Brasyl

MAY 24, 2006

Marcelina loved that minuscule, precise moment when the needle entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness, beauty, youth.

Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie. Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore. But the joy began in the lobby with Luesa the receptionist in her high-collared white dress saying “Good afternoon, Senhora Hoffman,” and the smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and brightness of the frosted glass panels and the bare wood floor and the cream-on-white cotton wall hangings, the New Age music that she scorned anywhere else (Tropicalismo hippy-shit) but here told her, “You’re wonderful, you’re special, you’re robed in light, the universe loves you, all you have to do is reach out your hand and take anything you desire.”

Eyes closed, lying flat on the reclining chair, she felt her work-weary crow’s-feet smoothed away, the young, energizing tautness of her skin. Two years before she had been in New York on the Real Sex in the City production and had been struck by how the ianqui women styled themselves out of personal empowerment and not, as a carioca would have done, because it was her duty before a scrutinizing, judgmental city. An alien creed: thousand-dollar shoes but no pedicure. But she had brought back one mantra among her shopping bags, an enlightenment she had stolen from Jennifer Aniston cossmetics ad. She whispered it to herself now, in the warm, jasmine-and-vetiver-scented sanctuary as the botulin toxins diffused through her skin.

Because I’m worth it.

“Oh, I love the World Cup.” Dona Bebel visited twice a week. Mondays the dry cleaning: dusting, vacuuming, putting things away. Thursdays the wet cleaning: bathroom and toilet, dishes and the laundry Marcelina strewed across her bedroom until by Wednesday evening she could not see the floor. She was a round woman in the indefinable late-fifties, early-sixties; hair heaved back into a headache-inducing bun; eternally in leggings, baggy T-shirts, and Havaianas; and Marcelina treasured her beyond pearls gold cocaine commissions.

“Querida, she comes twice a week, does your disgusting pants, and it’s still all there when she leaves?” Vitor was an old gay man, a former participant in a daytime makeover show Marcelina had produced, who lived a handful of streets from her decrepit apartment block with its back hard to the sheer rocks of the morro. An old and unrepentant Copa-ista, he took tea in the same cafe in the same evening hour every day to watch his bairro pass by. Marcelina had taken to meeting him once a week for doces and bitching as part of her extensive alt dot family, all bound to her in different degrees of gratitude or sycophancy. “Whatever she asks, you pay her.”

After a succession of Skinny Marias who had thieved all around them as if it were an additional social security levy and hid warrens of dust bunnies under the bed, Marcelina had been reluctant to take on another cleaner from Pavão. Bur price was price — the favela tucked away like an infolded navel into the hills behind Arpoador was that that unspeakable elephant of cheap labor upon which the Copa depended. She left the glasses twinkling like diamonds, the whites blinding, and when she discovered what it was that Marcelina did for her money, pitched a program idea: “You should do a show where you go and clean up people’s houses while they’re out at work. I’d watch that. Nothing people like better than looking at someone else’s filth.”

Filthy Pigs had on-screen screamfests, fights, camera-smashings; destroyed friendships of years; opened generational rifts children against parrents; ruined relationships; wrecked marriages; and provoked at least one shooting. Audiences watched through their fingers, faintly murmuring, “No, no.” Raimundo Sifuentes had thundered upon it in the review pages of O Globo as “the real filthy pigs are at Canal Quatro.” It was Marcelina’s first water-cooler show.

Over three years many of Marcelina’s best commissions had come from Dona Bebel. Kitsch and Bitch , which had brought Vitor to prominence and turned his small store of immaculate twentieth-century kitschery into a must-shop destination featured in in-flight magazines, had come from a commment as Dona Bebel slung the washing over the line in Marcelina’s precious roof garden that she always knew which men she cleaned for were gay because they had always had 1950s plastic around the place.

Guilt and remorse were as alien to Marcelina as a nun’s habit, but she honorably put a sliver of her bonus into Dona Bebel’s weekly envelope for every commission she won. She never asked what Dona Bebel thought when she saw her casual aside up in sixteen-by-nine with full graphics. She did not even know if Dona Bebel watched Canal Quatro. She was right off its demographic.

“Oooh, World Cup.” Marcelina’s whites went round in the washing machine on Wets Thursday. The apartment’s bare, tiled floors smelled of bleach and pine. “They’re going to put a big screen up down at the Gatinha Bar. I’m going to watch them all. Brazil versus Italy in the final, I say. I’d put money on it. This time we’ll beat them. They may have the best defense in Europe, but our Magic Quadrilateral will go through them like a knife. I think a program abour the World Cup would be a very good idea — I’d watch it. But if you want controversial, you have to go for the Fateful Final.”

“The what?” Marcelina said over the twelve hundred rev spin cycle gearing up.

For the first time Dona Bebel was taken aback.

“You mean, you don’t know about the Fateful Final? Every true Brazilian should have July sixteenth 1950 engraved on her heart. This wasn’t a soccet match. This was our Hiroshima. I don’t exaggerate. After the Fateful Final, nothing was the same again.”

“Tell me,” said Marcelina, settling down on top of the upturned plastic laundry basket.

Well, I was a very little girl at the time and we didn’t have a television, no one did, but…”

This is not history. This is legend. We built the Maracanã for the 1950 World Cup — then, as it is now, the greatest stadium in the world — and in front of two hundred thousand people, we were going to show the world the beauty and the poetry of Brazilian futebol. A war had ended, a new world had risen from its ashes; this was the World Cup of the Furure in the Nation of the Future.

This was the team: it was as great as any Seleção, as great even as the squad of 1970, but you won’t see it listed on the statue outside the Maracana. Coach: Flavio Costa. Front to back: Chico, Jair da Rosa Pinto, Ademir, Zizinho, Friaça; Bigode, Danilo, Bauer; Juvenal, Augusto; Barbosa. Five three two. Beautiful. Moaçir Barbosa: you hear much more about him. Now, in 1950 the system was different from the way it is now; it was a group system all the way to the final.

My father was working then on a bridge and had money, so he bought a radio just for the World Cup. He wired it into the streetlight. It was the only radio on the street, so everyone came around to listen. You could not move in our good room for people come for the game.

We kicked off the World Championships on the twenty-fourth of June against Mexico. Bam! Down they went. Four-nil. Next! Switzerland. Here we had a bit of a wobble — but that’s the best time to have a wobble, early on. A draw, two all. Now we had to beat Yugoslavia to qualify for the finals group. There can be only one from each group. We played it at the new Maracanã and we won: two nil. We’re through to the final group!

In the final group are Sweden, Spain, and Uruguay, the Sky-blue Celestes.

Now we have to put the radio in the window, because we couldn’t fit all the people who wanted to listen into the house. My father set it on an oil drum, and people lined up all the way down the hill.

Game one, we crush Sweden seven-one. Game two, Spain, six-one. Nothing — nothing — can stop Brazil. This will be one of the greatest Seleçãos in history. The only thing that stands between us and glory is tiny Uruguay. Rio expects, the nation expects, the world expects we will raise the Jules Rimet in the most beautiful stadium in the world in the most beautiful city in the world. O Mundo even prints pictures of the team in the early editions with the headline: These Are the World Champions!

On July sixteenth one-tenth of Rio is inside that oval. A tenth of the entire city, yes. The rest of the nation is listening on the radio: everyone remembers exactly where they were when the referee blew for kickoff. The first half is goalless. But in the twenty-eighth minute something very strange happens: Uruguay’s captain, Obdulio Varela, hits Bigode, and it’s like macumba. Everyone knows the energy in the stadium has changed; you could even feel it through the radio. The axé was no longer with Brazil. But then one minute into the second half, Friaça sees the angle… shoots. Gooool do Brasil! One-nil, one-nil, one-nil, one-nil. Everyone is dancing and singing in the house and every other house and all the way down the street onto the Copa. Then in the sixty-eighth minute, Gigghia for Uruguay picks up that macumba and runs with the ball. He’s past Bigode on the right wing, crosses. Schiaffino’s on the end of it and puts it past Barbosa. God himself could not have stopped that shot.

But we can still win. We’ve come back from worse than this. We’re Brazil. Then, at 4:33, all the clocks stop. Once again Gigghia beats Bigode. He’s into the box. But this time he doesn’t cross. He’s close on the post, but he takes the shot. Barbosa doesn’t think anyone could get in from that angle. He moves too slow, too late. The ball’s in the back of the net. Goal to Uruguay , says Luis Mendes on the radio, and then, as if he can’t believe what he said, he says it again: Goal to Uruguay. And again, six times he says it. It’s true. Uruguay two, Brazil one. There’s not a sound in the stadium, not a sound in our house or on the street, not in the whole of Pavão, not in the whole of Rio. Gigghia always said, only three people ever silenced the Maracana with one movement: Frank Sinatra, the pope, and him.

