Brasyl (26 page)

"What was this e-mail?"

"You know, maybe you can sound all innocent, maybe you don't
know, seeing as how it was an accident. You wouldn't deliberately
have sent me the proposal for your Moaçir Barbosa show, would
you?"

The native smell of her kitchen assaulted Marcelina, cloying and
dizzying. There was no help in words here. She had done it. She had
lied, she had betrayed, she had joyfully schemed to send an old man
to the pillory to build her career. Our Lady of Production Values had
averted her eyes. But there was mystery still.

"I didn't send that e-mail."

"Look, little girl, I'm no silver surfer, but even I can
recognize a return e-mail address. You just think you're so fucking
clever, and we're all so old and slow and you can just laugh at us.
Well, I still know a few people in this town, you know' You haven't
heard the last of this, not by a long long chalk. So you can fuck
yourself and all your fucking TV people as well; I wouldn't present
your show for a million reis."

"Mr. Soares, Mr. Soares, it's important, what time . . . "
Dead line. "What time did I send that e-mail?"

You never were going to present that show
, Marcelina raged
silently at the dead cellular. She knew it was a mealy little vice,
her need to have the last word when her enemy had no possibility of
reply.
Not if you were the last fucking carioca on the planet.
But it was bad, worse than she had ever known it. Christ Christ,
Christ of Rio, Christ of the Hunchback Mountain with your arms held
out the sea, Christ in the fog; help me now. Marcelina glanced at the
clock on the microwave, perpetually eight minutes fast. She had just
time to get to the office and then out to her mother's.

Robson didn't do Saturdays, and his replacement edgy-but-inclusive
public-facing homosexual with the nickname Lampiao was new on the
desk and asked Marcelina for her ID. She didn't bite him in two. She
would have need of him later.

The drizzle had steepened into full rain; streaks turned the Glass
Menagerie into a strange tech jungle. The Sent Items folder on her
workstation confirmed: proposal for
Barbosa: Trial of the Century
sent to [email protected] at 23:32 August fifth. While her
alt dot family was singularly failing to comfort her. Proper
passwords and logins and everything. Marcelina called up the security
page and tabbed the change password button. One by one blobs vanished
as she deleted them. New password? Her fingers halted over the keys
halfway through
mestreginga.
She knows you. Every thought
every reaction every detail and diary entry of your life. She knows
you play capoeira. She knows your shoe size dress size playlists how
many bottles of beer are in your fridge what kind of batteries you
use in the Rabbit. In the streaming gray Marcelina hugged herself,
suddenly chilled.
That's it, isn't it? You're in a program within
a program; a pilot for an ultimate reality TV show: Make Marcelina
Mad. Even now the cameras are swiveling to the direction of some dark
control room. They're all in on it: Ceiso and Cibelle and Agnetta,
the Black Plumed Bird, even Adriano. They were never going to make
your show; he just agreed at Blue Sky Friday because it's part of the
script: the clever clever comedy of a program maker who doesn't
realize she's starring in her own show.
The Girl Who Haunted
Herself
. Lisandra. That cow. She'd do it. She'd do anything to
make it to CE. She's laughing at you right now up in the gallery with
a couple of APs and Leandro the editor.

It has to be all just a show. Any other theory is madness.

Marcelina pulled a book at random off her shelf, opened at page 113,
typed the 113th word into the pulsing box.
Testament
. Good
word. One unlikely to be stumbled upon at random in Canal Quatro.

Saturday Boy Lampião was SMSing in a blur of thumbs behind his
desk. "Could you do me a favor?"

His lips pursed in irritation at the intertuption to his messaging.
"Well I don't know, I mean what if I got into trouble or
something?"

"I know a few people in production."

He rolled his eyes.

"Tell me what you want, then."

"Were you on last night?"

He shook his head.

"I need a look at the security footage."

"What's that?"

"From the cameras." She pointed them out like a
trolley-dolly indicating the emergency exits. "It all goes on to
a hundred-gig hard drive. Back there." He had been looking in
mild panic under his desk. "It's easy enough to download."

'Tm not supposed to let anyone round this side of the desk."

"It's for a show."

"There should be something in writing about this."

