Keys of Babylon

by Minhinnick, Robert

  Juan had long realised that hunger was this city’s pimp. And winter its enforcer. Voight had to let that pervy kid suck the jelly out of him. But the kid was broke. Not a dime for the dick. That’s where chasing cooter had got Jon Voight.

  How quickly after he came out of the tunnel, out of its black tube, it had gone wrong for Joe Buck. As to Ratso, he had been coughing from the start. There was blood on his vest like ketchup on the crackers. Everyone in that movie was cursed by their own dream.

  Ratso and Joe Buck? Mary Mack would announce. Of course they came in here. They were my best regulars. They had a drink here before getting on the bus. Dave remembered they was always scrounging peanuts off the bar. Then they was going down in the dark, down with their bundles to where the Greyhound was waiting, waiting to go through the tunnel, all the way down that tunnel and into the light.

  The first chords of Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown’ crashed out of the jukebox. Right on time, Jesus arrived. Juan poured Jesus a macadam-black coffee. They would have spoken their Spanishes but Mary Mack didn’t hold with language. Jesus worked in the tunnel, picking up garbage. Soda bottles, shredded tyres like crows’ wings.

  The students were discussing whether Europe was an American or Swedish band.

  Hey fellahs, hollered Mary. What youse think of the place? Grand’s the word. You know that Tom’s Diner? Tom’s up on Hundred and Twelve? They say they filmed Seinfeld there. Kind of a comedy show, they say. But this is the place to be. What you call authentic. Take a booth, boys. You like meatloaf?

  Meatloaf’s off, said Juan.

  Bat Outta Hell, said one of the students. It’s on next.

  Mary went back to the sleeping pill ads.

  Recently she had asked Juan where he came from.

  Salta, he had said.

  Where the fook’s that?

  Argentina.

  Why you washed up here then?

  Money, he said. Banks. The politicians changed the money. No, they murdered the money. And they killed me.

  Mary Mack girned at him. Oh yes, those politicians, she hissed. Anybody ever say you look like that Barack Obama? Only like, whiter. How old are you?

  Forty, Juan had said. He couldn’t believe it then. He couldn’t now. He was forty. A man of forty looking out of a dirty window. At the black snow. At the mouths of the tunnel, the three open mouths. On his wall was a picture of somewhere that wasn’t Salta. One of the hawk’s wing feathers, a foot long, barred brown and black at the tip, stood in a glass.

  In Salta, Juan used to go up the street until he was almost out of town. But there was the house. It was the house they held at the Peña, a labyrinth of rooms where couples gazed into one another’s eyes. He’d make his way through the chambers until he came to the garden. The parrilla would be glowing, the coals reddening as two cooks turned the spits, prepared the chorizo, the lomo. How that roasting meat scented the air. And the guitarists would be crooning their songs, the poets their rhymes. He would slip in. Nobody stopped him. Men and women danced in candlelight, the waiters hurried past with jugs of wine. One of the cooks might pass him a piece of cabrito and Juan would laugh, knowing the goat fat oiled his chin.

  The twenty bucks was folded stamp-size in his pocket. For my Peña, he thought. Might a Peña work here? It could work here. Real charcoal grill. Grease on the chin and a guitarist’s cries as the diners unwrapped, like his special presents to them, the corn leaves of their humida.

  Dead man in the tunnel, said Jesus. But we didn’t stop traffic. Oh no.

  She’s getting her place next week, said Peevo.

  Mary Mack was asleep with the zapper in her hand.

  Peña – traditional music and song.

  Parrilla – grill or barbecue restaurant

  Chorizo – one of the first meat courses at an Argentine parrilla.

  Lomo – fillet steak

  Humida – corn (maize) paste served in corn leaves.

  The boy with the rock ’n’ roll gene

  1

  The children Fabien knew lived near the bus station at Tiete. That’s where they’d go before and after school, running round the Santa Ritas coming in from the suburbs, the thousands disembarking, the thousands waiting to get on.

