Brasyl (37 page)

"What did he, what did the indio say?"

"He said, 'Of course, where else?'"

The laughter was slow spent, the madness of fear transfigured.

"Bur my friends, my friends," Quinn said, wiping his eyes
with the sleeve of his filthy black robe, "I must warn you, the
other father, the Black Pai, is coming. His great church is less than
a day from you, and all his thought is turned upon you." In a
breath all laughter ceased. "He intends the reduction of the
Iguapá, and all your concealments and traps will not avail
you, for he has as many warriors as there are stars in the sky and he
would sell everyone of their lives to assimilate you into his City of
God. Your gods and ancestors will wander lost; your name will be
forgotten."

A warrior called out a question. Waitacá translated. "How
does the Black Pai know this?"

"Because in my madness I told him," Quinn said.

A susurrus of dismay passed from warrior to warrior. A youth, a
still-fat boy, asked, "Will the Black Pai take us?"

Quinn sat back on his barrel, turned his gaze upward to the band of
stars.
You know the answer to that
, Falcon thought.
You
see them still; I think you see them always, those stars of the other
skies. All the worlds you told me are open to you.

"Bring your women and your children," Quinn said. "Your
beasts and your weapons, your tools and your cooking pots. Sling your
hammocks upon your backs and gather up your urocum and the bones of
your ancestors. Make cages for your curupaira, as many as you can
carry, male and female both. When you have done all this, burn your
village to the earth and follow me. There is a place for you. I have
seen it, a hidden place, a safe place, not just for the Iguapá
but also for everyone who flees the slave coffle and the block. There
will be no slaves. This place will be rich in fish and hunting,
manioc and fruits; it will be strong and defended." Quinn
inclined his head to Zemba. "No one will be able to take this
place, not the bandeirantes, not the Black Pai and his Guabirú
fighters. The name of it will be Cidade Maravillhosa, the Marvelous
City. Falcon, gather your supplies and what equipment you deem
necessary. Burn your canoes and whatever you do not require on the
journey. We leave this instant. I shall lead you."

"Quinn, Quinn, this is insanity, what madness ... ?" Falcon
cried, but Luis Quinn had already disappeared into the dark of the
forest. One by one the golden bodies of the Iguapá followed
him and vanished.

The book fitted the palm of the hand like a loved, kissed breviary;
small, dense, bound in soft, mottled-gold leather that felt strangely
warm and silky to Marcelina's touch, as if it were still alive.
Hand-sewn header tapes, a bookmark made from that same brass-and-gold
leather, edged with new bright gold leaf; this was a volume that had
been bound and rebound any times. The hand-painted endpapers were
original watercolor sketches of a river journey, both banks
represented, right at the top, left at the bottom, landmark trees,
missions, churches all marked. Indios adorned with fantastical
feathered headdresses and capes stood in canoes or on bamboo rafts;
pink river dolphins leaped from the water. In the top of a dead tree
red howler monkeys had been depicted in the oversize but minute
detail of a dedicated chronicler. All was annotated with legends
Marcelina could not decipher.

Mestre Ginga signaled for her to set the little book down. The cover
bore only the outline of a frog, embossed in gold leaf. With gloved
hands he moved it reverently to the end of the folding camp table
before setting the coffee in front of Marcelina. She too wore gloves,
and had been instructed under no circumstances to get the book wet.
She sipped her coffee. Good, smoky, from a Flamengo mug. The walls of
the little kitchen at the back of the fundação were
painted yellow, the handmade cupboards and work surrfaces blue and
green. A patriotic kitchen. A lizard sprang from stone
motionnlessness to skim up the wall between the framed photographs of
the great mestres and capoeiristas of the forties and fifties, before
the joga became legal, let alone fashionable; men playing in Panama
hats down in rodas down by the dock, stripped down to the singlets,
pleat-top pants rolled up to the knees. The classic kicks and
movement but with cigarettes in their mouths. That was true
malandragem.

"So," Mestre Ginga said. "What did you notice about
the book?"

The car had taken off like a jet from the side of the street, and in
the daze and confusion and the shock but above all the single,
searing icon of her face, her face, her own face behind the knife,
all Marcelina could think to say was, "I didn't know you owned a
car."

