Carioca Fletch

by Gregory Mcdonald

  Marilia frowned. “A small boy on a wooden leg?”

  “Yes. Supposedly the great-grandson. Named Janio Barreto, of course.”

  Marilia said, softly: “Or it could be that you are Janio Barreto, and you were murdered decades ago, and you have come back to Rio to reveal who murdered you.”

  Fletch stared at her. “Are you in on this, too?”

  “Fletcher, my new friend from North America, you must understand that most of the people in this world believe in reincarnation, in one form or another.” Marilia stood up and went to her word processor.

  She began to tear and stack the pages of her manuscript.

  “Marilia, may I point out to you that while you and I have been sitting in this room talking about ghosts and curses and calunga dolls, a magnificent, modern piece of technology quietly has been typing your manuscript in the corner?”

  “This will not be read in your country.” She placed the stack of new pages under a manuscript on her desk. “I am not translated and published in the United States of the North. The publishers, the people there have a different idea of reality, of what’s important, what affects people, what happens, of life and death.” She sat in her soft chair. “Have you at least had breakfast?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what shall we do?”

  “Tell me straight out if I should take this matter seriously.”

  “It is serious, if you’re not sleeping. You can become quite ill from not sleeping. You can drive your car into a lamp post.”

  “Marilia, nothing in my background prepares me for this. I was employed as an investigative reporter for a newspaper, dealing with real issues, police corruption—”

  “This is not real?”

  “Can it be real that I was murdered forty-seven years ago? That I have come back from the grave?”

  Marilia chuckled. “It’s real that you’ve come back to Rio de Janeiro. It’s real that some old woman thinks so. It’s real that you’re not sleeping. Ah, Carnival!” Marilia said. “People go crazy during Carnival!”

  “I don’t intend to be one of them.”

  “Reconciling differing realities,” Marilia apparently quoted from somewhere. “What does your education and training, as an investigative journalist, tell you to do in a situation which perplexes you?”

  Fletch thought a short moment. “Find out the story.”

  “My training says that, too. So let’s go find out the story. Where do the Barreto family live?”

  “Someone mentioned … Toninho mentioned … Santos Lima. Toninho said I had lived in the favela Santos Lima.”

  “Let’s go there, then.” Marilia stood up and took a bunch of keys from her desk. “Let’s go find out the story.”

  Twenty-two

  “Have you ever been in a favela before?” Marilia asked.

  “I have been in slums before. In Los Angeles, New York, Chicago.”

  They had driven slowly past The Hotel Yellow Parrot. None of the Barreto family was at that time waiting in front of the hotel.

  Fletch had parked the MP where Marilia told him to, on a city street a few blocks from the base of the favela.

  “Last week, our industrial city of Sao Paulo produced ten thousand Volkswagen cars,” Marilia said. “And twelve thousand, eight hundred and fifty babies. That is the reality of Brazil.”

  The favela of Santos Lima rose straight up a mountainside not all that far from the center of Rio de Janeiro. For the most part it was made of hovels stuck together by various materials, bits of lumber from here and there, packing crates, tar paper. A single roof might be made of over a hundred pieces of wood, tin, aluminum. A favorite patch was a flattened tin can nailed over a hole. A few were old, solid houses, all very small, and most of these had been painted at one time or another, purple, green, chartreuse. Some of the little stores, which mostly sold rice and beans and chope, looked somewhat permanent. As with most residential districts, the houses looked more solid, slightly more prosperous, the higher they were in the favela. The sewage from the higher houses flowed down muddy streets to settle under the lower houses.

  As they entered the favela and began to climb, radios blared music from every direction. In a nearby shack, a packing crate really, a samba drum was being tuned. At a distance a large bateria of drums could be heard practicing.

