by Ian McDonald
Adriana Corta waits in the São Sebastião Pavilion, a confection of pillars and domes at the highest point of the sloping lava-tube. Waters rush from between its columns. Two chairs, a table. A samovar of mint tea. Adriana Corta, dressed in lounging pants and a soft silk blouse, rises.
‘Irmã Loa.’
‘Senhora Corta. I bring you the fondest greetings of the sisterhood and the blessings of the saints and orixas.’
‘Thank you, sister. Tea?’ Adriana Corta pours a glass of mint tea. ‘I do so wish we could grow coffee on this world. It’s almost fifty years since my last arabica.’
The woman sits but she does not touch the glass.
‘I’m sorry for your family’s recent trouble,’ she says.
‘We survived.’ Adriana says. She sips her mint tea and grimaces. ‘Vile. You never stop worrying for them. Rafa will not give up on Robson. Carlinhos is fretting to get back in the field. Ariel has gone back to Meridian. Lucasinho has run off. Lucas has frozen his account but that won’t stop the boy. He is more like his father than Lucas realises.’
Irmã Loa lifts a cross from amongst her cascades of beads to her lips and kisses the crucified man.
‘Saints and orixas protect you. And Wagner?’
Adriana Corta brushes over the question with another.
‘But you; your work is secure now?’
‘Saint and sinner both pay breath tax,’ Irmã Loa says. ‘And Catholicism still objects to us. On the other hand we had our most successful Assumption Day festival. Your patronage is a constant blessing to us. It is so rare to find someone who thinks as we do, in centuries.’
‘You invest in people. I invest in technology. Our long-term goals will inevitably meet. Best if they meet now, so they will recognise each other when they meet up again, hundreds – thousands of years from now. So few people think in the long term. The truly long term. We’re both dynasty.’
Splashing up through the rivulets, drawn by voices; Luna: barefoot in a red play-dress.
‘Who are you?’ she says to the woman in white.
‘This is Irmã Loa of the Sisters of the Lords of Now,’ Adriana says. ‘She is taking tea with me.’
‘She’s not drinking her tea,’ Luna declares.
‘What’s that over your shoulder, a moth?’ Irmã Loa says. Luna nods, still a little afraid of the thin woman in white, despite her smile. ‘She is drawn to the light. But because she is so single-minded, that makes her easy to distract. The moth is so fragile, but she is the daughter is Yemanja. She is filled with intuition, the moth. She is drawn to love, and others love her.’
‘You don’t have a familiar,’ Luna says.
‘We don’t use them. They clutter us up. They get in the way of our communications.’
‘But you can see mine.’
‘We all wear the lenses, anzinho.’ Irmã Loa reaches into the folds of her turban to press a small object into Luna’s hand: a tiny print-plastic votive of a mermaid with a star on her brow. ‘Our Lady of the Waters. She will be your friend and guide you to the light.’
Luna presses the deity in her fist and skips off down through the tumbling waters.
‘That was kind of you,’ Adriana says. ‘I think of all my grandchildren, I love Luna the most. I fear for them. Havaianas to Havaianas in three generations. Do you know that saying, Sister? The first generation rises from poor people’s shoes. The second generation builds the riches. The third generation squanders the riches. Back to poor people’s shoes again. Long term projects, Sister.’
‘Why have you asked me here, Senhora Corta?’
‘I want to make a confession.’
Surprise on Irmã Loa’s still face.
‘With respect, you don’t strike me as a woman with much of a sense of sin, Senhora.’
‘And the Sisters are not a religion with much of a sense of sin either. I am an old woman, Sister. I am seventy-nine years old. No great age biologically, but I’m older than most things in this world. I wasn’t the first, but I was among the few. I came from nothing – a girl from nowhere – and I built all this, up in the sky. I want to tell that story. All of it. The good and the bad. Did you really think that funding was a donation?’
‘Senhora Corta, simplicity of spirit is not naivety.’
‘You will come here once a week, and I will make my confession to you. My family will enquire – Lucas needs to protect me – but they are not to know. Not until …’ Adriana Corta breaks off.
‘You’re dying, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. I’ve kept it secret of course. Only Helen de Braga knows. She has been with me through everything.’
