Sexile

by Lisa Lawrence

  A desperate run from the front door with the girl in my arms, mother and son in tow. Beatriz sent a hail of bullets to cover us.

  Don’t ask me how we got out of there. Lady Rambo would say “This way’ or tell me “Go here,’ and I barely kept track. The mother was sobbing and praying, and it was the little boy with the instincts of a small fleeing animal who consulted back and forth with Beatriz in Portuguese and enlisted a couple of trusted friends to let us cut through their homes. His family was known here. Beatriz was known here. I was a stranger.

  At the bottom of the hill was a large van, and Beatriz lost all her composure now. She tossed me the keys to unlock the door and yelled go, go, go, get in. As if we really needed coaxing. We jumped in while she swung the heavy rifle left to right, not knowing if Georgie and his pack were hard on our heels.

  “Beatriz!’ The little girl couldn’t wait.

  I held her in my arms as my new cranky best friend gunned the engine and drove us out of there, the little boy chattering, the mother still crying, but now in low and mournful sobs. Beatriz said something to her over her shoulder. It could have been It’s going to be all right, but it might just as well have been Be quiet, trying to concentrate here. The tone was even, not quite brusque, but there was an edge to it. She was what an American friend called a hard broad.

  After fifteen excruciating minutes, she pulled the van into the drive with the bright sign for PRONTO SOCORRO, and then I handed the little girl over to her mother at the hospital’s sliding entrance doors. The little boy looked up at me, his dark eyes very sad, as he said: “Obrigado e desculpa …‘

  I understood him thanking me. But desculpa? Telling me he’s sorry?

  It was surreal and grotesque. As if Beatriz and I were a callous Thelma and Louise pair belonging to another criminal faction—as if our brutal intrusion into their lives had to be interpreted as their fault, for form’s sake. Lest we come back. Lest we punish them. I found myself kneeling in front of the little boy.

  The mother called for him to hurry to her side, and I kissed the boy’s forehead and told him: “No, no! Desculpa, desculpa.’ Trying to make him understand—I wasn’t part of the factions in the favela.

  He ran to his mother, and Beatriz yelled at me to get back in the van. “Okay, we go! She get cared for at this place, okay? We can’t stay here!’

  I’ll probably never know if the girl lives, I thought. I hoped she would. Let her survive this and be whole.

  I was quiet for a few minutes, barely noticing that Beatriz was driving back to the favela.

  “Hey, whoa! What’s going on? Where are we going? You can drop me off here, and I can—’

  “You will be dead the minute you step foot in your hotel room,’ she snapped. “Listen, honey—’

  Why did the folks with guns have to talk like a bad Hollywood movie?

  “It’s great you kill Luis Antunes, but you are…What is word?…Amateur. They know you, and they will wait for you at your hotel.’

  I wasn’t convinced of that, or at least I didn’t want to be. I had checked in as Susan Braithewaite. “I’ll be fine.’

  “Do you joke?’ she sneered. “You are black!’

  “I’m African,’ I said. “And so what?’

  “I see no one explain you the facts of life.’

  Getting tired of this. I fell back on sarcasm. “I thought Brazil’s supposed to be this big happy ethnic mix!’

  Beatriz scowled. “You try marry a white man or get a good job, gringa! I don’t care you change name when you check in at your hotel—they don’t see many confident black chicks from Britain. Try. They know where you stay.’

  She had a point. I watched the morros getting closer. She couldn’t drive the van into the narrow favela streets, so if I needed to bolt and part company, I’d have my chance. But Helê said this Beatriz had her own reasons to try to kill Marinho, and if I could avoid getting my head blown off, it might be worthwhile finding out her story.

  So these were the “facts of life’ according to Beatriz—or at least the facts of the favelas. Most of the blacks of Rio and São Paulo lived in them. There was, according to her, no black middle class to speak of, and in fact, the old “lighter you go, the better things are’ rubbish went on here. In the country that has the largest population of African origin outside Africa itself, black pride fought a war for hearts and minds with the adoption of “white culture’ and trying to jettison your heritage. Race was Brazil’s dirty little secret. The multihued citizens may always smile on the beach in travelogue television, but miscegenation had originally been a tactic practiced with a vengeance to divide African slaves.

