Brasyl (31 page)

"They are the damned, Father. The ones who have rejected Christ
and His City and so condemn themselves to animal slavery. In time
they will all be sold."

"Men and women; children, Father Diego."

"They have brought it on themselves; do not pity them, they
neither deserve nor understand it."

"And the sick, Father Diego?"

Gonçalves 's boyish face was bland innocence.

"I am not quite certain what you mean."

"I looked into one of the malocas. I could not believe what I
saw, so I looked into another, and then another and another. This is
not the City of God; this is the City of Death."

"Overtheatrical, Father."

"I see no play, no amusement in whole households dead from
disease. The smallpox and the measles rend entire malocas and leave
not one alive. Your ledger there, so neatly ruled and inscribed—have
you records there for the numbers who have died since being liberated
into your City of God?"

Gonçalvessighed.

"The indio is a race under discipline. They have been given over
to us by God to be tried, tested, and, yes, admonished, Father.
Through discipline, through exercise, comes spiritual perfection. God
requires no less than the best of us as men and as a nation sacred to
Him. These diseases are the refiner's fire. God has a great plan for
this land; with His grace, I will build a people worthy of it."

"Silence." Luis Quinn's accent cut like a spade. "I
have seen all you have wrought here, but I take none of that into
account into my judgment, which is, that you are guilty of preaching
false doctrine: namely, that the people to whom you have been sent to
minister are born without souls and that it has been granted you the
power to bestow them. That is a deadly error, and with it, I find you
also guilty of the sin of hubris, which is the fatal sin of our Enemy
himself. In the name of Christ and for the love you bear Him, I
require you to place yourself under my authority and return with me
to São José Tarumás, and then to Salvador."

Gonçalves's lips moved as if telling beads or chewing sins.

"Buffoon."

Rage burned up in Quinn's heart, hot and sickening and adorable. That
is what he wants. Quinn continued in the same flat, emotionless
voice, "We will leave at dawn in my canoe. Instruct your headmen
and morbichas in whatever they require to maintain the aldeia until
your replacement has been sent from Salvador."

"I truly had expected more." Gonçalves's hands were
folded piously in his lap. Palm-oil lamps cast unreadable shadows on
his face. "A man of languages, from Coimbra indeed; not one of
those local peons who can barely even read their own names, let alone
the missal, and hear devils in every thunderstorm and várzea
frog, a man of learning and perception. Refinement. Have you any idea
how I long for a brother with whom I could discuss ideas and
speculations as far beyond the comprehension of these dear, simple
people as the firmament? I am disappointed, Quinn. I am sadly
disappointed."

"You refuse my authority?"

"Authority without power is empty, Father. Brazil has no place
for empty authority."

"You have seen my commission; you are aware of the license
Father Maggalhaes has given me."

"Really? Do you really imagine you could? Against me? Almost,
almost I might try it. But no, it would be a waste." An index
finger lifted a fraction, and directly a dozen crossbows were trained
on Luis Quinn. Quinn let his hands fall meekly open:
See, like
Christ I offer no resistance.
How soon he had forgotten the guile
and skill of the people of the rain forest.

"'I ask for a task most difficult,'—you said that once."
Was there no limit to this man's information' "I have such a
task for you. I had hoped you might embrace it willingly, even
gladly; recall. Now it seems I must compel you."

"I do not fear martyrdom at your hands," Luis Quinn said.

"Of course not, nor do I imagine I could coerce you by threat to
your life. Merely consider that for every bow pointed at you, three
are trained on Dr. Robert Falcon as he sleeps in his hammock at the
meeting of the White and Black rivers."

The two men knelt unspeaking. The compline of the forest spoke around
them: insects, frogs, shrieking birds of night passage. Luis Quinn
gave the barest of nods. Father Diego's finger scarcely flickered,
but the bowmen dissappeared like thoughts.

"Your task most difficult."