Then the final whistle went and Uruguay lifted the World Cup, and still there wasn’t a sound. My father couldn’t work for a week. A man up the hill threw himself in front of a bus; he couldn’t stand it. Rio froze over. The whole nation went into shock. We’ve never recovered from it. Maybe we expected too much; maybe the politicians talked it up until it wasn’t just a game of soccer, it was Brazil itself. People who were there in the Maracanã, do you know what they call themselves? “Survivors.” That’s right. But the real pain wasn’t that we lost the World Cup; it was the realization that maybe we weren’t as great as we believed we were. Even up in our shack on the Morro de Pavão, listening on a radio wired into the streetlight with an oil drum for an amplifier, we still thought we were part of a great future. Maybe now we weren’t the nation of the future, that everyone admired and envied, maybe we were just another South American banana republic strutting around all puffed out like a gamecock in gold braid and plumes that nobody really took seriously. The Frenchman de Gaulle once said, “Brazil is not a serious country”: after the Fateful Final, we believed him.

Of course we looked for scapegoats. We always do. Barbosa, he was the hated one. He was our last line of defense, the nation was depending on him, he let Brazil down, and Brazil was never going to let him forget it. He only played again once for the Seleção; then he gave up the game, gave up all his friends from the game, dropped out of society, and eventually disappeared completely. Brazil has given him fifty years of hell; you don’t even get that for murder.

“So it’s a trial format,” Marcelina Hoffman said. This Blue Sky Friday the pitching session took place in Adriano’s conference room, a glass cube with the titles of Canal Quatro’s biggest and noisiest hits etched into an equatorial strip. There were a couple of Marcelina’s among them. Toys and fresh new puzzles were strewn deliberately around the floor to encourage creativity. Last week it was Brain Gym for the PSP; this week, books of paper marked and precreased for Rude Origami. The Sauna, as its nickname around Rua Muniz Barreto implied, was notorious for its atrocious air-conditioning, but the sweat Marcelina felt beading down her sides was not greenhouse heat. Roda sweat: this glass room was as much a martial arts arena as any capoeira roda. It would take all her jeito, all her malicia, to dance down her enemies. Aid me, Nossa Senhora da Valiosa Producão.

“We track him down, haul him in, and put him on trial before the people of Brazil. We present evidence, for and against — he gets a fair trial. As fair as we want it to be. Maybe get a real judge to preside. Or Pelé. Then the viewers decide whether to forgive him or not.”

Glass tables in a glass room; arranged in a quadrilateral. Community-facilitating and democratic, except that Adriano and the Black Plumed Bird, so very very Audrey Hepburn today, sat on the side of the quadra farthest from the sun. Lisandra and her pitch team were to Marcelina’s right; the iiber-bosses on her left. Keep your enemies in your peripheral vision but never be seen looking; that is foolishness. Directly across the square from her was Arlindo Pernambucano from Entertainment; too too old to be creaming and shrieking over celebrity mags and general girliness but who, nonetheless, had a phenomenal hit-rate. But he was out of this jogo. It was Lisandra and Marcelina in the roda.

“What happens if he’s guilty?” Adriano asked. “We make him apologize on live TV.”

Adriano winced. But that’s all right; that’s the cringe-TV wince, the carrcrash/guilty-pleasure wince. Embarrassment TV. He was liking it.

“And is he still alive?”

“I ran a check through public records,” said Celso, Marcelina’s boy researcher and newest member of her alt dot family. He was intimidatingly sharp, nakedly ambitious, was always at his desk before Marcelina arrived and there after she left. She had no doubt that someday he would reach for Marcelina’s crown but not this day; not when the joy — the old heat of the idea that burned out of nowhere perfect and complete as if it had Made in Heaven stamped on the base, the joy she thought she had lost forever and might now only glimpse in Botafogo sunrises and the glow and laughter of the streets of Copa from her roof garden — glowed in her ovaries. I’m back, she thought.

“We could make the search for him part of the program,” Adriano said. He’s making suggestions , Marcelina observed. He’s taking ownership of it. She might get this. She might get this.

“He must be a very old man by now,” the Black Plumed Bird said. “Eighty-five,” said Celso at once.

“It’s an interesting idea, but is it Canal Quatro to hold an old man up to ridicule and humiliation? Is this just pelourinho by television?”

Yes , Marcelina wanted to scream. Nothing is more Canal Quatro than the whipping post, the pillory, the branding iron. It’s what we love most, the suffering of others, the freak show. Give us torment and madness, give us public dissections and disgust, give us girls taking their clothes off. We are a prurient, beastly species. They knew it in the eighteenth century; they knew the joy of public disgrace. If there were public executions, Canal Quatro would run them prime time and rule the ratings.

“It’s a chance for us to get closure on something that still festers, fifty years on. We’ve won since, but not when it really mattered, on our own soil, in our own stadium, in front of our own people.”

Adriano nodded. Lisandra had folded a page from her origami book into two red rabbits, fucking. She jiggled them in the edge of Marcelina’s vision.

“No, I like this,” the director of programming announced. “It’s edgy, noisy, divisive — we’d run an SMS guilty/innocent vote. It’s absolutely Canal Quatro. IPTRB.”

It presses the right buttons , Marcelina guessed.

“List shows have always performed well for us,” the Black Plumed Bird said, inclining her head a degree toward Lisandra. “All-Time Greatest Seleção would get people talking.” Celso had folded a sheet from his book into a green penis, which he slowly erected in Lisandra’s direction.

“No, thank you all,” Adriano said, pushing himself back a fraction from the glass table. Anticipation cracked around the room like indoor lightning. “I knew you’d do it. Okay, IRTAMD.”

I’m Ready to Announce My Decision.

“The universe has ten to the one hundred and twenty calculations left to perform,” said Heitor, feet on his desk in his corner office, gazing out at the traffic headed beach-ward and the rectangle of gold and blue on blue at its end, like a flag of jubilee. “Then it all stops and everything ends and it’s dark and cold and it goes on expanding forever until everything is infinitely far apart from everything else. You know, I am sure I’m developing a wheat allergy.”

“You could say, ‘Well done, Marcelina, congratulations, Marcelina, killer pitch, Marcelina, I’ll take you out and buy you champagne at the Cafe Barrbosa, Marcelina.’’’

The newsroom was accustomed to Marcelina Hoffman bursting out of scruffy, bitchy Popular Factual into their clean, focused atmosphere of serious journalism like a cracked exhaust muffler, striding thunder-faced between the rows of hotdesks to Heitor’s little sanctum where he contemplated his role as the bringer of bad tidings to millions and the futility of the news media in general. The door would close, the rants would start, the stringers would put their heads down or look up holidays online. So when she came in grinning as if she had done six lines off a toilet seat, small tits pushed out and golden curls bouncing, the newsroomers were momentarily flustered. No yells from Heitor’s office. Everyone in the building, let alone the eighth floor, knew they were occasionally fucking; the mystery was why. A few understood that a relationship can be born out of a necessity not to have sex with anyone who needed to have sex with you. They kept the insight to themselves. They feared they would have to play that card themselves someday.

“Fully funded development and a complete proposal in two weeks moving to a commission green light before the end of the month. Am I fucking hot or what?”

Heitor took his feet off his desk and turned toward Marcelina, seemingly filling two-thirds of his office, capoeira queen, haloed in success.

“Well done, Marcelina.”

He did not hug her to his big, bear body in its gray suit. It was not that kind of relationship.

“What are your shifts like this afternoon?” Cafe Barbosa: always a sign somewhere. Thank you, Our Lady of Production Values.

“Early evening bulletin and the main seven o’clock.”

Heitor the depressive news reader was a media joke far beyond Canal Quatro, but Marcelina knew that his sweet, contemplative melancholy was not caused by the constant rain of sensationalist, violent, celebrity-obsessed news that blew through his life, but because he felt responsible for it. He was Death invited to a nation’s TV dinners. Marcelina, in contrast, was quite happy to pursue a career of insignificant triviality.

“Here’s what going to happen. I have an appointment with a needle. I go to the Cafe Barbosa with my team, my alt dot family and anyone else who wants to buy me a beer. You come round, we go on to Lapa. We go back to yours. I fuck the ass off you. Bur first, I need you to help me.”

