Heliopolis (7 page)

If he had known all along, and was playing some sort of bluffing game with me and Melissa.

Ernesto might hate me that much.

W
e have an epidemic of helicopters now. There are over two hundred helipads in the city, and on Friday nights the skies darken as the wealth takes wing to retreat to its weekend homes. It wasn’t always like this, but Zé was one of the earliest of the very rich to take to the air. And for all the family’s nonchalance, you could tell that the ability to fly never got dull. Sometimes, on Sunday evenings when they left me waving particularly morosely, Zé would get the pilot to recede a little, then come in low and buzz me at high speed. I would feign exhilaration, dust myself off and go inside feeling as if something had been unnecessarily flaunted in my face. I know it was only a helicopter. But I wonder how much it contributed to the state of things between me and Melissa. Seeing her float away like that week after week, emphatically, according to all the evidence at my disposal, a superior being—how could I fail to put her on a pedestal?

There were practical reasons why it was necessary. First, Zé’s job made time a precious commodity; second, the family didn’t have the time to drive out to the farm every weekend. But there was a third reason why Zé wanted to keep his family safely up in the air. In addition to accounting for that raising of barometric pressure when they left on Sunday evenings, it also explains why they retreated so religiously to the farm every weekend, and why they were so ecstatic on arrival.

It happened in the city, on a school day. Only infrequently did the family enter our lives during the week, so when the kitchen phone rang, and my mother heard Zé on the line, she knew that something was wrong. Rebecca sometimes called her to discuss menus and arrangements for the weekend, but never Zé.

I am nine, and sitting in the kitchen licking cake mixture from a spoon: dark chocolate thickened with condensed milk. The phone goes, and my mother crosses the room wiping a hand on her apron. She answers normally, tired, bored. Expecting Silvio. But when she hears the voice on the other end, respect stiffens her voice. Then comes the blood-chilling sound of my mother praying. So this is what the end of the world sounds like.

There exist hybrid faiths where she came from, and she tended to keep the specifics of her beliefs out of my sight. All I know is that on the day Melissa was taken, my mother made sounds that I had never heard before. Horrified, I asked what was happening, and she told me, using her voice to say that I should not worry, while every other part of her screamed that worrying was exactly the right response.

I had a slingshot, a proper one, with a brace that extended to the forearm. It came equipped with lethal ball bearings, which I had soon exhausted missing mice and frogs around the farm buildings. But I had learnt how to use it to convert inert objects into deadly projectiles: stones, dried seedpods, stray bits of wood. That afternoon, after the phone call, I took the slingshot into the woods, and spent an hour firing at trees and fruit and birds, imagining every quarry to be the invisible foe I hated so much, and feeling more powerless and angry with each shot I missed.

Melissa was ten. The MaxiMarket chain was hitting the headlines for the speed of its expansion, and this financial success, combined with the public relations dream of Rebecca’s foundation, had made the family newsworthy. A full colour spread appeared in a widely read gossip magazine. It included one photo of the three of them posing on the farm with a horse, and another of Melissa chasing around with a butterfly net, her blonde tresses perfectly backlit by the sunshine. It got bad people thinking.

Class had finished for the day, and Zé’s driver had not yet appeared, so being Melissa she bounded off out of the jurisdiction of the guards, in the direction she knew her ride would be coming from, and waited at the lights. That’s where they grabbed her. A car door opened, and everything went dark. I can picture her calmly looking around as the bag came down over her head. She wouldn’t have been scared so much as interested in this new development—whenever she drew blood on the farm she was always more fascinated than afraid.

She did not scream or shout to begin with—not until she decided to get away, and threw her terrifying seizure. She never said a word against her captors, and refused even to attempt a description of them to the police. All we know is that they were taking her somewhere, presumably to formulate their demands, she faked the fit, and they threw her out of the car. I remember seeing her re-enact what she did to escape: contorted body, guttural sounds, a steady stream of froth emerging from the mouth. It terrified me even though I knew it was an act. When the kidnappers lifted the bag from her face and saw what was happening inside, they panicked. Luckily their car was not travelling at high speed. She got away with a sprained ankle, a black eye and a deep cut to her left eyebrow. The man who found her and called the police was a young mechanic named José Luís Oliveira, who lived nearby in a one-room house built by his father. In his gratitude, Zé bought the man a new apartment, and posed for photographers with him and his wife on handing over the keys.

