Brasyl (19 page)

The peças hauled, and
Fé em Deus
crawled along
the vast river. Falcon watched Quinn sit with the destroyed woman, at
times talking to her, at times reading his Spiritual Exercises with
fierce concentration. Falcon tried to sketch in his expedition log
his memory of the boat-town. Planes, angles of mist and shadow;
meaningless, hieratic.
This is a river of fear
, he wrote.
The
refined soul naturally veers from melodrama, but Brazil turns
hyperbole into reality. There is a spirit here, lowering, oppressive,
dreadful. It saps the heart and the energy as surely as the monstrous
heat and humidity, the ceaseless insects, the daily torrential
downpours; rain warm as blood that yet chills the bone. I find I can
almost believe anything I am told of the Amazon; that the boto is
some mermaid-creature that rises from the river at night to take
human lovers and father pink-skinned children; of the curupira with
his feet turned the wrong way, deceiver of hunters, protector of the
forest. On these hot, sleepless nights it is too easy to hear the
uakti, vast as a ship, hasting through the night forest, the wind
drawing strange music from the many fluted holes throughout its body.
And what of the woman-warriors after whom this river was (mis)-named,
the Amazons themselves?

The shadows grew long, the swift dark came down, and
Fé em
Deus
resounded with the cries and noises of a ship anchoring for
the night. Falcon felt old, thin, and fragile as a stick in a
drought, close to his own mortality. The figures in the aft deck,
darkest of all, ink on indigo. The palm oil wicks in their terracotta
pots drew studies of Quinn's face as he ministered to the dying
woman. Falcon knew well the hand gestures, the motions of the lips.

Quinn came forward for a fresh breaker of water and Falcon said
softly, "Did you administer extreme unction to that woman?"

Quinn ducked his head. "I did, yes, I did."

The fear that he too was no more than a notch on a belt running
through this airless, blood-fueled mill kept Falcon from easy sleep,
but as the immense, soft southern stars arced over him, the gentle
sway of
Fé em Deus
on the current sent him down into
dreams of angels, huge as thunderheads, moving slowly yet
irresistibly along the channels and tributaries of the Amazon, their
toenails, the size of sails, drawing wakes in the white water.

In the morning the postulant was missing from the ship.

"You were with her; how could this have happened?" Falcon's
voice was an accusation.

"I slept," Luis Quinn said simply, mildly. Falcon's temper
flared.

"Well where is she, man? She was in your care."

"I fear she went into the river. The acculico was used up. In
the madness of her torment she may have made an end of herself."

"But that is desperation, that is a mortal sin."

"I trust in the grace and mercy of Our Lord Jesus Christ."

Falcon looked again at his companion. He wore again his simple,
unaffected black habit and skullcap and his face a set of resigned
concern, spiritual distance, sorrow, and inevitable loss.
You lie
, Jesuit, Falcon said to himmself.
You were complicit; she
confessed that final, mortal sin to you and you absolved her. You did
not stop her. Did you even help her? From her hammock, to the side,
over the rail into the kind water?

"I bitterly regret my inability to save the sister," Quinn
said as if reading Falcon's doubts. "I shall pray for her soul
and repose when we reach São José Tarumás and
for myself do penance. For now, by your leave, my Spiritual Exercises
have been neglected and I must attend to them."

The adherents of Santo Daime drove good cars: Scandinavians, Germans,
high-end Japanese. They were parked ten deep around the private gym
in Recreio dos Bandeirantes. Valets cleaned windows and vacuumed
interiors; their fresh wax finishes hugging the yellow parking-lot
lights to their streamlines. Private security with berets and their
pants tucked into their boots patrolled in pairs, hands resting
lightly on light automatic weapons. A woman with her blonde-streaked
hair scraped painfully back beneath her green beret inspected
Marcelina's letter of introduction three times. Her cap badge carried
a crest of a mailed fist clutching crossed lightning bolts. A little
excessive, Marcelina thought. She took Marcelina's PDA and cellular.

"No pictures."

