by Ian McDonald
‘I understand it is in a state of renegotiation.’
‘France has long held ambitions in South America far beyond that plague-hole in the Guianas. An uncertain transfer of territory could hand them their opportunity to annex everything north of the Amazon-Solimões. They could have aldeias fortified, tribes armed with modern weaponry before we could even get a fleet to Belém.’
‘You suspect Dr Falcon is an agent,’ Luis Quinn said.
‘Versailles would have been insane not to have asked him.’
Magalhães spoke now. ‘I require you merely to observe and record. I have already alluded to your particular sensory acuity, and your facility at languages . . .’
‘Was I chosen as an admonitory or a spy?’
‘Our duty is of course to the greater glory of God,’ de Magalhães said.
‘Of course, Father.’ Luis Quinn dipped his head. New light fell on the table and the fat-leaved, aromatic shrubs: woman slaves brought baskets to dress the dinner table set up in the cool of the cloister. Candles sparked to life; covered silver dishes were laid on the cloth.
‘Excellent,’ cried Nóbrega leaping up from his seat, rubbing his hands. ‘That coca-stuff is all very fine, but it makes you damnable hungry.’
A flurry, a whistle of wings in the night above Luis Quinn’s head. Dark shapes dived on folded, curved wings to perch along the tiled eave of the private garden. Light caught hooked beaks, round cunning eyes, a raised, agile claw. Parrots, thought Luis Quinn. A task most difficult, by God’s grace.
OUR LADY OF SPANDEX
MAY 24, 2006
Marcelina loved that minuscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth.
Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie.
Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore. But the joy began in the lobby with Luesa the receptionist in her high-collared white dress saying ‘Good afternoon, Senhora Hoffman,’ and the smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and brightness of the frosted glass panels and the bare wood floor and the cream-on-white cotton wall hangings, the New Age music that she scorned anywhere else (Tropicalismo hippy-shit) but here told her, ‘You’re wonderful, you’re special, you’re robed in light, the universe loves you, all you have to do is reach out your hand and take anything you desire.’
Eyes closed, lying flat on the reclining chair, she felt her work-weary crow’s-feet smoothed away, the young, energizing tautness of her skin. Two years before she had been in New York on the Real Sex in the City production and had been struck by how the ianqui women styled themselves out of personal empowerment and not, as a carioca would have done, because it was her duty before a scrutinizing, judgmental city. An alien creed: thousand-dollar shoes but no pedicure. But she had brought back one mantra among her shopping bags, an enlightenment she had stolen from a Jennifer Aniston cosmetics ad. She whispered it to herself now, in the warm, jasmine-and-vetiver-scented sanctuary as the botulin toxins diffused through her skin.
Because I’m worth it.
‘Oh, I love the World Cup.’ Dona Bebel visited twice a week. Mondays the dry cleaning: dusting, vacuuming, putting things away. Thursdays the wet-cleaning: bathroom and toilet, dishes and the laundry Marcelina strewed across her bedroom until by Wednesday evening she could not see the floor. She was a round woman in the indefinable late-fifties, early-sixties; hair heaved back into a headache-inducing bun; eternally in leggings, baggy T-shirts, and Havaianas; and Marcelina treasured her beyond pearls gold cocaine commissions.
‘Querida, she comes twice a week, does your disgusting pants and it’s still all there when she leaves?’ Vitor was an old gay man, a former participant in a daytime makeover show Marcelina had produced, who lived a handful of streets from her decrepit apartment block with its back hard to the sheer rocks of the morro. An old and unrepentant Copa-ista, he took tea in the same café in the same evening hour every day to watch his bairro pass by. Marcelina had taken to meeting him once a week for doces and bitching as part of her extensive alt dot family, all bound to her in different degrees of gratitude or sycophancy. ‘Whatever she asks, you pay her.’
After a succession of Skinny Marias who had thieved all around them as if it were an additional social security levy and hid warrens of dust bunnies under the bed, Marcelina had been reluctant to take on another cleaner from Pavão. But price was price - the favela tucked away like an infolded navel into the hills behind Arpoador was that that unspeakable elephant of cheap labor upon which the Copa depended. She left the glasses twinkling like diamonds, the whites blinding, and when she discovered what it was that Marcelina did for her money, pitched a program idea: ‘You should do a show where you go and clean up people’s houses while they’re out at work. I’d watch that. Nothing people like better than looking at someone else’s filth.’
Filthy Pigs had on-screen screamfests, fights, camerasmashings; destroyed friendships of years; opened generational rifts children against parents; ruined relationships; wrecked marriages; and provoked at least one shooting. Audiences watched through their fingers, faintly murmuring, ‘No, no.’ Raimundo Sifuentes had thundered upon it in the review pages of O Globo as ‘the real filthy pigs are at Canal Quatro.’ It was Marcelina’s first water-cooler show.
Over three years many of Marcelina’s best commissions had come from Dona Bebel. Kitsch and Bitch, which had brought Vitor to prominence and turned his small store of immaculate twentieth-century kitschery into a must-shop destination featured in in-flight magazines, had come from a comment as Dona Bebel slung the washing over the line in Marcelina’s precious roof garden that she always knew which men she cleaned for were gay because they had always had 1950s’ plastic around the place.
