by Ian McDonald
Marcelina hung by the door, blinking softly as the television screen receded into a tiny jiggling mote at the end of a long, dim tunnel buzzing with cans of Kuat and amphetamines, Leandro and the Black Plumed Bird strange limousines playing bumper-tag with her. She heard her voice say, as if from a fold-back speaker, ‘We’re supposed to be edgy and noisy.’
‘There’s edgy and noisy and there’s not getting our broadcast license renewed.’ The Black Plumed Bird stood up, dusted cigarette ash from her lovely gloves. ‘Sorry, Marcelina.’ Her nylon-hosed calves brushed electrically as she opened the edit suite door. The light was blinding, the Black Plumed Bird an amorphous umbra in the center of the radiance, as if she had stepped into the heart of the sun.
‘It’ll blow over, it always does . . . .’ But Marcelina had contravened her own law: Never protest never question never plead. You must love it enough to make it but not so much you cannot let it fall. Her chosen genre - factual entertainment - had a hit rate of a bends-inducing 2 percent, and she had grown the skin, she had learned the kung-fu: never trust it until the ink was on the contract, and even then the scheduler giveth and the scheduler taketh away. But each knock-back robbed her of a little energy and impetus, like stopping a supertanker by kicking footballs at it. She could not remember when she had last loved it.
Leandro was closing down the pilot and archiving the edit-decision list.
‘Don’t want to rush you, but I’ve got Lisandra in on Lunch-hour Plastic Surgery .’
Marcelina scooped up her files and hard drive and thought that it might be very very good to cry. Not here, never here, not in front of Lisandra.
‘Oh, hey, Marcelina, say, sorry about Getaway . You know, that’s such bad timing . . .’
Lisandra settled herself into Marcelina’s chair and set her shot-logs and water bottle precisely on the desk. Leandro clicked up bins.
‘Isn’t that always the business?’
‘You know, you take it so philosophically. If it was me, I’d probably just go and get really really drunk somewhere.’
Well, that was an option, but now that you’ve mentioned it I would sooner wear shit for lipstick than get wrecked at Café Barbosa.
Marcelina imagined slowly pouring the acid from an uncapped car battery onto Lisandra’s face, drawing Jackson Pollock drip-patterns over her ice-cream peach-soft skin. Lunch-hour Plastic Surgery this, bitch.
Gunga spoke the rhythm, the bass chug, the pulse of the city and the mountain. Médio was the chatterer, the loose and cheeky gossip of the street and the bar, the celebrity news. Violinha was the singer, high over bass and rhythm, hymn over all, dropping onto the rhythm of gunga and médio then cartwheeling away, like the spirit of capoeira itself, into rhythmic flights and plays, feints and improvisations, shaking its ass all over the place.
Marcelina stood barefoot in a circle of music, chest heaving, arm upheld. Sweat ran copiously from her chin and elbow onto the floor. Tricks there, deceivings to be used in the play of the roda. She beckoned with her upraised hand, suitably insolent. Her opponent danced in the ginga, ready to attack and be attacked, every sense open. To so insolently summon an opponent to the dance had jeito, was malicioso.
É, I went walking, the capoeiristas chanted,
In the cool morning
I met Great São Bento
Playing cards with the Dog.
The roda clapped in counterpoint to the urgent, ringing rhythms of the berimbaus. So seemingly unsubtle an instrument, the berimbau, its origins as a war-bow apparent in the curve of the wooden verga, the taut cord. So homespun: a gourd, a piece of wire from the inside of a car tire, a bottle cap pressed against the string, a stick to beat it with, and only two notes in its round belly. A favela instrument. When she began to play capoeira Marcelina had scorned the berimbau; she was here for the fight, secondarily for the dance aspect of the jogo; but there is no dance without music, and as she learned the sequences she had come to appreciate their twanging, slangy voices, then to understand the rhythmic subtleties that lay within a trio of instruments that spoke only six notes. Mestre Ginga never tired of telling her she would never attain the corda vermelha if she neglected the berimbau. Capoeira was more than fighting. Marcelina had ordered a médio from the Fundação Mestre Bimba in Salvador, the spiritual home of the classical Capoeira Angola. It lay beside her sofa unopened in its padded instrument bag. For Marcelina in her red-and-white striped Capris and crop top, this day with her defeat at work lying still like sick in her throat, fighting was very good indeed.
