Marching the dusty ghetto streets of this expired dream, I pass the Macumba candles burning beside plates of oferendas. Bottles of cheap cachaça rum, tobacco and matches laid out on the ground at a crossroads; ubiquitous offerings to those ever-present spirits of the dead—unearthly entities I’ve never seen with my eyes, but who I know in my heart are there, always, moving in silence all around us.
Maybe I could feel them whispering to me from afar, traveling across wormholes and gulfs of time and space and other dimensions; phantom voices calling out to me over the years of my absence from a tangled underworld web of throbbing powers and devices; moving, dancing, laughing, playing, mocking us all, driving men’s mad desires through these sprawling, septic favelas, rolling hills, cracked industrial wastelands, slums, buildings, beaches and barrooms. A shadowy blanket of life; a subtle parallel existence, a World Unknown. Always present. Always there, awaiting my eventual return to the dark, uncharted depths of myself.
I can feel it all again now as I wander these long-forgotten streets—the steady, vital Presence of an obscure, arcane energy field. Something unseen and alive, vibrating behind smiles and laughter, showering the people, my people, with a special grace; that industrial-strength, ironclad Carioca humor, charity and style, twisting mortal flesh into a bulletproof armor of courage and fortitude as they run through their lives here, robbing and killing, fucking and loving, cheating and lying, living and dying, dancing forever in this unforgettable human ballet of hideous beauty, decadent opulence and crawling rat-shit squalor, stench and crazy, hungry, raw, passionate life; Cariocas—this perverse and enigmatic race of people to whom I, Ignácio Valência Lobos, shall now once again belong.
My weathered little Mexican leather traveling bag weighs heavy across my shoulder as I pass a short, stout paraíba sweeping at the sidewalk sssskkk ssssskkkk outside a shadowy little hole-in-the-wall boteco.
Skinny, barefooted mulatto kids kick a dull, deflated rubber ball around a weedy, abandoned dirt lot. A sudden staccato popcorn pow pow pow of gunfire. Two bulky gray-uniformed thugs pushing, shoving, dashing, flashing around a corner behind a darting brown shadow; a bare-chested Negro teenager running ahead, two guns held aloft pow pow pow, just like in a movie.
Nothing’s changed.
This isn’t a movie. It’s just Rio de Janeiro, City of God, in the Year of Our Lord, 2006, and Ignácio Valência Lobos is finally returning home.
Home. Shit. Twenty years gone by like a yellowed old newspaper dream and now I’m back. A no-name stranger returning to a strange old homeless home of rootless gypsy memories. Clean and sober, many years older, a tiny bit wiser even, perhaps. And just for today, this little lost idiot ghost called Ignácio is ready as he’ll ever be to face whatever the fuck comes next.
3. SCATTERED PIECES
“LIFE’S A VOYAGE THAT’S HOMEWARD BOUND.”
—Herman Melville
I settled in to the simple studio apartment fast; the top floor of a weathered, prewar, five-story walk-up in the old working-class neighborhood of Catete.
Moving in consisted of unpacking the meager contents of one small travel bag. I’m used to traveling light. The only thing I’ve ever managed to get right.
After three whole years clean and sober, the time has come to greet the past. Plenty of time tomorrow to shop for whatever items that odd proposition might entail . . . What’s it been, how long now since I’ve seen this place? Twenty-five years?
Vague memories, fragile as cobwebs in a stranger’s crypt, closed in around me as I turned a corner and plodded up the street. Approaching the building where my Tia Silvia had lived and died all alone, I thought of my long-estranged spinster aunt. Maybe the shadow of solitude that covered her like a moldy blanket in life was what gave her the dubious distinction of being the only one of my people who’d managed to sidestep the Curse and die of old age.
A white-haired porteiro shuffled over to greet me at the building’s entrance. Addressing me with the absurd formal title of “Seu Doutor Ignácio,” he graced me with an ancient mulatto smile; that singular, playful Carioca smile putting me right at ease as he handed me the keys to Aunt Silvia’s flat, five floors up.
I stood before the stairway, looking up. No elevator . . . Good . . . Need all the exercise I can get now . . . Been out of shape ever since I got out of prison . . . Then, a step at a time, I climbed the uneven wooden stairs, all the way to the top floor, thinking, remembering, one step at a time, up, up, up to the hoary old conjugado where my aunt had read the cards and buzios, and told the questionable fortunes of lonely, superstitious old Carioca whores.
