Brasyl

MAY 30-JUNE 4, 2006

The adherents of Santo Daime drove good cars: Scandinavians, Germans, high-end Japanese. They were parked ten deep around the private gym in Recreio dos Bandeirantes. Valets cleaned windows and vacuumed interiors; their fresh wax finishes hugging the yellow parking-lot lights to their streamlines. Private security with berets and their pants tucked into their boots patrolled in pairs, hands resting lightly on light automatic weapons. A woman with her blonde-streaked hair scraped painfully back beneath her green beret inspected Marcelina’s letter of introduction three times. Her cap badge carried a crest of a mailed fist clutching crossed lightning bolts. A little excessive, Marcelina thought. She took Marcelina’s PDA and cellular.

“No pictures.”

Her colleague, a shave-skull thug, harassed the taxi driver, checking his license plate against his hackney license, mumbling intimidating nothings into his collar-mike. Marcelina loathed security. They had bounced her our of too many and better gigs than this. But in the scented cool of the parking lot she heard the drums sway on the heavy air and felt the rhythms of the Green Saint begin to move her.

Her letter was again inspected in the lobby by an abiá with a white cloth wound around his head in a loose turban. He was a very young, very pure alva. Marcelina suspected it was so for most of the iaos of the Barquinha do Santo Daime. He had no idea what he was reading.

“This will get you into the terreiro. After that it’s up to you; my favors are all used up.”

Go somewhere once and you will go there again. For the second time that week Marcelina had arced out over Guanabara Bay to receive herbal tea in Feijão’s humid, scented bower. She had let the porcelain Japanese bowl sit untouched on the low plastic table before her. Did you drug me? did you feed me holy secrets? But she felt that Feijão might have been close for some time to the Barquinha; some fissure had taken place and he had called in an uncomfortable debt. Such intrigue for a disgraced goalkeeper.

Exu, Lord of the Crossings, stood on either side of the futsal court’s double doors; cheap poured concrete effigies of the deity in his malandro aspect: a grinning preto in a white suit and Panama hat and shoes, garishly painted. Marcelina pushed open the doors. The drumming leaped in her face.

Marcelina adored the frenzy of Rio’s homebrew religions; at New Year she loved to step out the front door of her apartment block and lose herself in the chaos of two million pressing souls on the Copacabana, throwing flowers into the waves as offerings to the Lady of the Sea. For a week after, the beach stank of the rotting petals cast up on the strand, but Marcelina would swing barefoot through them, sensing through her bare feet the water-memory of madness. The truest religions were the ones that most deeply kissed the irrational, the ecstatic, and in that Santo Daime was less ridiculous than many. The mood in the room was taut, breathless, alien. She knew that the worshipers had been drumming, dancing, spinning since early evening. It would not be long now. She only needed to be there for the third act.

She found a place at the low curving wall of the futsal court among the shuffling, hands-raising devotees. As a dancer in the center of the court spun back to the walls a worshiper, eyes closed, would spiral out to take his place, bare feet rucking up the carefully laid plastic sheeting.

Marcelina knew what that was for.

All the worshipers wore some measure of white; the headcloth as minimum for the abiás, a white shift in what looked to Marcelina like shiny, ugly, static-clingy polyester for the initiates. She would have felt conspicuous but that the worshipers had been spun so far out of themselves by two and a half hours of drum and dance that they would not have noticed Godzilla. Not so conspicuous, though, as an elderly, black ex-goalkeeper. She scanned the room. White meat, whiter even than her carioca-German DNA. She could understand the appeal of the shamanistic, the communal and unconstrained to the white middle classes behind their security fences and surveillance cameras and armed guards. The wilder world, the spirit of the deep forest, within reasonable limits and a twenty-minute commute-time every other Tuesday evening. Her eyebrows rose slightly at a handful of Nationally Recognizable Faces: two telenovela stars and a pop-ette famous for emulating everything Madonna did, but in a Brasileiro way. No wonder beret-girl had lifted her cameras. Marcelina entertained herself by calculating how much Caras maggazine would pay for shots of the worship’s inevitable conclusion.

The urn, covered with a white cloth, stood on a small altar beneath a garden sun canopy over the penalty area. The bateria was behind the goal line: they played as well as white people could be expected. A very spaced girl pounded on a hip-slung bass drum. A tall man with long, graying hair tied in a ponytail and a grayer Santa Claus beard could only be Bença Bento. An environmentalist, Marcelina knew from her research. Went up to protect the Roam and came back having met God. Or whatever Santo Daime believed ordered the universe. The divine. She wondered how many of the high-gloss SUVs parked outside ran on biofuel. Bença Bento was as relaxéd as if he were in his own front room, chatting amiably to the bateria’s alabé and the Barquinha’s ekediss, who all seemed to be postmenopausal women swathed in white, moving unconsciously but stiffly to the drums. In a momentary flash, Marcelina pictured her mother among them, imagined her bossa nova organ doubling with the bateria. Flash again: she momentarily locked eyes with a figure across the barracão. Its head was completely wrapped in white cloth so that only the eyes were exposed. Marcelina could not tell if it was man or woman, but the eyes were at once familiar and disturbing. She looked away; the rhythm changed, the dancers, loose-limbed and drenched with sweat, spun back to the edges of the court. Bença Bento stepped into the pavilion and removed the white cloth from the urn.

The communion was about to begin. The eguns stepped forward with supermarket tubes of disposable plastic cups, cafezinho sized. Not so ecofriendly that, either. Why are you mocking? Marcelina asked herself as the women filed past the urn, filling cups. What do you do up in that walled garden in Silvestre with your songs and your berimbaus that is so very different?

The music ended. Bença Bento raised his arms.

“In the name of Santo Daime, the Green Saint and Our Lady of the Veggetable Union, draw near, receive with love and unite with the order of the universe.”

He looks like Christopher Lee playing Saruman , Marcelina thought, and gigggled. Worshipers stepped forward, then broke into a run. Middle-class cariiocas mobbed the prim ladies of the egun; reaching, snatching, clawing for their cups of the ayahuasca tea. Marcelina noted that the abiás held back, as did the Head-Wrap Spooky Eyes. Her immediate neighbor, a lanky thirty-something man whose hair was receding patchily and unattractively, returned, eyes wide, pupils shrunk to pinpricks under the hallucinogenic tea. She saw him gag once, then stepped back neatly out of the arc of the projectile vomit that spattered onto the plastic sheeting.

True iâos held that the vomiting, a side effect of the mix of forest vines and shrubs that was the Green Saint, was as valuable in its purging, its purifying, as the hallucinations it whip-cracked across the frontal lobes. Now the bateria beat up again — Marcelina noticed that neither they nor the Bença took the Daime — and the worshipers danced and turned, self-absorbed in their hallucinations. Some rolled, spasming on the smeared plastic, the bolar, ridden by sprits from beyond the edge of physical reality. Teenagers in white, boys and girls both, in white turbans and T-shirts knelt with the tranced; they were the ekedis, protecting them from the trampling feet of the worshipers.

Marcelina had done Daime — something as like it as spit — two years ago in a co-pro for the National Geographic Channel: World’s Wackiest Religions. It sure beat Catholicism. She watched the Madonna wannabe and the two telenovela stars puke ecstatic jets onto the floor. It beat Kaballah too, for that matter. She wondered idly who had the cleaning contract. There was not enough money in Brazil to pay her to clean up hallucinogenic vomit.

She felt watched and looked over her shoulder to see Scary Eyes leave the court. Almost she seized it, demanded, “Hey, what gives?” She shivered. In this futsal court anything could happen: she had already experienced the power of the Daime. She hoped it was the Daime.

She waited until the mass had ended, the worshipers hauled to their feet, their soiled, fouled whites stripped off and stuffed into bin bags and the people sent into the world in peace. You’re going to let them drive in that condition? she thought. The police of Recreio dos Bandeirantes had more important tasks than hauling in cosmic white folk who could pay the jeitinho anyway: the task of keeping the favelas bottled up. Marcelina stepped over the plastic as the ekedis rolled the foul sheeting into the center of the court. The bateria packed its drums.

“Mr. Bento?”

The bença had heavy wizard’s eyebrows, which he flashed in genuine welcome.

“My name’s Marcelina Hoffman. I’m a producer with Canal Quatro.” She gave the bença a card; he passed it to an egun. “Feijão.”

A different eyebrow flash now.

“Ah, yes, of course. He called me to say you would call. I hadn’t thought it would be at a mass.”

“I’m trying to make a program where we find Moaçir Barbosa and forrgive him for the Maracanaço.” She almost believed the lie herself now. “Feijão told me that Barbosa had associations with this terreiro. I came along because I hoped I might run into him here.”

“You won’t find Barbosa here.”

Marcelina’s hope reeled as if it had taken a meia lua de compasso she had not the malicia to anticipate.

’’I’m sorry, Ms. Hoffman, that you’ve had a wasted journey.”

“Feijão said he had been involved with this church some years ago.”

“Feijão says too much. As you’ve probably guessed, Feijão and I do not see eye-to-eye on many things.”

Marcelina’s investigative senses raced: some scandal between the former Fluminense physio and the leader of a successful, middle-class, and assuredly wealthy Daime church? The feeling of ideas spinning around her like a storm of leaves was an old demon, Saci Pererê with his one leg and red hat and pipe, the imp of perverse and inverse of Nossa Senhora da Valiosa Producão: every time an idea was bounced her mind would race in compensation, leaping, snatching whatever idea came within her grasp to prove to herself that she was still creative, that she still had it.

“Do you know where he might have gone?” The bença was gray stone.

“At least could you tell me if he’s alive or dead?”

