Carioca Fletch (3 page)

“Yes.”

“She said you have the identical legs of her husband, the same stomach muscles from pulling the fish nets, the same proportion between your shoulders and your hips. She said the slight slash of your navel is identical.”

“Laura…”

“Well, she should know.”

“I have never pulled fish nets.”

“You have the muscles from Janio Barreto.”

“Laura, not many Brazilians have my basic light coloring.”

“Some do. Janio Barreto did. Your heads are identical, she says, your eyes.”

“I had a similarity to the husband of the woman in the green dress, too.”

“Similarity has nothing to do with it. She says you are Janio Barreto, her husband.”

“Who was murdered forty-seven years ago.”

“Yes.”

“I’m a ghost? Is that what she’s saying?”

“Partly that. No, you are yourself. You are Janio Barreto. You see, you came to Brazil. You see why, don’t you?”

Fletch exhaled deeply. “What is the old woman’s name?”

“Idalina. Idalina Barreto.”

“What bothers me is that you listened to her. The doorman—”

“Why not?” Laura turned the page of the magazine. “She was talking.”

“Laura, you seem to have no regard for the real past. Yet you listen to these impossibilities.”

She was studying some health chart in the magazine. “What’s real?”

“Which is more real to you?”

“Bananas are good for potassium,” she said. “I think I knew that.”

“You won’t let me explain. You won’t explain to me.”

“Forget Idalina Barreto, as much as you can, for now.”

She flung the magazine aside and looked at him standing between the window and the bureau.

“How are we to know each other?” he asked.

She rolled more onto her back and held one leg, one arm in the air. “By sharing your banana with me.”

He laughed.

“I need more potassium.”

“Potassium gluconate, I hope.”

“Come, come, Janio. I want some more of your potassium.”

“I’m not Janio.”

“Janio’s potassium. Your potassium. Harvest your banana and feed me your potassium.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Come, come, my Janio. It is ripe. I see that it is ripe. I will peel it with my teeth. Let me taste your banana.”

“Where’s my shoe?” He regretted kneeling on the floor in his long white trousers to look under the bed for his shoe.

She came into the room and stopped. In the bathroom she had bathed and done her hair and also dressed in white slacks and an open white shirt.

“Why is this stone under our bed?”

Sitting back on his haunches, he showed her the small carved stone he found under the bed. “It’s a toad. It looks like a toad.”

“That,” she said.

“Why is there a stone toad under our bed?”

“The maid must have left it there.”

“The maid left a stone toad under our bed?”

“Put it back,” Laura said. “It may be important to her.”

“My father’s here!” Laura dumped three teaspoonsful of sugar into her
cachaça
. “I hear his voice.”

Courteously, Fletch took his glass of
cachaça
from the silver tray held out to him by a houseman.
Cachaça
is a brandy made of sugar-cane juice. In Brazil it is courteous to offer guests
cachaça
. It is courteous of guests to accept
cachaça
. Fletch had tried it with some added sugar, much added sugar, no added sugar.
Cachaça
was a taste he had not acquired.

With his glass of
cachaça
in hand, he followed Laura out onto the terrace.

Teodomiro da Costa’s house was built somewhat upside down. Entering at street level, one went downstairs to the bedrooms and a small family sitting room, upstairs to the grand living room filled with splendid paintings and other
objets d’art
, upstairs again to a huge reception room complete with full bar. Off the reception room, high above Avenida Epitacio Passoa, overlooking the truly beautiful lagoon Rodrigo de Freitas, was a handsome terrace decorated with green, red, yellow flowering jungle plants.

Now in the reception room a long table had been set with crystal and silver for twelve.

Teodomiro da Costa did well exchanging currencies and commodities. Fletch had invested his money with him.

On the terrace Laura and Otavio were greeting each other with hugs and kisses and rapid talk in Brazilian Portuguese.

Wordlessly, Otavia then shook Fletch’s hand.

“
Boa noite
,” Fletch said.

“Otavio has come here to meet with his publisher,” Laura said. “He is staying nearby, with Alfredo and Gloria. Have you met them? Alfredo is a marvelous man, true Brazilian, so full of life, generous to a fault. Gloria is a marvelous woman, truly bright, so charming, with a large feminine soul.”

