Her hand shook. She wrote slowly,
You know I've gotten myself into
something bad—if I told yiu I would just scare you and there
still wouldn't be a thing you could do about it. It's all up to me
now. I am very very scared. I can't help it. I find I have to play
the hero, and that's not a role I know anything about. Give me Jerry
Springer trailer trash and Z-list scandal. And I find there are no
scripts for this; I'm making it up as I go along. But I've been doing
that all my life. It's the thing I know best. I can pitch it. But I
honestly don't know how this is going to end. I don't want to think.
Barbosa: it would have made the program of the century, but not in
the way anyone thought. A show I would have been proud of.
Not much of a love letter. Or maybe it was, a Marcelina love letter
where she bitches and moans about herself for two pages and then at
the end drops in the line,
Oh, by the way, I love you. I think
I've loved you for a long time. Can you do that, love someone without
knowing? It would be so much better if you could, clean and quick and
none of the mad, embarrassing stuff, none of the phone-bombing and
SMS-assaults. And then of course I start to think, is it me? And I'm
not sure which is the more difficult answer because one way I'm
stupid and I've hung my heart out and the other I didn't know and you
didn't say. Agh! I have to go. I love you. Wish me well. I'm not a
very good hero, I'm afraid.
Her thumb waited over the e-mail key. It deserved better. He deserved
better. The Lisandras dated by e-mail, dumped by SMS. Show some
malicia.
A scrape, a painful wedge of light opening into a parallelogram of
day. Fisico stood in the brightness. Marcelina thumbed save and slid
the PDA into her bag.
"Okay then," she said. "Let's go."
The bateria had been playing for two hours now, a steady two-tone
tick of an agogô begun before sunset and sent out over the
cellular network, the call to prayer. The barracão of the
Igréja of the Holy Curupaini was a large living room on the
first floor of a new-build apartment block. Cheap vinyl was rolled
up, the furniture piled against a wall. A folding kitchen table was
the altar, pushed against the big window with its breathtaking view
down across the glowing carpet of Rocinha to the towers of São
Conrado. A fair gold cloth dressed the table and was scattered with
assentamento: cubes of cake, cones of yellow farofa, saucers of beer,
little oranges stuck with joss-sticks. Holy medals, soccer stickers,
animal-game lottery cards, centavos, and cigarettes. The air was
sickly and headachy from incense trickling from church-stolen burners
and Yankee Colonial scented candles in glass jars. Squat saints and
orixás guarded the altar; most had indio features and carried
Amazonian plants and animals in their hands, snakes and jacarés
beneath their feet, like the vehicles and attributes of Hindu gods.
The only one unfamiliar to Marcelina was a near-life-size wood
carving depicting an indio woman, naked but her skin painted gold,
balancing on one foot and entwined, like a dollar sign, in an S of
snake-headed vine. She juggled planets. Marcelina recognized Saturn
by its rings, Jupiter by its satellites on projecting sticks. Our
Lady of All Worlds. The serpent's head was pressed to the woman's
pubis. The statue was old; the wood cracked with age, pocked with the
flight-holes of woodworm, but the craft and care spoke of an age of
faith made manifest. Sweepers worked the floor, two street boys with
twig besoms. The susurrus of sacred amaci purification soothed
Marcelina.
The bateria occupied the left window corner of the room, and the
drummers were already far into their improvisation, trading tempos
and breaks. On the opposing wall the kitchen door led to the
improvised camarinha. As initiate zemba Marcelina was permitted into
the fundamentos, which seemed to consist of Barbosa sitting at a
worktop with a cup of coffee reading the soccer results off his WAP
cellular. A brass cage stood beside the bottle-gas cooker; within, a
golden frog, stupid eyes wide, throat throbbing. A grasshopper
skewered on a pin and wired to the bars offered temptation. An
antique brass kettle on the gas hob spelled its fate.
