Invisibles

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Invisibles Page 16

by Ed Siegle


  At the end of May, Gilberto and Jackie took a bus to Paraty to celebrate her twenty-seventh birthday. It was the first time they’d been away without Joel. Inseparably they roamed the narrow streets, or lay together in a hammock in their pousada chirping stories of their lives before they met. Gilberto hired a schooner and they dived for starfish in the bluest shallows then sunbathed in a circle of them on the beach. On the bus home, as the mountains of Rio loomed, Jackie kissed him and said, ‘Why don’t you see if you can sing one night at A Gaiola?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, with excited eyes. ‘I mean, are you sure – ?’

  ‘We could go together, like the old days. Oh, let’s, Gil!’

  The next Friday they gave Gilberto top billing. Old smiles met his every gaze. There was warm applause as the spotlight lit him for the first time in over eighteen months, and happy murmurs as the band played the first bars of ‘Samba do Avião’ and regulars recalled past nights with this voice at their heart. Gilberto sang three Jobim songs, a slow rendition of a number by Jorge Ben, and finished with a much applauded version of ‘Jardim, Jardim’.

  In a back corner, a portly man sat on his own with a tumbler of whisky and a fat cigar. From his place in the spotlight Gilberto could discern few details of the crowd but he noticed the shape of this man, the peculiarity of his solitude, the fact that he kept his eyes constantly upon him and that he used his hands only to smoke and drink and not to applaud. Gilberto later recalled the irony of the thought that raced around his mind: that here was a real mogul from a record company. Perhaps whispers of his return had slithered from ear to ear, spurring a powerful man to seize his chance to hear the Nightingale again. Gilberto was almost certain he recognised his face. Had he seen his picture in a magazine? he wondered.

  Only later did he make the connection with photographs in Angelica’s apartment.

  The following morning the doorbell rang at five o’clock. Two men in brown suits waited politely while Gilberto and Jackie dressed. Jackie made coffee for the federal policemen and tried to open a vista of friendship, but they would go no further than to state with neutral smiles that the authorities would like to ask a few questions. The men drank their coffee and checked their watches. Gilberto told Jackie not to worry. There was nothing to worry about. He would set matters straight and would see her later. Perhaps she should stay at home in case he needed her to pick him up. He gave her the keys to the Beetle, kissed her on the cheek and left with the men.

  When Jackie arrived home from her walk to Sheepcote, she made sausage, mash and beans, mashing the spuds the way Joel liked to do it – with butter, cream and basil – though it was a bit fancy for her taste. She ate in front of Judge Judy then washed up.

  As she was finishing, the phone started to ring. She dried her hands quickly on her jeans, walked into the lounge, smoothed her hair and picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s Tony,’ he said.

  ‘So it is!’

  ‘Look… I won’t beat about the bush… I think we should cool things for a while…’

  ‘Do you have a period of “while” in mind?’ asked Jackie.

  ‘I mean… for good.’

  ‘That is a long while.’

  There was silence but Tony did not put down the phone. Jackie could not help but think that, if he really wanted to end it, the onus was on him to hang up. She wasn’t going to. Perhaps he was too polite. Perhaps he didn’t want to finish it, even if he thought he did.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jackie. I just can’t see a way –’

  ‘It’s perfectly all right. You don’t have to explain. We’re grown-ups. Why don’t I come over this afternoon and fetch my things?’

  ‘Your things? Right, of course. This afternoon’s no good, I’m afraid, but I’m not sure –’

  ‘Then leave me a message and let me know when’s best.’

  Jackie put down the phone.

  She made a cup of tea and watered the wilting basil plant on the windowsill. She wondered if there was something peculiar about falling for two such very different men as Gilberto and Tony. Did the disparity suggest a lack of honesty about what she really wanted? Did she just like Tony – love Tony? – because he was so different from Gilberto? Was it the difference or the man himself? She hoped she was beyond such crude reactions – at her age, after so much time. But even though she didn’t think about Gilberto every day or even every month, his shadow still fell across her love life. Yet you couldn’t run your fingers across the skin of a shadow. A new skin ought to beat an old ghost every time.

