Carioca Fletch

Four

“My father’s here!” Laura dumped three teaspoonsful of sugar into her cachaça. “I hear his voice.”

Courteously, Fletch took his glass of cachaça from the silver tray held out to him by a houseman. Cachaça is a brandy made of sugar-cane juice. In Brazil it is courteous to offer guests cachaça. It is courteous of guests to accept cachaça. Fletch had tried it with some added sugar, much added sugar, no added sugar. Cachaça was a taste he had not acquired.

With his glass of cachaça in hand, he followed Laura out onto the terrace.

Teodomiro da Costa’s house was built somewhat upside down. Entering at street level, one went downstairs to the bedrooms and a small family sitting room, upstairs to the grand living room filled with splendid paintings and other objets d’art, upstairs again to a huge reception room complete with full bar. Off the reception room, high above Avenida Epitacio Passoa, overlooking the truly beautiful lagoon Rodrigo de Freitas, was a handsome terrace decorated with green, red, yellow flowering jungle plants.

Now in the reception room a long table had been set with crystal and silver for twelve.

Teodomiro da Costa did well exchanging currencies and commodities. Fletch had invested his money with him.

On the terrace Laura and Otavio were greeting each other with hugs and kisses and rapid talk in Brazilian Portuguese.

Wordlessly, Otavia then shook Fletch’s hand.

“Boa noite,” Fletch said.

“Otavio has come here to meet with his publisher,” Laura said. “He is staying nearby, with Alfredo and Gloria. Have you met them? Alfredo is a marvelous man, true Brazilian, so full of life, generous to a fault. Gloria is a marvelous woman, truly bright, so charming, with a large feminine soul.”

“Are they here?”

Laura looked around at the other people on the terrace. “I don’t see them.”

“They are preparing for the Canecao Ball tomorrow night.” Otavio said. “I do not need to prepare. Poets are born in disguise.”

“And your mother?” Fletch asked Laura. “She did not come from Bahia?”

“My mother,” said Laura. “Orchids you can never leave.”

“They are worse than children,” agreed Otavio.

“Worse than I was, anyway,” Laura said.

Teodomiro da Costa came across the terrace to them. He was a tall man of sixty with the head of a bald eagle. “Fletcher, it is good to have you back. Did you enjoy Bahia?”

“Of course.”

“Good. For dinner we are having vatapa, a typical dish from Bahia.”

Fletch smiled and took Laura’s free hand. “I made friends there.”

“But Cavalcanti is my friend.” Teo kissed Laura on the cheek. “And Laura too.”

Otavio said, “We are all friends.”

Teo took Fletch’s cachaça and placed it on the tray of a passing houseman. He said something to the housewoman. “I have ordered you a screwdriver,” he said to Fletch.

“Is it called a screwdriver in Portuguese?”

Teo laughed. “I called it orange juice, vodka, and ice.”

“I must figure out the words for it.”

“Not hard.”

“To say it rapidly. With firmness.”

“Come. I want you to meet da Silva.” Slowly Teo guided Fletch by the elbow across the terrace. “Is Laura with you, or with her father?”

“With me.”

“Ah! You are so lucky.” Teo then introduced Fletch to another sixty-year-old businessman, Aloisio da Silva.

Immediately, da Silva said, “You must come to my office. I have a new computer system. The very latest. Digital. From your country.”

“I would be very interested in it.”

“Yes, You must come tell me what you think.”

The houseman brought Fletch his screwdriver.

“Also, perhaps you have noticed my new building going up. How long have you been in Rio?”

“I was here for three weeks, then I was in Bahia for two weeks. I am back three days.”

“Then perhaps you have not noticed my building?”

“Rio is so vibrant.”

“Of course. It is in the Centro. Near Avenida Rio Branco.”

“I did notice a new building going up there. Very big.”

“Very big. You must come and see it with me. You’d be very interested.”

“I’d like that.”

“It is amazing what a difference computers make when it comes to building a building.”

Marilia Diniz appeared with her glass of cachaça. She kissed Aloisio and Fletch on their cheeks.

“Are you well, Aloisio?”

“Of course.”

“Rich?”

“Of course.”

Marilia forever remained a surprise to Fletch. She had to be the only person in Rio with no sun-color in her face. She saw people from a different perspective.

“Marilia,” Fletch said. “Something happened to us after we left you.”

“Something always happens in Rio.” She sipped her cachaça. “Listen. Teo has some new paintings. He has promised to show us them after dinner.”

“Otavio, perhaps you would help me to understand something.”

“Yes?”

Fletch and Otavio Cavalcanti stood alone at the edge of the terrace, looking at the moonlight on the lagoon. Otavio was drinking Scotch and water.