"I don't," said Mestre Ginga, crashing gears. "I stole
it." It soon became clear that he didn't drive either, blazing a
course of grace and havoc between the taxis on Rua Barata Ribeiro,
scraping paint-thin to the walls of the Tunel Novo, leaping out in a
blare of horns into the lilac twilight of Botafogo. "I mean, how
hard can driving be if taxi drivers do it?"

Marcelina saw the glowing blue free-form sculpture that crowned Canal
Quatro appear above the build-line. It was a reassurance and a
sorrowing psalm, a promised land from which she was exiled. She
breathed deep, hard, the calming, powering intake of air that gave
her such burning strength in the roda or the pitching room.

"I need a few things explained to me."

Into Laranjeiras now, under the knees of the mountain.

"Yes, you do," said Mestre Ginga, leaning back in his seat
and steering one-handed. "It's knowing where to start. We'd
hoped that you wouldn't get involved, that we could handle the
admonitory before you learned anything, but when the bença was
murdered, we couldn't hold off."

"That was you at the terreiro."

"You always were too clever to be really smart," Mestre
Ginga said.

Familiar streets around Marcelina, they were heading up to the
fundação.
And you still have a Yoda complex
.
"I've been keeping an eye on you ever since that clown Raimundo
Soares sent you to Feijão. If he'd kept his mouth shut ... But
after the split with the bença he felt aggrieved. It should
have been him got cut up; then we wouldn't have been in this mess."

"Wait wait, what is this mess anyway?"

Onto the corkscrew road, scraping the ochre and yellow-painted walls
of the compounds.

"You want to be down a gear," Marcelina said, troubled by
the knocking, laboring engine. "You're taking it too low."

"And since when have you been Rubens Barrichello?"

"I watch my taxi drivers. So; that woman with the knife, who was
she?"

"Who did it look like she was?"

"Me."

"Then that's who she was. There's a way to explaining this that
makes sense. Otherwise, trust me, in this game nothing is
coincidence."

Then the stolen Ford drew up before the graffitied walls of the
fundação with its brightly colored, rumbling, happy
capoeiristas; and Mestre Ginga, with a haste and tension Marcelina
had never seen in him before, unlocked the gates and showed her round
the back into the patriotic kitchen.

"The book's some kind of expedition journal by an
eighteenth-century French explorer on the Amazon. I didn't read very
much of it; I find that old stuff kind of hard to read."

"I didn't ask what it was. I asked you, what did you notice?"

"Well, it's been rebound several times, and the contents are
handwritten but they're not original, I suspect; the illustrations
inside the cover had coded wtiting on them, and knowing the way
Brazil was in the eighteenth century, I reckon it's a good guess that
it was originally written in code as well."

"Good guess. Anything else."

"Like I said, I didn't read much of it. Now, I'm sure this old
eighteenth-century book has something to do with my evil double
trying to kill me, but it might be a whole lot simpler if you just
got to the point."

"Anything else."

Marcelina shrugged; then a realization of strange, a sense of cold
wonder, shivered through her. In the blossom-perfumed heat of Mestre
Ginga's kitchen, she saw the gooseflesh lift the fine, blonde hairs
on her forearm.

"There was a plague, a plague of horses." She knew the look
on Mestre Ginga's face; so many times she had seen it in the roda as
he squatted in the ring, leaning on his stick. Go on, my daughter, go
on. "All the horses, the donnkeys, even the oxen, they were
wiped out by the plague. That never happpened. It's fiction, it's a
story."

"No, it's true. It's a history. It's just not our history."

"This is insane."

"Lick the book," Mestre Ginga ordered. "Pick it up and
just touch the tip of your tongue to it."

