Brasyl (13 page)

Raimundo Soares slapped his thigh and rolled on his little fishing
stool. He was a squat, broad-featured man, his bare arms powerfully
muscled, his hair black by artifice rather than nature, Marcelina
suspected. The Dawn Fishers smiled and nodded. They had heard his
hundred stories hundreds of times; they were litany now.

"Now that's a great film."

"Heitor Serra said you might be able to help me with a program
idea." Marcelina sat in the just-cool sand, knees pulled up to
her chest. Raimundo Soares was right; this was the beach's best time.
She imagined herself joining the shameless old sag-titted men in
their Speedos and Havaianas, chest hair grizzled white, and the
chestnut-skinned, blonde-streaked women, of a certain age but still
in full makeup, all sauntering down for their morning sun sea and
swim. No better, truer way to start the day.

A sweet idea, but her world was a tapestry of sweet ideas, most of
which had no legs. Coffee and cigarette in the roof garden watching
them all dandering back from the sea, leaving patters of drips on the
sidewalks of the Copacabana. The TV professional habitually
overidentifies with the subject. On
UFO-Hunt
she'd wanted to
run off and live in a yurt selling patûa amulets to seekers.

"So how is the man? Still convinced life's brutal, stupid, and
meaningless?"

Marcelina thought of how she had left Heitor; tiptoeing around his
death-rattle snores, dressing by the lights from the lagoa that shone
through the balcony window of the Rua Tabatingüera apartment. He
liked her to walk around naked in front of that window, in stocking
and boots or the sheer bodysuit he had bought her, that she didn't
want to say cut the booty off her. And she enjoyed the anonymous
exhibitionism of it. The nearest neighbors were a kilometer away
across the lagoon. Most balconies fringing the lagoa Rodrigo de
Freitas bore tripods and telescopes: let them take their eyefuls. She
would never meet them. Heitor was excited by the voyeurism of being
voyeured: the watchers would never know that the apartment in which
that short loira woman paraded around like a puta belonged to the man
who daily told them of riots and robberies, tsunamis and suicide
bombings.

He had rolled over heavily with a growl, then woke. He had made it
the Cafe Barbosa. There had been beer for Celso and the rest of her
development team, Agnetta and Cibele; vodka and guarana for
Marcelina; and vodka martinis for Heitor. They hadn't gone dancing,
and she hadn't fucked the ass off him.

"Where are you going what the hell time is it?"

''I'm going to the beach," Marcelina said. The buzz of the
guarana glowed through the vodka murk like stormlight. "like you
said, it's best early. Give me a call later or something."

Like soldiers and flight crew, newsmen have the ability to seize any
opportunity for sleep. By the time Marcelina reached the front door
Heitor was emitting that strange, gasping rattle that at any time
might break into words or cries. The short hallway was where he kept
his library. Shelves would have reduced the space to a squeeze too
tight for a big man in a shiny suit, so the books—random titles
like Keys
to the Universe, The Long Tail and the New Economy, The
Fluminense Year Book 2002, The Denial of Death
—were
stacked up title on title into towers, some wedged against the
ceiling, others tottering as Marcelina tiptoed past. One particularly
heavy door-slam, perhaps after a bad news day, they would all come
down and crush him beneath their massed eruditions.

"And over much much too soon," Marcelina said. "Heitor
said you might be able to help me find Moaçir Barbosa."

The Brotherhood of Dawn Fishers went quiet over their reels.

"Maybe you should just tell me what the idea is," Raimundo
Soares said.

"We think it's high time he was forgiven for the Fateful Final,"
Marcelina lied.

