by Ian McDonald
‘In the name of Santo Daime, the Green Saint and Our Lady of the Vegetable Union, draw near, receive with love and unite with the order of the universe.’
He looks like Christopher Lee playing Saruman, Marcelina thought, and giggled. Worshippers stepped forward, then broke into a run. Middle-class cariocas mobbed the prim ladies of the egun; reaching, snatching, clawing for their cups of the ayahuasca tea. Marcelina noted that the abiás held back, as did the Head-Wrap Spooky Eyes. Her immediate neighbor, a lanky thirty-something man whose hair was receding patchily and unattractively, returned, eyes wide, pupils shrunk to pinpricks under the hallucinogenic tea. She saw him gag once, then stepped back neatly out of the arc of the projectile vomit that spattered onto the plastic sheeting.
True iâos held that the vomiting, a side effect of the mix of forest vines and shrubs that was the Green Saint, was as valuable in its purging, its purifying, as the hallucinations it whip-cracked across the frontal lobes. Now the bateria beat up again - Marcelina noticed that neither they nor the bença took the Daime - and the worshippers danced and turned, self-absorbed in their hallucinations. Some rolled, spasming on the smeared plastic, the bolar, ridden by spirits from beyond the edge of physical reality. Teenagers in white, boys and girls both, in white turbans and T-shirts knelt with the tranced; they were the ekedis, protecting them from the trampling feet of the worshippers.
Marcelina had done Daime - something as like it as spit - two years ago in a co-pro for National Geographic Channel: World’s Wackiest Religions. It sure beat Catholicism. She watched the Madonna wannabe and the two telenovela stars puke ecstatic jets onto the floor. It beat Kaballah too, for that matter. She wondered idly who had the cleaning contract. There was not enough money in Brazil to pay her to clean up hallucinogenic vomit.
She felt watched and looked over her shoulder to see Scary Eyes leave the court. Almost she seized him, demanded, ‘Hey, what gives?’ She shivered. In this futsal court anything could happen: she had already experienced the power of the Daime. She hoped it was the Daime.
She waited until the mass had ended, the worshippers hauled to their feet, their soiled, fouled whites stripped off and stuffed into bin bags and the people sent into the world in peace. You’re going to let them drive in that condition? she thought. The police of Recreio dos Bandeirantes had more important tasks than hauling in cosmic white folk who could pay the jeitinho anyway: the task of keeping the favelas bottled up. Marcelina stepped over the plastic as the ekedis rolled the foul sheeting into the center of the court. The bateria packed its drums.
‘Mr Bento?’
The bença had heavy wizard’s eyebrows, which he flashed in genuine welcome.
‘My name’s Marcelina Hoffman. I’m a producer with Canal Quatro.’ She gave the bença a card; he passed it to an egun. ‘Feijão.’
A different eyebrow flash now.
‘Ah, yes, of course. He called me to say you would call. I hadn’t thought it would be at a Mass.’
‘I’m trying to make a program where we find Moaçir Barbosa and forgive him for the Maracanaço.’ She almost believed the lie herself now. ‘Feijão told me that Barbosa had associations with this terreiro. I came along because I hoped I might run into him here.’
‘You won’t find Barbosa here.’
Marcelina’s hope reeled as if it had taken a meia lua de compasso she had not the malicia to anticipate.
‘I’m sorry, Ms Hoffman, that you’ve had a wasted journey.’
‘Feijão said he had been involved with this church some years ago.’
‘Feijão says too much. As you’ve probably guessed, Feijão and I do not see eye-to-eye on many things.’
Marcelina’s investigative senses raced: some scandal between the former Fluminense physio and the leader of a successful, middle-class, and assuredly wealthy Daime church? The feeling of ideas spinning around her like a storm of leaves was an old demon, Saci Pererê with his one leg and red hat and pipe, the imp of perverse and inverse of Nossa Senhora da Valiosa Producão: every time an idea was bounced her mind would race in compensation, leaping, snatching whatever idea came within her grasp to prove to herself that she was still creative, that she still had it.
‘Do you know where he might have gone?’
The bença was gray stone.
‘At least could you tell me if he’s alive or dead?’
‘Ms Hoffman, we’re finishing up here.’
Teams of ekedis tackled the futsal court with mops and buckets. Marcelina fantasized coercing the information from Bença Bento. You lie, old man, tell me where he is. She could probably take the Bucket Brigade, but girls with pants tucked into boots and light automatic weapons were a league apart. Heitor’s first rule of television: never get killed for a TV show.
She wasn’t beaten.
She could hear the high song in her inner ear of near tears, that she had not heard since the first time she went into the roda full of jizz and jeito and was humiliated in front of the fundação by a sixteen-year-old.
She would find a way around. She would find Barbosa.