“I thought there’d be a price.”

“The commission’s dependent on finding Barbosa. Do you know how I might go about that?”

“Well, I don’t … ”

“But you know someone who might.” The standard joke of journalists and lawyers.

“Try this guy.” Heitor inscribed a pink Post-it. “He can be a bit hard to find, but he knows Rio like no one else. Try catching him on Flamengo Beach, early.”

“How early?”

“Whatever you call early, earlier than that. He says it’s the beach’s best time.” Heitor turned away and grimaced as e-mail flurried into his in-box. “It’s bread, definitely. I’m going to give it up. You should read this.” A harddback book lay prone, praying on the desk. Heitor read aggressively, trying to find in printed pages ideas he might weave into an excuse for this mad world he found himself presenting twice a day. He pressed a book a week on Marcelina, who passed them on unread to Dona Bebel. Reading text was so static, so last century. “It’s about information theory, which is the latest theory of everything. It says the universe is just one huge quantum computer, and we are all programs running on it. I find that very comforting, don’t you?”

“Try and make it, Heitor. You need a lot of beer and hot hot sex.” He lifted a hand, absorbed with the incoming world.

Her car was not waiting outside on Rua Muniz Barreto. Marcelina looked up, Marcelina looked down, then went into reception.

“Did you call my taxi?”

“Called, came, went,” said Robson on the door, who was a glorious creature, tall, killer cheekbones, swimmer’s muscles, so black he glowed, and regularly voted Most Lickable in the Christmas Awards. Marcelina could not believe he was natural.

“What do you mean, went?”

“You tell me. You went off in it.”

“I went off in the taxi? I only just got here now.”

Robson looked at his hands in that way that people do when confronted by the publicly insane.

“Well, you came out of the elevator and said just what you said to me there now, ‘Did you call my taxi?’ And I said, yes, there it is outside, and you got in it and drove off.”

“I think that one of us is on very strong drugs.” It could be her. This could all be a guarana and speed flashback from the all-nighter. The pressure is off, you get the result of results, and your brain geysers like Mentos in Diet Coke.

“Well, I know what I saw.” The people who voted Robson Most Lickable had never spoken to him when riled, when a tone of camp petulance entered his voice.

“What was I wearing?” Marcelina said. Time was ticking. “Aw, fuck it, I’ll walk.”

Mysteries could wait. She had an appointment with the thin steel needle of love.

“Black suit,” Robson called after her. “You were in a black suit, and killer shoes.”

SEPTEMBER 25, 2032

Hot hot hot in skinny-heel knee boots, high-thigh polo neck body, and a cutie little black biker’s jacket cut bolero style, Efrim stalks the gafieira. Cidade de Luz is bouncing. This is a wedding gafieira, and they’re the best. The open end of José’s Garage is now the sound stage; the speakers hauled up on engine-tackles. A kid DJ wearing the national flag like Superman’s cape spins crowd-pleasers. A rollscreen displays a shifting constellation of pattterned lights, the arfids of the gafieira tracked through the Angels of Perrpetual Surveillance and displayed as a flock of beauty. Kid DJ sticks his fingers in the air, gets a small roar, claps his hands and holds them aloft, gets a big roar. Senhors, senhoras… Her entrance is lost in the dazzle of swinging lights and the opening drum-rush of “Pocotocopo,” this year’s big hit, but the audience sees the silver soccer ball lob into the air, freckled with glitterrspots. Milena Castro, Keepie-Uppie Queen, volleys her ball across the stage and back; head tits ass and knees. A smile with every bounce. The V of her thong bears the blue lozenge and green globe of Brasil. Ordem e Progresso. She rurns her back to the crowd, shakes her booty. There’s a ragged cheer.

Good girl , thinks Efrim. She’s the first of his two acts on tonight, in his other incarnation as MD of De Freitas Global Talent. But tonight he is in party mode, fabulous in huge afro wig and golden-glow body-blush with a tab of TalkTalk from Streets, his supplier of neurological enhancements, down him so he can say anything to anyone: absolutely flawless. The girls stare as Efrim stalks by, bag swinging. They’re meant to. Everyone is meant to. Tonight Efrim/Edson — a lad of parts — is hunting.

“Hey, Efrim!” Big Steak is over by the bar, one arm holding up a caipi, the other curled around fiancee, Serena. He owns a half share in the gym with Emerson, Edson’s brother number one. “Are you enjoying it?” From his ebullience and sway, Big Steak’s been loving the hospitality of his own gafieira. Serena Most Serene frowns at Edson. She has glasses but is too vain to wear them. Big Steak’s engagement present to her is a lasering in a proper Avenida Paulista surgery. “Looking foxy.” Efrim curtseys. Serena checks his fab thighs. “So you finally got yourself a good act. How long can she keep it up?”

“Longer than you,” says Efrim, gabby on the TalkTalk and striking the kind of pose you can only get with spike-heel boots and a monster Afro. Serena Most Serene creases over. Big Steak waves him away and someone is beckoning him over from beside the gas tanks, Hey Edson, get on over here. It’s Turkey-Feet with a posse of Penas, that old gang of Edson’s, at the back of the garage where they’re storing the knockoff vodka.

It had never really been a gang in the sense of honor and guns and ending up dead on a soft verge; more a group of guys who hung together, stealing the odd designer valuable, dealing the occasional dice of maconha or illicit download, here a little vehicle lifting, there some community policing, all as The Man up in the favela permitted. It had gone that way, for the younger ones saw no other road out of Cidade de Luz than walking up into the favela and taking the scarifications of a soldado of the drug lord. By then the old Penas were moving on, moving out, marrying, getting children, getting jobs, getting lazy and fat. Edson inevitably followed his older brothers into the Penas, but he had understood at once that it would ultimately be an obstacle to his ambitions. Edson subtly loosened the ties that bound him to the gang, flying farther and freer as his separate identities developed until, like a rare comet, he drifted in shaking his gaudy tail only for parties, gafieiras, wedddings, and funerals, a fortunate portent. He was his own gang now.

“It’s Efrim, honey.”

“Efrim Efrim, you got to see this.”

It catches the scatter-light on its curves like a knife, it fits the fist like a knife, it smells like a knife — but Efrim can see a shiver along the edge of the blade, like a thing there and not there, like a blade made from dreams. This is much more than a knife.

“Where did you get this?”

“Bought it from some guy from Itaquera, says he got it from the miliitary. Here, want a go?” Turkey-Feet waves the knife at Efrim.

“I’m not touching that thing.”

Turkey-Feet masks his rejection by making three sharp passes, blade whistling. Curting air. Efrim smells electricity.

“Look at this. This is cool.”

Turkey-Feet squats, sets a brick on the oily ground. With the delicacy of a dealer measuring doses on a scale, he rests the handle on the ground, sets the edge of the blade against the brick. The knife blade swings down through the brick as if it were liquid. Turkey-Feet quickly props a cigarette packet under the hilt. The blade continues its downward arc through José’s Garage floor until ir starts to slide, to pierce, sliding into the concrete until its hilt finds purchase.

Q-blade. Yes, Efrim has heard of these. No one knows where they come from: the army, the US military, the Chinese, the CIA, but since they started appearing in funk-bars as the weapon of preference, everyone knows what they do. Cut through anything. Edge so sharp it cuts right down to the atoms. From his sessions with Mr. Peach, Edson knows its sharper than that. Edged down to the quantum level. Break one — and the only thing thar will break a Q-blade is another Q-blade — and the shard will fall through solid rock all the way to the center of the earth.

“Is that not the coolest thing?”

“That is a thing of death, honey.” He can feel it from the blade, like sunburn. Streets’ pirate empathies have a fresh little synesthetic edge.

José’s Garage quakes as Kid DJ starts up a new set. Efrim leaves the Penas playing finger-and-knife games with the Q-blade. You will never get out of Cidade de Luz that way. It is time for De Freitas Global Talent’s other act to make its debut.

“Senhors senhoras, pod-wars! Pod-wars! Pod-wars!” the DJ bellows, his voice reverbing into a feedback screech. “Round one! Remixado João B versus PJ Suleimannnnnnn! There can be! Only! One! Let the wars begin!”

A wall of cheering as the contenders bounce onto the soundstage. Petty Cash will face whichever of these two wins the crowd’s hearts, hands, and feet. Efrim positions himself by the churrasco stand to check our the competition.

