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Marcelina asked, “What do you have to move on for?”

Barbosa stopped. “What do you think?” He tossed his empty plastic cup into a small brazier tended by two small boys. “You should be at school, learn something useful like my friend here,” he said to the boys. “Well, at least you understand now.”

“The curupairá, the Order? I don’t — ”

“Shut up. We don’t talk about that in front of the gentiles. And that wasn’t what I meant. What it’s like to have everything, to be King of the Sugar Loaf, and have it all taken away from you so that not even your best friends will talk to you.”

They didn’t take your family away , Marcelina thought. They left you that. It was a ramshackle conspiracy: a disgraced World Cup goalkeeper, a favela physicist, a middle-aged capoeira mestre, and now a wrecked television prooducer. The flimsiest of girder-works over the deepest of abysses, that this world, these streets, the skirt of rooftops spread out beneath like a first Communion frock, the blue sea and the blue sky and the green forest of the hills, even the soccer ball Fisico carried with the clumsiness of a geek-boy, were a weave of words and numbers. Solipsism seemed so unnecessary under a blue sky. But it was the world in which Marcelina found herself, and the conspiracy suitably dazed and uncertain, as if both white hats and black hats could not quite believe it. Heroes and villains barely competent for their roles — that was the way a real world would work. An improvised, found-source favela solution.

Fisico unlocked a small green door in a fresh brick wall and flicked on a bare bulb.

“You wait in here.”

“It’s kind of little,” Marcelina said.

“It won’t be long.”

“We have things to get ready,” Barbosa said. Marcelina heard a padlock snap on the hasp.

“Hey! Hey.”

The room was concrete floor, roughly pointed brick, a couple of plastic patio chairs, and a beer-fridge filled with bottled water plugged into the side of the light fitting. The door was badly painted planks nailed across a rudimentary Z-frame, bur they banished the sounds of the streets as utterly as deafness. Spills of light shone through the boards. Alone with your dreads , Marcelina thought. That’s the purpose. Descanso: chilling the head. A place between, the dark in the skull. Half an hour passed. It was a test. She would pass it, but not in the way they wanted. She pulled out her PDA and drew the stylus.

Dear Heitor.

Scratch it out.

Heitor.

Too abrupt, like calling a dog.

Querida. No. Hey. Teenage. Hi Heitor. E-mail-ese. Like Adriano’s acronym -speak.

I said I wouldn’t get in contact so that’s how you’ll know it really is me. That sounded like Marcelina Hoffman. I’m writing this because it’s possible I may not see you again. Ever. Overly melodramatic, going for the first-line grab, like one of her pitches? The stylus hovered over the highlight toggle. This is supposed to be … What is it supposed to be. A confessional?

A love letter.

Let it stand.

That makes this easy because it’s the coward’s way out; I’ll never have to live up to anything I’ve written here. Glib but true: he’d read that and say, “That is Marcelina.” It’s silly, I’m sitting here trying to write this to you and I can think of all the things I want to say — that’s so easy — but for once the hand won’t let me believe them. Funny, isn’t it, I can pitch any number of ideas I don’t really, deep down love, but when it comes to writing about something important, something real, I freeze.

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.