Heliopolis (3 page)

‘Why don’t we seal the place off and start a revolution?’

‘Seal it off how?’

‘Fences. Blockades.’

‘How’s that going to stop a helicopter?’ he said, tipping brandy into his coffee.

M
elissa dresses quickly and sprints up to the roof, while I cower in her bed, ready to throw myself into the wardrobe should Zé knock on the door. He doesn’t come down. Time is everything for him, and it’s wasteful to shut down and restart your engines just because your daughter hasn’t conditioned her hair. Panic over. I could go back to sleep if I wanted, but I don’t like being in the apartment alone, and there is always the possibility of Ernesto.

Ignoring the doorman’s suspicious stare, I let myself out of the building and go to a nearby Italian café that serves good coffee and freshly baked rolls. I think of Melissa as I pick up a warm roll and tear it open. Two of my favourite smells together—fresh bread and Melissa—one in my hands, and the other still on them. Distracted by this, I linger over breakfast longer than intended, but my boss is at a meeting all morning, so I’ll not hurry.

My car is a dented beige Gol, spotted with outbreaks of dark rust. The wave of air that engulfs me when I open the door is so hot that I wait for five minutes before forcing myself inside. When I take to the freeway, boiling petrol fumes stream through the front corner window, up my left arm and into my face. I shift my thighs on hot black plastic, and wish I had a better car.

Thanks to his relentlessly pessimistic view of the city, Zé advises that I vary my habits and try new routes to work, to avoid falling into a routine that might be exploited by kidnappers. I have taken this advice to heart: not only does it justify erratic arrival times, but lately it has also enabled me to explore the forlorn area surrounding our new office building. This morning, I turn off the freeway at random to explore an unfamiliar square. Down the narrow corridor between two bright orange tower blocks I glimpse some blasted shop fronts and an old stone fountain—enough to make me want to take the next exit and have a look around.

I pull in at the entrance to a dilapidated high-rise car park, where a man in oily blue overalls and a red baseball cap steps forward to assist me. I step out of the vehicle’s torrid atmosphere into the cool gloom.

‘I’ll only be half an hour,’ I say. ‘Don’t park it far away.’

He nods, peels off a pink duplicate ticket from a damp pad and hands it to me. Then he drives my car at speed up a ramp, into the rattling, clanking iron cage of the lift.

‘I said only half an hour!’ I shout, too late. The lift has already started. I watch its rusty exhaust pipe quivering as, with a high-pitched hydraulic whine, the car ascends to be buried on some high floor. It will take the attendant time to retrieve it, which will mean he can charge me more.

Shaking my head and clutching my pink ticket, I step outside into high, mid-morning light. Dazed and blinking, I realise that my sunglasses are being winched up in the lift along with the car, wonder what I am doing here, and have second thoughts. But it will take time now for the guy to come back down, then more time for him to re-ascend and collect the car. Looking back up at the flyover, I see gridlocked cars edging painfully forward against a backdrop of giant roadside advertisements: cereal mascots; confectionery creatures; a backlit Marlboro Man waving his lasso. Wasting half an hour here can’t do any harm. This might be my only chance: these days, whole neighbourhoods are reordered overnight, and today’s discovery might not be around next week. I cross the street, under the merciful shade of the flyover, and enter the blinding square.

The light is maddening, so bright that I stare down at the cracked mosaic pavement to escape it, and the burnt sugar fallout from the raging overpass is irritating my eyes and nose. All of which combines to make this dusty, monochrome space feel like somewhere I should not stay for long.

Since the city took off in the nineteenth century, wave after wave of developers have ripped through it, obliterating what lies in their path. But occasionally, the past remains in isolated fragments that seem as if they have escaped the halo of a nuclear explosion. This square is one such tatter—and only half of it, at that. Once, there would have been symmetry: a fountain surrounded by four handsome stone benches. Now, one bench has been stamped on by a raised concrete plaza that fronts the first of the orange tower blocks, while in place of the other is an angular capsule of black, reflective panels, which I recognise as one of the new ultrasecure ATM machines—a cold, dark shard, disturbing the cosy grime around it. It is as if the city has taken a bite of the square and will return again when it is hungry.

