Love Is Strange (A Paranormal Romance)

by Bruce Sterling

  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 colorf
ul 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.

  And Farfalla would pay money for a video DVD, every once in a while. Every Futurist knew that the DVD medium was doomed. But, kindness to the doomed was a beautiful gesture.

  Hepsiba’s cellphone beeped noisily. She glanced at the tiny screen. Then, she tilted her head at Farfalla, “Be a dear, and fetch that basket for me!”

  Farfalla fetched up a jute gunnysack. She ventured outside the temple once again. The wind was picking up. Farfalla minced carefully over to the handcrank and rolled the bamboo wheel.

  The iron cable thrummed and swayed with tension. The bamboo prayer-wheel squeaked and screeched. The sweat of the effort burst from Farfalla’s armpits and ran down her ribs.

  The collection basket finally hove into sight.

  Farfalla unlatched the basket’s straw lid. She stuffed all the contents into the gunnysask. She hauled the sack inside and placed the sacred temple offerings at Hepsiba’s feet. Baby-wipes, hooded towels, powdered milk, and oatmeal. Half a dozen packs of freeze-dried Thai ramen noodles.

  “She remembered the noodles!” crowed Hepsiba. “Those are the Houngan’s favorites! Be a dear, and make him a nice hot bowl.”

  “What’s with all this baby gear?” said Farfalla.

  “Her baby died,” shrugged Hepsiba. “We invoke the baby’s soul every Sunday. So, she is grateful.”

  Farfalla stared in horror at the pristine, unworn baby rubbish. “Oh Madonna!” she said, in a fresh river of tears, “to be pregnant is awful, but to have a dead baby is ten thousand times worse! How can this world be so cruel? How do we women endure it?”

  Hepsiba glanced up in mild irritation. “Can’t this wait until the commercials?”

  “Nana, why? Why am I so doomed and bad? I deserve to be this unhappy, don’t I? I was cursed! I am cursed with supernatural powers! Why am I so cynical? I am the future, but it’s like I am dead inside! I should be the source of light and happiness to everybody around me... I should bring everyone joy! Like I did when I was a little girl!”

  “You?” said Hepsiba, waving her skinny arm. “Girl, I knew you when you were a little girl! Most nice little girls, when they hear the mousetrap snap... They hide their faces and they cry for the sweet little mouse! But not you, not Farfalla Corrado. You would run over there with your pigtails flying. To see that mouse die!”

  “Did I do that?” said Farfalla.

  “You did. Because you always knew the mouse was doomed,” nodded Hepsiba. “Your father’s compost heaps brought us plenty of mice. Go boil that ramen. Ramen is such a holy blessing! Ramen only takes three minutes!”

  Farfalla gazed at the gaudy Thai grocery packet, which had somehow crossed half the planet to offer nourishment to the Brazilian underclass. “No, I will not do that,” she announced. “I have my moral principles. I am not going to cook this stupid, ugly, fast-food rubbish. I am going to make us a real dinner.”

  “Don’t be troublesome,” Hepsiba said.

  “Nana, I am Italian. I know how to cook. I can feed thirty European geeks in thirty minutes.”

  Farfalla gathered her resolve. She ventured outside to confront the temple’s windowboxes. The big troughs of dirt were full of half-abandoned home-farmed crops. Cilantro, tomatoes, chives, parsley.

  The African yam vines were particularly eldritch. Their leafy cascades tumbled way past the nineteenth floor. Farfalla grubbed up one of the yam-roots from its grimy, smelly bed. What a dirty, purple-tinted tuber.

  Farfalla washed the yam in the rain barrel. She lugged the yam into the temple. It looked, if anything, even uglier in there.

  Farfalla had at the yam with a paring knife. The ugliness flew off the yam in long thin strips. Its shining inner core emerged. The yam was gold inside.

  Conviction struck her. A tremendous premonition. Farfalla put the paring knife aside. “I sense the presence of the man who shares my life,” she announced. “My bridegroom is coming for me.”

  Bent over her TV romance, Hepsiba serenely ignored her.

  “Did you hear me say that? The man I will marry is coming to get me! He is! I know it! He is on the way!”

  “Well,” said Hepsiba, “’a man comes in at the door, but a child comes in at the heart.’ My child, he’s just a man, don’t worry so much! I am hiding you here! You are safe from this man! He couldn’t find you up here with an army.”

  “But, he needs me now! I must f
ly to him!”

  Farfalla jumped into her shoes.

  Far below her, at the rubbled-covered root of the skeleton, a truck had pulled up. From Farfalla’s height, the truck looked as tiny as a boy’s tin toy. But she recognized it anyway. It was an armored Mitsubishi Pajaro, the standard drug trafficker’s truck. Young men were climbing out of it. Young men, carrying guns.

  Gangsters. The favela gangsters had kidnapped Gavin Tremaine. The drug gang was going to torture and kill him. Gavin’s sweet body would be torn to bloody shreds before her eyes. Gavin had blundered into deadly trouble in his mad pursuit of her. Her beloved was in mortal peril. His death was all her fault.

  She had no hope... Only the dark pleasure of dying with him.

  She longed to simply fling herself off the skyscraper to crash on top of him, but it took Farfalla more than half an hour to reach the level of the street, on foot.

  Gavin and the gangsters were still busy, down there at street level. They were gluing paper WANTED posters to the walls of the local favela shacks. They were also playing loud baile-funk music out of their pockmarked truck.

  The gangsters were fending off a host of the local favela street kids, who were trying to beg from the gangsters, or sell them useless things, or steal something from them. There were mobs of kids living in the favela. The favela produced more kids than any other place in Brazil. The drug gangsters were teenagers, six or seven years older than the street-urchin kids, but on the same road ahead.

  The older drug-gang kids were jovially threatening to kill some of the younger street-urchin kids.

  Gavin glanced up as Farfalla hurried through the weedy construction rubble. Gavin squared away his stack of posters.