“You know these people?” Larkin asked, wiping his forehead. The day was already wickedly hot, and the heat was only building.
“I come in sometimes with a doctor Tânia browbeats,” Holly said. “My friend, Tânia Ramsay. She helped set up the crêche, and still drags in volunteers. I’m not much of a nurse, but I’m available.”
“Are you?” Larkin asked.
Holly mentally kicked herself, but only smiled. “For all manner of worthy things,” she said.
Larkin gave her a quick glance as he fumbled for a dry spot on his handkerchief. There didn’t seem to be one. He gave up and stuffed the sodden cloth into his pocket, looking peevish.
“I hope I don’t qualify as worthy.”
“Not at all,” Holly replied, and Larkin surprised her by laughing.
“I seem to be a little off-speed this morning,” he said.
What was Larkin looking for, really? He rambled beside her down the melancholy street, taller than any of the favelados, looking rangy on the move, athletic — clearly a runner — but also amused, aloof, noting without apparent concern the heart-breaking details of people’s lives. Catching Holly’s eye, he smiled and lifted his chin at the road ahead.
“The local tourist attraction?”
They’d arrived at the painted house, their neighbourhood folk art marvel. Wanton flowers bloomed across its scavenged boards.
“Monica is quite wonderful,” Holly replied. “A born artistic talent with just a huge personality. We know her because she brings her children to the crêche. Though every once in a while she goes on a bender. We don’t see her for a couple of weeks, and when we go looking, we find the kids running wild. So skinny. She’ll give them junk food and think she’s a good mother because they like it so much. But a diet of sugar. And the diseases — “
Holly paused, having lost her place in the script. It was getting far too hot, and she couldn’t find her way back to the story of Monica’s talent, their hopes for the children, and how much all this cost. As she wiped her face, Larkin waited silently, refusing to help out. All Holly could think of was the diseases; of washing and disinfecting her hands when she got back from nursing tours to pick up her sons at the crêche. She would usually find them playing soccer with the local kids, so much larger and better-fed they looked clumsy as they chased after the ball. Little streaks of local talent always got there first. She’d watch them finish a game through the bathroom window, washing obsessively before calling the boys inside and brushing back their hair; stroking it, feeling a defensive guilt about its healthy shine, and checking surreptitiously for lice.
“When I got home once, I did some watercolour washes like the skin of Monica’s six-year-old boy,” she said. “He had everything — ringworm, impetigo. And he was the most interesting colours. So I did these washes, and then — I’d been working with the children doing hand prints, so I ended up scrawling these outlined hands over top of the washes. Very primitive. Like those ancient paintings on the rocks and caves in Europe. About that texture. My friend Tânia — she’s a painter — Tânia said they’re the best things she’s seen me do.”
Awful as it sounds, Holly thought, pausing again. She could never seem to describe her art. Meaning it was good or bad? Larkin was still looking at her, but it was his turn now.
“Stigmata,” he said. “I’ve done some work with that myself.”
He undid his cuffs and began rolling up his sleeves. Holly didn’t know how he’d kept them buttoned for so long. Then she saw the ropy white scars across each wrist. She prickled with shock, then realized he was showing her the scars. Showing them off.
“One-upmanship, you mean,” she said. Larkin grinned and signalled, Touché.
“Shall we go on?” she asked, and he bowed with courtly irony before walking forward.
Holly had been on this tour often enough to lead the way to its finale. On the far side of an open space, where itinerant vendors sometimes spread their blankets to sell a few cans of cooking oil, or bottles of cachaça, Holly took Larkin into a narrow alley. They were almost at the morro, a hill that swelled suddenly out of the plain like a grey inky outcrop in a Chinese scroll, but busy, webbed with houses, pathways, peoples’ lives; and splintered always with violence. A drug lord ruled the morro. They couldn’t go up. But at its base, where the alley again widened, was something Larkin was clearly beginning to smell. By this time, they’d grown used to the usual favela stench of rancid food and sewage and decay. But this was something else under that, something dusky and ashen that caught at the throat.