  At first, it never occurred to him to ask where these people were going. But by the time he was twelve, he’d often watch the cometas loading up for the outlandish places beyond his city, the other cities of his country, his country which the teachers said was bigger than all the other countries, his country with its jungles and waterfalls and all that wild cerrado.

  And as Fabien watched he wondered. Step on, he learned, and in three days he might step out in Brasilia. Wasn’t that the new capital where no one had ever been? Or he might go to Rio. Rio with its white sand. He knew a rhyme about Rio, its thieving cariocas who wore sparkling wedding dresses. How long was the road to Rio?

  The passengers would look at their bundles. Then they doubtfully proffered them to the luggage handlers and pressed coins on those perspiring men who used pikes to push their possessions into different compartments. Once a woman brought two cockerels fighting in a Panasonic cardboard box. He grinned as the handler slid the box into the darkness under the bus and both birds grew quiet.

  Fabien learned the bus companies’ liveries. They reminded him of the city’s football teams. Fabien’s team was Corinthians although he had never seen a game. There were ancient buses with turnstiles and tickets on clicking wheels, while a modern coach, hot from Buenos Aires, purred like an aeroplane. He watched a couple emerge from its smoked glass, blinking in the dawn. After forty hours their journey had ended. Now they must start again.

  Yes, what a place was the bus station. That’s where he saw men cry, women cast themselves in despair to the ground. A bus had departed too soon. Someone had not arrived. Once a petrol-blue macaw walked around the Curitiba cometa, as if checking its suitability. Such a bird. It was as tall as his chest. Squinting up at him, it said, Oi, oi. Then Oi, oi once again. Behind the macaw came a humpbacked man who carried its cage and a dangling leather strap.

  When the police chased the children off he’d walk along the banks of the Rio Tiete and regard the sewage floes already glittering in the heat. Sometimes he’d see whole families of capybaras emerge from the water or the undergrowth of the shores, dusky sows, grave and circumspect, the piglets behind in single file as they minced through the rubbish, the city’s traffic stalled five yards away on the highway.

  But always the boy and his gang would drift back to the bus station and pool their money and buy coconut or sherbet at one of the barracas. People said it was the biggest bus station in the country. That meant maybe the whole planet. How he loved to breathe the sweet exhaust that hung over the station, feel the uncertainty of the travellers as the children danced around the bays. No fear there for him. No treasure of his tied up in a dirty blanket and wedged between an old woman’s shoes. This was where he came from. This was the centre of the world.

  One morning he arrived and stood still. A face had appeared in the bus station, an enormous face on the outside wall of the east side waiting room. He looked up at the face and shivered. Such a face, the pale face of a man crowned with dark hair. And on the head of this man a cap like a soldier might wear, or maybe an engineer. A working man’s cap. Maybe even a bus driver’s cap. But this was no ordinary man. This was Bono. Bono was coming to the city to play a concert, Bono with his devil’s ears, his torturer’s grin. Bono had saved the world and now everyone was celebrating. And even though Bono was wearing his working man’s uniform, Bono was a lord, one of the great senhors, his teeth strong as a goat’s, his songs an electric wind that blew around the world.

  The boy had heard ‘In the Name of Love’ on the radio and now it was in his head forever. Love was what Bono sang about. Love love love. And here was Bono in the city. Ready to sing for them about love. How hugely he loomed, above the people who clutched Il Globo and their little travelling altars, above the man who
rested an alabaster madonna like a rifle on his shoulder.

  2

  When he was fourteen his mother moved the family across the city. Olimpio was his barrio now, Olimpio where the Santa Ritas ran, but not the great coaches with their silver fuselages and names of cities lost in the rainforest. There was a rat in their new apartment, and sometimes a hummingbird came in down the passageway to drink at mother’s hibiscus.

  Olimpio was a long street crossed by flyways and bridges. His mother didn’t need to tell him to take the bridges instead of the subways, but that’s what she did every day. The subways scared Fabien, but he still ventured there. Men lay on cardboard in their own piss. Druggies begged for change. You could see the bones in their faces, the scorched silver paper.

  At night he’d walk out on Olimpio and watch the lightning in the southern sky amongst the skyscrapers. Every night it seemed that lightning soldered the south and the rains came down.