  This was the last country in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery and when it did, there wasn’t even “forty acres and a mule’ for those freed. With no legal and financial access to land, black people drifted to the cities and built their houses in the morros: the favelas. “In Brazil, we don’t even have racism as a criminal charge that deny bail until 1988,’ said Beatriz. “No one think it a big enough problem.’

  So never apartheid here and no Whites Only bathrooms, but there was no need. “Society can take care of it with a word,’ my guide informed me, cranking the steering wheel hard. People could—and still did—put you in your place. I got the idea. Poverty, the average white Brazilian would say, is the big social problem. Then you looked hard to see who lived in the favelas, which literally rested across the street from upmarket luxury homes. Beatriz drove the van past the invisible boundary, an uncanny juxtaposition. You didn’t even need to throw a stone. My God, the big rich houses sat a few feet away from the slums.

  Later, much later, I clicked on the BBC news site, which informed me that Rio alone has 752 favelas, with more than eighteen percent of the population living in them. Incredible.

  Up in the honeycomb of brick and metal shacks, the crime barons and parallel powers ruled. “The gangs have weapons the army don’t even have!’ And teaching them how to use those weapons were refugees from the civil war in Angola. “How you think I learn?’ Even before I tipped off Marinho by drawing attention to myself, Beatriz said, one of his lookouts probably flew a kite to warn the gang. It was the tactic used when the police came to make a raid.

  “So where are we going?’

  “The other side of the favela where we’ll both be safe, and things calm down,’ said Beatriz, staring darkly at the shanty town. “Tonight you stay with us. Tomorrow you can help me with a chore I have to do with my boyfriend.’

  “What’s his name?’

  “He’s British like you. His name is Graham Bailey.’

  ♦

  She didn’t notice how quiet I got, sitting next to her as she drove along. For a long while, I couldn’t listen to her steady monologue, too busy feeling hurt, thinking what a fool I was to be inspired by the instant attraction, the sudden connection I had with Graham. He has a girlfriend. Damn it. Well, we’d have much to discuss next time we met.

  Finally I pulled my head out of the dark thunderclouds and tuned in to Beatriz, who was rolling out some of the details of her life. She’d come to this particular slum, known as the “Favela do Buraco,’ as a naïve, insipid girl from the country, manipulated into a life of prostitution by a cafetão, a pimp. He told her she owed him a large financial “debt’ for letting her stay with him—then raped her and turned her into a whore.

  But Beatriz’s life was, relatively speaking, better than that of other girls forced out on the street. Her beauty was worth call-girl customers, rich ones. She actually took lessons in English to help her to communicate with johns. Then her luck got worse. Her cafetão “sold her debt’—in effect, sold her—to Henrique Marinho.

  “Marinho always a pimp!’ declared Beatriz, spitting out the window. “You know why he go into porn? Math.’

  “Math?’

  “Marinho wish to be respected. To be a cafetão, no matter how big his house, how many fancy chair and sofa he buy, he cannot do that. So he look at math. I hear him sa
y this in front of friends one day. Girls who sell themselves on the street still need to eat at least once a day, must look pretty, can complain and whine and like that, okay? But a few girls—told how to behave, who only have to fuck now and then—they can bring in thousands, no, millions from fools who watch them and jerk off. Then he say: ‘Fuck it, we do both.’”

  A cold bastard, yeah. Definitely sounded like him.

  “That’s when you escaped, isn’t it?’

  She parked the van and switched off the engine. “He’s a monster.’

  “Luis Antunes wasn’t. When he learned about the girls being used in movies he fled to Britain.’

  “Don’t be stupid. He go there to make more money— money for him and Marinho.’

  “Listen to me, Beatriz. I was hired to investigate him, and I found out the truth. He didn’t use sex slaves in his movies there. If anything, you lost an ally in London, not an enemy.’