  Joel walked the few blocks to Porcão and took a table at the side of the large windowless restaurant. He watched waiters armed with skewers of meat weave between tables laid with white cloths. He looked hungrily towards a giant buffet. Just as he was wondering if Nelson would come at all, a waiter brought him over.

  ‘Mind if we join you?’ said Nelson.

  With Nelson was an older man with lightly slicked-back hair, a blue shirt and a Panama hat.

  Zemané introduced himself.

  ‘Not your father, I’m afraid,’ he said, and shook hands with Joel.

  ‘A friend of Nelson’s?’ asked Joel.

  ‘More like an uncle,’ said Zemané.

  Nelson put his bag on a chair and Zemané parked his hat. Then they all took their plates to the buffet, which was crowned with a pig’s head carved from a melon. Joel picked up salad and quail’s eggs, some sashimi, curls of ginger and a smudge of wasabi. They returned to the table and Joel flipped over a disc, so that a green cartoon of a pig showed instead of a red one. A circling waiter swooped with a joint of picanha on a skewer. He carved a sliver as Joel held it with a pair of tongs. Zemané tucked a napkin into his collar and spooned rice and beans on to his plate. Joel ordered drinks. Caipirinhas arrived and waiters presented more cuts of beef. Zemané accepted some chicken hearts and Nelson waved over a waiter bearing sausages. Joel took a couple then turned the discs from green to red. Waiters swished passed, their eyes on the discs in case of a change.

  ‘So,’ said Joel, sitting back. ‘What’s the story?’

  Zemané finished his mouthful, wiped his mouth, took a sip of his drink, sat back and said, ‘The business is the following: I saw your father last Friday in Paraty.’

  ‘In Paraty? That’s miles away,’ said Joel.

  ‘In Paraty,’ Nelson said with a nod.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Ninety per cent,’ said Zemané.

  ‘Ninety per cent?’ said Joel. ‘What about the other ten?’

  ‘I’m never a hundred per cent about anything,’ said Zemané.

  ‘So where did you see him, I mean, what was he doing?’

  ‘Walking in the street, sitting in the street… later on he was lying in the street.’

  Joel looked at Nelson and said, ‘What happened to Cantagalo?’

  ‘I guess he must have moved on,’ said Nelson, his eyes darting to Zemané.

  ‘He must have been in Rio last Monday,’ said Joel, ‘because I saw him on the news.’

  ‘I guess he left town,’ said Zemané, and turned a disc to green.

  Waiters carved more slices of rare beef. Zemané ate slowly, as if nothing in the world were at stake. Nelson made another trip to the buffet, before diving on his food again. He cast smiles at Joel, who wondered what to do. It was hard to believe they were telling anything like the truth. He wondered if there were people who could verify Nelson was lying simply from the way he smiled: interrogators or poker players perhaps? To the learned eye a thousand signs… but Joel’s eye was not well schooled and all he could think of was the ninety per cent, though he knew he ought to be worrying more about the ten.

  ‘OK,’ said Joel, and smiled. ‘I’m really grateful for the tip-off. If you could tell me exactly where you saw him, I’ll head to Paraty.’

  Zemané put down his cutlery and turned the disc to red. ‘Why don’t you go with Nelson? He can show you.’

 
‘Do I get the feeling that’s more than a suggestion?’

  ‘Let me sum things up,’ said Zemané. ‘You want to find your father. You’re happy to pay but you don’t want to pay for lies.’

  ‘Obviously not.’

  ‘So, you and Nelson take a trip to Paraty. You pay him just like before – what did you agree – a hundred and fifty a day? Nelson will take you to where I saw the man and he’ll help you look round. Maybe you’ll find him tomorrow, or the next day, or the next. If he doesn’t show up by the end of the week, you stop paying and carry on alone… Are you understanding?’

  ‘All right, I get the picture, but –’

  Zemané held up his hand. ‘Of course, when we find him, there’s the reward your poster mentions… I expect you had a sum in mind?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Joel.

