A cellular shop. A man making manioc bread on a little glass-fronted barrow. This was the place. Marcelina leaned against the storefront and watched Rocinha’s busy past. All our worlds, separate yet intersecting. She felt pretty damn pleased with her philosophizing. Worthy of Heitor himself.
The moto-taxi passed once, turned, returned. The rider, a lanky morena-fechada in Rocinha uniform of Bermudas, basketball vest, and Havaianas, drew up beside her.
“You’re the Fisico,” Marcelina said.
“Show me,” the boy ordered.
Marcelina took out the little frog she had bought from the expensive Centro chocolatier. Moto-boy waited. She unwrapped the gold foil and popped it in her mouth. The sweat-heat chocolate left a little print like the spoor of something hunted in her palm. The boy nodded for Marcelina to slip onto the pillion. She locked her arms around his waist, and he hooted his way out into the throng of market-goers. Across the cracked blacktop serpentine of Estrada de Gávea the moto-taxi took to its native element like a monkey, the steep ladeiras zigzagging up between the rough, gray, graffiti-slashed apartment blocks. Amigos dos Amigos. It was half a year since Bem-Te-Vi had been cut down by the police, the ultimate arbiters in the wars between the drug kings, but the CV’s takeover had hardly reached out from the main arterials. Medieval private armies fighting for feudal lords to rule a renaisssance hill town, with walls, even. And cellulares. And a functioning sewerage system and water supply.
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 underpinnings of the favela, dashing and foaming down from the green, moist morro into a culvert. Up and out into the light at the foot of the narrowest, sheerest ladeira yet. FIsico held up his hand. Marcelina felt the mass and life of the favela beneath her; but here, high on the upper ranges of Rocinha, they seemed the only two lives. The empty, blank tenement blocks were eerie in their silence. Higher and higher, like Raimundo Soares’s Beckham story. Then Marcelina heard a ringing, slapping sound, a rhythm that made her gooseflesh stir. A soccer ball bounced into the stop of the ladeira from a higher flight, struck the wall and zigzagged down the steep steps. Fisico stepped under the bounce and caught the ball. He beckoned Marcelina up. She rounded the turn in the ladeira. At the top of the steep flights, dark against the bluest sky, was Moaçir Barbosa.
The Man Who Made All Brazil Cry.
Over the ten years she had worked her way up the Canal Quatro hierarchy from production runner to development executive, Marcelina’s life had necessarily been woven with an eclectic warp of celebrity: Cristina Aguilera, Shakira, Paris Hilton, even Gisele Bundchen, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, all of CSS, Bob Burnquist, Iruan Ergui Wu, and more wannabe popsters and telenovela actors than she could remember. Star-sickness she got over the first time she had to run to fix a rider for a spoiled celeb — that brand of water at that temperature and shrimp for the doggie. Many had impressed, but none had ever awed, until Moaçir Barbosa had stepped out of legend and sat down at the table in the Fundaçao Mestre Ginga. Swallow in throat, push back the tears. She had been brought from her childhood bed to look upon the face of Frank Sinatra, but those blue eyes had never moved her the way Barbosa settled heavily, painfully onto the aluminum chair. This was death and resurrection; this man in his pale suit had harrowed hell and returned. It was like the risen Jesus had climbed down from his hill high above this cool cool house.
“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.”