by Calvin Baker
Twenty minutes into the movie, I started to doze off from the pill, and went to the bathroom to remove my contact lenses and brush my teeth.
I do not know what happened next, but when I awoke there was an oxygen mask over my face. The steward told me I had fainted in the aisle, but that it was probably only exhaustion. I nodded lethargically, and went back to sleep.
When I awoke it was morning, and we were over the coast of Bahia. I fell back asleep and did not wake again until the wheels of the plane touched the runway in Rio. I retrieved my luggage from the carousel, bought a newspaper and café com leite, then exited the terminal to find a taxi.
I was soon stuck in the morning rush hour, overwhelmed by motion sickness from the stop-and-go traffic. I opened the windows to let in the fresh, humid, air, but was soon choked by the exhaust of whizzing motorbikes and diesel fumes from trucks. I was forced to close the window again, and curled up in the seat and closed my eyes in an attempt to keep from vomiting.
The driver, seeing me fidget, caught my eye the next time I looked ahead, and asked if I was okay. I told him the pollution was making me ill, and he suggested an alternate, if longer, route. I agreed and we pulled off the highway at the next exit. When he saw I had regained my composure, he began to re-create for me an argument he had had with his wife that morning. My Portuguese was limited to the superficial amount I could remember from a college class, combined with cognates from other Latin languages, which was perfect for his purposes, since it allowed me to follow the story only if I kept absolutely alert to what he was saying. He gleaned this, and smiled. He needed someone to hear him, so I listened as he filled the sealed interior with his woes.
We finally pulled up to the hotel, a boxy, glass-and-steelaffair from the seventies whose best days were well in the past. Its single charm was in being directly on the beach, with palm trees offering shade all around, beckoning optimistically.
When I went up to my room I found the interior as rundown as the exterior, but was pleased to discover I had a little balcony that opened to the sea. It was still early in the morning, and I opened both the double doors to let in the breeze, then lay down for a nap.
I had only just closed my eyes and started immediately to dream, when a banging at the door blasted me wide awake. From the ruckus in the hall I knew it was my friends, and opened the door to find Schoeller, Freddo, and Doc, who lifted me in a great bear hug. “There he is, in the cheapest goddamned room he could find,” Doc said, peeking around the room. “We are glad you came, but why are you so mean to yourself? You live once. Everything is available to you. Why not take it?”
“I flew right,” I said.
Doc had arrived in college after a stint in the Navy, where he was stationed in the Pacific doing intelligence. He had spent two years after that living with a tribe in Micronesia, until it was time for him to either take a wife or come back to the West and try to unify his experiences. After all of that he took school with a grain of salt, working hard enough to get into medical school, but not so hard that there was ever a Friday he did not skip classes to play golf. “Come on, let’s get this man to the beach,” he said to the others, after looking me over. “He needs a sun cure.”
They had been drinking since breakfast, and before I could change for the beach someone pushed a caipirinha into my hand. I went to get my swim trunks and bathing towel, and we headed down to Leblon.
It was nearly winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but still warm enough for the beaches to be packed, the tourists to be sunburned, and the homeless people to sleep out on the sidewalk. As we passed I gave a real to a mother begging with her child hitched against her hip, who was immediately harassed by the security guard from a nearby business, informing her she was begging too close to the entrance of a nearby mall. The way he spoke to her reminded me we were at the southern terminus of the old slave belt, whose northern edge was the Mason-Dixon line.
“You should let those people be,” Doc said to the guard: “Beggars are holy. They trust the universe to provide all they may need.”
“Maybe, but they’re bad for business,” Schoeller said.
The city was in the midst of a financial boom, and the air along the grand boulevard at the front of the hotel was charged with the thrill of new money vying against the anxiety of the old.
All of it melted at the shore into the democracy of the sea, along with my own worries. It was my first time in Rio, and the country felt like the New World in miniature, so much so that by noon, as we lunched at a beachfront café, I felt perfectly at ease with what to expect.
We retired for a siesta after lunch, and did not go out again until evening, when we had a lavish dinner atop Santa Teresa. After eating we piled into taxis, and Doc gave the driver an address across town. We drove out through the hills surrounding the city, past the outskirts of a ghetto, which looked like every other ghetto—kids too old for their age, premature sicknesses, somewhere to buy liquor, somewhere to play fútbol, a dancehall, no visible means of egress. I felt my earlier sense of division return, and began to watch everything from a remove, trying to decipher the society around me, until we eventually reached an industrial district, where we rolled two levels down a garage ramp, before stopping at a security gate.
Schoeller spoke into the camera at the gate, and the metal barrier receded into the ground, opening onto another ramp, which took us down a third level, where we were greeted by a doorman at a lavish, well-guarded marble entranceway, with a discreet sign above the door that said unironically, Cielo.
