Heliopolis (4 page)

Briskly, I cross the square. I can see the impassioned gestures; the boy’s desperation to make the world go his way; the building unwillingness to let this end on anything but his own terms. He will be embarrassed when I step in. He’ll hate me even more. But I’ll pay him off, anything to prevent him doing something stupid. I hear their raised voices over the laughter of the two oblivious girls in their doorway, and I speed up.

I don’t see how it starts. I just know that something bad is happening the way you always know. Feral danger signals go off in me. Sweat runs down my collar; the skin on my neck cringes. The event accelerates into my consciousness as it gains weight in the world, and suddenly what’s going on over there is all that matters.

The boy has gone for broke. He’s waving his knife in the guard’s face. The guard—probably stupid, definitely scared— shouts, telling the boy to put it away, and reaching for his gun.

I hurdle one side of the fountain to cover the distance as quickly as possible, to try and undo what I have begun. I want to scream, to tell the boy not to run. Running is like an invitation to those people to pull the trigger. But it is as if my throat has seized up.

The boy is beginning to recognise the scale of the mistake he’s made. As he turns away he sees me approaching, and thinks I’m after him too. His eyes flash wide at me, beaming panic, and he breaks into a run.

I yell at the security guard not to shoot, but there is no way he will let this opportunity pass. The boy threatened him with a knife. Whatever happens now, he is in the clear.

The boy runs badly. He hurls the knife to one side, embedding it in the trunk of the palm tree. But his blundering, flailing gesture comes too late: smoke puffs out behind him in the light.

The sound of the gun is flat, almost soft:
TAT
. And it’s over. The handle of the knife keeps wobbling after he falls, like a diving board after the jump, even after the damage has been done, and the boy’s shoulder is perforated, and the little mosaic tiles around him seem to be floating in glossy, black blood.

The guard stands motionless for a second, his mouth a perfect O, taking it in. He will say that he didn’t intend to shoot the boy—just to scare him—but he will be commended for his actions nonetheless. It is what he is paid for. These days, you can’t take chances.

The women scream. The victim screams. The cars on the flyover continue to lurch and blare. Just one more frenzied city drama in a thousand, to be forgotten and absorbed into the oozing traffic, and perhaps mentioned in passing over lunch.

The boy lies face down, his legs splayed and twisted, dark blood-soak spreading across his T-shirt. He raises his head a fraction, and in the heartbeat between one howl and the next, his stare finds mine. Then the guard places his boot on the boy’s head and pushes his face back to the ground.

When the guard gets out his phone to call the police, I look at the pink car-park ticket in my hand and realise there’s nothing more I can do but get to work. I’m late enough as it is.

T
he farm buildings spilled extravagantly over the lip of a wooded valley at one side, and lapped against the base of a steep hill on the other, as if they had been constructed on the top step of a giant staircase. You got vertigo whichever way you looked, whether up at the lone buzzard surfing thermals at the top of the hill, or down through the trees towards the silvery glint of the river. The main house, a grand plantation-style residence, was adjoined by seemingly endless guest bungalows and staff quarters, giving the impression more of a village than of one residence. There was room to spare—over a thousand hectares of it.

Our world, however, was the kitchen. My mother used to say that the range hadn’t gone cold in a century, and she may have been right: no matter how hot the day, the fire blazed. The kitchen, with its huge stone floor slabs, hollows worn into them from years of industry, was the heart of the house, and my mother its constant attendant. Nobody set foot in there without her permission, not even Zé or Rebecca. It was imbued as heavily with her personality as her wooden spoons, her saucepans and her table, on which everything was chopped and prepared, and which Silvio planed down every few weeks so that its surface remained pristine, renewing the top when the old one was exhausted. She was up at six every morning to stoke up the fire and throw open the doors on to the veranda that overlooked the valley outside, from the eaves of which her collection of songbirds hung in cages, making beautiful, pointless noise.

Guinea fowl pranced in the yard, their bulging feathered ankles like boots. Honey, flavoured by jacaranda pollen, was produced in hives round the side of the kitchen, and was often the object of raids by gangs of howler monkeys daring enough to believe they could get past my mother. A giant tortoise disappeared every winter, and re-emerged in the spring, ponderously ravenous. Nobody knew where she slept, or how long she had been alive.

Below the house and its outbuildings were a clay football pitch, a tennis court and a swimming pool fed by water that ran off the hill and down the valley. It was as well to look around before diving in: shoals of fish gulped lazily at the algae, frogs spawned in the water, and Silvio claimed he’d even caught a young caiman that had made its way up from the river, waiting patiently in the shallow end, ‘hoping for a bite of the good stuff.’