  Marilia Diniz and Fletch attracted much attention. Almost instantly they were surrounded by thirty, forty, fifty small children barefoot in the mud and sewage. The teeth of a few of the older children had rotted to stumps. Only a few of the very young had the distended bellies and skinny legs of malnutrition. Generally the bodies of the children old enough to fend and rummage for themselves, those over the age of six, although skinny, were well formed, as quick as darting fish. Their fingers tugged lightly at Marilia and Fletch; their imploring voices were low. For the most part, their eyes were bright.

  “Well over half the population of Brazil is under nineteen years old,” Marilia said. “And half of them are pregnant.”

  Marilia then asked the children for directions to the home of Idalina Barreto. In response, they fought for her hand to guide her there.

  Fletch followed along with his own gaggle of children. Perhaps a dozen times he felt their hands slip into and out of the empty pockets of his shorts.

  The women looked at him through their doorless doors and glassless windows with blank expressions on their worn faces, neither friendly nor unfriendly, not particularly curious. Their expressions indicated more that they were thinking about him, the life he led that they had glimpsed here and there; the big, clean buildings he had lived in, the airplanes he had flown in, the restaurants he had dined in, the accoutrements of his life, cars, telephones, air conditioners. There was little resentment in their look, as there was little resentment in their not being familiar with snow. His was a different life, vastly different, as different as if he had lived on Venus or Mars: too different to generate emotion.

  A man called to Fletch in Portuguese from a bar counter under a tin roof. “Come! I’ll buy you a little beer!”

  “Thanks,” Fletch answered in Portuguese. “Maybe later!”

  And of course Fletch wondered about their lives as he walked through their world. To do without everything he knew, even a little money, privacy, machinery, in most cases, work. To do without everything but each other. He wondered if he could adapt to such a life, but only as he wondered if he could adapt to life on Jupiter or Saturn.

  As they passed a small home, a toothless, bald old woman in a rocking chair in the shade looked at Fletch through rheumy eyes. “Janio!” she shrieked. “Janio Barreto!”

  She tried to get out of her chair, but fell back.

  Fletch just kept moving.

  As they turned the corner around a sizable pink building, Fletch spotted young Janio Barreto down the dirt track. The boy hurried away on his wooden leg—doubtless, to broadcast the news that Fletch was coming.

  The Barreto home was not very high in the favela.

  Idalina Barreto stood tall in the door to her home, hands on her hips. Janio and other small children were in front of the house. Her eyes narrowed as Marilia and Fletch approached.

  “Bom dia,” Marilia said. She introduced herself. She explained that they had come to hear all about Janio Barreto and what had happened to him forty-seven years before.

  The hag pointed to Fletch and, in her crackly voice, asked some question about Fletch.

  Marilia said, “She wants to know if you will tell her what happened. Why you were murdered, and who murdered you.”

  There was no humor, no irony, in Marilia’s face.

  Sleepless, slightly dizzy in the bright sunlight, surrounded by a swarm of whispering children, Fletch shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  As Idalina Barreto led Marilia and Fletch into her home, she dispatched children to find various relatives and bring them here.

  The inside of the house was a space protected from some of the elements by walls of
many boards of different shapes and sizes, nailed together at different angles under a patched tin roof.

  The interior was impeccable. The dirt floor was reasonably dry and freshly swept. Plates, pans, cups, and glasses near the basin sparkled. A round table in the center of the room was polished. On it was a pretty embroidered cloth, and on the cloth was a bowl of fresh flowers. The calunga doll was also on the table. Chairs of various styles and sizes were around the walls of the room.

  On the wall, either side of a battery radio, were magazine pictures of Jesus and the Pope.

  A vast crowd was collecting outside the house.

  Marilia said, “Idalina would like to know if you’d like coffee.”

  “Yes. Thank her.”

  Idalina flicked her wrist, and more children darted out.

  Then she sat in a tall-backed wooden chair with wide arms. She gathered the hems of her long white dress around her ankles.

  She indicated with a sweep of her hand that Marilia and Fletch should be seated in chairs of their choosing.