“Ms. Hoffman, we’re finishing up here.”

Teams of ekedis tackled the futsal court with mops and buckets.

Marcelina fantasized coercing the information from Bença Bento. You lie, old man, tell me where he is. She could probably take the Bucket Brigade, but girls with pants tucked into boots and light automatic weapons were a league apart. Heitor’s first rule of television: never get killed for a TV show.

She wasn’t beaten.

She could hear the high song in her inner ear of near tears, that she had not heard since the first time she went into the roda full of jizz and jeito and was humiliated in front of the fundação by a sixteen-year-old.

She would find a way around. She would find Barbosa.

Her malicia and the taxi driver’s professional jeito jerked at the same moment on Avenida Sernambetiba: her glance over her shoulder; his lingering look in the mirror. There is a sick vertigo when the pattern of traffic resolves into the certainty that you are being followed. Innocence becomes stupidity; every action is potential treachery. You feel those headlights like thumbs at the base of your skull. In the backseat of your cab you have anywhere to go and nowhere to arrive because they will be behind you. You don’t look — you daren’t look, but you begin to impute character and motivation. Who are you, what do you want, where do you expect me to lead you? You enter an almost telepathic communication, a hunter’s empathy: Do you know that I know! If you did, would that be enough to make you peel out and go away?

Marcelina had been followed once before, tailgated in a crew car on the Love Trials: Test Your Fiance shoot by a jealous bride-to-be of one of the conntestants. Production security had pulled her in, but Marcelina had shivered for hours afterward, her city suddenly full of eyes. There had been nothing remotely Miami Vice about it.

“Can you see who’s driving?” Marcelina asked.

“It’s a cab,” the driver said. She could see his eyes scanning in the rearview mirror. She knew every driver in the Canal Quatro taxi firm by his or her eyes.

“Give me the number. I’ll call them and tell them one of their drivers is harassing me.”

“He’d get fired.”

“And I care?”

“I can’t see the number anyway,” the driver muttered. “There’s someone in the back.”

“Man or woman?”

“I am trying to drive this thing as well, you know.”

Marcelina was convulsed by a sudden shiver. The boys down in SFX had once turned a wing of the Canal Quatro building into a haunted house for a Halloween party. Her flesh had crawled; she had been seized by inexplicable, disabling anxiety. She had feared what was in the locked storeroom at the end of the corridor. It had all been a clever trick of infrasound, air currents, and subtly distorting perspectives. But this was the pure shudder of irrational dread. In that car was the thing that haunted her, all her sins drawn out of the hills and beaches, the bays and curving avenues of her city and made flesh. In that taxi was the anti-Marcelina, and when they met, they would annihilate each other.

Stop it. You’re still flashing back to the herbal tea. Or maybe they put something into the air at the terreiro.

“How far back is he?” she asked the driver.

“About five cars.”

“Head up into Rocinha.”

The driver drifted across lanes onto the Auto-Estrada Lagoa-Barra.

Marcelina risked a glance behind her. The hunting taxi slid out of the traffic onto their tail, still keeping a chaperoned distance of five cars. You are in your TV show now. This is Getaway: ultimate reality television. But I will get you , Marcelina thought. Rocinha butted with the jarring abruptness of an artificial limb against the million-real apartment towers of São Conrado. The great favela unfolded like a fan of jeweled lights across the rocky saddle between the great city forest of Tijuca and the sheer rock peaks of Pedra Dois Irmãos. The cheek-to-cheek impromptu apartment blocks, some several stories tall, were built to within meters of the mouth of the Gavea Tunnel. The military police had a permanent checkpoint at the flyover by the Largo da Macumba flyover: two armored riot-control vehicles, a half dozen young people in the light chestnut of the military police standing around eating fast food from the bar across the road. Same expressions of boredom and anger she had seen in the parking lot security at the Barguinha; same pants tucked into boots. Much bigger guns.

“Pull in there.”

They looked up as one as the cab drew in to the side of the road ahead of the lead APC. Edgy times. They had only just succeeded in pushing the favelados back into their slums. Construction machinery lined the edge of the street, shuttered for the night with galvanized plates over the glass and guarded by private security. Another favela wall. A tall twenty-something male cradled his assault rifle and sauntered toward the cab. Marcelina switched on her camera phone. A photograph would prove it. Here it came. Here it came.

The taxi passed at speed, accelerating into the Gávea tunnel that led under Rocinha to the Zona Sul. In the back, in the back, there … The camera phone flashed. In the electric flicker she saw a figure with its head wrapped in a loose turban of white cloth. The man from the terreiro. Marcelina felt a sob of relief burst inside her. You are not mad. The universe is rational. You’ve been working too hard, to much pressure too much anxiety, that’s all.

A rap at the window. The militar gestured for her to wind it down. “Is there a problem here?” He stooped and peered into the taxi. “No, Officer, no, no problem at all.”

“Can I see some ID please?”

It was not quite a smell, but it inhabited the air; not quite a sensation but it pricked like electricity; not quite a change but a disturbance in the domestic order — nothing sensible yet she knew it the moment she opened the door to her apartment. When she was an underpaid and loving-it production runner straight off her Media master’s, Marcelina had shared a tatty little apartment by the cemetery with a Fortaleza travesti come to seek his fortune in Rio. He worked night shifts in a Lapa bar and drank Marcelina’s beer, ate her food, used her washing powder, watched her cable TV, broke her Japanese tea-set bowl by bowl, and never paid a centavo toward the rent but imagined that his innate colorfulness was ample recompense, blithely disregarding the evidence of his own eyes, that travestis were cheap as beans in Lapa. Marcelina would be returning when he was leaving and thus never caught him in his violations, but she always knew when he had been through her panty drawer. However carefully he covered his crime there was always a sense, a ripple in the aether, a linger of an alien but maddeningly familiar perfume.

She smelled it now in the small tiled lobby of her apartment.

Somebody had been in her home.

It was one of the mysteries of her alt dot family that, though their lives were strewn all over Centro and Zona Sul, they always arrived together and left together. Marcelina received them in her garden. She customarily entertained up on the roof. Adriano himself had been up here for her Stones Party, revolving with the rest of her guests through the corner of the garden with the ocean view to peer through the slot between the buildings at the tiny spider figure prancing and kicking beneath orbit-visible lighting. There, that’s Rick. I mean Mick. The roof was her refuge and temple; the roof was air and the lilac and pink evening light; the roof connected her to the ocean by that parallelogram of beach, sea, and sky; the roof was the reason she had bought this ugly, clattery, strange-smelling apartment with its back to the morro as if it had been mugged by the street; and she had been sleeping on the roof for the past three nights.

The apartment was infected.

She had gone straightaway to Gloria the concierge. She had seen nothing. Mangueira samba school could have marched through the lobby of Fonseca apartments in spangles, feathers, and skin with full bateria and she would have chittered away on her cellular.

Celso, Cibelle, Agnetta, Vitor up from his street-watching cafe, Moises and Tito whom she had met on the Gay Jungle (elevator pitch: can eleven gay men marooned in a stilt-house in the middle of the Amazon turn the one straight guy gay!) series and recruited to her alt dot family. Mediaistas and gay men. See who you run to in a crisis. All her guests were welcomed with a spliff. When the real estate agent had opened the rusting roof door, Marcelina had followed him up into a sunlit field of waving maconha. “Is this included in the price?” she’d asked. There was at least ten thousand street-reis of shade-grown Moroccan beneath the water tanks and satellite dishes. Dona Bebel had showed her how to dry it in the airing cupboard. It would take her five years to smoke her way through it.

“I’ve brought you all here tonight…” Laughs, cheers.

“You know what I mean. You’re my urban family, my gay dads. I tell you things I wouldn’t tell my own flesh and blood.”

Oohings, cooings.

“No seriously seriously, if I can’t trust you, who can I trust? And I’d like to think you could trust me as well-not just work stuff. Other stuff.” It was coming out wrong; it was coming out as stupid and insincere as the night she tried to tell the guys who’d lifted the Getaway car they were on TV. But she had never asked so great a thing from them, never stripped herself so bare and pale.

“I need your help, guys. Some of you have noticed that I’ve been acting a bit… distracted lately. Like I can’t seem to remember things I’ve done, and then I get really paranoid.”

No one dared answer.

“I need you to tell me if there’s other stuff that maybe I haven’t remembered; things I might have done or said.”

Alt dot family looked at each other. Feet twisted, lips pursed.

“You walked right past me the other day,” Vitor said. His voice tightened, grew sharp and confident. “You didn’t even look round when I called after you. Mortified, I was. I almost didn’t come tonight, you know. I was this close.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, I don’t know, sometime around my time, you know the time I keep. Tea o’clock.”

“I do need to know, Vitor.”

“About five, five thirty. It was Wednesday.”

Marcelina touched her hands together, an almost-prayer, a particular gesture her development team knew well, when she was trying to pin down a part-baked idea.

“Vitor, you have to believe me when I tell you that at that time I was in Niteroi getting a letter of introduction to the Barquinha from Feijão. I can give you his number, you can call him.”

“Well, you walked right past me. Cut to the bone, querida; to the bone.”

“What direction was I walking?”

“The same as always; from here down to the taxi rank.”

Marcelina lifted her explaining hands to her mouth now.

“That wasn’t me, Vitor. I wasn’t there; I was in Niteroi, believe me.”

Everyone had stubbed out their spliffs now.

“Has anyone else experienced anything like this’”

Now Moises shuffled uncomfortably. He was a big fat sixty-something queen who ran a series of mysterious objet d’arts emporia; a true old-school carioca, he had an unrelenting if not always accurate wit, but delivered in a voice like velvet-covered razors. Since Gay Jungle , Marcelina had been looking for ways to get him his own series.

