Brasyl (23 page)

Her grip tightens as he turns off the highway onto the serpentine
road that is the gut of Cidade de Luz. She takes in the moto-taxis,
the buses, the grand pillared frontage of the Assembly of God Church
like a jerry-built heaven, the swags of power cables and tripping
runs of white water pipes clambering up through the houses and walled
yards into the glowing, chaotic mass of the high city, the true,
unrepentant favela.

The road takes another wind; then Edson hauls on the brakes. There's
someone in the road, right under his wheel. The bike skids; the
Fia—Fia II, he thinks of her—slides across the oily
concrete to hit the high curb. The fool in the road: it's Treats who
has dashed out from his usual roost at the Ipiranga station where he
hassles drivers into letting him clean their windshields while they
fill up.

"Edson Edson Edson, Petty Cash! He's dead, man, they've killed
him, came right in."

Edson seizes Treats by the scruff of his too-too-big basketball vest
and drags him round the back of the fuel station, out of the light,
among the gas cylinders.

"Shut up with my name, you don't know who's listening or
looking."

"Petty Cash, they—"

"Shut up. Stay there."

He picks up the beautiful, delicate Yamaha and wheels it over to Fia
II.

You have to stop calling her that, like she's a movie.
Fia.
But it's not right.

"You all right?" She goes to say something about her torn
top, but Edson hasn't time for that. "Keep your hood up, stay
out of the cameras, and lock yourself in the women's toilet. There
are people here who could recognize you. I will come for you. There's
a matter I have to deal with right now."

Edson orders Treats to go round to Dona Hortense and ask for his
go-bag.

"She'll know what that means. And show my mother some manners,
uneducated boy."

He goes through the alleys and ladeiros beneath the swags of power
cable and bougainvillea. Moto-taxis hoot past, pressing him to the
walls in the steep narrow lanes. The ambulance is still outside the
house. Edson can hear police drones circling overhead. The small
crowd has the patient, resting body language of people who have
passed from witness to vigil. A man-sized hole has been cut sheer
through the gate and part of the wall. It matches another through the
door and doorframe. And it is like a storm of dark birds flying out
of that hole, flying at Edson's head, blinding him with their wings
and claws and beaks, bird after bird after bird, too many too fast,
he swipes, slaps at them, but there are always more and they keep
coming, wing after wing after wing, and he knows that if he misses,
once, he will go down and their claws will be in his back.

"What happened?" Edson asks Mrs. Moraes seated on the side
of the road in her shorts and flip-flops, hair still up in foil and
her hand frozen to her mouth. Her neighbors stood around her.

"They came on a motorbike. The one on the back, he did that.
Jesus love my boy my boy my poor boy, what did he ever to do to
anyone?"

Now he sees Old Gear his antique dealer by the ambulance. All Edson's
alibis are there in the crowd. They all have the same look: He died
for you.

What if you get killed?
Petty Cash had joked. But he did. That
is what the ambulance crews are taking away in their black bag: a
body wearing a pair of I-shades that say
Edson Jesus Oliveira de
Freitas
. Edson is an unperson now.

There is no place for him in Cidade de Luz. At the Ipiranga station
he sees the ambulance pass, lights rotating, sirens hushed. Treats
has his go-bag.

"One more thing, Treats. Go back and tell Dona Hortense I'm with
the Sisters."

"The Sisters."

"She'll know. Good man." The jeitinho is fully paid. Next
time, it will be Edson owes Treats.

The Yamaha heads west through the contrails of light. Edson calls
back to Fia on the pillion. "Have you any money?"

"Some cash from selling tech and jewelry and stuff, but I've
spent most of it on food and a capsule to stay. Why?"

"I don't have anything. I don't exist. That ambulance that went
past, that was me in the back."

