Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance)

by Bruce Sterling

  “Hey, I love birds! I’m a birdwatcher! I’m an outdoorsy kind of guy.”

  “But, this is Sao Paulo! You don’t live here! You can’t know any of those things!”

  “Farfalla, cheer up, all right? The blue bird of happiness flew in here when you kissed me! Look at this bird. What beautiful plumage.”

  Farfalla had a peek at the tiny captured animal. Farfalla hated wild animals. Some were small, and some were large, but they were all wild and bad. There was a small dark disgusting drip of blood on the tip of the bird’s tiny beak.

  Gavin reached for an open window. “She’s happiness, but right now she’s kinda conked-out.” He gave the struggling bird an affectionate toss, into free air. “There you go, sister! Voe para um lindo futuro, irmã. Boa sorte!”12

  The bird winged her way into Sao Paulo’s soot-tinged sky.

  “Leave the bus,” said Farfalla. “Get off at the next stop. The hotel is near. Your conference hotel.”

  “Right. That’s the future!” Gavin hoisted his shoulder bag. “Don’t worry, I know the way.”

  12 “Fly to a beautiful future, sister. Good luck.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Facts of Life

  “Nana, it was so good of you to come and find me, in my helpless need and my deep sorrow,” said Farfalla. Nearby, a pig rooted slowly through its cornshucks and torn newspapers. “I hoped I would find you, myself... but I knew I never would! Because, I was so tired and so jetlagged. But you found me, and Nana... I love him, and he is breaking my heart.”

  Nana Hepsiba pulled her packing crate closer to the bar’s table, which was a cracked cable-spool. “My dear, I always knew you would come back to see me, one day in the future. I knew you would need my love advice.”

  “That man is driving me out of my mind! Today, I went into his bedroom... Something terrible happened in there! I don’t even have words for what happened. It was like ten years passed. I’m not lying! He put his arms around me, it was like ten years!”

  “My poor little one!” Nana tongue-clucked. “How long has it been since we had a good talk together? Ten years ago, is it? Well, I know I can help you! And in your later life, you will surely need my help again! I know that... Because, I can see it in your aura! I’m very sure you will need me... But I won’t be there to help you! Not in ten years! Because I’ll be dead, from my poverty, from my suffering! I can promise you that!”

  Hepsiba waved her plump, grandmotherly arms through the pink nylon sleeves of her dashiki. Beaded bracelets clattered on her wrists. “Look what the cruel years have done to your Nana! My dreadlocks have all turned white! All my hard work and sacrifice, for the ungrateful sinners who dwell in this dirty favela... Do they understand how I have protected them? Protected from so many dark, terrible forces, for so many years? Oh no! Nobody properly respects the Orixa spirits! Not any more! Now, it’s all about money, drugs, and television!”

  “Television?” Farfalla said.

  “When I think of how this favela once was, in the good old days, when I was young, like you! The girls were so decent and modest then! Even the prostitutes behaved themselves.”

  “When I was little,” said Farfalla, “you once told me.… Well, so many things. Once, you told me, that if I could walk under a rainbow, I could turn into a man.” She smiled. “And I believed you! I believed every one of your stories.”

  “That is true, you know.”

  “Nana, please! Nobody can ‘walk under a rainbow!’ A rainbow is just the reflection of the sun in wet air.”

  Nana scowled. “Who told you that nonsense? Don’t you ever see the rainbow flags, when men turn into women? Are you blind now, did you turn stupid in Italy? If you can’t see the truth in front of your eyes, how can I give you guidance?”

  “I do see the truth, in front of my eyes,” mourned Farfalla. “I see the truth all the time. The truth is always naked. Naked and shocking.”

  “My dear,” said Nana Hepsiba, “you came to me with a man problem... Yes, I knew you would do that, all along! Don’t you worry any more! You came to the right old woman for your problems! You came to the right place, too. You see that cop helicopter up there?”

  “Where?” said Farfalla, craning her neck to peer through the bar’s crooked door-frame.

