Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance) (49 page)

The Great Houngan had also made it clear, in his silent, cagey, eye-wrinkling way that Farfalla’s ceaseless wailing and girlish laments really got on his nerves.

The Great Houngan adjusted his white terrycloth robe. He stuck a pair of chopsticks through his white dreadlocked top-knot. He put on a crackling, eight-track Clara Nunes tape: his particular meditation favorite. Then, he settled down into his foamed pink yoga mat.

Glaring at her through his deeply yellowed eyewhites, the Great Houngan ritually chopped up four gooey buds of Cabrobó marijuana. He filled his sacred smoking-chalice from a white plastic water-bucket. Then, the Great Houngan fired up.

With ritual intensity, the Great Houngan inhaled and expelled vast, face-obscuring wreaths of smoke. The spiritualist temple filled with the pollutant smell of burnt hemp.

The Great Houngan silently persisted at his smoking. He had been at this self-sacrificing effort for decades.

Farfalla was somewhat vague on what the Great Houngan accomplished by his sacred, smokey, ritual breathing. Hepsiba’s contented, respectful face, however, made it entirely clear that her husband was doing one of the most important things in the world.

The Houngan had great magic. He had a magic power much greater than mere foresight. The Houngan’s magic power was forgetfulness. He was the great priest of necromantic forgetfulness: the forgetfulness of the dead.

The Umbanda Terreiro was a Spiritualist church. They held a firm faith in the persistent existence of the dead. All of the dead. Especially the dead of Brazil.

Most Brazilian spiritual mediums were concerned with dead Brazilian slaves and dead Brazilian Indians. These were the dead people of Brazil with the most motive to rest uneasy.

However, as Brazilian history progressed and re-ordered itself, the Great Houngan had achieved a higher plane of spiritual enlightenment. The great man had changed his necromantic tactics. The Houngan still smoked bales of marijuana for the spiritual sake of the resentful dead slaves and dead Indians. But, he had also taken on a singular, more important crusade.

The Great Houngan was engaged in a spiritual duel with the dark legacy of Brazilian President Getulio Vargas, the “Samba Fascist.” President Vargas, who was, of course, a master voodoo adept, had committed an awesome act of necromancy on the dreadful night of August 24, 1954. This tremendous, occult ritual, committed in a bloody haze of murder and conspiracy, had transformed Brazilian national life – seemingly, forever.

But, all hope was not lost — no matter what the wicked Brazilian dictator had done. Because, thanks to the tireless spiritual work of the Great Houngan — many Brazilians no longer remembered what Getulio Vargas had done on the star-aligned, accursed night of August 24, 1954. Brazilians had simply forgotten all about it. It no longer seemed to be of any relevance to them. They were free of the accursed act. They didn’t even care to access Wikipedia and look it up.

Peace could not descend on the dark, accursed soul of the dictator Vargas — that blessing was too much to ask, even of the Great Hougan. However, every ritual exhalation from the Houngan’s chalice would lay another thin, ashy layer of Brazilian forgetfulness on a crime designed to be eternal.

This was the nature of the Great Houngan’s great crusade. Although nobody ever noticed it, he was winning his crusade. Therefore, Farfalla and her Nana Hepsiba had to sit in a meditative silence, broken only the the chutter of the passing copters and the occasional urban ambulance, until the Houngan’s sacred rite was complete.

Then, the Houngan closed his reddened, swollen eyes, and turned off the samba racket from his eight-track tape.

He seemed to collapse right where he sat, on his cheap foam mat, cross-legged.

Farfalla finished off her styrofoam carton of rice and beans. She cleaned up the rest of dinner and exited the temple door.

Farfalla stepped onto the broad and dusty concrete beam, not daring to trust the rain-rotted plywood. She took five careful steps and tossed the airy white cartons off into empty space.

An evening breeze caught the filthy litter. The wind sent it wheeling like a trio of white pigeons over the Heliopolis favela.

Wind stripped the tarry reek of hemp smoke out of her clothes. Farfalla grabbed a taut steel cable and gazed over the largest city of the Southern Hemisphere.

In her youth, her father, the visionary architect, had dreamed of a day of justice when the favela would be transformed. A day when there would be no more dirt-floored, palm-thatched favela huts.

In a certain witchy, paranormal fashion, her father’s wish had come true. The twenty-teens were not the nineteen-seventies, and the favela had indeed changed radically.