She asks no questions as Edson explains his world. Carbon-fiber
angels watching the city by day and night, never ceasing, never
hasting. Universal arfid tagging and monitoring where the clothes on
your back and the shoes on your feet and the toys in your pocket
betray you. Total surveillance from rodovia toll cameras to
passersby's T-shirts or I-shades snatching casual shots; only the
rich and the dead have privacy. Information not owned but rented;
date-stamped music and designer logos that must be constantly
updated: intellectual property rights enforceable with death but
murder pay-per-view prime-time entertainment and pay-per-case
policing. Every click of the Chilli beans, every message and call and
map, every live Goooool! update, every road toll and every cafezinho
generates a cloud of marketing informaation, a vapor trail across
Sampa's information sphere. Alibis, multiple identiities, backup
selves—it is not safe to be one thing for too long. Speed is
life. She will be trying to work how she can exist—must
exist—in this world of Order and Progress, with no scan no
print no number, a dead girl come back to life. As he is a dead man,
driving west through the night traffic.

Robert Francois St.Honore Falcon: Expedition Log

A wonder a day and I do not doubt we should all live forever! I am
comforttably domiciled in the College adjoining the Carmelite Church
of Nossa Sennhora da Conceição, shaved, in clean linen,
and anticipating my first decent dinner in weeks, but my mind rerurns
to the phenomenon I witnessed today at the meeting of the waters.

Captain Acunha, desiring to show a proud Frenchman a marvel of his
land, called me to the prow to observe the extraordinary sight of two
rivers, one black, one milky white, flowing side by side in the same
channel; the black current of the Rio Negro, its confluence still two
leagues distant, runnning parallel to the silty flow of the Solimoes.
We steered along the line of division—I filled page after page
with my sketchings and I saw that, closely observed, the black and
the white waters curled around each other like intricate silhouette
work; curls within curls within curls of ever-diminishing scale, as I
have seen in the pattern of ferns and the leaves of certain trees. I
wonder, does it decrease in its self-similarity
ad infinitum?
Am I prejudiced to the macroscopic? Is there an implicit geometry, a
mathematical energy in the very small, that cascades up into the
greater, an automotive force of selfordering? I do think that there
is a law here, in river flow and in fern and leaf.

Now by contrast I consider São José Tarumás do
Rio Negro. A fort, manned by a handful of officers half-mad from
malaria and a company of native musketeers; the landings; a
government custom office; a court; the trading houses of spice
factors; the taverns and their attached caiçara; the hudddled
rows of whitewashed taipa huts of the settled indios, the praça,
the College; the church over all. The Church of Nossa Senhora da
Conceição is a gaudy of mannerist fancies and frenetic
painted decoration that seemed to rise sheer from the dark water as
we drew in to the wharf. It proclaims itself so because it is the
last: beyond São José lie the scattered aldeias and
far-between reduciones of the Rio Negro and Rio Branco. This sense of
the frontier, of the immense psychic pressure of the wilderness
beyond, gives São José its peculiar energy. The docks
are thronged with canoes and larger river craft; rafts of pau de
brasil logs lie marshalled in the river. The market is loud and
bright, the traders eager for my business. All is build and bustle;
along the river frontage new warehouses are being knocked together,
and on the higher ground walled houses, the bright new homes of the
merchants, want only for roofs. In every citizen from priest to slave
I see an eagerness to get down to business. It would, I believe, make
a good and strong regional capital.

Father Luis Quinn's reputation precedes him. The Carmelites welcomed
the visiting Jesuit admonitory with a musical progress. Trombas,
tammbourines, even a portative organ on a litter, and a veritable
host of indios in white—men, women, children—sparring
headdresses woven from palm fronds, waving same and singing together
a glorious cantata that combined European melodies and counterpoints
with native rhythms and exuberances. As I dogged along behind Quinn
with my baggage train, I found my pace adjusting to the rhythm.
Quinn, being a man much moved by music, was delighted, but I wonder
how much of his pleasure masked annoyance at being forestalled.
Despite the opulence of the friar's welcome, I sensed unease.