“Well, you did call me the other night. I thought I was on the Da Vinci Code , all those mysterious coded messages and everything.”

Marcelina’s head reeled. It had nothing to do with secondary maconha. “When was this?”

“Well. I know I’m a night owl, but half past three in the morning.”

“Was it on the house phone or the cellular?”

“Oh the cellular, of course. Took me hours to get back to sleep, everything buzzing round my head.”

“Moises, could you tell me what I said?”

“Oh, weird stuff, honey, weird stuff. Time and the universe and the order we see is not the true order. Are you in some kind of conspiracy thing? How exciting.”

“I’m trying to make a TV show about a World Cup goalkeeper, is all” Marcelina sat down on the wall. “Guys, at work, has there been anything else I don’t know about?”

“Apart from the e-mail thing, no,” Celso answered.

Agnetta said, “But you should know that the Black Plumed Bird has bunged Lisandra a few K to develop her Ultimate Seleção idea.” Unraveling, detuning, melting like a wax votive baby offered to a saint.

“Is everything all right?” Cibelle asked.

“There’s stuff going on I can’t explain,” Marcelina said. “All I can say is, if you know me, trust me: if it looks like me but doesn’t act like me, it isn’t me. I know this makes no sense at all, but it makes even less sense to me. I’m being haunted.”

“A ghost?” Tito, her third gay dad, was a specter of a man himself, pale and nocturnal. He knew every spook of old Copacabana personally, greeted them each dawn as he swung back through the streets to his home.

“No, something else. Something that’s not dead yet.”

“You know, there’s a program idea in that,” Celso said, but the eyes of her alt dot family were slipping away from hers. For the first time they made their separate farewells and left one by one.

You did not hold me , Marcelina thought. The spirit of maconha waited in the air. In its frame of tenements the sea still held late lilac. The surf was up and the air so still that the ocean-crash carried over the traffic on the Copa and the air smelled like she imagined hummingbirds must: sweet and floral and shimmering with color. A huge pale moon of Yemanja was floating free from the water tanks and aerials. Gunfire cracked in the distance: the little favela of Pavão at the western end of the Copa still tossed and scratched. She remembered a lilac night a lifetime ago; suddenly swept out of her bed by a tall queen from a Disney movie, all swish and swinging diamonds. Come on, get dressed. The three Hoffman sisters had sat pressed in round their mother in the back of the cab as it swept along the boulevards, the dark sea booming. Is it carnaval? Marcelina had asked when she saw the crowd in front of the floodlit hotel, white and huge as a cliff. No no, her mother had replied, something much more wonderful than that. She had pushed into the rear of the crowd. Some of the people had glared and then went, ah! or oh! and bowed from her path; most she shoved past: Come on girls, come on. Gloria and Iracema and Marcelina holding hands in a chain until they were at the front of the crowd. She had looked up at men in uniforms and men with cameras and men in evening dress and women even more glamorous than her mother. At her feet was a red carpet. A broad man with graying hair but the bluest eyes has walked up the carpet to flashing cameras and cheers and applause. Marcelina had been afraid of all the noise and the lights and the bodies, but her mother had said, Cheer! Cheer! Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo! The man had looked over, looked puzzled, then raised a hand, smiled, and walked on down the alley of lights.

In the taxi back she had peeped up the question Gloria and Iracema were too big and shy to ask.

“Mum, who was that?”

“My love, that was Mr. Frank Sinatra.”

Her mother’s face had shone like the women in St. Martin’s on solemn novena.

One moment of silver. The flicker on the screen. Her mother had shown it to her, on the steps of the Copa Palace, in every beautiful old tune she had pumped out of the organ. Marcelina had chased, leaped for it, snatched with her hands until she caught it and held it up, shivering and flowing from form to form, and she had seen in an instant how the trick was done.

She got her mattress and lightweight bag, stripped down to panties and vest in the backscatter of light from the morro.

JANUARY 27, 2033

How to weep, in Cidade de Luz.

Every new entry in the book requires Crying Cake. Flour, margarine, sugar, nuts, more sugar — the saints have sweet teeth — and a generous glug of cachaça, which the saints don’t mind at all. Bake. Cut into cubes with a knife cleaned in holy water, one cube per invocation. The rest must be left on the cooling tray on top of the front wall, for all the neighborhood. Select a saint. Her I-shades tell Dona Hortense the best for this entry is St. Christina (the Astonishing). She prints an image that she carefully snips out with scisssors, pastes onto a matchbook-sized board with other Catholic tat ripped from the parish magazine, and decorates the border with plastic beads and tinsel and shards of broken glass ornament from the Christmas box. The icon is then purified with salt and incense. Divination with the Chinese compass gives the best alignment; then the Book of Weeping is opened before the altar, the name and the need written in felt marker that gives a nice thick line, easy to read in the dim of the barracao, and the whole is dusted with farofa, which is then tipped down the valley of the book into an offertory cone before St. Christina the Astonishing. Thereafter until the weeping stops, the entry, with all the others for that day, will receive a tear.

St. Christina, be true , prayed Dona Hortense. Astonish me. For my littlest and second-favorite son suffers. He lies in his hammock, and from the flicker of his eyes I can tell he plays games and reads chat on his glasses; the food on his plate goes cold and draws flies; he neglects his deals and contacts and plans: this is a boy of energy and business and determination. I know Gerson — stupid, soft Gerson — slips pills into Edson’s Coke and coffee and they steal his energy, sap his will. Get him up get him out get him around his friends and clients for they can help him. Until then, let me launder his clothes and straighten his papers and fetch him coffee and leave him plates of chicken and beans and rice and tell Gerson to stop it with the pills and instead bring some proper money into the house.

Early in the morning of the day of the Feast of Nossa Senhora Apareçida Dona Hortense finds her littlest and second-favorite son climbing on the house roof. He is in shorts and a sleeveless T and Havaianas, poking at the geometry of white plastic pipes that surround the solar water heater. Cidade de Luz wears its civic bairro status proudly, but the every-man-for-himself plumbing uphill and down alley and the sagging, crazy-crow wiring — you can still plug into the streetlamps — betrays its favela provenance.

“These pipes need replacing.” Edson stands hands on hips looking around him. Not at pipes and plumbing, Dona Hortense knows, but at the city, the sky, his world. It’s begun.

“I’ve made kibes,” she says.

“I’ll be down in three minutes.”

That night Dona Hortense turns St. Christina the Astonishing’s Icon facedown and crumbles her Crying Cake as an offering to the birds.

In the mornings pensioners get special rates at the gym. Edson passes treadmills churning with men in baseball caps and saggy shorts and women in Capri tights and big Ts. Afternoons the soldados of the drug lord come down from Cidade Alta to pump. The Man has negotiated a corporate membership for them. The deal’s good, but they have a habit of leaving the weights at max to look macho to the next user. Emerson is out back trying to weld a broken weight machine, squinting through a square of smoked glass at the primal arc.

“Still taking old people’s money off them?” asks Edson. Emerson looks up, smiles, then grins.

“At least I’m making money.” Emerson kills the welding gun, slips off his gloves, hugs his brother to him. Little Sixth always was fiercely independent, never needing anyone’s permission, but he always brought his plans to Emerson as if for a blessing that Dona Hortense and all her saints could not bestow. There are Skols in cool-jackets in the store refrigerator. Emerson chases receptionist Maria-Maria out of the office — “all she ever does is chattbots anyway” — and they sit across his battered desk. Pensioners thump and hiss behind the ripple glass.

“So.”

“I’ll be all right. It’s time, isn’t it? Everything’s time. It’s like, I’m back again. Does that make sense? I was away, somewhere, like on holiday in my own house, and now I’m back again and it’s like it was spring and now it’s summer.”

Emerson doesn’t say, It’s been three and a half months. Nor does he say any stupid talk-show shit like, I don’t think I can ever understand what she meant to you. Emerson recalls how he felt when Anderson was killed. He had been up in the favela working on a newlywed floor on the top of an apartment block. They worked together: bricklayer and electrician, brothers Oliveira. Then the fireworks went up all around like a saint’s day. Police. Out on the steep ladeiros The Man’s foot soldiers had dumped I-shades, cash cards, arfided valuables — anything that might betray their location to the Angels of Perpetual Surveillance. The police stun drones swarmed in over Cidade Alta like black vultures. Already gunfire was rattling around the intersections where Cidade Alta grew out of Cidade de Luz. Anderson had gone to pick up elecctrical tape. Anderson had been caught out there. Firing everywhere now. Nowhere to run from it. Nowhere to go but stay on this roof. He’d called Anderson to tell him to get out, get home, get down to Luz, and if you can’t get out, get in, anywhere with a door and walls. No answer; the police had shut down the network. Scared now. He’d done a locate on Anderson’s I-shades. The seek function was accurate to millimeters. The center of Anderson’s I-shades was resting eight centimeters above ground level. That is the height of the bridge of a nose of a head lying sideways on the street. That was how Emerson had found him, in a great dark lake of drying blood. He had looked so startled, so annoyed. The police tried to make him out to be a soldado. Outrage from the Cidade de Luz District Council forced an admisssion that Anderson had been caught in crossfire trying to find safety. It was as much as anyone could hope for. A platitude to add to the stumbling well-wishes of friends and neighbors. Words were not sufficient, so they resorted to platitudes, trusting that Dona Hortense and her five surviving sons would read the unsayable truth behind them. Sometimes only platitudes are enough.

Edson says, “I need to ask you something.”

Emerson has learned to be wary of questions with preludes, but he says, “Go on.”

“Was there a video?”