"I'll get it for you on Monday."

"I'll get it for you."

"It would be simpler . . . "

He was at the black LaCie drive.

"How much do you want?"

"A couple of hours. Say from ten thirty to twelve thirty."

"I'll burn a DVD."

I'd rather download it onto my PDA
, Marcelina was about to
say. She bowed in acquiescence. Never underestimate the Brazilian
gift for bureaucracy. She watched the rain and the cable cars
vanishing into the cloud-cap of the Sugar Loaf. A helicopter buzzed
over Dois Irmãos. Not even winter rain could damp down the
embers of the recent unrest.
A rich hot magma runs beneath our
beautiful streets and avenues; we walk, we jog, we exercise our
little dogs on its crust, preening and strutting like we are New York
or Paris or London until the hidden order breaks through and the
woman who cleans your house, cooks your food, cares for your child;
the man who drives your taxi, delivers your flowers, fixes your
computer is sudddenly your enemy and the fire runs down to the sea.

Then she thought,
What if a helicopter hit a cable car? Now that's
a CNN moment.

"There you are. What's the show?"

"I'm not supposed to say, but we're all in it."

The clouds clung low to the Dois Irmãos and the long ridge of
Tijuca, turning Leblon into a bowl of towers, offered to the sea.
Hardy boys in toucan-bright neoprene braved the gray-on-gray
breakers. In the dash from cab to elevator lobby Marcelina was
drenched and shivering. No swirling glissandos of the Queen of the
Beija-Flor today. Moisture was bad for the electronics. The cab
driver had bought flowers and a surprisingly good bottle of French
wine. Most of Canal Quatro's account drivers were better production
assistants than the channel's own wannabes. Bottle in one hand,
flowers—with inscribed card—in the other, Marcelina rode
the mirrored box, dripping onto the fake marble floor.

She pressed the doorbell. Behind the chime came a fermata, the
opposite of an echo, a silence more sensed than heard of
conversations abruptly ending. Canal Quatro had made Marcelina
experienced in the subtleties of that silent click. Her mother
opened.

"Oh, so you decided to come, then." She pulled away as
Marcelina went to kiss her.

They were lined up in neat rows on all the available seating space in
her mother's cramped living room: Gloria and Iracema on the sofa,
babies between them, children at their feet caramelly with the
sugared treats on the coffee table; husband one perched on the side
of an armchair, husband two on a plastic seat brought in from the
balcony and wedged between a floor lamp and the organ. A tall glass
of vodka stood on a small side table by her mother's chair. Bubbles
rose through the ice cubes, a swizzle stick with a toucan on the end
perched against the edge of the glass. A rich smell of the
long-simmered meat and the beans filled the little apartment, the
mild acridity of the greens, the fresh top note of the sliced orange.
Feijoada had always been celebration to Marcelina. The windows were
steamed up.

"What is this, a jury of my peers?" Marcelina joked, but
the wine felt like a Ronald McDonald mask at a funeral and the
flowers the death itself.

"You've got a nerve, I should say," Gloria said. Marcelina
heard her mother close the door behind her.

The feijoada was now stifling and sickening.

Iracema slid the card across the table. Twin babies in fuzzy-angel
fur-suits ascended to heaven among hummingbirds and little fluffy
clouds.
Congratulations: it's two!
Marcelina opened it. . . .
I hope you miscarry and lose them, and if you don't lose them I
hope they have Down syndrome
. . . Marcelina snapped the card
shut. The room wheeled around her. Her family seemed at once removed
to cossmological distances and so close she could taste the film on
their teeth.

"You have to know I didn't write this."

"It's your handwriting." Gloria opened the prosecution.

"It looks like it but—"

"Who else knew Iracema was expecting twins?" Gloria's
husband Paulo rose from his perch.

"Come on, kids, let's see how the cooking's getting on."

"I did not write that, why would I write that?"

Gloria flipped the card over.

"Write it out again on the back."

. . . smug with your perfect kids and perfect husband and you
never even suspected that he sees other women. Why do you think he
goes to the gym four nights a week . . .

Stroke for stroke. Loop for loop. Scrawl for scrawl.

