Carioca Fletch

by Gregory Mcdonald

  “Who? What?”

  “Janio Barreto.”

  “Well, I’m not … whatever. Whoever. Let’s go.”

  Laura’s chin came forward a few centimeters. “She says you are.”

  The hag spoke some more, clearly repeating what she had said before, something about a boat.

  Looking into Fletch’s eyes, not smiling, Laura said, “She says you are her husband.”

  “Her husband. Ayuh.”

  Laura repeated with firmness: “She says you are Janio Barreto, her husband.”

  Now Laura had the old woman’s hands cupped in her own, gently, protectively.

  “Of course,” said Fletch. “Naturally. Certainly. She’s not the first to say that, you know. Or the second. Tell me, does she have a settlement lawyer in California?” The doorman, having heard all, having understood all, turned his head and looked at Fletch. “Tell her she’ll have to get in line with her settlement lawyer.”

  He smiled at the doorman.

  The doorman was not smiling at him.

  Laura said, “You are her husband, Janio Barreto.”

  “Hope she sues for settlement under that name. What is this? What’s going on? Laura!”

  Laura said, “You died forty-seven years ago, when you were a young man, about as you are now. When you were this lady’s young husband.”

  “Good grief.”

  “You are, how do I say it? Janio Barreto’s aura. His other person. His same person.” Laura smiled. “She is glad to see you.”

  “I can tell.” Standing in the little forecourt of the hotel, surrounded by thick, deep green bushes, hearing the cars going by in the avenida, the voices of the children playing, hearing, of course, the beatings of the samba drums, Fletch felt coldness breaking over him, prickling his skin. “Laura…”

  Still gently holding the woman’s hands, Laura said, “With this woman you have two sons and a daughter. Grown now, of course. They have children of their own. She wants you to meet them.”

  “Laura, she wants money. I’m not taking on an extended Brazilian family.”

  The doorman was still studying Fletch.

  “You were a sailor,” Laura said. “You earned your living from the sea.”

  The old woman had turned, was facing Fletch, presenting herself to him.

  Quietly, Laura said, “She wants to embrace you.”

  “Laura! My God …” Fletch could not help himself from moving somewhat backward, somewhat sideways. There were tears on the old woman’s cheeks. Laura had let go of the old woman’s hands. He felt a branch of one of the bushes against his bare back. “Laura, what is this? What are you doing?”

  “The important thing is …”

  The old woman came to Fletch. She raised her arms, put them around his neck. Approaching him, her eyes were soft, loving.

  “Laura!”

  The doorman held up his hand as if to stop traffic. “Wait, sir. There is more.”

  The hag’s cheek, wet with tears, was against Fletch’s. She smelled terribly, of cooking oils, of fish, and of a million other things. Her body pressed against his.

  He did not want to breathe. He wanted to gag. The branches from the bushes were stabbing into the skin of his back.

  “The important thing is …” Laura’s head was lowered. She spoke respectfully. “Is that forty-seven years ago, when you were a young man, in another life, you were murdered.”

  From the back of his throat, Fletch coughed over the old woman’s shoulder.

  Then Laura looked up at Fletch, her brown eyes moving rapidly from his left eye to his right to his left. “Now you must tell your family who murdered you!”

  Also with his eyes on Fletch’s, the doorman nodded solemnly.

  Her eyes settled in Fletch’s, Laura said, “Clearly you cannot rest until you do.”

  Three

  “Of course,” Fletch said, coming out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist, “I really don’t know how reasonable I want you to be.”

  “I am very reasonable.”

  Naked, long, lean, she lay across the rumpled white sheets of the bed reading Newsweek. Her wavy black hair fell over her face. The late afternoon sun through the shaded balcony window made consistent the gold in her skin.

  “Laura Soares,” he said. “From Sao Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos. Studied piano at the university in Bahia, then two years at the London Conservatory.”

  “I did not like London Conservatory. There is little understanding of Brazilian music there. In a conservatory they conserve music, you know? They don’t like to let it expand.”

