Brasyl

Dogs skipped and barked; women toiling uphill with plastic shopping bags moved aside to the shelter of apartment steps; girls smoked in front rooms, tipping ash through window grilles. And everywhere children, children children. Marcelina shouted over the shriek of the laboring engine, “Are you really a physicist?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” the boy said, turning onto an even steeper ladeira. The moto jolted up shallow, foot-worn steps. Marcelina’s toes scraped the rain-wet concrete.

“Nothing. It just seems, well…” Whatever she said would show her Zona-Sul-girl prejudice. Why should Loop Quantum Gravity physicists not live in Rocinha?

They were high now, the tree line visible between the tenements that clung to the almost vertical hillside. Marcelina looked down on the sweep of flat roofs with their blue water tanks and satellite dishes and lines of laundry. But the favela was fecund, uncontrollable; beyond the build-line new houses went up; cubes of brick and concrete, pallets of blocks and mortars sent up by the hoist-load to bare-chested bricklayers. Fisico stopped outside a corner lanchonete so new Marcelina could smell the fresh paint. Yet the Comando Vermehlo had laid claim to its tithe on the shape of a red CV on the ocher brick wall. The owner nodded; a barefoot boy trotted out to mind the bike.

“We walk from here.”

A dark archway led between doorways and windows. Televisions blared behind metal grilles; not one tuned to edgy, noisy Canal Quatro, Marcelina noted. Sudden steps led down into a small court; apartments piled unsteadily on top of each other leaned inquisitively over the open space. Two parrots perched on the web of electricity cables that held the whole assemblage in constructive tension. Down another flight of steps into a lightless passage, past a tiny neon-lit cubby of a bar, the seat built into the wall across the alleyway from the tin counter. A bridge crossed a stream buried beneath the concrete underpi

The Man Who Made All Brazil Cry.

Over the ten years she had worked her way up the Canal Quatro hierarchy from production ru

“Have you read it?” He rested a finger on the book.

“Some. Not all. A little.” She was stammering. She was Day Three on the job, pop-eyed at Mariah Carey.

“It’ll have to do.” Barbosa slipped the little book into his jacket. “I only came for this, really. Well, you’ve found me; and a world of trouble you’ve made for everyone, but most of all yourself. I suppose there’s nothing for it. Ginga will bring you up tomorrow and we will sort it out.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You made the mess; you’re going to have to clean it up.” Barbosa rose as stiffly as he had sat down, yet, like all former athletes, a fit ghost inhabbited him, the lithe and limber orixá of a cat-agile goalkeeper. He threw back a parting question from the door.

“Would you have done it?”

“What?”

“Put me on trial, like Soares said in the papers.”

For the first time Marcelina’s power of professional mendacity fails her.

“Yes. That was always the idea.”

Barbosa laughed, a single, deep chuckle.

“I think you would have found it was I who put Brazil on trial. Tomorrow. Don’t eat too much, and no alcohol.”

“Senhor Barbosa.”

The old man had lingered in the doorframe. “Is it true for you? About the goalposts?”

A smile.

“You don’t want to believe everything Soares says, but that doesn’t mean that it’s all lies.”

High Rocinha opened itself to Barbosa the goalkeeper. The suspicious streets opened shutters, doors, gratings, and grilles. Electrically thin teen mothers with children on their hips greeted the old man; young, haughty males with soldado tattoos at the bases of their spines bid respectful good mornings. Barbosa tipped his hat, smiled, took a pao do quijo from a lanchonete, a cafezzinho from a stall. Fisico dawdled behind.

“I don’t want to have to move on from here. It’s a good place, people have time, people look out for each other. I’m too old, I’ve moved on enough, I deserve a little peace at last. I’ve had five good years; I suppose you can’t ask for much more. I should have told Feijão I was dead.”

Marcelina asked, “What do you have to move on for?”

Barbosa stopped. “What do you think?” He tossed his empty plastic cup into a small brazier tended by two small boys. “You should be at school, learn something useful like my friend here,” he said to the boys. “Well, at least you understand now.”

“The curupairá, the Order? I don’t — ”

“Shut up. We don’t talk about that in front of the gentiles. And that wasn’t what I meant. What it’s like to have everything, to be King of the Sugar Loaf, and have it all taken away from you so that not even your best friends will talk to you.”

They didn’t take your family away , Marcelina thought. They left you that. It was a ramshackle conspiracy: a disgraced World Cup goalkeeper, a favela physicist, a middle-aged capoeira mestre, and now a wrecked television prooducer. The flimsiest of girder-works over the deepest of abysses, that this world, these streets, the skirt of rooftops spread out beneath like a first Communion frock, the blue sea and the blue sky and the green forest of the hills, even the soccer ball Fisico carried with the clumsiness of a geek-boy, were a weave of words and numbers. Solipsism seemed so u

Fisico unlocked a small green door in a fresh brick wall and flicked on a bare bulb.

“You wait in here.”

“It’s kind of little,” Marcelina said.

“It won’t be long.”

“We have things to get ready,” Barbosa said. Marcelina heard a padlock snap on the hasp.

“Hey! Hey.”

The room was concrete floor, roughly pointed brick, a couple of plastic patio chairs, and a beer-fridge filled with bottled water plugged into the side of the light fitting. The door was badly painted planks nailed across a rudimentary Z-frame, bur they banished the sounds of the streets as utterly as deafness. Spills of light shone through the boards. Alone with your dreads , Marcelina thought. That’s the purpose. Descanso: chilling the head. A place between, the dark in the skull. Half an hour passed. It was a test. She would pass it, but not in the way they wanted. She pulled out her PDA and drew the stylus.