Brasyl (8 page)

Then the final whistle went and Uruguay lifted the World Cup, and
still there wasn't a sound. My father couldn't work for a week. A man
up the hill threw himself in front of a bus; he couldn't stand it.
Rio froze over. The whole nation went into shock. We've never
recovered from it. Maybe we expected too much; maybe the politicians
talked it up until it wasn't just a game of soccer, it was Brazil
itself. People who were there in the Maracanã, do you know
what they call themselves? "Survivors." That's right. But
the real pain wasn't that we lost the World Cup; it was the
realization that maybe we weren't as great as we believed we were.
Even up in our shack on the Morro de Pavão, listening on a
radio wired into the streetlight with an oil drum for an amplifier,
we still thought we were part of a great future. Maybe now we weren't
the nation of the future, that everyone admired and envied, maybe we
were just another South American banana republic strutting around all
puffed out like a gamecock in gold braid and plumes that nobody
really took seriously. The Frenchman de Gaulle once said, "Brazil
is not a serious country": after the Fateful Final, we believed
him.

Of course we looked for scapegoats. We always do. Barbosa, he was the
hated one. He was our last line of defense, the nation was depending
on him, he let Brazil down, and Brazil was never going to let him
forget it. He only played again once for the Seleção;
then he gave up the game, gave up all his friends from the game,
dropped out of society, and eventually disappeared completely. Brazil
has given him fifty years of hell; you don't even get that for
murder.

"So it's a trial format," Marcelina Hoffman said. This Blue
Sky Friday the pitching session took place in Adriano's conference
room, a glass cube with the titles of Canal Quatro's biggest and
noisiest hits etched into an equatorial strip. There were a couple of
Marcelina's among them. Toys and fresh new puzzles were strewn
deliberately around the floor to encourage creativity. Last week it
was Brain Gym for the PSP; this week, books of paper marked and
precreased for Rude Origami. The Sauna, as its nickname around Rua
Muniz Barreto implied, was notorious for its atrocious
air-conditioning, but the sweat Marcelina felt beading down her sides
was not greenhouse heat. Roda sweat: this glass room was as much a
martial arts arena as any capoeira roda. It would take all her jeito,
all her malicia, to dance down her enemies. Aid me, Nossa Senhora da
Valiosa Producão.

"We track him down, haul him in, and put him on trial before the
people of Brazil. We present evidence, for and against—he gets
a fair trial. As fair as we want it to be. Maybe get a real judge to
preside. Or Pelé. Then the viewers decide whether to forgive
him or not."

Glass tables in a glass room; arranged in a quadrilateral.
Community-facilitating and democratic, except that Adriano and the
Black Plumed Bird, so very very Audrey Hepburn today, sat on the side
of the quadra farthest from the sun. Lisandra and her pitch team were
to Marcelina's right; the iiber-bosses on her left. Keep your enemies
in your peripheral vision but never be seen looking; that is
foolishness. Directly across the square from her was Arlindo
Pernambucano from Entertainment; too too old to be creaming and
shrieking over celebrity mags and general girliness but who,
nonetheless, had a phenomenal hit-rate. But he was out of this jogo.
It was Lisandra and Marcelina in the roda.

"What happens if he's guilty?" Adriano asked. "We make
him apologize on live TV."

Adriano winced. But that's all right; that's the cringe-TV wince, the
carrcrash/guilty-pleasure wince. Embarrassment TV. He was liking it.

"And is he still alive?"

"I ran a check through public records," said Celso,
Marcelina's boy researcher and newest member of her alt dot family.
He was intimidatingly sharp, nakedly ambitious, was always at his
desk before Marcelina arrived and there after she left. She had no
doubt that someday he would reach for Marcelina's crown but not this
day; not when the joy—the old heat of the idea that burned out
of nowhere perfect and complete as if it had
Made in Heaven
stamped on the base, the joy she thought she had lost forever and
might now only glimpse in Botafogo sunrises and the glow and laughter
of the streets of Copa from her roof garden—glowed in her
ovaries. I'm back, she thought.

"We could make the search for him part of the program,"
Adriano said.
He's making suggestions
, Marcelina observed.
He's taking ownership of it.
She might get this. She might get
this.

"He must be a very old man by now," the Black Plumed Bird
said. "Eighty-five," said Celso at once.