‘Is it far advanced?’
‘It is. The pain is under control. I know I am laying a burden on you. What you tell Rafa, or Ariel, but most of all Lucas, is up to you. But Lucas especially will pick and pick and pick away. Your lies must be airtight. If my children learn that I am dying, they will tear each other apart. Corta Hélio will fall.’
‘I should like to pray for you, Senhora Corta.’
‘Do as you wish. Then I will begin.’
THREE
My name. Begin with my name. Corta. It’s not a Portuguese name. The word is Spanish: it means a cut. It’s not really a name in Spanish either. It’s a sound that has rolled around the world, from country to country, language to language and become a word and then a name and finally washed up on the shores of Brazil.
When you apply to go to the moon the LDC insists on a DNA test. If you plan on staying, if you plan on raising children, the LDC doesn’t want chronic genetic conditions showing up in later life, or in your descendants. My DNA is from all over Earth. Old World, New World; Africa, eastern Mediterranean, western Mediterranean, Tupi, Japanese, Norwegian. I’m a planet in one woman.
Adriana Corta. Adriana after my Great-aunt Adriana. My clearest memory of her is that she played the electric organ. She lived in a tiny apartment and there in the middle of the room was this huge electric organ. It was the only thing of any value she owned. It was theft-proof: no one could have got it out of the apartment. She would play and we would dance around it. There were seven of us. Byron, Emerson, Elis, Adriana, Luiz, Eden, Caio. I was the middle kid. The worst place to be, the middle kid. But you get away with things when you’re in the middle. Your brothers and sisters are your camouflage. There was always music in the house. My mother couldn’t play any instruments but she loved to sing and a radio was always on somewhere. I grew up with all the classics. I brought them with me. When I worked on the surface, I’d play them in my helmet. Lucas is the only one who has my love of music. It’s a pity he has no voice.
Adriana Arena de Corta. My mother was Maria Cecilia Arena. She was a health worker for a Catholic social charity. Childcare and no contraception. I’m being unfair to her. She worked up in Vila Canoas; when she retired the whole favela turned out. My father burned his hand welding a car one day. He went to my mother to have it treated and ended up welded to her. She was a big, slow-moving woman; stiff in the hips and after Eden she gave up work and rarely went out of the apartment. She couldn’t hope to catch all of us so she shouted. She had a great booming voice that always found exactly whichever one of us was meant to hear it. She was so kind. Papa adored her. She had bad circulation and a sickly heart. Why are health workers always the least healthy?
I miss her still. Of all the ones back there, I think about her most.
Adriana Mão de Ferro Arena de Corta. Mão de Ferro. Iron hand. What a name, yes? All of us were Iron Hands, as was my father and all my uncles. It was the nickname of my grandfather Diogo, from Belo Horizonte. He died before I was born, but he worked in the iron mines from the age of fourteen until they laid him off because he was a danger to himself and others. Ten million tons he shovelled. I’ve shovelled more than that. A thousand times more than that. Ten thousand times. If anyone is Iron Hand, it’s me. Mining and metal. My father was a car dealer. He could strip and rebuild an engine before he could drive. He came to Rio when a rece
ssion hit Minas Gerais and he got a job in a cut-and-shut shop – you take two insurance write-offs, cut the front of one, the end off the other and weld them together. New car! He never liked the work – he was a very honest man, my father. Any news of corruption or graft on the news and he would shout at the screen. In Brazil in the tens and twenties he was shouting all the time. That graft on the Olympic stadiums! Working people can’t afford to ride the bus! He got into dealing cars – whether that is more honest than building ringers is a moral hair I can’t split. But he worked up quickly to a dealership, then gambled and bought a Mercedes franchise. It was the best decision he ever made – after marrying Mãe. My father, it seemed, had a gift for business. He moved us to Barra de Tijuca. Oh! I had never seen anything like it! A whole floor of an apartment block just for us. I only had to share a room with one sister! And if we leaned out of the window, and craned around, there, down between the other apartment blocks we could see the sea!