Sometimes, before the kidnapping, Melissa didn’t come, opting instead to spend her weekends at the beach houses of her city friends, many of whom thought Zé and Rebecca eccentric to retreat at every opportunity to a bug-infested ranch (Ernesto, I later discovered, being the principal offender). When this happened I would watch in vain for the dart of colour and energy that I so wanted to emerge from the helicopter, and Zé would place a hand on my shoulder as he beat down the steps, and say, ‘Not today, Ludo, I’m sorry. Call of the surf this weekend.’ After the kidnapping, the farm came into its own—as a 1,000 hectare comfort blanket for the entire family—and Melissa’s absence became a rarity. For all their gorgeous Friday evening appearances on the helicopter steps, the predominant emotion inside each of them was one of relief.

Not that this was evident in Rebecca’s behaviour. On the first weekend back, when Melissa limped down the helicopter steps with a dressing over her injured eye, my mother embraced her so tightly that I wondered whether she would ever let her go, while Rebecca remained typically disconnected. All weekend, it was my mother who fussed over Melissa and prepared her favourite dishes, while Rebecca behaved as if she had decided not to treat her differently, or even to refer to the abduction at all. It was as if Rebecca was almost annoyed with her daughter for getting herself into trouble—that this one child had created an inconvenient distraction from the needs of all the others out there.

Zé merely demonstrated his relief by saying much less than usual. I think he so badly wanted the incident not to have happened that he couldn’t bear to mention it. Money was spent trying to track down the perpetrators, but there was nothing to go on; Melissa couldn’t even tell the police sketch artist whether they were white or black. And I know that this powerlessness would have infuriated Zé. To have control wrested from him so definitively in any situation was unheard of, and would remain unspoken of too.

In the weeks that followed, Melissa did not wet the bed, become wary of strangers or exhibit any other sign of trauma, so everyone believed what they wanted to believe, and the event was buried. My mother found this shocking enough, but when Rebecca took her aside and told her that her continued preferential treatment of Melissa should stop as it might lead her into bad habits, it caused my mother to do something unprecedented: to criticise her saviour.

‘Dona Rebecca should be talking to the child more. She should be holding her tight, and not letting her go,’ she said quietly, into the sink, as if even to give voice to such disloyal thoughts was tantamount to blasphemy. And then, so faintly that I wondered whether she had said it at all, she added, ‘Only an Englishwoman.’

Later, accompanying Rebecca on her orphanage visits, I noticed that when dealing with the kids she tended to disdain affection in favour of problem solving: dressing wounds, taming hair, treating warts. When the children wanted a hug and nothing more practical, she would stand up, smooth down her linens and find a pretext to leave, the impression being that if her kindness were to be widely distributed, it could not be frittered away on single physical encounters. Her husband, by contrast, would reserve all his charm and tactility for the person he was talking to, even as he conducted his life with total ruthlessness.

But an event like that doesn’t just go away. However unaffected Melissa might have seemed, an arrow had been fired high in the air by what happened, and it had to come down eventually. That I was the only person to realise this is directly attributable to the fact that it was
feijoada
day.

If cooking
feijão
is an exercise in loading the beans with whatever flavour you can summon, then
feijoada
is about overkill: freighting them with everything and seeing what comes out. Every mouthful is different, and the dark, glossy sauce is enriched by every dried, salted, fresh or smoked cut you throw in. On
feijoada
day, Zé could spend the afternoon poring over the shuddering, bubbling clay pots my mother brought out, from the ‘new’ cuts which he liked well enough—smoked pork sausages, loin chops and belly, jerked and salted beef, salt pork—to the ‘old’ cuts to which he was devoted, and which for him were the main event—ears, tails, noses, trotters, tripe. Then there were the accompaniments: heaps of finely shredded green kale fried in garlic and oil, toasted cassava flour, pork rinds, plantains, rice, glistening slices of orange. And endless ice-cold jugs of passion fruit,
cajú
or lime
batida
to help it all on its way. On
feijoada
day my mother could not rest—she was on duty the whole time, keeping everybody topped up with fat and protein and alcohol.

