Heliopolis

by James Scudamore

  I lean in to kiss her cheek, puckishly reaching for her breast at the same time, but she spins away so that both advances glance off.

  ‘I preferred yesterday’s welcome,’ I say.

  Ernesto’s bags sit unpacked near the front door. I picture him dumping them as he arrives home, scooping her up and taking her to bed. I picture the surface of my half-drunk glass of water on the bedside table, rippling unnoticed as they fuck away his absence.

  ‘Don’t worry, I can’t stay long. I have to take an Australian out for dinner.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I need to borrow a shirt.’

  ‘Of Ernesto’s? It will dwarf you.’

  ‘At least it won’t make my skin come out in a rash.’

  ‘Ludo—’

  ‘Just let me borrow a shirt and then I’ll leave. If he does come back that will be the reason I’m here—an office emergency. He’ll be pleased to see me.’

  ‘I don’t want you here.’

  The phone rings, rescuing me. She leaves the room, and I hope it’s him, telling her he’ll be some time yet. Forgetting for a moment that I no longer live here, I tidy the place up, washing two glasses and retrieving a cushion impacted into the furniture by Ernesto. God, but he’s enormous. It might have been shot into the sofa by a cannon. This is not news to me, of course; I’ve slept on his side of the bed enough times to know the indentation he leaves. When the mattress hasn’t been turned for a while there’s a hollow on his side you could skateboard in.

  I head for the bedroom. As usual, the concentrated fug of Melissa in all the clothes and bed linen, the mother-lode of pheromones, makes me sway momentarily in the doorway. I note with approval that she hasn’t had time to change the sheets. There’s still some of me in here yet, then. But she’s tidied, and lit candles, and a pair of Ernesto’s trousers lies on the floor. I kick them under a chair, and throw open his wardrobe.

  Swathed in the least tent-like of Ernesto’s soft cotton shirts I emerge to find her at the granite kitchen island studying a recipe book. Two huge crabs steam in a saucepan on the stove.

  ‘The “Welcome Home” dinner,’ I say. ‘How lovely. What are you doing with these?’

  ‘Go away, Ludo. This is hard enough as it is.’

  ‘Let me help you,’ I say, rolling up the sleeves of Ernesto’s shirt. ‘You know I can do this better than you. You can still take the credit.’

  She takes a gulp from a glass of white wine, but can’t hide her relief at the offer. She never was much of a cook.

  ‘What were you going to do?’

  ‘A crab salad,’ she says. ‘He’s been in the interior for three days, so I thought he’d be sick of red meat.’

  ‘We can do better than that,’ I say. ‘Pour me a glass of wine. You can’t give the man a salad for his homecoming. He needs something more nourishing.’

  She admits defeat, and gets out a wine glass.

  ‘I promise,’ I say, getting to work on cracking the crabs and extracting their steaming, fragrant flesh, ‘that I’ll be gone in half an hour. You can sit and talk to me while I work, and then I’ll be gone.’

  She sits down, shaking her head, but relieved to have the job taken out of her hands.

  ‘What did you do today?’ I ask.

  ‘Not much. Shopping.’

  ‘Guess what happened at work? I was briefed on Zé’s new supermarket chain for the poor.’

  ‘I haven’t heard anything about that.’

  ‘No?’ I take a rolling pin to what remains of the claws and torsos, pounding them open. ‘Seems to be a big deal. Oscar says it is, anyway. Thinks it will give us a whole new generation of consumers to brainwash.’

  ‘Good on Papai. And Mamãe too—I bet this was her idea. Then again, I suppose it isn’t such a new idea: that surgeon in Rio has been doing free cosmetic work for favelados for years. The samba schools built a whole float in his honour when he retired.’

  And there’s your reason. So-called Zé Generoso never does anything out of pure generosity. His gifts come with conditions. Your running total is totted up at the checkout, just as if you were in one of his stores, and if he’s subsidising you for now, it’s only to help you graduate to the next level, where he can charge you the full whack. Meanwhile Melissa’s out blowing the proceeds on luxury brands while her father burns it up overhead on helicopter fuel.

  I open the convex sliding door leading to the balcony. ‘I bet you haven’t been watering my herbs.’