“What do you mean? Like…”

“ Take Out the Trash. Did you see one?”

“I don’t watch that kind of thing.”

“I know, but — ”

“I haven’t heard.”

“Me neither.”

“What are you thinking?”

Again, he hears the shudder in Edson’s breath.

“It was a Q-blade, so everyone automatically thinks, Take Out the Trash. But what if it wasn’t?”

“Go on.”

Edson twists his bottle in its plastic sleeve on Emerson’s desk.

“The last time I saw her, at Todos os Santos, when the gay guy tried to scare me off, she was talking to some people. One of them was a priest — a white priest. Well, he dressed like a priest, but a lot of white guys have this priest thing. And the night of the gafieira she got called over to some people who were not on the guest list.”

“What is it you want to do?”

“I just want to go down and have a look.”

“What for?”

“A trash can.”

“And if you find it?”

“Then that’s the end of it.”

“And if you don’t?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let it lie.”

“I know, I should. But I don’t think I can.”

“Then brother, you be very fucking careful.”

The old fit people thud and creak.

Edson makes his first pass on the wrong side of the road, then turns through the Ipiranga alco station on the central strip and pulls over onto the verge. He can re-create every slo-mo frame of the massacre scene, but now, here, he cannot find it in all the empty blacktop. No flowers, no Mass cards, no edible blessings. He leaves the Yam and walks up and down the margin, grit-stung by fast trucks. An off-cur of tire here, like a snake’s shed skin. A coil of sheared-off steel: street jewelry. He stands where the killer waited, hand out, hitching a lift. Edson extends his arm, draws an imaginary line of division across the blur of vehicles, houses, towers, sky. He feels nothing. This edgeplace is too dislocated for anything like memory or grief to attach.

A moto-taxi stops on the opposite verge. A long-haired woman dissmounts. The flowing cars frame her like the shutter of a movie camera. The woman walks up and down the verge. She leans forward, hands braced on hips, staring across the highway. Edson jerks upright. The image is branded onto his visual centers. The fall of the hair; the tilt of the cheekbones; the false-innocence of the doe-eyes, the anime eyes. Her.

Their eyes meet across car roofs. Heart stopped, time frozen, space conngealed, Edson steps toward her. The blare of horns sends him sprawling across the grit. She is running for the moto-taxi, gesturing the driver to Go go.

“Fia!” The highway swallows it. He saw her on this same margin, this spot where he stands. He saw her dead. Face covered. Logos on the soles of her shoes. He saw them take her away from this margin.

The moto-taxi weaves into the traffic. The thrall is broken. Edson snaps off a tracking shot on his Chillibeans. He jumps onto his bike, kicks up the engine. She wears a green leather jacket. Green leather jacket and long long hair streaming. He can find those. He takes a scary scary cut across the central strip and into the fast lane. She’s twelve cars ahead of him, shifting lanes. Edson’s Yamaha can outrun anything on this highway; dodging between biodiesel trucks on the Santos convoy, he closes the gap. She glances over her shoulder; her hair whips across her face. It’s me, me! Edson screams into the slipstream. She punches the rider on the back, jerks her thumb forward, then right. The rider bends over the throttles; the bike takes off like a fighter. Edson’s right behind it. She told him she never rode pillion. The sudden slowdown almost sends him into the back of a school minibus. One of São Paulo’s endemic roadlocks. He’s lost her. Edson cruises up the line of stationary traffic. She’s not in this line. He walks the scrambler between two cars, so close to the big RAV that the driver yells at him, Mind the chrome, favelado. Not in the center lane. Not in the inside lane. Where? He sees green leather accelerating up the offramp from the opposite side of the highway. Caught him with his own trick. But he knows where that road leads: Mother of Trash, Todos os Santos.

“Take it.” Mr. Peach offers the gun handle first to Sextinho. It’s a handsome, cocky piece he keeps in his bedside cabinet, for the night when the indentured biofarm workers above and the housing projects below meet and the world breaks over Fazenda Alvaranga.

“I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“It’s easy, I’ve shown you; this, this, and you’re ready. Just take the fucking thing.”

He never swears. Mr. Peach never swears. “I’m sorry…” He presses hand to head. “It’s just you don’t know what you’re doing. So take the fucking gun.”

Edson lifts the bone handle in limp fingers. It’s much heavier than he imagined. He understands now what the boys see in these pieces, the sexy metal, the potency. He stashes it away quickly in his bag. Dona Hortense must never find it. It would be a nail in her heart to see her littlest and second-favorite son gone to the gun. Quickly, he says, “You’ve seen the video, what do you think that was?”

“A ghost,” says Mr. Peach.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Edson says.

“I do,” says Mr. Peach. “The most real things there are, ghosts. Take the gun, Sextinho, and please, please, querida, look after yourself.”

That evening in his hammock Edson takes a fistful of pills and invents a new self: Bisbilhotinho, Little Snoop the private dick. He is polite and quite slow spoken. He plans everything carefully and moves slowly and deliberrately so that people will make no mistake about his seriousness. He always leaves himself a clear way out. He deals with killers. Little Snoop is a young personality and has yet to spread wide his wings and flash the colors hidden there, but Edson likes him, can see where Little Snoop might surprise him.

“You’re going where?” Petty Cash says as Bisbilhotinho trades identities with him. “Hey, I’m not so sure about this; if you get killed, I’m dead.”

“Then you get to inherit my clients,” Little Snoop says. “What clients?” Petty Cash calls after him.

It’s a risk, leaving the bike with all its engine parts in place, but he may need to get away fast. He’s paid two different kids well to mind it, with more on his return. They’ll keep an eye on each other. Todos os Santos at night is a blazing city. Truck headlights dip and veer as they plow the rutted road into the heart of Out Lady of Trash. Garbage fires smolder; kids gather around burning oil drums stirring the flames with broken planks. Churrassceiros tend their small braziers, charcoals red under white, flyaway ash. Boys shoot pool under clip-on neons in tattered lanchonetes. Edson can see the guns tucked in the backs of their baggies, like his own. But it doesn’t make him feel safe at all. Heads turn as he works his way up the spiral road. Atom Shop is closed.

The bar is jammed with customers watching soccer on a big screen. Little Snoop orders a Coke and shows the video grab to the barman. Edson has watched the clip so many times it has become a visual prayer: her face turning away from him as the moto-taxi accelerates into the traffic.

“Her parents are worried,” he says to the barman.

“I’d be too, if you’re looking here,” says the bartender, a handsome twenty-something. “No, I don’t recall her.”

“Do you mind if I pass it around?”

The fans pass the I-shades hand to hand, a cursory look, a purse of the lips, a shake of the head, a small sigh. Some comment that that is a goodlooking girl. Goooooooooooool! roars the commentator as Little Snoop steps down onto the road. Half the bar leaps to its feet.

Patiently, politely, Little Snoop works up the spiral. As the trasherers and collectors never rest, neither do the workshops and the disassemblers. The kids running handcarts of parts to the grill plates and ovens barely glance at the video. Have you seen her, have you seen her? The chippers and smelters bent over in the hissing light of bottled gas shake their heads, irriitated at the distraction.

“Her parents, eh?” The woman is big, easy, rolls of fat lapping generously as she sits, one leg outstretched, on the step of the gold refinery. Her wealth is in her teeth, around her neck, on her fingers, the stubby, sweet-smelling cigar she smokes with simple relish. “And they hired you? Son, you’re no priivate detective. But you’re not anything else either, so I’ll answer your guestion. Yes. I know this face.” Edson’s heart kicks inside so hard she must hear it: a meaty knock. “She was selling stuff, tech stuff; gear, good gear. Gear like I’ve never seen before, like no one had ever seen before. And some jewelry.”

“In the last month?”

“In the last twenty-four hours, son.”

Beyond the shotgun shacks, the dark trash mountains crawl with stars; LED head-torches and candle lanterns flickering like fireflies. The miasma the dump constantly exudes blue and yellow. It is radiantly beautiful. Weird stuff here by superstition, street legend. Whispers of night visions; strange juxtapositions of this city with other, illusory landscapes; angels, visitations, UFOs, orixás. Ghosts.

“Do you know who bought them?”

“Son, there’s always someone buying something around here. Some of the usual dealers — you won’t catch them here this time of night. They’ve more sense.”

“Do you know if she’s staying around here?”

“She’d be a bigger fool than you if she were. I got one set of eyes, son, and a failing memory. Count your blessings.”

Descending the spiral Little Snoop calls in at the futebol bar and has a bottle of good import whiskey sent up to bling woman. It’s expensive, but that’s the way his city works. A favor given, a favor returned. And his Yamaha is intact, untouched, absolutely flawless.

Eleven thirty-eight and Edson’s ass feels like a spill of hardened concrete. There’s one safe little niche on the hotel roof, but it’s small, uncomfortable, and ball-freezingly cold. This is an unglossy neighborhood, forgotten like discarded underwear behind the kanji frontages and Harajuku pinks of the sushi bars and theatrical teppanyaki eateries. Hardpoint sensors and an aerial drone on a three-minute orbit supplement the bored teen with the stupid near-moustache crewing the security barrier. Edson watches the HiLux pickup laden with vegetables drive through the gates into the cul-de-sac. Close behind the scooped red-tile roof the pencil-thin apartment towers rise, crowned in moving ads for beer and telenovelas. He’s never been so close to the mythical heart of the city. Praça de Sé is ten blocks away.

She grew up here , Edson thinks. Her life was shaped in this long, bulb-ended street like a vagina. She pedalled that pink kiddie-bike with the streamers from the handlebars around this turning circle. She put up a stall made from garden tools and sheets to sell doces and iced tea to the neighbors. She tongue-kissed her first boyfriend just around that step in the build-line where the segurança couldn’t watch her. Her parents are unloading the truck now, boxes bursting with green and dark red so soft you could imagine rolling over in them to sleep.

