Heliopolis

by James Scudamore

  My life was transformed by that moment, and Rebecca’s decision to knock on our door a second time probably saved me from an unpleasant, predictable fate. The favelado who becomes a foot soldier for a drug gang may be a cliché, but that’s because it happens every day. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that Rebecca saved my life.

  Look what can happen in a generation: my mother lived in a flimsy shack, and I have my own place and my own car, and I can speak and read and write better than most of the playboys you’ll meet, because I paid attention in school. But this is no normal case study. What happened to me does not happen. And unless you’re extremely good with a football, it definitely doesn’t happen if you’re male.

  I sometimes wonder whether Rebecca would have turned around again if my mother’s cooking hadn’t been so good. What if she had not been able to conjure something delicious from a handful of beans? I ask myself that question, allow myself to contemplate an alternative outcome for a moment, and then I go back to my business, grateful that this lucky path is the one I was asked to tread, and secure in my belief that a life dedicated to the preparation of good food is a life well spent.

  Favelas are subversive by definition. A community stops being classed as one when its streets make it on to official maps, which is never allowed to happen so long as the land is occupied without being owned. The result is whole cities of squatters with strong fingers and dirt under their nails from clinging on—the fingers of second-thought suicides who try to claw their way back up the cliff. But these people never made the decision to jump: they woke up on the edge of the precipice, with nowhere to go but down. Consequently, the way we left Heliópolis stamped out the possibility that my mother might ever again relax. Because she had cooked our way out of the slums, and because cooking was what had caused the miracle of our new existence, she feared that to stop preparing food might send us back, and that it was therefore safer never to stop.

  And stop she did not: she became a production line of cakes, stews, roasts and soups, mastering the signature dishes of Italian, French and latterly even Japanese cuisine. Food had saved her, and food became her mode of expression. Her hatred and determination, her relief and joy, were beaten into soufflés, stirred into risottos and baked into pies. I could gauge her mood through what she was making: something simple but soothing, like pão de queijo, cheese bread fresh from the oven, meant contentment, equanimity; richer treats, such as brigadeiros, tiny chocolate bombs with payloads of condensed milk, signified something closer to happiness. If she was frustrated or angry, the conflict would emerge in bold clashes of spice and sugar: clove and orange, chilli and ginger, coconut and saffron. When these exotic pasties and sweetmeats came my way I kept quiet, loving the sparks they generated on my taste buds even as I knew they meant I should keep a low profile.

  She spoke about what she wanted to speak about, or she did not speak at all. Whatever my father, or life in general, had inflicted upon her, she had reacted to it not with bitterness but by retreating into this world of industry, of calloused hands, of blood and flour, of sweat and cinnamon. It was as if she feared that to speak unguardedly about herself would release something she could never take back; that any admission of suffering would weaken her permanently.

  When I think of her now, tending her hives in the sunshine, threading chicken hearts on to skewers in the steam of the kitchen, or picking figs against a backdrop of green foliage, what I see most clearly are her dark, brown eyes—eyes that seemed always to be looking down, as though she lived in a permanent state of deference simply for being alive. But, at least when I was a boy, it meant that her eyes always found me.

  We lived together in the kitchen, so I was always within earshot. I became used to speaking without looking up, knowing that the reply would come as surely as if her voice were in my head. If she was working hard, the replies were short and blunt, particularly on Thursdays and Fridays, when the weekend was imminent. But occasionally, when she was relaxed, she spoke for hours, in a soft voice that seemed to come from a different person.

  I couldn’t cross the kitchen within range of her without receiving a light touch on the arm, or a tousling of the hair, as if I were a battery that charged her in quick, opportunistic fixes. More often than not these caresses were accompanied by the silent dispensation of something delicious: a spoonful from the feijão pot, a hot empada, an outstretched fingertip coated with thick, sweet doce de leite. In this way, whether she felt like talking or not, her love arrived constantly in spiced biscuits and sticky cakes, in slowly simmered stews and flash-fried garlicky greens, in piquant sauces and hot, salty chips. I had the services of a gourmet chef at my disposal seven days a week, whereas the family, for whom she was there and by whom she was paid, only got to enjoy her work on weekends. I ate like a prince but ran free as only the child of a servant can. And I had no father to tell me otherwise.

