Brasyl (14 page)
"What's the occasion?"
Dona Marisa was the kind of cook who used excellence at just one dish
to absolve her of every other culinary wrong. A sous-chef in the Café
Pitú had given her his recipe for feijoada ten years ago when
she was freshly moved to Leblon and she had produced this prodigy on
the closest Saturday to every family high-day since.
"Iracema is pregnant again."
Marcelina felt her grip tighten on the pestle as she carefully
pounded the ice.
"Twins."
A crack, a crash. The bottom of the glass lay on the floor in ice,
lime, and reeking vodka, punched out by an overheavy blow from the
marble pestle.
"Sorry about that. My hand slipped."
"Never mind never mind I drink too many anyway. The ruin of many
a good women, drinking at home. But twins! What do you think of that?
We've never had twins in our branch of the family. Now PatricÃa
and that lot down in Florianopolis, they dropped doubles all over the
place, as alike as beans in a pod."
"Play something for me. You never play these days."
"Oh, no one wants to hear me. It's old, that kind of stuff I
play."
"Not to me it's not. Go on. It was lovely hearing you when I was
coming up; I could hear you right down in the car park."
"Oh dear oh no what will everyone think?"
You know full well, Queen of the Fifteenth Floor
, Marcelina
thought.
Like me they've seen you playing on your balcony in your
tiara and pearl earrings. You make them smile.
"Oh, you talked me into it." Dona Marisa straightened
herself on the bench, ran her feet up and down the bass pedals like
an athlete warming up for high hurdles. Marcelina watched her fingers
fly like hummingbirds over the tabs and rhythm buttons. Then she
caressed the red power switch with a flick of her nails, and
"Desafinado" swelled out like angels bursting from the
heavenly spaces between the apartment towers of Leblon.
Liberace winked at her from the top of the sideboard.
Feijão the Bean wore a packet of American cigarettes tucked
into the top of a pair of Speedos. Speedos, a pair of Havaianas, and
his own hide, tanned to soft suede. He padded, restless and edgy as a
wasp, about his luxuriant verandah, settling on a wooden bench here,
the tiled lip of a plant bed there, a folding table there. He was
thin as a whip and comfortable with his body; she was nevertheless
thankful that he was devoid of all body hair. The very thought of the
gray, wire-haired chests of sixty-something men gave her cold
horrors.
"Raimundo Soares. So how is that old bastard?"
"Doing a lot of fishing these days."
Feijão poured herbal tea from a Japanese pot. It smelled of
macerated forest.
"That's the right answer. He called me, you know. He said you
don't know anything but you're all right. I get a lot of media
sniffing round after Barbosa—oh, you're not the first by any
means. I tell them he's gone, he's dead. I haven't heard of him in
ten years. Which is about right. But you've done it the right way."
Our Lady of Production Values, whom Marcelina pictured as the Blessed
Virgin crossed with a many-armed Hindu deity—those arms holding
cammeras, sound booms, budgets, schedules—smiled from within
her time-code halo. Feijão tapped a cigarette our of his
pouch, an oddly sexual gesture.
"They all ended up here over the years, the black men of 1950.
They'll try and tell you that there's no racism in Brazil; that's
shit. After the Maraacanaço, the blame fell heaviest on the
black players; it always does. Juvenal, Bigode. Even Master Ziza
himself, God be kind to him. Most of all, Barbosa. Niteroi is not
Rio. That bay can be as wide as you want it."
Feijão's mezzanine-level apartment faced a view that only
selling a successful business can afford. His walled patio was long
and narrow, humid and riotous with flowering shrubs and vines
tumbling over the walls. Jacarandas and a tumbling hibiscus framed
Rio across the bay. Marcelina had reached around the planet in
pursuit of the glittery and schlocky but had never been across the
stilt-walking bridge to Niteroi. The Marvelous City seemed smaller,
meaner, less certain; Niteroi the mirror to Rio's preening
narcissism.
Feijão sipped his tea.