  Fabien was fourteen now and quite the young man. He wasn’t tall but he was lean, his body tawny whipcord. He watched the schoolkids doing the lambada, the hot rains on their skin and the moths coming out of the dusk to float around their hair.

  Sometimes they’d all kiss one another, and he’d pass a peppermint from his mouth into the mouth of a trembling girl. Even when the girls were taller than Fabien they stood on tiptoe when they kissed him. He could feel their bodies straining, his hands upon their tiny waists.

  A few of the girls were dyed blonde now. There were gang tattoos on their arms. Fabien was also in a gang but he never thought about it. He carried a knife and he never thought about that either. Olimpio was not such a bad place. He danced along the street whistling his songs. There was music in his head, rhythms from the street, from the radios playing in the lanchonetes, a rhythm different from the thunder. Hey Fabio! the Paulistas would shout as he danced past. And he would smile his big smile.

  Because Fabien was happy. That’s what his mother said. The weather was stifling, the city was loud and her son was happy. Life wasn’t so bad. Even when acne erupted on his face, Fabien kept smiling his fabulous smile and soon those scars were healed and he was as smooth-cheeked as before. Sometimes his mother would stroke his chin and ask him when he was going to start shaving. Like a real man. Fabien would shrug and smile. Who needs to shave? he’d ask. It only slows you down.

  Eventually there was a line of dark hair on his lip. But no bristles. His cheeks stayed silky and his mother would embrace him and kiss her son until he laughed and struggled away. Like a snake, she’d think. A snake in the sugarcane.

  His older brother had left home now, his sisters too. It was only Fabien and his mother left on Olimpio, the traffic flying overhead, the old men sitting on the streets with their lottery tickets. Fabien knew them all.

  Then one day he came around the corner and he saw it. He saw the shop. He had passed that second-hand clothes shop a thousand times but today he went in, right to the back. The shirt hung there, on the last rail.

  All the clothes were second-hand on that part of Olimpio were Fabien lived. The boutiques were in a different barrio. Sometimes he and his friends made expeditions there and crowded in, but the security guys only gave them a minute before they moved the gang on.

  He paid for the shirt in soiled royals. It was Fabien’s shirt now. From the back rail’s motley. The shopkeeper whispered ‘bless you’.

  The shirt would look good on him. Entirely plausible its ivory sequins, the wild jabot. Fabien shot the cuffs and admired their blacker stitching. He had never seen a blacker shirt. 100% algodao it said on the label. Made in Brasil.

  Well bless you too, Senhor, thought Fabien. And bless the boy who must have sold the shirt to you, the skinny boy who first owned this shirt, tight as a toreador’s waistcoat. Yes a black bolero, this shirt. From the inside rail.

  3

  Fabien decided to keep the shirt a whole year until he might wear it in public. He had a plan, a delicious plan. Fabien shivered in bed when he thought of his plan, and he shivered when he stood on the Olimpio bridges and watched the lightning and the existence of the plan returned to him like the memory of the most marvellous thing in the world.

  Lightning was like an idea, he decided. An idea coming into his mind. And once the idea had arrived, his mind could never be the same. No, no, never the same.

  Lots of ideas occurred to Fabien now. He owned a guitar and had learned a ballad of the city that the old men sang in the bars. The old men sang of love and rum and death and rum and tears and rum. Which was stupid really. But the ballad gave him more ideas.

  He played the guitar so hard his nails bled. He started to write verses into an exercise book. He made lists of all the songs he would write and the order of those songs on the CDs he would release. Lists were important. Lists were an art. Some songs, he knew, belonged together. And some needed to be kept apart. He thought about the teachers placing children in the classroom. He had sat by Maria but maybe they hadn’t belonged side by side.

  Anyway, that was over. Since leaving school he had helped in a lanchonette in the Praca da Republica. His mother thought it too far across the city, but an uncle had found the job and good jobs were scarce.

