Brasyl (27 page)

"You've got your pants tucked into your boots," Marcelina
said.

"Come on, now. How much have you had?"

"Only wine officer, only wine."

"You should be ashamed of yourself, in public too. Come on,
now."

''I'm a corda vermelha, you know," Marcelina said. "I could
make you look very very silly." But the policewoman's grip on
Marcelina's elbow was irrefutable. She steered her toward the car.
Her partner, a broad-faced mulatinho, shook with laughter.

"I'm glad you think it's funny," Marcelina said as the
policewoman pressed her down into the seat. "Oh, I've gotten all
your upholstery wet." She tried to wipe away the drips with her
sleeve. "Where are you taking me?"

"Home."

Marcelina seized the policewoman's shirt.

"No, don't take me there, I can't go there, she's there."

The policewoman quickly and firmly unhooked Marcelina's fists.

"Well, you're in no condition to be out on the street. Would you
rather I took you in?"

"Heitor," Marcelina said. "Take me to Heitor.
Heitoooor!"

He thanked the officers patiently, who were genuinely awed to be in
the presence a television celebrity and delighted at the prospect of
profitable gossip. Marcelina sat on the topmost of the terrace steps,
runoff from the morro that rose sheer behind Heitor's apartment block
cascading around her.

"This is going to be all over Quem by Monday," Heitor said.
There was the discreet exhibitionism of a woman in a sheer playsuit
parading under the lenses across the lagoon; that same woman drunk
and shrieking on his back steps was quite another thing. "Jesus.
Are you going to come in? My car's going to be here in five minutes
and I'm going to have to change, this suit is ruined."

"Well boo hoo for your suit," Marcelina shouted to Heitor's
rain-soaked shoulders as he stepped through the sliding doors into
his bedroom. "It's my fucking life that's over, that's all."

Heitor threw a towel out to her. She wrapped it round her head like
Carmen Miranda but got to her feet, glitter pumps careful careful on
the treacherous waterfall steps and stumbled into the bedroom. Heitor
stood in his shorts and socks, knotting a knitted silk tie Marcelina
had brought him back from New York. She stood dripping onto his
carpet.

"Do you think it's like axé, that power can go out and
take shapes?"

Heitor pulled on his pants, checked the propriety of his creases.

"What are you talking about?"

Marcelina staggered out of her shoes as Heitor pulled his on with a
tortoiseshell shoehorn. Her Capri-cut jeans followed; she fell back
onto the bed as she tried to disengage her feet.

"Like some very strong feelings or stress or wanting something
too much can go out of you and gather together and take on a life and
body of its own," she said. "Like the umbanda mestres were
supposed to be able to tear off part of their souls and make it take
the shape of a dog or a monkey."

Marcelina put her arms up and slid off the bed out of her saturated
strappy top. Her bra followed. Heitor studied her small,
tight-nippled breasts in the full-length mirror. He shrugged on his
jacket.

"That's legend. Magic. Superstition. We live in a scientific,
entropic universe."

"But suppose suppose suppose. .. " Marcelina said in her
tanga. The intercom buzzed. Taxi. Heitor kissed her, circled his
thumbs over her nipples.

Marcelina pressed close, tried to slip the tongue. Heitor gently
pressed her down to the bed.

“I’ll see you in there later. And do try and get some
water down you."

"Heitor!"

The rain streaking across the coffin-narrow concrete garden was now
stained ochre with eroded soil. Marcelina sat up under the sheet,
knees pulled to chin, watching the morro wash between the potted
plants and down the steps, shivering at the horror. Sleep was
impossible. She scuffed around on Heitor's polished hardwood floor in
her bare feet, looking for water. Marcelina slowly bent over and
bared her ass to the telescopes across the lagoon. Wipe your lenses,
boys and girls. She slapped her backside.

But she had still wished her own sister's twin babies aborted in the
womb.

Marcelina flicked on the plasma screen. Noise, chatter, brainpan
jabber. Stop you thinking about yourself. And there was Heitor, the
remote control camera moving in for a close-up as the title graphics
rolled. The headlines tonight. Burning cars, police helicopters,
corpses in Bermudas. The walls around the favelas another course of
bricks taller. Lula rocked by fresh corruption allegations. Brazil,
the nation of the future. Then Marcelina saw Heitor scan the next
line on the autocue and his eyes widen. There was the tiniest of
pauses. Heitor never did that. Heitor was the old-school
public-service commitment to the Truth Well in a jungle of
eighteen-to-thirty-four demoographics and noisy edginess. Heitor was
professional down to the shine of his shoes. All her attention was
focused on the screen.