"Great for the immune system. Raimundo Soares will tell you a
hundred wonderful tales, but he's full of shit. There's only one of
them true: fifteen years ago Barbosa went into a shop to buy some
coffee and the woman beside him at the till turned around and shouted
to all the customers, 'Look! That's the man who made all Brazil
weep.' I know that because I was there. After he retired he came to
my gym because he wanted to stay in shape and because he knew me from
the old days. Little by little he lost touch with all the others from
1950, but never me. Then he found religion."
"What, like the Assembly of God?" It had become fashionable
for sportsmen to turn crente, to thank the Lord Jesus for goals and
medals and records they would previously have ascribed to saints and
Mary.
"You didn't listen." Feijão ground out his cigarette
butt under the sole of his Havaiana, immediately drew another. "I
said found religion, not found God."
In response to the cigarette, Marcelina drew her PDA.
"An umbanda terreiro?" The blacks were finding lily-white
Jesus; the whites were finding Afro-Brazilian orixás. So Rio.
"You could try listening instead of rushing in with guestions.
The Barquinha de Santo Daime."
Marcelina held her breath. The Cursed Barbosa a convert to the Green
Saint. The ratings would go into orbit.
"So Barbosa's still alive,"
"Did I say that? You're getting ahead of me again. He walked out
of his apartment three years ago and no one has seen hide nor hair of
him since, not even me."
"But this Daime Church would know . . . . I can find them."
Marcelina opened Google on her PDA. Feijão reached across the
table and covered the screen with his hand.
"No no no. You don't go rushing in like that. Barbosa has been
in hell for longer than you've been alive, girl. There are few enough
he trusted; you're only sitting here in my garden because Raimundo
Soares trusts you. I will talk to the Barquinha. I know the bença
there. Then I will call you. But I tell you this, if you try and go
around me, I will know."
The thin, sun-beaten man drained his herbal tea and stubbed his
cigaarette fiercely our in the porcelain bowl.
It was in the taxi as it arced back over the long, slender bowstring
of the Niteroi Bridge that Marcelina, Googling images, realized she
recognized the sacred vine.
Psychotria viridis
: it glossy
oval leaves and clusters of red berries had set off Feijão's
view over the Marvelous City.
Aleijadão was riding an A-frame bicycle up the center of the
Glass Menagerie, weaving in and out of the boxes of tapes and
slumping pillars of celebrity magazines on wheels the size of
industrial castors. He wobbled twice around Marcelina.
"What is that thing you're on?"
"Do you like it? It's the future of commuting."
"On Rio's hills? You want to try a tunnel at rush hour on that?"
"No, but it's kind of cool. Folds up to the size of a laptop."
Aleijadão tried to throw and turn and almost came into the
printer recycle box. His job was office monkey in the long, open-plan
development office known as the Glass Menagerie. "Steering's a
bit tricky and it doesn't half cut the ass off you. It's the latest
thing from that English guy, the one who invented the computer."
Always: the latest thing. "Alan Turing? He's—"
"No, some other guy. Invented those things on wheels you sat in
and pedaled: daleks? Hawking? Something like that?"
Days there were when Canal Quatro's playfulness, its willingness to
face into the breaking wave of the contemporary and ride it, thrilled
and braced Marcelina; then there were the others when Canal Quatro's
relentless hunger for the new, for novelty, oppressed her, a
shit-storm of plastic trivia; and knowingness and irony became grim
and joyless.
Marcelina's workplace Alt dot family looked up from their glass
cubicles at the entrance of their iiber-boss. So much she could read
from their lunches: at their desks, of course. Celso lifting sushi
with the delicacy and deftness of professional rehearsal in private.
Agnetta, as ever so completely dressed for the moment she had been
known to have new shoes delivered to the office in order to wear them
home that evening, chewed morosely on a diet lunch-replacement bar
snack. Cibelle, the only one Marcelina respected in addition to
fearing, picked apart a homemade bauru. She had been bringing them in
every day. Homemade was the new sushi, she said. Cibelle understood
how the trick was done, how to add your own little ripple to the
crest of the hip and watch the chaotic mathematics of storms and
power laws magnify it into a fashion wave. Already half of Lisandra's
production group were making their own lunches. Clever girl, but I
know you.
"Oh my God, is this some thing like we're all going to have to
do now, change clothes at lunchtime?" Agnetta flapped.
"What are you talking about?"
"Like, when you were in just now you were in the suit and now
you're in the Capri pants."
