First the football pitch, then the entire farm shrank away. The ponds in which I had floated away the hours became tiny; the water chute that had seemed a kilometre long was reduced to a thin blue scratch in the land. I tried to find the individual light I knew was my mother’s kitchen, and wondered what dish she was cooking in which to hide her pain.
As we spun around in the direction of the city, Melissa tapped me on the knee and pointed out a rippling herd of white cattle, the dust cloud it was kicking up in the dusk. The pilot knew it was my first time, and he banked low over the animals to speed them up. Zé noted my expression of wonder with proprietorial happiness, as if he’d just bought some new gadget and it hadn’t failed to deliver.
I remember the high whine of the engines, the smell of the fabric seats, Melissa’s teeth gleaming at me in the gloom. I also remember the studied, calm manner in which everyone else behaved. Even though bringing me with them must have been a novelty, it wasn’t long at all before all three wore detached expressions. Zé read a document he had taken from his briefcase. Melissa played an electronic game. Rebecca stared blankly out of the window, as if she were already turning her thoughts to the millions of children in the city who needed her attention, now that the problem I represented had been safely resolved. I tried to disguise the outrage I felt that all could affect such nonchalance while fields sped by beneath us, and the city drew ever closer. I tried to suppress the electric, nervous energy that lit up my body and made it impossible to sit still. I tried also not to look too overawed and excited, to remain unobtrusive, lest they should realise how much change I would bring to their carefully orchestrated lives and ask the pilot to spin round and take me back to the farm.
The city starts innocuously enough from the air—but it starts so early. It starts when you are nowhere near the city. For a long time, rolling green pasture and red earth and forests are all there is to see, broken up by herds of white cattle, clumps of cacti, termite mounds bigger than men. Then you begin to spot homes, and the spores of favelas, in creases in the land. And suddenly there are whole shanty cities.
Many times on that first journey there were false dawns, when we sped over settlements on the outskirts that merely contained tens of thousands of inhabitants, not tens of millions. And then we hit the real thing. No matter how often you see it, nothing prepares you for the scale. It’s like having a blindfold whipped from your eyes every time—as impossible to comprehend as an entire country. That first night, as we reached the edge of that galaxy of fuming green lights, a speck in the sky, I nurtured a secret, shameful feeling that I had somehow graduated to the position of a god.
‘Down there,’ shouted Zé, at one point, looking up from the document in his hand, and gesticulating. ‘Roughly, at least: The City of the Sun!’
I looked at him blankly.
‘Heliópolis,’ he explained, over-emphasising the syllables so I could hear him over the roar of the engine. ‘Not as bad as it was, but still tough. We’re working on it though!’ He flashed me a political smile. ‘The inhabitants are to be awarded the land they live on, so technically, it is no longer even a favela.’
I wasn’t sure exactly where he was pointing, but imagined I saw an area with dimmer and fewer lights than the rest. I nodded. And it was gone.
This city may not be the most beautiful, or the most poetic, or the most formally perfect, but it is the biggest, the loudest, the dirtiest, the most brazen. Twenty million souls and rising, and there is nothing to stop it seeping across its plateau, and nothing to get in the way of its commerce. It is an ever-expanding lung, whose oxygen is money—which is not to say that the air is evenly distributed. On the contrary; the money accumulates in specially created pockets. Like Angel Park.
The word ‘community’ doesn’t do Angel Park justice. It is a self-contained city of 30,000 people, with shopping malls, schools and a private police force that never goes off duty. Guards in black uniforms sit with potted plants and loaded guns behind reinforced glass in the ‘reception areas’ that dot the perimeter fence. If you’re a resident, they act like your best friends; to anyone without an appointment, or to some delivery boy to whom they feel superior—even to the police—they are less than welcoming. And God help you if you are a genuine intruder: they are bored and armed, and they live in a consequence-free environment.
