Brasyl (25 page)

"Paddle, you oxen!" Falcon roared, and, to Juripari his
Manao translator, "Command them to paddle, this instant."
The translator remained silent, the paddles unmoving. Falcon struck
at the back of a slave kneeling immediately before him. The man
received the blow with the stolidity of a buttressed forest tree.
Quinn and his crew were stroking swiftly toward the drifting canoes.
He hauled in along side the swearing, berating Falcon.

"Apologies, my friend, but this is as far as you travel with
me."

"What have you done? What nonsense is this? Some wretched Jesuit
plot."

"More that fabled Jesuit gold to which you alluded, Doctor. The
Society has never feared the power of lucre, like some others. But
you will come no further with me, Dr. Falcon. Ahead lies the
Arquipelago das Anavilhanas, which Manoel tells me is a mapless maze
of ever-shifting sand bars and lagoons. I have instructed your crew
to make camp on an island for five days. In that time I will have so
far outstripped your expedition that you will never find me. My
friend, it is not safe for you to go with me, and to be truthful, my
own misssion may lead me to actions that I would not wish witnessed
by one outside my Order. Neither was it safe, even for you, to remain
in São José Tarumás. But in the Anavilhanas, no
one will ever find you." Quinn lifted the Frenchman's sword from
the bottom of the pirogue and offered it to him. "This is your
weapon, not mine; and if I do not have it, Grace of Our Lady I shall
not be tempted to use it." He tossed the sword; Falcon caught it
lightly in his two hands. The canoes rocked on the still water, all
bound together in the dark currrent. "Argument is futile, my
dear friend, against Jesuit authority, and Jesuit gold." Quinn
nodded to his indio pilot; paddles dipped, the pirogue drew away from
the helpless Falcon. "I must confess a further crime against
you, Doctor, though, as I have returned your sword, it is more in the
nature of a trade. Your device, your Governing Engine; in this land
it would become a tool of the grossest human subjugation conceivable.
Forgive me; I have removed it from your baggage, together with the
plans. It is an evil thing."

"Quinn, Quinn!" Falcon shouted. "My engine, my
Governing Engine, what did you do with it, you faithless blackrobe?"

"Look for me around the mouth of the Rio Branco," Quinn
called back, and the river carried them apart until the pirogue,
pitifully small and fragile against the green wall of the várzea,
was lost among the narrow mud-choked channels.

Only when the sudden clap of flighting birds or the soft clop of a
jumping fish or the sun brilliant in the diamond of a water-bead
dropping from paddle-tip summoned him did Father Luis Quinn start
from rapture to find that hours had passed in the reverie of the
river. He had ceased counting the days since the parting at
Anavilhanas; morning followed morning like a chain of pearls, the
great dawn chorus of the forest, then the run out into the misty
water and the time-devouring stroke of the paddles; the simple
sacrament of physical work. No need, no desire for speech. Never in
all his disciplines and exercises had Quinn found so easy and
complete a submergence of the self into the other. The indolent slide
of jacaré into the water; the sudden scatter of capybara as
the pirogue entered a marshy furo between river loops, noses and tiny
ears held above the surface; the dash of a toucan across the channel,
a nestling in its outlandish beak, pursued by the plundered mother.
Once—had he imagined, had he truly beheld?—the wide
prideful eyes of the solitary jaguar, kneeling warily at a salt lick.
Their unthinking, animal actions were of one with the automatic
obedience of his muscles to the paddle. In physicality is true
subjugation of the self.

On and on and on. As Quinn's spirit went outward into the physical
world, as often it was cast backward. Memory became entangled with
reality. Luis Quinn knelt not in the waist of a pirogue, a frail
shave of bark, but stood at the taff-rail of a Porto carrack beating
for the Spanish Gate of Galway under a spring sky of swift,
gray-bottomed shower-heavy clouds. Fifteen years and his first return
since childhood; he had thought he would barely remember the old
language, but as Suibhne the captain led him from warehouse to
port-merchants to tavern and the men had greeted him like a
sea-divided relative, he found the grammar and idiom, the words and
blessings swinging into place like the timbers of a house. Seamus Óg
Quinn's son; big strapping lad he grew up to be, grand to see a Quinn
back among his old people and lands. Again, recollection: the great
hall on the upper floor of the casa in Porto; Pederneiras the tutor
taking him by the hand down from the schoolroom on the top floor to
this great, light-filled hall lowering with allegories of wealth, and
power crowning the merchants and navigators of Porto. As he had
peered down through the colonnaded window into the rattling street,
Pederneiras had opened a long, narrow shagreen-bound case. Within,
bound in baize, the blades. "Go, take one, feel it, adore it."
Luis Quinn's hand dropped around the hilt and a thrill burned up his
arm, a belly-fire, a hardening and pressing he now knew as sexual, a
feeling that twenty years disstant, kneeling in supplication, still
stirred him physically.

