There exist hybrid faiths where she came from, and she tended to keep the specifics of her beliefs out of my sight. All I know is that on the day Melissa was taken, my mother made sounds that I had never heard before. Horrified, I asked what was happening, and she told me, using her voice to say that I should not worry, while every other part of her screamed that worrying was exactly the right response.
I had a slingshot, a proper one, with a brace that extended to the forearm. It came equipped with lethal ball bearings, which I had soon exhausted missing mice and frogs around the farm buildings. But I had learnt how to use it to convert inert objects into deadly projectiles: stones, dried seedpods, stray bits of wood. That afternoon, after the phone call, I took the slingshot into the woods, and spent an hour firing at trees and fruit and birds, imagining every quarry to be the invisible foe I hated so much, and feeling more powerless and angry with each shot I missed.
Melissa was ten. The MaxiMarket chain was hitting the headlines for the speed of its expansion, and this financial success, combined with the public relations dream of Rebecca’s foundation, had made the family newsworthy. A full colour spread appeared in a widely read gossip magazine. It included one photo of the three of them posing on the farm with a horse, and another of Melissa chasing around with a butterfly net, her blonde tresses perfectly backlit by the sunshine. It got bad people thinking.
Class had finished for the day, and Zé’s driver had not yet appeared, so being Melissa she bounded off out of the jurisdiction of the guards, in the direction she knew her ride would be coming from, and waited at the lights. That’s where they grabbed her. A car door opened, and everything went dark. I can picture her calmly looking around as the bag came down over her head. She wouldn’t have been scared so much as interested in this new development—whenever she drew blood on the farm she was always more fascinated than afraid.
She did not scream or shout to begin with—not until she decided to get away, and threw her terrifying seizure. She never said a word against her captors, and refused even to attempt a description of them to the police. All we know is that they were taking her somewhere, presumably to formulate their demands, she faked the fit, and they threw her out of the car. I remember seeing her re-enact what she did to escape: contorted body, guttural sounds, a steady stream of froth emerging from the mouth. It terrified me even though I knew it was an act. When the kidnappers lifted the bag from her face and saw what was happening inside, they panicked. Luckily their car was not travelling at high speed. She got away with a sprained ankle, a black eye and a deep cut to her left eyebrow. The man who found her and called the police was a young mechanic named José Luís Oliveira, who lived nearby in a one-room house built by his father. In his gratitude, Zé bought the man a new apartment, and posed for photographers with him and his wife on handing over the keys.
Sometimes, before the kidnapping, Melissa didn’t come, opting instead to spend her weekends at the beach houses of her city friends, many of whom thought Zé and Rebecca eccentric to retreat at every opportunity to a bug-infested ranch (Ernesto, I later discovered, being the principal offender). When this happened I would watch in vain for the dart of colour and energy that I so wanted to emerge from the helicopter, and Zé would place a hand on my shoulder as he beat down the steps, and say, ‘Not today, Ludo, I’m sorry. Call of the surf this weekend.’ After the kidnapping, the farm came into its own—as a 1,000 hectare comfort blanket for the entire family—and Melissa’s absence became a rarity. For all their gorgeous Friday evening appearances on the helicopter steps, the predominant emotion inside each of them was one of relief.
Not that this was evident in Rebecca’s behaviour. On the first weekend back, when Melissa limped down the helicopter steps with a dressing over her injured eye, my mother embraced her so tightly that I wondered whether she would ever let her go, while Rebecca remained typically disconnected. All weekend, it was my mother who fussed over Melissa and prepared her favourite dishes, while Rebecca behaved as if she had decided not to treat her differently, or even to refer to the abduction at all. It was as if Rebecca was almost annoyed with her daughter for getting herself into trouble—that this one child had created an inconvenient distraction from the needs of all the others out there.
Zé merely demonstrated his relief by saying much less than usual. I think he so badly wanted the incident not to have happened that he couldn’t bear to mention it. Money was spent trying to track down the perpetrators, but there was nothing to go on; Melissa couldn’t even tell the police sketch artist whether they were white or black. And I know that this powerlessness would have infuriated Zé. To have control wrested from him so definitively in any situation was unheard of, and would remain unspoken of too.