If you wanted to, you could live most of your life in Angel Park without having to leave. Private highways mean that inhabitants can safely traverse areas not contained within the community to get to school or work. And when life’s amenities are for some reason not contained within its walls, like the grand city church at which Zé and his family worship, then out comes the helicopter again. When Zé wants to pray, he flies.
The marketing literature that seduced people out of the safety of their tower blocks when the first gated communities were developed made much of the fact that everything a successful middle or upper class family might possibly want could be found inside: you could live, work and relax there; breed, exercise and die there. Even more comforting—though not, of course, explicitly stated—was the understanding that this was a safe environment in which your kids could make their mistakes. They could lose their virginity, sample a drug or two, even joyride Papai’s car if they wanted, and all in relative safety, because the real police—the police with consequences—never got past the front door, and the only function of the park security was to keep real life at bay. Plus, you knew that whatever your kids were doing, they were doing it with the right sort of friend.
The grounds around the communal driveways that linked homes with the ancillary services were prettified with landscaped ponds and waterfalls. Unreal rocks and imported earth had been used to make them look natural, but they ended up looking every bit as fraudulent as the environments devised to fool animals in zoos. There were two shopping malls, an ice rink and a grand cinema complex that showed all the latest releases, approved for screening by committee and advertised in the compound newssheet.
Life in Angel Park is life with the sting removed. The more you accept what passes for reality behind its walls, the less likely it is that you’ll know the real thing until it breaks down your door. Impulses and feelings are all very well—but every one of them has been anticipated and rendered safe, and its potential consequences catered for. When your overindulged son wraps your Porsche round a lamppost, all he has to contend with is a security force whose paymaster is you, his parents, so he can never really get into trouble. And you can live your life without coming into contact with the favelas, or any other unsavoury aspect of the megacity outside. Behind the gates, it even smells better. The chemical fumes of the city recede, replaced by the aromas of cut grass and cinnamon candy, and the warm smell of freshly bathed Caucasian babies. That, in any case, is the theory.
A car met us at the heliport. I looked around anxiously for my bags, but they had been silently spirited away. The car that met us smelt of polished leather, and shot off down a pristine, empty road. I turned to Melissa, who was sitting beside me, watching my reactions.
‘Are we sharing a room?’ I asked, afraid of treading too hard on her turf.
She smiled. ‘Wait and see.’
We passed through a set of smooth, automatic gates, and the absurdity of my question was revealed, because there was the house: steep and huge, and familiar to me, though at first I couldn’t understand why. Then I realised that it had the same façade as that of the giant doll’s house that Melissa and I had played with on the farm. With its three storeys and its four reception rooms, I had always thought it unreal, a fantasy place. Nothing like it could exist in real life, unless it was a hotel or a palace. As we drew up beside the sumptuous spray of fountains outside the front door, I realised that all along the doll’s house had been an exact replica of this place; a lavish true-to-life gift and not, as I had imagined, the whim of a fanciful toymaker. The question of whether I would have a bedroom of my own was embarrassingly redundant. I couldn’t believe that I
had thought this was the real world, and that what they had wanted from the farm was something manufactured, when in fact, they lived in a doll’s house set in the grounds of a guarded amusement park. No wonder Zé said ‘down to earth’ every time they landed at the farm—they lived on another planet!
By the time I was shown to my room, my bag had been magicked up there already, and was being unpacked. The settling-in period I had prepared myself for was not, it seemed, necessary. Here were my clothes, pitifully arranged in a massive dark-wood closet that smelled of eucalyptus, beside piles of far more expensive ones that had been purchased for me; here was my toothbrush, leaning jauntily from a mug by the basin alongside Melissa’s, for all the world as if we’d brushed together that morning. When I introduced myself to the maid in my room, she, like the chauffeur who’d brought us from the helipad, called me ‘Senhor.’ It made me squirm. Already I felt homesick for the wood-smoke smell of the farm kitchen, for Silvio bursting in with a lewd remark, and most of all for the prickly yet willing object of those remarks, my mother. The room was silent and plush. Everything smelt new. Those few things I’d brought with me were swamped. I paced around the room for a moment after the maid had gone, wondering whether I should stay put or go downstairs. As soon as we arrived, the other three had marched off purposefully in different directions, and my desire to blend in was so strong that I wanted to fall in with their behaviour in spite of having no business to attend to—even less than I thought, now that my bag had been unpacked for me. Because the maid was there, I didn’t even have the opportunity to be ravished by the size of the room, to test the sponginess of the mattress with a nervous giggle. Everything was so casually supervised that I couldn’t even give vent to my wide-eyed, farm-boy amazement.