“Are they here?”

Laura looked around at the other people on the terrace. “I don’t see them.”

“They are preparing for the Canecao Ball tomorrow night.” Otavio said. “I do not need to prepare. Poets are born in disguise.”

“And your mother?” Fletch asked Laura. “She did not come from Bahia?”

“My mother,” said Laura. “Orchids you can never leave.”

“They are worse than children,” agreed Otavio.

“Worse than I was, anyway,” Laura said.

Teodomiro da Costa came across the terrace to them. He was a tall man of sixty with the head of a bald eagle. “Fletcher, it is good to have you back. Did you enjoy Bahia?”

“Of course.”

“Good. For dinner we are having
vatapa
, a typical dish from Bahia.”

Fletch smiled and took Laura’s free hand. “I made friends there.”

“But Cavalcanti is my friend.” Teo kissed Laura on the cheek. “And Laura too.”

Otavio said, “We are all friends.”

Teo took Fletch’s
cachaça
and placed it on the tray of a passing houseman. He said something to the housewoman. “I have ordered you a screwdriver,” he said to Fletch.

“Is it called a screwdriver in Portuguese?”

Teo laughed. “I called it orange juice, vodka, and ice.”

“I must figure out the words for it.”

“Not hard.”

“To say it rapidly. With firmness.”

“Come. I want you to meet da Silva.” Slowly Teo guided Fletch by the elbow across the terrace. “Is Laura with you, or with her father?”

“With me.”

“Ah! You are so lucky.” Teo then introduced Fletch to another sixty-year-old businessman, Aloisio da Silva.

Immediately, da Silva said, “You must come to my office. I
have a new computer system. The very latest. Digital. From your country.”

“I would be very interested in it.”

“Yes, You must come tell me what you think.”

The houseman brought Fletch his screwdriver.

“Also, perhaps you have noticed my new building going up. How long have you been in Rio?”

“I was here for three weeks, then I was in Bahia for two weeks. I am back three days.”

“Then perhaps you have not noticed my building?”

“Rio is so vibrant.”

“Of course. It is in the Centro. Near Avenida Rio Branco.”

“I did notice a new building going up there. Very big.”

“Very big. You must come and see it with me. You’d be very interested.”

“I’d like that.”

“It is amazing what a difference computers make when it comes to building a building.”

Marilia Diniz appeared with her glass of
cachaça
. She kissed Aloisio and Fletch on their cheeks.

“Are you well, Aloisio?”

“Of course.”

“Rich?”

“Of course.”

Marilia forever remained a surprise to Fletch. She had to be the only person in Rio with no sun-color in her face. She saw people from a different perspective.

“Marilia,” Fletch said. “Something happened to us after we left you.”

“Something always happens in Rio.” She sipped her
cachaça
. “Listen. Teo has some new paintings. He has promised to show us them after dinner.”

“Otavio, perhaps you would help me to understand something.”

“Yes?”

Fletch and Otavio Cavalcanti stood alone at the edge of the
terrace, looking at the moonlight on the lagoon. Otavio was drinking Scotch and water.

In Brazil, even distinguished scholars and poets are to be called by their first names.

“Does the name ‘Idalina Barreto’ mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“She is not a famous eccentric?”

“Not that I know.”

Laura was across the terrace talking with the Vianas.

“I wonder if it is a scam.”

“A what?”

“A swindle. Some sort of confidence trick.”

“Ah, yes. Trick.”

“This afternoon Laura and I were accosted by an old woman, a
macumbeira
of some sort, maybe, dressed in a long white gown, an old woman. She said her name is Idalina Barreto.”

From the terrace the samba drums could be heard only faintly.

“Yes?”

“She said I was her husband.”

Otavio turned his head to look at Fletch.

“Her dead husband. Janio Barreto. A sailor. Father of her children.”

“Yes…”

“That Janio was murdered when he was young, at my age, forty-seven years ago.”

“Yes.”

“Are you hearing me?”

“Naturally.”

“She demands that I tell her who murdered me.”

