Brasyl (2 page)

"The PCC has declared war with the police," said the Black
Plumed Bird. "There are at least a dozen cops dead already.
They've got hostages in the jail. Benfica will start next and then
... No, we can't do it."

Marcelina hung by the door, blinking softly as the television screen
receded into a tiny jiggling mote at the end of a long, dim tunnel
buzzing with cans of Kuat and amphetamines, Leandro and the Black
Plumed Bird strange limousines playing bumper-tag with her. She heard
her voice say, as if from a fold-back speaker, "We're supposed
to be edgy and noisy."

"There's edgy and noisy and there's not getting our broadcast
license renewed." The Black Plumed Bird stood up, dusted
cigarette ash from her lovely gloves. "Sorry, Marcelina."
Her nylon-hosed calves brushed electrically as she opened the edit
suite door. The light was blinding, the Black Plumed Bird an
amorphous umbra in the center of the radiance, as if she had stepped
into the heart of the sun.

"It'll blow over, it always does .... " But Marcelina had
contravened her own law: Never protest never question never plead.
You must love it enough to make it but not so much you cannot let it
fall. Her chosen genre—factual entertainment—had a hit
rate of a bends-inducing 2 percent, and she had grown the skin, she
had learned the kung-fu: never trust it until the ink was on the
contract, and even then the scheduler giveth and the scheduler taketh
away. But each knock-back robbed of a little energy and impetus, like
stopping a supertanker by kicking footballs at it. She could not
remember when she had last loved it.

Leandro was closing down the pilot and archiving the edit-decision
list.

"Don't want to rush you, but I've got Lisandra in on
Lunch-Hour
Plastic Surgery.
"

Marcelina scooped up her files and hard drive and thought that it
might be very very good to cry. Not here, never here, not in front of
Lisandra.

"Oh, hey, Marcelina, say, sorry about Getaway. You know, that's
such bad timing .... "

Lisandra settled herself into Marcelina's chair and set her shot-logs
and water bottle precisely on the desk. Leandro clicked up bins.

"Isn't that always the business?"

"You know, you take it so philosophically. If it was me, I'd
probably just go and get really really drunk somewhere."

Well, that was an option, but now that you've mentioned it, I
would sooner wear shit for lipstick than get wrecked at Cafe Barbosa.

Marcelina imagined slowly pouring the acid from an uncapped car
batttery onto Lisandra's face, drawing Jackson Pollock drip-patterns
over her ice-cream peach-soft skin.
Lunch-Hour Plastic Surgery
this, bitch.

Gunga spoke the rhythm, the bass chug, the pulse of the city and the
mountain. Médio was the chatterer, the loose and cheeky gossip
of the street and the bar, the celebrity news. Violinha was the
singer, high over bass and rhythm, hymn over all, dropping onto the
rhythm of gunga and medio then cartwheeling away, like the spirit of
capoeira itself, into rhythmic flights and plays, feints and
improvisations, shaking its ass all over the place.

Marcelina stood barefoot in a circle of music, chest heaving, arm
upheld. Sweat ran copiously from her chin and elbow onto the floor.
Tricks there, deceivings to be used in the play of the roda. She
beckoned with her upraised hand, suitably insolent. Her opponent
danced in the ginga, ready to attack and be attacked, every sense
open. To so insolently summon an opponent to the dance had jeito, was
malicioso.

É, I went walking
, the capoeiristas chanted.

In the cool morning

I met Great São Bento

Playing cards with the Dog.

The roda clapped in counterpoint to the urgent, ringing rhythms of
the berimbaus. So seemingly unsubtle an instrument, the berimbau, its
origins as a war-bow apparent in the curve of the wooden verga, the
taut cord. So homespun: a gourd, a piece of wire from the inside of a
car tire, a bottle cap pressed against the string, a stick to beat it
with, and only two notes in its round belly. A favela instrument.
When she began to play capoeira, Marcelina had scorned the berimbau;
she was here for the fight, secondarily for the dance aspect of the
jogo; but there is no dance without music, and as she learned the
sequences, she had come to appreciate their twanging, slangy voices,
then to understand the rhythmic subtleties that lay within a trio of
instruments that spoke only six notes. Mestre Ginga never tired of
telling her she would never attain the corda vermelha if she
neglected the berimbau. Capoeira was more than fighting. Marcelina
had ordered a médio from the Fundação Mestre
Bimba in Salvador, the spirirual home of the classical Capoeira
Angola. It lay beside her sofa unopened in its padded instrument bag.
For Marcelina in her red-and-white striped Capris and crop top, this
day with her defeat at work lying still like sick in her throat,
fighting was very good indeed.

