by Ian McDonald
‘All our powder.’
‘That is what I have calculated.’
‘Our artillery, our musketry . . .’ Falcon had helped the quilombistas haul the massive mahogany cannon up the greasy, mud-slick hill called Hope of the Saints. Now he was telling Zemba they were useless, worse than useless; they squatted on valuable strategic positions. ‘And if it is not sufficient, we would be defenseless.’
‘That is not my calculation to make.’
Zemba laughed, a deep, house-shaking chuckle. ‘Aîuba, you offer me some chance and no chance, which is better than damnation by a hair. How would this charge be delivered?’
‘Our magazine could be transported in six large war canoes.’
‘You shall have the best navigators,’ Zemba said, gesturing to his lieutenant, who at once loped from the observatory.
‘They would of necessity travel by night - without doubt, our enemy has moved his basilica and war-fleet upstream. At the dam . . .’ Falcon shook his head. ‘Once I see it I believe I could quickly calculate the weakest point of the structure.’
‘Of course, Father Gonçalves would not fail to have posted guards against just such an eventuality,’ Luis Quinn said. ‘There will be a fight while you make your calculations, Doctor. No, what is needed is someone who can in an instant know where to set the explosive.’
Cries of dismay and protest rang out around the circle of the aîuri.
‘Silence!’ Zemba roared again. He beat the heel of his staff of office on the floor planks. ‘The Mair is correct.’
‘I will know where best to site the powder; I will know where Gonçalves should set his guards. And, though I have forsworn the way of the sword, there must be a time for the setting aside of oaths. Would God hold me in greater contempt if I renounced my word or failed to protect His people?’ Then he murmured in Irish, ‘I should wish for a task most difficult.’
‘It’s decided,’ Zemba said. ‘The Mair will lead the attack on the dam. The powder will be ready with canoes and good fighting men, with what steel we can spare. I will prepare for the defense of the Kingdom of God. Christ and Our Lady bless us.’
The aîuri broke up, old men stiff from the floor.
‘Luis.’ Falcon held out a short, thick bamboo tube with a plaited lanyard to Quinn. ‘Take this for me, would you?’
‘What is it?’
‘The history of the quilombo of Cidade Maravilhosa; partial and poorly styled, overly emotional and lacking in any academic objectivity, yet true nonetheless. If the dam cannot be breached; if the charge is insufficient; if you, God between us and evil, should fail, surrender this to the waters downstream and pray to whatever God is left to us that it will find a safe landfall.’
The glow of early light leaked through the woven walls. Quinn lit a cigar. ‘The last I shall enjoy for some time,’ he quipped. Falcon felt a touch on his arm; Caixa, her golden face telling him he had done right for her and that was all this woman wanted. He wondered if she might be with child. A distant cry, like a bird but no bird of the varzea, came across the lightening sky. A second voice picked it up, a third until the canopy rang as if to the roars of the howler monkeys. Zemba rushed to the railing, snapped out his glass, but Falcon had already swiveled the great observatory telescope in its mount and was scanning the skyline beyond the eyries of the Cidade Maravilhosa’s lookouts. He let out a cry. In the objective, distant yet kindling in the rising sun, angels - vast angels in red and green and heaven’s blue, the instruments of divine warfare in their hands - advanced over the distant treetops.
OUR LADY OF ALL WORLDS
JUNE 11, 2006
The burned skeletons of construction machines still smoked, the orange paint blackened and bleached down to bare metal. The pichaçeiros had already been at work with their busy little rollers. Me me me. A shout out to the world from Rocinha. The slab concrete of the wall resisted fire, resisted even sledgehammers, chipped down to the reinforcing rods but still adamant. So it had been colonized. Every dozen paces the black tag of the ADA, Amigos dos Amigos, laid claim to the territory within. The red CV stamp of the Comando Vermelho challenged it: graffitis struggled to overtag each other. Lord wars: the great favela was one of the last surviving medieval city-states. One hundred and twenty-five thousand people lived draped over this saddle between the two great morros; the apartment blocks rose eleven floors high, balconies flying with laundry, looking down from their mountainside on the lesser towers of comfortable São Conrado and Gávea. The alleys and ladeiras were busy as rats with white plastic waterpipes, the black power cables festooning the sagging poles dipped so low children in their smart school T-shirts and track-suit bottoms ducked under them.