  I rolled out the whole saga, and to her credit, she sat and listened without interrupting. She had never heard of Helê, but she remembered Antunes had married a young girl from Rocinha. When I told her how Luis and Helê had tried to rescue Matilde, how I had brought the poor girl out of a dungeon back to her friend, Beatriz swore under her breath in Portuguese, her face going pale.

  “I almost killed him.’

  “Yes, I know,’ I said tartly. “You can’t go in guns blazing to every situation. You don’t know who’ll get hit…’ I started to think about that little girl. Please be okay.

  “Oh, yes?’ said Beatriz, lifting her chin defiantly. “So you say I can’t go bang-bang against a pig like Marinho?’

  “I’m not saying don’t go bang-bang, I’m saying find out first who’s caught in your crosshairs.’

  She didn’t understand the reference to crosshairs, and I pointed to the rifle scope. She laughed and chattered something fast in Portuguese. Eureka. “Oh, I see, I see.’ With perfect timing for gallows humor, she added, “You not worry. I make very sure to kill the right man who drive this truck.’

  Lovely.

  She drove us to her safe house on one of the fallen-soufflé mounds of the favela. As the van rolled up, I heard the rattle of at least a dozen unseen rifles being lifted and taken off semiautomatic fire to full auto. Click. Click, click, click, click, click. Jeez, I had trouble keeping the emotional pieces together after only weeks of looking over my shoulder—couldn’t imagine a permanent life of bunker mentality and paranoia.

  Beatriz jumped out and offered a hug to a scruffy-looking guy playing guard, then a girl, and she rattled off a set of quick introductions. I instantly forgot all their names, too many to keep track. Her men were ex-drug addicts and petty thieves. Some had escaped the ranches where there was debt slavery. Most of the women were once prostitutes indebted to Marinho or some other gang. Rescued and recruited. I soon picked up how Beatriz played mother or big sister to all of them.

  In a ramshackle house, much like the one belonging to the family of the little girl who had been shot, Beatriz supervised cooking of a communal meal. Black beans, rice, vegetables, smoked sausage and salt pork … I watched her dart back and forth from counter to sink, passing utensils and bowls, all while making suggestions (giving orders?) in Portuguese to her brood and then switching back to her stream-of-consciousness lecture for me.

  “Cooking for family is like cooking for army,’ laughed Beatriz. And I thought: Yeah, and you have both. “You wonder why we all together, why we don’t go back to our homes, back to the countryside. What would we do there? Work jobs for shit? And then types like Marinho put us back in debt? What, make babies?’

  “Have a normal life,’ I offered with a shrug, “instead of playing Robin Hood.’

  “Robin…?’ She didn’t get that one either. One of the men did, miming a bow and arrow, and there were peals of laughter in the kitchen. Instead of reading a criticism into it, they took the reference for a compliment. Of course. How could working a pitiful plot of land or raising children compare with this amateur revolutionary life? It was one where they each finally got a say, had a measure of control. And getting shot at brings its own rush. But you can’t run on the fuel of adrenaline constantly.

  I noticed after a while that many of her followers had drifted out of the kitchen and even out of the living room beyond. I looked to Beatriz questioningly.

  “Oh, they’ve gone to pray,’ she said absently.

  Hey, this is one of the most Catholic nations in the world, I reminded myself.

  “What, is this a holiday or something?’

  Not that I know much about Catholics, but they had seemed to all go together. Beatriz shook her head no.

  “You don’t need to pray?’

  “I go later,’ she said, stirring rice. “They don’t like to wait for me, because I take so long.’

  “You have a lot to ask God?’

  “Other way around,’ she replied, and she enjoyed my reaction.

  “For the longest time I was an atheist.’ She laughed. She said it like a young woman recalling her childhood, as if telling me that for the longest time she collected Barbies. “It make no sense to me in holy texts how women are treated—we are stupid, we are second, we must be told what we do.’

  “But now you believe in God again,’ I prompted gently.