"There is a tribe beyond the Iguapárá River, a
vagrant people, the Iguapá, forced from their traditional
terrains as other peoples flee the bandeirantes and lesser orders.
You will be interested to note that their language is neither a Tupi
derivative nor an Aruak/Carib variant. Among all the people of the
Rio Catrimani and Rio Branco, they are known as a race of prophets.
They seem to believe in a form of dream-time, akin ro real time,
inverted. All tribes and nations consult them, and they are always
right. Their legend has bought them immunity: the Iguapá have
never been involved in any of the endemic warfare that so delights
these people. It is my burden to bring the Iguapá the love of
Christ and his Salvation, but they are a fugitive, elusive nation.
The tribes protect them, even those assimilated into my City of God,
and my missionaries have so far been unsuccessful."

"My predecessors," Luis Quinn said. "The ones you said
departed from you hale in will and wind. You sent them to martyrdom."

Gonçalves pursed his lips in contemplation.

"Why, I had not considered it in that fashion, but you are
right, yes, yes, martyrdom I suppose it is. Certainly none survived."

"They returned to you?"

"Burning with visions and ravings, insanities and
impossibilities. Their minds were quite destroyed; some were babbling
and incoherent; a few even had lost the power of speech or were
completely insensate." Gonçalves pressed his hands into
unconscious prayer, touched them to his lips in wonder and devotion.
"Most succumbed after a few days. One individual, a stout
German, endured two weeks. Father Kaltenbacher led me to speculate
that an individual with even more highly developed mental faculties
might survive, even with the mind intact to communicate what they had
seen among the Iguapá."

"Your overweening pride leads you to madness if you believe that
my coming was anything other than at the order of Provincial-General
de Magalhães."

"Is that what you believe?" Gonçalves asked.
"Truly?" Again he touched his praying hands to his lips.
"Tomorrow you will leave with your native slave and a crew of my
Guabirús and travel up the Catrimani and the Iguapára.
The peoples who make use of the Iguapás' talents know how to
find them when they need them. You will understand if I do not take
you upon your honor to travel unescorted."

"Manoel is not my slave. Neither is Zemba; he has papers of
manumisssion, he is a free man."

"No longer; he will become a member of my personal entourage.
Now I bid you a good night, Father; you have a long and arduous
journey tomorrow, and you would do well to refresh yourself. Eat,
rest, and devote yourself to prayer and contemplation. Rejoice,
Father, you will behold glories none have ever seen and lived."

Again, the merest twitch of a finger and crossbows emerged silently
from the darkness. Luis Quinn, a giant among his painted captors,
glanced back. Gonçalves knelt at his desk, the quill again
moving steadily over the paper. Sensible of Quinn's regard, he looked
and smiled in pure, broad pleasure.

"I envy you, Father. Truly, I envy you."

O Dia
had it on the front page. It was relegated to page two
in
Jornal do Brasil
, pushed off the cover by a photograph of
the wife of the head of CBF in just a pair of soccer socks and a
strategically held ball.
O Correio Brasilense
likewise carried
the scoop on page two, with a recap in the entertainment pages and a
three-page analysis in the sports section, concluding that maybe it
was time to look objectively at the Maracanaço and that it had
swept away a swaggering complacency and so led to the mighty Seleçãos
of 1958 and 1970 and that Carlos Alberto Parreira might well heed the
lesson of 1950. Even
Folha de São Paulo
, which deigned
anything carioca as beneath serious regard, carried the story in the
bottom of the front page: RIO REALITY SHOW TO PUBLICLY TORTURE
MARACANAÇO VICTIM.
Jornal Copacabana
's Sunday Special
splashed a full front page of "Professional Carioca"
Raimundo Soares, arms folded, a look of righteous disgust on his face
with the Sugar Loaf behind him and the lead-line SHE MADE ME BETRAY A
FRIEND.
O Globo
opted for the full nuclear. Its cross-media
network was ten times the size of Canal Quatro, yet it saw the
upstart, adolescent independent channel as a grave threat to its key
demographic and never wasted an opportunity to shit on it. A
sixty-point screaming banner headline declared WELCOME BACK TO HELL.
Beneath it was the lead photo of Barbosa, kneeling as if in prayer in
the mouth of the Brazil goal, the ball sweetly in the back of the
net. In the bottom left column was a picture of Adriano in surf
shorts taken at the Intersul Television Conference in Florianopolis.
Adriano Russo, responsible for bad-taste youth-oriented shows as
Gay Jungle, Jailbait Superstar, and Filthy Pigs,
said that the
show was in the early stages of development among a raft of World Cup
Season programming and that it had not yet been green-lit. When asked
if the program intended to drag the eighty-five-year-old disgraced
former goalkeeper out of retirement and subject him to "trial by
television" and public humiliation, Canal Quatro's director of
programming said that the channel would maintain its position as the
leading producers of edgy, noisy, and controversial popular
television but that it was not, nor ever had been, its policy to hold
older or weaker members of society up to shame.