The police barely glanced at Marcelina Hoffman as she joined the throng moving up toward the street market. White was no less rare within the new favela wall than without. Anyone could go in - the São Conradeiros had to buy their cheap meat and cocaine somewhere. The walls were only there to protect passing drivers from ricochets and stray bullets. No other reason but the gunplay, the stray bullets. Anyone could leave, any time, during working hours. Surf boys with great muscles strolled, boards under arms, down to the beach at the Barra da Tijuca. Their Havaianas crunched broken glass and empty cartridge cases. The police looked them over more in envy then enmity. The sun was hot the sky was blue the surf was up and there was peace, of its Rocinha kind.
Ten reggaes bounced from as many windows and verandahs; rain had fallen again that morning and pooled water on the plastic stall roofs turned into treacherous rivers, pouring over the edges of the weather-sheets on to startled, laughing shoppers. Marcelina pressed up against a trestle across which two lambs lay in absolute dismemberment as a tour passed, whey-faced gringos in two olive-drab open-top Humvees, armored for the Baghdad green line. Devil-incisored teeth grimaced in the stripped sheep-skulls, eyeballs glared: LOIRA. They were right; she had been around the green globe and even across the Tijuca Bridge but this was the first time she had set Manolo in a favela. Marcelina had grown up at the foot of great Rocinha, but she was as much a tourist as the ianques in their armored tour-buses. And she thought, Why are we ashamed? We decry those tourists in their roll-bar Jeeps bouncing down through the market as if they’re on safari; Brasilia rails against the unstoppable wave of favelization; we tear down shacks and put up walls and declare bairro status like tattooing over the scars from a terrible childhood illness, one the ianques eradicated decades ago. Don’t visit them, don’t look at them, don’t talk about them, like idiot siblings taped to the bed in the back room; but they are not stumbling blocks on Brazil’s march to the future. They are the future. They are our solution to this fearful, uncertain century.
A celular shop. A man making manioc bread on a little glass-fronted barrow. This was the place. Marcelina leaned against the storefront and watched Rocinha busy past. All our worlds, separate yet intersecting. She felt pretty damn pleased with her philosophizing. Worthy of Heitor himself.
The moto-taxi passed once, turned, returned. The rider, a lanky morena-fechada in Rocinha uniform of Bermudas, basketball vest, and Havaianas, drew up beside her.
‘You’re the Físico,’ Marcelina said.
‘Show me,’ the boy ordered.
Marcelina took out the little frog she had bought from the expensive Centro chocolatier. Moto-boy waited. She unwrapped the gold foil and popped it in her mouth. The sweat-heat chocolate left a little print like the spoor of something hunted in her palm. The boy nodded for Marcelina to slip onto the pillion. She locked her arms around his waist, and he hooted his way out into the throng of market-goers. Across the cracked blacktop serpentine of Estrada de Gávea the moto-taxi took to its native element like a monkey, the steep ladeiras zigzagging up between the rough, gray, graffiti-slashed apartment blocks. Amigos dos Amigos. It was half a year since Bem-Te-Vi had been cut down by the police, the ultimate arbiters in the wars between the drug kings, but the CV’s takeover had hardly reached out from the main arterials. Medieval private
armies fighting for feudal lords to rule a renaissance hill town, with walls, even. And celulares. And a functioning sewerage system and water supply.
Dogs skipped and barked; women toiling uphill with plastic shopping bags moved aside to the shelter of apartment steps; girls smoked in front rooms, tipping ash through window grilles. And everywhere children, children, children. Marcelina shouted over the shriek of the laboring engine,
‘Are you really a physicist?’