Farfalla was overlooking a truly modern favela. Scarcely a trace of bamboo and palm and rattan. This modern favela was made of brick-red industrial breeze-block and rust-red corrugated tin.

The favelas of Sao Paulo were colossal. They were bigger than most people’s cities. So huge were they in their mega-urban proportions that, if every dead African slave and dead Brazilian Indian had leapt from his grave to seek his fortune in these modern slums, they wouldn’t even have raised the rent.

That was how big these modern favelas were, and yet, they weren’t even big — not by Sao Paulo standards. The favelas were obscurely tucked into mere corners and niches of the great metropolis. The favelas were blown there in heaps, like street-litter.

Foreigners obsessed about Brazil’s favelas because the favelas seemed so scandalous. Favelas starred in heart-wrenching European art movies. For Brazilians, the favelas were not dramatic, not exotic. For the people who lived there, who built there, favelas were modest and dull. Favelas were specifically created to be overlooked and ignored. They were invisible homes for invisible people.

Italy had a few small things, rather like favelas — some foreign gypsy squatter camps, mostly. But Farfalla was an architect’s daughter. She knew a lot about Italy’s problem. Not favelas, but the exact opposite. UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

UNESCO World Heritage sites were beautiful gardensand lovely castles, fine churches, royal villas, and sacred monasteries. Place which everyone in the world agreed were wonderful places. Not evil favela slums.

But they were also very, very dead. Italy was littered with dead castles. Zombie architecture occupied the peninsula. Modern Italians had to keep these dead things propped upright, because, being so old and dead, they were always falling into themselves. Nobody lived in them. Inhabited exclusively by ghosts and tourists, the UNESCO World Heritage sites had no children in them. Not even one living Italian child.

So, given her choice for a neighborhood: a dead, cold, frozen heritage, or a reeking, stinking tropical favela — Farfalla would always prefer the favela. It wasn’t even a decision. It was her instinctive allegiance. It was her fate as a living soul.

If Gavin Tremaine escaped her fatal clutch on his life, then someday, this favela was where Farfalla would go. To live. The favela had always been waiting for Farfalla. The favelas were her true futurity. The futurity for the planet’s real people. The people who were planetary losers. The young, the cheated, and the sleazy. The people who never got a break.

The favelas were futurity for anybody who dodged the law and the taxman. People like Farfalla Corrado, a globe-trotting girl with a big mystical streak. Every cute girl, someday, turns forty. Then, she’s not a cute girl, but an aging woman who used to live on her wits and good looks. Time takes those things away from women, and time doesn’t give them back.

It was all about a road ahead. The favela alley road. It’s all about the patient, downhill-strolling process of a woman’s diminished expectations. “Oh well, oh well, oh well... oh well.”

Some lost twin of hers was living that favela life right now. Farfalla knew that she had a double out there, someone who had shared that road ahead. An Italian woman émigré, living in Sao Paulo. Someone, maybe, twenty years older than herself. Some washed-up, hustling, Italian hippie chick. With a prison record, most likely. Drugs, theft, whatever. She got too close to that pretty-girl meat grinder. It chewed up her meat, and her soul, too.

Not even an unhappy woman, necessarily. Just a forgotten, lonely, wrinkly, half-mad creature. With her mangy cat,her hotplate, and her single teabag.

Farfalla began weeping again. Copiously. Endlessly. She could not believe the bitterness that soaked her universe. She squatted on the grimy concrete of the enormous bracing beam, and she clung to her rusty wire. She wept about her dirty rotten future in hot, salty torrents.

Briefly, it occurred to her to fling herself, with a final howl of despair, to her own death. She would plummet like a movie’s special-effect, spinning to the city’s filthy broken pavements, to shatter there like a dropped teacup...

But Farfalla didn’t want that. No, not to die. Not when there was such allure, such melancholy pleasure, such a seduction, in her dark abyss of self-pity.

So she wept, but she knew that she wept from resentment. Not from her sorrow, or from her love, either. From her rage. Resentment was the one guiding emotion that never failed her. The high priestess, Cassandra, would never throw herself from a tall building. Not unless Cassandra could land hard on somebody else.

And who would that guilty person be? Who should Cassandra destroy, in her sacred rage? When Cassandra made a bomb of her own body, whose death would appease her hatred?