  When Melissa and I lived here together, before the penthouse became her marital home and our relationship strayed beyond the fraternal, I grew herbs in terra-cotta troughs on the balcony, hoping to summon the ghost of nature from the smog of the megacity. There was coriander, parsley, thyme—all struggling on with nothing to sustain them but my ministrations and the evil city air. Now that I have been banished, the shrubs are a sorry sight: rows of dead, dry clumps, their leaves crumbling to dust at the touch.

  ‘Thought so,’ I say. ‘But wait! There’s life in this parsley.’

  It’s a miracle. Just what I need. God knows how much flavour it will have, but I won’t be eating it. I twist off the living shoots that remain, and step back inside.

  ‘Sorry about your plants,’ says Melissa.

  ‘Don’t worry. I hadn’t exactly pictured you or Ernesto out there at first light with the watering can.’

  I shred the parsley, and prepare mounds of chopped garlic and red chilli. Then I take down the frying pan from a hook above the black-granite work surface. My hand remembers this pan: the knot in its wooden handle, its patina. Its familiarity is heart-wrenching. It was one of my mother’s on the farm, bequeathed by me to Melissa. It was the pan that instigated our first kiss.

  Suddenly I want to get out of here. Initially, I wanted Ernesto to come home and find me cooking his dinner, a scorpion in his nest, but now I don’t want to see them together. So I make the sauce quickly, softening the garlic and adding the chilli and the crabmeat before turning the heat right up and flinging my glass of white wine over the mixture.

  ‘I’m late for my Australian,’ I say. ‘Add the parsley in a minute. Then cook some pasta—linguine if you have it—and toss that sauce in it for a minute or two before serving. It will be delicious.’

  I leave before she has the chance to forget to thank me.

  The Windsor Hotel has gone downhill. The plush leather banquettes on which I devoured my first club sandwich look old and lumpy, and are ripped in several places. The sophisticated off-white walls I remember are closer to washed-out lime green, and the mirrors look stained and tacky.

  Entering the bathroom to wash the smell of crabmeat off my hands, I find a very old, very black man sitting on a chair by the basins, a small plate of tips by his side. When I enter he leaps up to brush my shoulders, squeeze soap on to my hands, anoint me with aftershave—whatever I request. It embarrasses me. I tell him to stay seated and, realising I’m carrying it in my hand, I offer him the shirt from the office.

  ‘It’s clean,’ I say. ‘And brand new. I have no need of it.’

  He shrugs, feels the material with the tips of his fingers, and thanks me. I’m sure it’s a better gratuity than he’s used to, but as soon as I’ve left I worry that I have patronised him. The hotel uniform he is made to wear seems, at his age, to be an assault on his dignity as it is, and maybe I have made things worse by offering him my cast-offs.

  The white coats. The gloves. The slicked-back hair. The jump-to, cheery enthusiasm. We may as well just come out and say it: the toilet attendants in places like this are encouraged to look and act like slaves.

  ‘Plantation chic,’ I murmur, climbing the stairs, thinking I should write that down. It might come in useful for a campaign.

  Then I worry that I am patronising the man even more by thinking like this. Maybe he’s perfectly happy. Maybe he takes pride in his job. Maybe he finds sitting down there on his chair a relaxing way to make a little money in his old age. I spend ple
nty of hours myself hanging out in toilets trying to make the day go faster.

  In the bar, I order myself an unsweetened caipirinha, and settle into a seat discreetly located behind a battered marble column, revisiting my club-sandwich memory in order to forget about the toilet attendant. A pianist somewhere echoing and distant knocks out a slow, swinging version of ‘One Note Samba.’

  The waiter delivers my drink along with a dish of warm smoked almonds. He clears his throat nervously.

  ‘Would it be too much trouble, Senhor, for you to pay for your drink in advance? We’ve had problems lately with people running off without settling their tabs.’

  Yet more evidence that things aren’t what they used to be. But I don’t mind. There’s something inherently nostalgic about this dilapidated place, even without the memory, and it’s good nostalgia, the kind that’s like a warm bath, not the kind that makes every vital organ in your body ache. I curse the Australian in advance for being about to spoil my mood, and resolve to come back to the hotel again when I’m not meeting anybody. I could stay here for hours, staring at my reflection in the ceiling, anesthetising myself with cachaça and thinking of Melissa.

