, our
hope and home?"

Falcon bit back the riposte. This was not the Paris Academy, nor even
the Lunar Society meeting in some bourgeois salon. He contented
himself to watch the sensuous deftness with which she slipped a lith
of naked orange between her reddened lips.
And you presume to call
heaven your hope and home?
Dona da Maia da Garna turned with
relief from lemons and hell to the conversation at the far end of the
table. Her chaperone, a tall preta woman with an eye patch, once
handsome, now run to fat, leaned forward from her posiition behind
the dona's seat to study the pendulum. Falcon saw her press her thumb
against her wrist to measure it against her pulse. Even in undeclared
house arrest, Falcon had been close enough to Belém society to
understand the meaning of the eye patch. Jealous wives often revenged
themselves on their husbands' slave lovers by blinding them with
scissors.

"Forgive me, Father, I missed what you were saying there?"
Dona Maria said to Luis Quinn.

Even in his priestly black, Quinn was a massive presence, drawing all
attention and conversation as if he himself exerted a human
gravitation. He held Dona da Maia da Garna's gaze steadily, with none
of the simpering humility of the religious that so incensed Falcon.
The dona herself did not flinch from his look.
Like a man
,
Falcon observed.

"I was merely relating one of the interesting linguistic
characteristics of my native language—that is Irish,"
Quinn said. "In Irish we have no words for yes or no. If you are
asked a question, all you can do is confirm or deny the questioner.
Thus, in reply to the question 'Are you going to Galway?' the answer
'I am indeed going.'"

"That must make conversation very trying," the dona said.

"Not at all," Quinn answered. "It just makes it very
hard for an Irishman to say no to you." Women's laughter chimed
around the table. Falcon felt a needle-prick of envy at Quinn's
casual flirtatiousness. To those who use it least it is given
greatest. He had always relished the company of women and thought
himself adept in it, a sharp conversationalist and silver wit, but
Quinn captivated the table, leaning to their conversations,
listening, making each one feel the sole recipient of his attention.
The skill of a linguist, or a libertine?
Falcon thought. Now
Quinn was enchanting all with a rolling, rhythmic monologue that he
said was a great poem in his native tongue.

"And is it a love poem?" asked the dona.

"What other kind is worth reciting, madam?" Applause now.
Falcon idly stabbed his discarded and forgotten lemon with the paring
knife. He interjected, "But my dear Father Luis, to not be able
to say yes or no, does that not demonstrate a direct linkage between
language and thought? The word is the thought itself, and conversely,
what cannot be said cannot be thought."

The conversation died; the guests wore puzzled frowns. Father Quinn
tapped a forefinger on the table and leaned forward.

"My colleague the doctor makes an interesting point here. One of
the fasscinations of the Amazon—to a linguist like myself, I
suspect, rather than general society—is its richness of
tongues. I understand there are Indians among the far-flung
tributaries who have no word for the color blue, or for any relation
outside son and daughter, or for past or present. It would be a
pleasantly diverting conversation to speculate on how that affects
their perceptions of the world. If they cannot say blue, can they see
blue?"

"Or indeed, the effect upon their spiritual faculties,"
Falcon replied. "If you have no concept of a past or a future,
what meaning does the doctrine of original sin then hold? Could they
even entertain the concept of future promise, a life of the world to
come? No heaven, no hell, just the eternal present? But then is that
not eternity; a place beyond time? Do they already live in heaven, in
sinless innocence? Perhaps ignorance truly is bliss."

Several of the ladies were fanning themselves, uncomfortable at the
baiting radical-talk at their table. No one alive could remember the
Holy Office's visit to Recife, but the trauma of the
autos-da-fe
in the Praça there was still sharp enough in folk memory for
the Bishop Vasco's jeremiads against the vices of Belém to
alarm. The hostess said decorously, "I have heard that there are
peças fresh arrived from someplace so backward that they can
only express one idea at a time. It seems that each sentence is but a
single thought. We can understand their tongue, with some difficulty,
but they can never understand ours. It is as Dr. Falcon conjectured:
if you cannot say it, you cannot think it. Who ever thought of
descending these creatures? Quite useeless for work."

Dr. Falcon was poised to reply again, but the house steward Anundio
entered, rattled a small wooden clapper to attract the party's
attention, and announced that the musical piece would follow with
coffee.

"Oh, I had quite forgotten!" the dona said, clapping her
hands in delight.

"Father, dear Father, you will so much enjoy this. The most
charming little cteature, truly the voice of an angel." The
chaperones poured coffee from silver pots, wiping drips from the cups
with soft cotton cloths. Anundio led in a tiny indio child, thin as
want, dressed in a rough white shift. Falcon was unable to tell if it
was boy or girl. The child knelt and kissed the stone flagging.
"Picked it up for nothing at the Port House Tavern auction. Poor
thing was hours from death. Obviously from some reducione raid: only
the Jesuits, your pardon, Father, train the voice so. Go on, child."