  ‘Shall I tell you if you’re close?’

  ‘I’m guessing it’s more than I intended,’

  ‘How about two thousand reais?’ said Zemané.

  ‘You must be bloody joking!’ said Joel. ‘Do I look like an idiot?’

  ‘Just over seven hundred pounds,’ said Zemané. ‘Not a bad price for a father. I bet you earn more in a week.’

  ‘That’s not the point –’

  ‘I think it’s a fair price – fathers are in short supply these days.’

  ‘I preferred Nelson’s prices, personally.’

  ‘My friend prefers mine,’ said Zemané.

  ‘I thought he was your nephew,’ said Joel.

  ‘Nephew, brother, friend,’ said Zemané. ‘It’s all the same to a Carioca.’

  Nelson shrugged and smiled apologetically, as if to indicate he would have cut a more generous deal.

  Two thousand reais, thought Joel. What did they take him for? Maybe he could afford it, but it was a lot of money to ask. Ninety per cent certain: were he a betting man he still wouldn’t take the odds… but could he turn down any possibility of finding his old man? Besides, Joel would only have to pay if they did actually find Gilberto, so perhaps it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. It might be a lot of money, but nothing compared to the prize.

  ‘OK,’ said Joel. ‘Two thousand – if you take me to him, in person, no stunts. All on delivery – not half now, half later – and nothing if you fail.’

  Joel held out his hand. Nelson looked at Zemané, who nodded, so Nelson shook.

  Zemané turned a disc to green and waiters descended. The three of them ate more meat, with rice and beans and chips and cheese-bread. When they’d eaten their fill, a waiter took their plates, and another wheeled a dessert trolley to the table. They chose puddings. Zemané ordered a brandy and lit a cigar. They talked about Flamengo’s recent results and the latest news on Sandro and the hijack. Joel tried to find meanings hidden in their words and glances, without success.

  When they had all finished, a waiter brought the bill. Joel glanced at Zemané, who showed no sign of paying for his friend or nephew or himself, so Joel paid for the three of them. Zemané thanked him for his generosity, wished him the best of luck, then ambled to the door. Joel and Nelson followed shortly afterwards and walked to the front of Tiffany’s. Nelson wanted to ask if he could stay, but feared his credibility might be diminished if Joel knew the gravity of his predicament, so, telling Joel he was staying with a friend in Cantagalo, he headed instead for the lake, and followed its shore until he found a suitable bush. It had been a few years since he’d slept under branches, and it made him think of the life his sister led after she ran away. It made him ache to think of her sleeping without walls to protect her, without a roof to shelter her pretty head. It hurt more than anything to know he hadn’t been there when her moment had come.

  Seven

  Jackie sat in a deckchair in the garden. She read a book, drank tea and checked the signal on her mobile often. She wondered how long it would take Tony to call. There wasn’t much to pick up: a bracelet she’d taken off to replace with one he’d bought her, a red bikini she’d worn while she watched him garden, a pair of leather gloves, a book she’d finished and three bossa nova CDs. It was always handy to leave a few things at a lover’s house.

  She didn’t think he’d leave it very long and, in any case, this minor torture was nothing next to the disembowellings of the past: to have a husband in prison, probably maimed, possibly dead, while you feared every knock on the door of your sweltering flat and tried to pacify a child who only wanted his daddy back. She had received one letter during Gilberto’s first stint in jail. She’d found it sitting quietly in their mailbox in August 1970, over two months after his arrest, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a letter to arrive from a man she’d thought she might never see again. The letter was written in black ink on fine paper decorated with leaves and oranges. Having been petrified on his behalf, having been tormented by a lack of news, having spent days berating staff at police stations and government offices, it felt absurd to receive a letter of such elegant appearance.