The manager came to the entrance to welcome us, and escorted us into a sumptuous room with a walk-in humidor and wine cellar stocked with mature wines and aged cigars. In the room next to it was a chef grilling aged Argentinean steak, and in a larger room, girls in every corner, each more beautiful than the last. The room was furnished with antiques modeled after the Topkapi Palace, with rare Persian carpets and Ottoman artifacts. Only the girls were young. Tall girls, short girls, thin girls, buxom girls. Sweet girls, ruthless girls, desperate girls, good girls who had lost all trace of innocence, cynical girls whose experience of it had ended before their childhoods. Black, white, Asian, indigenous, mestizo, octoroon, quadroon, cafuzo, castas, they only have names for in the local language, and others they just invented with the last people to get off the boat and had not named yet. Whatever you wanted, whatever your unvoiced fantasy, whatever moved through you, dancing together in groups, laughing and winking, as we toured that palace of vice.
“Bunga bunga,” Freddo said.
“Technically,” Doc corrected, “bunga bunga requires the presence of water.”
“Please,” Schoeller begged, “don’t be a fucking pedant tonight.”
“I can’t believe you are having your bachelor party here,” Freddo said. “You’re getting married.”
“And when I get married I will be married,” Schoeller answered. “I am not yet.”
“Do you mean you will give up places like this once you are married?” Doc pressed.
“No.”
“He’s not marrying for love. Should he also give up pleasure?”
“What are you marrying for then?”
“Because we share the same values, and are devoted to the same way of life.”
“That makes it okay?”
“Once I’m married, it will mean something different to come to places like this, is all I mean.” He was marked by resignation as he looked around.
“I don’t care that he’s lying to his wife,” Freddo protested. “I care that he’s flaunting it, and making all of us complicit in his lying.”
“Please shut up, Freddo.”
“I can’t be here,” Freddo protested.
“Why not?” Doc demanded. “You are not forced to do anything. What are you afraid of?”
“It is because you see bodies. I see the poor girls I grew up with. I see my sister. My mother.”
“That is just a real cry for help.”
As much as I di
sliked agreeing with Freddo I shared his qualms, but for different reasons. Brothels were the nexus of everything I objected to. Besides commoditization of the body, the other interests colliding there were equally nefarious: human trafficking, drugs, violence, and a global network of corruption that flowed back into the legitimate economy. It was in fact one of the points where the legitimate and illegitimate markets mingled, and otherwise upstanding citizens aided all that civil society must necessarily abhor.
I did not say anything, but took it all in as we toured the rooms, more curious than anything else. I had never been inside one before. But the girls were beautiful, in so many different ways, as though someone had assembled a working definition of female beauty until, as we rounded a corner to the penultimate room, it was impossible to know where to focus your attention. There a forty-foot-high waterfall cascaded down from the ceiling, and a group of sirens frolicked in a pool beneath it.
“There,” Schoeller said, clapping his hands toward the water, as Doc fished in the interior pockets of his jacket and started passing around pills, “is the bunga, baby.”
“What’s this?” Schoeller asked, taking one of the pills Doc had passed.
“Molly.”
“The others?”
“China. Bolivia. Adderall. Sugarcubes. Valium. Methadone. Morphine.”
I knew then it had been a bad idea to come, but simply declined everything, until Schoeller lit a long, thin-stemmed pipe and passed it my way.
“What kind of hash is this?” I asked, exhaling a beautifully exotic taste in a plume of violet smoke.
“The opium kind,” he answered.
My muscles relaxed, and soon turned liquid, as the room began to swim pleasantly around me; I found a divan to relax on, while the others fanned out through the club, each in search of his respective desire. The last I remember of any of them that night was watching Doc leave around midnight with a coven of flame-haired she-devils. To do what, I could scarcely imagine.
My mind was swimming happily along the edges of the room, watching the light bend and colors merge, as I fused deeper and deeper into the divan. I had the sensation of falling through a trap door and descending ever deeper, until all that existed was music and color and light. I was completely oblivious to where I was when an Amazonian goddess appeared from the ether, and sat down next to me. She only spoke Tariana, a native language, and our conversation was halting at first, but soon felt completely fluent as she opened an app on her tablet that showed pictures of various poses, starting with starfish, and growing progressively more tantric.
“I do this, and this, and this if I like you. If I don’t like you, I do this. This if you’re good, and this if you are wicked.”
I wanted all she showed me, as I looked at her and wondered what it would be like to fuck a goddess.
Even if I had decided to leave with her, it would have been impossible, because I could not find my limbs. But as I lay there debating with myself, two other women approached, a tall, light one and a taller, dark one. Both looked like mutants from some further stage in human evolution as they sat down on either side of me.
“What language?” The taller one asked, as she took my head in her lap, while the other took my feet, stretching me out between them. The light one spoke Italian, Arabic, and Spanish; the dark one Japanese, German, Afrikaans, and Dutch. In the state I was in I spoke them all as we laughed and they asked if I wanted to go upstairs. Temptation was wearing me down, and I thought to go, telling myself it would be worthwhile if only for the experience. However, through a colossal and super-valiant effort of will, I declined.
