It’s five years since Seu Alejandro died and in that time he has grown from cult to myth to legend. Five years it’s taken me to track down those masters, from legend back through myth to a scorched hard drive. I’m at a bar in Laranjeiras. You wouldn’t know it, you’ve never even heard of it; if you were to come here you would think it dazingly trendy but the moment has already moved on from it. It’s my job to know such things. The people who know all know me as Cento-réis: hundred-réal Man. The joke goes that that’s the amount of money I’ll spend in one session on music. You’d know me better as Rubem de Castro. Columnist reviewer commentator blogger pundit radio-wit and professional idler: the last of the Real Cariocas. All those little things a man must do not to be seen to be trying too hard. If you met me you’d hate me. I’m the guy on the music forums with so much cooler recommendations than yours. At a party I’ll sneer at the host’s unforgivably populist playlist and tell you who you should be listening to now and where to find them. I might even slip on my own podcast and you’ll say, Who are these guys? While you’re jabbering away on your social networking sites about have you heard Tita Maria and Duane Duarte and Bonde do Role? I’ve already moved on to the next thing after the next thing. I could take you to the clubs and the bars and the sound systems but once I’d taken you, that would be the end of it, you know? For four decades I’ve surfed the sea of music that breaks around the rocks of this most lovely of cities. It’s tiring and relentless and it’s no way for a middle-aged man to live, but the moment you lose the wave, you go under.
Because I’m a middle-aged man still living on teenage overhang, when I hear the word “masters” I expect tape. I expect digibeta, DAT; the romantic part of me hopes for reels. The masters for Pretty Petty Thieves are on a hard drive the size of a cigarette packet. They sit on the table next to Guinle’s real packet of Hollywood Blues. Some bright-eyed singer-songwriter is picking out her heart-fluff to the fourths and fifths on the little stage. I’ve heard a thousand heartbreaks just like hers. I move my beer away from the drive. It’s been through fire and deep lost time but I’m terrified of spilling Antarctica over it.
“Can I hear some?”
“It’s a hard drive.” When Guinle left the police, like most of the cops who paid enough to be safe up in the favelas, he set up a private detective agency. His specialism was kidnappings: footballers’ mothers and pets. Now he runs a successful stable of gumshoes so he no longer has to hack security cameras or go through anyone’s garbage with chopsticks and only tackles those cases that interest him. I know him from the days when the New Bossa swept through the city. There’s an old musicians’ gaydar: we recognised each immediately at our tables on opposing sides of the dark, noisy club. It’s the set of the body, the sit and slight lean, the tilt of the head that says that whatever else you are hearing, you are always listening to the music.
I say, “I could be buying someone’s collection of boy-porn.”
Guinle holds out his phone. A set of white earbuds is plugged into it.
“Do you want to listen to it?”
“Have you listened to it?” Panic snatches sudden and cold at my heart. I can’t bear it that Guinle could have listened to the masters before me. It makes it dirty, used. It’s almost a sex thing, like someone else’s girlfriend after an indecently short interval.
“Not a note. What do you take me for? I just copied it because I knew you’d ask me that.”
“Promise me you won’t...” The need in my voice is ridiculous. Have some dignity man.
“I’ll give you until tomorrow morning. Once you’ve remembered that other little matter.”
I slide the envelope of cash across the table. It’s a big envelope, A4, too full to seal down the flap. There’s a pheromone of notes, of ink and hands and trade. Guinle scoops it into his briefcase. He’s too much a carioca to count the notes and too much a pro to query his clients’ cash calls.
“I make no representations about the state of the contents. You asked me to get the masters, I got them.”
“I must ask you how you did that sometime,” I say but I can hear my voice go off the moment, the way you hear it when a singer loses a cover of a song he doesn’t really understand or believe in. Just words. Because I have it. I have the lost Pretty Petty Thieves. In that slightly blackened titanium box is the last musical testament of Seu Alejandro. The world thought it was lost, but I found it and now it sits in the palm of my hand. I see that hand shake.
“Yes, you really must,” says Guinle.