Her colleague, a shave-skull thug, harassed the taxi driver, checking
his license plate against his hackney license, mumbling intimidating
nothings into his collar-mike. Marcelina loathed security. They had
bounced her our of too many and better gigs than this. But in the
scented cool of the parking lot she heard the drums sway on the heavy
air and felt the rhythms of the Green Saint begin to move her.

Her letter was again inspected in the lobby by an abiá with a
white cloth wound around his head in a loose turban. He was a very
young, very pure alva. Marcelina suspected it was so for most of the
iaos of the Barquinha do Santo Daime. He had no idea what he was
reading.

"This will get you into the terreiro. After that it's up to you;
my favors are all used up."

Go somewhere once and you will go there again. For the second time
that week Marcelina had arced out over Guanabara Bay to receive
herbal tea in Feijão's humid, scented bower. She had let the
porcelain Japanese bowl sit untouched on the low plastic table before
her.
Did you drug me? did you feed me holy secrets?
But she
felt that Feijão might have been close for some time to the
Barquinha; some fissure had taken place and he had called in an
uncomfortable debt. Such intrigue for a disgraced goalkeeper.

Exu, Lord of the Crossings, stood on either side of the futsal
court's double doors; cheap poured concrete effigies of the deity in
his malandro aspect: a grinning preto in a white suit and Panama hat
and shoes, garishly painted. Marcelina pushed open the doors. The
drumming leaped in her face.

Marcelina adored the frenzy of Rio's homebrew religions; at New Year
she loved to step out the front door of her apartment block and lose
herself in the chaos of two million pressing souls on the Copacabana,
throwing flowers into the waves as offerings to the Lady of the Sea.
For a week after, the beach stank of the rotting petals cast up on
the strand, but Marcelina would swing barefoot through them, sensing
through her bare feet the water-memory of madness. The truest
religions were the ones that most deeply kissed the irrational, the
ecstatic, and in that Santo Daime was less ridiculous than many. The
mood in the room was taut, breathless, alien. She knew that the
worshipers had been drumming, dancing, spinning since early evening.
It would not be long now. She only needed to be there for the third
act.

She found a place at the low curving wall of the futsal court among
the shuffling, hands-raising devotees. As a dancer in the center of
the court spun back to the walls a worshiper, eyes closed, would
spiral out to take his place, bare feet rucking up the carefully laid
plastic sheeting.

Marcelina knew what that was for.

All the worshipers wore some measure of white; the headcloth as
minimum for the abiás, a white shift in what looked to
Marcelina like shiny, ugly, static-clingy polyester for the
initiates. She would have felt conspicuous but that the worshipers
had been spun so far out of themselves by two and a half hours of
drum and dance that they would not have noticed Godzilla. Not so
conspicuous, though, as an elderly, black ex-goalkeeper. She scanned
the room. White meat, whiter even than her carioca-German DNA. She
could understand the appeal of the shamanistic, the communal and
unconstrained to the white middle classes behind their security
fences and surveillance cameras and armed guards. The wilder world,
the spirit of the deep forest, within reasonable limits and a
twenty-minute commute-time every other Tuesday evening. Her eyebrows
rose slightly at a handful of Nationally Recognizable Faces: two
telenovela stars and a pop-ette famous for emulating everything
Madonna did, but in a Brasileiro way. No wonder beret-girl had lifted
her cameras. Marcelina entertained herself by calculating how much
Caras maggazine would pay for shots of the worship's inevitable
conclusion.

The urn, covered with a white cloth, stood on a small altar beneath a
garden sun canopy over the penalty area. The bateria was behind the
goal line: they played as well as white people could be expected. A
very spaced girl pounded on a hip-slung bass drum. A tall man with
long, graying hair tied in a ponytail and a grayer Santa Claus beard
could only be Bença Bento. An environmentalist, Marcelina knew
from her research. Went up to protect the Roam and came back having
met God. Or whatever Santo Daime believed ordered the universe. The
divine. She wondered how many of the high-gloss SUVs parked outside
ran on biofuel. Bença Bento was as relaxéd as if he
were in his own front room, chatting amiably to the bateria's alabé
and the Barquinha's ekediss, who all seemed to be postmenopausal
women swathed in white, moving unconsciously but stiffly to the
drums. In a momentary flash, Marcelina pictured her mother among
them, imagined her bossa nova organ doubling with the bateria. Flash
again: she momentarily locked eyes with a figure across the barracão.
Its head was completely wrapped in white cloth so that only the eyes
were exposed. Marcelina could not tell if it was man or woman, but
the eyes were at once familiar and disturbing. She looked away; the
rhythm changed, the dancers, loose-limbed and drenched with sweat,
spun back to the edges of the court. Bença Bento stepped into
the pavilion and removed the white cloth from the urn.