Her malicia and the taxi-driver’s professional jeito jerked at the same moment on Avenida Sernambetiba: her glance over her shoulder; his lingering look in the mirror. There is a sick vertigo when the pattern of traffic resolves into the certainty that you are being followed. Innocence becomes stupidity; every action is potential treachery. You feel those headlights like thumbs at the base of your skull. In the backseat of your cab you have anywhere to go and nowhere to arrive because they will be behind you. You don’t look - you daren’t look, but you begin to impute character and motivation. Who are you, what do you want, where do you expect me to lead you? You enter an almost telepathic communication, a hunter’s empathy: Do you know that I know? If you did, would that be enough to make you peel out and go away?
Marcelina had been followed once before, tailgated in a crew car on the Love Trials: Test Your Fiancé shoot by jealous bride-to-be of one of the contestants. Production security had pulled her in, but Marcelina had shivered for hours afterwards, her city suddenly full of eyes. There had been nothing remotely Miami Vice about it.
‘Can you see who’s driving?’ Marcelina asked.
‘It’s a cab,’ the driver said. She could see his eyes scanning in the rearview mirror. She knew every driver in the Canal Quatro taxi firm by his or her eyes.
‘Give me the number. I’ll call them and tell them one of their drivers is harassing me.’
‘He’d get fired.’
‘And I care?’
‘I can’t see the number anyway,’ the driver muttered. ‘There’s someone in the back.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘I am trying to drive this thing as well, you know.’
Marcelina was convulsed by a sudden shiver. The boys down in SFX had once turned a wing of the Canal Quatro building into a haunted house for a Halloween party. Her flesh had crawled; she had been seized by inexplicable, disabling anxiety. She had feared what was in the locked storeroom at the end of the corridor. It had all been a clever trick of infrasound, air currents, and subtly distorting perspectives. But this was the pure shudder of irrational dread. In that car was the thing that haunted her, all her sins drawn out of the hills and beaches, the bays and curving avenues of her city and made flesh. In that taxi was the anti-Marcelina, and when they met, they would annihilate each other.
Stop it. You’re still flashing back to the herbal tea. Or maybe they put something into the air at the terreiro.
‘How far back is he?’ she asked the driver.
‘About five cars.’
‘Head up into Rocinha.’
The driver drifted across lanes on to the Auto-Estrada Lagoa-Barra. Marcelina risked a glance behind her. The hunting taxi slid out of the traffic onto their tail, still keeping a chaperoned distance of five cars. You are in your TV show now. This is Getaway: ultimate reality television. But I will get you, Marcelina thought. Rocinha butted with the jarring abrupt
ness of an artificial limb against the million-real apartment towers of São Conrado. The great favela unfolded like a fan of jeweled lights across the rocky saddle between the great city forest of Tijuca and the sheer rock peaks of Pedra Dois Irmãos. The cheek-to-cheek impromptu apartment blocks, some several stories tall, were built to within meters of the mouth of the Gávea Tunnel. The military police had a permanent checkpoint at the flyover by the Largo da Macumba flyover: two armored riot-control vehicles, a half dozen young people in the light chestnut of the military police standing around eating fast food from the bar across the road. Same expressions of boredom and anger she had seen in the car park security at the Barquinha; same pants tucked into boots. Much bigger guns.
‘Pull in there.’
They looked up as one as the cab drew in to the side of the road ahead of the lead APC. Edgy times. They had only just succeeded in pushing the favelados back into their slums. Construction machinery lined the edge of the street, shuttered for the night with galvanized plates over the glass and guarded by private security. Another favela wall. A tall twenty-something male cradled his assault rifle and sauntered toward the cab. Marcelina switched on her camera phone. A photograph would prove it. Here it came. Here it came.
The taxi passed at speed, accelerating into the Gávea tunnel that led under Rocinha to the Zona Sul. In the back, in the back, there . . . The camera phone flashed. In the electric flicker she saw a figure with its head wrapped in a loose turban of white cloth. The man from the terreiro. Marcelina felt a sob of relief burst inside her. You are not mad. The universe is rational. You’ve been working too hard, too much pressure too much anxiety, that’s all.
A rap at the window. The militar gestured for her to wind it down.
‘Is there a problem here?’ He stooped and peered into the taxi.
‘No, Officer, no, no problem at all.’
‘Can I see some ID please?’
It was not quite a smell, but it inhabited the air; not quite a sensation but it pricked like electricity; not quite a change but a disturbance in the domestic order - nothing sensible yet she knew it the moment she opened the door to her apartment. When she was an underpaid and loving-it production runner straight off her Media master’s Marcelina had shared a tatty little apartment by the cemetery with a Fortaleza travesti come to seek his fortune in Rio. He worked night shifts in a Lapa bar and drank Marcelina’s beer, ate her food, used her washing powder, watched her cable TV, broke her Japanese tea-set bowl by bowl and never paid a centavo toward the rent but imagined that his innate colorfulness was ample recompense, blithely disregarding the evidence of his own eyes, that travestis were cheap as beans in Lapa. Marcelina would be returning when he was leaving and thus never caught him in his violations, but she always knew when he had been through her panty drawer. However carefully he covered his crime there was always a sense, a ripple in the aether, a linger of an alien but maddeningly familiar perfume.