Even after being expelled from the kumpania, cut adrift from her gypsy roots, she’d always fancied herself a traditional Romani healer, a partragri from the old country. Much to my surprise, Tia Silvia had named me in her will, bequeathing me the one-room studio flat, with its sunny view of downtown, and the crooked green jumble of trees framing a partial view of the bay. She’d even left me a little money; just enough to get settled. That’s what some gadjo lawyer said in an email.
I’d won out by default, of course, being her only blood relative still above the ground here. The rest of the clan were long eating grass by the roots before I’d hopped on a rusty Panamanian freighter and left this oddball half-a-home behind, running like the damned, trying to get away from the Curse that plagued the Valência Lobos. Valência Lobos, the name of my people. My name. My blood.
And what blood! Suicides. Murders. Overdoses. Bad livers. Bad lives. Bad half-breed, half-gadjo, half-Romani gypsy blood. Blood of the Curse, and all that went with it: Jailhouses. Nuthouses. Whorehouses. Crackhouses. Disappointment. Disillusionment. Destruction. Death. A world of sudden, violent death.
I never knew or gave two shits who my father was. My mother did the best she could, for an aging, outcast gypsy whore with a bad name and that bad, bad blood. My whole bloodline laid to waste. All dead from the Curse; brothers, sister, cousins, aunts, uncles. Most gone before I was old enough to know I was alive—all but my mother, Dolores Valência Lobos, and her older sister, Silvia.
My mother had hung in there for a while, but chronic alcoholism is a rabid bitch from the lower realms; and then she was gone too. Dead by the time I was five . . . So much blood . . . Bad blood, bad, bad blood . . . Aunt Silvia was the only family left after my mother went in the hole. Old Silvia tried her best to take care of the kid. But little Ignácio was already broken beyond repair. Tainted. Mahrime.
Tainted by the Curse, he took it in stride, and took to the streets around the age of ten. And he did whatever he had to do to survive. Shoemaker’s glue. I can still smell that shit now. Some memories are there to stay, I guess, in the blood, along with the rest of the mess. The glue did the trick, though, all through my adolescence, till I stumbled onto a bigger, better world of backstreet barrooms and cachaça and cocaine, opening the way to a lackluster career of petty teenage crimes and punishments.
Yeah, I was lucky to survive, I suppose. But I’d always been a survivor, right? Sure, a hardened little gypsy warrior. Cigano guerreiro, that’s me. That’s what the urban street gypsies of Copacabana, who took me in and fed me from time to time, used to call me. And somehow, unlike the rest of my people, I managed to survive all the liquor, and even the hardest of drugs. At least till many years later, working for the syndicate in Mexico, running chiva between Sinaloa and Baja California.
That’s when the goddamn Curse caught up with me again. There were so many “agains” over the years. But that time had been my last. That hell-sent chiva had brought me to my knees for good. Chiva: the Goat. Pure Mexican black tar heroin. The devil’s drooling maw. I’d thought I was riding high there, till I got knocked down, set up to take a fall for some big shot politico. Busted. Prison. Stopped.
I’d crashed and burned and died a thousand deaths in there. And then I was done. Finished. The End. When I got out of jail, I moved into a humble little room in a working-class colonia of Mexico, D.F. I took a shitty factory job
and became a worker among workers, a friend among friends. That’s where I finally got sober. And then, one gut-wrenching day at a time, I did whatever I had to do to stay that way. I stayed that way. Over the next few years, I changed a lot.
So, that’s my fucking story in a nutshell. And here I am now, back again. Right back where the whole gruesome little nightmare began, a long time ago.
Ignácio Valência Lobos. Cigano guerreiro. Wide awake now. Picking up the shattered pieces of a faded, fuzzy little jigsaw puzzle nightmare called Home.
4. SHADOWS OF THE PAST
“DO NOT DWELL IN THE PAST, DO NOT DREAM OF THE FUTURE, CONCENTRATE THE MIND ON THE PRESENT MOMENT.”
—Buddha
At the top of the stairs, I stopped to wipe the sweat from my face and adjust my funny new glasses . . . Still can’t get used to wearing these things! Can’t get used to being over forty . . . When did that happen? Where did my whole fucking life go?
