The Destiny of Nathalie X

Never Saw Brazil

ON ONE of the sunniest of bright May mornings Senator Dom Liceu Maximiliano Lobo needlessly ran his comb through his neat goatee and ordered his chauffeur to pull off to the side of the road. On mornings like these he liked to walk the remaining five hundred meters to his office, which he maintained, out of sentiment’s sake, and because of the sea breezes, in Salvador’s Cidada Alta. He sauntered along the sidewalks, debating pleasantly whether to linger a moment with a coffee and a newspaper on the terrace of the hotel, or whether to stop off at Olímpia’s little apartment, which he kept for her, at very reasonable expense, in an old colonial building in a square near the cathedral. She would not be expecting him, and it might be an amusing, not to say sensuous, experience to dally an hour or so this early before the day’s work called. How bright the sun was, this fine morning, Senator Dom Liceu Maximiliano Lobo thought as he turned toward the cathedral, his heels ringing on the cobbles, and how vivid the solar benefaction made the geraniums. Life was indeed good.

The name was the problem, he saw. The problem lay there, definitely. Because … Because if you were not happy with your name, he realized, then a small but sustained lifelong stress was imposed on your psyche, your sense of self. It was like being condemned to wear too small shoes all the time; you could still get about but there would always be a pinching, a corn or two aching, something unnaturally hobbled about your gait.

Wesley Bright. Wesley. Bright.

The trouble with his name was that it wasn’t quite stupid enough — he was not a Wesley Bilderbeest or a Wesley Bugger; in fact it was almost a good name. If he had been Wesley Blade, say, or Wesley Beauregard he would have no complaints.

“Wesley?”

Janice passed him the docket. He clicked the switch on the mike.

“Four-seven? Four-seven?”

Silence. Just the permanent death rattle of the ether.

Four-seven answered. “Four-seven.”

“Parcel, four-seven. Pick up at Track-Track. Going to Heathrow, as directed.”

“Account?”

Wesley sighed. “Yes, four-seven. We do not do cash.”

“Oh yeah. Roger, Rog.”

He could always change his name, he supposed. Roger, perhaps. Roger Bright. Wesley Roger … No. There was that option, though: choose a new moniker, a new handle. But he wondered about that too: hard to shake off an old name, he would guess. It was the way you thought of yourself, after all, your tag on the pigeonhole. And when you were young, you never thought your name was odd — it was a source of dissatisfaction that came with aging, a realization that one didn’t really like being a “Wesley Bright” sort of person at all. In his case it had started at college, this chafing, this discomfort. He wondered about these fellows, actors and rock musicians, who called themselves Tsar, or Zane Zorro or DJ Sofaman … He was sure that, to themselves, they were always Norman Sidcup or Wilbur Dongdorfer in their private moments.

Colonel Liceu “o Falção” Lobo opened his eyes and he saw that the sun had risen sharp and green through the leafmass outside his bedroom. He shifted and stretched and felt the warm flank of Nilda brush his thigh. He eased himself out of bed and stood naked in the greenbright gloom. He freed his sweaty balls, tugging delicately at his scrotum. He rubbed his face and chest, inhaled, walked quietly out onto the balcony and felt the cool morning on his nakedness. He stood there, the wooden planks rough beneath his bare feet, and leaned on the balustrade looking at the beaten-earth parade ground his battalion had spent two weeks clearing out of the virgin jungle. There was nothing like a new parade ground, Colonel Liceu Lobo thought, with a thin smile of satisfaction, to signal you were here to stay.

He saw Sergeant Elias Galvão emerge from the latrines and amble across the square toward the battalion mess, tightening his belt as he went. A good man, Galvão, a professional, up this early too. “Morning, Sergeant,” Colonel Licen Lobo called from his balcony. Sergeant Elias Galvão came abruptly to attention, swiveled to face his naked colonel and saluted.

“Carry on,” Colonel Liceu Lobo instructed. Not a flicker on his impassive face, excellent. Sergeant Galvão’s lieutenant’s pips could not be long away.

“Liceu?” Nilda’s husky sleepy voice came from the bedroom. “Where are you?” The colonel felt his manhood stir, as if of its own accord. Yes, he thought, there were some compensations to be had from a provincial command.

