Brasyl

The treacherous hand hovered again, the stylus ready to delete. What could it not believe? This big, bluff, old-fashioned, glum, romantic, pessimistic, hopeful, catastrophically uncool square-headed newsreader-man. His books. His cookery. His wine his time his listening. His big gentle hands. His love of rain. His always availability, states of Brazil and world permitting. His too too many suits and shirts and always-respectable underwear. His sexiness that was never anything so modern or obvious as raunch, but something older, cleverer, dirtier, and more romantic; burlesque, louche, decadent.

She saw her stylus had written, You make me feel like a woman. Almost she consigned it to nothingness. But he did. You do. So long she had burned with acid envy at her sisters and their men and their security, and she had not reallized that she had her man, she had her security; a modern relationship, not something off the shelf marked 21st Century Bride or Hot Teenz. A grown-up thing that had evolved from a meshing of work schedules and body parts but in the end it was a man, a relationship, a love.

Her hand shook. She wrote slowly, You know I’ve gotten myself into something bad — if I told yiu I would just scare you and there still wouldn’t be a thing you could do about it. It’s all up to me now. I am very very scared. I can’t help it. I find I have to play the hero, and that’s not a role I know anything about. Give me Jerry Springer trailer trash and Z-list scandal. And I find there are no scripts for this; I’m making it up as I go along. But I’ve been doing that all my life. It’s the thing I know best. I can pitch it. But I honestly don’t know how this is going to end. I don’t want to think. Barbosa: it would have made the program of the century, but not in the way anyone thought. A show I would have been proud of.

Not much of a love letter. Or maybe it was, a Marcelina love letter where she bitches and moans about herself for two pages and then at the end drops in the line, Oh, by the way, I love you. I think I’ve loved you for a long time. Can you do that, love someone without knowing? It would be so much better if you could, clean and quick and none of the mad, embarrassing stuff, none of the phone-bombing and SMS-assaults. And then of course I start to think, is it me? And I’m not sure which is the more difficult answer because one way I’m stupid and I’ve hung my heart out and the other I didn’t know and you didn’t say. Agh! I have to go. I love you. Wish me well. I’m not a very good hero, I’m afraid.

Her thumb waited over the e-mail key. It deserved better. He deserved better. The Lisandras dated by e-mail, dumped by SMS. Show some malicia.

A scrape, a painful wedge of light opening into a parallelogram of day. Fisico stood in the brightness. Marcelina thumbed save and slid the PDA into her bag.

“Okay then,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The bateria had been playing for two hours now, a steady two-tone tick of an agogô begun before sunset and sent out over the cellular network, the call to prayer. The barracão of the Igréja of the Holy Curupaini was a large living room on the first floor of a new-build apartment block. Cheap vinyl was rolled up, the furniture piled against a wall. A folding kitchen table was the altar, pushed against the big window with its breathtaking view down across the glowing carpet of Rocinha to the towers of São Conrado. A fair gold cloth dressed the table and was scattered with assentamento: cubes of cake, cones of yellow farofa, saucers of beer, little oranges stuck with joss-sticks. Holy medals, soccer stickers, animal-game lottery cards, centavos, and cigarettes. The air was sickly and headachy from incense trickling from church-stolen burners and Yankee Colonial scented candles in glass jars. Squat saints and orixás guarded the altar; most had indio features and carried Amazonian plants and animals in their hands, snakes and jacarés beneath their feet, like the vehicles and attributes of Hindu gods. The only one unfamiliar to Marcelina was a near-life-size wood carving depicting an indio woman, naked but her skin painted gold, balancing on one foot and entwined, like a dollar sign, in an S of snake-headed vine. She juggled planets. Marcelina recognized Saturn by its rings, Jupiter by its satellites on projecting sticks. Our Lady of All Worlds. The serpent’s head was pressed to the woman’s pubis. The statue was old; the wood cracked with age, pocked with the flight-holes of woodworm, but the craft and care spoke of an age of faith made manifest. Sweepers worked the floor, two street boys with twig besoms. The susurrus of sacred amaci purification soothed Marcelina.

The bateria occupied the left window corner of the room, and the drummers were already far into their improvisation, trading tempos and breaks. On the opposing wall the kitchen door led to the improvised camarinha. As initiate zemba Marcelina was permitted into the fundamentos, which seemed to consist of Barbosa sitting at a worktop with a cup of coffee reading the soccer results off his WAP cellular. A brass cage stood beside the bottle-gas cooker; within, a golden frog, stupid eyes wide, throat throbbing. A grasshopper skewered on a pin and wired to the bars offered temptation. An antique brass kettle on the gas hob spelled its fate.

Summoned by drums, the egbé had been arriving since twilight; mostly men, some few women, pausing to purify themselves with a splash of holy water from the stoups by the front door. All wore white, though watches and jewelry showed they came from outside Rocinha. Many had painted a single stripe of gold down the center of their faces, brow to chin. Marcelina was dressed in a high-neck racer-back top and capoeira pants — all white — Fisico had sourced down in the town. The pants were a little chafing in the crotch; otherwise Fisico had read her size right. Full dark now, the great favela a fog of light spilling down from the green mountaintops to the sea. The bateria unleashed its full force. The terreiro shook, cups rattled on hooks, the refrigerator door was shaken open. Glancing out into the barracão Marcelina saw the space before the altar was as crowded with white-clad, dancing bodies as any Lapa 4 AM club, and yet more piled in behind. Some wore full bridal dress, gleamingly white and virginal; they pushed up to the very front of the barracão and whirled, already ridden by the orixás. She saw Mestre Ginga arrive, hastily bless himself, and work his way along the wall to the camarinha. He kissed Barbosa on each cheek and set a long flat object wrapped in banana leaves on the table.

“Awo,” he said to Marcelina’s puzzled look. Secret.

Now the alabé was calling, the egbé and the bateria responding, and Marcelina felt the music kick open an i