Summoned by drums, the egbé had been arriving since twilight;
mostly men, some few women, pausing to purify themselves with a
splash of holy water from the stoups by the front door. All wore
white, though watches and jewelry showed they came from outside
Rocinha. Many had painted a single stripe of gold down the center of
their faces, brow to chin. Marcelina was dressed in a high-neck
racer-back top and capoeira pants—all white—Fisico had
sourced down in the town. The pants were a little chafing in the
crotch; otherwise Fisico had read her size right. Full dark now, the
great favela a fog of light spilling down from the green mountaintops
to the sea. The bateria unleashed its full force. The terreiro shook,
cups rattled on hooks, the refrigerator door was shaken open.
Glancing out into the barracão Marcelina saw the space before
the altar was as crowded with white-clad, dancing bodies as any Lapa
4 AM club, and yet more piled in behind. Some wore full bridal dress,
gleamingly white and virginal; they pushed up to the very front of
the barracão and whirled, already ridden by the orixás.
She saw Mestre Ginga arrive, hastily bless himself, and work his way
along the wall to the camarinha. He kissed Barbosa on each cheek and
set a long flat object wrapped in banana leaves on the table.
"Awo," he said to Marcelina's puzzled look. Secret.
Now the alabé was calling, the egbé and the bateria
responding, and Marcelina felt the music kick open an inner door so
that fear and apprehension flowed into excitement and anticipation.
The drums caught her, lifted her. Even the glorious abandoned
insanity of the réveillon and its two milllion souls had not
thrilled her so, called the deep axé and sent tears down her
cheeks, shaken her to the ovaries. Barbosa touched her gently on the
hand, rose from his seat. Marcelina fell in behind him, Mestre Ginga
at the rear. Before quitting the camarinha he lit the gas under the
kettle.
A wall of sound greeted Marcelina. She lifted her fists: Mick walking
onto the stage on the Copacabana Beach before half of Rio. The egbé
went wild. Over the physical hammer of drums, so hard it hurt, came a
shout from the golden faces. Zemba! Zemba! The iâos in their
bridal dress whirled in bolar, the deep possession of the saint. The
Daime at Recreio dos Bandeirantes had been a security-guarded,
middle-class madness: the terreiro of the Curupairá was the
true spirit: axé burned along the concrete floor, from light
fitting to light fitting. Marcelina was whirled time out of mind;
space stretched; time shrank; she may have danced, she may have been
lost for a time among the white-clad bodies; then she was back at the
altar. Barbosa raised his white cane. Drums, voices, feet fell silent
and still. He spoke in a language Marcelina did not understand, part
indio, part church Latin, bur its meaning was clear to her, the
calls, the shouted responses: she was the zemba, the warrior, the
protector of the egbé. Barbosa guided her to the front of the
altar. The people murmured greeting. Mestre Ginga brought the copper
kettle from the kitchen, dancing a fidgety, malandragem little
tap-step as he worked around the assentamento past the drummers. The
alabé started a rattle on his agogô; the bateria took it
up, whisper of skin on skin. Mestre Ginga lifted the kettle before
the congregation, who again murmured, like the sea. Barbosa took the
kettle, quick as only a corda vermelha could be; Mestre Ginga caught
Marcelina, pinned her arms. Excitement burst inside her. Barbosa
brought the kettle up to her lips. She opened her mouth eagerly. This
was the sexiest thing she had ever ever done. Pae do Santo Barbosa
poured three drops of liquid onto the tip of her tongue. The
curupairá was rank, bitter, Marcelina grimaced, tried to spit
it our. On the third spit, the multiverse blossomed around her.
The barracão was a dazing blur, room upon room superimposed
within, next, above each other, yet each accessible from every other.
The eyes perrceived; the comprehension reeled. More people, more
people, the population of an entire city, and the entire planet,
crammed into this one room. Blinded by the white: Marcelina lifted
her hand to shield her eyes and saw a thousand hands halo it. Edit.
Everything is edit, cutting down those endless tapes of footage to
meaning. Peering through the white barracãos she caught
glimpses of other rooms, families coming together, televisions, meals
on battered sofas. Car engines on carpets. And beyond them all, the
dark forest. She whirled, throwing off a firework spray of
alternatives to the window. Rocinha was a universe of stars; galaxies
beyond galaxies of lights. Marcelina cried out, her ghosts and echoes
called around her. The gravity was irresistible; she might fall
forward forever into those clouds of lights. Beyond them, other
skylines, other Rios, other entire geographies. She saw unbounded
ocean; she saw archipelagos of light; she saw green cordilleras and
great pampas.