“Ghosts. Like, the way you mean ghost?” he had said to Mr. Peach, the gun hard against the crack of his ass.

“Go on.” There was a way Mr. Peach carried himself — eager, leaning, hands tense — when he expected more than affection and sex from Sextinho.

“There are millions of other Fias out there in other universes, other parts of the multiverse.”

“Yes.”

“And one of them…”

“Go on.”

“Has come through.”

“That’s a nice expression. Come through.”

“That’s impossible.”

“What you think is impossible and what quantum theory says is imposssible are very different things. What’s impossible is covered by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Pauli exclusion principle. The rest is just shades of probable. Quantum computing relies on what we call a ‘superposiition’: a linkage between the same atom in different states in different uniiverses. An answer comes through from somewhere out in those universes. And sometimes something more than an answer.”

To the right. On the roof of the garage. Movement, a figure. Edson’s heart thumps so hard it hurts. He needs to hurl. He moves to the low parapet, leans over. He can’t make out any detail in this damn yellow light. His hand goes to click up the zoom on his Chilli beans; then the figute sets a can of paint on the parapet. Some kid, a pichaçeiro, leaning over the edge to roller his tag. The heart eases, but the nausea peaks.

On the left. Walking slowly down the street, hood up, hands folded in the front pocket of a weird knitted short hoodie thing, like a street-nun. Skinny gray leggings tucked into fuck-me boots. Boots. Good boots, but who wears boots with leggings? He knows that too-tight walk, those too-short steps. Her face is shadowed by the hood, but the highlights, the glances are identification enough for Edson. Fia/Not Fia. Her hair is longer. But this is Fia. A Fia. Another Fia. She stops to glance down the guarded street. You were born there too, in that other Liberdade, weren’t you? The city, the streets, the houses are the same. What brought you? Curiosity? Proof? What are you feeling? Why are you in this world at all? The guard stirs in his booth. The Fia turns away, walks on. Edson drops from his surveillance, sits back to the coaming, panting, knees drawn up to thin chest. He has never been so scared, not even when he went up the hill to The Man to get his blessing to open De Freitas Global Talent, not even the night when Cidade Alta exploded around Emerson and Anderson.

You’ve identified her. Now get off this roost, get down there. Edson falls in thirty meters behind the Fia. The security kid checks him. Edson closes with the Fia. She glances over her shoulder. Twenty paces now. He knows how to do it. It’s all there in his head. Then the car stops across the end of the road.

“Fia!”

The car door opens; men step out. Fia turns at the sound of the name no one should speak. Edson pulls the big chrome gun out of the back of his pants. The security guard leaps to his feet. All in a bubble of space-time, beautiful, motionless.

“Fia! To me! Run to me. Fia, I knew you, do you understand? I knew you.”

She makes the decision in the instant it takes Edson to bring the gun up two-handed. She flees toward him, a tight-elbowed, flapping girl-run. The two men pelt after her. They are big; they know how to run; their jacket tails flap. Edson snatches Fia’s hand, drags her in his wake. He stops dead. Fia slams into him. From the other end of the street comes a third running man, a little flicker of blue light dancing around his right hand where the naked tip of his Q-blade wounds space-time. And the stupid stupid security kid has his gun gripped in both hands like something he’s seen in a game and he’s shouting, “Don’t move! Don’t fucking move! Put the gun down! Put the gun down!”

“Don’t be stupid, they’ll kill us all,” Edson shouts. “Run now!” The kid panics, throws away the piece, and flees up the street into the palm-creaking dekasegui gardens. Lights come on behind bamboo blinds as Edson snatches Fia down the side alley where he has parked the Yam. Jesus and all the Saints this is going to be tight. … Her arms close around his waist. Start. Start. Start. The engine yells into life. Edson steers one-handed down the alleyway, dodging trash cans and junk.

“Take the gun take the gun. Anything you see in front of you, shoot it.”

“But…”

But he’s already flying. The gun crash/flashes twice by the side of his head; he hears shells scream off walls and girderwork. He sees two dark shapes whirl away from him. Gone. But the third man, the man with the knife, blocks the exit from the alley. An arc of blue. He holds the Q-blade level; the bisecting stroke. This is how it was; let them come to you; let their own velocity cut them in half. Bang bang. The knifeman anticipates, dives, comes up with the blade ready. Crying with fear, Edson kicks out. The backhand slash shaves rubber swarf from the heel of his Nikes, but the man goes down. Edson guns the throttle and wheelies out into the street. Behind him, the two other killers are up. A whisper of jets: security drones are arriving onscene and deploying antipersonnel arrays. Sirens close from all sides, but Edson is through them, out into the light and the endless traffic of his Sampa.

The muzzle creeps cold into the hollow behind his ear on Rua Luis Gama.

“There’s no bullets in that thing.”

He feels Fia’s breath warm against the side of his head.

“Are you sure? Did you count them?”

“You’re going to shoot me in this traffic?”

She reaches round and locks one hand on the throttle, beside his. “I’ll take that risk.”

Tetchy. So her. So Fia.

“So who the hell are you.”

“Pur that thing away and I’ll tell. God alone knows how many cameras have seen it.”

“Cameras?”

“You really aren’t from round here, are you?”

Cold muzzle is replaced by hot whisper: “Yes I am.”

’’I’m Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. That’s just a name. Who are you with? The Order?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Did she know’ you? My … alter’”

“We were, she was my girlfriend.”

She says quickly, harshly, “I’m not her. You must know that.”

“But you are Fia Kishida.”

“Yes. No. I am Fia Kishida. It was you on the rodovia, wasn’t it? Where are we going?”

“Somewhere. Safe.” Not home. Some things, even more than guns, cannot be explained to Dona Hortense. Emerson can put a couple of mattresses down in the office; that will do until Edson thinks of what to do with a murdered girlfriend’s double come through from a parallel São Paulo and being hunted by pistoleiros and Q-blades. He feels Fia’s arms tight around his waist as he blurs through the wash of taillights. Behind him in the slipstream she says nothing. She knows where she is. It’s always São Paulo.

Her grip tightens as he turns off the highway onto the serpentine road that is the gut of Cidade de Luz. She takes in the moto-taxis, the buses, the grand pillared frontage of the Assembly of God Church like a jerry-built heaven, the swags of power cables and tripping runs of white water pipes clambering up through the houses and walled yards into the glowing, chaotic mass of the high city, the true, unrepentant favela.

The road takes another wind; then Edson hauls on the brakes. There’s someone in the road, right under his wheel. The bike skids; the Fia — Fia II, he thinks of her — slides across the oily concrete to hit the high curb. The fool in the road: it’s Treats who has dashed out from his usual roost at the Ipiranga station where he hassles drivers into letting him clean their windshields while they fill up.

“Edson Edson Edson, Petty Cash! He’s dead, man, they’ve killed him, came right in.”

Edson seizes Treats by the scruff of his too-too-big basketball vest and drags him round the back of the fuel station, out of the light, among the gas cylinders.

“Shut up with my name, you don’t know who’s listening or looking.”

“Petty Cash, they — ”

“Shut up. Stay there.”

He picks up the beautiful, delicate Yamaha and wheels it over to Fia II.

You have to stop calling her that, like she’s a movie. Fia. But it’s not right.

“You all right?” She goes to say something about her torn top, but Edson hasn’t time for that. “Keep your hood up, stay out of the cameras, and lock yourself in the women’s toilet. There are people here who could recognize you. I will come for you. There’s a matter I have to deal with right now.”

Edson orders Treats to go round to Dona Hortense and ask for his go-bag.

“She’ll know what that means. And show my mother some manners, uneducated boy.”

He goes through the alleys and ladeiros beneath the swags of power cable and bougainvillea. Moto-taxis hoot past, pressing him to the walls in the steep narrow lanes. The ambulance is still outside the house. Edson can hear police drones circling overhead. The small crowd has the patient, resting body language of people who have passed from witness to vigil. A man-sized hole has been cut sheer through the gate and part of the wall. It matches another through the door and doorframe. And it is like a storm of dark birds flying out of that hole, flying at Edson’s head, blinding him with their wings and claws and beaks, bird after bird after bird, too many too fast, he swipes, slaps at them, but there are always more and they keep coming, wing after wing after wing, and he knows that if he misses, once, he will go down and their claws will be in his back.

“What happened?” Edson asks Mrs. Moraes seated on the side of the road in her shorts and flip-flops, hair still up in foil and her hand frozen to her mouth. Her neighbors stood around her.

“They came on a motorbike. The one on the back, he did that. Jesus love my boy my boy my poor boy, what did he ever to do to anyone?”

Now he sees Old Gear his antique dealer by the ambulance. All Edson’s alibis are there in the crowd. They all have the same look: He died for you.

What if you get killed? Petty Cash had joked. But he did. That is what the ambulance crews are taking away in their black bag: a body wearing a pair of I-shades that say Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas. Edson is an unperson now.

There is no place for him in Cidade de Luz. At the Ipiranga station he sees the ambulance pass, lights rotating, sirens hushed. Treats has his go-bag.

“One more thing, Treats. Go back and tell Dona Hortense I’m with the Sisters.”

“The Sisters.”

“She’ll know. Good man.” The jeitinho is fully paid. Next time, it will be Edson owes Treats.

The Yamaha heads west through the contrails of light. Edson calls back to Fia on the pillion. “Have you any money?”

“Some cash from selling tech and jewelry and stuff, but I’ve spent most of it on food and a capsule to stay. Why?”

