by Ian McDonald
‘In this way, we have a sensitive means of determining the exact shape of our globe, whether prolate like this lemon - greater across its polar axis than its equatorial, or oblate, like this orange, bulging at its girth.’ A titter from down the table, Dona de Teffé, much gone on wine.
Dr Falcon acknowledged the dona with a nod. His lips had barely touched his glass; wine did poorly in this morbid heat, and it was wretched Portuguese stuff. But it was pleasant, uncommon pleasant, to dine in the company of women. Unheard-of at home; not even in Cayenne were such liberties taken. As everyone insisted on reminding him, the Amazon was another country, where affairs of commerce kept the senhores and the Portuguese merchants from their city houses months at a time.
‘Yes yes. Forgive me, Doctor - I must be very stupid - this is all fine and mathematical and scientific, I have no doubt, but what it does not explain to me is what holds it up.’
‘Holds what up?’ Falcon peered over his rounds of green glass, perplexed.
‘The lemon. Or the orange. Now I can easily see how it is we whirl around the sun, how this gravitational force of yours tethers us to it; it is no different from the bolas our vaqueiros use on our fazenda. But what I cannot understand is what holds it all up, what keeps us from plummeting endlessly through the void.’
Falcon set down the fruit. A breath of small exasperation left his lips.
‘Madam, nothing holds it up. Nothing needs to hold it up. Gravity draws us to the center of the Earth, as it draws our Earth to the center of the sun, but at the same time, the sun is drawn - infinitesimally, yes, but drawn nonetheless - to the center of our Earth. Everything attracts everything else; everything is in motion, all together.’
‘I must confess I find the old way much simpler and more satisfying.’ The dona skillfully quartered and peeled the orange with a sharp little curved knife. ‘The mind naturally rebels against a round Earth with everything drawn to the dark, infernal center. It is not only against nature, it is un-Christian; surely if we are attracted to anything, it should be upwards, to heaven, our hope and home?’
Falcon bit back the riposte. This was not the Paris Academy, nor even the Lunar Society meeting in some bourgeois salon. He contented himself to watch the sensuous deftness with which she slipped a lith of naked orange between her reddened lips. And you presume to call heaven your hope and home? Dona da Maia da Garna turned with relief from lemons and hell to the conversation at the far end of the table. Her chaperone, a tall preto woman with an eye patch, once handsome, now run to fat, leaned forward from her position behind the dona’s seat to study the pendulum. Falcon saw her press her thumb against her wrist to measure it against her pulse. Even in undeclared house arrest, Falcon had been close enough to Belém society to understand the meaning of the eye patch. Jealous wives often revenged themselves on their husbands’ slave lovers by blinding them with scissors.
‘Forgive me, Father, I missed what you were saying there?’ Dona Maria said to Luis Quinn.
Even in his priestly black, Quinn was a massive presence, drawing all attention and conversation as if he himself exerted a human gravitation. He held Dona da Maia da Garna’s gaze steadily, with none of the simpering humility of the religious that so incensed Falcon. The dona herself did not flinch from his look. Like a man, Falcon observed.
‘I was merely relating one of the interesting linguistic characteristics of my native language - that is Irish,’ Quinn said. ‘In Irish we have no words for yes or no. If you are asked a question, all you can do is confirm or deny the questioner. Thus, in reply to the question “Are you going to Galway?” the answer “I am indeed going.”’
‘That must make conversation very trying,’ the dona said.
‘Not at all,’ Quinn answered. ‘It just makes it very hard for an Irishman to say no to you.’ Women’s laughter chimed around the table. Falcon felt a needle-prick of envy at Quinn’s casual flirtatiousness. To those who use it least it is given greatest. He had always relished the company of women and thought himself adept in it, a sharp conversationalist and silver wit, but Quinn captivated the table, leaning to their conversations, listening, making each one feel the sole recipient of his attention. The skill of a linguist, or a libertine? Falcon thought. Now Quinn was enchanting all with a rolling, rhythmic monologue that he said was a great poem in his native tongue.
‘And is it a love poem?’ asked the dona.
