by Ian McDonald
Gonçalves’ lips moved as if telling beads or chewing sins.
‘Buffoon.’
Rage burned up in Quinn’s heart, hot and sickening and adorable. That is what he wants. Quinn continued in the same flat, emotionless voice, ‘We will leave at dawn in my canoe. Instruct your headmen and morbichas in whatever they require to maintain the aldeia until your replacement has been sent from Salvador. ’
‘I truly had expected more.’ Gonçalves’ hands were folded piously in his lap. Palm-oil lamps cast unreadable shadows on his face. ‘A man of languages, from Coimbra indeed; not one of those local péons who can barely even read their own names, let alone the missal, and hear devils in every thunderstorm and varzea frog, a man of learning and perception. Refinement. Have you any idea how I long for a brother with whom I could discuss ideas and speculations as far beyond the comprehension of these dear, simple people as the firmament? I am disappointed, Quinn. I am sadly disappointed.’
‘You refuse my authority?’
‘Authority without power is empty, Father. Brazil has no place for empty authority.’
‘You have seen my commission; you are aware of the license Father Magalhães has given me.’
‘Really? Do you really imagine you could? Against me? Almost, almost I might try it. But no, it would be a waste.’ An index finger lifted a fraction, and directly a dozen crossbows were trained on Luis Quinn. Quinn let his hands fall meekly open: See, like Christ I offer no resistance. How soon he had forgotten the guile and skill of the people of the rain forest.
‘“I ask for a task most difficult,” - you said that once.’ Was there no limit to this man’s information? ‘I have such a task for you. I had hoped you might embrace it willingly, even gladly; recall. Now it seems I must compel you.’
‘I do not fear martyrdom at your hands,’ Luis Quinn said.
‘Of course not, nor do I imagine I could coerce you by threat to your life. Merely consider that for every bow pointed at you, three are trained on Dr Robert Falcon as he sleeps in his hammock at the meeting of the White and Black rivers.’
The two men knelt unspeaking. The compline of the forest spoke around them: insects, frogs, shrieking birds of night passage. Luis Quinn gave the barest of nods. Father Diego’s finger scarcely flickered, but the bowmen disappeared like thoughts.
‘Your task most difficult.’
‘There is a tribe beyond the Iguapará River, a vagrant people, the Iguapá, forced from their traditional terrains as other peoples flee the bandeirantes and lesser orders. You will be interested to note that their language is neither a Tupi derivative nor an Aruak/Carib variant. Amongst all the people of the Rio Catrimani and Rio Branco they are known as a race of prophets. They seem to believe in a form of dream-time, akin to real time, inverted. All tribes and nations consult them, and they are always right. Their legend has bought them immunity: the Iguapá have never been involved in any of the endemic warfare that so delights these people. It is my burden to bring the Iguapá the love of Christ and his Salvation, but they are a fugitive, elusive nation. The tribes protect them, even those assimilated into my City of God, and my missionaries have so far been unsuccessful.’
‘My predecessors,’ Luis Quinn said. ‘The ones you said departed from you hale in will and wind. You sent them to martyrdom.’
Gonçalves pursed his lips in contemplation.
‘Why, I had not considered it in that fashion, but you are right, yes, yes, martyrdom I suppose it is. Certainly none survived.’
‘They returned to you?’
‘Burning with visions and ravings, insanities and impossibilities. Their minds were quite destroyed; some were babbling and incoherent; a few even had lost the power of speech or were completely insensate.’ Gonçalves pressed his hands into unconscious prayer, touched them to his lips in wonder and devotion. ‘Most succumbed after a few days. One individual, a stout German, endured two weeks. Father Kaltenbacher led me to speculate that an individual with even more highly developed mental faculties might survive, even with the mind intact to communicate what they had seen among the Iguapá.’
‘Your overweening pride leads you to madness if you believe that my coming was anything other than at the order of Provincial-General de Magalhães.’
‘Is that what you believe?’ Gonçalves asked. ‘Truly?’ Again he touched his praying hands to his lips. ‘Tomorrow you will leave with your native slave and a crew of my Guabirús and travel up the Catrimani and the Iguapará. The peoples who make use of the Iguapás’ talents know how to find them when they need them. You will understand if I do not take you upon your honor to travel unescorted.’
‘Manoel is not my slave. Neither is Zemba; he has papers of manumission, he is a free man.’
‘No longer; he will become a member of my personal entourage. Now I bid you a good night, Father; you have a long and arduous journey tomorrow, and you would do well to refresh yourself. Eat, rest, and devote yourself to prayer and contemplation. Rejoice, Father, you will behold glories none have ever seen and lived.’
Again, the merest twitch of a finger and crossbows emerged silently from the darkness. Luis Quinn, a giant among his painted captors, glanced back. Gonçalves knelt at his desk, the quill again moving steadily over the paper. Sensible of Quinn’s regard, he looked and smiled in pure, broad pleasure.
‘I envy you, Father. Truly, I envy you.’