  Rather than offer one definitive version of him, and create one specific repository for my resentment or my longing, my mother offered shadowy, multiple fathers, who floated over the table, conjured by her words. Sometimes he was a Portuguese nobleman she had met in Oporto, with whom she had lived when learning how to cook. This father she painted as a distinguished gentleman, playing the clarinet in his dressing gown, a glass of sticky green liqueur by his music stand, while my mother danced slowly in front of a popping fire to the high, mournful sound. I imagined them together in musty, shuttered rooms; on a lumpy bed with an iron bedstead; in a choked garden outside with a broken fountain. But he wasn’t always European; at other times he was variously a Berber tribesman or a Sephardic Jew with whom she had led a nomadic desert existence, learning her trade in plush silk tents that flapped in the breeze. I knew that she had no more been to Oporto or the Sahara than I had, but it didn’t matter. In this way, we travelled the world together, with our missing husband and missing father by our side.

  It was a fine game to play as I sat in the doorway of the kitchen listening to the twitter of songbirds in cages, but no more than that. Only once, at the age of five, did I ask the question, although I don’t remember it as being the moment when some urgent desire for the truth finally burst through. I recall it rather as an idle enquiry, something that occurred to me with the same naïve level of interest as if I were asking who had planted the trees in the forest outside. She was kneading dough, and had scattered the kitchen tabletop with flour that puffed out in tiny clouds in time to her strong, insistent movements.

  ‘You’re a lucky boy,’ she said, smiling grimly. ‘You have no father to boss you around—you just slipped down a rainbow.’

  At the time, it seemed as credible an explanation as any of the others.

  Once she let slip a genuine fact. It was my birthday, and she revealed that it was my father’s birthday too. I knew it had to be true because of all the fantastic claims she had made, this was the only one she ever tried to retract.

  ‘That was just a joke,’ she said. ‘Forget I said it.’

  I did not forget. If she didn’t take back palpably false stories about fathers who were pilots and nomads and thieves, then why take back this one? And I have clung to the fact that my father’s birthday was the same as mine ever since, certain that it is the only thing I know about him, without knowing why my mother so regretted telling me.

  It was a mixed farm: palm hearts, bananas and a small Brahma beef herd. Zé bought it partly as a way of establishing some agricultural credentials in preparation for his bid for office, but mainly as a place to spend weekends. Silvio, the farm manager, had been apprenticed as a young man to the previous owner, and he knew the land better than anyone. His job was to run the place, without ever letting Zé feel that he wasn’t in charge—a diplomatic posting on top of all the back-breaking work of the everyday.

  Weekend guests might never have known that it was a working farm at all. All the equipment was kept out of sight by Silvio’s house, so it wouldn’t interfere with the serious business of the weekend’s fun. The only t
ime any machinery came out was when it was required for the administration of leisure apparatus: when a goalpost had fallen over, or to clear a mudslide from the side of a plunge pool after heavy rain.

  And whatever else he might be doing, if the power went down at weekends Silvio knew where his priorities lay. Whether he achieved it by climbing poles to get at the power lines, cursing waist-deep in storm drains or kick-starting the back-up generator in the forest, keeping the electricity going was all that mattered—lest Silvio face Ze’s outrage at finding the light over his pool table extinguished, his caipirinha ice melted.

  Although he sometimes muttered dark things about the guests who came to mess the place up, Silvio held an antique, feudalistic respect for the system that infuriated me. I wanted him and my mother to lock all the doors and take control of the land—they who made it work. One day, when I was twelve and had heard of Che Guevara, I suggested it.

  ‘Why don’t we seal the place off and start a revolution?’