She smelled it now in the small tiled lobby of her apartment.
Somebody had been in her home.
It was one of the mysteries of her alt dot family that, though their lives were strewn all over Centro and Zona Sul, they always arrived together and left together. Marcelina received them in her garden. She customarily entertained up on the roof. Adriano himself had been up here for her Stones Party, revolving with the rest of her guests through the corner of the garden with the ocean view to peer through the slot between the buildings at the tiny spider figure prancing and kicking beneath orbit-visible lighting. There, that’s Rick. I mean Mick. The roof was her refuge and temple; the roof was air and the lilac and pink evening light; the roof connected her to the ocean by that parallelogram of beach, sea, and sky; the roof was the reason she had bought this ugly, clattery, strange-smelling apartment with its back to the morro as if it had been mugged by the street; and she had been sleeping on the roof for the past three nights.
The apartment was infected.
She had gone straight away to Gloria the concierge. She had seen nothing. Mangueira samba school could have marched through the lobby of Fonseca apartments in spangles, feathers, and skin with full bateria and she would have chittered away on her celular.
Celso, Cibelle, Agnetta, Vitor up from his street-watching café, Moises and Tito whom she had met on the Gay Jungle (elevator pitch: can eleven gay men marooned in a stilt-house in the middle of the Amazon turn the one straight guy gay?) series and recruited to her alt dot family. Mediaistas and gay men. See who you run to in a crisis. All her guests were welcomed with a spliff. When the real estate agent had opened the rusting roof door, Marcelina had followed him up into a sunlit field of waving maconha. ‘Is this included in the price?’ she’d asked. There was at least ten thousand street-reis of shade-grown Moroccan beneath the water tanks and satellite dishes. Dona Bebel had showed her how to dry it in the airing cupboard. It would take her five years to smoke her way through it.
‘I’ve brought you all here tonight . . .’
Laughs, cheers.
‘You know what I mean. You’re my urban family, my gay dads. I tell you things I wouldn’t tell my own flesh and blood.’
Oohings, cooings.
‘No seriously seriously, if I can’t trust you, who can I trust? And I’d like to think you could trust me as well - not just work stuff. Other stuff.’ It was coming out wrong; it was coming out as stupid and insincere as the night she tried to tell the guys who’d lifted the Getaway car they were on TV. But she had never asked so great a thing from them, never stripped herself so bare and pale.
‘I need your help, guys. Some of you have noticed that I’ve been acting a bit . . . distracted lately. Like I can’t seem to remember things I’ve done, then getting really paranoid.’
No one dared answer.
‘I need you to tell me if there’s other stuff that maybe I haven’t remembered; things I might have done or said.’
Alt dot family looked at each other. Feet twisted, lips pursed.
‘You walked right past me the other day,’ Vitor said. His voice tightened, grew sharp and confident. ‘You didn’t even look round when I called after you. Mortified, I was. I almost didn’t come tonight, you know. I was this close.’
‘When was this?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, sometime around my time, you know the time I keep. Tea o’clock.’
‘I do need to know, Vitor.’
‘About five, five thirty. It was Wednesday.’
Marcelina touched her hands together, an almost-prayer, a particular gesture her development team knew well, when she was trying to pin down a part-baked idea.
‘Vitor, you have to believe me when I tell you that at that time I was in Niteroi getting a letter of introduction to the Barquinha from Feijão. I can give you his number, you can call him.’
‘Well, you walked right past me. Cut to the bone, querida; to the bone.’
‘What direction was I walking?’
‘The same as always; from here down to the taxi rank.’
Marcelina lifted her explaining hands to her mouth now.
‘That wasn’t me, Vitor. I wasn’t there; I was in Niteroi, believe me.’
Everyone had stubbed out their spliffs now.
‘Has anyone else experienced anything like this?’
Now Moises shuffled uncomfortably. He was a big fat sixty-something queen who ran a series of mysterious objet d’arts emporia; a true old-school carioca, he had an unrelenting if not always accurate wit, but delivered in a voice like velvet-covered razors. Since Gay Jungle, Marcelina had been looking for ways to get him his own series.
‘Well, you did call me the other night. I thought I was in the Da Vinci Code, all those mysterious coded messages and everything.’
Marcelina’s head reeled. It had nothing to do with secondary maconha.
‘When was this?
‘Well. I know I’m a night owl, but half past three in the morning.’
‘Was it on the house phone or the celular?’
‘Moises, could you tell me what I said?’
‘Oh, weird stuff, honey, weird stuff. Time and the universe and the order we see is not the true order. Are you in some kind of conspiracy thing? How exciting.’
‘I’m trying to make a TV show about a World Cup goalkeeper, is all.’ Marcelina sat down on the wall. ‘Guys, at work, has there been anything else I don’t know about?’
‘Apart from the e-mail thing, no,’ Celso answered.
Agnetta said, ‘But you should know that the Black Plumed Bird has bunged Lisandra a few K to develop her Ultimate Seleção idea.’ Unraveling, detuning, melting like a wax votive baby offered to a saint.