Brasyl (43 page)

Ten reggaes bounced from as many windows and verandahs; ram had
fallen again that morning and pooled water on the plastic stall roofs
turned into treacherous rivers, pouring over the edges of the
weather-sheets on to startled, laughing shoppers. Marcelina pressed
up against a trestle across which two lambs lay in absolute
dismemberment as a tour passed, wheyfaced gringos in two olive-drab
open-top Humvees, armored for the Baghdad green line. Devil-incisored
teeth grimaced in the stripped sheep-skulls, eyeeballs glared, loira.
They were right; she had been around the green globe and even across
the Tijuca Bridge but this was the first time she had set Manolo in a
favela. Marcelina had grown up at the foot of great Rocinha, but she
was as much as tourist as the ianques in their armored tour-buses.
And she thought,
Why are we ashamed? We decry those tourists in
their roll-bar Jeeps bouncing down through the market as if they're
on safari; Brasilia rails against the unstoppable wave of
favelization; we tear down shacks and put up walls and declare bairro
status like tattooing over the scars from a terrible childhood
illness, one the ianques eradicated decades ago. Don't visit them,
don't look at them, don't talk about them, like idiot siblings taped
to the bed in the back room; but they are not stumbling blocks on
Brazil's march to the future. They are the future. They are our
solution to this fearful, uncertain century.

A cellular shop. A man making manioc bread on a little glass-fronted
barrow. This was the place. Marcelina leaned against the storefront
and watched Rocinha's busy past. All our worlds, separate yet
intersecting. She felt pretty damn pleased with her philosophizing.
Worthy of Heitor himself.

The moto-taxi passed once, turned, returned. The rider, a lanky
morena-fechada in Rocinha uniform of Bermudas, basketball vest, and
Havaianas, drew up beside her.

"You're the Fisico," Marcelina said.

"Show me," the boy ordered.

Marcelina took out the little frog she had bought from the expensive
Centro chocolatier. Moto-boy waited. She unwrapped the gold foil and
popped it in her mouth. The sweat-heat chocolate left a little print
like the spoor of something hunted in her palm. The boy nodded for
Marcelina to slip onto the pillion. She locked her arms around his
waist, and he hooted his way out into the throng of market-goers.
Across the cracked blacktop serpentine of Estrada de Gávea the
moto-taxi took to its native element like a monkey, the steep
ladeiras zigzagging up between the rough, gray, graffiti-slashed
apartment blocks. Amigos dos Amigos. It was half a year since
Bem-Te-Vi had been cut down by the police, the ultimate arbiters in
the wars between the drug kings, but the CV's takeover had hardly
reached out from the main arterials. Medieval private armies fighting
for feudal lords to rule a renaisssance hill town, with walls, even.
And cellulares. And a functioning sewerage system and water supply.

Dogs skipped and barked; women toiling uphill with plastic shopping
bags moved aside to the shelter of apartment steps; girls smoked in
front rooms, tipping ash through window grilles. And everywhere
children, children children. Marcelina shouted over the shriek of the
laboring engine, "Are you really a physicist?"

"Why shouldn't I be?" the boy said, turning onto an even
steeper ladeira. The moto jolted up shallow, foot-worn steps.
Marcelina's toes scraped the rain-wet concrete.

"Nothing. It just seems, well . . . " Whatever she said
would show her Zona-Sul-girl prejudice. Why should Loop Quantum
Gravity physicists not live in Rocinha?

They were high now, the tree line visible between the tenements that
clung to the almost vertical hillside. Marcelina looked down on the
sweep of flat roofs with their blue water tanks and satellite dishes
and lines of laundry. But the favela was fecund, uncontrollable;
beyond the build-line new houses went up; cubes of brick and
concrete, pallets of blocks and mortars sent up by the hoist-load to
bare-chested bricklayers. Fisico stopped outside a corner lanchonete
so new Marcelina could smell the fresh paint. Yet the Comando
Vermehlo had laid claim to its tithe on the shape of a red CV on the
ocher brick wall. The owner nodded; a barefoot boy trotted out to
mind the bike.

"We walk from here."