  ‘Seal it off how?’

  ‘Fences. Blockades.’

  ‘How’s that going to stop a helicopter?’ he said, tipping brandy into his coffee.

  WARM ROLLS

  Melissa dresses quickly and sprints up to the roof, while I cower in her bed, ready to throw myself into the wardrobe should Zé knock on the door. He doesn’t come down. Time is everything for him, and it’s wasteful to shut down and restart your engines just because your daughter hasn’t conditioned her hair. Panic over. I could go back to sleep if I wanted, but I don’t like being in the apartment alone, and there is always the possibility of Ernesto.

  Ignoring the doorman’s suspicious stare, I let myself out of the building and go to a nearby Italian café that serves good coffee and freshly baked rolls. I think of Melissa as I pick up a warm roll and tear it open. Two of my favourite smells together—fresh bread and Melissa—one in my hands, and the other still on them. Distracted by this, I linger over breakfast longer than intended, but my boss is at a meeting all morning, so I’ll not hurry.

  My car is a dented beige Gol, spotted with outbreaks of dark rust. The wave of air that engulfs me when I open the door is so hot that I wait for five minutes before forcing myself inside. When I take to the freeway, boiling petrol fumes stream through the front corner window, up my left arm and into my face. I shift my thighs on hot black plastic, and wish I had a better car.

  Thanks to his relentlessly pessimistic view of the city, Zé advises that I vary my habits and try new routes to work, to avoid falling into a routine that might be exploited by kidnappers. I have taken this advice to heart: not only does it justify erratic arrival times, but lately it has also enabled me to explore the forlorn area surrounding our new office building. This morning, I turn off the freeway at random to explore an unfamiliar square. Down the narrow corridor between two bright orange tower blocks I glimpse some blasted shop fronts and an old stone fountain—enough to make me want to take the next exit and have a look around.

  I pull in at the entrance to a dilapidated high-rise car park, where a man in oily blue overalls and a red baseball cap steps forward to assist me. I step out of the vehicle’s torrid atmosphere into the cool gloom.

  ‘I’ll only be half an hour,’ I say. ‘Don’t park it far away.’

  He nods, peels off a pink duplicate ticket from a damp pad and hands it to me. Then he drives my car at speed up a ramp, into the rattling, clanking iron cage of the lift.

  ‘I said only half an hour!’ I shout, too late. The lift has already started. I watch its rusty exhaust pipe quivering as, with a high-pitched hydraulic whine, the car ascends to be buried on some high floor. It will take the attendant time to retrieve it, which will mean he can charge me more.

  Shaking my head and clutching my pink ticket, I step outside into high, mid-morning light. Dazed and blinking, I realise that my sunglasses are being winched up in the lift along with the car, wonder what I am doing here, and have second thoughts. But it will take time now for the guy to come back down, then more time for him to re-ascend and collect the car. Looking back up at the flyover, I see gridlocked cars edging painfully forward against a backdrop of giant roadside advertisements: cereal mascots; confectionery creatures; a backlit Marlboro Man waving his lasso. Wasting half an hour here can’t do any harm. This might be my only chance: these days, whole neighbourhoods are reordered overnight, and today’s discovery might not be around next week. I cross the street, under the merciful shade of the flyover, and enter the blinding square.

  The light is maddening, so bright that I stare down at the cracked mosaic pavement to escape it, and the burnt sugar fallout from the raging overpass is irritating my eyes and nose. All of which combines to make this dusty, monochrome space feel like somewhere I should not stay for long.

  Since the city took off in the nineteenth century, wave after wave of developers have ripped through it, obliterating what lies in their path. But occasionally, the past remains in isolated fragments that seem as if they have escaped the halo of a nuclear explosion. This square is one such tatter—and only half of it, at that. Once, there would have been symmetry: a fountain surrounded by four handsome stone benches. Now, one bench has been stamped on by a raised concrete plaza that fronts the first of the orange tower blocks, while in place of the other is an angular capsule of black, reflective panels, which I recognise as one of the new ultrasecure ATM machines—a cold, dark shard, disturbing the cosy grime around it. It is as if the city has taken a bite of the square and will return again when it is hungry.