  Fletch took a humble seat in a kitchen-styled chair.

  As they waited silently, children brought them cups of very strong, very sweet coffee.

  A few adults came into the room, four women, two men. They were introduced to Fletch as Idalina’s children and grandchildren. Fletch stood to greet each of them and didn’t really get their names.

  Each stared at him, round-eyed. They didn’t seem willing or able to breathe normally. They backed into chairs along the walls.

  Finally, the one for whom everyone apparently had been waiting arrived: a man in his fifties, shirtless, in proper black shorts and sandals. His hair was neatly combed.

  “I speak English,” he said, shaking Fletch’s hand. “I am Janio Barreto Filho. I have worked many years as a waiter, in Copacabana.” He stared into Fletch’s eyes a long, breathless moment. Then, old enough to be Fletch’s father, he said, “I am your son.” In one movement, he hugged Fletch to him and embraced him hard. There was a choked sob in Fletch’s ear. “We are so glad you have come back.”

  Twenty-three

  “I will speak English so good as I can,” the middle-aged Janio Barreto Filho said. “Mother says to me you want me to bring to life for you the facts of what happened.”

  “Yes,” Fletch said. “Please.”

  “If this will help you tell us who murdered you …”

  Barreto Filho sat in a cushioned chair along the back wall of the house. Stately as a duchess, Idalina Barreto sat in her tall chair along the side wall. Fletch and Marilia sat along the other side wall.

  Adult relatives sat in the other chairs. Four stood near the door. Children sat on the dirt floor. The windows were filled with people listening.

  The area in front of the house was crowded with people.

  From somewhere in the neighborhood the distinct sound of a television ceased.

  But, of course, practicing drums could still be heard.

  As Janio Barreto Filho spoke, he was interrupted, questioned, reminded, and corrected by his mother and other adults inside and outside the house. Marilia helped to translate the difficult parts.

  Listening intently, as the room under the tin roof in the sun became hotter, the air thicker, Fletch put together a continuous narrative to take away with him, to dissect and analyse later.

  This may be a story, Janio Barreto Filho said, of a father who may have been right.

  After all these years, my mother would like to know.

  My father, Janio Barreto, was a handsome man, fair of hair and skin, well built, very lively, believed to be the best dancer in all the favela, maybe all of Rio de Janeiro. At least people say they enjoyed watching him the most. Sometimes, serving young people from North America, one or two from Chile or Argentina, in the hotels of Copacabana, I have thought of him, as this was always as he was described to me, light in color and as unconcerned with the sad little things in life as a rich person.

  It is said he came from near Sao Paulo, perhaps the descendant of one of the North Americans from the South of the United States who came to that area at the end of your Civil War, to try to continue their plantation, slave-owning lives there. Many such came, and, of course, such is the beauty and seductiveness of our women, it was not long before they too became a part of the Brazilian population, their children having black and Indian blood and therefore unable to keep their brothers and sisters in bondage.

  But you were truly fair, and came to the favela Santos Lima like a welcome thunder-storm in midwinter heat, casting your bolts of lightning everywhere. Why you came here, perhaps you could tell us now.

  You were fourteen or fifteen when you arrived, full of your juices, full of laughs and smiles, being here, there, everywhere at once. As soon as you came to the favela, everyone could not have enough news of you: Where is Janio? What has Janio done now? Did you hear what Janio did last night? When the pantaloons of the corrupt policeman were pasted on the statue of Saint Francis, when the new bicycle of the storekeeper was found in a bedroom of the brothel, when the shit-dam suddenly appeared around the big house a few of the faithful had built for the strict North American missionary, everyone knew you did it, and laughed with you, and stroked your fair hair.

  The prestige of any girl you lay with rose in the favela. I suppose some of the girls lied about this, as it seems impossible to me—a man who enjoys life as much as any other—that one boy could have granted such prestige to so very many girls. In my own youth, being your acknowledged son, too much was expected of me. Going down the street I had to protect myself, not only from girls, but from their mothers as well. It is true that the favela Santos Lima is known to have many more fair people than any other favela in Rio de Janeiro.