‘Why shouldn’t I be?’ the boy said, turning onto an even steeper ladeira. The moto jolted up shallow, foot-worn steps. Marcelina’s toes scraped the rain-wet concrete.
‘Nothing. It just seems, well . . .’ Whatever she said would show her Zona-Sul-girl prejudice. Why should Loop Quantum Gravity physicists not live in Rocinha?
They were high now, the tree line visible between the tenements that clung to the almost vertical hillside. Marcelina looked down on the sweep of flat roofs with their blue water tanks and satellite dishes and lines of laundry. But the favela was fecund, uncontrollable; beyond the build-line new houses went up; cubes of brick and concrete, pallets of blocks and mortars sent up by the hoist-load to bare-chested brick layers. Físico stopped outside a corner lanchonete so new Marcelina could smell the fresh paint. Yet the Comando Vermelho had laid claim to its tithe in the shape of a red CV on the ocher brick wall. The owner nodded; a barefoot boy trotted out to mind the bike.
‘We walk from here.’
A dark archway led between doorways and windows. Televisions blared behind metal grilles; not one tuned to edgy, noisy Canal Quatro, Marcelina noted. Sudden steps led down into a small court; apartments piled unsteadily on top of each other leaned inquisitively over the open space. Two parrots perched on the web of electricity cables that held the whole assemblage in constructive tension. Down another flight of steps into a lightless passage, past a tiny neon-lit cubby of a bar, the seat built into the wall across the alleyway from the tin counter. A bridge crossed a stream buried beneath the concrete underpinnings of the favela, dashing and foaming down from the green, moist morro into a culvert. Up and out into the light at the foot of the narrowest, sheerest ladeira yet. Físico held up his hand. Marcelina felt the mass and life of the favela beneath her; but here, high on the upper ranges of Rocinha, they seemed the only two lives. The empty, blank tenement blocks were eerie in their silence. Higher and higher, like Raimundo Soares’ Beckham story. Then Marcelina heard a ringing, slapping sound, a rhythm that made her gooseflesh stir. A football bounced into the top of the ladeira from a higher flight, struck the wall, and zigzagged down the steep steps. Físico stepped under the bounce and caught the ball. He beckoned Marcelina up. She rounded the turn in the ladeira. At the top of the steep flights, dark against the bluest sky, was Moaçir Barbosa.
The Man Who Made All Brazil Cry.
Over the ten years she had worked her way up the Canal Quatro hierarchy from production runner to development executive Marcelina’s life had necessarily been woven with an eclectic warp of celebrity: Cristina Aguilera, Shakira, Paris Hilton, even Gisele Bundchen, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, all of CSS, Bob Burnquist, Iruan Ergui Wu, and more wannabe popsters and telenovela actors than she could remember. Star-sickness she got over the first time she had to run to fix a rider for spoiled celeb - that brand of water at that temperature and shrimp for the doggie. Many had impressed, but none had ever awed, until Moaçir Barbosa had stepped out of legend and sat down at the table in the Fundação Mestre Ginga. Swallow in throat, push back the tears. She had been brought from her childhood bed to look upon the face of Frank Sinatra, but those blue eyes had never moved her the way Barbosa settled heavily, painfully onto the aluminum chair. This was death and resurrection; this man in his pale suit had harrowed hell and returned. It was like the risen Jesus had climbed down from his hill high above this cool cool house.
‘Have you read it?’ He rested a finger on the book.
‘Some. Not all. A little.’ She was stammering. She was Day Three on the job, pop-eyed at Mariah Carey.
‘It’ll have to do.’ Barbosa slipped the little book into his jacket. ‘I only came for this, really. Well, you’ve found me; and a world of trouble you’ve made for everyone, but most of all yourself. I suppose there’s nothing for it. Ginga will bring you up tomorrow and we will sort it out.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You made the mess; you’re going to have to clean it up.’ Barbosa rose as stiffly as he had sat down, yet, like all former athletes, a fit ghost inhabited him, the lithe and limber orixá of a cat-agile goalkeeper. He threw back a parting question from the door.