  But I still can’t get my mind off the toilet attendant. It takes me at least half of my sharp, numbing drink before I realise why. It’s because he reminds me of Silvio.

  HOMEMADE STEW

  I am eight. A weekend party is in progress. Snatches of music and laughter rise from the pool house. My mother scuttles from pocket to pocket of the party, meeting expectations, tidying as she goes. Melissa is not here. Escaping the crowds, I close the door behind me to take refuge in the large, white salon. The silence refreshes me. Cigarette smoke and the fumes of an overturned whisky glass blanket the smell of the furnishings. On the back of a glossy magazine, I see a small pile of icing sugar. As is the norm during large parties, I have been expelled from the kitchen, and I feel hungry and hard done by. I swipe a finger through the sugar and put it to my mouth. The taste, not sweet at all, makes me wince. I am experimenting with moving my mouth in different ways, contorting it, unable to feel anything, when my mother enters the room minutes later.

  ‘The sugar tastes funny,’ I say.

  ‘That sugar isn’t for you,’ she says, hoisting me away from the low table with one strong arm and depositing me at a safe distance before wiping away what’s left with a wet cloth. ‘Come back to the kitchen and I’ll give you some of the good stuff.’

  When I go to the kitchen I am unusually unhungry, and I can’t sit still long enough to read a sentence or watch even a minute of my favourite programme. I run to the woods and howl at the moon.

  There was no school nearby, and no time to travel to one, but Zé Generoso and his wife wouldn’t have dreamed of denying their workers an education. So I learned to read and write alongside my mother and the rest of the staff in the farm’s own schoolroom.

  It’s not difficult to come top of the class when your only competition is workmen anxious to get back to herding cattle or boring waterholes, but I knew I wasn’t stupid. And Rebecca, who gave regular English lessons to the staff (‘Like I’m ever going to use it,’ laughed Silvio), had noticed that I picked things up more quickly than most. It was a running joke that I was the farm’s ‘little genius,’ that I was ‘wasted here.’

  Zé and Rebecca were not great readers, but they couldn’t invite illustrious guests to stay for the weekend without having a few walls of improving literature. In addition to a political library, there to communicate that Zé knew his place in history—though I never saw him reading a book—the walls of the sitting room were stocked with literary classics, in English and Portuguese. There was plenty of chaff, and much duplication (at least three copies of Great Expectations, for example), but I was never short of something new with which to while away the time. When school was over for the morning, and often as a way of avoiding being roped into kitchen or farmwork, I would sit in the cool room, perched carefully on one sofa cushion so that I wouldn’t have to tidy up too much to cover my tracks, and read; not always understanding everything, but turning the pages fast, and covering a lot of ground.

  Not everyone appreciated how smart my mouth was getting. One high-spirited Saturday afternoon, just after my fourteenth birthday, I answered back to a younger, though no less creepy, Oscar Cascavel. He’d drunk one too many caipirinhas over lunch, and when he sensed I was laughing at him, he decided to teach me a lesson. After a high-speed chase around the farm, he finally cornered me in an outhouse, his lungs rattling like one of Silvio’s ancient diesel generators. He was so furious that he actually pinned me to the ground with his knees, like a schoolboy. The weight of him bruised my arms, and the swarthy, hairy mess of his stomach loomed over me, but I didn’t make a sound.

  And then, panicking a little, I remembered some stupid routine I’d learned years ago from Silvio, where my eyes would roll to the back of my head, and my teeth chattered. Melissa and I had used it on each other during play fights as kids. It was meant to make you look mad, to scare people into letting you get away, but I hadn’t done it for years.

  It did not work on Oscar. ‘What’s the matter? Are you subnormal? Stop that.’

  I stopped, shook my head, and opened my eyes properly.

  There was venom in his whisper, and his shortness of breath made his voice quaver. ‘You won’t get out of it that easily. Think you’re so clever, my little favelado? Let’s see.’