“Has there been a fire?” Larkin asked. “My God, I’d hate to think of a fire in here. It would all go up in a minute.”
“Fire’s a real problem,” Holly replied, as the stench grew stronger. A bassoon line for his symphony, she would say, deep and stubborn and rising. Holly led the way around a corner until they saw, not too far ahead, the abrupt face of the morro with a staircase built against it. Beside the staircase was the charred fence that now overpowered everything with its reek of quenched fire. Parts of it were charred, although the burned boards were not all together. One with its edges eaten black stood between two that were completely unharmed, just as they did in the house behind. There, damaged posts supported untouched beams to make a shallow but shadowy porch. Singed planks and painted ones, all odd sizes, were nailed one against the next to build the body of the house. Holly let Larkin slowly realize that there had been a fire, and afterwards every half-sound piece of lumber had been salvaged to rebuild so that someone — the survivors? the arsonist? — could live inside that graveyard smell.
“And people wonder why there’s such a rush on to the Amazon,” Holly said. The crash of cymbals, scorched wood symbols, and now they could go home.
“I’ve been wondering why you do your tour,” Larkin said. “Is this it? To produce a little ecological epiphany?”
Caught out, Holly met Larkin’s eye. He seemed remarkably tall and lean, imposing now, and cleaner than her. She smiled uncomfortably, then with real amusement.
“Actually, no. Todd’s people don’t usually want to see the urban jungle. The ones I bring through are from the local foreign community, people who want to have a look around before giving a donation to the crêche.
“You’re our first artist,” she said.
“I see.” Larkin’s voice was the driest thing around, although as he reached to scratch his back, his shirt clung to his chest as if he’d been performing under the punishing lights of a stage. Holly finally realized what she’d been missing about Larkin. He was wearing stage clothes. The loosely-tailored linen shirt, soft leather jungle boots. She realized she’d never seen any kind of performer wearing what people really wore, even off-stage. She’d been to Beverly Hills once and no one had been wearing what people really wore. But Larkin was supposed to be the audience here, not the performer.
“I seem to feel a little light-headed,” Holly told him.
“Tour’s over, is it?” Larkin asked. He still sounded remarkably dry, and drifted towards the morro stairs like a scrap of paper.
“What’s he after?” Erenilda asked, moving closer to Holly.
“He says inspiration. But I think what he means is stimulation.”
“Take care you don’t give it to him, girl.”
Larkin tested the bottom stair with one foot, looking speculative.
“She doesn’t want me to go up here, does she?” he asked. “I wonder why.”
Holly turned to Erenilda. “What happens if he goes up?”
“Sei lá.” Who knows? An odd expression, actually an abbreviation. “Sei lá no ceu,” they said, which literally translated as, “I’ll know up there in heaven.” After death, presumably. Looking down. “These days,” they implied, “I simply can’t predict, and it exasperates me profoundly.”
When Holly turned back to Larkin, she found he was already ha
lfway up the stairs.
“I’m light-headed, Erenilda,” she said.
“He’s going up.”
“Oh, what the hell,” Holly said, and started after Larkin.
Heading up the flimsy stairs, Holly felt giddy with daring. Was this what she was looking for? Erenilda lumbered after her, muttering that Larkin would get them all killed. Of course, they couldn’t let him go up there on his own. But he’d get them killed, she muttered, to the tune of a beating heart.
The stairs led up a super-heated slope of bare rock into a warren of shacks. Holly stared inside avidly, as any one of these people would have stared into her kitchen, here or at home. She sniffed the mildew, wrinkled her nose at the stench of rancid oil. Defining the odour — the desire to define the odour precisely — made Holly feel like an anthropologist. She noted each slap of a foot on the rock, each hushing mother, every silenced child. Todd said anthropologists had to efface themselves, forcing themselves to become no more than nose and eyes and ears. They were court reporters, not the judge, having to refrain from judgement and let the ambient culture sink into their subconscious so they could understand it on its own terms. What humility the profession must require. What awareness of its own fallibility. Imagine spending your life testing your humility against a stinking awful mess like this.