"I didn't write this!"

"Keep your voice down," Marcelina's mother hissed. "You've
done enough already without the little ones overhearing."

"Why would I want to send something like that?" It was the
only question she could ask, but she knew even before she spoke the
words it was a fatal one.

"Because you're jealous. You're jealous because we have things
you don't." Gloria looked her cold and full, sister to sister,
eye to eye. And if she had not done that, Marcelina might have been
wise, might have apologized and turned around and walked away. But it
was a challenge now, and Marcelina could not to be left without the
last word.

"And what could you have that I could possibly be jealous of?"

"Oh, I think we all know that."

"What, your lovely house and your lovely car and your lovely gym
memmbership and lovely medical insurance and lovely lovely
kindergarten fees? At least what I have, I earn."
Marcelina
stop it. Marcelina shut up.
But she never could. "No, no,
I'm not the one has the jealousy issues here. I'm not the one who
still can't handle the fact that she wasn't favorite. And that's
always been your problem. You're the jealous one; I'm the one having
a life."

"Don't you dare, dare try and turn this round on me and make it
like I'm to blame. I didn't send that card, and nothing can take away
from that."

"Well I didn't either, but I'm not going to try to explain it to
you because no one can explain anything to you, you're always so
right and sweet and dandy and everything's just perfect."

The hum of voices from the kitchen, bass and piccolo, had fallen
silent.

You're hearing right, kids. Your aunt's a monster. Don't be expecting
any pressents until you finish university. I'll pay for your therapy.
Iracema was in tears. Husband João-Carlos had moved from his
plastic chair to kneel beside het, caressing her wrist. Fragrant,
festive feijoada now revolted her: smell was the great imprinter of
memory and it was forever changed.
Get out Marcelina, before you
slash deeper than any healing.
But she turned back from the door
to spew, "Did any of you even stop to think that maybe something
wasn't right, that maybe there was more to this than just your blind
assumption that that's just Marcelina, isn't it? Have any of you
given even one moment's thought that maybe something is very, very
wrong? Fuck you, I don't need you, any of you."

She gave the door as good a slam as she could over an over-springy
plastic doormat. The elevator doors closed on a two-dimensional strip
of her mother flinging open the door, calling, "Marcelina!
Marcelina!" Then she turned to a line, to silence.

The wind had come down from the hills and was carrying away the low,
weeping clouds, blowing away the tops of the gray waves. Gulls
hovered over the spray line, webs outspread, wings tilting a breath
here, a feather there to hold them over the wave tops. Handsome boys
in cute rubber suits lounged on the sand and waited for the sky to
clear. On the black-and-white patterned sidewalk of Avenida Delfim
Moreira, Marcelina realized she still had her saturated flowers
clutched in her fist. She drew an orchid from the cellophane and
launched it at the surfer boys. They laughed and waved. She speared
flowers into Leblon's rain-pocked sand until she had no more. Surf's
up. That noise was back in her head, the whistle of world's end;
tears wrung out of the hollows of her skull.

You said that you said that you said that. But it wasn't me, it
wasn't me.
Then what was it? A reality television show? At her
most cruel, most desperate for shock, Marcelina would never have done
anything like that card. The family, you never touch the family. But
didn't you do that in
Filthy Pigs?
Friendships ended mothers
and daughters sundered, families at war?

At the bridge over the canal that drained the lagoon into the ocean,
where Leblon ended and Ipanema began, she chewed the plastic seal off
the bottle of wine, pushed the cork in with her thumb, and swigged
down hundred-real imported French Margaux. Cyclists and rollerbladers
in wet spandex stared as they whirred past, wheels throwing up narrow
wakes of rainwater.
Stare at me, stare all you like
. She had
downed the entire bottle by Arpoador, sent the empty bottle arcing up
into the air to smash among the power walkers. Marcelina peeled the
saturated hair back from her face to scowl at the staring faces.

"So? So?"

The brief woo of sirens sent Marcelina down with a wail onto her ass.
She sat gaping at the police cruiser as if it had fallen from an
angel's purse. A policewoman helped her to her feet. Rain spilled
from the peak of her cap onto Marcelina's upturned face.