“Foxy, Efrim,” says Regina the churrasco queen. Efrim grins. He loves the attention on the special occasions when he trots out in his travesti aspect. He lifts the bamboo skewer of fatty, blackened beef to his glossed lips. PJ Suleiman takes João B so easily it is embarrassing: the kid’s got no beats, rakes everything down to this vaqueiro guitar riff he thinks is funky but to the audience sounds like the theme from a gaucho telenovela. They pelt him off with empty caipiroshka cups.

Senhors, senhoras, Petty Petty Petty Caaaaaash!

Petty Cash had been the perfect alibi-quiet, no gang connections, deeply deeply devoted to the beats trilling out of his headphones. In Total Surveillance Sampa even the most respectable man of business needs an alibi to swap identities with sometime: many were the afternoons Edson had gone abour Cidade de Luz and even up to the favela with Petty Cash’s identity loaded on his I-shades while Petty Cash sat missing beats as Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas. Then one day Edson, as he switched identities back, actually listened to the choons dancing across Petty Cash’s I-shades, and for the first time the words crossed his lips: I might be able to do something with that. On that tin-roofed verandah De Freitas Global Talent was born. Now the world will see him shake mass booty.

Straight up Petty Cash catches PJ Suleiman’s hip-swaying samba paulistano, hauls a mangue bass out of his sample array, and brings in a beat that has the bass drivers bowing and booming in their cabs. The crowd reels back all at once, whoa! Then in midbeat everyone is up in the air, coming down on the counterpoint, and the bloco is bouncing. Suleiman tries something clever clever with a classic black-metal guitar solo and an old drum-bass rinse, and it’s itchy and scratchy but you can’t dance to that. Petty Cash takes the guitar solo, rips off the bass section and bolts on funk in industrial quantities: an old gringo bass line from another century and a so-fresh-they-haven’t-taken-the-plastic-off pau-rhythm. Efrim can see the track lines on Petty Cash’s I-shades as his eyeballs sample and mix in real time. The audience are living it loving it slapping it sucking it: no question who wins this face-off.

Then God says, Tonight, Efrim/Edson/everyone else you ever were or might be, I smile down from beyond satellite and balloons and Angels of Perpetual Surveillance on you.

Her. At the bar with a caipiroshka in a plastic cup in her hand and a gang of girlfriends. Pink jacare boots (what is this she has with endangering the cayman population?) and a little silver snake-scale A-line so short it skims her panties but moves magnificently, heavily, richly. Korr I-shades that go halfway around her head. Space-baby. Her hair is pink tonight. Pink and silver: perfect match for the seasonal must-have Giorelli Habbajabba bag on her arm. She came.

PJ de Peeeeeepoooooo! Kid DJ announces the next challenger as Efrim moves through the crowd toward the bar.

“Efrim Efrim Efrim!” The cries in his ear are like pistol shots. When Edson was in the Penas, Treats followed him like a dog around a bitch. Treats’s eyes and manic insistence betray a load of drugs. “Trampo’s dead, man. He’s dead!”

Trampo is — was — a dirty little favelado stupid enough to want to look mean who presumably took Edson’s place as the sunshine in Treats’s life when Edson walked out of the gang. Some are born with bullet marks on their bodies, like stigmata. Even in semi respectable Cidade de Luz murder is the most common death for young males. You properly come of age if you make thirty.

“They cut him in half, man; they fucking cut him in half. They left him at the side of the rodovia. There was the sign cut into the road.”

It would be a slope-sided rectangle with a domed top, a stylized garbage can. Take out the trash. Cut with one of those same weapons that the Penas played with so casually in the back of José’s Garage. That’s how everyone knows the Q-blade. It’s the real star on what has for the last six seasons been São Paulo’s top-rated TV show. No network could sanction a reality program where José Publics compete to join the resident team of bandeirantes to hunt down street hoods. But this is the time of total media, of universal content provision, wiki-vision. A bespoke pirate production house casts it payview to twelve million pairs of I-shades. Reformers, evangelical Christians, liberation priests, campaigning lawyers, and socialists demand something be done, we know where these people are, close them down out of great São Paulo. The police turn a blind eye. Someone has to take out the trash. Efrim would never filthy his retinas with such a thing, but he admires their business plan. And now they’ve come to Cidade de Luz. This is not a conversation for now. Frightening people at a wedding gafieira, and Efrim on the hunt. She is still there, at the impromptu bar made from trestle tables borrrowed from the parish center. The priest has more sense than to come to see what is being done with his tables; but the crentes, with their infallible noses for the unsaved, are handing out hell-is-scary-and-real tracts, all of which have been trodden underfoot into alcohol-soaked papier-mache. Women scoop caipiroshkas into plastic glasses from washing-up basins. Two guys in muscle tops pound limes in big wooden mortars. Get rid of this fool quick. Efrim rolls a little foil-wrapped ball of maconha out of his bag.

“Here, querida, for you, have this.” The kid is wasted already, but Edson wants him so far away that he can’t scare anyone else. How rude. “Go on, it’s yours, run on there.”

Senhors, Senhoras, PJ Raul Glor — ee — aaaaaah! G-g-g-gloriiiiai Another win for Petty Cash.

“Hooo honeys!” Efrim cruises in, hips waggling samba-time, looking their style up and down, down and up. “My, what shocking bad shoes.” Fia and her girlfriends whoop and cheer. Efrim lets the TalkTalk roll, swaggers up and down in a mock military inspection of each in turn. “Honey, has no one told you pterodactyl toes are no no no? Oh my sweet Jesus and Mary. Pink and orange? Efrim shall pray for you, for only Our Lady of Killer Shooz can save you now. Now you, you need a workout. Make an effort. Efrim is the one has to look at you. Telenovela arms, darling. Yours sag like an old priest’s dick. And as for you, honey, the only thing can save you is plastic. I’ll have a little whip round. I know a couple of cheap guys — don’t we all wish?” He stops in front of Fia. The Habbajabba is crooked over her arm, comfortable as a sleeping cat. You don’t know who I am. But I know who you are. Efrim loves the anonymity of the mask.

“Bur for you, I do some travesti magic. You don’t believe me? We all have the magic, the power, all us girls. You give me that bag and I will tell you magic things.” Laughing at the damn effrontery of Efrim, Fia hands over the Habbajabba. Efrim rubs his hands all over it, sniffs it, licks it. “Ah now: this bag says to me that it was given to you, not bought with money. A man gave this to you: wait, the bag tells me he is a businessman, he is a man with contacts and connections and people.” Efrim puts the bag up to his ear, pouts, eyes wide in mock shock. “The bag says the man gave it to you because you did him a big favor. You saved his dumb-ass brother from the seguranças.”

Efrim has been carefully steering Fia away from her girlfriends. They think it is funny — they wave, they kissy-kiss — and she is willing to be steered on this gafieira night. Edson holds the bag up and whispers to it, nods his head, rolls his big big eyes.

“The bag says, the man of business still owes you. After all, it was his brother, and he may be useless but he is still worth more than a bag. Even this bag.”

Fia laughs. It is like falling coins bouncing from a sidewalk.

“And how does this big businessman want to treat me?”

“He is about to do a deal on an Arabic lanchonete. Their kibes just slay you. He would like you to be the first to try what will surely be Sampa’s hottest food franchise and make him a rich rich man with an apartment on Ilhabela.”

That has always been Edson’s great dream: a house by the sea. Someday, before he is too middle-aged lazy to enjoy it, he will have a place down on Ilhabela where he can wake every morning and see the ocean. He will never visit it until it is built, but when it is he will arrive by night so all he can sense is the sound and the ocean will be the first thing he sees when he wakes. Santos is half an hour away by the fast train, but Edson has never seen the sea.

“Flowers are cheaper. And prettier,” says Fia.

“Flowers are already dead.”

“The bag told you all this?”

“With a little travesti magic.”

“I think you’ve worked enough magic tonight, whatever your name is.” Efrim’s heart jumps.

“Tonight, I am Efrim.”

“So what other little secrets have you got, Efrim/Edson or whoever else you are?”

Only one , says Edson/Efrim to himself, and not even my mother knows that.

He flounces, shaking his big Afro wig, because Efrim can get away with it.

“Well, you made the gafieira, so now I think you have to do the kibes. The bag says.”

“Do you remember what I said last time?”

’’’Don’t push it.’’’

