Narcisa

by Jonathan Shaw

  I could feel a poisonous taste of rancid adrenaline invading my mouth again. I knew the ghetto was off-limits to the cops; as long as we were in there, we were safe from the law. But, sooner or later, we would have to ride back out.

  For now, though, it was cool. The only purpose cops served in the crowded, crime-ridden shantytowns was as target practice for local bandidos. As authority figures, the police in my city had always ranked about as high as garbagemen. In the favelas, even that dubious status was reduced to the level of weak, insignificant annoyances—rats, pest, insignificant vermin to be shot on sight.

  The cops would keep their distance, I knew, clustered around the entrance up on the street, standing safe by their vehicles, guns ready, watching and waiting for the occasional payoff from people like us. Addicts coming out, holding drugs.

  That was what worried me.

  The uniformed scavengers were up there right now, I remembered, looking down through their binoculars, watching everything, lurking, waiting, like a murderous pack of unseen predators.

  55. HOLY ARMED HARMONY

  “YOU WANT TO SAY YOU’RE THE COUNTRY OF THE FUTURE? YOU WANT TO BE THE COUNTRY OF PROGRESS? THEN HAVE IT SO KIDS HAVE A CHOICE BETWEEN A BROOM AND A GUN, SO PEOPLE DON’T HAVE TO PICK THROUGH GARBAGE TO EAT, THEN COME TALK TO ME ABOUT BRAZIL.”

  —Nick Wong

  After a bumpy, sweating, nervous eternity, we came to a little dirt clearing. I slowed the bike and looked around. Legions of poor people were trudging past in the dusty path, on their way to work in the giant asphalt labyrinth below. Men and women dressed in crisp, clean work clothes. Uniforms of janitors and doormen, bus drivers and servants, cooks, gardeners and maids. Children in identical, crisp blue-and-white school uniforms.

  I sucked my teeth and spit in the dirt, muttering under my breath. “Who th’ fuck says they ever abolished slavery in Brazil, eh?”

  On one end of the little plaza was a simple one-story brick building, painted a dirty off-white color, a bit more tidy than the other ratty hollow-brick dwellings.

  I glanced up at the neat, hand-painted sign above the door:

  IGREJA EVANGELICA MUNDIAL DE JESUS CRISTO SENHOR

  Across the road from the evangelist church sat a weather-beaten card table, where a rawboned mulatto youth manned a makeshift open-air office, leaning back in a rusty old metal folding chair. As we approached, Narcisa leapt off the back of the still-moving bike like a cartoon ninja superhero, landing on her feet before a group of amused-looking teenaged bandidos. They seemed to know her face.

  On the table sat a large green plastic supermarket sack, filled with glassine bags and little foil bundles. From the motorcycle, I could read the stamps on the crude homemade labels. Colorful packages of weed. Cocaine. Rock. Crack. Cheap little bags of brand-name Death . . . “Hulk” . . . “Poderoso” . . . “Pancadão” . . . “Boladão.”

  Sitting beside the product was a notebook, and the other usual items. A compact Uzi machine gun. A battered black semi-automatic pistol. Taurus .40. Military police issue . . . Cop killers . . . And those fucking pigs are up there right now, watching us through their fucking binoculars, waiting to pluck us like chickens the minute we ride out of this fucking dump! Great!

  Raising one knee and slapping it twice in some weird ghetto code, Narcisa grinned at the boy at the table. He reached into his bag and handed her a couple of bundles of the rock. She tossed my last fifty down on the table. The kid snatched up the cash and wrote the transaction down in his little ledger. Business as usual.

  Still thinking of the cops lying in wait up on the street, I contemplated an alternative route out of the ghetto drug market . . . Another Great Escape with Narcisa . . . Fuck! Escape or payoff now . . . And no money for a bribe anymore either . . . Straight to fucking jail for me this time . . . Shit! I pictured myself back in the cadeia, fighting for space in a vermin-infested jail cell the size of my apartment, crammed in with a hundred other stinking caged animals, ankle-deep in human excrement.

  My mouth was dry. I could feel the paranoia creeping in again, poisoning my guts.

  Sitting on the bike, I snuck guilty little glances around. The fear was on me good now. I swallowed another mouthful of bitter spit, trying to act cool. But I was wearing panic like a sweaty straitjacket. I hoped it didn’t show.