Mestre Bimba, Mestre Nestor,
Mestres Ezequiel and Canjiquinha
These are the world-famous men
Who taught us how to play and sing, the roda chanted, ringed three deep inside the humid, verdant concrete quadrangle painted with Umbanda saints and legendary mestres of history caught in leaps of kung-fu-wire-ballet grace. Again Marcelina beckoned, smiling. The rhythm had dropped from the fighting São Bento Grande to the canto de entrada, a formality of the Angolan School Mestre Ginga retained for his own Senzala Carioca, praising famous and lost mestres. Jair stepped across the roda and locked his upraised hand with Marcelina’s. Face-to-face they stepped slowly, formal as a foro, around the circle of hands and voices and beating berimbaus. He was a cocky boy with ten years on Marcelina, tall and black and good-looking, if in an obvious and preening way, poised, assured to a point of cockiness. He didn’t fight women and whites. White people moved like trees, like truckloads of pigs on the way to the abattoir. Women were incapable of ever understanding malicia. It was a guy thing. Little white women with German names and German skins were most ridiculous of all. They shouldn’t even waste their time trying to play capoeira.
This little white German woman had surprised him twice already, the first with a lyrical S-dobrado that began with a feint kick from the floor - only ever hands and feet to touch the earth - that wheeled into a single-handstand and a sweeping blow from the right leg that Jair evaded by dropping into an immediate defensive negativa, arm raised to defend the face. Marcelina had easily foreseen and evaded his meia lua sweeping kick. É! É! the spectators had chanted. The second time they had gasped and clapped aloud as she dived into a meia lua pulada, the hand-spin kick that was Rio-Senzala’s great gift to the game of capoeira. She had caught Mestre Ginga in her peripheral vision; he squatted with his carved stick like an old Angolan king, his face stone. Old bastard. Nothing she did ever impressed him. You’re not Yoda. Then a chapeu-de-couro had come wheeling in, Jair wholly airborne, and Marcelina barely dropped back into a queda de quarto, hands and feet planted on the dance floor, watching the fighting foot sweep over her face.
At first capoeira had been another wave on the zeitgeist upon which Marcelina Hoffman surfed, driven by the perpetual, vampiric hunger for fresh cool. At Canal Quatro lunch was for losers, unless spent in a valid pursuit. For a while power walking had been the thing, Marcelina the first to venture out onto the searing Praia de Botafogo in the shoes, the spandex, the spider-eye shade and pedometer to tick off those iconic ten thousand footsteps. Within a week her few friends and many rivals were out on the streets, and then she had heard over the traffic the twang of berimbaus, the cheerful clatter of the agogô, the chanting from the green spaces of Flamengo Park. The next day she was with them, clapping in her Germanic, loira-girl way while wiry guys with their shirts off wheeled and reeled and kicked in the roda. It was a simple recruitment demonstration by Mestre Ginga for his school, but for Marcelina it was the New Cool Thing. For a season it ruled; every other pitch at the weekly sessions was capoeira-related, and then the Next Cool Thing blew in from the bay. By then Marcelina had donated the spandex and so-last-season shades to a charity store, given the pedometer to Mrs Costa from downstairs who was haunted by a fear that her husband was a somnambulist who walked the streets kilometer after kilometer at night, stealing little things, bought herself the classic rig of red-striped Capri pants and stretchy little top and was taxiing twice a week up the hairpin road u
p the breast of Corcovado, upon which Christ himself stood, an erect nipple, to Mestre Ginga’s Silvestre fundação. She was a convert to the battle-dance. Cool would come around again; it always did.
Hands locked, the capoeiristas circled. A damp night, clouds hung low over the Tijuca. The warm humidity held and amplified smells; the fruity, blousy sickliness of the bougainvilleas that overhung the fundação’s fighting yard, the rank smokiness of the oil from the lamps that defined the roda, the honey-salt sweetness of the sweat that ran down Marcelina’s upraised arm, the fecund, nurturing sourness of her armpit. She released her grip and sprang back from Jair. In a breath the berimbaus and agogô leaped into São Bento Grande; in the same breath Marcelina dropped to a squat, grabbed the cuffs of Jair’s skull-and-crossbone-patterned pants, stood up, and sent him onto his back.