He can see Fia run through all the reasons why she should say no again and dismiss them. It is only lunch. A call comes through on the peripheral vision of her Korrs. Her face changes. Efrim can hear a tinny, trebly man’s voice cut through the seismic bass of the pod-battles. He wants to stab that man. Fia opaques her I-shades, concealing her caller’s image. Her mouth sets hard. Frown lines. This is not a good call. She glances around to two men standing on the edge of the gafieira. She touches his hand.

“I got to go.”

“Hey hey honey, don’t leave me now. What about that little lanchonete?” She turns back before the crowd can take her away, touches her Korrs. A com address flicks up on Efrim’s I-shades.

“You be careful, now. There are killers out there.”

“I know,” she calls. “Oh, I know.”

Gone.

Dona Hortense at her Book of Weeping knows it. The dead and the abandoned and the ill and the down-in-heart and dispossessed and debt-haggard and wives of feckless husbands and mothers of careless children she rememmbers in her book know it. Useless Gerson, back home now and swinging his afternoons away in his brother’s hammock, knows it. All the living brothers know it, including number four son Milson out with the Brasilian UN peaceekeeping force in Haiti. Decio, who shaves Edson under the araça tree in his black leather chair, smooth and soft as a vagina, knows it. His broker knows it, his dealer knows it, the brothers who maintain his Yam know it, the kids who play futsal behind the Assembly of God, all his old irmaos from the Penas know it, all his alibis and his alibis’ alibis know it.

Edson’s in love.

The only one who doesn’t know it is Mr. Peach. And, dressed as Miracle Boy, Edson is trying to find a way of telling him.

It’s a slow crime day in Great São Paulo, so Captain Superb and Miracle Boy just lie on their bed in the fazenda. Miracle Boy smokes maconha; exhaling small, miraculous smoke rings up to the ceiling. His cape and mask hang on the knob of the carved, heavy mahogany bed. He keeps his boots on. Captain Superb likes that.

Sometimes it’s hero and villain. Sometimes it’s villain and hero. Someetimes, like today, it’s hero and hero. The superman and sidekick. Miracle Boy’s spandex costume is split green and yellow, head to toe. The left side, the yellow side, is emblazoned with a wraparound knee-to-chin blue six. Big six, little six. Sextinho. He’s been that nickname to Mr. Peach — sorry, Capptain Superb — half his life. This particular costume is cut a little cheap and digs into his ass crack. Miracle Boy has the mother of camel-toes.

Miracle Boy’s glad it’s hero on hero. Hero/villain-villain/hero tends to involve more bondage. There’s a lot of old slave-days stuff down in the baseements of this fazenda, including an iron slave-mask for gagging unruly peças that scares him. The house is full of old stuff that Mr. Peach keeps giving to Edson, but he’ll never have anyone to pass it on to. Edson could make more online, but he prefers his cash quick and secretive and vends through the guy at the Cidade de Luz Credit Union. De Freitas Global Talent is built on Alvaranga antiques.

In this scenario, it’s the gym and a lot of mutual appreciation in front of the mirrors. He passes the spliff to Captain Superb, who takes a little tentaative puff through his mask, leaks aromatic smoke through his nostril-holes. Captain Superb is in titanium and black: boots, pants, belt, gloves, full-head mask. Even afterward, in the chill, he likes to wear the mask. Seen, not seen. Lying on his back his belly doesn’t show. Edson doesn’t mind the belly as much as Mr. Peach thinks he does. He loves the old fuck.

“Hey hero.”

“What?”

“What do you know about quantum computing?”

“Why are you asking!”

Hero passes spliff back to boy wonder.

“I was talking to someone.”

“You were talking to someone about quantum computing?”

“It was business. Don’t give me a hard time. So: how does it work?”

Captain Superb’s civilian aspect is Mr. Peach, a semiretired professor of theoretical physics at the University of São Paulo, last heir of the former coffee fazenda of Alvaranga, superhero fetishist and Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas’s mentor and afternoon delight.

“Well, do you remember when I told you about shadows and frogs?” Edson/Sextinho wriggles in his costume and presses up against Mr. Peach. Ever since the first tentative, apologetic fumble — Mr. Peach much less comfortable than teenage, cocky Sextinho — every session has been paid for with a story. Like a superhero, Edson feels he can fly, high and vertiginous, on what physics tells him about the real.

The story of the shadows and the frogs is one of the best, simple yet confusing, moving from the mundane to the extraordinary, weird yet of profound importance. Edson is not sure he has worked out all the philosophical and emotional implications of it yet. He suspects no one can. Like all the best stories, it starts with a blindingly obvious question: what is light made of? Not so simple a question, not answerable by the simple razor of chopping it finer and finer until you reached fundamental units that could not be split any further (though Edson had learned, in his superhero sessions, that even that was correct; the fundaments had fundaments, and even those might be made up of vibrating strings like guitars, though Mr. Peach did not hold with that interpretation of reality). For what fundamental units of lightwere seemed to differ depending on what you did with them. Fire a single photon at certain metals and they would kick out debris, like when Edson would watch his older brothers practice on the road signs with the airgun. Fire one through two tiny, tiny slito, and they do something very different. It makes a pattern of shadows, dark and bright lines, like two sets of waves on a puddle meeting. How can a single photon go through both slits? One thing cannot be two things at the same time. Physics, Mr. Peach always says, is about physical reality. So what is the photon: wave or particle? This is the question at the heart of quantum physics, and any answer to it means that physical reality is very very different from what we think it is. Mr. Peach’s answer is that when the single photon goes through, the real photon goes through one slit but a ghost photon goes through the other slit at the same time and interferes with it. In fact, for every real photon that goes through, a trillion ghosts go with it, most of them so wide of the mark they never interfere with the this-worldly original. Of course Edson wanted to know what was so special about photons that they had ghosts. To which Mr. Peach said, Nothing. In physics the laws apply everywhere, so if photons have ghosts, so does every other particle (and these they had covered in Physics 101, years before) and everything made from those particles. A trillion ghost Sextinhos. A trillion ghost fazenda Alvarangas, a trillion ghost Brasils and ghost worlds and ghost suns. Ghost every things. And there is a word for a physical system of everything, and that is a universe. A trillion and more, vastly more, universes, as real to their Sextinhos and Mr. Peaches, their Miracle Boys and Captain Superbs, as this. To which Edson thought, head frying, Maybe somewhere I never took the peach from the bag the driver offered when he didn’t have any change for the thirteen-year-old car-minder. Physical reality is all these ghost universes stacked beside each other: the multiverse and — on the very smallest, briefest, weakest scales — the doors between the universes open. Edson’s still thinking about that; more real to him now he’s obsessed with a girl who works in ten to the eight hundred universes. But what about the frogs?

Oh, that’s easy, Mr. Peach had said. A frog’s eyes are so sensitive it can see a single photon of light.

“Frogs see on the quantum level; they can see into the multiverse,” says Miracle Boy as Captain Superb moves his gloved hands over the firm cutve of his ass. “That’s why they sit around with their eyes wide.”

“So what’s the sudden interest in quantum computation?” asks Captain Superb. The slatted light beaming through the shutters fades. The room goes dark. A gust of wind rocks the hanging flower baskets on the verandah. Sudden rain rattles on the roof tiles. “You’ve met someone, haven’t you? You bitch! Who is she, go on, tell me!” Captain Superb sits up, fingers raised to tickle Miracle Boy into submission. There is no bitch or bitterness in his voice. It’s not that kind of affair; it’s not that kind of city. Here you can lead many lives, be many selves. Mr. Peach has seen many half-heartbreaks pass through Sextinho’s life, but none ever touch what they have in the fazenda up on the hill. There are whole provinces of Edson’s life he barely knows, many he suspects he never will.

“Just tell me, and maybe then I might tell you,” Miracle Boy says, springing out from beneath the tormenting fingers, the stub on the maconha in his hand. Someday Edson hopes to graduate from being something Boy to something Man, or even Captain something.

“Okay. Come on back to bed, but you tell me, right?” He cups his hands over Miracle Boy’s semierect cock and begins the story.

Says Captain Superb, there are two classes of computations: the doable and the budget-busters. Time is money in computing as in any enterprise, so you need to know how long it’s going to take to do your computation: now, or longer than the universe has left to run. A surprising number of everyday problems fall into that latter category and are called NP problems. The most common problem is factorizing prime numbers.