Todd had lost that one, hadn’t he?
It was a jumbled maze, the morro. Easy to get turned around here. Walking up the rocky path — so steep, now, she could look down on the quilt-like plain of streets and houses — Holly had a dazed sense she was flying. Flying past the favelados on either side of her, who meticulously cast down their eyes. Wasn’t it was dazzling, wasn’t it was strange? With Larkin so drenched with sweat he seemed to slither through the air ahead of her. Or was he shimmering in the waves of heat?
A slop of greasy water landed in their path. Potato peelings. A few stray pieces of beans and rice. Holly looked up and saw an old woman staring out her window with a look of hatred on her deeply scarred face.
“Can I really manage this?” Holly asked.
“I thought that was Erenilda’s job,” Larkin answered. He looked avid, alive, taller than ever, but Holly only felt confused. Potato peelings?
Then she saw the two boys pointing guns, pointing them at her, and after a couple more heartbeats realized the guns weren’t toys.
Erenilda apologized as she stepped in front of Larkin. Holly was inclined to say that Larkin was the one who owed her an apology, then realized Erenilda was speaking to the boys — two gangly teenagers, posing with their weapons. Erenilda kept bobbing at them, like a hen picking grain.
It was supposed to be a simple walk around the neighbourhood, she explained. Sister Celeste had cleared it, even though nothing had ever happened before. But this particular foreigner was far more careless than most. He’d insisted on coming up the stairs, and Erenilda would never stop being sorry that she hadn’t prevented him. But wasn’t it a problem, when she had no idea what he wanted?
“To see the animals, the world of animals,” the taller boy replied. Both boys were immaculate, down to their imported white runners. Their mothers must have scrubbed for hours, Holly thought, picturing two lined women the same age she was.
“Is he a journalist?” the shorter boy asked, nodding at Larkin.
“Stupid,” the other one replied, butting him with the stock of his gun. “You see any cameras?”
“They said he was writing in a notebook. He could be from a newspaper. Stupid yourself.”
The boy cracked a burst of automatic rifle fire into the air. Holly shivered as the concussion echoed into her heels. Brothers, she thought. One mother scrubbing. One precious pair of panti-hose sacrificed for masks. She hadn’t noticed they were wearing masks at first, accepting their flattened faces as the way they were.
“Actually, he’s a musician,” Erenilda said. “They say he writes songs for famous singers.”
“Lulu writes his own songs,” the shorter one replied. Lulu Santos, the rock singer. They were speaking to a hard rock fan. What else should you expect to find on a morro?
I will not laugh, Holly told herself sternly. The taller, older boy looked as if he had never laughed in his life.
“Foreign musicians,” Erenilda said.
As the boys paused to consider this, Holly felt Larkin gently take her arm and urge her forward half a step. She didn’t understand, but he steered her with the graceful, warm insistence of a good dancer. Then she saw him reach slowly for Erenilda, who had placed herself in front of them. He urged her backward; led them both backward down the hill, each step fluid and almost undetectable, certainly hypnotic. The boys watched, but didn’t move, one paralyzed by the pressure of his questions, the other immobilized by his lack of curiosity. Larkin led them downhill like water slowly flowing. Then he took them around a corner, out of sight, and Holly laughed wildly as they ran.
Holly had never known Sister Celeste to be so quiet. She sat behind the old teacher’s desk in her office, hands clasped ostentatiously on top, bag after bag of donated rice and beans slipping off the shelves behind her. She looked so starchy herself that Holly had to stifle her giggles. The giddy relief of having survived, of having got away with it, left her feeling airborne.
“Land, Holly,” she told herself, not realizing she’d spoken out loud until she saw Larkin’s amused eyes.
She asked more soberly, “This won’t hurt the crêche?”