Guilt and remorse were as alien to Marcelina as a nun’s habit, but she honorably put a sliver of her bonus into Dona Bebel’s weekly envelope for every commission she won. She never asked what Dona Bebel thought when she saw her casual aside up in sixteen-by-nine with full graphics. She did not even know if Dona Bebel watched Canal Quatro. She was right off its demographic.
‘Oooh, World Cup.’ Marcelina’s whites went round in the washing machine on Wets Thursday. The apartment’s bare, tiled floors smelled of bleach and pine. ‘They’re going to put a big screen up down at the Gatinha Bar. I’m going to watch them all. Brazil versus Italy in the final, I say. I’d put money on it. This time we’ll beat them. They may have the best defense in Europe, but our Magic Quadrilateral will go through them like a knife. I think a program about the World Cup would be a very good idea - I’d watch it. But if you want controversial you have to go for the Fateful Final.’
‘The what?’ Marcelina said over the twelve hundred rev spin cycle gearing up.
For the first time Dona Bebel was taken aback.
‘You mean, you don’t know about the Fateful
Final? Every true Brazilian should have July sixteenth 1950 engraved on her heart. This wasn’t a soccer match. This was our Hiroshima. I don’t exaggerate. After the Fateful Final, nothing was the same again.’
‘Tell me,’ said Marcelina, settling down on top of the upturned plastic laundry basket.
‘Well, I was a very little girl at the time and we didn’t have a television, no one did, but . . .’
This is not history. This is legend. We built the Maracanã for the 1950 World Cup - then, as it is now, the greatest stadium in the world - and in front of two hundred thousand people, we were going to show the world the beauty and the poetry of Brazilian futebol. A war had ended, a new world had risen from its ashes; this was the World Cup of the Future in the Nation of the Future.
This was the team: it was as great as any Seleção, as great even as the squad of 1970, but you won’t see it listed on the statue outside the Maracanã. Coach: Flávio Costa. Front to back: Chico, Jair da Rosa Pinto, Ademir, Zizinho, Friaça; Bigode, Danilo, Bauer; Juvenal, Augusto; Barbosa. Five three two. Beautiful. Moaçir Barbosa: you’ll hear much more about him. Now, in 1950 the system was different from the way it is now; it was a group system all the way to the final.
My father was working then on a bridge and had money, so he bought a radio just for the World Cup. He wired it into the streetlight. It was the only radio on the street, so everyone came around to listen. You could not move in our good room for people come for the game.
We kicked off the World Championships on the twenty-fourth of June against Mexico. Bam! Down they went. Four-nil. Next! Switzerland. Here we had a bit of a wobble - but that’s the best time to have a wobble, early on. A draw, two all. Now we had to beat Yugoslavia to qualify for the finals group. There can be only one from each group. We played it at the new Maracanã and we won: two nil. We’re through to the final group!
In the final group are Sweden, Spain, and Uruguay, the Sky-blue Celestes.
Now we have to put the radio in the window, because we couldn’t fit all the people who wanted to listen into the house. My father set it on an oil drum, and people lined up all the way down the hill.
Game one, we crush Sweden seven-one. Game two, Spain, six-one. Nothing - nothing - can stop Brazil. This will be one of the greatest Seleçãos in history. The only thing that stands between us and glory is tiny Uruguay. Rio expects, the nation expects, the world expects we will raise the Jules Rimet in the most beautiful stadium in the world in the most beautiful city in the world. O Mundo even prints pictures of the team in the early editions with the headline: These are the World Champions!
On July sixteenth one-tenth of Rio is inside that oval. A tenth of the entire city, yes. The rest of the nation is listening on the radio: everyone remembers exactly where they were when the referee blew for kickoff. The first half is goal-less. But in the twenty-eighth minute something very strange happens: Uruguay’s captain Obdulio Varela hits Bigode, and it’s like macumba. Everyone knows the energy in the stadium has changed; you can even feel it through the radio. The axé is no longer with Brazil. But then one minute into the second half, Friaça sees the angle . . . shoots. Gooool do Brasil! One-nil, one-nil, one-nil, one-nil. Everyone is dancing and singing in the house and every other house and all the way down to street onto the Copa. Then in the sixty-eighth minute, Gigghia for Uruguay picks up that macumba and runs with the ball. He’s past Bigode on the right wing, crosses. Schiaffino’s on the end of it and puts it past Barbosa. God himself could not have stopped that shot.
But we can still win. We’ve come back from worse than this. We’re Brazil. Then, at 4:33, all the clocks stop. Once again Gigghia beats Bigode. He’s into the box. But this time he doesn’t cross. He’s close on the post, but he takes the shot. Barbosa doesn’t think anyone could get in from that angle. He moves too slow, too late. The ball’s in the back of the net. Goal to Uruguay, says Luis Mendes on the radio, and then, as if he can’t believe what he said, he says it again: Goal to Uruguay. And again, six times he says it. It’s true. Uruguay two, Brazil one. There’s not a sound in the stadium, not a sound in our house or on the street, not in the whole of Pavão, not in the whole of Rio. Gigghia always said, only three people ever silenced the Maracanã with one movement: Frank Sinatra, the pope, and him.