  Another scrawny, cracked-out kid with pasty mulatto skin and burned-out, jaundiced eyes leaned on a nearby brick wall, smoking a fat basiado. He wore a red and black knit cap and was holding a tarnished 12-gauge shotgun. A battered AK-47 was slung over his bony shoulder.

  Both the lanky bandidos wore flip-flops, colorful Bermuda shorts and stylish, sporty tank tops, just like the rich playboys at the beach in Ipanema. But I knew those swaggering, skinny teens didn’t play. They were working for the dono, the Operator, the Owner, the Boss of their morro—which was surrounded by a huge, tangled complex of other favelas. Each comunidade was separated from the other sprawling shantytowns all around it, only by the rival donos in charge of the drug turf, and the ragtag gangs of scraggly gun-jockeys who ran their retail sales.

  A fragile ecosystem of loosely organized crime.

  All the bosses and teenage soldiers were at constant war now; at war with each other, and at war with the cops; all for control of their respective territories. I knew that all the different police factions were at war with each other there too, over who sold the guns and protection and strategic information to the many opposing factions and their high-rolling ghetto-superstar bosses. The younger lookouts and other wannabe bandidos up there were all at war with each other, as well, fighting for lucrative position, status and rank. Every one of those shirtless little slum rats dreamed of being a dono someday.

  Most wouldn’t live to take a legal drink, of course. It’s a complicated place. Culture shock for the average middle-class Carioca.

  For a majority of Rio’s citizens, though, the shadowy netherworld of the favelas is the only home they’ll ever know. The real culture shock for them is down in streets of the big, heartless metropolis down below; that familiar “other” world. The asphalt jungle. O Asfalto. The Concrete. The City. Rio de Janeiro.

  As soon as you come up into the hillside slums from the city proper, you can feel this weird, subtle shift; the immediacy of a constant, unspoken, life-and-death tension. Paranoia crackles in the air like a dark, deadly electrical current. I could smell it in the hot, fetid wind as I sat there on the bike, waiting.

  On one side of the dusty plaza, a thriving open-air drug market. Across the way, the Gospel Church. The evangelical Churches, like most cultural abominations in Brazil, were imported from North America—straight out of the white-trash Bible Belt of that other degenerate, modern-day Babylon, a direct bull’s-eye strike into the latter-day slave colonies of third-world South America.

  Small churches are big business up in the ghettos, always open at night, when people come straggling home from work, tired, worn-out, beaten, broken, humiliated, spent. At day’s end, favelados have always had limited options for entertainment, after toiling all day at the ass end of the soul-grinding asphalt machine of the city. Most go home and switch on the television novela to numb their minds down to face another day in the murderous capitalist matrix below.

  Others occupy themselves in the raucous open-air botecos owned by the drug bosses. There they can drink cheap cane rum cachaça and snort, smoke and gamble their many cares away, carousing late into the long, sweaty summer nights. Many turn up late for work down in the concrete slaughterhouse the next morning, jittery, hungover, stunned and baffled, with even shittier prospects than the day before—but just as powerless, just as fucked.

  Looking around that smelly ghetto dirt pile, it made sense to me that so many younger favelados would gladly give up on the rat race to join the swelling ranks of bandidos, with dreams of taking the things they wanted at gunpoint. Ambition doesn’t always die in the ghetto; it just takes on surreal, desperate proportions.

  Most of those kids wind up c
old and stiff as a dead dog, of course, lying in a muddy ditch with a mouthful of roaches; often, within their first year living by the gun. Others who don’t make the grade end up in one of the notorious favela “microwaves,” a macabre drug trade practice used to weed out the rats and cowards by stuffing them alive into stacks of old truck tires, then dousing them with gasoline and lighting a match.

  Retribution, I knew, had always been swift and unforgiving up in the hills.

  Living in the shadows of such brutal realities, an ever-popular option for mindless distraction was for sale at a bargain price, right there at the little Gospel Church—a welcoming refuge for honest, hardworking, gullible slum dwellers. A place where they could donate 10 percent of their meager slave-wages to some fast-talking, foaming-mouthed, false-prophet preacher, the self-appointed representative of a pissed-off, Made-in-America, fundamentalist doomsday McDeity.

