by Ian McDonald
‘Is it true?’ Marcelina slipped off her shoes and buried her feet in the cool sand, feeling the silky grains run between her toes.
‘Does it matter?’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘Barbosa? No. He disappeared completely about ten, fifteen years ago. He might even be dead. People still claim to see him in shopping malls, like Elvis Presley. He’s an old man; he’s been an old man for fifty years. If I thought you were going to do some hatchet job on poor old Barbosa, I wouldn’t give you the time of day. The poor bastard’s suffered enough. But this . . .’
‘No, we wouldn’t do anything like that,’ Marcelina lied for the second time.
‘Even Zizinho’s dead now . . . . There’s one left who might know. Feijão. The Bean.’
‘Who’s he, a player or something?’
‘You really don’t know anything about this, do you? Feijão was the physiotherapist, the assistant physiotherapist. He was still in training, his dad was on the CBD, as it was then before it became the CBF, and got him a job on the team. Basically all he did was keep the sponges wet in the bucket, but he was like a lucky mascot to the team; they used to ruffle his hair before they went down to the tunnel. Lot of good he was. He ended up team physio with Fluminense and then opened a little health club. He sold it and retired about five years ago; I met him while I was researching the Ronaldo book and the Society of Sports Journalists. Did you know I ended up in court in a libel case over the length of Ronaldo’s dick?’
He’s right, murmured the irmãos of the rod.
‘The judge found for me, of course. If anyone would know, Feijão would. He’s over in Niteroi now; this is his number.’ Raimundo Soares took a little elastic-bound reporter’s notebook from the hip pocket of his Bermudas and scrawled down a number with a stub of pencil. ‘Tell him I sent you. That way he might talk to you.’
‘Thank you, Mr Soares.’
‘Hey, you’ll need someone to present it; who better than one of Brazil’s best writers and the last professional carioca?’
That’s him, chorused the fisher kings. He’s the malandro.
‘I’ll mention it to the commissioner,’ Marcelina said, her third lie. No cock crowed, but the float on Raimundo’s line bobbed under.
‘Hey, look at that!’ He pushed his tractor hat up on his head and bent to his reel. When Marcelina looked back, from the shaded green of Flamengo Park, the Brotherhood of Dawn Fishers were unhooking the catch and returning it to the sea. Fish from Guanabara Bay were tainted, but it pleased Marcelina to imagine the old men offering it in honor to Yemanja.
She could hear the electric organ from the bay where the taxi dropped her: Aquerela do Brasil; samba-exaltação rhythm, heavy on the lower manual, wafting down over the balconies, among the satellite dishes and water tanks. Her mother’s favorite. She found her step quickening to the rhythm as she nodded past Malvina on the concierge’s desk. The music swirled down the stairwell. Malvina was smiling. When Dona Marisa played organ, the whole building smiled. Even the music in the elevator was unable to defeat Dona Marisa on the manuals as her chords and chachachas boomed around the winch drums and speeding counterweights.
Every child thinks her childhood is normal. Wasn’t everyone’s mother Marisa Pinzón the Organ Queen of the Beija-Flor ? Queen Marisa’s most lustrous days, when she ruled the land beyond midnight, Venus arising from the Art Deco shell of the Beija-Flor Club Wurlitzer, were already fading when Marcelina was born. Her two older sisters shared increasingly bitter and resentful memories of grandmothers and tias, cigarette girls and gay cleaners sent to babysit while their mother, swathed in satin and rhinestones, diamante tiara on her brow, gilded shoe tapping out the rhythm, played rumbas and pagodes and foros to the discreet little silver tables. There were photographs of her with Tom Jobim, flirting with Chico Buarque, duetting with Liberace. Marcelina had only the unfocused memory of staring up at a glitterball turning on the ceiling, dazzled by the endless carnival of lights.