‘What other kind is worth reciting, madam?’ Applause now. Falcon idly stabbed his discarded and forgotten lemon with the paring knife. He interjected, ‘But my dear Father Luis, to not be able to say yes or no, does that not demonstrate a direct linkage between language and thought? The word is the thought itself, and conversely, what cannot be said cannot be thought.’
The conversation died; the guests wore puzzled frowns. Father Quinn tapped a forefinger on the table and leaned forward.
‘My colleague the doctor makes an interesting point here. One of the fascinations of the Amazon - to a linguist like myself, I suspect, rather than general society - is its richness of tongues. I understand there are Indians among the far-flung tributaries who have no word for the color blue, or for any relation outside son and daughter, or for past or present. It would be a pleasantly diverting conversation to speculate on how that affects their perceptions of the world. If they cannot say blue, can they see blue?’
‘Or indeed, the effect upon their spiritual faculties,’ Falcon replied. ‘If you have no concept of a past or a future, what meaning does the doctrine of original sin then hold? Could they even entertain the concept of future promise, a life of the world to come? No heaven, no hell, just the eternal present? But then is that not eternity; a place beyond time? Do they already live in heaven, in sinless innocence? Perhaps ignorance truly is bliss.’
Several of the ladies were fanning themselves, uncomfortable at the baiting radical-talk at their table. No one alive could remember the Holy Office’s visit to Recife, but the trauma of the autos-da-fé in the Praça there was still sharp enough in folk memory for the Bishop Vasco’s jeremiads against the vices of Belém to alarm. The hostess said decorously, ‘I have heard that there are peças fresh arrived from someplace so backward that they can only express one idea at a time. It seems that each sentence is but a single thought. We can understand their tongue, with some difficulty, but they can never understand ours. It is as Dr Falcon conjectured: if you cannot say it, you cannot think it. Who ever thought of descending these creatures? Quite useless for work.’
Dr Falcon was poised to reply again, but the house steward Anuncão entered, rattled a small wooden clapper to attract the party’s attention, and announced that the musical piece would follow with coffee.
‘Oh, I had quite forgotten!’ the dona said, clapping her hands in delight. ‘Father, dear Father, you will so much enjoy this. The most charming little creature, truly the voice of an angel.’ The chaperones poured coffee from silver pots, wiping drips from the cups with soft cotton cloths. Anuncão led in a tiny índio child, thin as want, dressed in a rough white shift. Falcon was unable to tell if it was boy or girl. The child knelt and kissed the stone flagging. ‘Picked it up for nothing at the Port House Tavern auction. Poor thing was hours from death. Obviously from some reducione raid: only the Jesuits, your pardon, Father, train the voice so. Go on, child.’
The child stood arms at side, a distant animal look in its eyes. The voice when it came was so small, so distant, it hardly seemed to issue from the open mouth but from a hidden place beyond Earth and heaven. Falcon had given his wig to the house slaves early on account of the dreadful close heat and now felt the close-shaved nape of his neck prickle. The little voice climbed to a pure, spearing perfection: an Avé, but not by any composer known to Falcon; its rhythms were skewed, its time signature shifting and mercurial, its inner implied harmonies disquieting, discordant. Yet Falcon felt the tears run freely down his face. When he glanced up the table he saw that Quinn was similarly moved. The women of Belém were stone, unmovi
ng stone. The eyes of the chaperones, each behind her lady, were averted from the white race. Despite the dona’s declaration, this was not the voice of an angel. This came from a deeper, older place; this was the voice of the far forest, the deep river, the voice a child might find if it had followed those waters down to the slave markets of Belém do Pará.
While the child sang, João removed the pendulum from before Dr Falcon and, heels clicking on stone, went to replace it in the belly of his master’s clock.