  A single-storey colonial-style building, lately a slum, survives on the older side. Its walls have been posted over so many times and in so many colours that they have faded to one texture and to a colour that is all colours. The carved stone over its entrance reads MDCCCLXXX, topped off by an angel flanked by two bugle-playing cherubs. It would have been grand here once. I picture carriages; ladies with parasols; men in dark suits with pearls in their neckties.

  I sit on a bench, imagining that if I strain hard enough I might hear one last gasp of this past, but I can’t get comfortable. My eyes won’t adjust to the light. My throat is dry, still catching on flyover fumes. The alcohol that led me into Melissa’s bed last night is thudding in my head. I am on the point of retrieving my car and heading to work when I notice what is happening on the opposite side of the square.

  At the foot of the tower nearest to me, two women—both short and buxom, with electric-yellow hair—have left their office for their first cigarette of the day. They’re chatting happily, not gasping down the smoke in haste, but inhaling with panache. They lean across the doorway, relishing the light and the heat, gossiping and touching each another on the arm as they speak. They do not see the boy approaching them.

  I saw him entering the square, from the shadows to one side. He stands out because of his tattered clothes and a pronounced limp, which he did not have when he first appeared. The ladies in the doorway will not know this.

  I can’t hear what is said between them. I just see his frantic hands, his imploring arms. The women hear him out, then shake their tinted hairdos and ostentatiously turn to resume their conversation. The boy keeps performing even as he leaves them, dragging his foot along the pavement in such a contorted way that his bare, street-blackened heel does not sit on the sole of his paper-thin flip-flop.

  There follows the tiniest chess gambit, played out in the black and white of the square—a strategic flicker that flares as briefly as sunlight off an opening window. The boy catches sight of me on my bench, and wonders how much I saw. When did I notice him? Is his cover blown, or can he try again? The look is fleeting and sly, but he drops out of character for it, and I register this because I saw him before the limp, before the overture of anguished sobs with which he approached the women.

  I watch him come over, testing his act with my full attention. He can’t be much older than fifteen, but he is a good performer. I should be walking away before this encounter starts, but I’m curious. The bo
y wants something from me, which means, in theory at least, that these are circumstances I can control.

  ‘Good m-m-morning, S-S-Senhor.’ The voice is husky, not yet broken, but given an unnatural shove in that direction by too much cigarette smoke. His ripped yellow T-shirt has been washed a thousand times, but not lately. The smell—body odour, cachaça, a whiff of urine—barges into my senses. A thick vein throbs in his neck. His leg jigs up and down, a bare heel tapping in the dust, still only half-sitting on the flip-flop sole. His face is so dirty that he might be black, or white, or both, and while he doesn’t look thin he is probably malnourished. Everything about him says he’s running on very little to lose.

  ‘Mmm . . . mmm . . . aaa. . .’ Panic, or a convincing imitation of it, shudders through his body, making his head quiver. His breathing shoots out in fast, irregular bursts, like the panting of a trapped animal. The tortured, lip-chewing contortions of his mouth imply a grave problem: something so bad that it is paralysing his speech. The skyward glances hint at prayer, as if he were imploring the heavens to intercede and somehow resolve this unthinkable situation.

  ‘Calm down,’ I say. ‘Tell me what is wrong.’

  His mother is dying. She is in hospital and he needs the taxi fare to get there to say goodbye. He’ll pay me back. He offers me a fake watch that dangles off his wrist as surety. Light glints off its face, dazzling me, making me blink.

  More colourful stories occur to me immediately. My brother has been bitten by a snake, and I must rush him to the Instituto Butantan for an antidote. I was mugged by rogue gold-dealers. My girlfriend is choking on candy floss in the park.