I have a ritual. Everyone has a ritual. I know a great great singer who can only face an audience if he’s masturbated. You’d know him too. He’s a household name. There are footballers who have to put on one boot first, or never wear two the same colour, or carry a picture of the Pope or Our Lady next to their hearts. Truckers bless their rigs, coders bless their keyboards, policemen bless their guns. And then there is sex. There is always sex. Some have times and places and positions; some have foreplay that’s scripted and rehearsed as a high mass. Some cannot achieve anything with the lights on. For some it’s clothing: something they have to wear, or have the other wear, without which they cannot be remotely aroused.
I practice my ritual in the best room in the apartment. It’s not the biggest or the best aired or the quietest but it has a breathtaking view out over Botafogo and Guanabara to the hills of Niteroi beyond. Out of the right-hand window are Leme Morro and the Sugarloaf. In the evening, in the sudden lilac twilight when the lights come like a necklace around the shoulders of the moros, it is heartbreakingly beautiful. Here’s what I keep in this room. A chair of course; an old, deep leather armchair with the springs going so I can sag into it. A beer fridge. A small side table for the beer and the remote. The sound system, in the holy corner where the two views meet. This is my listening room. This is my church. I take my place in the chair. I’ve had it positioned scientifically to get the best surround sound separation. My cleaner is under orders never to move it on pain of instant dismissal. I settle my fat ass deep into the seat. It’s important to get comfortable. I’m going to be there for a while. I take one Antarctica from the fridge and pop the can. Rio spreads like wings on either side of me. I love her so hard it hurts. Then I lift the remote control and start Seu Alejandro’s Pretty Petty Thieves.
On the first listen through I never do anything. I need to get the whole recording. The whole concept, entire, the song order, the big idea. Marcelo from the Tuesday Afternoon Boys calls it the gestalt. He’s some kind of therapist in it. Call that first pass the hearing. This second pass is the listening. It’s then you notice the details of the arrangements, the engineering, how the lyrics work with the melody. Is that a horn section there? He’s pulled the bass up here, pushed it back there. Why has he used a cello line, for God’s sake? The third time is the savouring. You know how the songs work, what they are trying to achieve and the way the music is constructed and how it works on your heart. Now you can appreciate the details. The way drum and bass syncopate against each other. The complex time signature—11/8—that always eludes your four-square tapping toe. That ever-shifting harmony line that disguises a very simple, almost folk melody and gives it a dress of carioca sophistication. The twists, the false starts and surprise endings, the games you can play with middle eights, joys you can only appreciate after a lifetime of immersion in MPB.
But there are holes. There are hideous holes. Trans-Amazonian-Highway holes, that can swallow an entire truck. The main vocals are unmixed. On some of the songs Seu Alejandro sounds like he is bellowing like an old and angry beach bum, others like he is humming to himself trying to find his car in a supermarket car park. Arrangements are fragmentary; there are suggestions of ’70s funk horn sections or his signature trip-hop rhythms, which he lifted from another age, another culture and made unmistakably Tropicalismo. Back vocals are either non-existent or too far to the front and the bass is painfully low in the mix. There is a screamingly frustrating twenty three second gap in the middl
e of “Immaculate Conception” and track 8: “Bottle Club”, just ends, full stop, whether by fire or intention I can’t tell. The title track doesn’t exist beyond an opening carnaval blast of drums, brass and what sounds like sampled traffic noise. Astonishing, but a shard. Again, this could be a Seu Alejandro joke or the effects of the fire. The last two tracks are sketches: “Breakfast News” is an acoustic guitar piece—few ever tugged the heart so with his strings than Seu Alejandro, with suggestions of lyrics muttered into the mike; scraps and lines and euphonies. The final track, provisionally titled [a ghost samba] is his joyfully melancholy guitar with a severely simple cello line.
But it is Seu Alejandro. Unmistakably, gloriously Seu Alejandro.
I crack a fresh Antarctica and start the third listen. My hand is shaking. As I listen with the ear of savouring, the shake becomes worse until I can hardly hold my beer. My whole body is tight, every muscle like a drumskin; I am quivering as if trying to keep back tears. Not just tears, but the kind of uncontrollable, on-the-floor howling and quaking that leaves phlegm pouring from your nose and mouth, the kind men must never be seen doing, the kind men do when love walks away from them and they realise their lives have been lies. It’s the holes, those Amazonian holes; they join together into a void. How dare Seu Alejandro die and leave it incomplete and damaged? How dare Seu Alejandro leave me with just this? It is as abandonment as complete as any of my brief wives and girlfriends. I am bereft, I am furious with him.