In the weeks that followed, Melissa did not wet the bed, become wary of strangers or exhibit any other sign of trauma, so everyone believed what they wanted to believe, and the event was buried. My mother found this shocking enough, but when Rebecca took her aside and told her that her continued preferential treatment of Melissa should stop as it might lead her into bad habits, it caused my mother to do something unprecedented: to criticise her saviour.
‘Dona Rebecca should be talking to the child more. She should be holding her tight, and not letting her go,’ she said quietly, into the sink, as if even to give voice to such disloyal thoughts was tantamount to blasphemy. And then, so faintly that I wondered whether she had said it at all, she added, ‘Only an Englishwoman.’
Later, accompanying Rebecca on her orphanage visits, I noticed that when dealing with the kids she tended to disdain affection in favour of problem solving: dressing wounds, taming hair, treating warts. When the children wanted a hug and nothing more practical, she would stand up, smooth down her linens and find a pretext to leave, the impression being that if her kindness were to be widely distributed, it could not be frittered away on single physical encounters. Her husband, by contrast, would reserve all his charm and tactility for the person he was talking to, even as he conducted his life with total ruthlessness.
But an event like that doesn’t just go away. However unaffected Melissa might have seemed, an arrow had been fired high in the air by what happened, and it had to come down eventually. That I was the only person to realise this is directly attributable to the fact that it was feijoada day.
If cooking feijão is an exercise in loading the beans with whatever flavour you can summon, then feijoada is about overkill: freighting them with everything and seeing what comes out. Every mouthful is different, and the dark, glossy sauce is enriched by every dried, salted, fresh or smoked cut you throw in. On feijoada day, Zé could spend the afternoon poring over the shuddering, bubbling clay pots my mother brought out, from the ‘new’ cuts which he liked well enough—smoked pork sausages, loin chops and belly, jerked and salted beef, salt pork—to the ‘old’ cuts to which he was devoted, and which for him were the main event—ears, tails, noses, trotters, tripe. Then there were the accompaniments: heaps of finely shredded green kale fried in garlic and oil, toasted cassava flour, pork rinds, plantains, rice, glistening slices of orange. And endless ice-cold jugs of passion fruit, cajú or lime batida to help it all on its way. On feijoada day my mother could not rest—she was on duty the whole time, keeping everybody topped up with fat and protein and alcohol.
An invariable aftereffect of this ritual was that it put everyone to sleep for hours, which is the only possible way we could have managed to go missing for a whole afternoon so soon after Melissa’s ordeal. If they’d lunched lightly they would have been scouring the farm for guerrilla kidnappers when we didn’t turn up. Instead, guests reclined on loungers under the eaves of the pool house, some drinking coffee and brandy and watching the rain outside, others groaning or snoring, while Zé browsed the table for any remaining worthwhile morsels. And we disappeared.
The storm had been building all morning. Clouds heavy with rain massed over the valley; hummingbirds flickered from plant to plant, getting their business out
of the way before the onslaught. Rebecca was not enjoying her weekend. Two of her lunch guests were significant donors to the Uproot Foundation whom she wanted to impress, and one of them was a high-ranking Church official. Fearing that her husband and his friends, who invariably got drunk on feijoada day, might let her down, Rebecca compensated by concentrating as much as possible on those elements of the lunch that she could control. She asked my mother to clean down every surface several times in advance of the visit, and to make sure that the feijoada be more spectacular than ever.
Just before her special guests were due to arrive, Rebecca was on the veranda aligning magazines and setting down dishes of peanuts and pão de queijo when Melissa, who had been quiet since the kidnap but was now starting to recover her energy, came sprinting out of the house and wrapped herself around her mother’s leg, hotly pursued by me and the ice cube I was intent on putting down her back.
‘Leave me alone!’ shouted Rebecca. ‘What’s got into you?’
Melissa squealed. ‘Ludo has an ice cube!’
‘Snap out of it, will you? I’m meeting some very important people today—people who are going to help save a lot of children who are much less lucky than the two of you. Kids who have the kind of lives you can’t imagine.’