The roda roared with delight; the berimbau players drew mocking laughter from their strings. Mestre Ginga suppressed a smile. Boca de calça; a move so simple, so silly that you would never think it could work, but that was the only way it did work. And now, the finishing blow. Marcelina held out her hand. When the hand is offered, the game is over. But Jair came out of his defensive negativa in an armada spin-kick. Marcelina ducked under Jair’s bare foot easily and while he was still off-balance, stepped under his guard and roundly boxed both ears in a clapping double galopante. Jair went down with a bellow, the laughter stopped, the berimbaus fell silent. A bird croaked; Mestre Ginga was not any kind of smiling now. Again Marcelina extended the hand. Jair shook his head, picked himself up, walked out of the roda shaking his head.
Mestre Ginga was waiting in the yellow streetlight as Marcelina waited for her taxi. Some drive, some are driven in this life. Low-bowing tree branches and scrambling ficus cast a fractured, shifting light on him as he leaned on his stick. The patúa amulets he wore around his neck to defeat spirits swung.
You’re not fucking Yoda, Marcelina thought. Or Gandalf the Grey.
‘That was good. I liked that. The boca de calça, that’s a real malandro’s move.’ Mestre Ginga’s voice was an eighty-a-day nicotine rasp. As far as Marcelina knew, he had never smoked, never done maconha let alone anything more powdery, and drank only on saints’ days and national holidays. Nodules on the vocal cords was the prevailing theory; whatever the biology, it was very Karate Kid. ‘I thought maybe, maybe, at last you might be learning something about real jeito, and then . . .’
‘I apologized to him, he’s cool about it. His ears’ll be ringing for a day or two, but he was the one wouldn’t end it. I offered, he refused. Like you say, the street has no rules.’
As she came up dancing out of her defensive crouch, she had seen not Jair’s face but the Black Plumed Bird in all her grace and makeup, and her fists had at once known what they needed to do: the box on the ears, the most humiliating attack in the jogo. A slap on the face, doubled.
‘You were angry. Angry is stupid. Don’t I teach you that? The laughing man can always beat the angry man because the angry man is stupid, acts from his anger, not his malicia.’
‘Yeah yeah whatever,’ Marcelina said throwing her kit bag into the back of the taxi. She had hoped that the dance-fight would burn away the anger, turn it, as in Mestre Ginga’s homespun Zen, into the mocking laughter of the true malandro, carefree, loved by a world that looked after him like a mother. The music, the chants, the sly jig-step of the preparatory ginga had only driven it deeper until it pierced a dark reservoir of rage: anger so old, so buried it had transformed into a black, volatile oil. There were years of anger down there. Anger at family of course, at her mother delicately, respectably turning herself into a drunk in her Leblon apartment; at her sisters and their husbands and their babies. Anger at friends who were rivals and sycophants she kept in line-of-sight. But mostly anger at herself, that at thirty-four she had walked too far down a road, in such special shoes, to be able to return. ‘I can’t see children compensating for the career gain I stand to make.’ The family Hoffman had been gathered in the Leopold Restaurant for her mother’s sixtieth birthday, and she, twenty-three, fresh into Canal Quatro as a junior researcher, dazzled by the lights, the cameras, the action. Marcelina could still hear her voice over the table, the beer, the assurance: a declaration of war on her married older sisters, their men, the eggs in their ovaries.
‘I don’t want to go the Copa,’ she ordered, celular out, thumb dancing its own ginga over the text keys. ‘Take me to Rua Tabatingüera.’
‘Good,’ the driver said. ‘The Copa’s crawling with cops and militaries. It’s really kicking off down at Morro do Pavão.’
It was not the first weekly briefing she had attended hungover. Canal Quatro’s boardroom - the communication-facilitating sofas and low coffee tables, the curving glass wall and the gold and blue of Botafogo with the smog low over Niteroí across the bay - thudded to an über-deep bass line. In keeping with the station’s policy of freshness and kidulthood, the boardroom’s walls were giant photomurals of Star Wars collectibles. Marcelina felt Boba Fett oppressing her. She would be all right as long as she didn’t have to say anything; as long as Lisandra did not work out by her bitch-queen spider-sense that Marcelina was coming from two-thirds of a bottle of Gray Goose, and then much much cold Bavaria from Heitor’s chiller. Another day, another chemical romance.