Sense of cold wonder became vertiginous fear. Favors and privileges
had flowed around the Organ Queen of the Beija-Flor, one of them free
and unlimmited access to the private pool and beach of the Ilha
Grande Hotel at Arpoador, the rocky point between the golden curves
of Copacabana and Ipanema. Dalliances and liaisons blew through the
airy corridors and cloisters, but the children who splashed round the
rocks were as oblivious to this as they were to satellites. The big
thrill was the Leaping Point, a five-meter rock that overhung a
Yemanja-blue plunge pool: a hold of the nose, a quick cross, and down
like a harpoon into the clear cold water. Marcelina—age
eight—had always envied the bigger girls who filled their
swimsuits and the gawky boys who could make the leap. For hot holiday
weeks she had tried to call up the courage to go up on to the Leaping
Point, and then at the last day of summer before school resumed she
had worked up sufficient force of soul to climb up the rock. Her
mother and sisters, racked out on the wooden sun loungers, waved and
cheered,
Go on go on go on!
She crossed herself. She looked
down. The deep blue water looked back up into her soul. And she
couldn't do it. There was swallowing madness down there. The climb
back down the rock-cut steps, backward, feeling her way one hand, one
foot at a time, was the longest walk of her life.

Marcelina looked into the book. The golden eye of the frog held her.

Where would the walk back down from this painted sanctuary take her?
Not back to any life she could recognize. The old capoeiristas, the
great mestres and corda vermelhas, taunted her with their jeito.
Our
Lady of Production Values, who is our Lady of Jeito, aid me.

Marcelina lifted the book to her face and touched the eye of the
golden frog with the tip of her tongue. And the book opened the room
opened the city opened the world opened.

Marcelina lifted a hand. A thousand hands bled off that, like the
feedback echo of visual dub. The table was a Church of All Tables,
the green and blue cabinets a Picasso of unfolding cubes. And Mestre
Ginga was a host of ghosts, an Indian god of moving limbs and heads.
The book in her hand unfolded into pages upon pages within pages,
endless origami. Voices, a choir of voices, a million voices, a
million cities roaring and singing and jabbering at once. Marcelina
reached for the table—which table, which hands—and rose
to her feet through a blur of images. Then Mestre Ginga was at her
side, prising open her mouth, pouring strong, hot, startling black
coffee down her throat. Marcelina coughed, retched up bile black
cafezinho and was herself again, lone, isolate, entire. She dropped
into the aluminum kitchen chair.

"What did you do to me?"

Mestre Ginga ducked his head apologetically.

"I showed you the order of the universe."

Marcelina slung the book across the table. Mestre Ginga caught it,
squared it neat to the end of the galvanised tin top.

"You drugged me!" She accused him with a finger.

"Yes. No. You know my methods. Your body teaches." Mestre
Ginga sat back in his chair and laughed. "And you accuse me?"

"There's a difference. That was a spiked book."

"The book is bound in the skin of the curupairá, the
sacred golden frog." Marcelina had been to the Amazon to
research
Twenty Secret Ways to Kill Someone
and had seen the
murderous power of brightly colored forest frogs.

"You could have killed me."

"Why should I do that? Marcelina, I know what you think of
me—you don't have anywhere near as much malicia as you think,
but believe me when I say, what you do have, you are going to need.
Every last drop of it. So stop thinking stupid and start acting like
a malandro, because stupid is going to get not just you killed but
everyone else around you."

The room shivered around Marcelina, spraying off multiple realities
like a dog shaking water from its coat.

"So it's some kind of hallucinogen, like ayahuasca."

"No, nothing like ayahuasca. The iâos of the bença
believe that the Daime stimulates those parts of the brain that
generate the sensations of spirituality. Cutupairá shows the
literal truth. The eye of the frog is so sensitive that it can
perceive a single photon of light, a single quantum event. The frog
sees the fundamental quantum nature of reality."

The snap was on Marcelina's lip:
And what does a capoeira Mestre
know about quantum theory?
In surliness was security; she was in
a place as familiar and comfortable as home, yet the step from the
yard where she played the great game into the green, blue, and yellow
kitchen was the step from one world to another. Rio had always been a
city of shifting realities, hill and sea, the apartment buildings
that grew out of the sheer rock of the morros, the jarring abutments
of million-real houses with favela newlywed blocks, piled one on top
of another. And where the realities overlap, violence spills through.
Heitor, whose private life you entered through books, had so many
times tried to explain quantum theory to Marcelina, usually when she
just wanted him to tell her how hot her ass looked in the latest
little mesh number. All she understood of it was that her career
depended on it and that there were three interpretations (as she
tried to get him to take a line from the glass-top table), only one
of which could be true; but whichever one was, it meant that reality
was completely different from what common sense told us. So shut up
the mouth and listen to Mestre Yoda.