She had no memories whatsoever of her father. She had been a primitive streak when Martim Hoffman put on his suit and took his leather briefcase and went out to do business in Petropolis and never returned. For years she had thought Liberace was her dad.
Marcelina shivered with pleasure as the elevator door opened to a sweeping glissando up the keys. Her mother played less and less frequently since the arthritis that would surely turn her knuckles into Brazil nuts had been diagnosed. She hesitated before ringing the bell, enjoying the music. Her alt dot family would have mocked, but it’s always different when it’s your mother. She pressed the button. The music stopped in midbar.
‘You don’t call, you don’t visit . . .’
‘I’m here now. And I sent you an SMS.’
‘Only because I sent you one first.’
They hugged, they kissed.
‘You’re looking tight again,’ Marcelina’s mother said, holding her daughter at arm’s length to scrutinize her face. ‘Have you been on the Botox again? Give me his number.’
‘You should get a chain on that door. Anyone could be in here, they’d just brush you aside.’
‘You lecture me about security, still living in that dirty, nasty old Copa? Look, I’ve found you this nice little two-bed apartment down on Rua Carlos Góls; it’s only two blocks from me. I got the agent to print out the details. Don’t go without them.’
The organ stood by the open French windows, lights glowing. The table had been set on the little balcony; Marcelina squeezed into her plastic patio chair. It was safest to look at the horizon. Golden surfer boys played there on the ever-breaking wave. She could never look at surfers without a painful sense of another life she could have lived. Dona Marisa brought stacked plates of doces: lemon cake, toothachy peanut squares from Minas Gerais, little honey wafers. Coffee in a pot, and an afternoon vodka for the hostess. Her third, Marcelina judged from the empties on the organ and the arm of the sofa.
‘So what is it you have to tell me?’
‘No no no, let’s have your news first. Me, I live up here fifteen floors above contradiction and excitement.’ She offered the Minas Gerais peanut cookies. Marcelina opted for the honey wafers as the least deadly to her daily calorific intake.
‘Well, I’ve got a commission.’
Her mother clasped her hands to her chest. Unlike every other mother of whom she had heard at Canal Quatro, Marisa Pinzón understood completely what her daughter did for a living. Marcelina was her true heiress; Gloria and Iracema disappointed in their successful marriages and expensively clad families. Mundanity as the ultimate teenage rebellion. In Marcelina’s informal casual name-droppings, professional brushes with stellar celebrity, and occasional affairs with a smart man on a pale blue screen who told the country terrible things every night was the lingering perfume of an age when the Queen of the Keyboard ruled from the Copa Palace to Barra. Time for men and babies when you are older while the stars are low enough for you to still touch and magic works yet.
Marcelina could never deflate her mother’s flight over the thousand lights of Ipanema with her aching doubt that her sisters had made the right choice, that she had sold her eggs for edginess and a two-second producer’s credit. Marcelina explained the premise. Her mother sipped her clinking vodka and scowled.
‘Barbosa, that bad black man.’
‘Don’t tell me you remember the Fateful Final?’
‘Every carioca remembers what they were doing at the Maracanaço. I was having a stupidly giddy affair with Dean Martin’s lawyer. Dino gave five shows in the Copa Palace. He deserves what you do to him, he made us a laughingstock.’
‘What? Who?’
‘Barbosa. Evil man.’
Dona Marisa was Marcelina’s infallible one-woman focus group. She drained her vodka.
‘Querida, would you get me another one?’ Marcelina quartered lemon and spooned ice into the glass. Her mother called, ‘I’m going to have a little feijoada.’
‘What’s the occasion
?’
Dona Marisa was the kind of cook who used excellence at just one dish to absolve her of every other culinary wrong. A souschef in the Café Pitú had given her his recipe for feijoada ten years ago when she was freshly moved to Leblon and she had produced this prodigy on the closest Saturday to every family high-day since.
‘Iracema is pregnant again.’
Marcelina felt her grip tighten on the pestle as she carefully pounded the ice.
