Heliopolis

To Rose

‘Rio is a beauty. But São Paulo—São Paulo is a
city
.’
—MARLENE DIETRICH

I
t’s early, not yet seven
A
.
M
., and once again I’m waking up beside my adoptive sister.

This has got to stop. She’s a married woman.

The air-conditioning is on high, and my head feels like it’s immersed in freezing water, even though Melissa’s body is cleaving to mine wherever it can, making me hot and clammy beneath the covers. I sit up, and reach for the remote control that operates the blinds. They track smoothly upwards and the city, bile yellow, pours in from every direction.

Melissa’s penthouse is at the head of a long avenue that bisects the Garden District straight through to the smogcloaked towers of downtown. From up here you look down on the treetops and the green parakeets that flit between them. At night gridlocked traffic lights up the avenue in glittering ribbons of red and white. During big football matches, when a goal is scored, the fireworks burst silently beneath you.

I stretch and lie back to think of more ways in which I could mark Ernesto’s territory, to see if he’d latch on to the fact that I’m sleeping with his wife. You’d think he’d have noticed something by now: whenever these stopovers take place I find myself brushing his body hairs from the bed before I get in it, so I must be leaving a few of my own, and I make a habit of draining every half-glass of water he leaves on the bedside table. But he hasn’t. So I’m taking bigger risks. I sit in his dressing gown reading his diary on the computer when Melissa’s in the shower, and altering it here and there if I feel I’ve been unfairly represented. I drink his wine. I eat his leftovers. I use his toothbrush. I’ve even written him messages on the bathroom mirror with my finger in the hope that they might shimmer into view next time he has a shave. But so far, he hasn’t a clue. He’s too busy out saving the rest of the world to notice that he’s losing his wife.

I’m thinking these ignoble thoughts about Ernesto, touching the back of his wife’s neck and trying to make her move so her nipple will brush against my chest, when the sound of a helicopter directly overhead deals a defibrillator jolt to my heart.

Melissa’s father, Zé Fischer Carnicelli, hasn’t been down to street level in the city for over fifteen years. He lives in a gated community of 30,000 inhabitants, way out of town, and is flown from there to his downtown office every morning in a helicopter that has the word
Predator
painted graffiti-style over its nose, along with gnashing teeth and a pair of evil yellow eyes. He’s approaching retirement, but he still keeps regular office hours. A chauffeur drives him between his house and the heliport, then back again in the evening. During the day, he might hop to another high-rise to meet someone for lunch, or to attend an afternoon meeting, but he never touches the pavement. It’s not just a question of safety: if he went by car he could get snared in a traffic jam lasting hours. Nobody who’s anybody gets driven to work in the city these days.

On his way, he’s delighted to pick up Melissa and deposit her at her office. He doesn’t see as much of his daughter as he’d like now that she is married, and this way he gets to spend the first few minutes of his day with her as they speed over the boiling, stationary traffic. Because Melissa’s penthouse is directly under the helipad, he doesn’t even need to phone ahead: she sees the helicopter coming and hears it rumbling on the roof, which gives her just enough time to take a slurp of coffee, grab her keys, and rush upstairs to kiss her Papai good morning.

Being found in bed with Melissa by her father is a far more terrifying prospect than getting caught by her husband. If Zé walked in now, my life would end—it’s that simple.

‘Relax. It’s not him.’ Melissa stirs, and detaches her lips from the hollow beneath my jaw. ‘It’s too early, you know that.’ She squirms gorgeously on my leg, naked and hot.

‘Ernesto?’

‘When did Ernesto ever fly? Don’t move.’ Her hand strays into my hair, placating me as gently as possible so she doesn’t have to wake up.

She’s right about the helicopter. The sound of blades beating overhead soon recedes. I lie still for a further half-hour, pretending that more sleep might be within reach, before accepting the inevitable.

‘I’ll squeeze some juice,’ I say, sitting up. The sticky noise of her body separating itself from mine banishes the night with all the finality of a plunge into cold water. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid: for better or worse, the wound is exposed. Once again, we face the facts.

In the hallway, the naked form creeping across the mirror startles me, and for an instant I am Ernesto, stumbling on this burglar in his bed. I stand up straight, to assess what he would face if he walked in now.

I’m a shade or two lighter than my mother, which implies that my biological father was lighter still. Because I’m cashew to her caramel, it’s likely his skin was even less toasted: milk and honey, almond cream. Where that leaves me, I don’t know: probably, to employ an expression still in common usage in spite of the racial democracy we are said to enjoy, with ‘one foot in the kitchen.’ That said, my prosperity of recent years helps: ‘money makes you whiter,’ as they say. Colour isn’t immutable: it’s just a matter of context.

Either way, things don’t look as good as they once did. Baldness is carving twin channels towards the back of my head, like a boat’s wake. My skin is pitted and flawed like tired fruit, and my cheekbones look swollen, almost bruised. Otherwise, I’m like a sylph: I might not be here at all. If you took a swing at the place where you thought my belly was, you’d probably miss it. My metabolism is a super-tuned engine, always processing, churning with hot acid. It’s why, in spite of my appetite, I am always underweight. It’s why my clothes hang well. It’s why I can’t sit still. It’s why people always think I’m nervous, and why nobody ever properly relaxes in my presence.

The sylph in the mirror sighs. Ernesto. She married Ernesto the gentle giant—five years on, I can still hardly believe it. I wonder if there’s something about his bulk she finds reassuring. His weight, pinning her down. Perhaps it reminds her of being kidnapped, provides an element of Stockholm Syndrome that splashes Tabasco on all that marital meat and potatoes.