Wesley, trying not to inhale, walked with his business partner, Gerald Brockway, co-owner of B.B. Radio Cars, through the humid fug of the “bullpen” toward the front door. There were three drivers there waiting for jobs and naturally they were talking about cars.

“How’s the Carlton, Tone,” Gerald asked.

“Magic.”

“Brilliant.”

“Cheers.”

Outside, Wesley opened the passenger door of his Rover for Gerald.

“You happy with this?” Gerald asked. “I thought you wanted an Orion.”

“It’s fine,” Wesley said.

“Noël got five grand for his Granada.”

“Really?”

“They hold their value, the old ones. Amazing. Years later. It’s well rubbish what they did, restyling like that.”

Wesley couldn’t think of what to say. He thought a shrill ringing had started in his inner ear. Tinnitus. He lived in constant fear of tinnitus.

“Change for the sake of change,” Gerald said, slowly, sadly, shaking his head.

Wesley started the engine and pulled away.

“Look at Saab.”

“Sorry?”

“They’ve had to bring back the 900. You can’t give away a 9000.”

“Can we talk about something else, Ger?”

Gerald looked at him. “You all right?”

“Of course. Just, you know.”

“No prob, my son. Where are we going to eat?”

“Everyone has heard of samba and bossa nova, sure,” Wesley said. “But this is another type of music called chorinho—not many people know about it. Love it. Play it all the time. I can lend you some CDs.”

“I’d like to give him a break, Wes. But something in me says fire the bastard. Why should we help him, Wes? Why? Big error. ‘No good deed goes unpunished,’ that’s my personal philosophy. Is there any way we can turn this down? What the hell is it?”

“Chorinho.”

“You cannot diddle major account customers. Two hours’ waiting time? I mean, what does he take us for? Couple of merchant bankers?”

“It means ‘little cry.’ ”

“What is this stuff, Wesley? You got any English music?”

Wesley watched Gerald mash his egg mayonnaise into a creamy pulp. He dribbled thin streams of olive oil and vinegar onto the mixture, which he stirred, and then freely sprinkled on pepper and salt.

“That’s disgusting,” Wesley said. “How am I meant to eat this?” He pointed his knife at his steak.

“I haven’t had a steak for two years. You should have my teeth problems, Wesley. You should feel sorry for me, mate.”

“I do feel sorry for you. I’d feel more sorry for you if you’d been to a dentist. You can be helped, you know. You don’t have to suffer. A man of your age. Jesus.”

Gerald ate some of his mixture. Wesley looked around for a waitress and saw Elizabetta, the plump one. She came over, beaming.

“Pint of lager, please. Ger?”

“Large gin and tonic.”

Wesley lowered his voice. “Is, um, Margarita in today?” he asked Elizabetta.

“This afternoon she come.”

He shifted his shoulders around. Gerald was not listening. “Tell her I’ll phone. Say Wesley will phone. Wesley.”

“Wesley. OK.”

Gerald pulped his apple crumble with the back of his spoon.

“Nice little place this, Wes. Worth the drive. What is it, Italian?”

“Sort of. Bit of everything.”

“ ‘International cuisine,’ then.”

Wesley looked around the Caravelle. There was no nautical theme visible in its pragmatic decor, unless you counted the one seascape among its five reproductions on the wall. He and Gerald sat in a row of booths reminiscent more of — what was the word? Seating arrangements in libraries … — carrels, yes. Maybe the name was a malapropism, he thought. An asparagus on the banks of the Nile. Someone had blundered: it should have been called the Carrel Café & Restaurant. Names, again … He stopped thinking about it and thought instead about Margarita.

Mar-ga-ri-ta. Not Margaret.

He rolled the “r”s. Marrrrgarrrita.

She was dark, of course, very Latin, with a severe thin face that possessed, he thought, what you might call a strong beauty. Not pretty, exactly, but there was a look about her that attracted him, although, he realized, she was one of these southern European women who would not age well. But now she was young and slim and her hair was long and, most important of all, she was Portuguese. Uma moça bonita.

Gerald offered him one of his small cigars.

Dr. Liceu Lobo put down his coffee cup and relit his real excelente. He drew, with pedantic and practiced care, a steady thin stream of smoke from the neatly docked and already nicely moist end and held it in his mouth, savoring the tobacco’s dry tang before pluming it at the small sunbird that pecked at the crumbs of his pastry on the patio table. The bird flew off with a shrill shgrreakakak and Dr. Liceu Lobo chuckled. It was time to return to the clinic, Senhora Fontenova was due for her vitamin D injections.