A dark archway led between doorways and windows. Televisions blared
behind metal grilles; not one tuned to edgy, noisy Canal Quatro,
Marcelina noted. Sudden steps led down into a small court; apartments
piled unsteadily on top of each other leaned inquisitively over the
open space. Two parrots perched on the web of electricity cables that
held the whole assemblage in constructive tension. Down another
flight of steps into a lightless passage, past a tiny neon-lit cubby
of a bar, the seat built into the wall across the alleyway from the
tin counter. A bridge crossed a stream buried beneath the concrete
underpinnings of the favela, dashing and foaming down from the green,
moist morro into a culvert. Up and out into the light at the foot of
the narrowest, sheerest ladeira yet. FIsico held up his hand.
Marcelina felt the mass and life of the favela beneath her; but here,
high on the upper ranges of Rocinha, they seemed the only two lives.
The empty, blank tenement blocks were eerie in their silence. Higher
and higher, like Raimundo Soares's Beckham story. Then Marcelina
heard a ringing, slapping sound, a rhythm that made her gooseflesh
stir. A soccer ball bounced into the stop of the ladeira from a
higher flight, struck the wall and zigzagged down the steep steps.
Fisico stepped under the bounce and caught the ball. He beckoned
Marcelina up. She rounded the turn in the ladeira. At the top of the
steep flights, dark against the bluest sky, was Moaçir
Barbosa.

The Man Who Made All Brazil Cry.

Over the ten years she had worked her way up the Canal Quatro
hierarchy from production runner to development executive,
Marcelina's life had necessarily been woven with an eclectic warp of
celebrity: Cristina Aguilera, Shakira, Paris Hilton, even Gisele
Bundchen, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, all of CSS, Bob Burnquist, Iruan Ergui
Wu, and more wannabe popsters and telenovela actors than she could
remember. Star-sickness she got over the first time she had to run to
fix a rider for a spoiled celeb—that brand of water at that
temperature and shrimp for the doggie. Many had impressed, but none
had ever awed, until Moaçir Barbosa had stepped out of legend
and sat down at the table in the Fundaçao Mestre Ginga.
Swallow in throat, push back the tears. She had been brought from her
childhood bed to look upon the face of Frank Sinatra, but those blue
eyes had never moved her the way Barbosa settled heavily, painfully
onto the aluminum chair. This was death and resurrection; this man in
his pale suit had harrowed hell and returned. It was like the risen
Jesus had climbed down from his hill high above this cool cool house.

"Have you read it?" He rested a finger on the book.

"Some. Not all. A little." She was stammering. She was Day
Three on the job, pop-eyed at Mariah Carey.

"It'll have to do." Barbosa slipped the little book into
his jacket. "I only came for this, really. Well, you've found
me; and a world of trouble you've made for everyone, but most of all
yourself. I suppose there's nothing for it. Ginga will bring you up
tomorrow and we will sort it out."

"I don't know what you mean."

"You made the mess; you're going to have to clean it up."
Barbosa rose as stiffly as he had sat down, yet, like all former
athletes, a fit ghost inhabbited him, the lithe and limber orixá
of a cat-agile goalkeeper. He threw back a parting question from the
door.

"Would you have done it?"

"What?"

"Put me on trial, like Soares said in the papers."

For the first time Marcelina's power of professional mendacity fails
her.

"Yes. That was always the idea."

Barbosa laughed, a single, deep chuckle.

"I think you would have found it was I who put Brazil on trial.
Tomorrow. Don't eat too much, and no alcohol."

"Senhor Barbosa."

The old man had lingered in the doorframe. "Is it true for you?
About the goalposts?"

A smile.

"You don't want to believe everything Soares says, but that
doesn't mean that it's all lies."

High Rocinha opened itself to Barbosa the goalkeeper. The suspicious
streets opened shutters, doors, gratings, and grilles. Electrically
thin teen mothers with children on their hips greeted the old man;
young, haughty males with soldado tattoos at the bases of their
spines bid respectful good mornings. Barbosa tipped his hat, smiled,
took a pao do quijo from a lanchonete, a cafezzinho from a stall.
Fisico dawdled behind.

"I don't want to have to move on from here. It's a good place,
people have time, people look out for each other. I'm too old, I've
moved on enough, I deserve a little peace at last. I've had five good
years; I suppose you can't ask for much more. I should have told
Feijão I was dead."