  The church was doing a thriving business there too, peddling its noxious concoction of spiritual pride, social intolerance and stifling puritanical “morality,” Satan and Evil and Sin. The concept of Evil was something people could surely relate to, of course, in that fear-fueled nightmare stew of soul-stifling poverty, violence and crime. How not, living at the shit end of the Mass-Market Consumer Dream Culture? Such is the day-to-day reality in this Brave New Rio de Janeiro, City of God, in the Year of Our Lord, 2010.

  Just like the drug bosses, the favela preachers had a lucrative racket going for themselves. All that and a big old Made-in-America Day-Glo plastic Jesus on their side too. And they wouldn’t want to mess it all up by pissing off the guys with the big guns, doing business right across the road from their little white church. So everybody just lived and let live—or let die, depending on the time of day—in a tenuous symbiotic coexistence, each gang pushing its own brand of dope or salvation to the masses, and not making waves.

  God-Blessed, Government-Sponsored Holy Armed Harmony had always served the social order well in the land of my birth. A perfect tool for keeping the sheeple in line, and not making trouble for the real Bosses. The Big Boys. The Top Gangsters, those corrupt, reptilian politicos sitting in their clean, air-conditioned offices, sucking the lifeblood of the people, while fixing the larger issues of the republic to suit their own exclusive gangs; selling a nation’s future to the gringo banks, and spending all the money on themselves . . . Living in obscene luxury, while the rest of us gotta limp around in circles in these dirty, ass-reeking slums, like a bunch of broken windup toys . . . Fuck! No wonder Narcisa wants no part of this fucking world!

  As Narcisa completed her transaction, neither of the young drug dealers even glanced in my direction. They knew I was there, of course. Hard to miss a long-haired, gold-toothed gypsy, covered in prison tattoos, sitting right beside you on a motorbike. Still, nobody looked.

  It didn’t surprise me. In that place, a simple look could kill.

  To them, I could’ve been anybody sitting there, armed with grenades and a gun, maybe sent by the cops or the rival donos across the way to start another lucrative turf war. Those boys knew, all too well, that my face could be the last one they’d ever see; and they just preferred not to look. I didn’t blame them. I got it. I didn’t look at them much either. It’s always better that way, up in the hills.

  Her business concluded, Narcisa jumped back on the bike.

  As I rode off, she started slapping my back like a horse again, shouting orders, breathing hot licks of flame into my ear . . . go go go! I gunned the motor as she chattered away nonstop, a crack-maddened radio announcer of doom and obsession, speaking in a language we both knew well. Addiction.

  “Go, Cigano, go, that way down there, turn left, go, go! We gonna go out de other side, go! No policia there now, got it?”

  I got it. The bandidos had tipped her off, thank Christ, to an alternate route out. I grinned, feeling a happy wave of relief as I turned and coasted straight down the hill, safe and sound, away from the cops.

  “Take me to Love House now, Cigano, fast, go go, vai logo, anda, cara, vai-aii! I gotta make de important e’speriment right now, go go go . . .”

  I obeyed with pleasure. Her wish was my command. Narcisa was a benevolent dictator that day, and I was willing to do whatever I had to in order to keep her happy.

  The thought of her going back to Copacabana to spread her long white angel legs for pink-faced gringos in dark hotel rooms by the sea had become intolerable to me, a constant threat to my fragile peace of mind.

  I knew I would do whatever I must now, in order to keep her close, while continuing to hope and pray for our redemption.

  56. VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED

  “IF MISERY LOVES COMPANY, MISERY HAS COMPANY ENOUGH.”

  —Thoreau

  Then, one day, Narcisa disappeared again.

  I’d spent the previous week catering to her every bizarre whim and demand, running her back and forth to the favela at all hours of the day and night, trying to keep up with her mad, crack-fueled metaphysical “experiments.”

  Finally, one evening, my brain twisted into a spiky tangle of sleeplessness, I threw in the towel and let her out of my sight. I simply had to get some rest, so I handed her a few bucks to go out and cop on her own, then I crashed.

  That was the last I saw of her for days.

  Then came the searing mental agony of not knowing if she was dead or alive. More sleepless nights, sitting up worrying, imagining her getting fucked in the eyes by gangs of rabid, drooling gringo sex tourists, and worse. Worried sick, I went out looking for her. I searched all the usual spots. Narcisa was nowhere.

  As a last resort, I decided to take a ride over to Vila Mimosa.