He felt Adalgisa’s hand on his shoulder and he leaned his head back against her firm midriff, her finger trickled down over his collarbone and tangled and twirled the dense gray hairs on his chest.

“Your mother wants to see you.”

Wesley swung open the gate to his small and scruffy garden and reminded himself yet again to do something about the clematis that overburdened the trellis on either side of his front door. Pauline was bloody meant to be i.c. garden, he told himself, irritated at her, but then he also remembered he had contrived to keep her away from the house the last month or so, prepared to spend weekends and the odd night at her small flat rather than have her in his home. As he hooked his door keys out of his tight pocket with one hand he tugged with the other at a frond of clematis that dangled annoyingly close to his face, and a fine confetti of dust and dead leaves fell quickly onto his hair and shoulders.

After he had showered he lay naked on his bed, his hand on his cock, and thought about masturbating but decided against. He felt clean and, for the first time that day, almost relaxed. He thought about Margarita and wondered what she looked like with her clothes off. She was thin, perhaps a little on the thin side for his taste, if he were honest, but she did have a distinct bust and her long straight hair was always clean, though he wished she wouldn’t tuck it behind her ears and drag it taut into a lank swishing ponytail. Restaurant regulations, he supposed. He realized then that he had never seen her with her hair down and felt, for a moment, a sharp intense sorrow for himself and his lot in life. He sat up and swung his legs off the bed, amazed that there was a shimmer of tears in his eyes.

“God. Jesus!” he said mockingly to himself, out loud. “Poor little chap.”

He dressed himself brusquely.

Downstairs, he poured himself a large rum and coke and put Milton Nascimento on the CD player and hummed along to the great man’s ethereal falsetto. Never failed to cheer him up. Never failed. He took a great gulp of the chilled drink and felt the alcohol surge. He swayed over to the drinks cabinet and added another slug. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon. Fuck it, he thought. Fuck it.

He should have parked somewhere else, he realized crossly, as unexpected sun warmed the Rover while he waited outside Pauline’s bank. He didn’t have a headache but his palate was dry and stretched and his sinuses were responding unhappily to the rum. He flared his nostrils and exhaled into his cupped hand. His breath felt unnaturally hot on his palm. He sneezed, three times, violently. Come on, Pauline. Jesus.

She emerged from the stout teak doors of the bank, waved and skittered over toward the car. High heels, he saw. She has got nice legs. Definitely, he thought. Thin ankles. They must be three-inch heels, he reckoned, she’ll be taller than me. Was it his imagination or was that the sun flashing off the small diamond cluster of her engagement ring?

He leaned across the seat and flung the door open for her.

“Wesley! You going to a funeral or something? Gaw!”

“It’s just a suit. Jesus.”

“It’s a black suit. Black. Really.”

“Charcoal gray.”

“Where’s your Prince of Wales check? I love that one.”

“Cleaners.”

“You don’t wear a black suit to a christening, Wesley. Honestly.”

Professor Liceu Lobo kissed the top of his mother’s head and sat down at her feet.

“Hey, little Mama, how are you today?”

“Oh, I’m fine. A little closer to God.”

“Nah, little Mama, He needs you here, to look after me.”

She laughed softly and smoothed the hair back from his forehead in gentle combing motions.

“Are you going to the university today?”

“Tomorrow. Today is for you, little Mama.”

He felt her small rough hands on his skin at the hairline and closed his eyes. His mother had been doing this to him ever since he could remember. Soothing, like waves on the shore. “Like waves on the shore your hands on my hair”… The line came to him and with it, elusively, a hint of something more. Don’t force it, he told himself, it will come. The rhythm was fixed already. Like waves on the shore. The mother figure, mother earth … Maybe there was an idea to investigate. He would work on it in the study, after dinner. Perhaps a poem? Or maybe the title of a novel? As ondas em la praia. It had a serene yet epic ring to it.

He heard a sound and looked up, opening his eyes to see Marialva carrying a tray. The muffled belling of ice in a glass jug filled with a clear fruit punch. Seven glasses. The children must be back from school.