In Brazil, even distinguished scholars and poets are to be called by their first names.

“Does the name ‘Idalina Barreto’ mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“She is not a famous eccentric?”

“Not that I know.”

Laura was across the terrace talking with the Vianas.

“I wonder if it is a scam.”

“A what?”

“A swindle. Some sort of confidence trick.”

“Ah, yes. Trick.”

“This afternoon Laura and I were accosted by an old woman, a macumbeira of some sort, maybe, dressed in a long white gown, an old woman. She said her name is Idalina Barreto.”

From the terrace the samba drums could be heard only faintly.

“Yes?”

“She said I was her husband.”

Otavio turned his head to look at Fletch.

“Her dead husband. Janio Barreto. A sailor. Father of her children.”

“Yes…”

“That Janio was murdered when he was young, at my age, forty-seven years ago.”

“Yes.”

“Are you hearing me?”

“Naturally.”

“She demands that I tell her who murdered me.”

Otavio was looking at Fletch as had Laura, as had the doorman at The Hotel Yellow Parrot. Then his eyes shifted in a circle around Fletch’s head.

“Will you help me to understand this?”

Then Otavio took a drink. “What’s there to understand?”

At the long table at dinner they talked of the magic in much Brazilian food which provides so much energy, the masses of sugar usually placed in the coffee, in the cachaça, the sweetness of cachaça anyway, the dende oil in the vatapa they were having for dinner. The drink, guaraná, is without alcohol and also gives energy. It was said by the Indians that it cleared the blood channels going to and coming from the heart. Fletch had discovered that it relieved tiredness.

Down the table, Laura said, “Bananas are good for you, too. There is potassium in bananas.”

Then Marilia asked about the paintings Teo had bought.

“I’ll show them to you after dinner. Perhaps, first, Laura will play for us.”

“Please,” said the Viana woman.

“Certainly.”

“Then I will show them to you,” Teo said.

Aloisio da Silva asked Fletch, “Have you visited the Museu de Arte Moderna?”

“Yes.”

“I should think you’d be very interested in that building.”

“I am very interested in the building. It is a wonderful building. And I had a splendid lunch there.” The people at table became silent. “There were few paintings in the museum when I was there.”

“Ah, yes,” Marilia said.

“I was thinking of the building,” Aloisio said.

“There was a fire …” Teo said.

“All the paintings were burned up,” the Viana woman said. “Very sad.”

“Not all. A few were left,” Viana said.

Aloisio blinked at his plate. “I was thinking the building would interest you.”

Fletch said, “The paintings in the museum got burned. Is this another case of queima de arquivo?”

The silence at the table was complete.

From the head of the table, Teodomiro da Costa looked down at Fletch. A virus a few years before had given da Costa’s left eye a permanent hooded effect, which became worse when he was tired, or wished to use it on someone. He was now using it on Fletch.

“It is a good thing, I think,” Fletch said into the silence, “for the artists of each generation to destroy the past, to begin again. I think perhaps it is necessary for them.”

It was many moments, then, before conversation flowed smoothly again.

“You have Laura, I see. I am glad.” Viana sat next to Fletch on the divan in the living room. They were waiting for Laura Soares to play the piano. “You must be very careful of women in Rio.”

“You must be very careful of women everywhere.”

“That is true. But women in Rio.” He sipped his coffee. “Even I. Late at night. Have found myself dancing with one of them. A man, you know. An operated-on man. It is more easy than you think to be tricked.”

“Not anything is as it seems in Brazil,” Fletch said.

“It is easy to be tricked.”

Laura played first some Villa Lobos, of course, then some of her own arrangements of the compositions of Milton Nascimento, somehow keeping in balance his romantic sweetness, his folkloric virility, his always progressing, complicated, mysterious melodic lines. At the side of the room, in a deep armchair, Otavio Cavalcanti dozed over his coffee cup. Then she played arrangements of other deeply folkloric Brazilian music Fletch did not recognize.

Laura Soares must have used piano technique she learned at the London Conservatory, but she played none of the music she had learned there.

After everyone except Otavio, her father, had applauded, Laura said, “Not so good.” She smiled at Fletch. “I have practiced little the last two weeks.”

“We have come to see your new paintings, Teo!” So the young man first into the reception room announced. With his white open shirt and slacks he wore a forest green cape, a green buccaneer hat, green shoes. Immediately, his eyes found Fletch across the room.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Teo said from the bar.

Just suddenly they were there, four young men dressed expensively, tailored perfectly, each in his own style, moving slowly, expectantly into the big reception room at the top of the house like a theatrical troupe taking over a stage. All but one had lithe bodies, the graceful ways of moving one would expect from fencers, acrobats, or gymnasts. The fourth was heavier, duller in the eye, maybe a little drunk, and moved unevenly.