  Of course you took on friends, a gang of three or four boys, two of whom were Idalina’s brothers. Together you spent the days on the beaches, wrestling, swimming, playing soccer, the nights drinking and dancing and gambling, increasing the prestige of girls individually and raising mischief.

  Now, Idalina’s father was a man of great dignity. Although he worked as a conductor on a trolley car, he spent his life studying to be a bookkeeper. He never succeeded in finding work as a bookkeeper, but he prepared himself. It was his fervent wish at least to hand on to his sons the idea of being a bookkeeper.

  He did not share in the favela’s general idolatry of Janio Barreto. He felt you were leading his sons astray, giving them a liveliness that was not natural to them or in keeping with the idea of keeping books.

  Through people he knew at the samba school, finally he succeeded in getting his sons jobs on a fishing boat. But the old men who owned the fishing boat made the condition highly irksome to old Fernando that they would only hire his sons to work on the fishing boat if they could hire Janio Barreto as well. Whether the idea was that they believed my uncles needed your leadership and brains, even though at first you knew nothing about the sea, being from the interior of Brazil, or whether it was the idea of the elders to get you to sea and therefore away from the favela some hours of the week and therefore cut down on the mischief and population growth, or whether they wanted, by being your employers, to be the first to know and tell of your pranks is unknown to me. To get his sons employed, Fernando had no choice but to agree.

  So you went on the fishing boat with the Gomes brothers, and soon there were stories of a dead cold fish five feet long being put in the bed of the most precise bachelor in the favela while he slept (it was sad he never slept in his bed or ate fish again), of a fishing-boat race which caused an older captain, whom you had taunted unmercifully, to become so determined to win at any cost that he rammed his own dock under full sail at such high speed he smashed his boat to slivers.

  Fernando put up with all this with resignation. At least his sons had jobs, and there was hope that after a while working hard at sea, they would come to the idea of bookkeeping.

  But when you began to call upon his daughter Idalina, coo to her through the window, sprea
d flowers you stole from the cemetery all over the roof of the house, Fernando went into a rage.

  Nor did he consider it funny when, on the night of his Saint’s Day and perhaps he had had a bit too much to drink and lay in a stupor, you came along and shaved off only half of his mustache.

  Then, at the age of eighteen, when most young men consider it wise and appropriate to be humble, apparently goaded by Fernando’s open disapproval of you, you announced to the whole favela your intention of making Idalina your wife.

  The favela was delighted. They knew marriage would do you no harm, not slow you down or make you less entertaining.

  Idalina was delighted. It did not disturb her to be marrying the liveliest boy in the favela, or that her bond to you in marriage would have to be made of elastic.

  Fernando fell into a mood so black for weeks he could not think of bookkeeping. He spent his time keeping his eye on Idalina. He argued with the air.

  “Am I the only sane man in the world to see that Janio Barreto is a bad boy and no match for my Idalina? He has done enough to me, in keeping my sons from thinking in assets and debits! Why does he want a wife when he has every girl in the favela spitting at each other over him? He will never stop! Does he want to marry my daughter and continue his wild life just to torment me? It is as natural for him to be a husband as it is for a tomcat to pull a wagon!

  “Idalina, he is no good! At the first difficulties of life, he will wander away! Already he has wandered from his home once! I want to know why! Once a man has wandered from his home, he is never to be trusted! He will wander again!

  “Believe me, he will end up beaten in a gutter! That will not be a husband to be proud of!

  “Probably dead! Some day someone will put a knife to him, and that will be the end of your husband, Janio Barreto, and of your marriage!”

  The weight of the favela was on the side of the young lovers, of course, as people who are not directly involved in a situation always prefer romance to reason, and while Fernando stewed in his deep gloom, you and Idalina were married.