Wesley looked across the room at Pauline trying vainly to calm the puce, wailing baby. Daniel-Ian Young, his nephew. It was a better name than Wesley Bright, he thought — just — though he had never come across the two Christian names thus conjoined before. Bit of a mouthful. He wondered if he dared point out to his brother-in-law the good decade-odd remorseless bullying that lay ahead for the youngster once his peers discovered what his initials spelled. He decided to store it away in his grudge-bunker as potential retaliation. Sometimes Dermot really got on his wick.

He watched his brother-in-law, Dermot Young, approach, two pint-tankards in hand. Wesley accepted his gladly. He had a terrible thirst.

“Fine pair of lungs on him, any road,” Dermot said. “You were saying, Wesley.”

“—No, it’s a state called Minas Gerais, quite remote, but with this amazing musical tradition. I mean, you’ve got Beto Guedes, Toninho Horta, the one and only Milton Nascimento, of course, Lo Borges, Wagner Tiso. All these incredible talents who—”

“—HELEN! Can you put him down, or something? We can’t hear ourselves think, here.”

Wesley gulped fizzy beer. Pauline, relieved of Daniel-Ian, was coming over with a slice of christening cake on a plate, his mother in tow.

“All right, all right,” Pauline said, with an unpleasant leering tone to her voice, Wesley thought. “What are you two plotting? Mmm?”

“Where did you get that suit, Wesley?” his mother asked, guilelessly. “Is it one of your dad’s?”

There was merry laughter at this. Wesley kept a smile on his face.

“No,” Dermot said. “Wes was telling me about this bunch of musicians from—”

“—Brazil.” Pauline’s shoulders sagged and she turned wearily to Wesley’s mother. “Told you, didn’t I, Isobel? Brazil. Brazil. Told you. Honestly.”

“You and Brazil,” his mother admonished. “It’s not as if we’ve got any Brazilians in the family.”

“Not as if you’ve even been there,” Pauline said, a distinct hostility in her voice. “Never even set foot.”

Wesley silently hummed the melody from a João Gilberto samba to himself. Gilberto had taken the traditional form and distilled it through a good jazz filter. It was João who had stripped away the excess of percussion in Brazilian music and brought bossa nova to the—

“Yeah, what is it with you and Brazil, Wes?” Dermot asked, a thin line of beer suds on his top lip. “What gives?”

WHUCHINNNNNNG! WHACHANNNNGGG!! Liceu Lobo put down his guitar, and before selecting the mandolin he tied his dreadlocks back behind his head in a slack bun. Gibson Piaçava played a dull roll on the zabumba and Liceu Lobo began slowly to strum the musical phrase that seemed to be dominating “The Waves on the Shore” at this stage in its extemporized composition. Joel Carlos Brandt automatically started to echo the mandolin phrases on his guitar and Bola da Rocha plaintively picked up the melody on his saxophone.

Behind the glass of the recording studio Albertina swayed her hips to and fro to the sinuous rhythm that was slowly building. Pure chorinho, she thought, sensuous yet melancholy, only Liceu is capable of this, of all the great choros in Brazil, he was the greatest. At that moment he looked around and caught her eye and he smiled at her as he played. She kissed the tip of her forefinger and pressed it against the warm glass of the window that separated them. Once Liceu and his fellow musicians started a session like this it could last for days, weeks even. She would wait patiently for him, though, wait until he was finished and take him home to their wide bed.

Wesley stepped out into the back garden and flipped open his mobile phone.

“Café Caravelle, may I help you, please?”

“Ah. Could I speak to, ah, Margarita?”

“MARGARITA! Telefono.”

In the chilly dusk of a back garden in Hounslow, Wesley Bright listened to the gabble of foreign voices, the erratic percussion of silverware and china and felt he was calling some distant land, far overseas. A warmth located itself in his body, a spreading coin of heat, deep in his bowels.

“Ghello?” That slight guttural catch on the “h”…

“Margarita, it’s Wesley.”

“Ghello?”

“Wesley. It’s me — Wesley.”

“Please?”

“WESLEY!” He stopped himself from shouting louder in time, and repeated his name in a throat-tearing whisper several times, glancing around at the yellow windows of Dermot’s house. He saw someone peering at him, in silhouette.

“Ah, Wesley,” Margarita said. “Yes?”

“I’ll pick you up at ten, outside the café.”