Zé poked his head round the door. ‘You should be comfortable in here. Did they get you some clothes?’
‘Yes, thank you. For all of this . . . ’ I began.
But he’d already left the room and was pounding down the first-floor corridor (red carpets, chandeliers, black and white 1960s photos), assuming I was following him. I ran to catch up.
‘I think we should do a quick tour of the property. You need to familiarise yourself with the security measures, in case you should ever be here when the house is empty.’
It seemed unlikely—I’d already met two members of staff and I had only entered three rooms of the house—but I followed him downstairs.
‘You’ll need to know the locations of all the trip lasers—I set them off by accident myself sometimes, and I swear that Intruder Beware voice scares me to death every time—and we’ll need to drill you through all the relevant alarm codes and passwords in case the park security guards ever turn up. They wouldn’t hesitate to shoot you if they didn’t know who you were. Then there are the searchlights—they have the power of a million candles each, and you should know how to operate them. And you must learn the attack calls for the dogs.’
I’d seen two mottled, stocky hounds pacing around the garden as we pulled up. They hadn’t looked all that threatening.
‘Don’t be fooled by the sight of them,’ Zé went on. ‘They’re Fila Brasileiro fighting mastiffs, and they’re lethal. They’re bred to control livestock—so a man is nothing more than a snack as far as they’re concerned.’
‘Control?’ I said.
He sniffed. ‘Aggressively control. Then of course there’s the panic room—I’ll show you how that works later on.’ He handed me a shiny, thin aerosol can. ‘And this is your Silver Bullet. Keep it on you at all times. I get them custom made, and we all carry one. They spray a substance forty times more powerful than Mace into the eyes of your assailant, and coat him with a sticky ultraviolet paint for the purposes of identification after the event. Don’t leave home without it!’ he added in English, with a cheery American accent.
I must have looked uneasy, because he paused in the middle of a large sitting room decked out with white carpets and gold mirrors, and said, ‘Ludo, you look terrified. Don’t worry. This is just how things are in the city.’
I nodded. ‘Carry on. I’m listening.’
‘That’s almost it. All we need to do now is teach you how to handle a gun.’
‘I can shoot,’ I said quickly.
‘Not a rifle, like on the farm. Here, you’ll need to know your way around a handgun. Just in case. What I always tell Melissa to do if anyone gets inside is to take up a defensive position in one of the bedrooms and bring the intruders down one by one as they come in. But don’t worry: I’ve asked Ernesto to take you out tomorrow morning for a shooting lesson.’
Ernesto? I thought. Who the hell is Ernesto?
‘But for now,’ Zé went on, ‘it’s time for dinner.’
And then something reached my nose that made my body quiver. A warm smell of meat and onions slowly simmered in wine, herbs and cream, and distinctively spiked with nutmeg. It was a Sunday evening favourite for me. It was the smell, comforting as one of her hugs, of my mother’s chicken stew.
I saw Zé stride forth into the kitchen, arms outstretched, and disappear from view. Then I heard him say, ‘Dinner! What delicious food do you have for us this evening, oh cook of my dreams?’