"There's a fair few people would disagree with you still, but I
think it's years overdue. There'd be a lot of interest in a program
about the Maracanaço, still. Of course, I was too young to
properly remember it, but there are a lot of people still remember
that night in July and a whole lot more who still believe the legend.
There's a journo down in Arpoador, João Luiz, my generation,
he got a print of the original film and recut it so it looks like the
ball hits the post, then cut in footage from another game of Bigode
clearing it. There's a guy younger than you made a short movie a
couple of years back abour this futebol journalist—I think he
was based on me—who goes back in time to try and change the
Fateful Final, but whatever he does, the ball still goes past Barbosa
into the back of the net. I even heard this guy talking on some
science show on the Discovery Channel or something like that about
that quantum theory and how there are all these parallel universes
all around us. The metaphor he used was that there are hundreds,
thousands of universes out there where Brazil won the Fateful Final.
Still didn't understand it, but I thought it was a nice allegory.
There's a great story about Barbosa: it's a few years after the
Maracanaço, before it got to him and he drifted away. He gets
a few friends from the old team around—all the black players,
you know what I mean—for a barbecue. There's a lot of beer and
talk abour soccer and then someone notices that the wood in the
barbecue is flaring up and sputtering and giving off this smell, like
burning paint. So he looks closer, and it is burning paint. There's a
bit of wood still unburned, and its covered in white paint. Barbosa's
only chopped up the goallposts from the Maracana and used them for
firewood."

"Is it true?" Marcelina slipped off her shoes and buried
her feet in the cool sand, feeling the silky grains run between her
toes.

"Does it matter?"

"Do you know where he is?"

"Barbosa? No. He disappeared completely abour ten, fifteen years
ago. He might even be dead. People still claim to see him in shopping
malls, like Elvis Presley. He's an old man; he's been an old man for
fifty years. If I thought you were going to do some hatchet job on
poor old Barbosa, I wouldn't give you the time of day. The poor
bastard's suffered enough. But this . . . "

"No, we wouldn't do anything like that," Marcelina lied for
the second time.

"Even Zizinho's dead now . . . . There's one left who might
know. Feijão. The Bean."

"Who's he, a player or something?"

"You really don't know anything about this, do you? Feijão
was the physiotherapist, the assistant physiotherapist. He was still
in training, his dad was on the CBD, as it was then before it became
the CBF, and got him a job on the team. Basically all he did was keep
the sponges wet in the bucket, but he was like a lucky mascot to the
team; they used to ruffle his hair before they went down to the
tunnel. Lot of good he was. He ended up team physio with Fluminense
and then opened a little health club. He sold it and retired about
five years ago; I met him while I was researching the Ronaldo book
and the Society of Sports Journalists. Did you know I ended up in
court in a libel case over the length of Ronaldo's dick?"

He's right
, murmured the irmãos of the rod.

"The judge found for me, of course. If anyone would know, Feijão
would. He's over in Niteroi now; this is his number." Raimundo
Soares took a little elastic-bound reporter's notebook from the hip
pocket of his Bermudas and scrawled down a number with a stub of
pencil. "Tell him I sent you. That way he might talk to you."

"Thank you, Mr. Soares."

"Hey, you'll need someone to present it; who better than one of
Brazil's best writers and the last professional carioca?"

That's him
, chorused the fisher kings.
He's the malandro.

"I'll mention it to the commissioner," Marcelina said, her
third lie. No cock crowed, but the float on Raimundo's line bobbed
under.

"Hey, look at that!" He pushed his tractor hat up on his
head and bent to his reel. When Marcelina looked back, from the
shaded green of Flamengo Park, the Brotherhood of Dawn Fishers were
unhooking the catch and returning it to the sea. Fish from Guanabara
Bay were tainted, but it pleased Marcelina to imagine the old men
offering it in honor to Yemanja.

She could hear the electric organ from the bay where the taxi dropped
her: Aquerela do Brasil; samba-exaltação rhythm, heavy
on the lower manual, wafting down over the balconies, among the
satellite dishes and water tanks. Her mother's favorite. She found
her step quickening to the rhythm as she nodded past Malvina on the
concierge's desk. The music swirled down the stairwell. Malvina was
smiling. When Dona Marisa played organ, the whole building smiled.
Even the music in the elevaror was unable to defeat Dona Marisa on
the manuals as her chords and chachachas boomed around the winch
drums and speeding counterweights.