A single-storey colonial-style building, lately a slum, survives on the older side. Its walls have been posted over so many times and in so many colours that they have faded to one texture and to a colour that is all colours. The carved stone over its entrance reads
MDCCCLXXX
, topped off by an angel flanked by two bugle-playing cherubs. It would have been grand here once. I picture carriages; ladies with parasols; men in dark suits with pearls in their neckties.

I sit on a bench, imagining that if I strain hard enough I might hear one last gasp of this past, but I can’t get comfortable. My eyes won’t adjust to the light. My throat is dry, still catching on flyover fumes. The alcohol that led me into Melissa’s bed last night is thudding in my head. I am on the point of retrieving my car and heading to work when I notice what is happening on the opposite side of the square.

At the foot of the tower nearest to me, two women—both short and buxom, with electric-yellow hair—have left their office for their first cigarette of the day. They’re chatting happily, not gasping down the smoke in haste, but inhaling with panache. They lean across the doorway, relishing the light and the heat, gossiping and touching each another on the arm as they speak. They do not see the boy approaching them.

I saw him entering the square, from the shadows to one side. He stands out because of his tattered clothes and a pronounced limp, which he did not have when he first appeared. The ladies in the doorway will not know this.

I can’t hear what is said between them. I just see his frantic hands, his imploring arms. The women hear him out, then shake their tinted hairdos and ostentatiously turn to resume their conversation. The boy keeps performing even as he leaves them, dragging his foot along the pavement in such a contorted way that his bare, street-blackened heel does not sit on the sole of his paper-thin flip-flop.

There follows the tiniest chess gambit, played out in the black and white of the square—a strategic flicker that flares as briefly as sunlight off an opening window. The boy catches sight of me on my bench, and wonders how much I saw. When did I notice him? Is his cover blown, or can he try again? The look is fleeting and sly, but he drops out of character for it, and I register this because I saw him before the limp, before the overture of anguished sobs with which he approached the women.

I watch him come over, testing his act with my full attention. He can’t be much older than fifteen, but he is a good performer. I should be walking away before this encounter starts, but I’m curious. The boy wants something from me, which means, in theory at least, that these are circumstances I can control.

‘Good m-m-morning, S-S-Senhor.’ The voice is husky, not yet broken, but given an unnatural shove in that direction by too much cigarette smoke. His ripped yellow T-shirt has been washed a thousand times, but not lately. The smell—body odour,
cachaça
, a whiff of urine—barges into my senses. A thick vein throbs in his neck. His leg jigs up and down, a bare heel tapping in the dust, still only half-sitting on the flip-flop sole. His face is so dirty that he might be black, or white, or both, and while he doesn’t look thin he is probably malnourished. Everything about him says he’s running on very little to lose.

‘Mmm . . . mmm . . . aaa. . .’ Panic, or a convincing imitation of it, shudders through his body, making his head quiver. His breathing shoots out in fast, irregular bursts, like the panting of a trapped animal. The tortured, lip-chewing contortions of his mouth imply a grave problem: something so bad that it is paralysing his speech. The skyward glances hint at prayer, as if he were imploring the heavens to intercede and somehow resolve this unthinkable situation.

‘Calm down,’ I say. ‘Tell me what is wrong.’

His mother is dying. She is in hospital and he needs the taxi fare to get there to say goodbye. He’ll pay me back. He offers me a fake watch that dangles off his wrist as surety. Light glints off its face, dazzling me, making me blink.

More colourful stories occur to me immediately.
My brother has been bitten by a snake, and I must rush him to the Instituto Butantan for an antidote. I was mugged by rogue gold-dealers. My girlfriend is choking on candy floss in the park.

‘I will drive you,’ I offer, getting to my feet. ‘My car’s parked right here. Which hospital?’

He’s thrown, but has the composure to remember his stutter. He is angry: why won’t I just give him the money? Don’t I trust him?

‘No,’ I say. ‘You’re trying to con me.’

The stutter goes. The foot straightens on its sole. ‘You think you look so innocent, brother?’ he says, looking at the skin of my arm. ‘With a change of clothes, a bad night’s sleep and some mud on your face, you’d look just like me.’