Somebody deserved to be destroyed. Somebody out there was darkly guilty of making this world this bad. Some demonic, satanic figure. Just look at the size of that slum! Just imagine the fantastic crowd of downtrodden wretches, stuck in there, crammed in there! The surplus flesh of the Third World, the no-hopers! Who was responsible?

Who could be bad enough, wicked enough, to ruin everything, to make life on Earth so worthless, and a vengeful death so appealing? Somebody had done that.

Adam, maybe. Except in that big story, Eve was the villain.

Farfalla wobbled back inside the voodoo temple. The temple, a complex contraption of plywood, chickenwire and fiberboard, was wedged deep into a shadowy corner of three massive skyscraper beams.

Farfalla sat down on a mirrorcloth pillow, wiping at her swollen, aching eyes. Framed portraits of Brazilian gurus and seers graced the temple walls. Blackout curtains shaded the windows. Gaudy swathes of nylon carpet were nailed to the floor.

A stout mahogany shelf held the little temple’s sacred pantheon of Orixa deities. They were tall occult figures, carefully molded from colorful Taiwanese plastic. The Cosmic Cupid had just been added to their number. The bronze Cupid stood there among the voodoo idols, a little wobbly and pockmarked, but stubbornly upright.

Nana Hepsibah glanced tenderly at her slumbering husband. Then, she seated herself on an overstuffed pillow and clicked on her television.

“’Xica da Silva’ is the best telenovela they ever made!” Hepsiba confided, confronting her cheap Korean vacuum-tube. “The Houngan never wants to watch my favorite show with me, but you should bring that pillow and sit down right here! Xica is just so sweet and good — yes, our dear little Xica! Wait till you see all her lovely costumes! I cry every time I see how Xica’s men make her suffer!”

“You have some pretty bad reception up here, Nana,” said Farfalla. She fetched the broom from the corner.

Then, Farfalla pursued the temple’s cobwebs. It comforted Farfalla to play the housemaid inside the house of her old housemaid. There was something so karmically perfect about that. Wheels within wheels. Yes.

Besides, obviously, no one else was ever going to sweep away these dusty, ghostly, dirty, trailing voodoo cobwebs. Nobody ever did that any more, except her. The older people around her didn’t even notice them any more. All the people of her parent’s generation were getting frail. Black, white, brown, Brazilian, Italian, American, rich, poor, they were all very alike, in a way. Because soon they would all be dead.

They couldn’t see their own decline. They didn’t realize that their world had passed them by. They clung to old people’s illusions. For them, the future was invading the present faster than the past could put it away.

It made Farfalla’s heart hurt.

Nana shook her gray head over her muttering gray screen. “Xica talked much louder, ten years ago! And she looked much prettier then, too! They have cut big pieces out of her soap opera, and put in many more commercials! How cruel people are!”

“Why do you watch these old TV repeats, anyway?” said Farfalla. “I could go onto BitTorrent and download ‘Xica da Silva’ for free.”

Nana was startled. She glared at Farfalla in occult dread. “Stop hurting my Xica! You know that’s a wicked thing to do!”

“But it’s so easy! Oh come on, everybody does that!”

“That doesn’t mean that
you
should be wicked! You call yourself an adept? You should have higher standards, my girl! If everybody jumped off a skyscraper, would you jump off the skyscraper?”

Farfalla opened her mouth to cruelly riposte:
No, I would LEAD all those stupid bastards to jump off the skyscraper!
Then, Farfalla gritted her teeth in silence.

Sassing your elders, by boasting to them about your own evil. Could anything be more immature? And to say a fatal thing like that in front of a whole rack of voodoo gods? You’d have to be an utter fool.

Farfalla hefted her witchy broom. The TV program resumed. Farfalla felt a slow, adult resolve growing within herself. Once again, she was bouncing back from rock bottom. She would stop weeping and moaning. Just stop it. And not just shrug it off this time, and pretend to make the best of it.

She would find some moral backbone in her life. She would stop passively embracing the path of least resistance. She would do some kind and good things, yes, just for once. She would make her own world a better place through her own efforts!

For instance, maybe she would find out who the actress was in ‘Xica da Silva.’ She would amend the actress’s Wikipedia article. Actresses were needy women with self-esteem problems, just like herself. Maybe Farfalla would follow the Twitter account of the actress. She would say supportive things about the actress’s faltering career.