Adriana Maria do Céu Mão de Ferro Arena de Corta. Mary of Heaven. Our Lady of the Starry Skies. My mother worked for the Abrigo Cristo Redentor and sent us all to catechism and mass but she was very far from being a good Catholic. When we were sick she would light a candle and slip a holy medal under the pillow but she also bought herbs and prayers and icons from mãe-do-santo. Double insurance, she called it. The more deities on the case the better. We grew up with two invisible worlds overlapping us; saints and orixas. So I was named after a Catholic saint who was also Yemanja. I remember my mother taking us down to the beach at Barra for Reveillon. It was the one time of the year she would go to the beach. The ocean scared her. We spent the week after Christmas making costumes – blue and white, the holy colours. Mãe made fantastic head-dresses out of wire and old pairs of tights – Pai would spray-paint them in the back of the workshop. That for me is the smell of New Year – car paint. Mãe would dress all in white and everyone treated her with great respect as she walked down to the beach. I felt so proud – she was like a great ship. Millions went to Reveillon up at Rio but we weren’t so shabby down at Barra. This was our festival. Everyone hung out palm fronds on their balconies. Cars drove up and down Avenida Sernambetida playing music. There were so many people milling around they could only drive slowly so it was safe even for very small kids. There were DJs and lots of food. All the things that Yemanja loved. Weed. Flowers. White flowers, paper boats, candles. We went down to the edge of the water with the ocean at our toes. Even Mãe, ankle deep in the breaking waves, sand running out from under her toes. Flowers in our hair, candles in our hands. We were waiting for the moment the edge of the moon rose over the sea. And there it was – the tiniest edge of moon, as thin as a fingernail clipping. It seemed to bleed over the horizon. Huge. So huge. Then my perceptions moved and I saw that it wasn’t rising beyond the edge of the world; it was forming out of the water. The sea was boiling and breaking and the white of the waves were being pulled together into the moon. I couldn’t speak. None of us could. Still we stood, thousands of us. A line of white and blue along the edge of Brazil. Then the moon rose clear and full and a line of silver reached across the sea from it to me. The path of Yemanja. The road the Lady walked to reach our world. And I remember thinking, but roads lead both ways. I could walk out along that road to the moon. Then we threw our flowers into the water and the waves drew them out. We set our little tea-lights in the paper boats and put them in to follow the flowers. Most drowned but some were drawn out along the moon path to Yemanja. I have never forgotten the tiny boats bobbing out along the line of the moon.
Mãe never believed that people had walked there, up on the moon. It was inconceivable. The moon was a person, not a stone satellite. People could not walk like fleas on the skins of other people. She still did not believe that people were walking there, years later, before I left, when I took her down to the beach. By then she could hardly move. I hired a car and drove the couple of hundred metres to the beach. Pai had lost the dealership. We weren’t car people any more. We had the apartment because Pai had paid off the mortgage early. It was full of us again: Byron, Emerson, Elis, Luiz, Eden, Caio. Adriana. All the birds back to roost.
Mãe was huge as a moon by then, but all the people down for Reveillon paid her respect and the cars on the Avenida hooted their horns to her. She was great and holy. I took her by the hand down to the water and we saw the moon seem to form out of the sea and I said, I’ll be there soon. She laughed and could not believe it, but then she said, well, it’ll be easy for me to go on to the balcony and wave to you.
Adriana Maria do Céu Mão de Ferro Arena de Corta. A Outra. Outrinha. The other one, the little other one. Average Jane. That’s my final name. That’s the name that has shaped my life the most. The average one. Not the best looker, not the brightest and most outgoing. Not the one vovo gave the Easter money to first. Average Adriana. I had good legs but my body was too short and my nose and ears too big. Little slitty eyes, and my skin was too dark. My parents thought they were doing me a favour. They didn’t want me to have any illusions. They said, you’ll never be a looker, you’ll never be the golden one, the lucky one, so don’t expect the world to fall into your hands like a peach. You’ll have to work for it. You’ll have to use every one of your strengths and talents to get what others get because of their looks, their smiles. The Other One. No one has called me that in fifty years. You are the only person on this world knows that name. And I can feel my jaw setting hard. My teeth are clenching. All because of that name. Fifty years on this world, and still that name! That name!