They’d brought her too! Without even telling me! God knew how they’d got her here so fast—maybe the helicopter had gone back to fetch her—but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was here. I flew across the polished marble of the hallway and into the kitchen, ready to give her the embrace of her life. My mother stood at a large, spotlit stove with her back to me, wearing the same blue smock she had worked in ever since I could remember.
Zé wheeled round as I entered. ‘And this, Claudia, is Ludo—our new member of the family.’
The woman who was not my mother turned around and held out her hand for me to shake. She wiped it first on her smock, which I now realised was standard issue uniform for all Zé’s kitchen employees and not something unique to my mother. And, much more horrifying, neither was her recipe for chicken stew.
CLUB SANDWICH
A candle burns on my table. As I wait, and hope that the Australian has forgotten our meeting, I dip the fingertips of my right hand one by one into the molten pool around the wick, relishing the hot, sharp pain followed by the feeling of delicious intimacy as each fingertip is coated in solidifying wax. I peel the caps off in turn, and let them fall to the table, where they land like petrified flower petals. I scoop them up and drop them into the breast pocket of Ernesto’s big, baggy shirt, not wanting to appear too bored by my guest’s late arrival.
I make a bet with myself that I can identify him when he walks in. It’s a little unfair. I would know when he’s here with my eyes closed, so much does he jar with the faded elegance of the place. There’s something almost obscene about how healthy he looks: his tanned, blemish-free skin; the dog-dick, coral pink of his tongue against the bright white of his teeth. His T-shirt clings like sandwich wrap to a pair of repellent, inflated pectorals. His trousers have huge saddlebag pockets in their sides, as if he were on safari and needed kit to hand for every possible scenario. Was he expecting an untamed wilderness, or does he just dress for the outback all the time?
‘How you going?’ he says, in English. He’s been drinking already. He walks with a swagger, and when he sits down, his feet swing out loosely from his ankles like cars on a fairground spinner.
‘Well,’ I reply. ‘Cachaça makes excellent fuel. We even power the cars with it here, as you may remember.’
He laughs, and sits down.
‘When were you last here?’ I say. ‘Should I be speaking to you in English?’
He laughs, and switches languages. ‘No—my Portuguese is intact. Although it’s been a few years.’
‘Your English—you’ve picked up quite an accent,’ I say, playfully.
‘I have. But speaking this language again—it’s wonderful. I can hear the Carnival drums already! Let me tell you straight away, I’m excited about working back here—and I would love
to make the move permanent if I can.’ The waiter arrives. ‘Could I get a beer thanks.’
‘Bring him a caipirinha as well,’ I say. ‘He’s home now!’ The only way to make this experience bearable is to get him drunker. He’s physically fit, so it shouldn’t be hard.
My task for the evening is not simply to entertain him. He is on the verge of accepting a secondment to the agency, so in theory I’m vetting him as much as schmoozing him. That’s what I tell myself, anyway. The truth is that to deny him the position if he wants it would be out of the question. His father is another old buddy of Oscar’s, so that is pretty much that; showing him a good time is my only option. It won’t be easy—my real feelings are snapping about in my throat like snakes, ready to strike—but the fact that he has to feel charmed doesn’t mean I can’t have some fun at his expense.
Within the hour, he is well oiled, and talking. After my second caipirinha I order a bottle of Californian Pinot Noir, but the Australian decides to stay on beer and spirits. While I’m ordering the drinks he also leans over to request ‘the largest cigar in the hotel’ from our waiter, and slobbers on the end of it like a dog with a twig when it arrives.
‘I love it here,’ he says. ‘I’ve been reading up on how the market works. Tiny ideas for tiny minds: it’s like being a god. Back home, consumers expect to be entertained before they’ll even consider hearing your brand name. Over here, it’s like the good old days—you tell them to do something and they do it.’
I smile. ‘We like to think it’s more complicated than that. Now, what would you like to eat this evening?’
‘What’s on the menu?’
‘Everything!’ I say. ‘Nowadays. In that area, I expect the city has changed beyond recognition since you were last here.’
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