Pauline stood at the kitchen door, frowning out into the thickening dusk of the garden. Wesley advanced into the rectangle of light the open door had thrown on the grass.

“What’re you up to, Wesley?”

Wesley slid his thin phone into his hip pocket.

“Needed a breath of fresh air,” he said. “I’m feeling a bit off, to tell the truth. Those vol-au-vents tasted dodgy to me.”

Pauline was upset, she had been expecting a meal out after the christening, but she was also concerned for him and his health. “I thought you looked a bit sort of pallid,” she said when he dropped her at her flat. She made him wait while she went inside and reemerged with two sachets of mint infusion, “to help settle your stomach,” she said. She took them whenever she felt bilious, she told him, and they worked wonders.

As he drove off he smelled strongly the pungent impress of her perfume, or powder or makeup, on his cheek where she had kissed him, and he felt a squirm of guilt at his duplicity — if something so easily accomplished merited the description — and a small pelt of shame covered him for a minute or two as he headed east toward the Café Caravelle and the waiting Margarita.

Her hair was down. Her hair was down and he was both rapt and astonished at the change it wrought in her. And to see her out of black too, he thought, it was almost too much. He carried their drinks through the jostling noisy pub to the back where she sat, on a high stool, elbow resting on a narrow shelf designed to take glasses. She was drinking a double vodka and water, no ice and no slice, a fact he found exciting and vaguely troubling. He had smelled her drink as the barmaid had served up his rum and coke and it had seemed redolent of heavy industry, some strange fuel or new lubricant, something one would pour into a machine rather than down one’s throat. It seemed, also, definitely not a drink of the warm South either, not at all apt for his taciturn Latin beauty, more suited to the bleak cravings of a sheet-metal worker in Smolensk. Still, it was gratifying to observe how she put it away, shudderless, in three pragmatic drafts. Then she spoke briefly, brutally, of how much she hated her job. It was a familiar theme, one Wesley recognized from his two previous social encounters with Margarita — the first a snatched coffee in a hamburger franchise before her evening shift began, and then a more leisurely autumnal Sunday lunch at a brash pub on the river at Richmond.

On that last occasion she had seemed out of sorts, cowed perhaps by the strapping conviviality of the tall, noisy lads and their feisty, jolly girls. But tonight she had returned to the same tiresome plaint — the mendacious and rebarbative qualities of the Caravelle’s manager, João — so Wesley had to concede it was clearly something of an obsession.

They had kissed briefly and not very satisfactorily after their Sunday pub tryst, and Wesley felt this allowed him now to take her free hand (her other held her cigarette) and squeeze it. She stopped talking and, he thought, half smiled at him.

“Weseley,” she said, and stubbed out her cigarette. Then she grinned. “Tonight, I thin I wan to be drunk …”

There you had it, he thought. There. That was it. That moment held the gigantic difference between a Pauline and a Margarita. A mint infusion and an iceless vodka. He felt his bowels weaken with shocking desire.

He returned to the bar to fetch another drink for her and ordered the same for himself. The tepid alcohol seemed all the more powerful for the absence of chill. His nasal passages burned, he wrinkled his tear-flooded eyes. Made from potatoes, hard to believe. Or is it potato peelings? His teeth felt loose. He stood beside her. Someone had taken his stool.

Margarita sipped her drink with more decorum this time. “I hate that fockin’ job,” she said.

He raised her knuckles to his lips and dabbed at them.

“God, I’ve missed you,” he said, then took a deep breath. “Margarita,” he said softly, “tenho muito atração para tu.” He hoped to God he had it right, with the correct slushing and nasal sounds. He found Portuguese farcically difficult to pronounce, no matter how many hours he spent listening to his tapes.

She frowned. Too fast you fool, you bloody fool.

“What?” Her lips half formed a word. “I, I don’t—”

More slowly, more carefully: “Tenho muito atração — muito, muito — para tu.”

He slipped his hand around her thin back, fingers snagging momentarily on the buckle of her bra and drew her to him. He kissed her, there in the hot pub, boldly, with noticeable teeth clash, but no recoil from Margarita.

He moved his head back, his palm still resting on her body, warm above her hip.

She touched her lips with the palp of her thumb, scrutinizing him, not hostile, he was glad to see, not even surprised. She drank some more of her flat gray drink, still looking at him over the rim of her glass.