So: I was born without grace or favour. So: my nose was too big and my skin too dark. I would make myself exceptional. I would be the one who would do anything, dare anything. I knew I would never be caught. In school I was the kid with her hand up first. I was the girl who wouldn’t shut up when the boys were talking. I was the one who hacked into the school network and changed exam results. The obvious geek boy did it. I asked Baby Norton, the futsal star all the girls worshipped, to slip his hand down the front of my skirt. And he did and everyone was so shocked. I wore the camouflage of the pretty around me. I was never again picked for the girls’ futsal team. So be it: I found my own sport, Brazilian jiu jitsu. My mother didn’t approve at all. Pai loved MMA on the cable and he found me a dojo. I was small and sneaky and dirty and could throw boys twice my age. I was in secondary school then. Oh I was bad. I beat the pretty girls to the guys because they knew I would do anything. I did, but not as much as the pretty girls thought I did. The legend was enough. The pretty girls cut me out of their social cliques and parties. Big loss. They tried schemes and stings to humiliate me but none of them could dream up a social scam worth a damn. They put stuff about me on Facebook; I hacked them back ten times. I could code better than all of them put together. And they didn’t dare try to physically bully me or throw battery acid at me; I was quick and I was hard and I could throw them around like Barbie dolls. Secondary school was war. Isn’t it always, everywhere?
The guys were mostly okay, by the way. They talked anal but guys always talk anal. A blow job and they were satisfied. They were as scared of me as the girls.
Isn’t this scandalous? A lady of my years talking about anal and oral sex.
Papai was delighted when he heard I was going to study engineering. Extraction engineering: I was a true daughter of Minas Gerais. A true Iron Hand. My mother was ten types of horrified. Engineering was a man’s thing. I would never marry. I would never have children. I would eat with my fingers and have dirt under my nails and no man would look at me. And in São Paulo. That dreadful dreadful city.
I loved São Paulo. I loved the scary ugliness of it. I loved its anonymity. I loved its banality. I loved the endless vista of skyscrapers. I loved that it didn’t compromise. Compared to the moon, it’s an angel of beauty. There is no beauty on the moon. São Paulo was like me; nothing to look at but bursting with energy, ideas, anger and spit.
I found a good group of friends. Guys most and first – it was st
ill unusual to find a woman studying extraction engineering and I knew better how guys worked than girls. Men were simple and straightforward. I found I could have girls as friends. I found out what how the friendship of women differs from the friendship of men. I found I could like girls. I found I could love them. I was an opportunist, I was flagrant. I knew tricks. I think of that young woman and her boldness and brashness and I adore her. She wasted no opportunity. I had only just moved on to the campus when I painted myself in the national flag, head to toenails and went on a naked bike ride through the streets of São Paulo. Everyone looked at me, no one saw me. I was naked and invisible. I liked that very much. Oh, the body I had then. So much more I could have done with it!
I will tell you now about Lyoto. He is a name trawled up from deep – do you know what trawling is? I sometimes forget that there are old world words and ideas the new generations have no reference for. Animal similes – my grandchildren just frown. Luna has never seen a cow, or a pig, or even a chicken, alive and clucking.
Lyoto. I can’t see him clearly any more, but I remember his voice. He had a southern accent – he was from Curitiba. I think he was my first love. Oh, you smile. I didn’t flirt with him, tease him, seduce him, play sexy games with him so it must have been love. I met him on the jiu jitsu team. Sports teams, they’re all sex sex sex; everyone is doing it all the time. We were at a competition – I was on the women’s team, Light class, Purple belt. He was Heavy, Black Fifth. I remember his weight and his belt, but not his face.
Papai would borrow the flashiest Mercedes from the showroom and drive to home competitions. It was a long drive but he enjoyed it. Afterwards he would drive me through Jardins and take me out to dinner somewhere expensive. I would step out of that big car and feel like a millionaire.
Then one time he drove up and I didn’t get in the car and go with him. I wanted to go drinking beer with Lyoto and then on to a party. I remember the sad look on Papai’s face that we wouldn’t be driving down Rua Barão de Capanema again checking off the menus on the car screen. I think I made him feel like a millionaire too. He still came to the tournaments, right up until I went to Ouro Preto for post-grad. It was too far for him to drive and I was losing interest in the fighting by then. Year after year, tumbling about on a mat, to advance by a Dan here, a belt there.