  “Sometimes gives concerts. Daughter of Otavio Cavalcanti, scholar and poet. And your mother cultivates orchids and takes photographs.”

  “My mother grows flowers and takes pictures of them. She is trying to beat time.”

  Fletch opened the shade more. Their room was at the back of the hotel, overlooking utility areas. Through tall windows in the building across the area, Fletch watched a man painting a room. The man, in undershirt and shorts, had been painting the room during the day and well into the evening since they had arrived at The Yellow Parrot. It looked an ordinary, albeit big, room. The man was either a meticulous painter or had no other work waiting for him.

  Fletch said nothing for a moment.

  He had gone directly into the shower. The odor of the old woman had clung to him. His face was sticky from her tears, the back of his neck pasty from her caresses.

  He had gotten himself thoroughly soaped when the shower curtain drew back and Laura stepped in. She helped him wash, even putting him on his knees in the bathtub, doubling him over, to scrub the back of his neck. She was kneeling before him in the bathtub, the shower water cascading off her head, shoulders, breasts. He began to clean her thighs with his tongue.

  After they messed up the bed and each other to the sound of the samba drums coming through the windows, and lying quietly awhile until the sweat dried and made him feel cool, he went back into the shower.

  Standing at the window he said, “Questions…”

  Reading from the magazine, the lean, naked Laura said, “Half your diet should be carbohydrates.”

  “You’re reading about diets? You don’t need to improve yourself.”

  “My mother will be glad to hear about the carbohydrates. Am I saying ‘carbohydrates’ right?”

  “No. But I understand.”

  “I don’t think they talk about carbohydrates in London. I never heard the word. Pasta!”

  “Don’t you have any questions?” he asked.

  “About pasta?” Still she did not look up from the magazine.

  “About the woman in the green silk dress. I told you she probably thinks I killed her husband. She’s come here to find me.”

  “So?”

  “You haven’t asked me about that.”

  “That has to do with your past. Anyone can make up a story and say it is the past.”

  “You’re not curious?”

  “About the future. What time is it?”

  He looked at his watch on the bureau. “Nearly seven.”

  “We cannot be too much on time at da Costa’s for dinner. It is not polite to the servants. It gives them too much to do at once. Makes them nervous.”

  “I have questions.”

  “Probably. You are a North American.”

  “Your father is Otavio Cavalcanti. You are Laura Soares.”

  “That is the past, Fletcher old top.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It has to do with who had the name in the past. Then you forget it. This article says you should eat much more chicken and fish than red meat. It says nothing of rice and beans. Feijoada.”

  “Are you going to talk to me about that old woman?”

  “Forget it, for now. She is not Yemanjá.”

  “I am not Janio Barreto. Whoever.”

  “She says you are. She recognized you. She says she studied you carefully while we were at the café.
Did you notice her?”

  “Yes.”

  “She said you have the identical legs of her husband, the same stomach muscles from pulling the fish nets, the same proportion between your shoulders and your hips. She said the slight slash of your navel is identical.”

  “Laura…”

  “Well, she should know.”

  “I have never pulled fish nets.”

  “You have the muscles from Janio Barreto.”

  “Laura, not many Brazilians have my basic light coloring.”

  “Some do. Janio Barreto did. Your heads are identical, she says, your eyes.”

  “I had a similarity to the husband of the woman in the green dress, too.”

  “Similarity has nothing to do with it. She says you are Janio Barreto, her husband.”

  “Who was murdered forty-seven years ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m a ghost? Is that what she’s saying?”

  “Partly that. No, you are yourself. You are Janio Barreto. You see, you came to Brazil. You see why, don’t you?”

  Fletch exhaled deeply. “What is the old woman’s name?”

  “Idalina. Idalina Barreto.”

  “What bothers me is that you listened to her. The doorman—”

  “Why not?” Laura turned the page of the magazine. “She was talking.”