  “Flying over that big smoke column. You see that helicopter full of cops with guns? Well, I can’t give you that helicopter. No. I can’t. Now, look over there. No, right there. Stop fussing with your pretty hair, and turn your head and look. Right there. You see that great blue skyscraper over there, where those fancy rich folk won the TV lottery? To win the lottery and make ten million reals, I can’t give you that, either. No, I can’t. But between women and men? There, I have seen it all! Yes, yes, I know everything about that. I know the very worst.” Hepsiba tapped her ginger-scented tin can of hot quentao pinga. “Your man gave you a disease, didn’t he? A wicked disease a woman gets only in bed.”

  “No, he didn’t,” said Farfalla, “I mean, I don’t think he did. I mean, I haven’t had any blood test yet. I guess, for safety’s sake, I should do that right away, but I’ve been so busy...”

  “You are pregnant! I knew it!”

  “Maybe. Yes. Yes, I could be pregnant. That’s bad, it’s so awful, isn’t it... It’s terrifying! I feel weak, I feel sick with fear... I think I feel changed, deep inside... Is that supposed to happen? Why? Nana, why do women suffer so much in this world?”

  Hepsiba fiddled with the long cotton wrapping of her turban. “Well, I can take care of that for you. It takes three days. A lot of herbs. And a lot of spells.” Hepsiba squeezed her wrinkled greenish eyes shut, and she opened them again. “You should have been a good girl. Make this man marry you first, but no! No, you were a headstrong and foolish girl! You surrendered to your wicked passion, and you fell into his arms.” Hepsiba sighed. “You’re not the first such girl, and you won’t be the last!”

  “Nana, yes, I did that, but, well, no. It’s not like that at all. He wants to marry me. He wanted to marry me from the first day we met. I think he wanted to marry me before we met.”

  Hepsiba blinked. “He did?”

  “Yes! He’s very insistent about it! He’s always doing things I don’t expect... He scares me! I don’t want to marry him! My parents never ‘got married’... Nana, he’s always yelling at me! He wants to give me his family name... There’s something wrong with him.”

  Nana nodded wisely. “He’s a foreigner. Something about him is just not right for you.”

  “Well, he’s not the best-looking guy in the world... That’s not true. He’s a foreigner who speaks terrible Italian, but now that I’m all used to him, if he looked any cuter, I’d die.”

  “A man’s good looks won’t make you die,” Hepsiba declared. “I always knew that you were fated to meet a handsome foreign millionaire. That was written on your tiny palm-line when you were three years old. I knew you would marry a rich man, and, also, you would never forget your dear old nanny, Hepsiba. And look, see that was true, here you are! Right here, in good old Dona Ida Cardoso’s Nordestino bar.”

  Hepsiba leaned across the battered rim of the cable spool. She dug into a jumbo bowl of Biluzitos Premium pizza-flavored snacks. “My dear, you must listen to me carefully now. God can be kind to wise women. God put the animals and rich men on this earth for the sake of women. What the animals eat, and where animals sleep, nature supplies. Whereas if animals had to do what we women have to do to get by in this world, then the animals would suffer greatly.”

  “That is so true,” said Farfalla.

  “Whenever I get a little money, these days,” mused Hepsiba, munching, “I always give to the poor little children of these slums, so that they will not have to beg for bread, or coffee, or cigarettes. But, I send my thoughts straight to the sky! My soul flies straight up to the sacred heaven! And I think — what about the spirits of the dead, those of us who live up there? Are they better than us now, those ghosts of our past? Our wise and saintly dead, they
look after us! Yes, they do! They want us to look after each other! That’s why, after you are rich, you’ll give me a lot of money.”

  “You shouldn’t say such things,” said Farfalla.

  “My sweet one, how can I not tell you the truth? Every little bedtime story that I told you — when you were my sweet little girl? Every time — they always had a spiritual truth!”

  “Then, he will marry me,” said Farfalla. “You said that he will marry me. And he said that I would marry him. He never lies to me, and neither do you. So now, I know that he will marry me. But, he is not my One.”

  “If he’s not the One, that is pretty bad,” Hepsiba admitted, “because that was such a beautiful story... that story about the One? The One who loves you, and you only, and you only love him? Forever? I told you that story, with my own mouth here.” Hepsiba patted her lips, and her bangles clattered.

  “That story,” she said was, “well... it was a very good narrative. Of course, that story was the truth, at least, but adepts can interpret the truth...”