"And Canal Quatro finds itself in the news with the allegations
by journalist Raimundo Soares to be published in the
Jornal de
Copacabana
tomorrow that it is to make a television program about
the Maracanaço. He alleges that he received a confidential
e-mail from a Canal Quatro producer that the entertainment program
will track down the eighty-five-year-old Moaçir Barbosa, seen
by many as being chiefly responsible for the Maracanaço, and
publicly humiliate him in a mock trial reality show."

VT insert of Raimundo Soares in surf shirt and shorts on rain-swept
Flamengo Beach, his brotherhood nodding over their lines behind him.
Cynicism. Lied to. Pillorying an old man. Then Marcelina could not
hear anymore because the sound in her eyes in her head in her ears
squeezed out into the world.

It was all ended. Our Lady of Production Values had abandoned her.

She pointed the remote and sent Heitor into the dark. Her heartbeat
was the loudest sound in the room.

"Who are you?" Marcelina shouted. "Why are you doing
this to me? What did I do?"

She fled into the bedroom, emptied her bag onto the bed. There,
there, the translucent plastic clamshell. She slid the DVD into the
side of Heitor's plasma screen.

Her finger hesitated over the play button.

She had to know. She had to see.

Marcelina wound through Canal Quatro staff slipping out home, a nod
and a silent word to Lampião. There went Leandro. Several
fast-scans minutes of Lampião dully gaping at a flickering
television. How little he moved. Then Marcelina saw the edge of the
door revolve across the shot. A figure in a dark suit entered.
Marcelina's fingers stumbled over the buttons as she tried to find
slo-mo. Back. Back. The drive whined. Again the figure entered. A
woman. A woman jogging forward frame by frame in a good suit—dark
gray. A woman, short, with a lot of naturally curled bouncing blonde
hair. A loira woman. Lampião looked up from his TV and smiled.

Frame by frame, the woman turned to check the location of the camera.
Marcelina hit pause. The only snow that Rio knew blew across the top
of the screen.

Her face. She was looking into her own face.

After midnight the axé flows strongest through the Igreja of
the Sisterhood of the Boa Morte. Taxis and minibuses bring
supplicants from all across the northern suburbs: when the saints are
tired the walls between the worlds are weak, and the most powerful
workings may be dared. Edson tosses a coin to St. Martin, the
Christian aspect of Exu, Lord of the Crossroads, Trickster and
Rent-boy of the orixás, patron of all malandros.

The Sisters of the Good Death have orbited Edson's life like fairy
godmothers. His grandmother from the northeast had given the
Sisterhood her two daughters, Hortense and Marizete, in exchange for
the success of her sons in hard, clutching Sampa. But Dona Hortense
had loved pirate radio and dancing and boys with fast cars and the
madre had released her from her vows (truly, no God regards the vow
of a fourteen-year-old as binding). Tia Marizete found peace and
purpose in the discipline of a post-Catholic nun and remained and for
twenty-five years had brought the Dignified Burial and unofficial
social services to the bairros and favelas of north São Paulo.
Unlike their mother church in Bahia, the Paulistana daughters did not
practice seclusion: their Baiana crinolines and turbans were familiar
and welcome sights on the streets as they gave healings, told
fortunes, and collected reis in their baskets. Twice a year, at the
Lady Days, Tia Marizete would call on her sister and nephews and the
entire bairro would land on Dona Hortense's verandah with a variety
of small but niggling maladies.

"Does your mother know where you are?" Tia Marizete asks,
clearing the guest room of gay abiás ("we've become icons
again, Mother help us"). She sets wards of palm and holy cake on
the windowsills and door lintels.

"She knows. She's not to come looking for me. Don't let her. I
need money. And I may have to stay a while."

"You are welcome as long as you need. But I have a service to
conduct. And Edson, remember, this is God's house." Then the
drums start so loud he can feel them in his bowels, but they are a
comfort; he feels himself slipping down into their rhythm. By the
time the tetchy initiate slips a tray of beans and rice and two Cokes
through the door he's nodding, exhausted.