She did wish she could stop crying every time she went to Heitor’s.
Genre heads, commissioners, execs, and line producers. The Black Plumed Bird in shades and headscarf as if she’d just stepped windswept and sun-kissed off the back of a Moto Guzzi. Rosa the scheduler put the overnights up on the projector. Minimalist leather sofas creaked as bodies sagged into them. Rede Globo’s new telenovela Nu Brasil had averaged 40 percent audience share over its four sampling periods, critically 44 percent in the eighteen-to-thirty-four grouping. Canal Quatro’s Ninja School in the same timeslot had taken 8.5, skewing heavily toward the intended male audience, but a full point and a half behind SBT’s Beauty School Drop-Outs and equal to the peak segment for Globo Sport. And Adriano Russo was coming in now for a quick word.
Canal Quatro’s director of programming took care to look as if he had just parked his surfboard at reception, but he still had his own reserved chair at the end of the runway of glass tables, and nicely manicured hands busy busy with folders and Blackberries.
‘First of all, IMHO, in this room are the most creative, imaginative, hardworking, and hard-playing people I have ever met. NQA.’ The etiquette was to nod along with Adriano’s chat-room-speak, even when he used English acronyms or, as was commonly believed, made them up. ‘We’ve had a bad night; okay, let’s not have a bad season.’ He straightened the folder on the glass table. ‘NTK senior production and genre heads only. I’ve come into information about Rede Globo’s winter schedule.’ Even the Black Plumed Bird was jolted. ‘PDFs have been e-mailed to you, but the linchpin of the season is a new telenovela. Before you begin groaning about boring unimaginative programming, I’ll give you a couple of details. It’s called A World Somewhere, it’s written by Alejandro and Cosquim, but USP: it marks the return of Ana Paula Arósio. She’s playing against Rodrigo Santoro. They’ve got them both back in Brazil, and on television. The whole thing was shot on a secret closed set in Brasilia, which is why no one heard a word about it. The big press launch is next Wednesday. The first ep TXs on June fifteenth; we need something big, noisy, look-at-me. Water-cooler TV, rude and edgy, “How dare those Canal Quatro bastards” the usual sort of thing. We want the television reviewers’ EPOOTH.’
Eyes Popping Out Of Their Heads, Marcelina surmised through the thud thud of too much morning. This was not a show to play against the telenovela. Anything that tried to take on Ana Paulo Arósio and Rodrigo Santoro would go down with ten bullets in its head. But Globo was calculating that A World Somewhere would generate a huge inheritance audience inert in front of the television and ripe for whatever came after, almost certainly, in Marcelina’s experience, a cheap and cheerful ‘ . . . Revealed�
� puff-doc with lots of behind-the-scenes and actor interviews, teasers but no actual plot spoilers. That was the audience Adriano Russo wanted to steal. For the first time in months arousal flickered at the base of Marcelina Hoffman’s heart. Her hangover evaporated in a puff of adrenaline. Blond ambition. Blond promotion. The commissioning merry-go-round between the main networks was spinning again. Factual entertainment would prance round again. Her own little glass cubicle. People would have to knock to come in. Her own PA. She could drops hints for things like Blackberries or pink Razrs and they would appear on her desk in the morning through the tech-fairy. The first thing a new commissioning editor does is decommission all her enemies’ shows. She fantasized shooting down all Lisandra’s proposals at the Friday Blue Sky sessions. She could get that apartment in Leblon, maybe even a beach view. That would please her mother. She could cease temporizing with her lunchtime shots of Botox and declare full plastic assault on those thirty-something anxiety lines. Thank you, Our Lady of Production.
‘We have six weeks to turn it round. Pitches to genre heads on Blue Sky Friday.’ Adriano Russo squared his papers and stood up. ‘Thank you all.’
Bye Adriano thanks Adriano see you Friday Adriano hugs Adriano.