"I see you need no encouragement from me, Senhor Luis,"
Pederneiras had said, observing the precocious pride in his pupil's
breeches. "Now, the garde."

Bright metal in his hand once again, the flattened silver of a stout
tankard, crushed by repeated blows to the skull of a man.
The
master has commanded me to serve you no more.
Still his body
remembered that deep, exultant joy. Luis Quinn turned the disciplines
of his exercise to expunge the luxuurious memory of sin.
Preparatory
prayer
: ask of Christ his grace that all intentions, actions,
and works may be directed to his greater glory. First point: the sin
of the angels. Naked they were, and innocent, dwelling in a paradise
of bounty and clemency, yet still in their forests and great rivers
the Enemy corrupted them. They consumed human flesh, they rejoiced in
the meat of their enemies, and so we condemned them as pagan, animal,
without soul or spirit, fit only for slavery. In so doing we
condemned ourselves.
Second point
: the sin of old Adam.
Quinn's memory turned from the battered shell of metal in his fist to
the smashed skull on the floor. He heard again the hooting animal
howls of his friends cheering him on through the fire of lust and
drink.
Third point
: the sin of the soul condemned through
mortal vice. Father Diego Gonçalves, what do you know of him?
Manoel the pilot, a diligent altar boy, dared say nothing against the
Church, but his hunched shoulders and bowed head, as if cowering from
the vastness of the Rio Negro, spoke old dread to Luis Quinn. Zemba,
a freed slave who since his manumission at Belém had worked
his way up the river to the rumors of an El Dorado in the immensity
beyond São José Tarumás, a land of future where
his history would be forrgotten.
The City of God
, he said.
The kingdom of heaven is built there
.

Luis Quinn turned the three sins beneath his contemplation and saw
that they were indivisible: the pride of kings, the pride of the
spirit, the pride of power.
Now I understand why you sent me,
Father James. Conclude the meditation with the Paternoster
. But
as the comfortable words formed the river exploded around him,
dashing him from contemplation: botos, in their dozens, spearing
through the water around the pirogue, curving up through the surface
to gasp in air, some bursting free from their element entirely in an
ecstatic leap. Quinn's heart leaped in wonder and joy; then, as he
followed a flying, twisting boto to the zenith of its arc, to
wordless awe. Angels moved over the várzea, striding across
the forest canopy, their feet brushing the treetops. Angels carmine
and gold, Madonna blue and silver, angels bearing harps and
psalteries, drums and maracas, swords and double-curved warbows: the
host of heaven.
We strive not against men but against
principalities and powers.

The pirogue shot clear from the narrow gut of the furo to rejoin the
main channel, and Quinn involuntarily rose to his feet in wonder.
From bank to bank the channel was black with canoes; men perched in
the stern driving their bobbing wooden shells onward, women and
children in the waist. Some were entirely crewed by grinning,
spray-wet children. At the center of the great fleet rose the object
of Quinn's awe. A basilica sailed the river. Nave, chancel, apses,
buttresses, and clerestory; in every detail a church from the
wooden-shingled dome to the crucifix between its two towers. Every
inch of the basilica was covered in carved, painted reliefs of the
gospels and the catechisms, the martyrdoms of saints and the
stoopings of angels; the illumination caught and kindled in the
westering light as radiantly as any rose window. Each wooden
roof-slat was painted with the representation of a flower. Figures
stood on the railed balcony above the porch, tiny as insects. Insect
was the image caught in Quinn's reeling mind; the great church seemed
to stride across the water on a thousand spindle legs. A second,
colder look revealed them to be a forest of sweeps propelling the
towering edifice down the channel. The basilica did not move by human
muscle alone; the finials of the wall-buttresses had been extended
into masts slung with yardage and brown, palm-cloth sail; the towers
too bore sprits, stays, and banners. One pennant was figured with Our
Lady and child, the other a woman, standing on one foot, her body
entwined with forest vines and flowers. Naked red bodies patterned
black with genipapo swarmed the ropes and ratlines. Then Luis Quinn's
attention rose to the mastheads. Each mast was capped with a titanic
carving of an angel: trumpet, harp, lozenge-bladed sword, shield, and
castanets. Their faces were those of the people of the canoes:
high-cheeked, narrow-eyed, black-haired Rio Negro angels.