The Sisters have always saved him. When he was twelve he had been
given a fluky antibiotic that kicked off a massive allergic reaction
that left mouth, tongue, lips covered in white-lipped ulcers and
drove him fever-mad, hallucinating that a ball at once chokingly
small and jaw-wrenchingly huge was being forced endlessly into his
mouth. The doctor had rolled his eyes and shaken his head. Biology
would take its course. His brothers had carried him on the back of a
HiLux to the Sisters, wrapped in sweat-soaked sheets. Tia Marizete
had laid him in one of the acolytes' rooms, bathed him with scented
and herbal waters, anointed him with sweet oils, scattered prayers
and consecrated farofa over him. Three days he had raged along the
borderlands between life and death. The ulcers advanced down his
throat. If they reached his tonsils, he would die. They halted at the
base of his uvula. Axé. Through it all, the memory the drums
and the clapping hands, the stamp and belljingle of the Sisters as
they whirled in their ecstasy dances; the cheers and tears and
praises to Our Lady, Our Wonderful Lady. Down, into the drums.

Crying. Soft and faltering, at the very end of tears, more gasp than
sob. Edson slips from the thin foam mattress. The sound comes from
the camarinha, the innermost, holiest sanctuary, the heart of axé.
Fia sits in the middle of the floor, legs curled, fingers twined.
Around her the statues of the saints on their poles lean against the
walls, each draped in his or her sacramental color.

"Hey. It's only me. You know, we shouldn't really be in here.
It's for the Sisters and the high initiates only."

It takes a long time for Fia's gasps to form words. Edson's cold and
shivering after his sleep; the energy of the night has left him. He
could hold Fia; his comfort, her warmth. But it's not her.

"Did you ever have a dream where you're at home and you know
everyone and everything, but they don't know you, they've never known
you, and no matter how much you try and tell them, they never will
know you?"

"Everyone has that dream."

"But you know me, and I've never seen you before in my life. You
say you are Edson Jesus . . . "

"Oliveira de Freitas."

"I think I need to know this now. Who was I?"

So among the shrouded saints Edson tells her about her father with
his New Age columns and stable of accountancy bots and her mother
with her urban farm and her brother away across the big planet on his
gap-year chasing surf and surf-bunnies ....

"Sorry, what?"

"Yoshi, your brother. You have a brother, where you come from?"

"Of course I do, but he's in his first year at the São
Paulo Seminary."

Edson blinks in astonishment.

Fia asks, "Edson, what was I like?"

"You. Not you. She liked bags, clothes, girlie things. Shoes.
The last day I saw her, she went to a shop to get these shoes
printed."

He sees the soles, the logos bobbing before him as the crash team
slides the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.

"Shoes, printed?"

Edson explains the technology as he understands it. When Fia
concentrates, she tilts her head to one side. Edson never saw the
real Fia do that. It makes this Fia look even less true, like a dead
doll.

"She never got on the back of my bike. She always took taxis.
She hated getting dirty, even when we were up in Todos os Santos she
was immaculate, always immaculate. She had quite a lot of
girlfriends."
How little I know
, Edson realizes. A few
details, a scoop of observations. "She was very direct. I don't
think she was comfortable being too near to things. All those
friends, but she was never really close to them. She liked being an
outsider. She liked being the rebel, the quantumeira."

''I'm nowhere near as wild and romantic as that," Fia says.
"Just a plain quantum-computing postgrad specializing in
multiversal economic moddeling. My world; it's less paranoid. We
don't watch each other all the time. But it's more . . . broken. I'm
broken, everyone's broken. We leave bits of ourselves all over the
place: memories, diaries, names, experiences, knowledge, friends,
personalities even, I suppose. I loaded everything I could, but there
are still important parts of me back there: pictures, childhood
memories, school friends. And the world is broken. It's not like
this. This is . . . like heaven."

Edson tries to imagine the point at which Fia's world branched off
from his. But that is a trap, Mr. Peach had taught. There is no heart
reality from which everything else diverges. Every part of the
multiverse exists, has existed, will exist, independently of every
other. Edson shivers. How can you live with that sort of knowledge?
But Fia notices him shiver.