OUR LADY OF THE TELENOVELAS
JUNE 9-10, 2006
O Dia had it on the front page. It was relegated to page two in Jornal do Brasil, pushed off the cover by a photograph of the wife of the head of CBF in just a pair of soccer socks and a strategically held ball. O Correio Brasilense likewise carried the scoop on page two, with a recap in the entertainment pages and a three-page analysis in the sports section, concluding that maybe it was time to look objectively at the Maracanaço and that it had swept away a swaggering complacency and so led to the mighty Seleçãos of 1958 and 1970 and that Carlos Alberto Parreira might well heed the lesson of 1950. Even Folha de São Paulo, which deigned anything carioca as beneath serious regard, carried the story in the bottom of the front page: RIO REALITY SHOW TO PUBLICLY TORTURE MARACANACO VICTIM. Jornal Copacabana’s Sunday Special splashed a full front page of ‘Professional Carioca’ Raimundo Soares, arms folded, a look of righteous disgust on his face with the Sugar Loaf behind him and the lead-line SHE MADE ME BETRAY A FRIEND. O Globo opted for the full nuclear. Its cross-media network was ten times the size of Canal Quatro, yet it saw the upstart, adolescent independent channel as a grave threat to its key demographic and never wasted an opportunity to shit on it. A sixty-point screaming banner headline declared WELCOME BACK TO HELL. Beneath it was the lead photo of Barbosa, kneeling as if in prayer in the mouth of the Brazil goal, the ball sweetly in the back of the net. In the bottom left column was a picture of Adriano in surf shorts taken at the Intersul Television Conference in Florianopolis. Adriano Russo, responsible for bad-taste youth-oriented shows as Gay Jungle, Jailbait Superstar, and Filthy Pigs, said that the show was in the early stages of development among a raft of World Cup Season programming and that it had not yet been green-lit. When asked if the program intended to drag the eighty-five-year-old disgraced former goalkeeper out of retirement and subject him to ‘trial by television’ and public humiliation, Canal Quatro’s director of programming said that the channel would maintain its position as the leading producers of edgy, noisy, and controversial popular television but that it was not, nor ever had been, its policy to hold older or weaker members of society up to shame.
They had called Adriano at dinner with his wife and guests in Satyricon, made him talk in front of the diners and all the waiting staff.
Page two ran a picture of the headquarters on Rua Muniz Barreto under the headline THRONE OF LIES. Beneath, the LIST OF SHAME ran down a chart of Canal Quatro’s sleaziest shows, from Nude Big Brother to Queen for a Day: I’m Coming Out!
And there she was on page three, a grainy celular snap o
f her at the commissioning party in Café Barbosa (a sign, a sign it had been, but against all she had assumed it to be) up on the table shaking it with her liter of Skol in its plastic cool jacket in her hand and Celso rolling his eyes as he pretended to lick her ass.
Queen of Sleaze
This is the Canal Quatro producer responsible for the Barbosa outrage, snapped during a drink-, drug-, and sex-fueled media party. Marcelina Hoffman is one of Canal Quatro’s most controversial program makers: her Jailbait Superstar, a talent show for inmates of a women’s prison, created a record number of complaints when it was revealed that the winner would be released, no matter what she had done. Ironically, it was Senhora Hoffman herself who gave the game away by accidentally sending an e-mail revealing the true purpose of the program to crusading journalist Raimundo Soares, after she lied to the King of the Cariocas in return for his help in finding Barbosa. Senhora Hoffman is a well-known Zona Sul party girl, infamous for her drinking and consumption of cocaine, and is described by work colleagues as a ‘borderline plastic surgery addict.’ Her name has recently been linked with Heitor Serra, Canal Quatro’s respected newsreader . . . .
The paper fell from Marcelina’s fingers. With a keening, animal cry she lay back among the tabloids and broadsheets scattered across Heitor’s floor, haloed in shouting headlines. Help Us Find Barbosa First! Rs 50,000 Reward! Save Barbosa. Fifty Years Is Enough.
Footsteps. Marcelina opened her eyes. Heitor stood over her like a Colossus, like the anticipation of water-sport sex, bizarrely foreshortened.
‘I’m dead.’
Heitor kicked the papers across the room.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Forever. I couldn’t sleep, and when I could I dreamed I was awake. Do you have to get all the papers delivered?’
‘It’s my job.’
Heitor had dropped back from the studio after the eleven thirty news update expecting Furaçao Marcelina to have blown through his apartment, strewing books, upturning tables, shattering glasses and fine china, shredding suits slashing paintings smashing the religious statues and images he had so adoringly collected over two decades of spiritual seeking. He had found something much more frightening: Marcelina seated in the middle of the floor, naked but for tanga, one knee pulled up to her breasts, the other folded around its ankle. She clutched her shin with both arms. Television cast the only light. When she looked up Heitor saw a face so ghost-eaten, so alien that he had almost cried out, home invaded.
‘Look.’
Marcelina had uncurled a fist holding the DVD remote, beeped it at the screen.
‘What is it?’
‘Don’t you see?’ Marcelina had howled, and in her voice the hurricane broke. ‘It’s me.’
Heitor prised the remote out of her fingers, vanished the apparition paused in the act of looking up into the camera.
