The pill kicked in before she had finished the glass. Heitor lifted
her into his bed. She was as small and light as a street dog. Heitor
felt ashamed of all the times he had pinned her under his broad body;
her thin, angular bones bending, her wiry thighs wrapped around his
wide hairy back.
Ninety percent of Heitor's cabinet of cures was out of date.
Marcelina had come up out of the sleeping pill like a sea-launched
missile. He snored; she padded into the living room to look again at
the thing she could not commprehend. Again and again she watched the
figure in the sweet black suit enter through the revolving door, go
up to Lampião, and finally turn to look up into the camera for
some clue, some truth. She had slowed the DVD down to a click through
the individual frames. That was how she had found the tiny hint of a
smile on her face, as if she-her-had intended that Marcelina see her
grand imposture. Again and again and again, until the engine drone
and brake-creak of the delivery boy's LiteAce, the sound of feet on
steps, and the thud of bundled papers against the back door.
Across the room Marcelina's cellular sang "Don'cha Wish Your
Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me," Brasiliero remix.
"Aren't you going to get that?" A bone-deep media-ista,
Heitor could be driven to high anxiety by an unanswered telephone.
"It'll be the Black Plumed Bird."
"I'll get it for you."
"No!" Then, gently, "I don't want her to know you're
here. The papers ... "
"I can see the papers. You have to talk to her sometime."
The SMS alert jabbered, a recording of a very high travesti raving at
the Copa carnaval party about his upcoming surgery.
"Give me a sweatshirt or something, then."
On the balcony Marcelina strode up and down in panties and a holey
old hoodie. Across the lagoon the apartment blocks were a holy city
of silver and gold; the last rags of early mist burned off the green
hills, and fit girls were running on the lakeside loop. Heitor tried
to read Marcelina's hands.
"So?"
Marcelina dropped onto the leather sofa.
"Bad enough. She told me to take some unofficial leave;
basically, I'm suspended on full pay."
"They could have fired you on the spot."
"She talked Adriano down from that. She's giving me the benefit
of the doubt that I didn't send the e-mail, that it was some kind of
industrial espionage or someone hacked my computer. I think I may
have got it wrong about the Black Plumed Bird."
"And the show?"
"Adriano thinks it may have done us some good. APRIGPR."
"We don't get his text speak down in News and Current Affairs."
"All PR Is Good PR. He'll wait until he sees if there's a
ratings backlash against
Rede Gobo
. I may get it yet."
"There's another call you need to make." Heitor's espresso
machine filled the kitchen zone with shriekings and roarings.
"I know. Oh, I know." Her mother would be drunk, would have
been drinking slowly, steadily all night, one slow little vodka at a
time, watching the mesh of headlights along the rainy avenues of
Leblon. Frank Sinatra had turned away. It had always been nothing
more than reflections from a glitterball. Your self shattered into a
thousand spangles and mirrored back to you. "And I will make it.
But I can't stay here, Heitor."
"Oswaldo has hinted that it might not be the best thing for my
professsional objectivity. Stay as long as you need. I'm not Jesus."
"It's not about you. Can you understand that? It's not about
you. It's just that, while she's still out there, I need you to be
able to trust me, and that can only happen if you know that if I call
or e-mail or drop round, it won't be me. It'll be her and whatever
she says will be a lie."
"I'd know her. I interviewed a policeman once who worked with
forged banknotes. I asked him how he learned to spot the fakes and he
said, by looking at the originals. I'd know you anywhere."
"Did Raimundo Soares know? Did any of the people she sambaed
past at Canal Quatro know? Did my sisters and my own mother know? No,
it's safer this way."
"And how will I know when it's over?"
"I haven't worked that out yet!" Marcelina snapped. "Why
are you making this harder for me? I don't know how any of this is
going to work, but I do know that I am a very, very good researcher
and it's time for me to stop being the hunted and turn it all around
and become the hunter. What am I hunting? Myself. That's all I can
say about it. Something that looks like me, sounds like me, thinks
like me, knows what I'm going to do before I do it, and is absolutely
dedicated to destroying me. Why, I don't know. I'll find that out.