The child stood arms at side, a distant animal look in its eyes. The
voice when it came was so small, so distant, it hardly seemed to
issue from the open mouth but from a hidden place beyond Earth and
heaven. Falcon had given his wig to the house slaves early on account
of the dreadful close heat and now felt the close-shaved nape of his
neck prickle. The little voice climbed to a pure, spearing
perfection: an Ave, but not by any composer known to Falcon; its
rhythms were skewed, its time signature shifting and mercurial, its
inner implied harmonies disquieting, discordant. Yet Falcon felt the
tears run freely down his face. When he glanced up the table, he saw
that Quinn was similarly moved. The women of Belém were stone,
unmoving stone. The eyes of the chaperones, each behind her lady,
were averted from the white race. Despite the dona's declaration,
this was not the voice of an angel. This came from a deeper, older
place; this was the voice of the far forest, the deep river, the
voice a child might find if it had followed those waters down to the
slave markets of Belém do Para.

While the child sang, João removed the pendulum from before
Dr. Falcon and, heels clicking on scone, went to replace it in the
belly of his master's clock.

The Last of the Real Cariocas sent the weighted line looping out into
the pink light of Guanabara Bay. It was the Hour of Yemanja. The sun
was still beneath the hills on the far side of the bay, the light
that pink only seen in travel shots of Rio, the ones in which a
skinny boy in Bermudas turns sommersaults on the beach. Lights still
burned along Flamengo Park, and the curve of Botafogo, a surf-line of
brilliants around the feet of the morros. Headlights moved across the
Niteroi Bridge. The red-eye shift moved like a carnaval procession
out on to the strip at Santos Dumont Airport, the aircraft delicate,
long-legged like hunting spiders in the shimmering light. The
Brotherhood of Dawn Fishers was stalking silhouettes, elegant as
cranes as they flicked and cast, the broadenings and heavinesses of
age and middle age erased against the sunrise. Their soft voices
carried far on the peach-perfect, intoxicating air, yet the grosser
thunder of the jets powering up one by one into their takeoff runs
was pressed down and muted. Marcelina found her own voice dropping to
a whisper. Police sirens among the hills, the linger of tire smoke on
the air added to the sense of the sacramental. Marcelina had not been
so close to spirituality since she had made
UFO-Hunt
down in
Valo de Amanheçer outside Brasilia. The pink turned to lilac
to Marian blue as the sun rose.

"I know a hundred World Cup Stories." Raimundo Soares
watched his weight drop into the glowing water. He claimed to be the
last professional carioca; sometime journalist, sometime writer with
a good book about the new bossa nova, a better book about Ronaldo
Fenômeno, and a so-so guide to how to be a professional carioca
on his backlist. A little fishing early with the brothers, a little
cafezinho when the heat got up, a few hundred words on the laptop,
the rest of the afternoon he'd spend in a cafe, watching ass on its
way to the beach, or strolling around his city, remembering it,
memorizing it. In the evening, receptions, parties, openings, his
many lovers: a late sleep and up again at fish-jump. He claimed to
have worn nothing but surf-Ts and Bermuda shorts for twenty years,
even to his own mother's funeral. He was the loafer, the malandro who
doesn't have to try too hard, carioca of cariocas: they should make
him a Living Treasure. "This is true. David Beckham comes to
Rio; he's going to play at the Maracanã for a benefit for
Pelé. He's the guest of the CBF, so he's got the wife, the
kids; everything. They put him up at the Copa Palace, nothing's too
much trouble for Senhor Becks; presidential suite, private limo, the
lot. Anyway, one evening he goes out for a little kick-about on the
beach and these hoods jump him. Guns and everything, one two three,
into the car and he's gone. Lifted. Right under his guards' noses. So
there's Beckham in the back with these malandros with the gold-plated
guns thinking, Oh sweet Jesus, I am dead. Posh is a widow and
Brooklyn and Romeo will grow up never knowing their father. Anyway,
they take him up into Rocinha, up the Estrada da Gávea, and
then from that on to a smaller road, and from that onto an even
smaller road until it's so steep and narrow the car can't go any
farther. So they bundle him out and take him up the ladeira at
gunpoint and anytime anyone sticks so much as a nostril out of their
house, the hoods pull an Uzi on them; up and up and up, right up to
the top of the favela, and they take him into this tiny little
concrete room right under the tree line and there's Bem- Te-Vi, the
big drug lord. This was back before they shot him. And he stands
there, and he looks at Beckham this way, and he looks at Beckham that
way; he looks at Beckham every way, like he's looking at a car, and
then he makes a sign and in comes this guy with a big sack. Beckham
thinks, Jesus and Mary, what's going on here? Then Bem-Te-Vi stands
beside him and they pull out the World Cup, the original Jules Rimet,
solid gold and everything, right Out of the sack. Bem-Te-Vi takes one
side, Beckham takes the other, and this guy gets out a digital
camera, says, 'Smile, Mr. Beckham.' Click! Flash! And then Bem-Te-Vi
tutns to Becks and shakes his hand and says, 'Thank you very much,
Mr. Beckham, it's been a real honor. . . . Oh, by the way . . . if
anyone
ever
finds out about this . . .'''