“I don’t have anything. I don’t exist. That ambulance that went past, that was me in the back.”

She asks no questions as Edson explains his world. Carbon-fiber angels watching the city by day and night, never ceasing, never hasting. Universal arfid tagging and monitoring where the clothes on your back and the shoes on your feet and the toys in your pocket betray you. Total surveillance from rodovia toll cameras to passersby’s T-shirts or I-shades snatching casual shots; only the rich and the dead have privacy. Information not owned but rented; date-stamped music and designer logos that must be constantly updated: intellectual property rights enforceable with death but murder pay-per-view prime-time entertainment and pay-per-case policing. Every click of the Chilli beans, every message and call and map, every live Goooool! update, every road toll and every cafezinho generates a cloud of marketing informaation, a vapor trail across Sampa’s information sphere. Alibis, multiple identiities, backup selves — it is not safe to be one thing for too long. Speed is life. She will be trying to work how she can exist — must exist — in this world of Order and Progress, with no scan no print no number, a dead girl come back to life. As he is a dead man, driving west through the night traffic.

SEPTEMBER 16- I7, 1732

Robert Francois St.Honore Falcon: Expedition Log

A wonder a day and I do not doubt we should all live forever! I am comforttably domiciled in the College adjoining the Carmelite Church of Nossa Sennhora da Conceição, shaved, in clean linen, and anticipating my first decent dinner in weeks, but my mind rerurns to the phenomenon I witnessed today at the meeting of the waters.

Captain Acunha, desiring to show a proud Frenchman a marvel of his land, called me to the prow to observe the extraordinary sight of two rivers, one black, one milky white, flowing side by side in the same channel; the black current of the Rio Negro, its confluence still two leagues distant, runnning parallel to the silty flow of the Solimoes. We steered along the line of division — I filled page after page with my sketchings and I saw that, closely observed, the black and the white waters curled around each other like intricate silhouette work; curls within curls within curls of ever-diminishing scale, as I have seen in the pattern of ferns and the leaves of certain trees. I wonder, does it decrease in its self-similarity ad infinitum? Am I prejudiced to the macroscopic? Is there an implicit geometry, a mathematical energy in the very small, that cascades up into the greater, an automotive force of selfordering? I do think that there is a law here, in river flow and in fern and leaf.

Now by contrast I consider São José Tarumás do Rio Negro. A fort, manned by a handful of officers half-mad from malaria and a company of native musketeers; the landings; a government custom office; a court; the trading houses of spice factors; the taverns and their attached caiçara; the hudddled rows of whitewashed taipa huts of the settled indios, the praça, the College; the church over all. The Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição is a gaudy of mannerist fancies and frenetic painted decoration that seemed to rise sheer from the dark water as we drew in to the wharf. It proclaims itself so because it is the last: beyond São José lie the scattered aldeias and far-between reduciones of the Rio Negro and Rio Branco. This sense of the frontier, of the immense psychic pressure of the wilderness beyond, gives São José its peculiar energy. The docks are thronged with canoes and larger river craft; rafts of pau de brasil logs lie marshalled in the river. The market is loud and bright, the traders eager for my business. All is build and bustle; along the river frontage new warehouses are being knocked together, and on the higher ground walled houses, the bright new homes of the merchants, want only for roofs. In every citizen from priest to slave I see an eagerness to get down to business. It would, I believe, make a good and strong regional capital.

Father Luis Quinn’s reputation precedes him. The Carmelites welcomed the visiting Jesuit admonitory with a musical progress. Trombas, tammbourines, even a portative organ on a litter, and a veritable host of indios in white — men, women, children — sparring headdresses woven from palm fronds, waving same and singing together a glorious cantata that combined European melodies and counterpoints with native rhythms and exuberances. As I dogged along behind Quinn with my baggage train, I found my pace adjusting to the rhythm. Quinn, being a man much moved by music, was delighted, but I wonder how much of his pleasure masked annoyance at being forestalled. Despite the opulence of the friar’s welcome, I sensed unease.

Father Quinn received the sacraments; I reconciled myself to Mammon by presenting my travel permits to Capitan de Araujo of the fort and a subbsequent prolonged questioning neither unfriendly nor inquisitorial in tone, rather born out of long isolation and a lack of any true novelty. Here I received the first setback to my plans: I was informed that Acunha would be unable to take me onwards up the Rio Negro: new orders from Salvador forbade any armed vessel from proceeding beyond São José for fear of the Dutch pirates, who were once again active in the area and could easily seize such a ship and turn it against this garrison of the Barra. I did not like to comment that the wood, sand, and adobe revetments looked well capable of laughing off Fé em Deus’s pop guns, but if I have learned one thing in Brazil, it is never to antagonize local potentates on whose goodwill you depend. The captain concluded by commenting that he had heard that I enjoyed a reputation as a swordsman, and, if time permitted, would welcome a chance to try his skill on the strand before the fort, the traditional dueling ground. I think I shall decline him. He is an amiable enough dunderhead; his denial a frustration, nothing more. There are canoes by the score beneath the pontoon houses in the floating harbor. I shall begin my bargaining tomorrow.

(Addendum)

I am troubled by a scene I glimpsed from my window in the College.

Raised voices and a hellish bellowing made me glance out; by the light of torches, a fat ox had been manhandled into the pracça before the church, a rope to each hoof, horn, and nostril and men hauling on them, yet scarcely able to control the bellowing, terrified beast. A man stepped forth with a poleax, set himself before the creature, and brought his weapon down between the ox’s ears. Seven blows it took before the maddened animal fell and was still. I turned away when the men started to dismember the ox in the praça, but I am certain that it was stricken with the plague, the madness. It has reached São José Tarumás, the last place in the world, it would seem, or is it from here that it originates?

I trust the bloody barbarism does not upset my appetite for the friar’s hospitality.

The men fell on them at the landing. Faces hidden behind kerchiefs, the three attackers stepped out from the cover of the pontoon houses on either side of the bobbing gangplank. Flight, evasion, was impossible in so narrow a pass. Quinn had no time to react before the big broad carpenter’s mallet swung out of the twilight shadows of the river town and caught him full in the chest. He went down and in the same instant the assailant swung his weapon to bring it down finally on the father’s head. Falcon’s foot was there to meet the attacker’s wrist. Bone cracked; the man gave a shrill, shrieking cry as the weight of the mallet snapped his hand over, broken, useless, agonized. The assailants had miscalculated their attack; the stricture of the plank walks compelled them to attack one man at a time. As Quinn fought to regain presence, the second assailant thrust his wounded colleague out of the way and pulled a pistol. With a cry and a delicate kick, Falcon sent it spinning down the planking. He retrieved it as it skidded toward the water and extinction, drew the muzzle on the second masked man as the assailant raised his foot to stamp down on Quinn’s bowed neck.

“Hold off or you die this instant,” he commanded. The man glowered at him, shook his head, and pressed forward. Falcon flickered his thumb over the wheel lock. Now the third assassin elbowed his colleague out of the road. He held a naked knife, faced Falcon at breath distance, hands held out in the knife-fighters pose seeming half-supplication.

“I hardly think — ”

The man struck. Falcon saw the top finger-length of the pistol fall to the wood. Worked hardwood, steel, and brass had been cut through as cleanly as silk. The man grinned, wove a pass with his knife. Falcon thought he saw blue fire burn in its trace. Falcon threw his hand up to protect his face and, heedless, pulled the trigger. The explosion was like a cannon blast in the strait labyrinth of wooden verandahs and gangways. The ball careered wide, sky-shot, lost. Falcon had never intended it to hit. In the daze and confusion, he struck the knife-man with two short, stabbing punches; Lyon harborblows. The blade fell from the assailant’s grip, struck the wood, and continued into it as if it were water until the hilt brought a halt. Now Quinn entered the fight, windful and hale. He snatched up the dropped blade. It cut through the planks; the boardwalk cracked and settled beneath him. Quinn drew himself to his full height; his bulk filled the coffin-narrow alley. The wounded mallet-man and the pistoleiro had already fled. The knife-man too scrambled away but in his panic tripped on a board-end and went sprawling on his back. With a bestial roar, Quinn was on top of him; knife slung underhand, a gutting blow, no Christian stroke.

“Luis. Luis Quinn.”

A voice, through the brilliant, lordly rage. For an instant Luis Quinn considered turning and using this blade, this divine, hellish edge on the tiny, whining voice that dared to deny him, imagined it curting and cutting until there was nothing left but a stain. Then he saw the houses and the doors and windows close around him, felt the thatch stroking his shoulders, the man beneath his blade, the helpless, ridiculous man and the glorious fear in his eyes above the masking kerchief. In the last instant before you face eternity you still maintain your disguise , he thought.

“Fly!” Luis Quinn thundered. “Fly!”

The assailant crabbed away, found his feet, fled. Quinn pushed past the pale, shaken Falcon and descended to the jetty where moments — it seemed an age in the gelid time of fighting he knew so well from the dueling days — before they had been dickering with the canoe feitores. A marveling look at the blade — no shop in Brazil had ever made such a thing — and he flung it with all might out over the heads of the canoemen into the river. His ribs ached from the effort: had the angelic knife left an arc of blue in its wake, a wound in the air? Now Falcon was at his side.

“My friend, I seem to have outstayed my welcome.”

The church was death-dark, lit only by the votives at the feet of the patrons and the red heart of the sanctuary lamp, but Falcon was easily able to find Quinn by following the trail of cigar smoke.

“In France it would be considered a sin most heinous to smoke in a church.”