Mestre Bimba, Mestre Nestor,

Mestres Ezequiel and Canjiquinha

These are the world-famous men

Who taught us how to play and sing
, the roda chanted, ringed
three deep inside the humid, verdant concrete quadrangle painted with
Umbanda saints and legendary mestres of history caught in leaps of
kung-fu-wire-ballet grace. Again Marcelina beckoned, smiling. The
rhythm had dropped from the fighting São Bento Grande to the
canto de entrada, a formality of the Angolan School Mestre Ginga
retained for his own Senzala Carioca, praising famous and lost
mestres. Jair stepped across the roda and locked his upraised hand
with Marcelina's. Face-to-face they stepped slowly, formal as a foro,
around the circle of hands and voices and beating berimbaus. He was a
cocky boy with ten years on Marcelina, tall and black and
good-looking, if in an obvious and preening way, poised, assured to a
point of cockiness. He didn't fight women and whites. White people
moved like trees, like truckloads of pigs on the way to the abattoir.
Women were incapable of ever understanding malicia. It was a guy
thing. Little white women with German names and German skins were
most ridiculous of all. They shouldn't even waste their time trying
to play capoeira.

This little white German woman had surprised him twice already, the
first with a lyrical S-dobrado that began with a feint kick from the
floor—only ever hands and feet to touch the earth—that
wheeled into a single-hand stand and a sweeping blow from the right
leg that Jair evaded by dropping into an immediate defensive
negativa, arm raised to defend the face. Marcelina had easily
foreseen and evaded his meia lua sweeping kick. É! É!
the spectators had chanted. The second time they had gasped and
clapped aloud as she dived into a meia lua pulada, the hand-spin kick
that was Rio-Senzala's great gift to the game of capoeira. She had
caught Mestre Ginga in her peripheral vision; he squatted with his
carved stick like an old Angolan king, his face stone. Old bastard.
Nothing she did ever impressed him.
You're not Yoda
. Then a
chapeu-de-couro had come wheeling in, Jair wholly airborne, and
Marcelina barely dropped back into a queda de quarto, hands and feet
planted on the dance floor, watching the fighting foot sweep over her
face.

At first capoeira had been another wave on the zeitgeist upon which
Marcelina Hoffman surfed, driven by the perpetual, vampiric hunger
for fresh cool. At Canal Quatro lunch was for losers, unless spent in
a valid pursuit. For a while power walking had been the thing,
Marcelina the first to venture out onto the searing Praia de Botafogo
in the shoes, the spandex, the spider-eye shade and pedometer to tick
off those iconic ten thousand footsteps. Within a week her few
friends and many rivals were out on the streets, and then she had
heard over the traffic the twang of berimbaus, the cheerful clatter
of the agogô, the chanting from the green spaces of Flamengo
Park. The next day she was with them, clapping in her Germanic,
loira-girl way while wiry guys with their shirts off wheeled and
reeled and kicked in the roda. It was a simple recruitment
demonstration by Mestre Ginga for his school, but for Marcelina it
was the New Cool Thing. For a season it ruled; every other pitch at
the weekly sessions was capoeira-related, and then the Next Cool
Thing blew in from the bay. By then Marcelina had donated the spandex
and so-last-season shades to a charity store, given the pedometer to
Mrs. Costa from downstairs, who was haunted by a fear that her
husband was a somnambulist who walked the streets kilometer after
kilometer at night, stealing little things, bought herself the
classic rig of red-striped Capri pants and stretchy little top, and
was taxiing twice a week up the hairpin road up the breast of
Corcovado, upon which Christ himself stood, an erect nipple, to
Mestre Ginga's Silvestre fundação. She was a convert to
the battle-dance. Cool would come around again; it always did.

Hands locked, the capoeiristas circled. A damp night, clouds hung low
over the Tijuca. The warm humidity held and amplified smells; the
fruity, blousy sickliness of the bougainvilleas that overhung the
fundação's fighting yard, the rank smokiness of the oil
from the lamps that defined the roda, the honey-salt sweetness of the
sweat that ran down Marcelina's upraised arm, the fecund, nurturing
sourness of her armpit. She released her grip and sprang back from
Jair. In a breath the berimbaus and agogô leaped into São
Bento Grande; in the same breath Marcelina dropped to a squat,
grabbed the cuffs of Jair's skull-and-crossbone-patterned pants,
stood up, and sent him onto his back.