But I do know that if it looks like me and thinks like me and talks
like me, then it is me. How, I don't know either. You tell me—you've
shelffuls of books out there on everything under the sun. You've got
a theory for everything: give me one, anyone that makes any sense."
"Nothing does make any sense." Heitor sat heavily on the
opposing creaking leather minimalist sofa-cube across the glass
coffee table.
"That doesn't matter. Do you want to see the DVD again and tell
me that isn't rea!?"
"Some error of timing?"
"Ask my entire development team. They were smoking my blow at
the time."
"Well, if your evil twin is barefaced enough to get deliberately
caught on camera at Canal Quatro, why did she disguise herself at
terreiro?"
"I don't know. Maybe it wasn't her. Maybe there's another
player. I'll find out." Marcelina fiddled with her coffee cup.
"Do you think I have an evil twin? Do you think my mother . . .
? She had her glittering career—she was Queen of Beija-Flor—and
I always felt I was inconvenient. Could she have ... no. Not even her
at her most fucked up . . . . "
But it seduced, a great archetype: the twins separated at birth, one
spun into the neon and sequins of the Copacabana; the other to
obscurity hungry, and now she had returned to claim her birthright.
Had she seen this in a telenovela once?
"Ask her," Heitor said.
Perhaps the coffee, perhaps the psychotherapeutic arrangement of the
sofas, perhaps just the bell-like clarity of a friend listening and
asking the one quesstion that made it fall apart into brilliant
facets. Suddenly the face in the freezeeframe, the papers scattered
across the floor, were clear and simple. Of course there was no
spirit-Marcelina woven out of stress and wisps of axé blowing
between the morros. There was no magic in the hills or in the city:
Heitor's bleak philosophy allowed no magic into the world at all. No
ghosts no Saci Pererés no doppelgangers no parallel universes.
Just an old family secret come to take her due. But you don't know
Marcelina Hoffman. She is the capoeirista; she takes down the smart
boys with jeito and malicia: she is the malandra.
She had dried her clothes at midnight in Heitor's tumble dryer-his
cleaner believed in laundry on a Monday and it was no use asking
Heitor; white goods hated him. He could not even properly operate his
microwave and certainly his oven had never been used. Her jeans were
tight and stiff as she forced her way into them, the top shrunken to
overclinginess and her shoes still damp, the insoles stained. She
swung her bag over her shoulder.
"Where will you go?"
"I'll find somewhere. Not home."
"How will you let me know when you've done whatever it is you
need to do?"
"You'll know, newsboy." She stood up on tiptoes to kiss
Heitor, old big growly bear-man. So easy to stay among the books and
the minimalist leather, the picture glass and the slinky little
playsuits, so easy to drop everyything onto him and burrow down into
his mass and depth. So dangerous. No one was safe until she had the
mystery under her foot in the roda. "How exactly do you go about
asking you mother, 'Mum, do I have a secret twin sister you gave away
at birth?'"
Heitor's Blackberry chirruped. It was not the first time sex had been
interrupted by his RSS headline feed. She felt him tighten against
her, muscle armoring.
"What is it, big bear?"
"That guy you went to see at the terreiro."
"Bença Bento?"
"He's been found dead. Murdered. Cut to pieces in the night."
Heitor hugged her to him, that strong-gentle crush-fearful delicacy
of big men. "You be careful, oh so careful."
The hat was shaped like an enormous upturned shoe, the sole brimming
low over the kiss-curl, the heel—solid, chunky, Cubano even—a
brave crest. Marcelina lifted it with the reverence of the host.
"Go on, try it," Vitor urged, his face silver-screen
brilliant.
Marcelina almost laughed at her reflection in the long mirror, put
her hands on her hips and struck vampish, Carmen Mirandaesque poses,
pout pout. Mwah. Then the light shifted, as it did dramatically in
this old dream-theater, and in the sudden chiaroscuro she saw the
Marcelina Hoffman her mother had dreamed: a silvery, powered
night-moth, the toast of the Copacabana stepping out of the deep dark
of the mirror. Marcelina shivered and snatched off the hat, but the
sun grew strong again through the glass roof and she saw in the
flaking silvering a pair of silver wings, and silver
muscle-armor—pecced and abbed and burnished—and there a
bloated, chinoiserie horror-baby mask.
