Like soldiers and flight crew, newsmen have the ability to seize any opportunity for sleep. By the time Marcelina reached the front door Heitor was emitting that strange, gasping rattle that at any time might break into words or cries. The short hallway was where he kept his library. Shelves would have reduced the space to a squeeze too tight for a big man in a shiny suit, so the books — random titles like Keys to the Universe, The Long Tail and the New Economy, The Fluminense Year Book 2002, The Denial of Death — were stacked up title on title into towers, some wedged against the ceiling, others tottering as Marcelina tiptoed past. One particularly heavy door-slam, perhaps after a bad news day, they would all come down and crush him beneath their massed eruditions.
“And over much much too soon,” Marcelina said. “Heitor said you might be able to help me find Moaçir Barbosa.”
The Brotherhood of Dawn Fishers went quiet over their reels.
“Maybe you should just tell me what the idea is,” Raimundo Soares said.
“We think it’s high time he was forgiven for the Fateful Final,” Marcelina lied.
“There’s a fair few people would disagree with you still, but I think it’s years overdue. There’d be a lot of interest in a program about the Maracanaço, still. Of course, I was too young to properly remember it, but there are a lot of people still remember that night in July and a whole lot more who still believe the legend. There’s a journo down in Arpoador, João Luiz, my generation, he got a print of the original film and recut it so it looks like the ball hits the post, then cut in footage from another game of Bigode clearing it. There’s a guy younger than you made a short movie a couple of years back abour this futebol journalist — I think he was based on me — who goes back in time to try and change the Fateful Final, but whatever he does, the ball still goes past Barbosa into the back of the net. I even heard this guy talking on some science show on the Discovery Channel or something like that about that quantum theory and how there are all these parallel universes all around us. The metaphor he used was that there are hundreds, thousands of universes out there where Brazil won the Fateful Final. Still didn’t understand it, but I thought it was a nice allegory. There’s a great story about Barbosa: it’s a few years after the Maracanaço, before it got to him and he drifted away. He gets a few friends from the old team around — all the black players, you know what I mean — for a barbecue. There’s a lot of beer and talk abour soccer and then someone notices that the wood in the barbecue is flaring up and sputtering and giving off this smell, like burning paint. So he looks closer, and it is burning paint. There’s a bit of wood still unburned, and its covered in white paint. Barbosa’s only chopped up the goallposts from the Maracana and used them for firewood.”
“Is it true?” Marcelina slipped off her shoes and buried her feet in the cool sand, feeling the silky grains run between her toes.
“Does it matter?”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Barbosa? No. He disappeared completely abour ten, fifteen years ago. He might even be dead. People still claim to see him in shopping malls, like Elvis Presley. He’s an old man; he’s been an old man for fifty years. If I thought you were going to do some hatchet job on poor old Barbosa, I wouldn’t give you the time of day. The poor bastard’s suffered enough. But this…”
“No, we wouldn’t do anything like that,” Marcelina lied for the second time.
“Even Zizinho’s dead now… There’s one left who might know. Feijão. The Bean.”
“Who’s he, a player or something?”
“You really don’t know anything about this, do you? Feijão was the physiotherapist, the assistant physiotherapist. He was still in training, his dad was on the CBD, as it was then before it became the CBF, and got him a job on the team. Basically all he did was keep the sponges wet in the bucket, but he was like a lucky mascot to the team; they used to ruffle his hair before they went down to the tunnel. Lot of good he was. He ended up team physio with Fluminense and then opened a little health club. He sold it and retired about five years ago; I met him while I was researching the Ronaldo book and the Society of Sports Journalists. Did you know I ended up in court in a libel case over the length of Ronaldo’s dick?”
He’s right , murmured the irmãos of the rod.
“The judge found for me, of course. If anyone would know, Feijão would. He’s over in Niteroi now; this is his number.” Raimundo Soares took a little elastic-bound reporter’s notebook from the hip pocket of his Bermudas and scrawled down a number with a stub of pencil. “Tell him I sent you. That way he might talk to you.”
“Thank you, Mr. Soares.”
“Hey, you’ll need someone to present it; who better than one of Brazil’s best writers and the last professional carioca?”
That’s him , chorused the fisher kings. He’s the malandro.
“I’ll mention it to the commissioner,” Marcelina said, her third lie. No cock crowed, but the float on Raimundo’s line bobbed under.
“Hey, look at that!” He pushed his tractor hat up on his head and bent to his reel. When Marcelina looked back, from the shaded green of Flamengo Park, the Brotherhood of Dawn Fishers were unhooking the catch and returning it to the sea. Fish from Guanabara Bay were tainted, but it pleased Marcelina to imagine the old men offering it in honor to Yemanja.
She could hear the electric organ from the bay where the taxi dropped her: Aquerela do Brasil; samba-exaltação rhythm, heavy on the lower manual, wafting down over the balconies, among the satellite dishes and water tanks. Her mother’s favorite. She found her step quickening to the rhythm as she nodded past Malvina on the concierge’s desk. The music swirled down the stairwell. Malvina was smiling. When Dona Marisa played organ, the whole building smiled. Even the music in the elevaror was unable to defeat Dona Marisa on the manuals as her chords and chachachas boomed around the winch drums and speeding counterweights.
Every child thinks her childhood is normal. Wasn’t everyone’s mother Marisa Pinzón the Organ Queen of the Beija-Flor? Queen Marisa’s most lustrous days, when she ruled the land beyond midnight, Venus arising from the Art Deco shell of the Beija-Flor Club Wurlitzer, were already fading when Marcelina was born. Her two older sisters shared increasingly bitter and resentful memories of grandmothers and tias, cigarette girls and gay cleaners sent to babysit while their mother, swathed in satin and rhinestones, diamante tiara on her brow, gilded shoe tapping out the rhythm, played rumbas and pagodes and foros to the discreet little silver tables. There were photographs of her with Tom Jobim, flirting with Chico Buarque, duetting with Liberace. Marcelina had only the unfocused memory of staring up at a glitterball turning on the ceiling, dazzled by the endless carnival of lights.
She had no memories whatsoever of her father. She had been a primitive streak when Martim Hoffman put on his suit and took his leather briefcase and went our to do business in Petropolis and never returned. For years she had thought Liberace was her dad.
Marcelina shivered with pleasure as the elevator door opened to a sweeping glissando up the keys. Her mother played less and less frequently since the arthritis that would surely turn her knuckles into Brazil nuts had been diagnosed. She hesitated before ringing the bell, enjoying the music. Her alt dot family would have mocked, but it’s always different when it’s your mother. She pressed the button. The music stopped in midbar.
“You don’t call, you don’t visit…”
“I’m here now. And I sent you an SMS.”
“Only because I sent you one first.”