"It's an interesting idea, but is it Canal Quatro to hold an old
man up to ridicule and humiliation? Is this just pelourinho by
television?"

Yes
, Marcelina wanted to scream. Nothing is more Canal Quatro
than the whipping post, the pillory, the branding iron. It's what we
love most, the suffering of others, the freak show. Give us torment
and madness, give us public dissections and disgust, give us girls
taking their clothes off. We are a prurient, beastly species. They
knew it in the eighteenth century; they knew the joy of public
disgrace. If there were public executions, Canal Quatro would run
them prime time and rule the ratings.

"It's a chance for us to get closure on something that still
festers, fifty years on. We've won since, but not when it really
mattered, on our own soil, in our own stadium, in front of our own
people."

Adriano nodded. Lisandra had folded a page from her origami book into
two red rabbits, fucking. She jiggled them in the edge of Marcelina's
vision.

"No, I like this," the director of programming announced.
"It's edgy, noisy, divisive—we'd run an SMS
guilty/innocent vote. It's absolutely Canal Quatro. IPTRB."

It presses the right buttons
, Marcelina guessed.

"List shows have always performed well for us," the Black
Plumed Bird said, inclining her head a degree toward Lisandra.
"All-Time Greatest Seleção would get people
talking." Celso had folded a sheet from his book into a green
penis, which he slowly erected in Lisandra's direction.

"No, thank you all," Adriano said, pushing himself back a
fraction from the glass table. Anticipation cracked around the room
like indoor lightning. "I knew you'd do it. Okay, IRTAMD."

I'm Ready to Announce My Decision.

"The universe has ten to the one hundred and twenty calculations
left to perform," said Heitor, feet on his desk in his corner
office, gazing out at the traffic headed beach-ward and the rectangle
of gold and blue on blue at its end, like a flag of jubilee. "Then
it all stops and everything ends and it's dark and cold and it goes
on expanding forever until everything is infinitely far apart from
everything else. You know, I am sure I'm developing a wheat allergy."

"You could say, 'Well done, Marcelina, congratulations,
Marcelina, killer pitch, Marcelina, I'll take you out and buy you
champagne at the Cafe Barrbosa, Marcelina.'''

The newsroom was accustomed to Marcelina Hoffman bursting out of
scruffy, bitchy Popular Factual into their clean, focused atmosphere
of serious journalism like a cracked exhaust muffler, striding
thunder-faced between the rows of hotdesks to Heitor's little sanctum
where he contemplated his role as the bringer of bad tidings to
millions and the futility of the news media in general. The door
would close, the rants would start, the stringers would put their
heads down or look up holidays online. So when she came in grinning
as if she had done six lines off a toilet seat, small tits pushed out
and golden curls bouncing, the newsroomers were momentarily
flustered. No yells from Heitor's office. Everyone in the building,
let alone the eighth floor, knew they were occasionally fucking; the
mystery was why. A few understood that a relationship can be born out
of a necessity not to have sex with anyone who needed to have sex
with you. They kept the insight to themselves. They feared they would
have to play that card themselves someday.

"Fully funded development and a complete proposal in two weeks
moving to a commission green light before the end of the month. Am I
fucking hot or what?"

Heitor took his feet off his desk and turned toward Marcelina,
seemingly filling two-thirds of his office, capoeira queen, haloed in
success.

"Well done, Marcelina."

He did not hug her to his big, bear body in its gray suit. It was not
that kind of relationship.

"What are your shifts like this afternoon?" Cafe Barbosa:
always a sign somewhere. Thank you, Our Lady of Production Values.

"Early evening bulletin and the main seven o'clock."

Heitor the depressive news reader was a media joke far beyond Canal
Quatro, but Marcelina knew that his sweet, contemplative melancholy
was not caused by the constant rain of sensationalist, violent,
celebrity-obsessed news that blew through his life, but because he
felt responsible for it. He was Death invited to a nation's TV
dinners. Marcelina, in contrast, was quite happy to pursue a career
of insignificant triviality.

"Here's what going to happen. I have an appointment with a
needle. I go to the Cafe Barbosa with my team, my alt dot family and
anyone else who wants to buy me a beer. You come round, we go on to
Lapa. We go back to yours. I fuck the ass off you. Bur first, I need
you to help me."