"It's ... ," she said, wondering.
"The wrong Brazil," Vitor said. "They were striking
set after the shoot, and it was all a dreadful kerfuffle and someone
thought it was the shipping destination. "
Vitor was of a generation whose duties and obligations went beyond
those of alt dot families and honored still the carioca tradition of
providing a bed and a beer for a night or a year and asking no
questions. He had flung open his little shop of kitscheries to
Marcelina, blown up the air mattress for her in the box room
cluttered with boxes of old movie magazines and soccer programs, and
when she had asked if there was a place where she could see her
apartment without being seen, had without a word unlocked the door at
the end of kitchen and ushered her through into the only true magic
that Rio still knew. Marcelina had always wondered where Vitor had
found the art deco treasures that had so perfectly topped off the
interiors in
Kitsch and Bitch
. His apartment,
odd-proportioned, impractical rooms, strange staircases, and
inteerior balconies, was the converted foyer of a lost cinema, a
jewel box of the 1940s smothered in cheap, shoving blocks like a
forest tree within a strangler fig. Beneath the vaulted ceiling all
the old movies had come to die. Props, sets, flats, lighting rigs,
and costumes, entire World War Two fighter aircraft, pieces of ocean
liner, cafes, and casas were jammed and piled together.
"They put everything in here, just in case they ever needed it
again," Vitor said as he led Marcelina up to the top gallery.
"And then someone locked the door and walked away and everyone
forgot about it until I did a bit of digging into the
Jornal
records. Mind your step there, the damp's got in."
There's a program idea in here somewhere, Marcelina had thought; and
it was grounding, it was sanity, it was the ineluctable truth of the
trivial. There was a sun still in the sky and Jesus on a mountain.
Now, even as she laid down the surreal shoe-hat, she gave a little
cry: perched on a polystyrene head, all waxén pineapples and
bananas be-dusted, was the original tutti-frutti hat.
"Here's a good place." Vitor opened a door into blinking,
blinding light; a small room one side of which was a great circular
window, leaded as if with vines. He patted a wicker chair. "You
can see everything from up here, and no one will see you because no
ever looks up. I'll bring you tea by and by."
It was a fine belvedere, part of a former bar, Marcelina theorized,
commanding a sweep of street life: the convenience store, the two
bars, the kilometric restaurant and the dry cleaners, the video store
and the Chinese restaurant, and the lobbies of thirty apartment
blocks, her own among them. So near, so secret. How many times, she
wondered, might Vitor have watched her comings and goings? A freeze
of fear: might her enemy have watched from this very seat and noted
down her routines? Vitor would not have known; Vitor had met her
already, when she snubbed him on the street, and had not known the
difference. Paranoia. Paranoia was understandable.
Once, twice, three times Marcelina jerked herself awake, nodding into
a doze in the comfortable, dusty warmth of the cupola. Investigative
work, surrveillance, had never been her thing. Running around with
cameras and sound booms, PDAs and release forms; that was the game.
Vitor brought tea, twice. He never asked what she was doing there,
watching the silver door of her apartment, never once mentioned her
brief notoriety in the Sundays—a proper World Cup scandal had
swept her into the center pages on all but the Globo papers. The old
men and women came back from the beach. The street vendors worked the
intersection. The bars put out tables and lit up televisions, a
steady line of home-shifting workers went into the 7-Eleven and came
out with bottled water and beer and beans. She learned the timetables
of the metro trains arriving at Copacabana Station by the pulses of
pedestrians down the streets. She saw Vitor take his accustomed seat
by the street, order his tea, and open his paper. Friends and
acquaintances stopped to chat for a moment, a minute, an hour.
That
looks a good life
, Marcelina thought. Uncomplicated, investing
in relations, humane and civilized. Then she thought,
You'd be
bored bored bored within half an hour
. Give me Supermodel Sex
Secrets
and
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.
She could procrastinate no longer. Marcelina called her mother.
"Hi. It's me. Don't hang up. Are you all right? Are you okay?
Have you been, you know? Don't hang up."