“I see no vice in it.” Quinn stood leaning against the pulpit; a vertiginous affair clinging high to the chancel wall like the nest of some forest bird, dizzy with painted putti and allegorical figures. “We honor the cross with our hearts and minds, not our inhalations and exhalations. And do we not drink wine in the most holy of places?”

The stew of the Rio Negro day seemed to roost in the church. Falcon was hot, oppressed, afraid. Twice now he had seen the rage of Luis Quinn.

“Your absence was noted at supper.”

“I have a set of exercises to complete before I continue my task.”

“I told them as much.”

“And did they note the attack at the landing today?”

“They did not.”

“Strange that in so contained a town as São José the friar has nothing to say about a deadly assault on a visiting admonitory.” Quinn examined the dying coal of his cigar and neatly ground it to extinction on the tiled floor. “There is wrong here so deep, so strongly rooted, that I fear it is beyond my power to destroy it.”

’’’Destroy,’ that is a peculiarly martial word for a man of faith.”

“Mine is a martial order. Do you know why I was chosen as admonitory in Coimbra?”

“Because of your facility with languages. And because, forgive me, you have killed a man.”

Quinn snapped our a bark of a laugh, flattened and ugly in his uncommon accent.

“I suppose that is not so difficult a surmise. Can you also surmise how I killed that man?”

“The obvious deduction would be in the heat and passion of a satisfaction.”

“That would be the obvious deduction. No, I killed him with a pewter drinking tankard. I struck him on the side of the head, and in his helplessness I set upon him and with the same vessel beat the life from his body, and beyond that, until not even his master could recognize him. Do you know who this man was?”

Falcon felt his scalp itch beneath his wig in the stifling heat of the church. “From your words, a servant. One of your own household?”

“No, a slave in a tavern in Porto. A Brazilian slave, in truth, an indio; recalling now his speech, I would guess a Tupiniquin. The owner had made his fortune in the colony and retired with his household and slaves to the Kingdom. He did not say much to me, only that he had been instructed to refuse me any further drink. So before all my friends, my good drinking and fighting friends, I took up the empty tankard and struck him down. Now, can you guess why I gave myself to the Society of Jesus?”

“Remorse and penance of course, not merely for the murder — let us not bandy words, it was nothing less — but because you were of that exalted class that can murder with impunity.”

“All that, yes, but you have missed the heart of it. I said that mine was a martial order: the discipline, friend, the discipline. Because when I murdered that slave — I do not choose to bandy words either — do you know what I felt? Joy. Joy such as I have never known before or since. Those moments when I have taken or administered the Sacrament, when I pray alone and I know I am caught up by the Spirit of Christ, even when the music stirs me to tears: these are not even the faintest echoes of what I felt when I took that life in my hands and tore it out. Nothing, Falcon, nothing compares to it. When I went out, in my fighting days, I merely touched the hem of it. It was a terrible, beautiful joy, Falcon, and so so hard to give up.”

“I have seen it,” Falcon said weakly. The heat — he could not breathe, the sweat was trickling down the nape of his neck. He removed his wig, clutched it nervously, like a suitor a nosegay.

“You have seen nothing,” Quinn said. “You understand nothing. You never can. I asked for a task most difficult; God has granted me my desire, but it is greater and harder than Father James, than anyone in Coimbra, ever imagined. Father Diego Gonçalves of my Society came to this river twelve years ago. His works the apostles themselves might envy; whole nations won for Christ and pacified, the cross for two hundred leagues up the Rio Branco, aldeias and reduciones that were shining beacons of what could be achieved in this bestial land. Peace, plenty, learning, the right knowledge of God and of his Church — every soul could sing, every soul could read and write. Episcopal visitors wrote of the beauty and splendor of these settlements: glorious churches, skilled people who gave their labor freely, not through coercion or slavery. I have read his letters on the ship from Salvador to Belém. Father Diego applied to the provincial for permission to set up a printing press: he was a visionary man, a true prophet. In his petition he included sketches of a place of learning, high on the Rio Branco, a new city — a new Jerusalem, he called it, a university in the forest. I have seen the sketches in the College library at Salvador; it is sinfully ambitious, maniacal in its scale: an entire city in the Amazon. He was refused of course.”

“Portugal’s colonial policy is very clear; Brazil is a commercial adjunct, nothing more. Continue, pray.”

“After that, nothing. Father Diego Gonçalves sailed from this fort seven years ago into the high lands beyond the Rio Branco. Entradas and survivors of lost bandeiras told of monstrous constructions, entire populations enslaved and put to work. An empire within an empire, hacked out of deep forest. Death and blood. When three successive visitors sent from Salvador to ascertain the truth of these rumors failed to return, the Society applied for an admonitory. ”

“Your mission is to find Father Diego Gonçalves.”

“And return him to the discipline of the Order, by any means.”

“I fear that I understand your meaning too well, Father.”

“I may murder him if necessary. That is your word, isn’t it? By rumor alone he has become a liability to the Society. Our presence in Brazil is ever precarious. ”

“Kill a brother priest.”

“My own Society has made me a hypocrite, yet I obey, as any soldier obeys, as any soldier must.”

Falcon wiped sweat from his neck with his blouse sleeve. The smell of stale incense was intolerably cloying. His eyes itched.

“Those men who attacked us: do you believe they were Father Diego’s men?”

“No; I believe they were in the hire of that same father with whom you dined so well so recently. He is too greasy and well fed to be much of a plotter, our Friar Braga. I questioned him after the Mass; he lies well and habitually. The wealth of the Carmelites has always been founded on the red gold; I suspect their presence is only tolerated here because they descend a steady supply of slaves to the engenhos.”

“Do you believe he could be responsible for the destruction of the boatttown?”

“Not even the Carmelites are so compromised. But I am not safe here; you, my friend, enjoy some measure of protection through your crown misssion. I am merely a priest, and in this latitude priests have always been disspensable. We leave in the morning, but I will not return to the Colegio, not this night.”

“Then I shall watch and wait with you,” Falcon declared.

“I would caution against spending too much time in my company. But at the least leave me your sword.”

“Gladly,” Falcon said as he removed his weapon belt and handed it, buckles ringing, to Quinn. “I could wish that you had not thrown that uncommon knife into the river.”

“I had to,” Quinn said, lifting the sheath into the sanctuary light to work out its character and feel. “It was a wrong thing. It scared me. Go now; you have been here too long. I shall watch and pray. I so desire prayer: my spirit feels sullied, stained by compromise.”

Light on the black water; a million dapple-shards brilliant in the eastering sun that sent a blade of gold along the river. The far bank was limned in light, the shore sand bright yellow; though over a league distant, every detail was pin sharp, every tree in the forest canopy so distinct Falcon could distinguish the very leaves and branches. The pandemoniac bellowing of red howler monkeys came clear and full to his ears. Falcon stood a time at the top of the river steps blinking in the light, shading his eyes with his hand against the vast glare; not even his green eyeglasses could defeat so triumphant a sun. The heat was rising with the morning, the insects few and torpid; he hoped to be out in the deep stream by the time both became intolerable. But this moment was fresh and clean and new-minted, so present that all the terrors and whisperings of the night seemed phantoms, and Falcon wanted to stretch it to its last note.

Quinn was already in his canoe. The Jesuit, a smallpox-scarred Indio in mission whites, and an immense, broad black were its entire crew. The remainder of the pirogue was filled with Quinn’s manioc and beans. Falcon’s much larger fleet rocked on the dazzling ripples: a canoe with awning for the geographer, three for his staff, five for his baggage, a further three for their supplies, all well manned with Silo José Manao slaves.

“A great grand morning, thanks be to God!” Quinn called out in French. “I cannot wait for the off.”

“You travel light,” Falcon remarked as he descended the steps. The river had fallen farther in the night; planks had been hastily laid across the already-cracking mud, but there were still a few oozing, sinking footsteps through the mud to the canoe. “Is this the best the fabled Jesuit gold can purchase?”

“Light and fast, please God,” Quinn said in Portuguese now. “And sure the paddles of three willing men are worth a whole fleet of pressed slaves.”

The black man grinned broadly. Determination set in his face, Falcon picked his way up the rocking canoe to his seat in the center under the cotton awning. He could feel the silent derision of his crew, the more audible laughter of Quinn’s small outfit, in the flush of his face. He settled delicately into his wicker seat, the sunshade hiding him from insects and scorn. Falcon raised his handkerchief.

“Away then.”

The golden river broke into coins of light as the paddles struck and pulled. Falcon gripped the sides as the bow-water climbed the flanks of the canoe. A moment’s fear, then his fleet fell in around him, paddlers slipping into unconscious unison, an arrow formation curving out into the Rio Negro. Quinn’s smaller, lighter craft, frail as a leaf on water, surged ahead. Falcon noticed how easily Quinn’s massive frame, despite the terrible blow it had sustained so recently, learned the paddle’s rhythms. Falcon could not resist the infantile urge to wave his kerchief to him. Quinn returned the acknowledgment with a wide, careless grin.

Time vanished with the rolling stream; when Falcon glanced back around the side of his shade, São José Tarumás had dropped from view behind a turn of the stream so subtle that it had been beneath even his trained regard, so vast that the walls of green seemed to close behind him. Against will and reason, Falcon found the spirit of the river entering him. It maniifested itself as stillness, a reluctance to move, to lift any of the instruments he had set in his place to measure the sun and space and time, to engage in any action that might send thought and will rippling out across the black water. The calls of birds and canopy beasts, the splash of river life, the push and drip of the paddles and the hum of the water against the hull, all seemed to him parts of a greater chorale the sum of which was an enormous, cosmoological silence. The still spires of smoke from across the green canopy, the riverside settlements, the squat thatched cones of churches, their wooden crosses erect before them, the frequent river traffic that hailed and waved and smiled-all were as far from him as if painted in aquarelle on paper and Falcon were a drip of rain running down the glass. His hands should be meassuring, his hands should be sketching, mapping, annotating; his hands gripped the sides of the canoe, river-tranced, hour after hour.