They left and I was proud of my willpower, self-satisfied that I remained true to my discipline, as I watched the lights and color bend so that there were no longer angles in the room, only swooping curves of red and purple emotion until I locked eyes with a woman standing directly across from me, who I remembered seeing when I’d first entered, but had lost sight of amid the undifferentiated faces. When our eyes locked, though, she came to me right away, smiling enigmatically and asking what had taken me so long.
She was a large-eyed, big-bosomed country broad, no other term would do; there was something earthy and old-fashioned about her seductiveness. The kind of woman you hope to find on a lonesome night: apple-bottomed, quick-witted, bewitching, Old and Middle English words from the womb and the milk of the language.
Not beautiful, maybe even a little bit homely if you were slow and missed the point; when I looked at her, there was no explaining it, my dick signaled like a compass. A roost cock, keening and crowing to her soft heat as she sat down and took me in her lap, rocking me back to my first body.
“You work in entertainment,” she said perceptively, “but you were in the army before.”
“Close,” I answered, asking how she knew. She shrugged, and ordered herself a drink and put it on my tab. We began to talk and I poured out my tribulations, my conflicted desires, my whole damn life. She crooked her head to the side, looking down at me, and told me to wise up, I had a grand life if I looked the right way.
“Let me get you a spyglass, Watson,” she said. I still didn’t understand, and she didn’t answer again, only slid down and cradled herself against me to show me what she meant.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“I should not,” I answered. “It is against my code.”
“Your what?” she asked.
“My code.”
She laughed. “That is because you still do not know what is right for you, or what you want. If you did you wouldn’t say should. You would say will.”
“I don’t will anything from this place,” I said. “That’s not what I’m about.”
“Come with me, let me find out what you’re about,” she teased.
“I suppose you will help me know what I want, too,” I said.
“Yes,” she answered, turning serious. “The body has a knowledge of its own.”
“I do not sleep with odalisques.”
“You still do not understand, do you? That’s not what I am.”
“What are you doing here, then?”
“I am a professional lover.”
“What does that cost?”
“What is that worth?”
“What is the difference?” I looked up at her, but she was just a light among all the lights.
“The qualia of experience,” she answered.
“That’s a fine word.”
“I used to read in the library, when I dropped out of school and moved to the city to find a job.”
“You should have stayed in school.”
“If I would have had money.”
I had studied enough languages to appreciate the complexity of the verb tense she had constructed. “That took effort to master.”
“The compound subjunctive,” she said ruefully, “is the story of my life. If I would have known, if I could have done, if it should happen that. If it were up to me. Should it ever be. It’s not really the same in American as Brazilian, though. It’s the official verb tense of mad visions and inconsolable sorrows, and belongs to poor people and dreamers. This lifetime brought to you by the subjunctive tense.”
I laughed at her nerdy joke. At the same time I was touched and knew I was going to leave with her, despite my own rules. Smart girls turned me on.
“So,” she said, taking a sip of rum. “The physicalists believe all phenomena can be reduced to the material. The essential concern with all of these things is, of course, how consciousness arises from the body. Whether the consciousness, or soul that makes us human, is only another phenomenon of the body.”
I was too far gone to follow, and asked her to clarify.
“Take for example a hypothetical woman, named Maria, who is a brilliant scientist but has lived in a black-and-white room her entire life where her entire life’s work has been to study the red of flowers. She understands red is the longest wavelength visible to the naked eye, and she knows how the brain is excited by and react
s to red. She knows, in fact, all there is to know about red, without ever having seen it, or a flower.
“One day Maria decides to finally leave the black-and-white room. She steps out from her little box, and she sees the world for the first time, and she sees red for the first time, and she sees her first flower. Does Maria know what red is?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Does she?”
“It’s just a philosophical game,” she cooed, stroking me playfully. “Not real life. They like to ask questions like that because I think God does not talk to philosophers very much.”
“Why did you bring it up then?” I was confused, still burning to know the answer to the question.
“Because, baby, I know all there is to know about love.”
She may have said you. She may have said blue. I do not remember. I was high on opium, and she had me in her hands.
20
She led me through the halls of that ode to Dionysus, to a room carpeted in silk and exquisitely woven cushions, where she slipped off her dress, and led me to a marble bath. She undressed me and drew the water, then led me in, where she washed me and afterward toweled me dry, before massaging my entire body with rose-scented oil. We went to bed and she laced her legs, long as a country day, around me and I felt perfectly within my skin, undivided in a way I had not since I was a boy. We made love and it was as she said, she was a professional lover.
The next morning, as we sat in bed she kissed me before rising from the sheets, looking down at me still amid the pillows. My head hurt, and my cock, and my conscience as well. “We had something, meu amor,” she said, rubbing my temples. “Maybe not what you’re looking for, but something all the same. You should drop me a postcard from time to time. Come back and see me when you can.”
“I do not think I will be back this way again,” I said, even as I warmed to the sound of her saying my love in the unguarded southern way. “So you don’t have to lie to me. I know it’s business. Me projecting a fantasy onto you, and you playing it back to get money. It’s okay.”
