Brasyl (21 page)

"A ghost?" Tito, her third gay dad, was a specter of a man
himself, pale and nocturnal. He knew every spook of old Copacabana
personally, greeted them each dawn as he swung back through the
streets to his home.

"No, something else. Something that's not dead yet."

"You know, there's a program idea in that," Celso said, but
the eyes of her alt dot family were slipping away from hers. For the
first time they made their separate farewells and left one by one.

You did not hold me
, Marcelina thought. The spirit of maconha
waited in the air. In its frame of tenements the sea still held late
lilac. The surf was up and the air so still that the ocean-crash
carried over the traffic on the Copa and the air smelled like she
imagined hummingbirds must: sweet and floral and shimmering with
color. A huge pale moon of Yemanja was floating free from the water
tanks and aerials. Gunfire cracked in the distance: the little favela
of Pavão at the western end of the Copa still tossed and
scratched. She remembered a lilac night a lifetime ago; suddenly
swept out of her bed by a tall queen from a Disney movie, all swish
and swinging diamonds.
Come on, get dressed
. The three
Hoffman sisters had sat pressed in round their mother in the back of
the cab as it swept along the boulevards, the dark sea booming.
Is
it carnaval?
Marcelina had asked when she saw the crowd in front
of the floodlit hotel, white and huge as a cliff. No no, her mother
had replied,
something much more wonderful than that
. She had
pushed into the rear of the crowd. Some of the people had glared and
then went, ah! or oh! and bowed from her path; most she shoved past:
Come on girls, come on
. Gloria and Iracema and Marcelina
holding hands in a chain until they were at the front of the crowd.
She had looked up at men in uniforms and men with cameras and men in
evening dress and women even more glamorous than her mother. At her
feet was a red carpet. A broad man with graying hair but the bluest
eyes has walked up the carpet to flashing cameras and cheers and
applause. Marcelina had been afraid of all the noise and the lights
and the bodies, but her mother had said,
Cheer! Cheer! Yoo-hoo!
Yoo-hoo!
The man had looked over, looked puzzled, then raised a
hand, smiled, and walked on down the alley of lights.

In the taxi back she had peeped up the question Gloria and Iracema
were too big and shy to ask.

"Mum, who was that?"

"My love, that was Mr. Frank Sinatra."

Her mother's face had shone like the women in St. Martin's on solemn
novena.

One moment of silver. The flicker on the screen. Her mother had shown
it to her, on the steps of the Copa Palace, in every beautiful old
tune she had pumped out of the organ. Marcelina had chased, leaped
for it, snatched with her hands until she caught it and held it up,
shivering and flowing from form to form, and she had seen in an
instant how the trick was done.

She got her mattress and lightweight bag, stripped down to panties
and vest in the backscatter of light from the morro.

How to weep, in Cidade de Luz.

Every new entry in the book requires Crying Cake. Flour, margarine,
sugar, nuts, more sugar—the saints have sweet teeth—and a
generous glug of cachaça, which the saints don't mind at all.
Bake. Cut into cubes with a knife cleaned in holy water, one cube per
invocation. The rest must be left on the cooling tray on top of the
front wall, for all the neighborhood. Select a saint. Her I-shades
tell Dona Hortense the best for this entry is St. Christina (the
Astonishing). She prints an image that she carefully snips out with
scisssors, pastes onto a matchbook-sized board with other Catholic
tat ripped from the parish magazine, and decorates the border with
plastic beads and tinsel and shards of broken glass ornament from the
Christmas box. The icon is then purified with salt and incense.
Divination with the Chinese compass gives the best alignment; then
the Book of Weeping is opened before the altar, the name and the need
written in felt marker that gives a nice thick line, easy to read in
the dim of the barracao, and the whole is dusted with farofa, which
is then tipped down the valley of the book into an offertory cone
before St. Christina the Astonishing. Thereafter until the weeping
stops, the entry, with all the others for that day, will receive a
tear.