Otavio was looking at Fletch as had Laura, as had the doorman at The Hotel Yellow Parrot. Then his eyes shifted in a circle around Fletch’s head.

“Will you help me to understand this?”

Then Otavio took a drink. “What’s there to understand?”

At the long table at dinner they talked of the magic in much
Brazilian food which provides so much energy, the masses of sugar usually placed in the coffee, in the
cachaça
, the sweetness of
cachaça
anyway, the
dende
oil in the
vatapa
they were having for dinner. The drink,
guaraná
, is without alcohol and also gives energy. It was said by the Indians that it cleared the blood channels going to and coming from the heart. Fletch had discovered that it relieved tiredness.

Down the table, Laura said, “Bananas are good for you, too. There is potassium in bananas.”

Then Marilia asked about the paintings Teo had bought.

“I’ll show them to you after dinner. Perhaps, first, Laura will play for us.”

“Please,” said the Viana woman.

“Certainly.”

“Then I will show them to you,” Teo said.

Aloisio da Silva asked Fletch, “Have you visited the Museu de Arte Moderna?”

“Yes.”

“I should think you’d be very interested in that building.”

“I am very interested in the building. It is a wonderful building. And I had a splendid lunch there.” The people at table became silent. “There were few paintings in the museum when I was there.”

“Ah, yes,” Marilia said.

“I was thinking of the building,” Aloisio said.

“There was a fire …” Teo said.

“All the paintings were burned up,” the Viana woman said. “Very sad.”

“Not all. A few were left,” Viana said.

Aloisio blinked at his plate. “I was thinking the building would interest you.”

Fletch said, “The paintings in the museum got burned. Is this another case of
queima de arquivo
?”

The silence at the table was complete.

From the head of the table, Teodomiro da Costa looked down at Fletch. A virus a few years before had given da Costa’s left
eye a permanent hooded effect, which became worse when he was tired, or wished to use it on someone. He was now using it on Fletch.

“It is a good thing, I think,” Fletch said into the silence, “for the artists of each generation to destroy the past, to begin again. I think perhaps it is necessary for them.”

It was many moments, then, before conversation flowed smoothly again.

“You have Laura, I see. I am glad.” Viana sat next to Fletch on the divan in the living room. They were waiting for Laura Soares to play the piano. “You must be very careful of women in Rio.”

“You must be very careful of women everywhere.”

“That is true. But women in Rio.” He sipped his coffee. “Even I. Late at night. Have found myself dancing with one of them. A man, you know. An operated-on man. It is more easy than you think to be tricked.”

“Not anything is as it seems in Brazil,” Fletch said.

“It is easy to be tricked.”

Laura played first some Villa Lobos, of course, then some of her own arrangements of the compositions of Milton Nascimento, somehow keeping in balance his romantic sweetness, his folkloric virility, his always progressing, complicated, mysterious melodic lines. At the side of the room, in a deep armchair, Otavio Cavalcanti dozed over his coffee cup. Then she played arrangements of other deeply folkloric Brazilian music Fletch did not recognize.

Laura Soares must have used piano technique she learned at the London Conservatory, but she played none of the music she had learned there.

After everyone except Otavio, her father, had applauded, Laura said, “Not so good.” She smiled at Fletch. “I have practiced little the last two weeks.”

“We have come to see your new paintings, Teo!” So the young
man first into the reception room announced. With his white open shirt and slacks he wore a forest green cape, a green buccaneer hat, green shoes. Immediately, his eyes found Fletch across the room.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Teo said from the bar.

Just suddenly they were there, four young men dressed expensively, tailored perfectly, each in his own style, moving slowly, expectantly into the big reception room at the top of the house like a theatrical troupe taking over a stage. All but one had lithe bodies, the graceful ways of moving one would expect from fencers, acrobats, or gymnasts. The fourth was heavier, duller in the eye, maybe a little drunk, and moved unevenly.

“Toninho!” the women cried.

The Viana woman smothered him with kisses.

“Tito! Orlando!” No one seemed to greet the fourth young man immediately. Someone finally said, “Norival! How do you find yourself?”

Tito was dressed entirely in black. His shirt and slacks had to have been fitted to him while they were wet. No seams showed in his clothes.