OUR LADY OF TRASH
MAY 25-28, 2006
The Last of the Real Cariocas sent the weighted line looping out into the pink light of Guanabara Bay. It was the Hour of Yemanja. The sun was still beneath the hills on the far side of the bay, the light that pink only seen in travel shots of Rio, the ones in which a skinny boy in Bermudas turns somersaults on the beach. Lights still burned along Flamengo Park, and the curve of Botafogo, a surf-line of brilliants around the feet of the morros. Headlights moved across the Niteroi Bridge. The red-eye shift moved like a carnaval procession out on to the strip at Santos Dumont Airport, the aircraft delicate, long-legged like hunting spiders in the shimmering light. The Brotherhood of Dawn Fishers was stalking silhouettes, elegant as cranes as they flicked and cast, the broadenings and heavinesses of age and middle age erased against the sunrise. Their soft voices carried far on the peach-perfect, intoxicating air, yet the grosser thunder of the jets powering up one by one into their takeoff runs was pressed down and muted. Marcelina found her own voice dropping to a whisper. Police sirens among the hills, the linger of tire smoke on the air added to the sense of the sacramental. Marcelina had not been so close to spirituality since she had made UFO-Hunt down in Válo de Amanheçer outside Brasilia. The pink turned to lilac to Marian blue as the sun rose.
‘I know a hundred World Cup Stories.’ Raimundo Soares watched his weight drop into the glowing water. He claimed to be the last professional carioca; sometime journalist, sometime writer with a good book about the new bossa nova, a better book about Ronaldo Fenômeno and a so-so guide to how to be a professional carioca on his backlist. A little fishing early with the brothers, a little cafezinho when the heat got up, a few hundred words on the laptop, the rest of the afternoon he’d spend in a café, watching ass on its way to the beach, or strolling around his city, remembering it, memorizing it. In the evening, receptions, parties, openings, his many lovers: a late sleep and up again at fish-jump. He claimed to have worn nothing but surf-Ts and Bermuda shorts for twenty years, even to his own mother’s funeral. He was the loafer, the malandro who doesn’t have to try too hard, carioca of cariocas: they should make him a Living Treasure. ‘This is true. David Beckham comes to Rio; he’s going to play at the Maracanã for a benefit for Pelé. He’s the guest of the CBF, so he’s got the wife, the kids; everything. They put him up the Copa Palace, nothing’s too much trouble for Senhor Becks; presidential suite, private limo, the lot. Anyway, one evening he goes out for a little kick-about on the beach and these hoods jump him. Guns and everything, one two three, into the car and he’s gone. Lifted. Right under his guards’ noses. So there’s Beckham in the back with these malandros with the gold-plated guns thinking, Oh sweet Jesus, I am dead Posh is a widow and Brooklyn and Romeo will grow up never knowing their father. Anyway, they take him up into Rocinha, up the Estrada da Gávea, and then from that on to a smaller road, and from that onto an even smaller road until it’s so steep and narrow the car can’t go any farther. So they bundle him out and take him up the ladeira at gunpoint and anytime anyone sticks so much as a nostril out of their house, the hoods pull an Uzi on them; up and up and up, right up to the top of the favela, and they take him into this tiny little concrete room right under the tree line and there’s Bem-Te-Vi, the big drug lord. This was back before they shot him. And he stands there, and he looks at Beckham this way, and he looks at Beckham that way; he looks at Beckham every way, like he’s looking at a car, and then he makes a sign and in comes this guy with a big sack. Beckham thinks, Jesus and Mary, what’s going on here? Then Bem-Te-Vi stands beside him and they pull out the World Cup, the original Jules Rimet, solid gold and everything, right out of the sack. Bem-Te-Vi takes one side, Beckham takes the other, and this guy gets out a digital camera, says, “Smile Mr Beckham.” Click! Flash! And then Bem-Te-Vi turns to Becks and shakes his hand and says, “Thank you very much, Mr Beckham, it’s been a real honor . . . . Oh, by the way . . . if anyone ever finds out about this . . .”’
Raimundo Soares slapped his thigh and rolled on his little fishing stool. He was a squat, broad-featured man, his bare arms powerfully muscled, his hair black by artifice rather than nature, Marcelina suspected. The Dawn Fishers smiled and nodded. They had heard his hundred stories hundreds of times; they were litany now.
‘Now that’s a great film.’
‘Heitor Serra said you might be able to help me with a program idea.’ Marcelina sat in the just-cool sand, knees pulled up to her chest. Raimundo Soares was right: this was the beach’s best time. She imagined herself joining the shameless old sag-titted men in their Speedos and Havaianas, chest hair grizzled white, and the chestnut-skinned, blond-streaked women, of a certain age but still in full makeup, all sauntering down for their morning sun sea and swim. No better, truer way to start the day.