Father Quinn received the sacraments; I reconciled myself to Mammon
by presenting my travel permits to Capitan de Araujo of the fort and
a subbsequent prolonged questioning neither unfriendly nor
inquisitorial in tone, rather born out of long isolation and a lack
of any true novelty. Here I received the first setback to my plans: I
was informed that Acunha would be unable to take me onwards up the
Rio Negro: new orders from Salvador forbade any armed vessel from
proceeding beyond São José for fear of the Dutch
pirates, who were once again active in the area and could easily
seize such a ship and turn it against this garrison of the Barra. I
did not like to comment that the wood, sand, and adobe revetments
looked well capable of laughing off
Fé em Deus
's pop
guns, but if I have learned one thing in Brazil, it is never to
antagonize local potentates on whose goodwill you depend. The captain
concluded by commenting that he had heard that I enjoyed a reputation
as a swordsman, and, if time permitted, would welcome a chance to try
his skill on the strand before the fort, the traditional dueling
ground. I think I shall decline him. He is an amiable enough
dunderhead; his denial a frustration, nothing more. There are canoes
by the score beneath the pontoon houses in the floating harbor. I
shall begin my bargaining tomorrow.

(Addendum)

I am troubled by a scene I glimpsed from my window in the College.

Raised voices and a hellish bellowing made me glance out; by the
light of torches, a fat ox had been manhandled into the pracça
before the church, a rope to each hoof, horn, and nostril and men
hauling on them, yet scarcely able to control the bellowing,
terrified beast. A man stepped forth with a poleax, set himself
before the creature, and brought his weapon down between the ox's
ears. Seven blows it took before the maddened animal fell and was
still. I turned away when the men started to dismember the ox in the
praça, but I am certain that it was stricken with the plague,
the madness. It has reached São José Tarumás,
the last place in the world, it would seem, or is it from here that
it originates?

I trust the bloody barbarism does not upset my appetite for the
friar's hospitality.

The men fell on them at the landing. Faces hidden behind kerchiefs,
the three attackers stepped out from the cover of the pontoon houses
on either side of the bobbing gangplank. Flight, evasion, was
impossible in so narrow a pass. Quinn had no time to react before the
big broad carpenter's mallet swung out of the twilight shadows of the
river town and caught him full in the chest. He went down and in the
same instant the assailant swung his weapon to bring it down finally
on the father's head. Falcon's foot was there to meet the attacker's
wrist. Bone cracked; the man gave a shrill, shrieking cry as the
weight of the mallet snapped his hand over, broken, useless,
agonized. The assailants had miscalculated their attack; the
stricture of the plank walks compelled them to attack one man at a
time. As Quinn fought to regain presence, the second assailant thrust
his wounded colleague out of the way and pulled a pistol. With a cry
and a delicate kick, Falcon sent it spinning down the planking. He
retrieved it as it skidded toward the water and extinction, drew the
muzzle on the second masked man as the assailant raised his foot to
stamp down on Quinn's bowed neck.

"Hold off or you die this instant," he commanded. The man
glowered at him, shook his head, and pressed forward. Falcon
flickered his thumb over the wheel lock. Now the third assassin
elbowed his colleague out of the road. He held a naked knife, faced
Falcon at breath distance, hands held out in the knife-fighters pose
seeming half-supplication.

"I hardly think—"

The man struck. Falcon saw the top finger-length of the pistol fall
to the wood. Worked hardwood, steel, and brass had been cut through
as cleanly as silk. The man grinned, wove a pass with his knife.
Falcon thought he saw blue fire burn in its trace. Falcon threw his
hand up to protect his face and, heedless, pulled the trigger. The
explosion was like a cannon blast in the strait labyrinth of wooden
verandahs and gangways. The ball careered wide, sky-shot, lost.
Falcon had never intended it to hit. In the daze and confusion, he
struck the knife-man with two short, stabbing punches; Lyon
harborblows. The blade fell from the assailant's grip, struck the
wood, and continued into it as if it were water until the hilt
brought a halt. Now Quinn entered the fight, windful and hale. He
snatched up the dropped blade. It cut through the planks; the
boardwalk cracked and settled beneath him. Quinn drew himself to his
full height; his bulk filled the coffin-narrow alley. The wounded
mallet-man and the pistoleiro had already fled. The knife-man too
scrambled away but in his panic tripped on a board-end and went
sprawling on his back. With a bestial roar, Quinn was on top of him;
knife slung underhand, a gutting blow, no Christian stroke.