“My mum does this,” Fia says. “She has a little urban farm, a couple of backlots, and she hires half a dozen rooftops. She wouldn’t come here, though; she specializes in designer brassicas for the Japanese restaurant market. She’s boring. It’s beautiful.”
She’s secretive; she takes it slow. Edson hasn’t gotten to kiss her yet, let alone sex. Over kibes in that little Arab lanchonete he had promised (and they had not disappointed — Yellow Dog lanches would soon to be added to the De Freitas Global Talent portfolio) Edson had thrilled her with his telenovela of family: The Sons of Dona Hortense. Emer the bricklayer who bought a share in a gym with the money he brought down from the tower cranes of São Paulo; Ander the dead this eight years gone, cut down up in the favela; Denil the builder of fine planes for mighty Embraer; Mil the soldier boy in a violent and foreign land, remembered every night in Dona Hortense’s Book of Weeping that no high-velocity round might seek out his blue beret; Ger the aspirant malandro if he could do a decent day’s work; and Ed the man of business and affairs and talent management and many faces who would one day buy this lanchonete, turn it into an empire, and retire to his place by the ocean to watch the sun rise out of the sea. The Brothers Oliveira: on festivals and public holidays the house was so full of testosterone that Dona Hortense would send them all out into the street to play soccer; anything to work off the male aggression.
Fia had applauded but turned away his question about her family. Edson supposes there’s only so much you can say when you are a secret quantumista.
Now they’ve been out together ten times and she’s taking him to Our Lady of Trash to buy a pair of shoes and telling him finally about her family.
“And my dad runs a stable of accountancy ware, but what he really likes best are the pieces he writes for this cheesy New Age feed in Brasilia. He’s got this idea of fusing Mahayana Buddhism with umbanda Paulistana — as if Brazil doesn’t have enough religions already. My kid brother Yoshi is on a gap-year — he’s surfing his way around the world. All the girls think he’s fantastic. And I grew up in a little house with black balconies and red roof in Liberdade like six generation of Kishidas before me. We had a swimming pool and I had dolls and a pink bike with candy-stripe ribbons on the hanndlebars. See? I told you it was boring.”
“Do they know what you do?” Edson asks as Fia hauls him by the hand through the temporary alleys between trucks and buses.
“I tell them I’m freelancing. It’s not a lie. I don’t like to lie to them.” Edson knows the date is a test. Our Lady of Trash rules a landscape of superstition and street legend. Whispers of night visions; strange juxtaposiitions of this city with other, illusory landscapes; angels, visitations, UFOs, ghosts, orixás. Some, they say, have received strange great gifts: the power of prophecy, the talent to discern truth, the ability to work the weather. Some have been lost entirely, wandering away and never returning to their homes and families, though relatives may sometimes glimpse them among the trash towers, close yet far away, as if trapped in a maze of mirrors. It changes you, they say. You see farther; you see things as they really are.
Edson’s damned if he’s going to let Todos os Santos scare him. But it surely is a place to move with confidence and smarts, and so he has dressed for authority and jeito in a white suit and ruffle-fronted shirt. Fia’s shopping outfit consists of slinky boots, goldie-looking shorts with button-down pockets, calf-length shimmer coat, and Habbajabba bag.
“Hey!”
Edson almost dislocates her shoulder as he yanks her to a stop. She turns, cartoon eyes wide, to open her hot little temper on him and sees the garbage truck sway to a stop blasting all fifteen horns at her. The driver crosses himself. Trucks pile up behind him, a garbage jam. There is one direct road into the heart of Todos os Santos, and it belongs to the huge municipal caminhaos da lixo, laboring through dust and biodiesel reek. Their multiple wheel sets deeply rut the red dirt road; under rain it rurns to mud and the trucks lumber and lurch axle-deep, like dinosaurs. The track leads to the only completed onnramp of the unfinished intersection; from it they wend higher, like some kid’s Hot Wheel toy-car set, up the curving roadways until they reach the edge of the drop, reverse, lights flashing and warnings yelling, to evacuate their belllies onto the ever-growing trash mountain of Todos os Santos.
“Saved your life,” says Edson. Fia holds his eyes for three seconds. That’s enough to signal a kiss. But Edson hesitates. The moment is lost. She lets slip his hand and heads up into the second circle. This is the district of the ware shops, the copywrong vendors, the black pharmers. Your child has tubercuulosis, flu, malaria? HIV? Here’s a pill for your ill, at noncorporation prices. You can’t get yourself up in the morning, your husband just wants to sit and watch telenovelas all day, your children won’t go to school and are eating the walls? We can give you something for that. It’s been how long since you last had an erection? Oh my man, I feel for you. Here. And it will make you come buckets. You really like this track this movie this installment of BangBang! or A World Somewhere but you can’t keep up the rental payments and don’t want to lose it at the end of the month? We strip it, you keep it. Entertainnment is for life not for hire. You want, you need, the futebol feeds but you can’t afford the payments? We have a chip for every need. You are a man of debts, mistresses, crimes; seguranças police priests lawyers lovers wives after you? Here are eyes, here are fingerprints, here are names and faces and alibis and doppelgängers and ghosts and people who never lived. We can wash you purer than the crentes’ Jesus. And among them, a spray-bombed pink door to a tottering upstairs office and a hand-rollered pichacão sign slung on a selfadhesive peg: Atom Shop Is Open.
It wasn’t always sex and spandex. Today Mr. Peach was making Edson a mogueca. You need feeding up, Sextinho; you don’t look after yourself. Wasting away like a love-struck fool. Superhero costumes were hung up in the Bat-wardrobe. Mr. Peach was dressed now in dreadful shorts and a beach shirt. Edson in his sharp-creased whites said, “I still can’t believe you knew her at São Paulo U.”