A sweet idea, but her world was a tapestry of sweet ideas, most of which had no legs. Coffee and cigarette in the roof garden watching them all dandering back from the sea, leaving patters of drips on the sidewalks of the Copacabana. The TV professional habitually overidentifies with the subject. On UFO-Hunt she’d wanted to run off and live in a yurt selling patúa amulets to seekers.
‘So how is the man? Still convinced life’s brutal, stupid, and meaningless?’
Marcelina thought of how she had left Heitor; tiptoeing around his death-rattle snores, dressing by the lights from the lagoa that shone through the balcony window of the Rua Tabatingüera apartment. He liked her to walk around naked in front of that window, in stockings and boots or the sheer bodysuit he had bought her, that she didn’t want to say cut the booty off her. And she enjoyed the anonymous exhibitionism of it. The nearest neighbors were a kilometer away across the lagoon. Most balconies fringing the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas bore tripods and telescopes: let them take their eyefuls. She would never meet them. Heitor was excited by the voyeurism of being voyeured: the watchers would never know that the apartment in which that short loira woman paraded around like a puta belonged to the man who daily told them of riots and robberies, tsunamis and suicide bombings.
He had rolled over heavily with a growl, then woke. He had made it to the Café Barbosa. There had been beer for Celso and the rest of her development team, Agnetta and Cibele; vodka and guaraná for Marcelina; and vodka martinis for Heitor. They hadn’t gone dancing, and she hadn’t fucked the ass off him.
‘Where are you going what the hell time is it?’
‘I’m going to the beach,’ Marcelina said. The buzz of the guaraná glowed through the vodka murk like stormlight. ‘Like you said, it’s best early. Give me a call later or something.’
Like soldiers and flight crew, newsmen have the ability to seize any opportunity for sleep. By the time Marcelina reached the front door Heitor was emitting that strange, gasping rattle that at any time might break into words or cries. The short hallway was where he kept his library. Shelves would have reduced the space to a squeeze too tight for a big man in a shiny suit, so the books - random titles like Keys to the Universe; The Long Tail and the New Economy; The Fluminense Year Book 2002; The Denial of Death - were stacked up title on title into towers, some wedged against the ceiling, others tottering as Marcelina tiptoed past. One particularly heavy door-slam, perhaps after a bad news day, they would all come down and crush him beneath their massed eruditions.
‘And over much much too soon,’ Marcelina said. ‘Heitor said you might be able to help me find Moaçir Barbosa.’
The Brotherhood of Dawn Fishers went quiet over their reels.
‘We think it’s high time he was forgiven for the Fateful Final,’ Marcelina lied.
‘There’s a fair few people would disagree with you still, but I think it’s years overdue. There’d be a lot of interest in a program about the Maracanaço, still. Of course, I was too young to properly remember it, but there are a lot of people still remember that night in July and a whole lot more who still believe the legend. There’s a journo down in Arpoador, João Luiz, my generation, he got a print of the original film and recut it so it looks like the ball hits the post, then cut in footage from another game of Bigode clearing it. There’s a guy younger than you made a short movie a couple of years back about this futebol journalist - I think he was based on me - who goes back in time to try and change the Fateful Final, but whatever he does, the ball still goes past Barbosa into the back of the net. I even heard this guy talking on some science show on the Discovery Channel or something like that about that quantum theory and how there are all these parallel universes all around us. The metaphor he used was that there are hundreds, thousands of universes out there where Brazil won the Fateful Final. Still didn’t understand it, but I thought it was a nice allegory. There’s a great story about Barbosa: it’s a few years after the Maracanaço, before it got to him and he drifted away. He gets a few friends from the old team around - all the black players, you know what I mean - for a barbecue. There’s a lot of beer and talk about soccer and then someone notices that the wood in the barbecue is flaring up and sputtering and giving off this smell, like burning paint. So he looks closer, and it is burning paint. There’s a bit of wood still unburned, and it’s covered in white paint. Barbosa’s only chopped up the goalposts from the Maracanã and used them for firewood.’