  The Rolex rattled near my face as he scrabbled at his belt buckle. He pulled the belt from its loops in a swift, swishing movement, and folded it once, gripping the ends in his right fist. He held it over me, shaking it as he spoke. I stared up at him, resolved not to respond, not even to flinch, when the strike came.

  ‘What’s six times nine?’

  ‘Fifty-four.’

  ‘What’s the capital of Canada?’

  I blinked, brain racing. ‘Toronto?’

  ‘Who wrote The Masters and the Slaves?’

  I stared at him, desperate not to show my fear. He shook the folded belt again, glaring back, his face bright red. ‘I’m warning you. Who wrote The Masters and the Slaves?’

  This was lucky. I knew the answer only because I had seen the spine of the book on the shelves. ‘Gilberto Freyre.’

  ‘And what makes you think I’m not going to hit you anyway?’

  I spoke fast, getting the words out quickly before I lost my nerve. ‘If you do, Senhor, I don’t know how I will explain it to Zé Generoso and his wife. I may also have to tell them about the way you try to touch my mother in the kitchen when you come here. I may only be a little favelado, but I am loved in this house. And so is she.’

  Kneeling hard on my arms, he spat something unintelligible and got up to retreat, leaving me on my back in the outhouse, chest rising and falling like a manic piston. He visited the farm again many more times, but those were the last words we exchanged before my first day at the agency ten years later.

  Idiot. I bet he still doesn’t know what the capital of Canada is.

  I’m sure the decision wasn’t taken lightly. Rebecca probably agonised over it for months, particularly over the question of whether what she had in mind was respectful or not—a line she was terrified of crossing. And then, one afternoon, not long after my unpleasant run-in with Oscar, when my mother had finished cleaning up after lunch and was relaxing with her cafézinho, Rebecca came to the kitchen and offered to take her son away to the city.

  My mother came to me bright-eyed that evening, and said, ‘Something wonderful has happened.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sit down, and I’ll tell you about it.’

  That evening I ate slowly, staring at the wall, wondering what it all meant. My mother wouldn’t have dreamt of showing me how she really felt, but her sadness was as evident in the chicken stew she ladled on to my plate as if the meat had been simmered in her tears.

  The exact terms of the ‘adoption’ were never explained to me. I have never seen the paper
work, if any exists. I expect Zé steamrollered through the red tape as always, with bribery and string-pulling. Whatever the specifics, I did wonder why the family had to adopt me to help me. If it was simply a question of education, why not just borrow me from my mother during the week, rather than steal me away from her completely? It was most likely a stipulation of Zé’s. He never liked being a minor shareholder. And although he wouldn’t have said so, I think he felt the lack of a son everywhere, from the football field to the boardroom. Given Rebecca’s ever more consuming preoccupation with the children of the city, I might be his only chance to have one. Perhaps he also saw how unlikely it was that Melissa would want to take over his business, and wanted to offset that disappointment by hedging his bets.

  In this way, Zé’s and Rebecca’s colonisation of me, that had started when I was less than a year old in Heliópolis, was made complete.

  My mother never came out to see off the helicopter on any normal Sunday, and the day I climbed the metal steps myself for the first time was no different. We said our farewells in the kitchen, my clothes and exercise books packed in a bag on the worn stone slabs. The birdcages under the eaves were ominously silent during our final embrace. But I felt no sadness. I was suddenly, keenly aware of how little there was on the farm to keep me, and I knew I would be back soon enough. Most importantly, I couldn’t believe I was really about to go up in the helicopter.

  Instinctively I stood to attention beside it as the others filed in, but Zé slapped my back and pushed me towards the doorway.

  ‘In you get! Tonight Ludinho comes with us!’ he shouted over the noise of the rotor, as if this revolution in my life were a Sunday evening entertainment he had contrived for himself.

  The whirling blades put me in mind of decapitation, and I kept my head down as I climbed inside. Once seated, I stared from the window at the bright orange clay of the football pitch, and the marks in it made by that weekend’s sliding tackles. Melissa and her parents took their seats, and belted up. The family helicopter at that time was so basic as to be almost military, and its stark interior and flashing lights all fed my fourteen-year-old imagination with the impression of a drop behind enemy lines.