How did I become this interloper, this bed-hopping marriage wrecker? I smile like a villain to make myself feel better, and say, ‘Ludo dos Santos, pleased to meet you.’

I halve oranges at the granite island in the middle of the kitchen and squeeze them as quickly as I can, adding an extra spoonful of pulp from the juicer to my glass to bulk it out. I’m padding back across the polished penthouse floor with two tumblers of frothy yellow when I feel the throb of another approaching helicopter. I see the flickering bug as it picks out this building and rears up over it. And now it is time to panic, because no matter how unlikely it is that he’ll come down to the apartment, this one is carrying Melissa’s father.

Who is also, of course, my father.

My full name is Ludwig Aparecido dos Santos. People assume my mother was a music lover, but I’m told that ‘Ludwig’ was a bar in the city years ago, whose name was written above the door in a curly silver script that pleased her. As for the rest, the name ‘Aparecido’ refers to my mother’s sometime contention that instead of having a real father I ‘slipped down a rainbow,’ while ‘dos Santos’ was the name given to orphans during the infancy of the country, because they were deemed to be in the care of the saints.

The point is that it’s my real name, not an adopted one. Zé, Melissa’s father, took me aside not long after the process was finalised and explained why he wasn’t giving me his:

‘It would give you more problems than advantages. And we can’t afford to take chances after what happened to Melissa.’

As he is chief executive of the MaxiMarket supermarket chain, and also enjoyed a brief stint as Minister for Agriculture before a change of government sent him back to commerce, he and his family have always been prime targets for kidnappers. Melissa was ten when she was taken, and she only escaped because she had the presence of mind to fake an epileptic seizure. Her kidnappers were so spooked by it that they threw her out of a moving car and were never heard from again.

‘She’s a little shaken,’ I heard Zé saying into the phone that weekend. ‘It’s most unfortunate. But we still have her.’

Unfortunate
. I doubt he’d pay any attention at all if someone grabbed me.

Melissa’s kidnapping occurred because she wandered off into the streets after school when the chauffeur was late picking her up, but it wasn’t her fault—in this city, you’re only marginally safer in a vehicle. They changed the traffic laws not long ago to prevent carjacking: red no longer means ‘stop.’ Now, it means ‘proceed with caution.’

Unlike Melissa, I do not live in the clouds. Nor do I inhabit a fortress, like her father. I have a studio apartment in a reasonable area—one of three candy-bar blocks in beige, pink and white, clustered around a communal pool. My apartment is on the first floor of the white one, nestled in its base: it’s like living in a cave at the foot of a cliff. My sole concession to deterrence is the balcony wall, into which I have embedded shards of bottle glass in blue, green and red, but these are obscured by the dense foliage of the plants I grow to remind me of the farm where I grew up.

Zé lectures me on the subject. ‘You’re naïve, Ludo. The minute we adopted you, you became different. One day it will happen—someone will target you—and there will be no use regretting it after the fact.’

He may have a point, but I have less to steal than he does, and given the differences between our lifestyles I suspect an element of paranoia. In his worldview there is no such thing as a middle class, and no such thing as a non-criminal underclass. The house that he flies home to every weeknight is a fortified compound, buffered by terraced ponds and beds of hostile, spiky shrubs. His self-watering lawns are patrolled by two pure-bred fighting mastiffs, which roll over on demand for Zé and his family, but would take the leg off an uninvited guest. His palm trees contain motion-sensitive cameras connected to the hub of technology in the guardhouse: if you disturbed so much as a blade of his grass, Zé would know about it. And that’s just the beginning. Before you even get to the house you have to enter the compound itself, which is defended by bundles of oiled razor wire and a tooled-up crew that resembles a private army rather than a team of security guards. It would take a thief with Special Forces training to get past the outer walls, let alone breach Zé’s last line of defence, and even if you did, you wouldn’t find him—he’d be sealed in his tungsten panic room long before you got in, along with every other member of his family, and every object of value. Zé Fischer Carnicelli trusts nobody but himself, however many people he employs to protect him.

For the very rich, like him, a pall of fear almost as heavy as the pollution hangs over this unmappable metropolis—but if, like me, you have less to protect, you can get high on the energy of the place, and allow it to fascinate and excite you. Town planning never happened: there wasn’t time. The city ambushed its inhabitants, exploding in consecutive booms of coffee, sugar and rubber, so quickly that nobody could draw breath to say what should go where. It has been expanding ever since, sustained by all that ferocious energy. And here, just as in the universe, anything could happen.

Derelict skyscrapers are not uncommon in the city centre, because when they get old it’s easier and cheaper to build afresh somewhere new than to knock down and start again. These bricked-up towers rot into squats and vertical shanty towns, awaiting the eraser of redevelopment. In some neighbourhoods, there is so little green and so much concrete that during afternoon storms the streets simply flood. The roads themselves become gutters, as if the buildings were the beings for whom the city was intended, and humans their waste.

But turn a corner and you might find lush foliage, pristine pavements, smoked-glass security gatehouses, and deep, glinting swimming pools. For every wrecked no-go area there is an optimistic new condominium; for every rotting ruin a daring new spire. The city is being reclaimed all the time, either by the forces of development or those of deterioration: the only constant is its power to change. Mobility is celebrated to the point that whole highways are named in honour of Workers and Immigrants. That is why for every desperate hopeful arriving today from the northeast, and every Japanese, Italian, or Lebanese who pitched up in previous years, the city is a stronghold to be stormed; a glaring citadel of opportunity, with swarms coming from all sides to hurl themselves at its ramparts, prepared to end up dead on the walls if they fail. But they must not fail.