This setup might have propagated disease had the water been stagnant, but Silvio was cleverer than that. He’d created a miniature ecosystem of pools and channels, linked to the natural watercourse, so there was constant circulation. Water flowed naturally down the hill, but it was diverted on the way for the purpose of irrigated entertainment. And, in creating this little miracle, Silvio also incorporated what was the farm’s showpiece, the feature designed to show Zé’s fun-loving side to his guests for maximum effect: a long water chute, dug into the side of the hill, which Silvio had smoothly concreted over and painted in stark municipal blue. A powerful pump drew water from the muddy pool at the bottom of the slide so that the cataract that emerged at the top was powerful enough to flush even the plumpest of Zé’s drunken weekend guests to the bottom, where they plunged into the frothing brown pool at great speed. Silvio would scrub the chute every Friday before the family arrived, checking it over to ensure no leaf litter had accumulated.

‘Better make it flow fast, hadn’t we Ludo?’ he’d say. ‘Don’t want any of those rich old turds getting clogged in the pipes.’ His wheezing laughter would roll down the valley. Then, at the flick of a switch, the surface of the pool, unbroken all week, would bubble and pound into action. And the weekend would be about to start.

Whatever I was doing on Friday afternoon had to stop in time for me to join the lineup that greeted the helicopter. I had reason to be excited; this was not for me, as for others, the prelude to onerous duties, but a starting-pistol shot that launched two days of pleasure.

The drone would come first: distant, separating itself slowly from the rest of the background noise—somebody in the next valley mowing grass, perhaps—but then the sound would build until the machine shot in over the trees. Our line would straighten. The sky would darken with the grey blur of the blades. My mother would fuss with my hair. And then it would be over us, and our hair would be whipped up anyway by the down-blast of whirling rotors. Clay from the football pitch would be pulverised and thrown into the air. The goalpost netting would shudder. Wheels would extend, and touch hesitantly down in the centre circle of the pitch. A door would unfold and a set of metal steps would unfurl to the ground, the bottom one biting into the clay like a spade. And there they would be: the first family of the ranch. You almost expected them to wave, or for a lapdog to bound out to complete the picture.

Rebecca was always first to emerge, her arms outstretched to receive me, her face broadcasting joy and kindness. The expression was a constant; you never surprised her looking sour or bitter, or forced her hastily to put up a façade of concern. She’d met Zé as a young woman on a postgraduate assignment with the Red Cross, and in spite of the wealth she had married into, she had never forgotten what brought her to our country to begin with. In addition to her work with the Uproot Foundation, she was on the boards of three orphanages, and if she was ever tetchy or distant you could guarantee it was because of some worry connected with another person. She wore pale, unrumpled linens, and expensive cosmetics whose oily scent made me feel queasy in her embrace (I preferred the soap-scrubbed non-smell of my mother, but kept this to myself). Whenever she was in the room it was as if an angel had descended, to look willowy and concerned, and empathise, professionally.

Next, Melissa would burst down the steps, aching either to pick up where we had left off the week before, or to introduce some new discovery she’d made over the past five days. She loved being a child, she loved the farm and she loved her playmate. Through all that has happened, she has always made me feel wanted, included. She would never ignore me, whoever else might be in the room, which is not necessarily true of the rest of her family. From as far back as I can remember she has been well meaning and affectionate, to the point of being clumsy in her enthusiasm. She would break things with love—as when, at the age of six, she accidentally sat on a newly hatched chick that she was trying to hide in her pocket and smuggle home to the city. Her lack of cynicism means that the world can sometimes let her down. During those carnivorous weekends on the farm, it wasn’t unusual for a whole pig or even a young steer to be barbecued slowly over a huge charcoal fire. I would watch transfixed as the flesh went dark and the smell rose, ask to ladle hot fat over the meat and be offered first refusal on the more exotic cuts (hearts, livers, brains). Melissa, by contrast, had reached the age of seven before she connected those fragrant carcasses to the calves that stumbled around in the fields, and it was months before she again ate meat.

Last to descend: José Ícaro Fischer Carnicelli, or as he was known to one and all, Zé Generoso. The nickname derives from his legendary hospitality and the large donations the MaxiMarket chain makes to the poor. But on occasion I have detected a whiff of sarcasm in the way it was muttered by Silvio, or by my mother—as if for every act of magnanimity or largesse, Zé was chalking up your score, that there was always some future reckoning in his mind at which your position was constantly under review. He was a professional though: athletic, good-looking and amiable—even if he did have a tendency to ask the same question of each member of staff every week, as if every person was only linked in his mind to one area of concern. (Because my mother occasionally had trouble with a bad leg, that was her question; because Silvio’s sister had at one time been ill, the question Zé asked of him was, ‘And how is your sister?’) He would wait for his family to disembark, then move fast, as if embarrassed by the attention. Melissa later explained this to me: if everyone around you moves slowly and you move quickly, you communicate that your time is at a premium, and that you can afford to pay others to waste their time on your behalf. They did it at Melissa’s wedding too—made the godparents walk down the aisle painstakingly slowly at the start of the ceremony, before pounding down at the last minute with presidential haste themselves.

It wasn’t as if we were lined up like the domestics of some French château to greet the master, but there was an unspoken understanding that Zé didn’t like it if the complement was incomplete.