  “Hepsiba, never mind all that now! Tell me what has gone wrong. Help me, save me!” Farfalla gazed out the broken, chained wooden doors of the favela bar, at a massive tangle of filched electrical wiring and a graffiti-spattered wall of brick-red breeze-blocks. “I know that I belong here... I want to be here, I feel safe here, because the favela is the world as it really, truly is... But him? His world? I can’t begin to tell you what his world is like! I tried, but I have no words for it! No words that make sense here!”

  “Where should this man be,” shrugged Hepsiba, “your millionaire boy, who loves his computers, so much better than he will ever love you?”

  “Well, this is a favela rum bar. Gavin belongs in a Starbucks.”

  Hepsiba put her plump hands to her graying temples. “I will consult the spirits now... Yes... There is a ‘Starbucks Paulista’ on the Alameda Santos. Yes... I can see... I can sense your betrothed. He is sitting there. He is with fancy friends from the fancy districts downtown. They are discussing the many bad things that Seattle does to Brazilian coffee.”

  “Oh, Hepsiba, for heaven’s sake.”

  Offended, Hepsiba produced a battered but serviceable Nokia Model 1100 cellphone from her rattan bag. “You don’t believe me! You don’t believe what I said to you! Let’s call your handsome lover! Let’s see about that right now, my dear.”

  “Can you call him,” said Farfalla, “please, please, and ask if he is my One? My only One, who is meant for me? Is he? Just tell me that, and I won’t bother you any more, I promise!”

  “Do you love him?”

  “I think that I love him... I don’t love anyone else... but every time we meet, something strange happens... Things happen too fast, or too slow, or they happen in the wrong order, and they wreck my story... What kind of decent life is that? How can I live like that, with him? We cannot get to our ‘Happy Ever After’ part, because our ‘after’ part comes before our ‘happy’ part!”

  “A million girls have that problem!” snorted Hepsiba. “Stop thinking that you are so special! Go ahead, marry him! Your belly doesn’t show yet! Handle this right and your parents will never find out.”

  Farfalla took a deep breath. “I cannot marry any man unless he is my one true love.”

  “He has a million dollars,” Hepsiba pointed out.

  “Yes, of course, maybe I’m crazy, but why do I care? Why? He is cursed with his family’s wealth. That curse is written all over him! The money is breaking his heart, I know it is... I can never help him with his money problems! What am I supposed to do, spend it for him faster? I’m terrible with money!”

  “My dear, wealth is for the benefit of family and friends. Rich girls go to heaven if they do good works.”

  “Fine! Maybe I could marry him! Maybe I could live with him, and speak English for the rest of my life! I don’t care that he’s a foreigner, that he is geeky and weird, that he lives all his days upside down and inside out! If he were my One, I could face all that! I could face any sacrifice, for his sake... Any sacrifice at all, even great wealth, a beautiful house, and maybe an Alfa Romeo! But, if he’s not my One... if we’re together, and the future can’t bear it, because it’s wrong ... nothing will save us! We are doomed! We will doom each other!”

  Hepsiba scraped the last crumbled wheat snacks out of her crockery bowl, then wiped her salty fingers on her elastic stretch pants. “Time passes,” said Hepsiba, gently. “That story about the special One meant just for you...” Hepsiba paused. “Well, that was certainly true, but it was a young girl’s truth. Because you were a young girl then. You were innocent. You are a grown woman now. Remember that other fairy story I told you... about the frog, the ball, and the well? And the frog has the golden ball, and the princess has to hold that frog in her hand, and kiss his wet, ugly body? Well, romance is that shining golden ball, while a marriage is that frog in the well. We wise women... we tell the good, old, stories to young, innocent girls. So that they will grow up with some hope in their hearts and live to become women. And be wives. And be mothers of more little girls. Some day, you’ll understand all that.”

  Farfalla shook her head slowly. She ran her fingers through her shortened locks. Farfalla was getting used to being back in Brazil. Life in Brazil had always been exactly like this. By the posh standards of Italy, or the money standards of America, life here was completely batty, but life here had a loose, folksy rhythm and interior depth that spoke directly to her soul. Brazilian life had magical resources of resilience.