It’s full dark now. The lights draw the curves of the bays and the breasts of the hills. Pretty Petty Thieves comes to its third ending and I am all right. I’m all right. I’m already starting to think of how I might put it all together and complete what the Seu left broken.
We are the Tuesday Afternoon Boys and every Tuesday afternoon we play at the Lagoa futsal court. We’ve been playing every Tuesday for seven years, ever since the first of us turned forty. In the afternoon the only other teams are skinny kids in basketball vests and baggy shorts. We don’t play them, they can dribble the ball around us like Garrincha tying a left-back in knots; we play each other. We play futsal to show we’re still alive, we play in the afternoon to show we’re masters of our own time.
I’m on the subs bench. When the average team age is in the low forties, you spend most of the game on the subs bench, but everyone gets a turn on court. That’s the point of turning up on a Tuesday afternoon. But the real work gets done on that bench.
The ball goes out and Carlinhos, our manager for this week, calls Captain Spooky off. He looks like he’s dying. Face so red it could explode, chest heaving, the sweat lashing off him. He crashes down on the bench beside me and it’s a full two minutes before he can get a word between the death-gasps.
“Jesus and Mary,” I tell him. “You should listen to your doctor sometime. He said this is going to be the death of you.”
He shakes his head, smiling through the panting.
“The person. Most likely. To kill you. Is your own. Doctor.”
Captain Spooky claims he is a real doctor. MDs are not real doctors. It’s all hand waving and wizardry. MD-ing is about instinct and opinion and subjective thought. There’s no science, no objectivity, nothing empirical or evidence-based about medicine. It’s a package of received knowledge, opinion and status-plays. Physicians, from the word physic: that makes it sound like a science. Proper science has hypotheses, experiments, statistical analysis, proof and margins of certainty and error. Physics, now that is science, and that’s what Captain Spooky is: a real, true, proper physicist. With angina.
His real science is theoretical physics. It’s a young man’s game, he’ll tell you—like futsal—but he’s kept his tenure, no lean feat for a man pushing fifty. Five more years, he says. Five more years and he’ll take the retirement package. His field is so complex and abstruse it makes my head swim even thinking about it. It sounds like esoteric nonsense to me, but he swears that theoretical quantum computing has millions of everyday applications and implications that will change our lives beyond recognition. I bow to his experience—he’s beaten off a lot of young dogs snapping from below; all I know is that he’s tried to explain it to me in the Rodrigo de Freitas Bar and Grill over the post-match caipiroskas with which we replace lost body-fluids, and I still don’t get it. When things get really really small and really really short in duration they behave in ways that seem impossible to us; that seems to be the gist of it. And because of that, there isn’t one me, there are billion trillion mes, and there isn’t one world, there are a billion trillion worlds, all different: every possible world and me that can exist, exists somewhere. If you thought about that too much you’d fry your head. And that’s why we call him Captain Spooky.
“So.” The words are easier now. “Your limited edition. How many times have you listened to her now?”
For Captain Spooky everything to do with computers was feminine. Our Lady of the Digits.
“Enough for it to be exciting like a lover, not so much that it’s become a wife.”
“Jesus man, you need to get over that. How long ago was it?”
“Eight years five months.”
“We’ve all been through it. It’s a life stage. Well, all except John the Idiot, and he’d welcome the chance for an agonising divorce.” The circles of sweat on the front and back of his T-shirt are expanding to meet the ones under his arms. It is not a good look. Captain Spooky squirts water from the Action! bottle over his face. He says, “I mean, have you thought about doing anything with it?”
“What, you mean, copy it? Distribute it? Release it?” I think I keep the sudden crackle of rage out of my voice, but I feel my muscles clench and tense. “Do you know what I call those? Blasphemy records. Once they have you, those companies will release every half-baked idea or whistle you ever recorded, every coffee-bar twang. If they could make money they’d put out Seu Alejandro singing in the shower. Bastards. The entire reason I tracked down and bought that disk was to keep it out of the hands of those vultures.”