An invariable aftereffect of this ritual was that it put everyone to sleep for hours, which is the only possible way we could have managed to go missing for a whole afternoon so soon after Melissa’s ordeal. If they’d lunched lightly they would have been scouring the farm for guerrilla kidnappers when we didn’t turn up. Instead, guests reclined on loungers under the eaves of the pool house, some drinking coffee and brandy and watching the rain outside, others groaning or snoring, while Zé browsed the table for any remaining worthwhile morsels. And we disappeared.

The storm had been building all morning. Clouds heavy with rain massed over the valley; hummingbirds flickered from plant to plant, getting their business out of the way before the onslaught. Rebecca was not enjoying her weekend. Two of her lunch guests were significant donors to the Uproot Foundation whom she wanted to impress, and one of them was a high-ranking Church official. Fearing that her husband and his friends, who invariably got drunk on
feijoada
day, might let her down, Rebecca compensated by concentrating as much as possible on those elements of the lunch that she could control. She asked my mother to clean down every surface several times in advance of the visit, and to make sure that the
feijoada
be more spectacular than ever.

Just before her special guests were due to arrive, Rebecca was on the veranda aligning magazines and setting down dishes of peanuts and
pão de queijo
when Melissa, who had been quiet since the kidnap but was now starting to recover her energy, came sprinting out of the house and wrapped herself around her mother’s leg, hotly pursued by me and the ice cube I was intent on putting down her back.

‘Leave me alone!’ shouted Rebecca. ‘What’s got into you?’

Melissa squealed. ‘Ludo has an ice cube!’

‘Snap out of it, will you? I’m meeting some very important people today—people who are going to help save a lot of children who are much less lucky than the two of you. Kids who have the kind of lives you can’t imagine.’

Melissa was struggling not to cry.

‘Come on,’ said her mother. ‘I know you had a horrible time, but you’re OK now, aren’t you?’

Melissa nodded, still fighting tears.

‘And you have to remember that what happened to you is nothing compared to what some of my kids at the orphanage go through, or the ones that live on the street.’

‘I know that, Mamãe.’

‘You’re incredibly lucky. Don’t ever forget that.’

‘I won’t.’

Rebecca heard a car arriving, checked her hair in the patio doors and walked into the house.

I had been watching the exchange silently from the doorway, and now, wordlessly, I approached Melissa, whose eyes blazed with powerful, childish indignation.

‘Sorry,’ I said, dropping the ice cube and wiping my hand on my shirt.

‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘What shall we do now?’

‘I don’t want to be here,’ she said. ‘Let’s take off.’

‘What about the
feijoada
?’

I had been enjoying the buildup, watching my mother soak the beans and the salt cuts, helping to stoke the fire all afternoon, getting high in the kitchen on the smells of flesh marinating in lime juice and garlic and on the sight of Silvio arriving with bags of bright pink noses and strings of freshly stuffed sausages.

‘They’ll be sitting there for hours. And my mother is in a terrible mood. We should escape. Bring your slingshot.’

The meal was served under the eaves of the pool house so everyone could watch the storm as it came up the valley, and the main course was just arriving as we escaped. Roars of approval went up as each new delicacy emerged. Melissa and I were forgotten. Leaving the laughter of the lunch table behind us, we crept into the forest, fine rain soaking our faces. The darkening skies and dense greenery sapped the light. The rush of the river was only a distant backdrop, and all the noise that mattered seemed to be right beside us: the calm beat of raindrops hitting foliage, the shuffle and scamper of forest creatures. Enraptured by the hot, wet atmosphere, we walked in silence, failing to notice how steadily the rain was intensifying.

We came upon a recently fallen tree not far from the outhouse that contained the back-up electricity generator. Its roots had left a deep red hollow in the earth, already slick with mud.