He’s right—certainly in this bleaching light, which makes cars and tree trunks white hot, and their shadows black as ink.

‘And that means I should give you money?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why do you perform like that? Isn’t it easier just to mug people like everybody else?’

‘I’m not a thief.’

The sunlight is giving me a headache. I want to retrieve my car, get to work, and sit in my air-conditioned office with a bottle of ice-cold water and some painkillers.

‘I have to go to work now,’ I say, turning towards the car park. ‘Good luck.’

I walk away slowly. I don’t want to give him the impression I am escaping; I just want to end the encounter.

‘What gives you the right to walk away?’ he shouts, his voice cracking. ‘You can’t leave me. Give me money. Whatever money you have.’

Suddenly, the light, my itching eyes, the heat, the dehydration, Melissa—all of it combusts. I turn, and stride up to him, and push him hard in the chest. Melissa’s face flashes before me. The deep-blue water of her eyes.

‘The right? What gives you the right to demand money from me? If you want money, you have to earn it.’

‘How do you earn your money, brother?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘I bet you were born with it like all the rest. You have no idea what it’s like for people like me.’

‘Shut up! That routine of yours: does it ever work?’

‘Of course it works.’

‘Make it work for me now. If you do, I’ll go right up to that ATM and withdraw double the amount you make.’

‘Fuck off, man.’

‘I mean it. In fact, forget the routine. Get the money however you like. I don’t believe people would take you seriously in any situation. You’re just a kid, with a fuzzy moustache and a whiny voice. Come back here with some money, and I’ll double it.’

My rage is genuine. I want to put him in harm’s way. I want him to take risks.

‘You shouldn’t tempt me, my friend. Something bad could happen.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I’ve got something here you can take seriously.’

He’s showing me the handle of a mean-looking kitchen knife, which juts from a pair of too-big trousers held up with rope.

‘Please don’t get that out,’ I say, trying to hold his eye. ‘It’s a bad idea.’

‘Don’t worry, rich man. I’m not threatening you. Ha! How pathetic. I’m just showing this to you so you know I mean business. And so you know that if you try to run away instead of doubling my money then this is what will come after you.’

‘I’ll be right here.’

He stares at me with bloodshot eyes, fighting the impulse to get out the knife and use it on me. Somehow my anger enables me to hold his gaze in spite of the fear.

‘I have no cash,’ I say. ‘And you won’t get me into that ATM without a fight. It’s your choice.’

He pauses before leaving, pushing his face close to mine. I can smell weed on his breath behind the sugary reek of the
cachaça
.

‘You obviously never wondered where your next meal was coming from,’ he mutters. ‘Or there’s no way you could do this.’

I’ve still got a roll in my pocket from the café. I contemplate offering it to him, but that might only antagonise him further.

I shrug. ‘Do you want the money or not?’

He turns and stomps off across the square. As soon as he’s gone I regret what I have done. My irritation, which had nothing to do with him and everything to do with Melissa, made me goad him. And maybe something in the physical similarity between us, and the way he drew attention to it, made me realise that my own temper could be used to ignite his. I could see the buttons I needed to push. Now, gazing across the desolate, dusty square, I have an impulse to follow him, give him cash and take back the challenge.

But I do not. Instead I watch him hanging around, looking for his next mark, talking angrily to himself, replaying the situation and getting incensed in retrospect. He approaches passers-by, but they ignore him and walk on. He paces around under a palm tree, agitation building. Even at this distance I can see his pride kicking in.

I look away, wondering what the time is and thinking that I should be getting to work. Then I look back, and suddenly I want to move as quickly as I can, to release him from this situation. Because now I see that he has given up waiting for members of the public, has gone up to the security window in the base of the orange tower block, and is already engaged in animated conversation with the guard. A tall, dark man in his twenties, he looks down at the boy sceptically with his hands on his hips. He wears a brown uniform and a cap, and the polished wooden handle of a pistol juts from a holster on his belt. This is exceptionally unwise. Private guards are untrained, underpaid and bored—just waiting for an opportunity to draw their guns.