‘Twins.’
A crack, a crash. The bottom of the glass lay on the floor in ice, lime, and reeking vodka, punched out by an overheavy blow from the marble pestle.
‘Sorry about that. My hand slipped.’
‘Never mind never mind I drink too many anyway. The ruin of many a good woman, drinking at home. But twins! What do you think of that? We’ve never had twins in our branch of the family. Now Patricía and that lot down in Florianopolis, they dropped doubles all over the place, as alike as beans in a pod.’
‘Play something for me. You never play these days.’
‘Oh, no one wants to hear me. It’s old, that kind of stuff I play.’
‘Not to me it’s not. Go on. It was lovely hearing you when I was coming up; I could hear you right down in the car park.’
‘Oh dear oh no what will everyone think?’
You know full well, Queen of the Fifteenth Floor, Marcelina thought. Like me they’ve seen you playing on your balcony in your tiara and pearl earrings. You make them smile.
‘Oh, you talked me into it.’ Dona Marisa straightened herself on the bench, ran her feet up and down the bass pedals like an athlete warming up for high hurdles. Marcelina watched her fingers fly like hummingbirds over the tabs and rhythm buttons. Then she caressed the red power switch with a flick of her nails, and ‘Desafinado’ swelled out like angels bursting from the heavenly spaces between the apartment towers of Leblon.
Liberace winked at her from the top of the sideboard.
Feijão the Bean wore a packet of American cigarettes tucked into the top of a pair of Speedos. Speedos, a pair of Havaianas, and his own hide, tanned to soft suede. He padded, restless and edgy as a wasp, about his luxuriant verandah, settling on a wooden bench here, the tiled lip of a plant bed there, a folding table there. He was thin as a whip and comfortable with his body; she was nevertheless thankful that he was devoid of all body hair. The very thought of the gray, wire-haired chests of sixty-something men gave her cold horrors.
‘Raimundo Soares. So how is that old bastard?’
‘Doing a lot of fishing these days.’
Feijão poured herbal tea from a Japanese pot. It smelled of macerated forest.
‘That’s the right answer. He called me, you know. He said you don’t know anything but you’re all right. I get a lot of media sniffing round after Barbosa - oh, you’re not the first by any means. I tell them he’s gone, he’s dead. I haven’t heard of him in ten years. Which is about right. But you’ve done it the right way.’
Our Lady of Production Values, whom Marcelina pictured as the Blessed Virgin crossed with a many-armed Hindu deity - those arms holding cameras, sound booms, budgets, schedules - smiled from within her time-code halo. Feijão tapped a cigarette out of his pouch, an oddly sexual gesture.
‘They all ended up here over the years, the black men of 1950. They’ll try and tell you that there’s no racism in Brazil; that’s shit. After the Maracanaço, the blame fell heaviest on the black players; it always does. Juvenal, Bigode. Even Master Ziza himself, God be kind to him. Most of all, Barbosa. Niteroi is not Rio. That bay can be as wide as you want it.’
Feijão’s mezzanine level apartment faced a view that only selling a successful business can afford. His walled patio was long and narrow, humid and riotous with flowering shrubs and vines tumbling over the walls. Jacarandas and a tumbling hibiscus framed Rio across the bay. Marcelina had reached around the planet in pursuit of the glittery and schlocky but had never been across the stilt-walking bridge to Niteroi. The Marvelous City seemed smaller, meaner, less certain; Niteroi the mirror to Rio’s preening narcissism.
Feijão sipped his tea.
‘Great for the immune system. Raimundo Soares will tell you a hundred wonderful tales, but he’s full of shit. There’s only one of them true: fifteen years ago Barbosa went into a shop to buy some coffee and the woman beside him at the till turned around and shouted to all the customers, ‘Look! That’s the man who made all Brazil weep.’ I know that because I was there. After he retired he came to my gym because he wanted to stay in shape and because he knew me from the old days. Little by little he lost touch with all the others from 1950, but never me. Then he found religion.’