St. Christina, be true
, prayed Dona Hortense.
Astonish me.
For my littlest and second-favorite son suffers. He lies in his
hammock, and from the flicker of his eyes I can tell he plays games
and reads chat on his glasses; the food on his plate goes cold and
draws flies; he neglects his deals and contacts and plans: this is a
boy of energy and business and determination. I know Gerson—stupid,
soft Gerson—slips pills into Edson's Coke and coffee and they
steal his energy, sap his will. Get him up get him out get him around
his friends and clients for they can help him. Until then, let me
launder his clothes and straighten his papers and fetch him coffee
and leave him plates of chicken and beans and rice and tell Gerson to
stop it with the pills and instead bring some proper money into the
house.

Early in the morning of the day of the Feast of Nossa Senhora
Apareçida Dona Hortense finds her littlest and second-favorite
son climbing on the house roof. He is in shorts and a sleeveless T
and Havaianas, poking at the geometry of white plastic pipes that
surround the solar water heater. Cidade de Luz wears its civic bairro
status proudly, but the every-man-for-himself plumbing uphill and
down alley and the sagging, crazy-crow wiring—you can still
plug into the streetlamps—betrays its favela provenance.

"These pipes need replacing." Edson stands hands on hips
looking around him. Not at pipes and plumbing, Dona Hortense knows,
but at the city, the sky, his world. It's begun.

"I've made kibes," she says.

"I'll be down in three minutes."

That night Dona Hortense turns St. Christina the Astonishing's Icon
facedown and crumbles her Crying Cake as an offering to the birds.

In the mornings pensioners get special rates at the gym. Edson passes
treadmills churning with men in baseball caps and saggy shorts and
women in Capri tights and big Ts. Afternoons the soldados of the drug
lord come down from Cidade Alta to pump. The Man has negotiated a
corporate membership for them. The deal's good, but they have a habit
of leaving the weights at max to look macho to the next user. Emerson
is out back trying to weld a broken weight machine, squinting through
a square of smoked glass at the primal arc.

"Still taking old people's money off them?" asks Edson.
Emerson looks up, smiles, then grins.

"At least I'm making money." Emerson kills the welding gun,
slips off his gloves, hugs his brother to him. Little Sixth always
was fiercely independent, never needing anyone's permission, but he
always brought his plans to Emerson as if for a blessing that Dona
Hortense and all her saints could not bestow. There are Skols in
cool-jackets in the store refrigerator. Emerson chases receptionist
Maria-Maria out of the office—"all she ever does is
chattbots anyway"—and they sit across his battered desk.
Pensioners thump and hiss behind the ripple glass.

"So."

"I'll be all right. It's time, isn't it? Everything's time. It's
like, I'm back again. Does that make sense? I was away, somewhere,
like on holiday in my own house, and now I'm back again and it's like
it was spring and now it's summer."

Emerson doesn't say,
It's been three and a half months
. Nor
does he say any stupid talk-show shit like,
I don't think I can
ever understand what she meant to you.
Emerson recalls how he
felt when Anderson was killed. He had been up in the favela working
on a newlywed floor on the top of an apartment block. They worked
together: bricklayer and electrician, brothers Oliveira. Then the
fireworks went up all around like a saint's day. Police. Out on the
steep ladeiros The Man's foot soldiers had dumped I-shades, cash
cards, arfided valuables—anything that might betray their
location to the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. The police stun
drones swarmed in over Cidade Alta like black vultures. Already
gunfire was rattling around the intersections where Cidade Alta grew
out of Cidade de Luz. Anderson had gone to pick up elecctrical tape.
Anderson had been caught out there. Firing everywhere now. Nowhere to
run from it. Nowhere to go but stay on this roof. He'd called
Anderson to tell him to get out, get home, get down to Luz, and if
you can't get out, get in, anywhere with a door and walls. No answer;
the police had shut down the network. Scared now. He'd done a locate
on Anderson's I-shades. The seek function was accurate to
millimeters. The center of Anderson's I-shades was resting eight
centimeters above ground level. That is the height of the bridge of a
nose of a head lying sideways on the street. That was how Emerson had
found him, in a great dark lake of drying blood. He had looked so
startled, so annoyed. The police tried to make him out to be a
soldado. Outrage from the Cidade de Luz District Council forced an
admisssion that Anderson had been caught in crossfire trying to find
safety. It was as much as anyone could hope for. A platitude to add
to the stumbling well-wishes of friends and neighbors. Words were not
sufficient, so they resorted to platitudes, trusting that Dona
Hortense and her five surviving sons would read the unsayable truth
behind them. Sometimes only platitudes are enough.