“Toninho!” the women cried.

The Viana woman smothered him with kisses.

“Tito! Orlando!” No one seemed to greet the fourth young man immediately. Someone finally said, “Norival! How do you find yourself?”

Tito was dressed entirely in black. His shirt and slacks had to have been fitted to him while they were wet. No seams showed in his clothes.

Orlando wore blue stripes down the sides of his white slacks, blue epaulettes on his shoulders.

And Norival was dressed as expensively, but somehow the earth-brown pockets in his light green slacks and shirt did not seem so amusing.

The people had surrounded the four young men, three of whom were uncommonly handsome, and were talking in Portuguese and laughing. Laura had gone to give each of them a hug and kisses.

Fletch ordered a guaraná from the barman.

Not only had the dinner been cleared from the long table in the reception room during Laura’s recital, the long table itself had disappeared.

Their backs to the room, some paintings had been placed on the floor along one wall.

One easel had been set up in the best light of that room.

Now Toninho stood in that light, in front of the easel, making gestures with his arms which made his green cape ripple in that light. Whatever he was saying was making the people around him laugh. He seemed to be charming even his companions, Tito, Orlando, and Norival.

Laura’s eyes were shining happily when she came back to Fletch.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“The Tap Dancers. They are called the Tap Dancers. Just friends of each other. It’s just a name.”

“Do they dance?”

“You mean, professionally?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Sing?”

“No.”

“Do tricks?”

“They are just friends.”

“Fashionable, I think.”

“Aren’t they sleek?”

Hand emerging from his cape, Toninho came forward to shake hands with Fletch.

“Toninho,” Laura said happily. “This is I. M. Fletcher.”

“Ah, yes.” Toninho’s eyes were as brilliant as gems and as active as boiling water. “Janio Barreto. I am Toninho Braga.”

“You know about that?” Fletch shook hands.

Toninho flung his arms up, sending his cape back over his shoulders. Clearly, in his eyes, he was enjoying his own act; possibly, confident in his virility, he was satirizing fashion, fashionable behavior. “The whole world knows about that!”

Teo da Costa came into the group.

Laura said something to Toninho in Portuguese. Toninho answered, briefly, and she laughed.

“Fletcher,” Teo da Costa said quietly, “within the next day or so, I would like to talk with you. Privately.”

“Of course.”

“Your father is not here. Not looking into your life…”

With great dignity, Teo’s face was averted.

“Of course, Teo. I’d appreciate it.”

“Come, Teo!” Toninho exclaimed. “The paintings! We came to see your new paintings!”

One by one, Teo placed the paintings on the easel and let his guests study, enjoy them. They were by Marcier, Bianco, Portinari, Teruz, di Cavalcanti, Virgulino. For the most part they were clear, even bold, in the bright, solid earth colors. Especially did Fletch like one of a mother and child, another of a child with a cage. All the rhythms and colors and feelings and mysteries of Brazil were in the paintings, to Fletch.

Later, Fletch sat on the divan next to the sleepy Otavio Cavalcanti.

“You like the paintings?” Otavio asked.

“Very much.”

“Better than the museum building?” Otavio smiled. “You are a North American. Everyone expects your passion to be for buildings and computers and other machines.”

“Yes.”

“Teo perhaps has the best collection, now that the museum is just a wonderful building again.”

“He must be careful of fire.”

To that, Otavio did not respond.

“Perhaps you can tell me this,” Fletch said to Otavio. “Getting dressed tonight, looking for a shoe, I discovered a small carved stone under my bed.”

Otavio raised one eyebrow.

“A small stone. It was carved into a toad. A frog.”

Otavia sighed.

“Why would the maid put a stone toad under my bed?”

Slowly, heavily, Otavio Cavalcanti lifted himself off the divan. He went to the bar and got himself a Scotch and water.

“Come on.” Laura samba-walked across the room, holding her hands out to Fletch. He sat alone on the divan, thinking of Ilha dos Caicaras. He was thinking of himself as Ilha dos Caicaras, a small island in the lagoon. “I worked enough. I played a little concert. Let’s go with the Tap Dancers.”

“Where are they going?”

Otavio was drinking alone at the bar.

“Seven-oh-six. Toninho wants us to go with them. To hear the music. To dance.”

“Everyone?”

“Just you and me. And the Tap Dancers.”

Fletch got up from the divan. “Why do I keep asking your father questions? Great scholar. I have never gotten an answer yet.”

Laura glanced at her father at the bar. “Come on. If you have foolish questions, the Tap Dancers will have foolish answers for you. You’ll get along fine together.”