Miracle Boy says, “I know about prime numbers. They’re the magic numbers from which all the others are built. Like the chemical elements for mathematics. ”

“That’s a good analogy, Sextinho,” says Captain Superb. “It’s easy and quick ro multiply two prime numbers-doesn’t really matter how big, even up to a hundred thousand digits-together. What’s not so easy is to take that number apart again-what we call factorization. There are a number of mathhematical tricks you can pull to eliminate some obvious no-contenders, but at some point you still have to divide your original number by every odd number until you find a result that divides evenly. If you add a single extra digit to your original number, it triples the amount of time a computer needs to run through all the calculations. A two-hundred-and-fifty-digit number would take our fastest conventional computers over ten million years. That’s why very large primes are code-makers’ best friends. It’s easy to take twodigit primes as your keys that unlock your arfid chip and multiply them together. But to take that million-digit product down into its prime factors, there literally isn’t enough time left in the universe for a single computer to crank out that sum. But quantum computers can crack a problem like that in milliseconds. But what if you divided a number that would take ten billion years to factor up into chunks and farmed them out to other computers?

“Ten computers, it would only take a billion years to solve. A million computers, a thousand years. Ten million computers would be a hundred years; a hundred million …

“There is at least that number of processors in São Paulo. But with modern crypto, you’re looking at computation runs at least ten billion times that. There aren’t enough computers in the world. In fact, if every atom of the Earth was a tiny nanocomputer, there still wouldn’t be enough.”

“But there are ghost universes,” Miracle Boy says. The rain lashes hard on the roof, then eases. The eaves drip. Sun breaks through the shutter slats.

“Correct. At the smallest level, the quantum level, the universe — all the universes of the multiverse — display what we call coherence. In a sense, what seem like separate particles in the other universes are all the same particle, just different aspects of it. Information about them, about the state they’re in, is shared between them. And where you have information, you have computing.”

“She’d said ten to the eight hundred universes. There was this glowing thing, they had to keep it cold.” He thinks about the frogs that can see into quantum worlds.

“That sounds like a high-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate, a state of matter in one uniform quantum state. An array like that could do compuutations in, let me see, ten to the hundred thousand universes. That’s a lot for a handbag. It’s approaching what we’d call a general-purpose quantum computer. Most quantum computers are what we call special purpose-they’re algorithm crackers for encryption. But a general-purpose QC is a much more powerful and dangerous beast.”

“What could you do with one?”

“What couldn’t you do? One thing that immediately springs to mind is that no secret over three years old is safe. Certainly the Pentagon, the White House, the CIA, and the FBI are open for business. But the big picture is rendering, what we would call a universal simulator, one that can get down to that level. What’s the difference between the real weather, and the rendering?”

Miracle Boy tried to imagine a hurricane that blows between worlds. He shivers. He says, “Do you think she might be in danger?”

Captain Superb shrugs in his spandex suit.

“Isn’t everyone these days? Everyone’s presumed to be guilty of something. Hell, they can cut you up just for a television show. But the gringos and the government guard their quantum technology very carefully; if she’s using an unlicensed machine, someone will be interested. Even at São Paulo U the quantum cores were so heavily monitored you had to have a security officer with you. You’ve got yourself a scary girlfriend, Sextinho. So who is she, this Quantum Girl?”

“She’s called Fia Kishida.”

And it is as if Captain Superb has been struck by a White Event and been turned into a real superhero, for he flies off the bed. Miracle Boy sees him clearly suspended in midair. Captain Superb leans over Miracle Boy, spandex puffing and sucking around his mouth. He fumbles for the zips, pulls it down, shakes his graying, wavy hair out.

“What did you say? Fia Kishida? Fia Kishida?”

JULY 22, 1732

“So you’re the swordsman,” the bishop of Grão Pará said as Luis Quinn touched his lips to the proffered ring. “Younger than I’d expected. And bigger. Most of the swordsmen I’ve met were small things, scrawny chickens of things. Effete. But then many big men are light on their feet, I’ve found.”

“The sword belongs to another life, Your Grace.” Luis Quinn regained his feet and stood, hands folded in submission. Bishop Vasco da Mascarennhas’s chamber was dark, furnished in heavily carved woods from the Tocantins, deep reds and blacks. The ornate putti and seraphs had African mouths and noses, Indio eyes and cheekbones. The heat was oppression, the light beyond the drawn shutters painful.

“Yours is a military order, is it not? Of course I cannot compel you, but it would be no bad thing for your society to be seen to be… muscular. Brazil respects power and little else. There are fellows here aplenty — big idle lumps, up from the captaincies to make their fortunes — who fancy themmselves a rip with the blade. Yes, the very thing: I shall arrange a sport.”

“Your Grace, I have foresworn-”

“Of course you have, of course. Wooden swords, a good poke in the arse, that sort of thing. It would be good to show those arrogant turkey cocks a thing or two. Teach them a little respect for Church authority and keep them away from the indio girls. We get little enough novelty here, as you might imagine.” The bishop rose from his ornate chair. Wood scraped heavily over stone. “Are you a man for the sport, Father? I tell you, there is a great game they have here, the indios brought it, played with a ball of blown latex, though the blacks have the best skill at it. It’s all in the feet; you’re allowed to use the head as well, but not the hands, never the hands. You steer it to the enemy’s goal purely by foot. A splendid sight. You’ll come with me to the cloister garden; the heat is intolerable indoors this time of the day.”

Bishop Vasco was a big man and not at all light on his feet. He sweated luxuriously as he ambled around the shaded garden. Decorative panels of handpainted blue-on-white Portuguese tiles depicted allegories of the theological virtues. A fountain trickled in the center of the worn limestone Bags, a sound as fragile and deep as years. Birds peered and whooped from the eaves.

“I wish they had sent you to me, Quinn. Sometimes I wish Belem were a dog, that I might shake it by the throat. Carnality and lust, I tell you, carrnality and lust. Lust for gold; not merely the Vila Rica gold, but the red gold and the black gold, especially in this time of plague and madness. You know what I speak of. Oh, for a dozen — half a dozen — stout mission fathers: even just one examiner from the Holy Office! That would set them about their ears. I have heard about your railing at the porters of the Cidade Baixa. That is exactly the type of thing we need here, Quinn, exactly. A tedious enough passage, I take it?”

“Contrary winds and currents, Your Grace, but I am no sailor. I spent the time in prayer and preparation.”

“Yes yes, my captains say it is faster and easier to sail to the Island of Madeira and then Belém than the uncertain seas off Pernambuco. Pray, what is it the Society requires so urgently it must have an admonitory sent from Coimbra? I am aware of the Frenchman — how could one not be, fluttering around the promenade like a butterfly with his fripperies and gewgaws.”

“Your Grace, it is a matter of some delicacy within our Society.”

Bishop Vasco stopped in his tracks, face red with more than afternoon heat. He rapped his stick on the stones. Birds flew up in a clatter from the curved eave-tiles. Faces appeared in dark doorways.

“Wretched Jesuitical … It’s that Gonçalves, isn’t it? Don’t answer; I wouldn’t make a liar of you. Keep your Jesuitical secrets. I have my own informations.” He ducked his head; sweat flew from his long, curled wig. “Forgive me, Father Quinn. The heat makes me intemperate, aye, and this country. Understand this one thing: Brazil is not as other places. Even in this city the Society of Jesus, the Franciscans, and the Carmelites are in the scantest of communions with each other over the status; high on the Amazon, it is naked rivalry. The Holy Church is little more than an engine fed with the souls of the red man — and his flesh also. What’s this, what’s this?” A secretary bowed into the bishop’s path and knelt, offering up a leather tray of documents. “Hah. My attention is required. Well, Father Quinn, I shall send with instructions for that diversion I mentioned. I may even risk a little wager myself. I very much look forward to seeing you in action.”

The bishop mimed a sword-lunge with his stick as Luis Quinn bowed, then, before objection could be mouthed, hobbled heavily after his whiterobed secretary into the sweating shadows of the chapter.

The Ver-o-Peso roared with laughter as the red-faced youth in the torn shirt went reeling across the cobbles from the boot-shove to his arse. Red laughter, black laughter from the roped-off wagons and drays on the city side of the wide dock where ships and rafts from the high Amazon and Tocantins moored four deep. White laughter from the chairs and temporary stands set up on barrel and planking. From the street and the steps and all around Luis Quinn, the laughter of males. From the wooden balconies on the macaw-colored façades of the feitores’ houses and inns, immodestly open to heat and regard, the laughter of women. Luis Quinn stood victorious before the stone slave block. The young pretender had been dragged away by his friends to the jeers and fruit of slaves; a fat, arrogant son of a jumped-up cane-grower with pretensions to gentry, humiliated in two plays, spanked around the quadrangle like a carnival fool by the flat of Luis Quinn’s mock sword, jipping and whining before the convulsed audience. Then, the final boot: Out of my sight. Luis Quinn took in the faces, the wide, delighted faces. Many skins, many colors, but the open mourhs were all the same: red, hungry. Looking up he saw eyes above fluttering fans and beaded veils. Luis Quinn strode around the ring, arms held high, receiving the praise of the people of Belém do Pará.