Every child thinks her childhood is normal. Wasn't everyone's mother
Marisa Pinzón the Organ Queen of the Beija-Flor? Queen
Marisa's most lustrous days, when she ruled the land beyond midnight,
Venus arising from the Art Deco shell of the Beija-Flor Club
Wurlitzer, were already fading when Marcelina was born. Her two older
sisters shared increasingly bitter and resentful memories of
grandmothers and tias, cigarette girls and gay cleaners sent to
babysit while their mother, swathed in satin and rhinestones,
diamante tiara on her brow, gilded shoe tapping out the rhythm,
played rumbas and pagodes and foros to the discreet little silver
tables. There were photographs of her with Tom Jobim, flirting with
Chico Buarque, duetting with Liberace. Marcelina had only the
unfocused memory of staring up at a glitterball turning on the
ceiling, dazzled by the endless carnival of lights.

She had no memories whatsoever of her father. She had been a
primitive streak when Martim Hoffman put on his suit and took his
leather briefcase and went our to do business in Petropolis and never
returned. For years she had thought Liberace was her dad.

Marcelina shivered with pleasure as the elevator door opened to a
sweeping glissando up the keys. Her mother played less and less
frequently since the arthritis that would surely turn her knuckles
into Brazil nuts had been diagnosed. She hesitated before ringing the
bell, enjoying the music. Her alt dot family would have mocked, but
it's always different when it's your mother. She pressed the button.
The music stopped in midbar.

"You don't call, you don't visit . . . "

"I'm here now. And I sent you an SMS."

"Only because I sent you one first."

They hugged, they kissed.

"You're looking tight again," Marcelina's mother said,
holding her daughter at arm's length to scrutinize her face. "Have
you been on the Botox again? Give me his number."

"You should get a chain on that door. Anyone could be in here,
they'd just brush you aside."

"You lecture me about security, still living in that dirty,
nasty old Copa? Look, I've found you this nice little two-bed
apartment down on Rua Carlos Góls; it's only two blocks from
me. I got the agent to print out the details. Don't go without them."

The organ stood by the open French windows, lights glowing. The table
had been set on the little balcony; Marcelina squeezed into her
plastic patio chair. It was safest to look at the horizon. Golden
surfer boys played there on the ever-breaking wave. She could never
look at surfers without a painful sense of another life she could
have lived. Dona Marisa brought stacked plates of doces: lemon cake,
toothachey peanut squares from Minas Gerais, little honey wafers.
Coffee in a pot, and an afternoon vodka for the hostess. Her third,
Marcelina judged from the empties on the organ and the arm of the
sofa.

"So what is it you have to tell me?"

"No no no, let's have your news first. Me, I live up here
fifteen floors above contradiction and excitement." She offered
the Minas Gerais peanut cookies. Marcelina opted for the honey wafers
as the least deadly to her daily calorific intake.

"Well, I've got a commission."

Her mother clasped her hands to her chest. Unlike every other mother
of whom she had heard at Canal Quatro, Marisa Pinzón
understood completely what her daughter did for a living. Marcelina
was her true heiress; Gloria and Iracema disappointed in their
successful marriages and expensively clad families. Mundanity as the
ultimate teenage rebellion. In Marcelina's informal casual
name-droppings, professional brushes with stellar celebrity, and
occasional affairs with a smart man on a pale blue screen who told
the country terrible things every night was the lingering perfume of
an age when the Queen of the Keyboard ruled from the Copa Palace to
Barra. Time for men and babies when you are older while the stars are
low enough for you to still touch and magic works yet.

Marcelina could never deflate her mother's flight over the thousand
lights of Ipanema with her aching doubt that her sisters had made the
right choice, that she had sold her eggs for edginess and a
two-second producer's credit. Marcelina explained the premise. Her
mother sipped her clinking vodka and scowled.

"Barbosa, that bad black man."

"Don't tell me you remember the Fateful Final?"

"Every carioca remembers what they were doing at the Maracanaço.
I was having a stupidly giddy affair with Dean Martin's lawyer. Dino
gave five shows in the Copa Palace. He deserves what you do to him,
he made us a laughingstock. "

"What? Who?"

"Barbosa. Evil man."

Dona Marisa was Marcelina's infallible one-woman focus group. She
drained her vodka.

"Querida, would you get me another one?" Marcelina
quartered lemon and spooned ice into the glass. Her mother called,
"I'm going to have a little feijoada."