Thinking, remembering, I walked along the dark, empty corridor up to the old apartment. I put the key into the lock. It fit. Squinting, I stepped inside to a sweet, nostalgic smell of mildew. Standing there in the musty shadows, I was hit with putrid scents of a putrid past. Shuddering, despite the stagnant greenhouse heat, I pulled a string to a 40-watt attached to the dusty old wooden ceiling fan.
I looked around the hot little space. High ceiling. A few framed pictures on rough plaster walls. Faces. Landscapes. Getting my bearings, slowly merging into a place of forbidden memories. Bits and scraps of furniture. Same comfortable old leather sofa. Same pair of frayed wicker chairs. The same wobbly mosaic table where she used to do her consultas with the cards.
Recognizing pieces of a past life, putting together abstract memories, my eyes made sluggish contact with other little details, strewn about like frozen ghosts; the tiny kitchen, a small, modern-looking fridge. At the top of a short wooden ladder, a masculine, no-frills loft bed with fluffy feather pillows.
No television . . . Good . . . No time to waste watching TV . . . Time to live, like it’s my last fucking day on earth . . . Yeah, time to outlive the goddamn Curse now.
I ambled over and stood leafing through a pile of old, yellowed books on a dusty shelf, examining them, one by one. Occult Spiritist literature. The Book of Spirits. The Gospel According to Spirits. Allan Kardec. Years since I’ve read anything in Portuguese. After the half-remembered Romani gypsy dialect of my people, Portuguese was always my native tongue. But, save a few random encounters with the odd Brazilian here and there in my travels, over the last twenty years, I’ve only spoken it in nightmares.
Fascinated, I leafed through the old, familiar texts, time-traveling, reaching out for more memories, like flowers in some forbidden garden.
Shit, there it is . . . How could I ever forget this one?
Turning it over, I stared at the back cover: NOSSO LAR: FRANCISCO C. XAVIER’S CLASSIC PARANORMAL SAGA. AN ACCOUNT OF A SPIRIT’S EXPERIENCES IN THE AFTERLIFE. I remembered how I’d once devoured those books, so many years ago, in a foggy, long-forgotten quest for knowledge. As an adolescent, I’d pursued the Spiritist Doctrine and the Umbanda. Seems I’d always been seeking some illusive esoteric relief from the Maldicâo. The Curse.
I could hear a bitter little guffaw emerge from my throat like a ghost as a new wave of vague, uncomfortable recollections crawled up my spine. Maybe I’d pursued all that shit too far for my own good. And now, here I was again, after all these years.
You can run, but you can’t hide, little Ignácio . . . It all comes back around.
I closed the book and wandered into the bathroom. I pissed long and hard, the way a man pisses after a long, demanding trip. As I flushed the toilet, sluggish brown water filled the bowl. I jiggled the handle to jump-start the long-neglected plumbing, remembering the place had sat empty, unused for years. I watched as the bowl filled with clean, clear water. Grinning, I tested the faucet on the yellowing sea-foam-green porcelain bathtub.
Waiting for the rusty sludge to run its course, I went over to stare out a large window in the main room, peering down at the scruffy green plaza below.
Feeling a sudden gasp of claustrophobia, I threw the shutters open wide. Humid tropical air enveloped me like a giant mouth as I stood listening to the city’s lumbering machinery, pounding and humming and buzzing below.
Ship’s horns. Motors. Sirens. Roosters. Dogs barking. People coughing, spitting, shouting, laughing, singing, living, dying . . . And I’m still alive!
Poking around, not much in the way of personal items. Maybe some other lost gypsy ghost had already cleaned the place out of valuables.
Guess that’s what happens when you die.
Whatever. I don’t give a shit. Why should I? I never cared much for televisions or valuables or personal effects anyway.
Who needs all that crap to worry about? What does a man really need? A few good books. Some spending cash. Maybe a girl to pass the time. A pen and paper. Change of underwear, whatever . . . I oughta get a motorcycle, though, as soon as I get a hold of that cash.
Yeah! First thing! Mobility.
Vida Cigana. O lungo drom. The long road to nowhere. Gypsy Life. Freedom.
Yeah. That’s all I ever needed.
Feeling a giddy wave of anticipation, I stride across the little apartment and crack open a rain-spotted wood and glass door. Stepping out onto a tiny, dirt-coated Portuguese-tiled balcony, I stand there awhile, looking around, thinking, taking in the sunny green view. A comfortable view. A blank canvas.