“Some men wear their sins on their faces,” said Bishop Vasco, lolling in his chair, sweating freely despite the fringed canopy shading him from the molten sun and the work of two boy-slaves with feather fans.

“The women?” said the royal judge Rafael Pires de Campos. A noble-brother of the Misericordia banished to a pestilential backwater, he was keen on any sport that might break the monotony of striving feitores. It was widely known in Grão Pará that Pires de Campos financed the bishop’s foray into private mercantilism, and that the Episcopal fleet had suffered repeated and expensive drubbings from Dutch pirates whirling down from Curaçao.

“No, the pride, man, the pride. Yes, I am quite sure that our admonitory there was quite the blade before he took his first Exercises. And that’s another fifty escudos. How did you ever imagine that fat bumpkin could beat the Jesuit? Cash or offset?”

“Stroke it from the tally. Where is he from, the Jesuit? His accent is exceedingly rare.”

“Ireland.”

“Where is that? I don’t know of any country with that name.”

Bishop Vasco explained the geography and briefly the country’s represssive heretical laws. Pires de Campos pursed his lips, shook his head.

“I am little wiser, Your Grace. But I do think it is a good thing your Jesuit there is leaving Belém soon. Cloth or no cloth, there are a few would cheerfully have him pistoled in his bed.”

Quinn washed his face and sweat-caked hair in glinting handfuls of water from a street seller’s cask. The sport was over; the people would have to wait for the next auction from the block. The crowd stirred, dusted itself, reached to close its shutters, its brief corporate life dispersed when a movement at the port end of the market sent a ripple of turning heads around the rope ring. Applause swelled to full-throated cheering as a slight, slender man entered the ring. His dress was formal to the edge of foppishness, European, overrefined for Brazil. Eccentrically, he wore green-tinted circular eyeglasses, a source of comment and hilarity among the spectators. The man bowed elaborately.

“Father Luis Quinn?”

Quinn dipped his head. Water mingled with sweat dripping from his face; he stood in the arena, and under the terrible noon sun he realized how it had drawn the old hot joy high in him, like a tide, heat calling to blood heat. Cease now. But he could never walk away from a challenge from God or from a man.

“Your service, Father. I am Dr. Robert Francois St. Honore Falcon, a geographer and geometer of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris and guest of this colony. I understand you have some facility with a sword. I myself trained with Master of Defense Teillagory himself in Paris and very much relish the opportunity to try my skill against yours.”

“Very well, monsieur,” Luis Quinn said in French. “It is especially pleasing to fight someone who can pronounce my name correctly. I trust you have no issue with being beaten by a priest.”

The crowd hooted its appreciation.

“Do not think your collar will protect you,” Falcon said, passing cane, hat, wig, and heavy coat to his slave, retaining his curious, soul-screening glasses. “I come from a family of notorious freethinkers.”

Luis Quinn raised his wooden stave in salute. Falcon picked up the disscarded baton and returned the courtesy. Each man folded his free hand into the small of his back and began to circle. The Ver-o-Peso fell silent as if struck by an angel.

“Another fifty on the Jesuit,” Bishop Vasco said.

“Really? I think this Frenchman may yet surprise him.” Pires de Campos delicately dabbed his perspiring face with a scented handkerchief. “See?” The encircling faces let out a great gasp and cheer as Quinn made a mistimed lunge that Falcon deftly sidestepped; Falcon rapped the priest across the back as he stumbled past. Quinn shook his head, smiled to himself, recovered. The two men resumed their circles in the afternoon heat.

“Your man has been seeing off rapscallions all morning. The Frenchman IS fresh as a nosegay,” Pires de Campos commented, then found his fist clenched around his kerchief, throat tight to yell as Falcon made a series of dazzling feints that drove Luis Quinn across the ring before launching a flying fleche that had even breathless Vasco out of his chair. Tension turned to wonder to a thunder of amazement as Quinn threw himself back, under and away from the spearing staff. Both men fell heavily to the cobbles and rolled, Luis Quinn first to his feet. The tip of Quinn’s stick struck a point from the back of Falcon’s stockinged calf.

“That would not count in Paris,” Falcon said, rolling into his stance and dancing away from Quinn.

“As you can see, we are not in Paris,” said Quinn, and, laughing joyously, innsanely, launched a flurry of curs that drove Falcon back to the edge of the water.

“Even for a Jesuit, that is subtle,” cried Falcon, catching Quinn’s blade and turning it away. As space opened between the two combatants, the little Frenchman leaped and kicked the priest in the chest. Quinn reeled back toward the center of the ring. The Ver-o-Peso was a circle of roaring voices.

“Teillagory never taught that,” Quinn answered. The two men faced each other once more in the garde. Action upon action, lunge and parry, circle and feint. The barbs and witticisms of the swordsmen devolved into grunts and gasps. Bishop Vasco’s knuckles were white as he gripped the golden knurled head of his cane. The cheers of the spectators softened into mute absorption. A true battle was being fought here. Luis Quinn circled in front of the dapper, dancing Frenchman. The rage flickered like far summer lightning, haunting clouds. Luis Quinn pushed it down, pushed it away. He flicked sweat from the matted tips of his hair. Tired, so bull-tired, and every second the sun drew the strength from him; but he could not let this little man beat him before these slaves and petty masters. Again the old rage called, the old friend, the strength from beyond comprehension, from beyond right and wrong. I will come. I have never failed you. All the sun of the square was gathered up and burning in his tight, nauseous belly. Luis Quinn saw himself bearing down on this prancing fencer, with one stroke snapping his ridicuulous srick, driving him down, punching the tip of his wooden sword through his rib cage and out rhrough his back, organs impaled and beating.

Luis Quinn snapped upright, eyes wide, nostrils flared. He unfolded his left hand from the garde position and let it fall. He lifted his sword to his face, touched his nose in salute, and threw the stick to the cobbles. Falcon hesitated. Behind that green glass, what do your eyes read? Luis Quinn thought. Falcon nodded, harrumphed through his nose, then swept his own sword into the salute and threw it down beside Quinn’s.

Whistles and jeers swelled into a thunder of disapproval. Fruit began to fall and burst fragrantly on the sun-heated cobbles. In the edge of his eye Luis Quinn saw Bishop Vasco’s slaves hasten him away on his litter. Some of his household remained, arguing strenuously with the retainers of a fidalgo in pale blue. You set me a test and I beat it, Luis Quinn thought. Brazil respects only power, but power is nothing without control.

Falcon gave a courtly bow. “So, Father, I look forward to our voyage together. We have much to explore.”

The pelt of derision falling around the duelist grew thin and failed as the spectators drifted away, the order of the enslaved day restored. The tropical fruits, crusting in the sun, began to smell nauseatingly and drew flies. One by one the ladies of the Pelourinho closed up their gelosias.

Dona Maria da Maia da Garna looked again from the lemon to the orange.

“So tell me again how a piece of clock can tell us whether the world is pointed or flattened? Once more and I am sure I shall have it.”

Dr. Falcon sighed and again set the little lead bob swinging in its gimbals.

The dona persisted out of politeness to her educated guest; the other women had long since abandoned the demonstration and turned to their own small talk, which, though they saw each other daily, never seemed to stale. Five months Falcon had itched in social isolation in his rotting, rack-rented casa by the ocean docks, daily applying to bureaucrats and magistrates for a permission here, a docket there, only to be sent away with a demand for supporting applications, informations, and affidavits. Now the advent of a Jesuit had swept away all obstacles; the permits and letters of comfort arrived by special messenger that day, and the doors on polite society, barred so firmly, swung open. He suspected that as a geographer, a scientist, he was far less extraordinary a beast than as a Frenchman with a facility for the art of defense.

Dona Maria had indeed hoped for an after-dinner sport; a preto Bahian slave who knew the foot-fighting dance was ready and a space cleared in the sugar warehouse to try the thing. Thus far the only martial skill the Frenchman had demonstrated was a few Lyonnais wharf-side tricks with fish knives that anyone might learn down by the Atlantic dock. Instead she was watching a pendulum swinging tick-tock-tick-tock while he held a lemon in his right hand and an orange in his left.