"I thought there'd be a price."

"The commission's dependent on finding Barbosa. Do you know how
I might go about that?"

"Well, I don't .... "

"But you know someone who might." The standard joke of
journalists and lawyers.

"Try this guy." Heitor inscribed a pink Post-it. "He
can be a bit hard to find, but he knows Rio like no one else. Try
catching him on Flamengo Beach, early."

"How early?"

"Whatever you call early, earlier than that. He says it's the
beach's best time." Heitor turned away and grimaced as e-mail
flurried into his in-box. "It's bread, definitely. I'm going to
give it up. You should read this." A harddback book lay prone,
praying on the desk. Heitor read aggressively, trying to find in
printed pages ideas he might weave into an excuse for this mad world
he found himself presenting twice a day. He pressed a book a week on
Marcelina, who passed them on unread to Dona Bebel. Reading text was
so static, so last century. "It's about information theory,
which is the latest theory of everything. It says the universe is
just one huge quantum computer, and we are all programs running on
it. I find that very comforting, don't you?"

"Try and make it, Heitor. You need a lot of beer and hot hot
sex." He lifted a hand, absorbed with the incoming world.

Her car was not waiting outside on Rua Muniz Barreto. Marcelina
looked up, Marcelina looked down, then went into reception.

"Did you call my taxi?"

"Called, came, went," said Robson on the door, who was a
glorious creature, tall, killer cheekbones, swimmer's muscles, so
black he glowed, and regularly voted Most Lickable in the Christmas
Awards. Marcelina could not believe he was natural.

"What do you mean, went?"

"You tell me. You went off in it."

"I went off in the taxi? I only just got here now."

Robson looked at his hands in that way that people do when confronted
by the publicly insane.

"Well, you came out of the elevator and said just what you said
to me there now, 'Did you call my taxi?' And I said, yes, there it is
outside, and you got in it and drove off."

"I think that one of us is on very strong drugs." It could
be her. This could all be a guarana and speed flashback from the
all-nighter. The pressure is off, you get the result of results, and
your brain geysers like Mentos in Diet Coke.

"Well, I know what I saw." The people who voted Robson Most
Lickable had never spoken to him when riled, when a tone of camp
petulance entered his voice.

"What was I wearing?" Marcelina said. Time was ticking.
"Aw, fuck it, I'll walk."

Mysteries could wait. She had an appointment with the thin steel
needle of love.

"Black suit," Robson called after her. "You were in a
black suit, and killer shoes."

Hot hot hot in skinny-heel knee boots, high-thigh polo neck body, and
a cutie little black biker's jacket cut bolero style, Efrim stalks
the gafieira. Cidade de Luz is bouncing. This is a wedding gafieira,
and they're the best. The open end of José's Garage is now the
sound stage; the speakers hauled up on engine-tackles. A kid DJ
wearing the national flag like Superman's cape spins crowd-pleasers.
A rollscreen displays a shifting constellation of pattterned lights,
the arfids of the gafieira tracked through the Angels of Perrpetual
Surveillance and displayed as a flock of beauty. Kid DJ sticks his
fingers in the air, gets a small roar, claps his hands and holds them
aloft, gets a big roar. Senhors, senhoras . . . Her entrance is lost
in the dazzle of swinging lights and the opening drum-rush of
"Pocotocopo," this year's big hit, but the audience sees
the silver soccer ball lob into the air, freckled with glitterrspots.
Milena Castro, Keepie-Uppie Queen, volleys her ball across the stage
and back; head tits ass and knees. A smile with every bounce. The V
of her thong bears the blue lozenge and green globe of Brasil. Ordem
e Progresso. She rurns her back to the crowd, shakes her booty.
There's a ragged cheer.

Good girl
, thinks Efrim. She's the first of his two acts on
tonight, in his other incarnation as MD of De Freitas Global Talent.
But tonight he is in party mode, fabulous in huge afro wig and
golden-glow body-blush with a tab of TalkTalk from Streets, his
supplier of neurological enhancements, down him so he can say
anything to anyone: absolutely flawless. The girls stare as Efrim
stalks by, bag swinging. They're meant to. Everyone is meant to.
Tonight Efrim/Edson—a lad of parts—is hunting.