Yeah, just get a cleaning woman to come and mop up a little and it’ll all be okay . . . Yeah. Okay. This is good . . . I can do this now.
The hot, fetid stench of afternoon reminds me that nothing good can be accomplished during the day; that rot, decay and death are the only games in town. Ah, but at night, Rio’s shadows fill with that lazy perfumed lure . . . Saudade . . . I can feel it calling as I close up the apartment and pocket the keys.
I descend the creaky wooden staircase, and then I’m out in the late-afternoon shadows again, traversing the familiar paths of my old home. Walking along, I reminisce, wondering who’s still around, what random ghosts I’ll unearth as I begin this weird archeological dig into the murky back rooms of my life.
The mad, alien chant of the cigarras hisses from a massive ancient mango tree in the plaza as I wander among dim phantom whispers of a long, dragging pre-Carnaval afternoon. Nearing the throbbing downtown sprawl, stumbling through crooked, humming electric memory-gardens of dusk, the muggy air feels tinted with a patina of the past . . . Saudade . . . I move along in a spell, stepping over scattered pieces of time’s broken artifacts, breathing in a magical world of details; crowded shouts rising from dusky restaurants and botiquims; people everywhere, talking of soccer scores and lazy late-afternoon topics of little consequence.
Ragged beggars shuffle shirtless among the outdoor tables of smiling men in thin, crisp business suits, holding gleaming glasses of cold chopp beer aloft, gesturing hands dancing with those well-manicured fingers, tanned on sunny weekend beaches. All the details of Rio are tattooing themselves across my brain again in heart-stabbing, sensual waves of shaking hips; a gay avalanche of lovely female faces, ivory teeth and erotic pink bubble-gum lips, smiling in frozen snapshots of wild expectation and excitement, laughing, yelling, spilling their careless, drawling Carioca chatter out to the sweaty rush-hour winds.
Weary, defeated office warriors and working-class commuters move past under the enormous building shadows, like lost herds of cattle, lumbering along in quiet submission to their poverty. Looking around, I know I’m really, finally home.
Smiling to myself, I stride over to a bus stop, where the big buses marked COPACABANA fly past. A clamoring red and yellow lotacão rolls up to the curb, hissing like a conveyer-belt time machine.
I pull some coins from my pocket and climb on.
5. PRINCESS OF THE SEA
“BENEATH ALL STORIES OF THE WORLD, IS A STORY ABOUT LOVE.”
&nb
sp; —Nick Wong
A ship’s horn booms long and deep and low across the water as I stand looking across the half-moon stretch of white white sand and tall whitewashed buildings.
I wonder like a child at the first lights of dusk, twinkling like a spectacular jeweled necklace on Her Majesty, Copacabana Beach, Princess of the Sea.
My eyes follow the great glowing primal form of a cruise ship, creeping out from behind the granite mass of mountain; an enormous silent phantom, backlit by a purple-red setting sun reflected on dreaming clouds. As it emerges, plodding and surreal, it feels so close, as if I could reach out like Godzilla and snatch up the heady little dream shape. A haze of bottled-up tears clouds my vision; all cabins are alight, glittering like a thousand fairy torches as it lumbers across the water. The warm waves roll in and out, gentle as baby lambs murmuring at my feet.
Like a character in some old black-and-white movie, I’m sitting at a wobbly wooden table by the waves, drinking coconut water from a straw.
Taking in my first night home, the sights and sounds shuttle me back in time, and I envision myself sitting here in this same place, laughing and drinking with friends and lovers, long ago, in another lifetime, another dream.
After prowling the lonesome planet for decades like a crazed ghost, I’m really back. And it feels as if I never left, like an old, potent drug covering me in a rushing wave of invisible water, filling my nose, ears, eyes and skin, as a warm sea breeze blows through me, like a timeless song I have always and forever known.
I watch as a ragged group of mulattos with cavaquinhos and padeiros approach in the early evening shadows, singing to some tourists. Gringos, drinking strong, sweet rum caipirinhas, standing around, getting hammered, grinning like retarded children, laughing at nothing. I close my eyes and listen to the voices and rhythms. I have the old song’s lyrics memorized again by the time the garotos push empty tambourines into pudgy pink gringo faces. I look on as they extort their cash, then weave among the tables like cats in search of a new batch of mice.
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