“The attractive force — the gravitational force — that acts upon the penndulum is directly proportional to its distance from the center of gravity that attracts it — in this instance the center of our Earth. My pendulum — your clock mechanism is too crude to display the variation, alas — will thus vibrate faster if it is closer to the center of the Earth, slower if it is farther away.”

João the foot servant stood solid as death by the dining-room door, wearing the same stern face that he had when Dr. Falcon had darted swift as a lizard around all the casa grande’s clocks, lifting his uncouth green glasses to leer into their faces. His eyebrows had lifted a wrinkle as Dr. Falcon opened the case of the German long-case, the master’s prize and time-keeper for all the escapements of the house, and deftly unhooked the pendulum mechanism.

“In this way, we have a sensitive means of determining the exact shape of our globe, whether prolate like this lemon — greater across its polar axis than its equatorial — or oblate, like this orange, bulging at its girth.” A titter from down the table, Dona de Teffé, much gone on wine.

Dr. Falcon acknowledged the dona with a nod. His lips had barely touched his glass; wine did poorly in this morbid heat, and it was wretched Portuguese stuff. But it was pleasant, uncommon pleasant, to dine in the company of women. Unheard-of at home; not even in Cayenne were such liberties taken. As everyone insisted on reminding him, the Amazon was another country, where affairs of commerce kept the senhores and the Portuguese merchants from their city houses months at a time.

“Yes yes. Forgive me, Doctor — I must be very stupid — this is all fine and mathematical and scientific, I have no doubt, but what it does not explain to me is what holds it up.”

“Holds what up?” Falcon peered over his rounds of green glass, perplexed. “The lemon. Or the orange. Now I can easily see how it is we whirl around the sun, how this gravitational force of yours tethers us to it; it is no different from the bolas our vaqueiros use on our fazenda. But what I cannot understand is what holds it all up, what keeps us from plummeting endlessly through the void.”

Falcon set down the fruit. A breath of small exasperation left his lips. “Madam, nothing holds it up. Nothing needs to hold it up. Gravity draws us to the center of the Earth, as it draws our Earth to the center of the sun, but at the same time, the sun is drawn-infinitesimally, yes, but drawn nonetheless-to the center of our Earth. Everything attracts everything else; everything is in motion, all together.”

“I must confess I find the old way much simpler and more satisfying.” The dona skillfully quartered and peeled the orange with a sharp little curved knife. “The mind naturally rebels against a round Earth with everything drawn to the dark, infernal center. It is not only against nature, it is un-Christian; surely if we are attracted to anything, it should be upwards, to heaven, our hope and home?”

Falcon bit back the riposte. This was not the Paris Academy, nor even the Lunar Society meeting in some bourgeois salon. He contented himself to watch the sensuous deftness with which she slipped a lith of naked orange between her reddened lips. And you presume to call heaven your hope and home? Dona da Maia da Garna turned with relief from lemons and hell to the conversation at the far end of the table. Her chaperone, a tall preta woman with an eye patch, once handsome, now run to fat, leaned forward from her posiition behind the dona’s seat to study the pendulum. Falcon saw her press her thumb against her wrist to measure it against her pulse. Even in undeclared house arrest, Falcon had been close enough to Belém society to understand the meaning of the eye patch. Jealous wives often revenged themselves on their husbands’ slave lovers by blinding them with scissors.

“Forgive me, Father, I missed what you were saying there?” Dona Maria said to Luis Quinn.

Even in his priestly black, Quinn was a massive presence, drawing all attention and conversation as if he himself exerted a human gravitation. He held Dona da Maia da Garna’s gaze steadily, with none of the simpering humility of the religious that so incensed Falcon. The dona herself did not flinch from his look. Like a man , Falcon observed.

“I was merely relating one of the interesting linguistic characteristics of my native language — that is Irish,” Quinn said. “In Irish we have no words for yes or no. If you are asked a question, all you can do is confirm or deny the questioner. Thus, in reply to the question ‘Are you going to Galway?’ the answer ‘I am indeed going.’”

“That must make conversation very trying,” the dona said.

“Not at all,” Quinn answered. “It just makes it very hard for an Irishman to say no to you.” Women’s laughter chimed around the table. Falcon felt a needle-prick of envy at Quinn’s casual flirtatiousness. To those who use it least it is given greatest. He had always relished the company of women and thought himself adept in it, a sharp conversationalist and silver wit, but Quinn captivated the table, leaning to their conversations, listening, making each one feel the sole recipient of his attention. The skill of a linguist, or a libertine? Falcon thought. Now Quinn was enchanting all with a rolling, rhythmic monologue that he said was a great poem in his native tongue.

“And is it a love poem?” asked the dona.

“What other kind is worth reciting, madam?” Applause now. Falcon idly stabbed his discarded and forgotten lemon with the paring knife. He interjected, “But my dear Father Luis, to not be able to say yes or no, does that not demonstrate a direct linkage between language and thought? The word is the thought itself, and conversely, what cannot be said cannot be thought.”

The conversation died; the guests wore puzzled frowns. Father Quinn tapped a forefinger on the table and leaned forward.

“My colleague the doctor makes an interesting point here. One of the fasscinations of the Amazon — to a linguist like myself, I suspect, rather than general society — is its richness of tongues. I understand there are Indians among the far-flung tributaries who have no word for the color blue, or for any relation outside son and daughter, or for past or present. It would be a pleasantly diverting conversation to speculate on how that affects their perceptions of the world. If they cannot say blue, can they see blue?”

“Or indeed, the effect upon their spiritual faculties,” Falcon replied. “If you have no concept of a past or a future, what meaning does the doctrine of original sin then hold? Could they even entertain the concept of future promise, a life of the world to come? No heaven, no hell, just the eternal present? But then is that not eternity; a place beyond time? Do they already live in heaven, in sinless innocence? Perhaps ignorance truly is bliss.”

Several of the ladies were fanning themselves, uncomfortable at the baiting radical-talk at their table. No one alive could remember the Holy Office’s visit to Recife, but the trauma of the autos-da-fe in the Praça there was still sharp enough in folk memory for the Bishop Vasco’s jeremiads against the vices of Belém to alarm. The hostess said decorously, “I have heard that there are peças fresh arrived from someplace so backward that they can only express one idea at a time. It seems that each sentence is but a single thought. We can understand their tongue, with some difficulty, but they can never understand ours. It is as Dr. Falcon conjectured: if you cannot say it, you cannot think it. Who ever thought of descending these creatures? Quite useeless for work.”

Dr. Falcon was poised to reply again, but the house steward Anundio entered, rattled a small wooden clapper to attract the party’s attention, and announced that the musical piece would follow with coffee.

“Oh, I had quite forgotten!” the dona said, clapping her hands in delight.

“Father, dear Father, you will so much enjoy this. The most charming little cteature, truly the voice of an angel.” The chaperones poured coffee from silver pots, wiping drips from the cups with soft cotton cloths. Anundio led in a tiny indio child, thin as want, dressed in a rough white shift. Falcon was unable to tell if it was boy or girl. The child knelt and kissed the stone flagging. “Picked it up for nothing at the Port House Tavern auction. Poor thing was hours from death. Obviously from some reducione raid: only the Jesuits, your pardon, Father, train the voice so. Go on, child.”

The child stood arms at side, a distant animal look in its eyes. The voice when it came was so small, so distant, it hardly seemed to issue from the open mouth but from a hidden place beyond Earth and heaven. Falcon had given his wig to the house slaves early on account of the dreadful close heat and now felt the close-shaved nape of his neck prickle. The little voice climbed to a pure, spearing perfection: an Ave, but not by any composer known to Falcon; its rhythms were skewed, its time signature shifting and mercurial, its inner implied harmonies disquieting, discordant. Yet Falcon felt the tears run freely down his face. When he glanced up the table, he saw that Quinn was similarly moved. The women of Belém were stone, unmoving stone. The eyes of the chaperones, each behind her lady, were averted from the white race. Despite the dona’s declaration, this was not the voice of an angel. This came from a deeper, older place; this was the voice of the far forest, the deep river, the voice a child might find if it had followed those waters down to the slave markets of Belém do Para.

While the child sang, João removed the pendulum from before Dr. Falcon and, heels clicking on scone, went to replace it in the belly of his master’s clock.