  In that bar he learned how to make coffee on the Belle Epoque with its nozzles and spouts. He learned how to bang the milk jugs on the counter to make best use of the froth. He laid out cups and glasses in the morning and cleaned the microwaves. He went to the supermarkets to buy rolls and the little squares of cheese and ham in plastic packets. He also learned where to stock the Brahma beer and where the golden Antarctica. Behind him at the counter he gradually came to sense where lay the Fernet bottle and every crusted cachaca. One man always ordered Johnnie Walker Black Label. The boss warned him to pour it carefully. Every drop was precious. The drinker let Fabien keep the change and said he had a beautiful smile.

  In his breaks he’d wander around the square and listen to the fortune tellers. Once or twice he would enter the cathedral. It was peaceful there after the crush of Republica. Candles burned and women prayed in the candlelight. More ideas came into his mind, just like the candlelight seeping through the gloom. His friend Mauricio came with him once and they sat in the middle of a pew. Mauricio’s girl was pregnant and Mauricio was planning his escape. They ate sandwiches from the lanchonette and watched the candles, the hundreds of candles, a reef of candlelight in the south transept. Write to me, said Fabien. Tell me where you are.

  Then they had gravely kissed in the cathedral and Mauricio went off to pack his bag and Fabien to taking Antarcticas out of the fridge to wait under the counter in their circles of dew.

  4

  At last it was time. He wriggled in the looking glass. Maria had come round and she was helping him prepare. Fabien didn’t think the shirt looked right. Not as it must have looked on the boy who had first owned the shirt. The rightful owner.

  He wondered where that boy was now. Probably out tonight as Fabien himself would be. He could see him clearly. There he sways, thought Fabien, amidst the sweat and the sucos and the sinners on the Santa Rita, its rattling silver through the slums, that other boy strap-hanging down Olimpio, disguised for destiny.

  Only a bus, the Santa Rita, thought Fabien. But if I took that ride I wonder where my soul would sit. And then Fabien thought of the child who worked till midnight stitching his mysterious shirt.

  Fabien also wore a belt fastened with a silver snakehead. His jeans were black and shone like oil, his black winklepickers were from another booth on Olimpio. Maria was to come with him, Maria who was not cool or cute or anyone’s idea of a rock chick. Maria was plump and floral. But Fabien was grateful. Fabien was scared.

  He popped a pill. Maria refused one. Then out into the street they went, the traffic flying overhead. He carried his guitar in its canvas case, Maria already trying to keep up.

  The two bus journeys took an hour. A short walk, and then they came to the revolving door. Maria wanted to catch her breath but Fabien walked into the
foyer and joined a line for one of the elevators. There was a deskman watching a screen. The buildings in Manhattan were collapsing over and over again.

  But no one stopped him. No one looked at him. The lift was a glass cube. Fabien could see the back of his own head, the glossy comb marks. On the thirty-second floor they emerged with another couple, the woman with her hair spun like candyfloss. And then, at last, the Bar Unique.

  Fabien headed for the bar itself. Again, nobody stopped him. One minute later he and Maria sat on high stools watching a man mix their mojitos. After a while, he began to look around. And what he saw was what he expected to see in a place like that. Women like roses in cellophane. Men absorbed by other men. Behind them the city spread its pinnacles. Fabien could see helicopter lights, a neon newspaper title.

  He knew where these people came from. Turn uphill off Olimpio and walk a straight kilometre. The gang had done it often. He remembered one Sunday morning. How he had laughed to himself. There were the ancient rich in their paranoid paradise. There were the edificios with their gates and guards, the yellow butterflies and the pekingese turds. There were men with dark glasses and radios watching the drawbridges come down. There were the laughing parakeets, laughing especially at one old man who had bought a newspaper so bulky, Fabien thought it might take him the rest of his life to reach the Corinthians match report.

  Plastic surgeons, whispered Fabien to Maria. The finest dentists of the age. But there were others too. And when Fabien sang, it was for these younger drinkers. Those were the ones he serenaded. Fabien began to sing ‘Yesterday’. Wasn’t McCartney in the city, his face rising like Gulliver over the sides of buildings, the ruined cherub on his greatest tour, the DVDs of previous concerts playing in the malls?