Marcelina asked, "What do you have to move on for?"

Barbosa stopped. "What do you think?" He tossed his empty
plastic cup into a small brazier tended by two small boys. "You
should be at school, learn something useful like my friend here,"
he said to the boys. "Well, at least you understand now."

"The curupairá, the Order? I don't—"

"Shut up. We don't talk about that in front of the gentiles. And
that wasn't what I meant. What it's like to have everything, to be
King of the Sugar Loaf, and have it all taken away from you so that
not even your best friends will talk to you."

They didn't take your family away
, Marcelina thought.
They
left you that
. It was a ramshackle conspiracy: a disgraced World
Cup goalkeeper, a favela physicist, a middle-aged capoeira mestre,
and now a wrecked television prooducer. The flimsiest of girder-works
over the deepest of abysses, that this world, these streets, the
skirt of rooftops spread out beneath like a first Communion frock,
the blue sea and the blue sky and the green forest of the hills, even
the soccer ball Fisico carried with the clumsiness of a geek-boy,
were a weave of words and numbers. Solipsism seemed so unnecessary
under a blue sky. But it was the world in which Marcelina found
herself, and the conspiracy suitably dazed and uncertain, as if both
white hats and black hats could not quite believe it. Heroes and
villains barely competent for their roles—that was the way a
real world would work. An improvised, found-source favela solution.

Fisico unlocked a small green door in a fresh brick wall and flicked
on a bare bulb.

"You wait in here."

"It's kind of little," Marcelina said.

"It won't be long."

"We have things to get ready," Barbosa said. Marcelina
heard a padlock snap on the hasp.

"Hey! Hey."

The room was concrete floor, roughly pointed brick, a couple of
plastic patio chairs, and a beer-fridge filled with bottled water
plugged into the side of the light fitting. The door was badly
painted planks nailed across a rudimentary Z-frame, bur they banished
the sounds of the streets as utterly as deafness. Spills of light
shone through the boards.
Alone with your dreads
, Marcelina
thought. That's the purpose. Descanso: chilling the head. A place
between, the dark in the skull. Half an hour passed. It was a test.
She would pass it, but not in the way they wanted. She pulled out her
PDA and drew the stylus.

Dear Heitor.

Scratch it out.

Heitor.

Too abrupt, like calling a dog.

Querida.
No.
Hey.
Teenage.
Hi Heitor.
E-mail-ese. Like Adriano's acronym -speak.

I said I wouldn't get in contact so that's how you'll know it
really is me.
That sounded like Marcelina Hoffman.
I'm writing
this because it's possible I may not see you again. Ever.
Overly
melodramatic, going for the first-line grab, like one of her pitches?
The stylus hovered over the highlight toggle. This is supposed to be
... What is it supposed to be. A confessional?

A love letter.

Let it stand.

That makes this easy because it's the coward's way out; I'll never
have to live up to anything I've written here
. Glib but true:
he'd read that and say, "That is Marcelina."
It's silly,
I'm sitting here trying to write this to you and I can think of all
the things I want to say—that's so easy—but for once the
hand won't let me believe them. Funny, isn't it, I can pitch any
number of ideas I don't really, deep down love, but when it comes to
writing about something important, something real, I freeze.

The treacherous hand hovered again, the stylus ready to delete. What
could it not believe? This big, bluff, old-fashioned, glum, romantic,
pessimistic, hopeful, catastrophically uncool square-headed
newsreader-man. His books. His cookery. His wine his time his
listening. His big gentle hands. His love of rain. His always
availability, states of Brazil and world permitting. His too too many
suits and shirts and always-respectable underwear. His sexiness that
was never anything so modern or obvious as raunch, but something
older, cleverer, dirtier, and more romantic; burlesque, louche,
decadent.

She saw her stylus had written,
You make me feel like a woman
. Almost she consigned it to nothingness. But he did.
You do
.
So long she had burned with acid envy at her sisters and their men
and their security, and she had not reallized that she had her man,
she had her security; a modern relationship, not something off the
shelf marked 21st Century Bride or Hot Teenz. A grown-up thing that
had evolved from a meshing of work schedules and body parts but in
the end it was a man, a relationship, a love.