Melissa was struggling not to cry.
‘Come on,’ said her mother. ‘I know you had a horrible time, but you’re OK now, aren’t you?’
Melissa nodded, still fighting tears.
‘And you have to remember that what happened to you is nothing compared to what some of my kids at the orphanage go through, or the ones that live on the street.’
‘I know that, Mamãe.’
‘You’re incredibly lucky. Don’t ever forget that.’
‘I won’t.’
Rebecca heard a car arriving, checked her hair in the patio doors and walked into the house.
I had been watching the exchange silently from the doorway, and now, wordlessly, I approached Melissa, whose eyes blazed with powerful, childish indignation.
‘Sorry,’ I said, dropping the ice cube and wiping my hand on my shirt.
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘What shall we do now?’
‘I don’t want to be here,’ she said. ‘Let’s take off.’
‘What about the feijoada?’
I had been enjoying the buildup, watching my mother soak the beans and the salt cuts, helping to stoke the fire all afternoon, getting high in the kitchen on the smells of flesh marinating in lime juice and garlic and on the sight of Silvio arriving with bags of bright pink noses and strings of freshly stuffed sausages.
‘They’ll be sitting there for hours. And my mother is in a terrible mood. We should escape. Bring your slingshot.’
The meal was served under the eaves of the pool house so everyone could watch the storm as it came up the valley, and the main course was just arriving as we escaped. Roars of approval went up as each new delicacy emerged. Melissa and I were forgotten. Leaving the laughter of the lunch table behind us, we crept into the forest, fine rain soaking our faces. The darkening skies and dense greenery sapped the light. The rush of the river was only a distant backdrop, and all the noise that mattered seemed to be right beside us: the calm beat of raindrops hitting foliage, the shuffle and scamper of forest creatures. Enraptured by the hot, wet atmosphere, we walked in silence, failing to notice how steadily the rain was intensifying.
We came upon a recently fallen tree not far from the outhouse that contained the back-up electricity generator. Its roots had left a deep red hollow in the earth, already slick with mud.
‘Let’s live wild for the day,’ said Melissa.
‘What’s “living wild”?’
‘Living off the land. Killing our food,’ she said.
This was out of character. It wasn’t all that long since the sight of a dead animal had been enough to upset her for days. But something in the intimacy of the steady, warm rain and the dark-green canopy overhead was conducive to strange behaviour. We could do anything here, and the world would never know.
Soon, the rain was coming down so hard that water gushed down the hill, making a cataract out of the path.
‘We can’t get back up,’ said Melissa. ‘So we’ll have to stay.’
We took off our clothes and hid them behind a rock. Then we covered ourselves in mud and leaves, and daubed on to our bodies what we decided were the markings of Tupi Indians, comparing how they looked on the different shades of our skin.
Apart from my mother’s, which I had never scrutinised closely, Melissa’s was the only naked female body I’d seen. There was nothing more or less than I had imagined; a crucial component was missing, which I had expected, and an abrupt vertical fold was there in its place, which I had not. But for a glance at me Melissa didn’t seem interested in the differences between us, so I followed her lead and concentrated on the game instead. We staked our claim on the land. We found berries that Melissa claimed were edible and which I well knew were not, so we only pretended to eat them. We laid branches over the hollow in the ground, and called it our ‘base.’
‘Let’s be the first Indians. We’re Adam and Eve, and this is our new world,’ said Melissa, her eyes glaring starkly from her blackened face.
‘OK,’ I said.
She gestured at the slingshot hanging from my arm. The river roared somewhere behind her. ‘Now you have to kill something for us to eat.’
‘What shall I kill?’
‘Anything. That bird.’ She pointed at a green parakeet twittering in a tree.
I took aim, and let fly. The bird’s calls stopped abruptly. I saw a flurry and a flash of leaves, and thought it had flown away, but then came a thud as it hit the ground.
‘Good,’ said Melissa. She leapt over to pick up the body. ‘It isn’t quite dead, so it can be our prisoner. Put it in the hole.’