Now bells sounded from the basilica. The figures on the balcony moved
with sudden activity, and a large canoe was pushed out from the line
of mooring poles at the church-ship's bow. Quinn read the inscription
over the main portal, though he already knew what it must say:
Ad
maioram Dei Gloriam.

Silver rain woke Marcelina Hoffman. Her face and hair were dewed; her
sleeping bag gleamed beneath a mist of fine droplets like the pupa of
some extraordinary Luna moth. A ceiling of soft, ragged cloud raced
above her face, seemingly low enough to lick. The morros were
abruptly amputated, their tops invisible in the mist. Marcelina
watched the streaming gray tear around the spines and quills of
antennae and aerials that capped the taller apartment towers. She put
out her tongue, a taste not a kiss, and let the warm drizzle settle
on it. The noises from the street were subdued, baffled; car tires
slushy on the wet, greasy blacktop. Gulls sobbed, hovering seen and
unseen in the mist; the rain-sodden Copacabana lay beneath their
yellow avaricious eyes. Raucous weather-prophets. Marcelina shivered
in her bag; gulls calling had always disturbed her; the voice of the
sea calling her out over its horizon: new worlds, new challenges.

Downstairs the apartment felt chill and abandoned. The furniture was
cold to the touch, damp and unfamiliar; the clothes in the closets
belonged to a previous, fled tenant. The apartment had reverted to
its natural smell, that distinctive pheromone of place that had
struck Marcelina with almost physical force the moment the agent had
opened the door, that she had worked so hard to banish with scented
candles and oil burners and coffee and maconha but that crept back,
under doors through air-conditioning vents every time she left it for
more than a few days. Marcelina made coffee and felt the kitchen
watching her. Carpet-treading in your own house.

Her cellular, charging on the worktop, blinked. Message. Received
2:23. The number was familiar but evoked no name or face.

Bip.

A man's voice raged at her. Marcelina almost threw the phone from
her. It spun on the bare, almost surgically clean worktop, voice
gabbling. Marcelina picked up the phone. Raimundo Soares, furious,
more furious than she had thought possible for the Last Real Carioca.
She killed the message and called back straightaway.

He recognized her number. Seven hours had not mellowed him; he was
furious beyond even a hello good morning how are you?

"Wait wait wait wait, I understand you're angry with me, but
what is it you're actually angry about?"

"What do you mean? Don't you play any more stupid games with me.
Bloody women you're all the same, tricks and games, oh yes."

"Wait wait wait wait." How many times has she said these
words in just seven days? "Pretend I don't know anything, and
start at the very beginning." She could never hear those words
without recalling her mother's medley of hits from
The Sound of
Music
, Samba-ized. Christ on crutches; it was Feijoada Saturday:
feijoada and organ, the happy Annunciation of the blessed Iracema.
But it was marvelous indeed how the mind reached for the ridiculous,
the incongruous in dark and panic.

"Oh no, I'm not to fall for that soft-soap; I know how you
reality TV people work. That e-mail; it's all a joke at my expense,
isn't it? There's probbably a camera over there watching me right
now; you've probably even got one in my toilet so you can watch me
scratching myself."

"Mr. Soares, what e-mail are you talking about?"

"Don't you mister me, don't you ever mister me. I've heard of
these things; people hit the wrong button and the e-mail goes out to
someone it's not supposed to; well, I saw it and I know your game.
You may have made a fool out of me, but you won't make a fool out of
the people of Rio, oh no."