  She paused a moment from the cooking and said, “God make no sense without war—without war for what is right. We here to struggle, you see? Every animal, every tree, earn its place. And if you must earn your place—it is natural, yes? You can only earn it by doing what is right, and then God save you. They dump my ass at thirteen in a lorry and take me to fuck how many guys a day. Because I was stupid and let them take me. Years! Years of that life until I shove a corkscrew in the chest of one guy to run away from Marinho. I tell myself: Now you are strong enough. Now you smarten up. We give birth because we women are strong enough. We raise children because we are secretly the stronger. But we must stop being stupid. We must lead the war for what is right, the war to take down bastards like Marinho …’

  I stopped paying close attention. I’d heard some of this before, the masochistic notion that we are only given the burdens we can handle. Maybe she needed the world to make sense this way, this weird mix of “evolve or die’ with the line that God really loves you after all, baby, you just have to try harder. Yeah, right. She saw the skepticism in my face.

  “You think I am peasant.’

  “I don’t think anything of the kind.’

  But I was lying. I did feel a twinge of condescending superiority, doubting she’d ever had a chance to be properly schooled. The old liberal conceit: People will surely believe what you do if they learn more.

  “I read,’ snapped Beatriz. “I read plenty when I learn English. I read about Joan of Arc, about Russian women— Stalingrad—fierce soldiers. I see the movie about it on DVD. I read about God to see if I’m wrong.’

  “I’m not saying you’re wrong,’ I answered. “I’m saying I don’t know. That’s all I can ever say. I think that’s all any of us can say if we’re completely honest.’

  She was dismissive. “Oof! People who say they don’t know—they just don’t like churches and temples.’

  “I like churches and temples fine. My experience is: you know the people who admit they don’t know? They tend to not like guns. Yeah, I’m in their camp. Both feet.’

  Religious arguments were always a waste of time. I already knew how volatile she was, and since I was a house-guest for the evening, it would be stupid to offend her. Had to admit she was casually fascinating, this hyperactive bandit and rape survivor, and it was easy to see the charisma that influenced the others.

  Her followers drifted back, and we ate our meal, washed up, and then Beatriz surprised me by saying her group wanted to check out a baile funk (a funk party, as the locals call it). It was being held on the edge of the favela in safe territory for her people. It struck me as strange, like a group of students wanting to see a live band, but I tho
ught, okay, they can’t be bandits twenty-four hours a day with this Marinho vendetta, raiding brothels and robbing gangster businesses. They all lived together, and if individual hopes and dreams were abandoned long ago, there must still be a communal urge to seek some normalcy. Have a beer. Listen to some music.

  Funk carioca. Brazilian funk. (Hey, don’t ask me how to categorize it, I heard heart-attack thumping dance music, and some people compare it loosely to Miami Bass, but that’s way oversimplified for me.) It pounded out of enormous speakers in the bare-bones shed of a venue. Beatriz explained how the bailes had started in the middle-class districts of Rio thirty years earlier and had slowly migrated to the favelas, so that now you found the parties all over the place.

  Like everything else in music, it seemed to be constantly changing, getting an edge like proibidão, the hard-core stuff that slammed the cops, or the newer funk that had explicit sexual lyrics, and on it goes. Maybe this had started as Brazilian black culture, but everyone was welcome now, white middle-class kids dancing away with young people of every brown hue. No one gave a damn what you were here.

  I watched the members of her little army shake it and dance, and I weighed the idea of slipping away and trying to get back to my hotel to confirm if Marinho’s creeps were really waiting for me, or if I could at least sneak in to collect my belongings and check into another spot. Probably wouldn’t go down well with my hostess, and to take down Marinho, I needed all the friends I could get. Well, perhaps I could suggest a couple of her people come with me for the task. I found Beatriz out back, finishing up some sort of meeting with a guy in an open-necked white dress shirt and beige slacks who did his best to stay in the shadows.

  I got a reasonably good look at him—prominent nose, deep-set eyes, and a thick mustache. He looked vaguely Turkish or Arabic, and he glanced once in my direction with a look that said I wasn’t welcome. He made a curt nod to Beatriz before he turned to go.

  “So you didn’t just come here for the music,’ I commented.

  “Oh, I like the music,’ she replied evenly, about to float back to her friends.