I jumped into the rising orange water to lay down our victim. Slimy, pungent mud slid between my bare toes. I breathed in the smells of rain and steaming earth, enjoying inhabiting this version of myself—a boy who killed things in the jungle, and defended his friend from harm.
‘Now you get in the hole too,’ said Melissa.
‘Why me?’
‘Because you’re my prisoner as well.’
It didn’t occur to me to do anything other than go along with the game, so I crept into the hollow in the ground, and let her cover it with leafy branches. Crouching in the puddle inside, I started to get cold, and shouted to Melissa, asking how long I was supposed to stay down there. Abruptly, she burst through the roof of leaves over my head, and landed beside me.
She stared at me in the dripping gloom. ‘Now you have to lie on me.’
I did as requested. Her skin felt warm against mine. She lay rigid, her arms at her sides.
‘You have to move back and forward.’
‘This is stupid,’ I said. ‘I know you don’t do it like this.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve seen how animals do it.’
And suddenly she was screaming, and I felt it too. Fire ants were sweeping over our bodies in a red wave of pain. They had been living in the base of the fallen tree, and without the protection of the trunk the rain was drowning them in their nest.
‘We should get in the river,’ I said, my skin alive with them. I got to my feet and ripped away the covering branches.
‘No,’ she said. ‘This is natural. We have to leave them. Sit down.’
The jags of pain in my limbs, my fingers, on my genitals, merged into an allover heat. I remember crying, but thinking that there was no way I could jump into the river if Melissa did not. I remember finding the red of the bites shocking against her pig-pink complexion, and thinking that the colour was somehow more at home on my skin, because it was darker.
As the afternoon progressed and the killing began in earnest, I felt that we were taking our revenge with the slingshot for what the ants had done to us. Somehow, the pain made me shoot
better, and with every bird I brought down, the bites seemed to glow brighter on my body. I began to appreciate the link between the wounds that nature had inflicted on me, and the revenge I was exacting on it in return. Everything we saw was condemned by Melissa and fired at by me: two thrushes, a kingfisher and a rat. We even took aim at an infant monkey unlucky enough to come into view. Melissa had a sweet little potbelly at this time. I can see her now, coated in mud, stomach out, jumping around in the undergrowth, pointing her finger at the unfortunate creature I was to kill next.
Silvio, the only person not occupied by the feijoada, had set out when the rain started to come down hard. By the time he tracked us down, our naked bodies were shivering and mud-streaked, and broken up by bright sores from the ant bites. Our ‘base’ had become a mortuary of feathered bodies, their plumage limp, their colours muddy. Melissa and I stared at him from the hole. He stared back, smoking, rain dripping from the brim of his hat, as if we did this every afternoon. But his smile was absent, and he spoke calmly, as though he’d found us preparing to leap from a high ledge.
‘Why don’t you both have a swim in the river, then get dressed before I take you back up to the house,’ he said, glancing briefly at the dead animals, at the slingshot hanging from my hand.
By the time we had returned from the river—damp, cold, meekly dressed—he had disposed of the birds and filled in the hole. At the house he gave us calamine lotion for our bites, and told Zé and Rebecca, who still lolled round the lunch table watching the rain, that we’d gone for a swim and lost track of time. He never told anyone what he’d seen.
Against all logic, it was Zé’s belief that you had to follow feijoada with a very big dinner. ‘Sometimes,’ he would say, ‘I think I only enjoy eating it so much because of the room it makes in my stomach for the next meal.’ That evening, we ate like monsters, everything the grill could offer, and every one of my mother’s sumptuous side dishes. Smiling sweetly at each other, coasting on the exhilaration generated by the rain, the ant bites, the killing, we snapped at chops, sucked on bones, devoured steaks. I remember competitions: how quickly we could each eat a burger, how many chicken hearts we could fit in our mouths at a time. Our faces glowed in the lamplight of the veranda, grease on our chins. I lay awake all night, unable to sleep, partly because I was still immersed in the rapture of the afternoon, but mostly because my belly was taut as a barrel, and I was bent double with indigestion, and the still-glowing pain of the ant bites.
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