‘Good afternoon everyone,’ he would say, briskly trotting down the steps, unpretentiously carrying the family’s weekend bags. Then he might pause, look around and say, ‘But where is Silvio?’

‘He wanted to be here,’ someone would chip in (usually my mother). ‘But there are cows in calf.’

‘Tell him to come and see me, will you? I was hoping to talk to him about fences this weekend.’

The pretext would almost certainly be improvised—just an excuse to see the errant individual—but in this way Zé was able to give everyone a discreet seigniorial once-over, like a trainer checking the teeth of his dogs.

The arrival was always picturesque, theatrical: Rebecca’s silk scarf flitting about her face like a monster butterfly; Melissa a shot of colour from the gloomy interior; Zé grinning broadly behind his mirrored sunglasses at the door, which he would sometimes open early as they flew in over his land. When he emerged and established that all were present and correct, he would gesture vaguely back at the helicopter and turn to whoever was around, saying, ‘Let’s get this thing out of the way so we can play some football,’ as if he were a salesman stowing his briefcase. Then he would grind his handmade Italian shoes into the red clay, and mutter: ‘Down to earth. Down to earth, at last.’

I loved it all: the anticipation of that first hint of rotor noise; the drama of the arrival; the Friday night smells of aftershave, cut limes and barbecues. When the helicopter was towed away by tractor into its shed beside the football pitch, and the doors closed on it, the weekend could start for real.

Zé could never wait to get on the football field. He would ditch his suit for a T-shirt and a pair of indecently flared blue satin shorts, frayed at the edges—some relic from his university days—and begin organising teams from a lineup of guests and employees. He saw no reason to blunt his competitive edge just because there were children on the field, and was quite happy to send us skittling across the clay—often Melissa, who being tough took it well, or me, who as an employee had no choice but to take it well. The least dangerous situation was when he was refereeing, but it was a position he hated because of the requirement for impartiality.

His enthusiasm was so blind and so masculine that it verged on the dictatorial: if he wanted a cold beer, everyone had to have one; when he was in the mood for steak (which was much of the time) then he couldn’t fathom the idea that you might not be. My mother had accustomed herself to his capricious approach to the weekend’s catering, and had worked out subtle but firm ways of dealing with it without making too many last-minute changes. For example, when she had been preparing a seafood platter, Zé might declare after one or two drinks that he’d gone off the idea of lobster, and wanted red meat instead.

‘Must we have all this seafood?
Fish don’t pull wagons
, as my father used to say. Bring me beef!’

‘Senhor, I have spent the afternoon, and a lot of your money, on this dish. Will it go to waste?’

‘Very well. Serve both, my angel. And make sure you keep back plenty for the boys. How is Silvio to round up my cattle if he has no strength? Keep him three lobsters, you hear? Force them on him!’

Guests would arrive in armoured 4x4s or mud-spattered jeeps: tanned men with bellies and moustaches, who chatted by the pool all weekend gripping beers and caipirinhas; stunning wives on sunloungers with tinted hair and manicured nails and cosmetically enhanced bodies, rotating in the heat like rotisserie chickens. Sometimes a second or a third helicopter would land. On big weekends there’d be a whole football tournament, and Zé would have people to impress and points to score. Once there was even a visit from the president.

Melissa and I would dip in and out of the weekend’s activities. We spent hours floating in pools talking nonsense. We lost ourselves in the woods. Often, we took to the tree house, a creation of Silvio’s high in the branches of a giant fig tree, which gave us an unfettered view of the proceedings below, and allowed us to lie in sleeping bags spying on the guests, our giggles muffled by the din of roosting starlings. During Saturday-night parties that went on late into the night, Melissa and I would watch things get more boisterous—more than once we saw Zé trying his luck with other women, but it didn’t seem to upset her—then fall asleep together as, no matter how much we wanted to stay awake, our exhaustion kicked in.

But time was always running out, and however much fun was had over the weekend, the family would soon be packing up and heading back to the city. On Sunday afternoons, as they turned their attention to the week ahead, the mood would change. Melissa would become grumpy and distant, and our games would seem suddenly irrelevant.

I had no memory of the city. I knew I had been born there, but nothing more. The place had developed a life of its own in my head. I would ask Melissa questions. Were the buildings as high as mountains? Was the pollution really so bad you had to keep the light on all day? Were there animals? To the family, though, the city represented reality, from which this weekend amusement park was nothing but a welcome distraction. When the Predator was wheeled out from its shed, the transformation from football pitch back to helipad was the surest sign that my world was again about to deflate. As the light faded, Melissa and her parents would disappear into the house to pack and freshen up for the journey. And then it would be over. Staff were not required to line up to say goodbye—Sunday evenings were businesslike—but I would stand there anyway, watching in silence as the helicopter lifted off, spun its nose round and, with the core-jangling scream of a Formula One car, shuttled wastefully back to the city.