  “Laura, you seem to have no regard for the real past. Yet you listen to these impossibilities.”

  She was studying some health chart in the magazine. “What’s real?”

  “Which is more real to you?”

  “Bananas are good for potassium,” she said. “I think I knew that.”

  “You won’t let me explain. You won’t explain to me.”

  “Forget Idalina Barreto, as much as you can, for now.”

  She flung the magazine aside and looked at him standing between the window and the bureau.

  “How are we to know each other?” he asked.

  She rolled more onto her back and held one leg, one arm in the air. “By sharing your banana with me.”

  He laughed.

  “I need more potassium.”

  “Potassium gluconate, I hope.”

  “Come, come, Janio. I want some more of your potassium.”

  “I’m not Janio.”

  “Janio’s potassium. Your potassium. Harvest your banana and feed me your potassium.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Come, come, my Janio. It is ripe. I see that it is ripe. I will peel it with my teeth. Let me taste your banana.”

  “Where’s my shoe?” He regretted kneeling on the floor in his long white trousers to look under the bed for his shoe.

  She came into the room and stopped. In the bathroom she had bathed and done her hair and also dressed in white slacks and an open white shirt.

  “Why is this stone under our bed?”

  Sitting back on his haunches, he showed her the small carved stone he found under the bed. “It’s a toad. It looks like a toad.”

  “That,” she said.

  “Why is there a stone toad under our bed?”

  “The maid must have left it there.”

  “The maid left a stone toad under our bed?”

  “Put it back,” Laura said. “It may be important to her.”

  Four

  “My father’s here!” Laura dumped three teaspoonsful of sugar into her cachaça. “I hear his voice.”

  Courteously, Fletch took his glass of cachaça from the silver tray held out to him by a houseman. Cachaça is a brandy made of sugar-cane juice. In Brazil it is courteous to offer guests cachaça. It is courteous of guests to accept cachaça. Fletch had tried it with some added sugar, much added sugar, no added sugar. Cachaça was a taste he had not acquired.

  With his glass of cachaça in hand, he followed Laura out onto the terrace.

  Teodomiro da Costa’s house was built somewhat upside down. Entering at street level, one went downstairs to the bedrooms and a small family sitting room, upstairs to the grand living room filled with splendid paintings and other objets d’art, upstairs again to a huge reception room complete with full bar. Off the reception room, high above Avenida Epitacio Passoa, overlooking the truly beautiful lagoon Rodrigo de Freitas, was a handsome terrace decorated with green, red, yellow flowering jungle plants.

  Now in the reception room a long table had been set with crystal and silver for twelve.

  Teodomiro da Costa did well exchanging currencies and commodities. Fletch had invested his money with him.

  On the terrace Laura and Otavio were greeting each other with hugs and kisses and rapid talk in Brazilian Portuguese.

  Wordlessly, Otavia then shook Fletch’s hand.

  “Boa noite,” Fletch said.

  “Otavio has come here to meet with his publisher,” Laura said. “He is staying nearby, with Alfredo and Gloria. Have you met them? Alfredo is a marvelous man, true Brazilian, so full of life, generous to a fault. Gloria is a marvelous woman, truly bright, so charming, with a large feminine soul.”

  “Are they here?”

  Laura looked around at the other people on the terrace. “I don’t see them.”

  “They are preparing for the Canecao Ball tomorrow night.” Otavio said. “I do not need to prepare. Poets are born in disguise.”

  “And your mother?” Fletch asked Laura. “She did not come from Bahia?”

  “My mother,” said Laura. “Orchids you can never leave.”

  “They are worse than children,” agreed Otavio.

  “Worse than I was, anyway,” Laura said.

  Teodomiro da Costa came across the terrace to them. He was a tall man of sixty with the head of a bald eagle. “Fletcher, it is good to have you back. Did you enjoy Bahia?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. For dinner we are having vatapa, a typical dish from Bahia.”

  Fletch smiled and took Laura’s free hand. “I made friends there.”