Edson says, "I need to ask you something."

Emerson has learned to be wary of questions with preludes, but he
says, "Go on."

"Was there a video?"

"What do you mean? Like . . . "

"
Take Out the Trash
. Did you see one?"

"I don't watch that kind of thing."

"I know, but—"

"I haven't heard."

"Me neither."

"What are you thinking?"

Again, he hears the shudder in Edson's breath.

"It was a Q-blade, so everyone automatically thinks,
Take Out
the Trash.
But what if it wasn't?"

"Go on."

Edson twists his bottle in its plastic sleeve on Emerson's desk.

"The last time I saw her, at Todos os Santos, when the gay guy
tried to scare me off, she was talking to some people. One of them
was a priest—a white priest. Well, he dressed like a priest,
but a lot of white guys have this priest thing. And the night of the
gafieira she got called over to some people who were not on the guest
list."

"What is it you want to do?"

"I just want to go down and have a look."

"What for?"

"A trash can."

"And if you find it?"

"Then that's the end of it."

"And if you don't?"

"I don't know."

"Let it lie."

"I know, I should. But I don't think I can."

"Then brother, you be very fucking careful."

The old fit people thud and creak.

Edson makes his first pass on the wrong side of the road, then turns
through the Ipiranga alco station on the central strip and pulls over
onto the verge. He can re-create every slo-mo frame of the massacre
scene, but now, here, he cannot find it in all the empty blacktop. No
flowers, no Mass cards, no edible blessings. He leaves the Yam and
walks up and down the margin, grit-stung by fast trucks. An off-cur
of tire here, like a snake's shed skin. A coil of sheared-off steel:
street jewelry. He stands where the killer waited, hand out, hitching
a lift. Edson extends his arm, draws an imaginary line of division
across the blur of vehicles, houses, towers, sky. He feels nothing.
This edgeplace is too dislocated for anything like memory or grief to
attach.

A moto-taxi stops on the opposite verge. A long-haired woman
dissmounts. The flowing cars frame her like the shutter of a movie
camera. The woman walks up and down the verge. She leans forward,
hands braced on hips, staring across the highway. Edson jerks
upright. The image is branded onto his visual centers. The fall of
the hair; the tilt of the cheekbones; the false-innocence of the
doe-eyes, the anime eyes. Her.

Their eyes meet across car roofs. Heart stopped, time frozen, space
conngealed, Edson steps toward her. The blare of horns sends him
sprawling across the grit. She is running for the moto-taxi,
gesturing the driver to
Go go
.

"Fia!" The highway swallows it. He saw her on this same
margin, this spot where he stands. He saw her dead. Face covered.
Logos on the soles of her shoes. He saw them take her away from this
margin.

The moto-taxi weaves into the traffic. The thrall is broken. Edson
snaps off a tracking shot on his Chillibeans. He jumps onto his bike,
kicks up the engine. She wears a green leather jacket. Green leather
jacket and long long hair streaming. He can find those. He takes a
scary scary cut across the central strip and into the fast lane.
She's twelve cars ahead of him, shifting lanes. Edson's Yamaha can
outrun anything on this highway; dodging between biodiesel trucks on
the Santos convoy, he closes the gap. She glances over her shoulder;
her hair whips across her face. It's me, me! Edson screams into the
slipstream. She punches the rider on the back, jerks her thumb
forward, then right. The rider bends over the throttles; the bike
takes off like a fighter. Edson's right behind it. She told him she
never rode pillion. The sudden slowdown almost sends him into the
back of a school minibus. One of São Paulo's endemic
roadlocks. He's lost her. Edson cruises up the line of stationary
traffic. She's not in this line. He walks the scrambler between two
cars, so close to the big RAV that the driver yells at him,
Mind
the chrome, favelado
. Not in the center lane. Not in the inside
lane. Where? He sees green leather accelerating up the offramp from
the opposite side of the highway. Caught him with his own trick. But
he knows where that road leads: Mother of Trash, Todos os Santos.