  Farfalla finished complaining. There was no use to Cassandra laments, not here. She could complain all day in Brazil, but instead of Italian heartaches or American headaches, at the end of the day in Brazil it was just: Que diabo! Live your life, while you can!

  It was her own future life at stake here, and she did have to live it. Her mentor was telling her — in gentle words, but telling her — that she had to compromise her magic principles, and sell out her true destiny, just because a suitor had some money! Well, Gavin didn’t have any money — he just had the pretense and appearance of money, over a shell of debt — while she, Farfalla Corrado, possessed a genuine magic.

  “You are not talking sense to me,” Farfalla said boldly. “What about you? What about your love story?”

  “Well, of course, I have a One,” said Hepsiba, indignantly. “I am a Sainted Sister of the Umbanda Terreiro! It would be a scandal if I failed to get my One.”

  “Nana, I, too, have powers! I see the ghosts of the past, and the harbingers of the future. I know that they are the same!”

  “Don’t you be so proud, my dear! There are a thousand girls in this favela who have much greater magic powers than you have! Do you think life is easy for girls with magic powers? Look around yourself! You stopped living here in the favela, where the true struggle of darkness takes place! You went to Italy, and you put on your pretty clothes, and you forgot all about us.”

  “That’s true,” Farfalla admitted. “I ran from reality as soon as I could.”

  “That’s all right,” sighed Hepsiba. “You haven’t changed one bit. I still love you, my dear. You will always be my sweet, little girl.”

  Hepsiba finished off her tin cup of reeking pinga, and drew a breath. “Voodoo does not exist to make us happy! If magic powers made people happy, then all us voodoo people would be happy. Very, very few of us adepts are ever happy. Did you ever see a happy, cheerful, voodoo adept, with pretty flowers and rainbows? Oh sure, the big star pop-singers. And the government ministers. And the winners of the state lottery, of course. And also, the master thieves and the richest newspaper astrologers. Those are the happy Brazilian voodoo people. Everyone else is dark and terrifying! Voodoo is the black art. Voodoo is necromancy.”

  “But, I want to be happy! I want to marry someone who will make me happy. Forever after! That was promised to me!”

  “Oh, yes, you say that now. That’s because you haven’t married him yet. Did you ever hear a woman tel
l a romance story about the tenth year of her marriage? Let me tell you all about that, my girl. Because, even for a very powerful voodoo witch, getting rid of a husband is hard.”

  Hepsiba gazed, narrow-eyed, around the favela bar. There were eighteen other customers crammed into the tiny tin-roofed shack, because the speakeasy was as densely crowded as every other place in the Heliopolis favela. However, the local drinkers were red-eyed with the landlady’s cheap sugar-cane cachaca, which cost two reais a shot. Unless you wanted to take a soccer-labelled shot-glass home with you, in which case that cost five reais.

  None of these slumping, drunken, penniless customers seemed to be spying or eavesdropping on their magical conspiracy, so Hepsiba continued with her tale. “First, you do not have to kill your husband. I do not prophesy that you will kill this man. No. You can always run away and come home to me instead. Because I have the power to save you! Because I promise you this, you can come and stay in my terreiro, under my holy roof. And your man, this foolish foreign man, he will never, ever find you here. A camel would leap through the eye of a needle first. I would know, if he ever came looking. And he would never reach you or touch you. Because the tongues of favela women are not made of bone, but the tongues of women can break a man’s bones. And that is the truth.”

  Hepsiba signaled for a refill of pinga. The landlady brought over a crockery jug, and watched with care as Hepsiba paid her few coins. Hepsiba waited until the landlady had retired behind her bar with her blaring color TV. Then, Hepsiba leaned in and further confided:

  “I do prophesy that you will marry this millionaire, because that is just good sense. But, rich men can be wicked men. He might make happy, but before you live ‘ever after,’ he might make your life into hell. So, I will teach you how to escape that hell. This is not a story for innocent little girls. So listen to me closely nowYou do not poison him. No, not right away. Never get too eager. You must wait for him to fall ill of a natural sickness. Because all men, even the strongest men, are born of women and made of flesh and blood. So, when this man you once loved and you have learned to hate, falls sick at last, do not rejoice. No. You do the opposite. You cling to him. You weep for him. You nurse him with tender care.