‘What, like the Assembly of God?’ It had become fashionable for sportsmen to turn crente, to thank the Lord Jesus for goals and medals and records they would previously have ascribed to saints and Mary.
‘You didn’t listen.’ Feijão ground out his cigarette butt under the sole of his Havaiana, immediately drew another. ‘I said found religion, not found God.’
In response to the cigarette, Marcelina drew her PDA.
‘An umbanda terreiro?’ The blacks were finding lily-white Jesus; the whites were finding Afro-Brazilian orixás. So Rio.
‘You could try listening instead of rushing in with questions. The Barquinha de Santo Daime.’
Marcelina held her breath. The Cursed Barbosa a convert to the Green Saint. The ratings would go into orbit.
‘So Barbosa’s still alive.’
‘Did I say that? You’re getting ahead of me again. He walked out of his apartment three years ago and no one has seen hide nor hair of him since, not even me.’
‘But this Daime Church would know . . . . I can find them.’ Marcelina opened Google on her PDA. Feijão reached across the table and covered the screen with his hand.
‘No no no. You don’t go rushing in like that. Barbosa has been in hell for longer than you’ve been alive, girl. There are few enough he trusted; you’re only sitting here in my garden because Raimundo Soares trusts you. I will talk to the Barquinha. I know the bença there. Then I will call you. But I tell you this, if you try and go around me, I will know.’
The thin, sun-beaten man drained his herbal tea and stubbed his cigarette fiercely out in the porcelain bowl.
It was in the taxi as it arced back over the long, slender bowstring of the Niteroi Bridge that Marcelina, googling images, realized she recognized the sacred vine. Psychotria viridis: its glossy oval leaves and clusters of red berries had set off Feijão’s view over the Marvelous City.
Aleijadão was riding an A-frame bicycle up the center of the Glass Menagerie, weaving in and out of the boxes of tapes and slumping pillars of celebrity magazines on wheels the size of industrial castors. He wobbled twice around Marcelina.
‘What is that thing you’re on?’
‘Do you like it? It’s the future of commuting.’
‘On Rio’s hills? You want to try a tunnel at rush hour on that?’
‘No, but it’s kind of cool. Folds up to the size of a laptop.’ Aleijadão tried to throw a turn and almost came off into the printer recycle box. His job was office monkey in the long, open-plan development office known as the Glass Menagerie. ‘Steering’s a bit tricky and it doesn’t half cut the ass off you. It’s the latest thing from that English guy, the one who invented the computer.’
Always: the latest thing.
‘Alan Turing? He’s—’
‘No, some other guy. Invented those things on wheels you sat in and pedaled: daleks? Hawking? Something like that?’
Days there were when Canal Quatro’s playfulness, its willingness to face into the breaking wave of the contemporary and ride it, thrilled and braced Marcelina; then there were the others when Canal Quatro’s relentless hunger for the new, for novelty, oppressed her, a shit-storm of plastic trivia; and knowingness and irony became grim and joyless.
Marcelina’s workplace alt dot family looked up from their glass cubicles at the entra
nce of their über-boss. So much she could read from their lunches: at their desks, of course. Celso lifting sushi with the delicacy and deftness of a professional rehearsal in private. Agnetta, as ever so completely dressed for the moment she had been known to have new shoes delivered to the office in order to wear them home that evening, chewed morosely on a diet lunch replacement bar snack. Cibelle, the only one Marcelina respected in addition to fearing, picked apart a homemade bauru. She had been bringing them in every day. Homemade was the new sushi, she said. Cibelle understood how the trick was done, how to add your own little ripple to the crest of the hip and watch the chaotic mathematics of storms and power laws magnify it into a fashion wave. Already half of Lisandra’s production group were making their own lunches. Clever girl, but I know you.