They had called Adriano at dinner with his wife and guests in
Satyricon, made him talk in front of the diners and all the waiting
staff.

Page two ran a picture of the headquarters on Rua Muniz Barreto under
the headline THRONE OF LIES. Beneath, the LIST OF SHAME ran down a
chart of Canal Quatro's sleaziest shows, from
Nude Big Brother
to
Queen for a Day: I'm Coming Out!'
And there she was on page
three, a grainy cellular snap of her at the commissioning party in
Café Barbosa (a sign, a sign it had been, but against all she
had assumed it to be) up on the table shaking it with her liter of
Skol in its plastic cool jacket in her hand and Celso rolling his
eyes as he pretended to lick her ass.

Queen of Sleaze

This is the Canal Quatro producer responsible for the Barbosa
outrage, snapped during a drink- , drug- , and sex-fueled media
party. Marcelina Hoffman is one of Canal Quatro's most controversial
program makers: her
Jailbait Superstar,
a talent show for
inmates of a women's prison, created a record number of complaints
when it was revealed that the winner would be released, no matter
what she had done. Ironically, it was Senhora Hoffman herself who
gave the game away by accidentally sending an e-mail revealing the
true purpose of the program to crusading journalist Raimundo Soares,
after she lied to the King of the Cariocas in return for his help in
finding Barbosa. Senhora Hoffman is a well-known Zona Sui party girl,
infamous for her drinking and consumption of cocaine, and is
described by work colleagues as a "borderline plastic surgery
addict." Her name has recently been linked with Heitor Serra,
Canal Quatro's respected newsreader. . . .

The paper fell from Marcelina's fingers. With a keening, animal cry
she lay back among the tabloids and broadsheets scattered across
Heitor's floor, haloed in shouting headlines.
HELP UU FIND BARBOSA
FIRST! Rs 50,000 REWARD! SAVE BARBOSA. FIFTY YEARS IS ENOUGH.

Footsteps. Marcelina opened her eyes. Heitor stood over her like a
Colossus, like the anticipation of water-sport sex, bizarrely
foreshortened.

"I'm dead."

Heitor kicked the papers across the room. "How long have you
been here?"

"Forever. I couldn't sleep, and when I could I dreamed I was
awake. Do you have to get all the papers delivered?"

"It's my job."

Heitor had dropped back from the studio after the eleven thirty news
update expecting Furaçao Marcelina to have blown through his
apartment, strewing books, upturning tables, shattering glasses and
fine china, shredding suits slashing paintings smashing the religious
statues and images he had so adoringly collected over two decades of
spiritual seeking. He had found something much more frightening:
Marcelina seated in the middle of the floor, naked but for tanga, one
knee pulled up to her breasts, the other folded around its ankle. She
clutched her shin with both arms. Television cast the only light.
When she looked up, Heitor saw a face so ghost-eaten, so alien that
he had almost cried out, home invaded.

"Look."

Marcelina had uncurled a fist holding the DVD remote, beeped it at
the screen.

"What is it?"

"Don't you see?" Marcelina had howled, and in her voice the
hurricane broke. "It's me."

Heitor prised the remote out of her fingers, vanished the apparition
paused in the act of looking up into the camera.

"In the morning."

"No, not in the morning."

"Get that down you."

He had filled a glass from the refrigerator.

"What is it?"

"Just water." Plus a capsule from his kitchen
pharmacopoeia. "You need to rehydrate."

"She wants rid of me," Marcelina had said, sipping the
water. "Who?"

"The me."