I feel my face is now the red one, and Captain Spooky’s pale at my anger. He holds up his hands in supplication.
“Okay okay okay man. It’s your music. What I meant was, you say it’s full of holes and drops out and incomplete tracks.” He leans forward. It’s not a good smell. “What if you could fill in those holes and finish those part songs?”
I shake my head.
“It’d be guesswork. It’d be someone else either fitting their own ideas in or, which is worse, doing a bad Seu Alejandro impersonation. No no no, keep it the way it is. I’ll always be imagining what it would have been like. That’s okay. That’s the price.”
Captain Spooky purses thumb and forefinger; a scientist of the very small’s gesture of precision.
“What if we could take imagination out of it? What if we could finish the collection exactly as Seu Alejandro intended? With his own music?”
“Short of a medium I can’t see how anyone could do that.”
“I could. Just give me a copy. I don’t want your masters, you hold on to them, just give a decent OMFs. A disk would do, or email them over to me.”
I want to ask him what spooky macumba he intends to work but the ball has gone out and Carlinhos, the other, real captain, is sending Bastard Max off and signing for me to come on. My muscles have gone tight as a virgin; I will play like a drain but with the Tuesday Afternoon Boys everyone gets a turn on pitch. I can suffer for it later.
The room, the chair, the beer, the sunset. My hand on the remote but my finger wavers over the play button. Three weeks and three days after I sent him the files of Pretty Petty Thieves they came back to me. Captain Spooky hadn’t been at the Lagoa since the day we talked about the good music, the pure music. The chest pains and the overheating had got worse so he’d been to see his doctor and the man had gone berserk. Running around kicking a ball at his age at his weight in this heat. Of course, the doctor still knew nothing, but he’d take his advice—purely precautionary—until the
pain went away. Sorry it took so long, he said in the email. The quantum mainframe gets booked pretty solid. I could see alone from the attachment details that they were changed. Fatter, fresher. Frightening. I dithered, I hovered over the files. I didn’t want to open them. I didn’t want to hear them. I wanted to rip them on to my system then and there. I wanted to hear them like my daughter’s voice on the phone.
The sky is lilac but won’t hold it much longer: indigo’s coming. There’s a high jet, night-bound up out over the Atlantic: it’s gold in the caught twilight. The streets and the cars are twinkling and I watch the glow of the cable cars slide like pearls between the pendant lights of the stations. Rio has always, irreducibly been she.
I hit play.
There is a ritual so I give it the three listens though from the very opening bar I can hear the difference. The first time is still the whole thing. I listen to Pretty Petty Thieves straight through. It’s some time before I hit the play button for the second listen. I’m floored, I’m on the ceiling, my heart is racing and at the same time I shine like a child at a first communion. It’s all there. Entire and full and rich and more ambitious, more playful, more daring than I could ever have imagined. No holes, this is a smooth highway of sound. And it’s Seu Alejandro, unmistakably Seu Alejandro though everything is new and strange and wonderful like falling in love. It sounds like the greatest thing you ever heard. I must listen again. I must dive in and swim down deep between the tracks and the layers and the individual notes.
The second time I deep-listen. That’s a Senegalese guitar with a deliberately primitive noreste four-part harmony: it’s Mother Africa but with Seu Alejandro’s signature English trip-hop beat. But there’s invention: musique concrete from Rio traffic noises fluttering as delicate as bird song over “Miracle of the Fishes”, and a dazzling, hilarious two-step of dub bass with Nacão Zumbi death-guitar thrashes on “Angela and Angela”. “Kicking” is so totally different I almost did not recognise the song on first pass, now on second listen the changes are so radical I feel them as a physical shock. It had been faux fun, now it’s a shimmering, shadowy dubstep, dark and melancholic. And then there is [a ghost samba]. It is still the same simple cello line and heartbreak acoustic guitar but it has words now, Seu Alejandro’s unearthly but diamond-clear, diamond-sharp falsetto and a twitter of four-a.m. electronics so ethereal it might come through a radio telescope. The breath catches in my chest. I can hear my heart. It’s some time before I touch the play button again.
Other Worlds Than These Page 31