“Sei lá.” Sister Celeste emphasized each word bitterly. But wasn’t there something almost unbearably delightful about a nun knowing someday in heaven?
“Well, here,” Larkin said, fumbling in his pants pocket. He came to stand so close behind her, Holly could feel the heat of him on her back. Half turning, she saw him offer a huge wad of banknotes to the sister.
Holly blanched. “You took that up there?”
“What difference would it have made?” Larkin asked, holding out the bills.
But Sister Celeste refused to take them. She kept her hands tightly clasped, and her mouth looked even tighter. Larkin shrugged, and put the money on her desk.
“What difference did it make?” he insisted, starting to range around the office. They watched him take in the Sacred Hearts, the family education diplomas, the Brazilian and Irish flags. Sister Celeste came from County Cork, but she’d been in Brazil so long that she no longer spoke much English. Even when they’d arrived, and she’d been happy to see him, Larkin and the sister had found communication difficult.
“I thought Holly said you’d left the church,” he said, as he roamed.
“I said she’d left her order, not the church.” Holly replied.
“Might I ask why?” Larkin asked, ending his circular tour in front of the desk.
Sister Celeste met his eyes steadily. “I was unworthy,” she replied. With a great shout of jolly, cynical laughter, she pulled open the top drawer of her desk and swept the money inside.
5
The day was cool. Holly sat in her top-floor studio, spine held rigid as she faced her easel. Everyone knew this was her time for working, although they sometimes forgot and walked in unexpectedly to find her staring blankly at a project. In that case she always told them she was blocked by an artistic problem. Then made one up.
In Holly’s experience, staring at projects neither evaporated problems nor precipitated inspiration. You had to work for that. Yet blanking out this way — staring past the canvas — was her way of getting focused. She refused to explain; it was nobody’s business. Besides, they’d lock her up.
At the moment Holly was trying to cast herself back to 1832, to the Consul’s residence in Rio. She could picture the outside walls, seedy with efflorescence; see the carriage entrance, the liveried servants manipulating the handles, the peeling wooden doors opening in front of her. Yet she couldn’t seem to get inside. Her concentration was off. Th
e courtyard she would normally see as starkly lit by the tropical sun looked smudged today, as if someone had been putting his fingers all over the picture.
Holly closed her eyes. She refused to think about Larkin or dwell on what had happened up the morro. That was yesterday. It was over. She’d been stupid, but she’d survived. Maybe even got away with it. With what? An image, a conjunction of colours? She had to push the experience so far away she’d see only the essentials; what she could use. Surely 1832 was far enough.
Yet only with the greatest effort could Holly force her antique carriage into the courtyard; could she emerge from the carriage like an underwater swimmer and move in slow motion through the cave of a door into the glimmering mirrored halls of her residence.
It is mid-May and the Consul’s wife is returning in good time to receive her afternoon visitor.
But Holly couldn’t remember reading whether May had been cool that year or unseasonably hot. She felt annoyed with herself. She had to get the details right. It was one of the rules, a type of discipline.
Self-discipline.
The Consul’s wife reaches her drawing room and sits down gratefully. Even in her exhaustion, her spine is rigid, her posture perfect against the swanning lines of the gilt chair. She wears the transparent, faintly tinted muslin she has copied from her cousin, Rosamond Vincy of Middlemarch. Footsteps approach. She has not expected her caller so soon, but readies herself to receive the young gentleman just over from Shropshire, a naturalist like her husband, Mr. Austen, who is off on an expedition to the interior.
Holly jumped as the door to her studio swung open and Larkin walked in. She realized she’d heard the bell at the outside gate, heard the sound of the gate scraping open. What a strange thing to do, to incorporate Larkin’s approaching footsteps into her daydream. To hear and not to hear him. She remembered now the sound of someone sprinting up the stairs, and saw that Larkin looked damp and slightly flushed. At the same time she realized her own cheeks were hot from blushing.
Drink the Sky Page 5