Quinn’s hail broke the spell. His pirogue had drawn ahead, hour on hour, until it seemed a mosquito on the surface of the water. Now, where the channel divided into a braid of marshy islets and eyots, he bade his steersman turn across the current and waited in midstream. As he drifted toward Falcon’s phalanx, Quinn raised his paddle over his head in his two hands and thrust it into the air three times. On the instant every paddler in Falcon’s fleet put up his oar. Impetus lost, the inexorable hand of the Rio Negro took the boats, checked them, turned them, scattered their line of order into chaos.

“Paddle, you oxen!” Falcon roared, and, to Juripari his Manao translator, “Command them to paddle, this instant.” The translator remained silent, the paddles unmoving. Falcon struck at the back of a slave kneeling immediately before him. The man received the blow with the stolidity of a buttressed forest tree. Quinn and his crew were stroking swiftly toward the drifting canoes. He hauled in along side the swearing, berating Falcon.

“Apologies, my friend, but this is as far as you travel with me.”

“What have you done? What nonsense is this? Some wretched Jesuit plot.”

“More that fabled Jesuit gold to which you alluded, Doctor. The Society has never feared the power of lucre, like some others. But you will come no further with me, Dr. Falcon. Ahead lies the Arquipelago das Anavilhanas, which Manoel tells me is a mapless maze of ever-shifting sand bars and lagoons. I have instructed your crew to make camp on an island for five days. In that time I will have so far outstripped your expedition that you will never find me. My friend, it is not safe for you to go with me, and to be truthful, my own misssion may lead me to actions that I would not wish witnessed by one outside my Order. Neither was it safe, even for you, to remain in São José Tarumás. But in the Anavilhanas, no one will ever find you.” Quinn lifted the Frenchman’s sword from the bottom of the pirogue and offered it to him. “This is your weapon, not mine; and if I do not have it, Grace of Our Lady I shall not be tempted to use it.” He tossed the sword; Falcon caught it lightly in his two hands. The canoes rocked on the still water, all bound together in the dark currrent. “Argument is futile, my dear friend, against Jesuit authority, and Jesuit gold.” Quinn nodded to his indio pilot; paddles dipped, the pirogue drew away from the helpless Falcon. “I must confess a further crime against you, Doctor, though, as I have returned your sword, it is more in the nature of a trade. Your device, your Governing Engine; in this land it would become a tool of the grossest human subjugation conceivable. Forgive me; I have removed it from your baggage, together with the plans. It is an evil thing.”

“Quinn, Quinn!” Falcon shouted. “My engine, my Governing Engine, what did you do with it, you faithless blackrobe?”

“Look for me around the mouth of the Rio Branco,” Quinn called back, and the river carried them apart until the pirogue, pitifully small and fragile against the green wall of the várzea, was lost among the narrow mud-choked channels.

Only when the sudden clap of flighting birds or the soft clop of a jumping fish or the sun brilliant in the diamond of a water-bead dropping from paddle-tip summoned him did Father Luis Quinn start from rapture to find that hours had passed in the reverie of the river. He had ceased counting the days since the parting at Anavilhanas; morning followed morning like a chain of pearls, the great dawn chorus of the forest, then the run out into the misty water and the time-devouring stroke of the paddles; the simple sacrament of physical work. No need, no desire for speech. Never in all his disciplines and exercises had Quinn found so easy and complete a submergence of the self into the other. The indolent slide of jacaré into the water; the sudden scatter of capybara as the pirogue entered a marshy furo between river loops, noses and tiny ears held above the surface; the dash of a toucan across the channel, a nestling in its outlandish beak, pursued by the plundered mother. Once — had he imagined, had he truly beheld? — the wide prideful eyes of the solitary jaguar, kneeling warily at a salt lick. Their unthinking, animal actions were of one with the automatic obedience of his muscles to the paddle. In physicality is true subjugation of the self.

On and on and on. As Quinn’s spirit went outward into the physical world, as often it was cast backward. Memory became entangled with reality. Luis Quinn knelt not in the waist of a pirogue, a frail shave of bark, but stood at the taff-rail of a Porto carrack beating for the Spanish Gate of Galway under a spring sky of swift, gray-bottomed shower-heavy clouds. Fifteen years and his first return since childhood; he had thought he would barely remember the old language, but as Suibhne the captain led him from warehouse to port-merchants to tavern and the men had greeted him like a sea-divided relative, he found the grammar and idiom, the words and blessings swinging into place like the timbers of a house. Seamus Óg Quinn’s son; big strapping lad he grew up to be, grand to see a Quinn back among his old people and lands. Again, recollection: the great hall on the upper floor of the casa in Porto; Pederneiras the tutor taking him by the hand down from the schoolroom on the top floor to this great, light-filled hall lowering with allegories of wealth, and power crowning the merchants and navigators of Porto. As he had peered down through the colonnaded window into the rattling street, Pederneiras had opened a long, narrow shagreen-bound case. Within, bound in baize, the blades. “Go, take one, feel it, adore it.” Luis Quinn’s hand dropped around the hilt and a thrill burned up his arm, a belly-fire, a hardening and pressing he now knew as sexual, a feeling that twenty years disstant, kneeling in supplication, still stirred him physically.

“I see you need no encouragement from me, Senhor Luis,” Pederneiras had said, observing the precocious pride in his pupil’s breeches. “Now, the garde.”

Bright metal in his hand once again, the flattened silver of a stout tankard, crushed by repeated blows to the skull of a man. The master has commanded me to serve you no more. Still his body remembered that deep, exultant joy. Luis Quinn turned the disciplines of his exercise to expunge the luxuurious memory of sin. Preparatory prayer: ask of Christ his grace that all intentions, actions, and works may be directed to his greater glory. First point: the sin of the angels. Naked they were, and innocent, dwelling in a paradise of bounty and clemency, yet still in their forests and great rivers the Enemy corrupted them. They consumed human flesh, they rejoiced in the meat of their enemies, and so we condemned them as pagan, animal, without soul or spirit, fit only for slavery. In so doing we condemned ourselves. Second point: the sin of old Adam. Quinn’s memory turned from the battered shell of metal in his fist to the smashed skull on the floor. He heard again the hooting animal howls of his friends cheering him on through the fire of lust and drink. Third point: the sin of the soul condemned through mortal vice. Father Diego Gonçalves, what do you know of him? Manoel the pilot, a diligent altar boy, dared say nothing against the Church, but his hunched shoulders and bowed head, as if cowering from the vastness of the Rio Negro, spoke old dread to Luis Quinn. Zemba, a freed slave who since his manumission at Belém had worked his way up the river to the rumors of an El Dorado in the immensity beyond São José Tarumás, a land of future where his history would be forrgotten. The City of God , he said. The kingdom of heaven is built there.

Luis Quinn turned the three sins beneath his contemplation and saw that they were indivisible: the pride of kings, the pride of the spirit, the pride of power. Now I understand why you sent me, Father James. Conclude the meditation with the Paternoster. But as the comfortable words formed the river exploded around him, dashing him from contemplation: botos, in their dozens, spearing through the water around the pirogue, curving up through the surface to gasp in air, some bursting free from their element entirely in an ecstatic leap. Quinn’s heart leaped in wonder and joy; then, as he followed a flying, twisting boto to the zenith of its arc, to wordless awe. Angels moved over the várzea, striding across the forest canopy, their feet brushing the treetops. Angels carmine and gold, Madonna blue and silver, angels bearing harps and psalteries, drums and maracas, swords and double-curved warbows: the host of heaven. We strive not against men but against principalities and powers.

The pirogue shot clear from the narrow gut of the furo to rejoin the main channel, and Quinn involuntarily rose to his feet in wonder. From bank to bank the channel was black with canoes; men perched in the stern driving their bobbing wooden shells onward, women and children in the waist. Some were entirely crewed by grinning, spray-wet children. At the center of the great fleet rose the object of Quinn’s awe. A basilica sailed the river. Nave, chancel, apses, buttresses, and clerestory; in every detail a church from the wooden-shingled dome to the crucifix between its two towers. Every inch of the basilica was covered in carved, painted reliefs of the gospels and the catechisms, the martyrdoms of saints and the stoopings of angels; the illumination caught and kindled in the westering light as radiantly as any rose window. Each wooden roof-slat was painted with the representation of a flower. Figures stood on the railed balcony above the porch, tiny as insects. Insect was the image caught in Quinn’s reeling mind; the great church seemed to stride across the water on a thousand spindle legs. A second, colder look revealed them to be a forest of sweeps propelling the towering edifice down the channel. The basilica did not move by human muscle alone; the finials of the wall-buttresses had been extended into masts slung with yardage and brown, palm-cloth sail; the towers too bore sprits, stays, and banners. One pennant was figured with Our Lady and child, the other a woman, standing on one foot, her body entwined with forest vines and flowers. Naked red bodies patterned black with genipapo swarmed the ropes and ratlines. Then Luis Quinn’s attention rose to the mastheads. Each mast was capped with a titanic carving of an angel: trumpet, harp, lozenge-bladed sword, shield, and castanets. Their faces were those of the people of the canoes: high-cheeked, narrow-eyed, black-haired Rio Negro angels.

Now bells sounded from the basilica. The figures on the balcony moved with sudden activity, and a large canoe was pushed out from the line of mooring poles at the church-ship’s bow. Quinn read the inscription over the main portal, though he already knew what it must say: Ad maioram Dei Gloriam.