  “But Cavalcanti is my friend.” Teo kissed Laura on the cheek. “And Laura too.”

  Otavio said, “We are all friends.”

  Teo took Fletch’s cachaça and placed it on the tray of a passing houseman. He said something to the housewoman. “I have ordered you a screwdriver,” he said to Fletch.

  “Is it called a screwdriver in Portuguese?”

  Teo laughed. “I called it orange juice, vodka, and ice.”

  “I must figure out the words for it.”

  “Not hard.”

  “To say it rapidly. With firmness.”

  “Come. I want you to meet da Silva.” Slowly Teo guided Fletch by the elbow across the terrace. “Is Laura with you, or with her father?”

  “With me.”

  “Ah! You are so lucky.” Teo then introduced Fletch to another sixty-year-old businessman, Aloisio da Silva.

  Immediately, da Silva said, “You must come to my office. I have a new computer system. The very latest. Digital. From your country.”

  “I would be very interested in it.”

  “Yes, You must come tell me what you think.”

  The houseman brought Fletch his screwdriver.

  “Also, perhaps you have noticed my new building going up. How long have you been in Rio?”

  “I was here for three weeks, then I was in Bahia for two weeks. I am back three days.”

  “Then perhaps you have not noticed my building?”

  “Rio is so vibrant.”

  “Of course. It is in the Centro. Near Avenida Rio Branco.”

  “I did notice a new building going up there. Very big.”

  “Very big. You must come and see it with me. You’d be very interested.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “It is amazing what a difference computers make when it comes to building a building.”

  Marilia Diniz appeared with her glass of cachaça. She kissed Aloisio and Fletch on their cheeks.

  “Are you well, Aloisio?”

  “Of course.”

  “Rich?”r />
  “Of course.”

  Marilia forever remained a surprise to Fletch. She had to be the only person in Rio with no sun-color in her face. She saw people from a different perspective.

  “Marilia,” Fletch said. “Something happened to us after we left you.”

  “Something always happens in Rio.” She sipped her cachaça. “Listen. Teo has some new paintings. He has promised to show us them after dinner.”

  “Otavio, perhaps you would help me to understand something.”

  “Yes?”

  Fletch and Otavio Cavalcanti stood alone at the edge of the terrace, looking at the moonlight on the lagoon. Otavio was drinking Scotch and water.

  In Brazil, even distinguished scholars and poets are to be called by their first names.

  “Does the name ‘Idalina Barreto’ mean anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “She is not a famous eccentric?”

  “Not that I know.”

  Laura was across the terrace talking with the Vianas.

  “I wonder if it is a scam.”

  “A what?”

  “A swindle. Some sort of confidence trick.”

  “Ah, yes. Trick.”

  “This afternoon Laura and I were accosted by an old woman, a macumbeira of some sort, maybe, dressed in a long white gown, an old woman. She said her name is Idalina Barreto.”

  From the terrace the samba drums could be heard only faintly.

  “Yes?”

  “She said I was her husband.”

  Otavio turned his head to look at Fletch.

  “Her dead husband. Janio Barreto. A sailor. Father of her children.”

  “Yes…”

  “That Janio was murdered when he was young, at my age, forty-seven years ago.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you hearing me?”

  “Naturally.”

  “She demands that I tell her who murdered me.”

  Otavio was looking at Fletch as had Laura, as had the doorman at The Hotel Yellow Parrot. Then his eyes shifted in a circle around Fletch’s head.

  “Will you help me to understand this?”

  Then Otavio took a drink. “What’s there to understand?”

  At the long table at dinner they talked of the magic in much Brazilian food which provides so much energy, the masses of sugar usually placed in the coffee, in the cachaça, the sweetness of cachaça anyway, the dende oil in the vatapa they were having for dinner. The drink, guaraná, is without alcohol and also gives energy. It was said by the Indians that it cleared the blood channels going to and coming from the heart. Fletch had discovered that it relieved tiredness.