The communion was about to begin. The eguns stepped forward with
supermarket tubes of disposable plastic cups, cafezinho sized. Not so
ecofriendly that, either.
Why are you mocking?
Marcelina asked
herself as the women filed past the urn, filling cups. What do you do
up in that walled garden in Silvestre with your songs and your
berimbaus that is so very different?

The music ended. Bença Bento raised his arms.

"In the name of Santo Daime, the Green Saint and Our Lady of the
Veggetable Union, draw near, receive with love and unite with the
order of the universe."

He looks like Christopher Lee playing Saruman
, Marcelina
thought, and gigggled. Worshipers stepped forward, then broke into a
run. Middle-class cariiocas mobbed the prim ladies of the egun;
reaching, snatching, clawing for their cups of the ayahuasca tea.
Marcelina noted that the abiás held back, as did the Head-Wrap
Spooky Eyes. Her immediate neighbor, a lanky thirty-something man
whose hair was receding patchily and unattractively, returned, eyes
wide, pupils shrunk to pinpricks under the hallucinogenic tea. She
saw him gag once, then stepped back neatly out of the arc of the
projectile vomit that spattered onto the plastic sheeting.

True iâos held that the vomiting, a side effect of the mix of
forest vines and shrubs that was the Green Saint, was as valuable in
its purging, its purifying, as the hallucinations it whip-cracked
across the frontal lobes. Now the bateria beat up again—Marcelina
noticed that neither they nor the Bença took the Daime—and
the worshipers danced and turned, self-absorbed in their
hallucinations. Some rolled, spasming on the smeared plastic, the
bolar, ridden by sprits from beyond the edge of physical reality.
Teenagers in white, boys and girls both, in white turbans and
T-shirts knelt with the tranced; they were the ekedis, protecting
them from the trampling feet of the worshipers.

Marcelina had done Daime—something as like it as spit—two
years ago in a co-pro for the National Geographic Channel:
World's
Wackiest Religions.
It sure beat Catholicism. She watched the
Madonna wannabe and the two telenovela stars puke ecstatic jets onto
the floor. It beat Kaballah too, for that matter. She wondered idly
who had the cleaning contract. There was not enough money in Brazil
to pay her to clean up hallucinogenic vomit.

She felt watched and looked over her shoulder to see Scary Eyes leave
the court. Almost she seized it, demanded, "Hey, what gives?"
She shivered. In this futsal court anything could happen: she had
already experienced the power of the Daime. She hoped it was the
Daime.

She waited until the mass had ended, the worshipers hauled to their
feet, their soiled, fouled whites stripped off and stuffed into bin
bags and the people sent into the world in peace.
You're going to
let them drive in that condition?
she thought. The police of
Recreio dos Bandeirantes had more important tasks than hauling in
cosmic white folk who could pay the jeitinho anyway: the task of
keeping the favelas bottled up. Marcelina stepped over the plastic as
the ekedis rolled the foul sheeting into the center of the court. The
bateria packed its drums.

"Mr. Bento?"

The bença had heavy wizard's eyebrows, which he flashed in
genuine welcome.

"My name's Marcelina Hoffman. I'm a producer with Canal Quatro."
She gave the bença a card; he passed it to an egun. "Feijão."

A different eyebrow flash now.

"Ah, yes, of course. He called me to say you would call. I
hadn't thought it would be at a mass."

"I'm trying to make a program where we find Moaçir
Barbosa and forrgive him for the Maracanaço." She almost
believed the lie herself now. "Feijão told me that
Barbosa had associations with this terreiro. I came along because I
hoped I might run into him here."

"You won't find Barbosa here."

Marcelina's hope reeled as if it had taken a meia lua de compasso she
had not the malicia to anticipate.