They hugged, they kissed.
“You’re looking tight again,” Marcelina’s mother said, holding her daughter at arm’s length to scrutinize her face. “Have you been on the Botox again? Give me his number.”
“You should get a chain on that door. Anyone could be in here, they’d just brush you aside.”
“You lecture me about security, still living in that dirty, nasty old Copa? Look, I’ve found you this nice little two-bed apartment down on Rua Carlos Góls; it’s only two blocks from me. I got the agent to print out the details. Don’t go without them.”
The organ stood by the open French windows, lights glowing. The table had been set on the little balcony; Marcelina squeezed into her plastic patio chair. It was safest to look at the horizon. Golden surfer boys played there on the ever-breaking wave. She could never look at surfers without a painful sense of another life she could have lived. Dona Marisa brought stacked plates of doces: lemon cake, toothachey peanut squares from Minas Gerais, little honey wafers. Coffee in a pot, and an afternoon vodka for the hostess. Her third, Marcelina judged from the empties on the organ and the arm of the sofa.
“So what is it you have to tell me?”
“No no no, let’s have your news first. Me, I live up here fifteen floors above contradiction and excitement.” She offered the Minas Gerais peanut cookies. Marcelina opted for the honey wafers as the least deadly to her daily calorific intake.
“Well, I’ve got a commission.”
Her mother clasped her hands to her chest. Unlike every other mother of whom she had heard at Canal Quatro, Marisa Pinzón understood completely what her daughter did for a living. Marcelina was her true heiress; Gloria and Iracema disappointed in their successful marriages and expensively clad families. Mundanity as the ultimate teenage rebellion. In Marcelina’s informal casual name-droppings, professional brushes with stellar celebrity, and occasional affairs with a smart man on a pale blue screen who told the country terrible things every night was the lingering perfume of an age when the Queen of the Keyboard ruled from the Copa Palace to Barra. Time for men and babies when you are older while the stars are low enough for you to still touch and magic works yet.
Marcelina could never deflate her mother’s flight over the thousand lights of Ipanema with her aching doubt that her sisters had made the right choice, that she had sold her eggs for edginess and a two-second producer’s credit. Marcelina explained the premise. Her mother sipped her clinking vodka and scowled.
“Barbosa, that bad black man.”
“Don’t tell me you remember the Fateful Final?”
“Every carioca remembers what they were doing at the Maracanaço. I was having a stupidly giddy affair with Dean Martin’s lawyer. Dino gave five shows in the Copa Palace. He deserves what you do to him, he made us a laughingstock. ”
“What? Who?”
“Barbosa. Evil man.”
Dona Marisa was Marcelina’s infallible one-woman focus group. She drained her vodka.
“Querida, would you get me another one?” Marcelina quartered lemon and spooned ice into the glass. Her mother called, “I’m going to have a little feijoada.”
“What’s the occasion?”
Dona Marisa was the kind of cook who used excellence at just one dish to absolve her of every other culinary wrong. A sous-chef in the Café Pitú had given her his recipe for feijoada ten years ago when she was freshly moved to Leblon and she had produced this prodigy on the closest Saturday to every family high-day since.
“Iracema is pregnant again.”
Marcelina felt her grip tighten on the pestle as she carefully pounded the ice.
“Twins.”
A crack, a crash. The bottom of the glass lay on the floor in ice, lime, and reeking vodka, punched out by an overheavy blow from the marble pestle.
“Sorry about that. My hand slipped.”
“Never mind never mind I drink too many anyway. The ruin of many a good women, drinking at home. But twins! What do you think of that? We’ve never had twins in our branch of the family. Now Patricía and that lot down in Florianopolis, they dropped doubles all over the place, as alike as beans in a pod.”
“Play something for me. You never play these days.”
“Oh, no one wants to hear me. It’s old, that kind of stuff I play.”
“Not to me it’s not. Go on. It was lovely hearing you when I was coming up; I could hear you right down in the car park.”
“Oh dear oh no what will everyone think?”
You know full well, Queen of the Fifteenth Floor , Marcelina thought. Like me they’ve seen you playing on your balcony in your tiara and pearl earrings. You make them smile.
“Oh, you talked me into it.” Dona Marisa straightened herself on the bench, ran her feet up and down the bass pedals like an athlete warming up for high hurdles. Marcelina watched her fingers fly like hummingbirds over the tabs and rhythm buttons. Then she caressed the red power switch with a flick of her nails, and “Desafinado” swelled out like angels bursting from the heavenly spaces between the apartment towers of Leblon.
Liberace winked at her from the top of the sideboard.
Feijão the Bean wore a packet of American cigarettes tucked into the top of a pair of Speedos. Speedos, a pair of Havaianas, and his own hide, tanned to soft suede. He padded, restless and edgy as a wasp, about his luxuriant verandah, settling on a wooden bench here, the tiled lip of a plant bed there, a folding table there. He was thin as a whip and comfortable with his body; she was nevertheless thankful that he was devoid of all body hair. The very thought of the gray, wire-haired chests of sixty-something men gave her cold horrors.
“Raimundo Soares. So how is that old bastard?”
“Doing a lot of fishing these days.”
Feijão poured herbal tea from a Japanese pot. It smelled of macerated forest.
“That’s the right answer. He called me, you know. He said you don’t know anything but you’re all right. I get a lot of media sniffing round after Barbosa — oh, you’re not the first by any means. I tell them he’s gone, he’s dead. I haven’t heard of him in ten years. Which is about right. But you’ve done it the right way.”
Our Lady of Production Values, whom Marcelina pictured as the Blessed Virgin crossed with a many-armed Hindu deity — those arms holding cammeras, sound booms, budgets, schedules — smiled from within her time-code halo. Feijão tapped a cigarette our of his pouch, an oddly sexual gesture.
“They all ended up here over the years, the black men of 1950. They’ll try and tell you that there’s no racism in Brazil; that’s shit. After the Maraacanaço, the blame fell heaviest on the black players; it always does. Juvenal, Bigode. Even Master Ziza himself, God be kind to him. Most of all, Barbosa. Niteroi is not Rio. That bay can be as wide as you want it.”
Feijão’s mezzanine-level apartment faced a view that only selling a successful business can afford. His walled patio was long and narrow, humid and riotous with flowering shrubs and vines tumbling over the walls. Jacarandas and a tumbling hibiscus framed Rio across the bay. Marcelina had reached around the planet in pursuit of the glittery and schlocky but had never been across the stilt-walking bridge to Niteroi. The Marvelous City seemed smaller, meaner, less certain; Niteroi the mirror to Rio’s preening narcissism.
Feijão sipped his tea.
“Great for the immune system. Raimundo Soares will tell you a hundred wonderful tales, but he’s full of shit. There’s only one of them true: fifteen years ago Barbosa went into a shop to buy some coffee and the woman beside him at the till turned around and shouted to all the customers, ‘Look! That’s the man who made all Brazil weep.’ I know that because I was there. After he retired he came to my gym because he wanted to stay in shape and because he knew me from the old days. Little by little he lost touch with all the others from 1950, but never me. Then he found religion.”