The roda roared with delight; the berimbau players drew mocking
laughter from their strings. Mestre Ginga suppressed a smile. Boca de
calça; a move so simple, so silly that you would never think
it could work, but that was the only way it did work. And now, the
finishing blow. Marcelina held out her hand. When the hand is
offered, the game is over. But Jair came out of his defensive
negativa in an armada spin-kick. Marcelina ducked under Jair's bare
foot easily and, while he was still off-balance, stepped under his
guard and roundly boxed both ears in a clapping double galopante.
Jair went down with a bellow, the laughter stopped, the berimbaus
fell silent. A bird croaked; Mestre Ginga was not any kind of smiling
now. Again Marcelina extended the hand. Jair shook his head, picked
himself up, walked out of the roda shaking his head.

Mestre Ginga was waiting in the yellow streetlight as Marcelina
waited for her taxi. Some drive, some are driven in this life.
Low-bowing tree branches and scrambling ficus cast a fractured,
shifting light on him as he leaned on his stick. The patua amulets he
wore around his neck to defeat spirits swung.

You're not fucking Yoda
, Marcelina thought.
Or Gandalf the
Grey.

"That was good. I liked that. The boca de calça, that's a
real malandro's move." Mestre Ginga's voice was an eighty-a-day
nicotine rasp. As far as Marcelina knew, he had never smoked, never
done maconha let alone anything more powdery, and drank only on
saints' days and national holidays. Nodules on the vocal cords was
the prevailing theory; whatever the biology, it was very
Karate
Kid
. "I thought maybe, maybe, at last you might be learning
something about real jeito, and then ... "

"I apologized to him, he's cool about it. His ears'll be ringing
for a day or two, but he was the one wouldn't end it. I offered, he
refused. Like you say, the street has no rules."

As she come up dancing out of her defensive crouch, she had seen not
Jair's face but the Black Plumed Bird in all her grace and makeup,
and her fists had at once known what they needed to do: the box on
the ears, the most humiliating attack in the jogo. A slap on the
face, doubled.

"You were angry. Angry is stupid. Don't I teach you that? The
laughing man can always beat the angry man because the angry man is
stupid, acts from his anger, not his malicia."

"Yeah yeah whatever," Marcelina said throwing her kit bag
into the back of the taxi. She had hoped that the dance-fight would
burn away the anger, turn it, as in Mestre Ginga's homespun Zen, into
the mocking laughter of the true malandro, carefree, loved by a world
that looked after him like a mother. The music, the chants, the sly
jig-step of the preparatory ginga had only driven it deeper until it
pierced a dark reservoir of rage: anger so old, so buried it had
transformed into a black, volatile oil. There were years of anger
down there. Anger at family of course, at her mother delicately,
respectably turning herself into a drunk in her Leblon apartment; at
her sisters and their husbands and their babies. Anger at friends who
were rivals and sycophants she kept in line-of-sight. But mostly
anger at herself, that at thirty-four she had walked too far down a
road, in such special shoes, to be able to return. "I can't see
children compensating for the career gain I stand to make." The
family Hoffman had been gathered in the Leopold Restaurant for her
mother's sixtieth birthday, and she, twenty-three, fresh into Canal
Quatro as a junior researcher, dazzled by the lights, the cameras,
the action. Marcelina could still hear her voice over the table, the
beer, the assurance: a declaration of war on her married older
sisters, their men, the eggs in their ovaries.

"I don't want to go the Copa," she ordered, cellular out,
thumb dancing its own ginga over the text keys. "Take me to Rua
Tabatingüera."

"Good," the driver said. "The Copa's crawling with
cops and militaries. It's really kicking off down at Morro do Pavao."

It was not the first weekly briefing she had attended hungover. Canal
Quatro's boardroom—the communication-facilitating sofas and low
coffee tables, the curving glass wall and the bold and blue of
Botafogo with the smog low over Niterol across the bay—thudded
to an über-deep bass line. In keeping with the station's policy
of freshness and kidulthood, the boardroom's walls were giant
photomurals of Star Wars collectibles. Marcelina felt Boba Fett
oppressing her. She would be all right as long as she didn't have to
say anything; as long as Lisandra did not work out by her bitch-queen
spidersense that Marcelina was coming from two-thirds of a bottle of
Gray Goose, and then much much cold Bavaria from Heitor's chiller.
Another day, another chemical romance.