  Gilberto wrote that, upon leaving the flat, the two men in suits had shown him into the back of a van, in which there were two more agents. There were no windows, though weak light from the windscreen half lit the indifferent faces of his captors. Gilberto had tried to memorise their route but it was hard to see much from where he sat and he soon lost track. The agents had chatted about football and plans for the weekend as if Gilberto were not there. As the van stole him further from home Gilberto remembered his casual remarks about repression – a cloud he’d assumed would sit overhead for a while but rain only on others – and felt sudden sympathy for imprisoned artists, solidarity with missing writers. He felt for the Bahians. He feared he might vomit.

  As Jackie read the letter, she wondered how it could have arrived in such a pristine state and how a man suspected of agitation – she assumed this was the charge – could be allowed to post such thoughts?

  An agent had taken Gilberto’s arm and pulled him roughly out of the van. Gilberto remarked on the peculiarity of being handled with hostility and realised that in the course of his life he’d been touched a million times with Brazilian affection but never once by a man who meant him harm. He was made to sit in a corridor on a plastic chair, where he waited for hours, ignored by passing soldiers and clerks in spite of requests for a glass of water. Once a soldier had taken him to the bathroom, remaining behind him as he peed. At the end of the day he was taken on a long ride in another van with two military policemen who told him not to look at them. They talked about a new lieutenant nicknamed Martelo – ‘Hammer’ – who’d made a malandro sing like a bird the night before. Gilberto wondered if they knew he was known as the Nightingale. He kept his eyes away from the eyes of the guards but it was hard not to look at their black machine guns. He had the feeling that even to touch them would hurt.

  Gilberto was marched though a compound with one guard in front, and another behind nudging a gun in his back. He was taken into a block four or five storeys high, the outside of which was studded with lines of bars through which black arms flailed like antennae. He was ordered to empty his pockets, remove his watch and take off all his clothes except his underpants. He was kept standing as papers were examined. There seemed confusion over his category and, although the soldiers were in favour of putting him in one of the large cells with the malandros, the sergeant decided that even if the reasons for his incarceration were not typical, were unclear even, it was preferable to lodge him with the political prisoners in the solitary section, since the papers had been signed by the major, and the sergeant didn’t want to be responsible for spoiling the prisoner, in case the major had his own plans.

  For two months, Gilberto lived in a cell just long enough to lie down in, with a dirty mattress and a dribble of a shower in a corner beside a toilet which was often blocked, making it hard to escape a stench of shit. The heat was almost unbearable, with only a tiny window high on the wall and a hatch in the door for ventilation. He was fed a chunk of hard bread and a mug of coffee in the morning
, water every now and again, and a slop of chewy meat and beans at lunch, into which the more humorous guards would sometimes drop a cockroach – though after a while he retched no more from the embellished food than the unadulterated. Some of the guards would talk to him through the hatch – about Flamengo, the news, their families. Gilberto loathed hearing them speak about their children. Others would talk of how they were going to put him in with the malandros and tell them he’d raped a little girl. Sometimes Gilberto was able to talk to those in neighbouring cells, though the teacher on the left would only talk about God, and a journalist on the right was taken away crying one night. After a while Gilberto started talking to himself, taking on the role of Jackie or Joel, imagining them in the Botanical Gardens on a Sunday afternoon after lunch at a churrascaria. Joel would talk about school or Flamengo, or they would plan the promised trip up Pedra da Gávea. Gilberto swore that when he was released they’d buy a compass and a map, pick the perfect day and tackle the ascent – just as soon as he put on a bit of weight again and built his strength up. Jackie promised to cook his favourite meals: fricassê de galinha or cabrito à caçadora with mountains of farofa and cheese-bread still warm and sticky in the middle.

  Every few days Gilberto would be taken out of his cell and marched round the compound with a gun at his back. Once or twice he was allowed to sit on the grass in the sun. He took great interest in the hazy blue shapes of mountains on the horizon and tried to write a song in his head about the longing for freedom they inspired, but all he could conjure was an endless string of notes which refused to settle into a melody. One day he was led at gunpoint into a low building in which a radio was playing Bach, where a tall lieutenant handed Gilberto his clothes. When Gilberto had dressed he was shown into an office and told to sit in a chair behind a broad mahogany desk. A soldier stood in a corner, holding a machine gun across his chest.

 

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