‘Would you have done it?’
‘What?’
‘Put me on trial, like Soares said in the papers.’
For the first time Marcelina’s power of professional mendacity fails her.
‘Yes. That was always the idea.’
Barbosa laughed, a single, deep chuckle.
‘I think you would have found it was I who put Brazil on trial. Tomorrow. Don’t eat too much, and no alcohol.’
‘Senhor Barbosa.’
The old man had lingered in the doorframe.
‘Is it true for you? About the goalposts?’
A smile.
‘You don’t want to believe everything Soares says, but that doesn’t mean that it’s all lies.’
High Rocinha opened itself to Barbosa the goalkeeper. The suspicious streets opened shutters, doors, gratings, and grilles. Electrically thin teen mothers with children on their hips greeted the old man; young, haughty males with soldado tattoos at the bases of their spines bid respectful good mornings. Barbosa tipped his hat, smiled, took a pão do quijo from a lanchonete, a cafezinho from a stall. Físico dawdled behind.
‘I don’t want to have to move on from here. It’s a good place, people have time, people look out for each other. I’m too old, I’ve moved on enough, I deserve a little peace at last. I’ve had five good years; I suppose you can’t ask for much more. I should have told Feijão I was dead.’
Marcelina asked, ‘What do you have to move on for?’
Barbosa stopped. ‘What do you think?’ He tossed his empty plastic cup into a small brazier tended by two small boys. ‘You should be at school, learn something useful like my friend here,’ he said to the boys. ‘Well, at least you understand now.’
‘The curupairá, the Order? I don’t—’
‘Shut up. We don’t talk about that in front of the gentiles. And that wasn’t what I meant. What it’s like to have everything, to be King of the Sugar Loaf, and have it all taken away from you so that not even your best friends will talk to you.’
They didn’t take your family away, Marcelina thought. They left you that. It was a ramshackle conspiracy: a disgraced World Cup goalkeeper, a favela physicist, a middle-aged capoeira mestre, and now a wrecked television producer. The flimsiest of girder-works over the deepest of abysses, that this world, these streets, the skirt of rooftops spread out beneath like a first Communion frock, the blue sea and the blue sky and the green forest of the hills, even the football Físico carried with the clumsiness of a geek-boy, were a weave of words and numbers. Solipsism seemed so unnecessary under a blue sky. But it was the world in which Marcelina found herself, and the conspiracy suitably dazed and uncertain, as if both white hats and black hats could not quite believe it. Heroes and villains barely competent for their roles - that was the way a real world would work. An improvised, found-source favela solution.
Físico unlocked a small green door in a fresh brick wall and flicked on a bare bulb.
‘You wait in here.’
‘It’s kind of little,’ Marcelina said.
‘It won’t be long.’
‘We have things to get ready,’ Barbosa said. Marcelina heard a padlock snap on the hasp.
‘Hey! Hey.’
The room was concrete floor, roughly pointed brick, a couple of plastic patio chairs, and a beer-fridge filled with bottled water plugged into the side
of the light fitting. The door was badly painted planks nailed across a rudimentary Z-frame, but they banished the sounds of the streets as utterly as deafness. Spills of light shone through the boards. Alone with your dreads, Marcelina thought. That’s the purpose. Descanso: chilling the head. A place between, the dark in the skull. Half an hour passed. It was a test. She would pass it, but not in the way they wanted. She pulled out her PDA and drew the stylus.
Dear Heitor.
Scratch it out.
Heitor.
Too abrupt, like calling a dog.
Querida. No. Hey. Teenage. Hi Heitor. E-mail-ese. Like Adriano’s acronym-speak.
I said I wouldn’t get in contact so that’s how you’ll know it really is me. That sounded like Marcelina Hoffman. I’m writing this because it’s possible I may not see you again. Ever. Overly melodramatic, going for the first-line grab, like one of her pitches? The stylus hovered over the highlight toggle. This is supposed to be . . . What is it supposed to be. A confessional?