  Could she have sunk so low? I wondered. Could Narcisa really be so desperate and depraved now to have ended up at that infamous lowlife sex ghetto? It was a long shot, I knew, but in her present state, I figured anything was possible.

  It had been ages since I’d been there, but I would’ve known the way blindfolded as I rode through the sleeping downtown streets, past the shadowy dockyards of Praça Mauá and the dark, deserted Praça da Bandeira.

  Making the familiar turn onto the old Rua Ceará, there it was, dead ahead. Vila Mimosa. The end of the line for legions of Carioca whores; the beginning of a new life of debauchery and degradation for emerging generations of bright-eyed young favela girls. An apprenticeship. A brutal, rough-and-tumble initiation into the fascinating, compelling, profitable world of dick.

  Most of the garotas there hailed from the poverty-blighted wastelands of the Baixada, where life is cheap and short for all but those born under a lucky star. The poor in Rio grow such calloused souls that even sex must be fast-paced, clumsy and heavy-handed, like a barroom brawl. Like heat-crazed tropical insects that only live for a day, those girls know they won’t have much time to spread their wings and fly. They have to get their kicks and their dick while they can, how they can, wherever they can. And in Vila Mimosa, there’s always plenty of dick. All sizes, shapes, ages and colors. From the misshapen, throbbing purple bananas attached to sweaty, hardworking garbagemen and construction grunts, to the sleek golden-brown members of well-toned Ipanema playboys, Vila Mimosa is a true democracy of the dick: the land of the fifteen-minute, fifteen-buck, short-time fuck. I rolled along past the darkened little hole-in-the-wall bars on the outskirts, where gangs of outlaw bikers sat like laconic alligators at crooked wooden bar tables, plotting mayhem and glory, drinking beer in the greasy yellow shadows.

  Parking the bike near the entrance to the zona, I strolled on, past the late-night meatpacking warehouses, where sleeping delivery trucks lined the piss-slick cobblestones, waiting for dawn to transport their deathly red cargo to the city’s hungry mouths. And then, there it was, another parallel meat market, a slaughterhouse of cheap, easy, short-time sex. Prostitution’s Heart of Darkness.

  Approaching the chaotic jumble of winking, blinking, trembling, run-down two- and three-story whorehouse dwellings, the pounding cacophony of a hundred competing jukeboxe
s grew louder and more consuming with each step.

  By the time I reached the middle of the action, it was a polluted wave of hellish noise, a distorted doomsday symphony of chaos. The narrow alleys branching off like diseased arteries from the main road were where the action was. As I turned into the first little beco and made my way through that pulsating, demented sperm derby, the giant loudspeakers assaulted my ears from every angle, like a traffic jam on the road to hell. Brushing against sweaty crowds of scrawny, shirtless favela boys, I navigated the lusty human sewer like a nervous ghost.

  On either side of the reeking corridors were cramped doorways, cluttered with flabby, drunk, coked-up, naked meat puppets; misshapen, dark-skinned women and girls, all gyrating to the earsplitting rhythms, like tortured ghosts trapped in unbearable skin bags.

  Here and there, a bold, shadowy hand reached out of the dark human muddle to grope at my crotch, like a greedy monkey grabbing at a banana. Swatting the intrusive claws away like insects, I moved on, deeper into the humid, urine-reeking mist, feeling around like a sleepwalker searching for something that’s gone.

  That’s when I realized I was looking for something more than Narcisa there. Something elemental. Something essential. The past. My youth. These poor, pathetic, sad-faced bitches’ youth. Whatever. I was longing for something. Anything. But there wasn’t anything anymore.

  Nothing. It was all gone now.

  Good times gone . . . And here I am, a lonely old loser, lost in a freaky, obsolete House of Mirrors . . . A living horror gallery of flaccid, naked, tortured human meat with the look and texture of moldy fruit rotting in the pissy tropical air, waiting for the flies, the ants, the cockroach feast to begin . . . Shit.

  I shuddered as I passed another lineup of dilapidated aging hookers. Dull-eyed, crabby old fish-faced legions of the damned, standing around in broken doorways, teetering on sad, cheap plastic heels, dancing their tired-out, sordid gyrations into the dung-colored night. I cringed at the sudden realization that, like Narcisa, perhaps I’d finally managed to corrupt my rusty old soul to the breaking point, that there was really no turning back anymore.