“Sempre para tu, Margarita, sempre.” Huskily, this. Sincere.

“Weseley. What are you saying? Sempre, I know. But the rest …”

“I … I am speaking Portuguese.”

“For why?”

“Because, I — Because I want to speak your language to you. I love your language, you must understand. I love it. I hear it in my head in your music.”

“Well …” She shrugged and reached for her cigarettes. “Then you must not speak Portuguese at me, Weseley. I am Italian.”

Marta shucked off her brassiere and had hooked down her panties with her thumbs within seconds, Liceu Lobo thought, of his entering her room in the bordello. He caught a glimpse of her plump fanny from the light cast by the bathroom cubicle. She was hot tonight, on fire, he thought, as he hauled off his T-shirt and allowed his shorts to fall to the floor. As he reached the bedside he felt her hands reaching for his engorged member. He was a pretty boy and even the oldest hooker liked a pretty boy with a precocious and impatient tool. He felt Marta’s hands all over his pepino, as if she were assessing it for some strumpet’s inventory. Maldito seja! Liceu Lobo thought, violently clenching his sphincter muscles as Marta settled him between her generous and welcoming thighs, he should definitely have jerked off before coming here tonight. Marta always had that effect on him. Deus! He hurled himself into the fray.

It had not gone well. No. He had to face up to that, acknowledge it, squarely. As lovemaking went it was indubitably B minus. B double-minus, possibly. And it was his fault. But could he put it down to the fact that he had been in bed with an Italian girl and not a Portuguese one? Or perhaps it had something to do with the half dozen vodkas and water he had consumed as he kept pace with Margarita?…

But the mood had changed, subtly, when he had learned the truth, a kind of keening sadness, a thin draft of melancholy seemed to enter the boisterous pub, depressing him. An unmistakable sense of being let down by Margarita’s nationality. She was meant to be Portuguese, that was the whole point, anything else was wrong.

He turned over in his bed and stared at the faint silhouette of Margarita’s profile as she slept beside him. Did it matter? he urged himself. This was the first non-British girl he had kissed, let alone made love to, so why had he been unable to shake off that sense of distraction? It was a sullenness of spirit that had possessed him, as if he were a spoiled child who had been promised and then denied a present. It was hardly Margarita’s fault, after all, but an irrational side of him still blamed her for not being Portuguese, for unconsciously raising his hopes by not warning him from their first encounter that she didn’t fit his national bill. Somehow she had to share the responsibility.

He turned away and dozed, and half dreamed of Liceu Lobo in a white suit. On a mountaintop with Leonor or Branca or Caterina or Joana. A balcony with two cane chairs. Mangos big as rugby balls. Liceu, blond hair flying, putting down his guitar, offering his hand, saying, “My deal is my smile.” Joana’s slim mulatto body. The sound of distant water falling.

He half sat, blinking stupidly.

“Joana?”

The naked figure in his doorway froze.

“Joana?”

The figure moved.

“Vaffanculo,” Margarita said, weariness making her voice harsh. She switched on the light and began to get dressed, still talking, but more to herself than to him. Wesley’s meager Portuguese was no help here, but he could tell her words were unkind. He hadn’t fully awakened from his dream. How could he explain that to her? She was dressed in a moment and did not shut the door as she left.

After she had gone, Wesley pulled on his dressing gown and walked slowly down the stairs. He sat for a while in his unlit sitting room, swigging directly from the rum bottle, resting it on his knee between mouthfuls, coughing and breathing deeply, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Eventually he rose to his feet and slid Elis Regina into his CD player. The strange and almost insupportable plangency of the woman’s voice filled the shadowy space around him. Nem uma lágrima. “Not one tear,” Wesley said to himself. Out loud. His voice sounded peculiar to him, a stranger’s. Poor tragic Elis, Elis Regina, who died in 1982, aged thirty-seven, tragically, of an unwise cocktail of drugs and alcohol. “Drink ’n’ drugs,” the CD’s sleeve notes had said. Tragic. A tragic loss to Brazilian music. Fucking tragic. He would call Pauline in the morning, that’s what he would do. In the meantime he had his chorinho to console him. He would make it up with Pauline, she deserved a treat, some sort of treat, definitely, a weekend somewhere. Definitely. Not one tear, Elis Regina sang for him. He would be all right. There was always Brazil. Not one tear.