‘In the morning.’
‘No, not in the morning.’
‘Get that down you.’
He had filled a glass from the refrigerator.
‘What is it?’
‘Just water.’ Plus a capsule from his kitchen pharmacopoeia. ‘You need to rehydrate.’
‘She wants rid of me,’ Marcelina had said, sipping the water.
‘Who?’
‘The me.’
The pill kicked in before she had finished the glass. Heitor lifted her into his bed. She was as small and light as a street dog. Heitor felt ashamed of all the times he had pinned her under his broad body; her thin, angular bones bending, her wiry thighs wrapped around his wide hairy back.
Ninety percent of Heitor’s cabinet of cures was out of date. Marcelina had come up out of the sleeping pill like a sea-launched missile. He snored; she padded into the living room to look again at the thing she could not comprehend. Again and again she watched the figure in the sweet black suit enter through the revolving door, go up to Lampião, and finally turn to look up into the camera for some clue, some truth. She had slowed the DVD down to a click through the individual frames. That was how she had found the tiny hint of a smile on her face, as if she - her-had intended that Marcelina see her grand imposture. Again and again and again, until the engine drone and brake-creak of the delivery boy’s LiteAce, the sound of feet on steps, and the thud of bundled papers against the back door.
Across the room Marcelina’s celular sang ‘Don’cha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me,’ Brasiliero remix.
‘Aren’t you going to get that?’ A bone-deep media-ista, Heitor could be driven to high anxiety by an unanswered telephone.
‘It’ll be the Black Plumed Bird.’
‘I’ll get it for you.’
‘No!’ Then, gently, ‘I don’t want her to know you’re here. The papers . . .’
‘I can see the papers. You have to talk to her sometime.’
The SMS alert jabbered, a recording of a very high travesti raving at the Copa carnaval party about his upcoming surgery.
‘Give me a sweatshirt or something, then.’
On the balcony Marcelina strode up and down in panties and a holey old hoodie. Across the lagoon the apartment blocks were a holy city of silver and gold; the last rags of early mist burned off the green hills, and fit girls were running on the lakeside loop. Heitor tried to read Marcelina’s hands.
‘So?’
Marcelina dropped onto the leather sofa.
‘Bad enough. She told me to take some unofficial leave; basically, I’m suspended on full pay.’
‘They could have fired you on the spot.’
‘She talked Adriano down from that. She’s giving me the benefit of the doubt that I didn’t send the e-mail, that it was some kind of industrial espionage or someone hacked my computer. I think I may have got it wrong about the Black Plumed Bird.’
‘And the show?’
‘Adriano thinks it may have done us some good. APRIGPR.’
‘We don’t get his text speak down in News and Current Affairs.’
‘All PR Is Good PR. He’ll wait until he sees if there’s a ratings backlash against Rede Globo. I may get it yet.’
‘There’s another call you need to make.’ Heitor’s espresso machine filled the kitchen zone with shriekings and roarings.
‘I know. Oh, I know.’ Her mother would be drunk, would have been drinking slowly, steadily all night, one slow little vodka at a time, watching the mesh of headlights along the rainy avenues of Leblon. Frank Sinatra had turned away. It had always been nothing more than reflections from a glitterball. Your self shattered into a thousand spangles and mirrored back to you. ‘And I will make it. But I can’t stay here, Heitor.’
‘Oswaldo has hinted that it might not be the best thing for my professional objectivity. Stay as long as you need. I’m not Jesus.’
‘It’s not about you. Can you understand that? It’s not about you. It’s just that, while she’s still out there, I need you to be able to trust me, and that can only happen if you know that if I call or e-mail or drop round, it won’t be me. It’ll be her and whatever she says will be a lie.’
‘I’d know her. I interviewed a policeman once who worked with forged banknotes. I asked him how he learned to spot the fakes and he said, by looking at the originals. I’d know you anywhere.’
‘Did Raimundo Soares know? Did any of the people she sambaed past at Canal Quatro know? Did my sisters and my own mother know? No, it’s safer this way.’
‘And how will I know when it’s over?’
‘I haven’t worked that out yet!’ Marcelina snapped. ‘Why are you making this harder for me? I don’t know how any of this is going to work, but I do know that I am a very, very good researcher and it’s time for me to stop being the hunted and turn it all around and become the hunter. What am I hunting? Myself. That’s all I can say about it. Something that looks like me, sounds like me, thinks like me, knows what I’m going to do before I do it, and is absolutely dedicated to destroying me. Why, I don’t know. I’ll find that out. But I do know that if it loo
ks like me and thinks like me and talks like me, then it is me. How, I don’t know either. You tell me - you’ve shelffuls of books out there on everything under the sun. You’ve got a theory for everything: give me one, any one that makes any sense.’
‘Nothing does make any sense.’ Heitor sat heavily on the opposing creaking leather minimalist sofa-cube across the glass coffee table.
‘That doesn’t matter. Do you want to see the DVD again and tell me that isn’t real?’
‘Some error of timing?’
‘Ask my entire development team. They were smoking my blow at the time.’