Then the final whistle went and Uruguay lifted the World Cup, and still there wasn’t a sound. My father couldn’t work for a week. A man up the hill threw himself in front of a bus; he couldn’t stand it. Rio froze over. The whole nation went into shock. We’ve never recovered from it. Maybe we expected too much; maybe the politicians talked it up until it wasn’t just a game of soccer, it was Brazil itself. People who were there in the Maracanã, do you know what they call themselves? ‘Survivors.’ That’s right. But the real pain wasn’t that we lost the World Cup; it was the realization that maybe we weren’t as great as we believed we were. Even up in our shack on the Morro de Pavão, listening on a radio wired into the streetlight with an oil drum for an amplifier, we still thought we were part of a great future. Maybe now we weren’t the nation of the future, that everyone admired and envied, maybe we were just another South American banana republic strutting around all puffed out like a gamecock in gold braid and plumes that nobody really took seriously. The Frenchman de Gaulle once said, ‘Brazil is not a serious country’: after the Fateful Final, we believed him.
Of course we looked for scapegoats. We always do. Barbosa, he was the hated one. He was our last line of defense, the nation was depending on him, he let Brazil down, and Brazil was never going to let him forget it. He only played again once for the Seleção; then he gave up the game, gave up all his friends from the game, dropped out of society and eventually disappeared completely. Brazil has given him fifty years of hell; you don’t even get that for murder.
‘So it’s a trial format,’ Marcelina Hoffman said. This Blue Sky Friday the pitching session took place in Adriano’s conference room, a glass cube with the titles of Canal Quatro’s biggest and noisiest hits etched into an equatorial strip. There were a couple of Marcelina’s among them. Toys and fresh new puzzles were strewn deliberately around the floor to encourage creativity. Last week it was Brain Gym for the PSP; this week, books of paper marked and precreased for Rude Origami. The Sauna, as its nickname around Rua Muniz Barreto implied, was notorious for its atrocious air-conditioning, but the sweat Marcelina felt beading down her sides was not greenhouse heat. Roda sweat: this glass room was as much a martial arts arena as any capoeira roda. It would take all her jeito, all her malicia, to dance down her enemies. Aid me, Nossa Senhora da Valiosa Producão.
‘We track him down, haul him in, and put him on trial before the people of Brazil. We present evidence, for and against - he gets a fair trial. As fair as we want it to be. Maybe get a real judge to preside. Or Pelé. Then the viewers decide whether to forgive him or not.’
Glass tables in a glass room; arranged in a quadrilateral. Community-facilitating and democratic, except that Adriano and the Black Plumed Bird, so very very Audrey Hepburn today, sat on the side of the quadra farthest from the sun. Lisandra and her pitch team were to Marcelina’s right; the über-bosses on her left. Keep your enemies in your peripheral vision but never be seen looking; that is foolishness. Directly across the square from her was Arlindo Pernambucano from Entertainment; too too old to be screaming and shrieking over celebrity mags and general girliness but who, nonetheless, had a phenomenal hit-rate. But he was out of this jogo. It was Lisandra and Marcelina in the roda.
‘What happens if he’s guilty?’ Adriano asked.
‘We make him apologize on live TV.’
Adriano winced. But that’s all right; that’s the cringe-TV wince, the car-crash/guilty-pleasure wince. Embarrassment TV. He was liking it.
‘And is he still alive?’
‘I ran a check through public records,’ said Celso, Marcelina’s boy researcher and newest member of her alt dot family. He was intimidatingly sharp, nakedly ambitious, was always at his desk
before Marcelina arrived and there after she left. She had no doubt that someday he would reach for Marcelina’s crown but not this day; not when the joy - the old heat of the idea that burned out of nowhere perfect and complete as if it had Made in Heaven stamped on the base, the joy she thought she had lost forever and might now only glimpse in Botafogo sunrises and the glow and laughter of the streets of Copa from her roof garden - glowed in her ovaries. I’m back, she thought.
‘We could make the search for him part of the program,’ Adriano said. He’s making suggestions, Marcelina observed. He’s taking ownership of it. She might get this. She might get this.
‘He must be a very old man by now,’ the Black Plumed Bird said.
‘Eighty-five,’ said Celso at once.
‘It’s an interesting idea, but is it Canal Quatro to hold an old man up to ridicule and humiliation? Is this just pelourinho by television?’
Yes, Marcelina wanted to scream. Nothing is more Canal Quatro than the whipping post, the pillory, the branding iron. It’s what we love most, the suffering of others, the freak show. Give us torment and madness, give us public dissections and disgust, give us girls taking their clothes off. We are a prurient, beastly species. They knew it in the eighteenth century; they knew the joy of public disgrace. If there were public executions, Canal Quatro would run them prime time and rule the ratings.