Marcelina shook her head. Eighty percent of what Agnetta said to her
was incomprehensible.
"Any calls for me?"
"Same answer as five minutes ago," Celso said, mixing
wasabi. Marcelina held her hands out in a shrug of bafflement.
"What is this, National Freak Marcelina Hoffman Day?"
Then she saw Adriano break from his creative huddle with Lisandra and
the Black Plumed Bird to beckon her with a lift of the finger, a
raise of the eyebrows.
"That was a very funny e-mail. Someday someone will make a
program like that and the ratings will be through the roof, but I
don't think it is Canal Quatro. In fact, if I thought you were
seriously proposing a series where members of the public hunt down
and assassinate favelados like some kind of
Running Man
show,
I MBATC."
Might Be a Tad Concerned.
"Ah, well, yeah . . . " Marcelina spluttered.
"In future, IMBAGI to pitch ideas through the regular creative
channels."
She returned blazing like a failed space-launch to her luv-cluster.
Lunches were set down in a flash.
"I don't know whose idea of a joke that was, but nothing ever,
ever goes out of this production team unless it's cleared by me.
Ever."
"We always do that, boss." She turned on her laptop.
"Well, someone sent a hoax e-mail to Adriano, and it wasn't me."
"It was," said Agnetta faintly. "You did it. I saw
you."
The chattering, ringing, beeping tunnel of the Glass Menagerie
suddenly turned on end and Marcelina felt herself falling through
desks and workstaations and heaps of paper toward a final shattering
on the great window become a floor.
"Imagine I'm very very stupid and haven't the faintest idea what
you're talking about."
"About five, six minutes ago you came in, said hello, logged
onto your laptop, and fired off an e-mail," said Celso. Cibelle
sat back in her chair, arms folded.
"But my laptop is biometric locked." Standard security in a
world where ideas were currency.
"Well, it's open now," Celso said.
Marcelina went to the screen. The login icon spun in the taskbar. She
opened the in-house e-mail system.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Take Our the Trash . . .
The glass tube of the development office revolved around her,
Marcelina a shiny ort in a kaleidoscope of flying madnesses.
She had drunk the tea.
The Green Saint was the saint of visions and illusions.
Feijão had the sacred vine growing in his garden.
The Barquinha of Santo Daime was a church of hallucinations.
She had drunk the tea. There was no other rational explanation.
Marcelina closed the program and touched her thumb to the log-out
pad.
A trip to the market. A trip into the biodiesel smog beneath the
unfinished rodovia intersection of Todos os Santos, the missing
buckle of the cincture of highways that binds the city of Saint Paul.
A trip to the printer, to buy new shoes.
The taxi drops Edson and Fia at the edge of Our Lady of Trash. It's
not that the drivers won't go inside—and they won't no matter
how high you tip them—it's that they can't. Todos os Santos,
like hell, is arranged in concentric rings. Unlike hell, it ascends:
the summit of the great waste mountain at its heart can just be
glimpsed over the roofs of the slapped-together stores and
manufactories, the pylons and com rowers and transmission lines. The
outermost zone is a carousel of motion where cabs, buses, mota-taxis,
private cars drop and pick up their rides. Trucks plow through the
gyre of traffic, blaring tunes on their multiple digital horns.
Priests celebrate Mass under the forest of big umbrellas that is
Todos os Santos's rodoviaria, along rows of neatly spread tarpaulins
piled with pyramids of green oranges and greener limes, shocks of
lettuce and pak choi, red tomatoes and green peppers, past palisades
of sugar cane waiting for the hand-mill and past the chugging, sweet
steam of cachaça stills. The first circle of Todos os Santos
is the veggetable market. Every hour of every day motorbike drays,
cycle carts, pickups, refrigerator vans bring produce in from the
city gardens. There is never a time where there are not buyers
pressing in around the farmers as they unload boxes and sacks onto
the spread ground-sheets, the clip-together plastic stalls, the
rent-paying shops with shelving and cool cabinets. By night the
buying and selling continues unabated by a million low-energy neons
and, for those who can't afford biodiesel generators, lantern light;
and for those whose profit margin would be damaged even by that,
stolen electricity.