Marcelina turned to Barbosa. She saw him alive, she saw him dead, she
saw him gone, she saw him glorious, a hero, the greatest goalkeeper
Brazil ever knew, a government minister, a UN goodwill ambassador.
She saw him hounded and humiliated on prime-time television; she saw
an old man take off his hat and his jacket and walk into the waves
off Ipanema; she saw twenty milllion fingers poised over the TV
remote red button to vote: innocent or guilty?
Next the curupairá touched the auditory centers and opened
them up. One voice, ten voices, a choir, a cacophony. The reverential
silence of the barrracão became an ocean of soft breathing,
became a hurricane. Marcelina clapped her hands over her ears, cried
out. The cry rang out from a million universes, each clear and
distinct. Beyond rhe edges of the cry were voices, her own voice.
Eyes squeezed shut against the shatter of the multiverse, Marcelina
forced her understanding toward the distant voices, tried to pick
them out one by one. There was a way to navigare the multiverse, she
discovered; what you sensed depended on what you focused upon. Focus
on the terreiro, on the favela light, and you saw geographically.
Concentrate on a person, on Barbosa, on her own voice, and you
steered from life to life, ignoring distance and time. Mind was the
key. Top to bottom, beginning to end, it was all thought.
Marcelina gingerly opened her eyes. She stood at the center of a
cloud of selves; a mirror-maze of Marcelina Hoffmans before, behind,
to left to right, above, below but all connected to her and to each
other. One mind, one life in all its fullness. She saw herself a
star, commissioning editor, channel controller, telenovela director,
pop producer. She saw herself a journalist, a fashion designer, a
party gatinha. She saw herself married, pregnant, children around
her; she saw herself divorced, alcoholic; she saw herself down; she
saw herself dead more times than she wanted: in a fast German car, in
a mugging, with a belt around her forearm, in a toilet, at the end of
a blade that could cut through anything. There. Fast as a bat, moving
away from her sight as she touched it, crossing from world to world
to world. Herself. Her enemy. The anti-Marcelina, the hunter, the
cop, the police.
I see you
, she thought. In that revelation, she saw beyond,
to the blur of quantum computations, to the fundamental stuff of
reality, the woven fabric of time and calculation. And she saw, as
she remembered sitting backstage with the hands watching the
Astonishing Ganymede, the famously bad conjuror of the Beija-Flor,
waiting for her mother to sweep up from the band pit on her mirrored
Wurlitzer, how the trick was done. It was simple, so very simple.
Everything was edit. Take a sample here, another there, put them
together, smooth over the joins with a little cutaway. New reality.
Innocent and shining with wonder, she reached out her hand to seize
reality.
Mestre Ginga's arms were around her again; fingers forced open her
mouth, a million open mouths, a billion fingers. Coffee. Marcelina
choked, gagged, heaved in Mestre Ginga's wire-strong arms. The
flocking universes flew away like a storm of butterflies.
"Coffee," she swore, retching dryly over the assentamentos.
"You're very much mistaken if you think it's just coffee,"
Mestre Ginga said, slowly releasing her. "Even those three drops
can be too much."
"I saw everything," Marcelina said. She leaned on the edge
of the altar, shaking, head bowed, sweat dripping from her lank hair.
"I was ... everything." Every muscle spasmed. No capoeira
jogo had ever wrung her so dry. Slowly she became aware that there
was a roomful of expectant devotees in white, waiting for the word
from the multiverse. "I saw ... her."
"And she saw you," Barbosa said. "She knows what you
are now."
"The zemba."
"You are nor the zemba yet," Barbosa said.
Tock-tock
, said the agogô, beginning a fresh rhythm. The iâos
swayed and swirled, left to right, their dresses floating up around
them. Fisico entered from the camarinha carrying the leaf-wrapped
object. He set it reverently on the altar. Shards of other worlds
flickered around Marcelina. Would it always be this? She suspected
so. On the edge of her vision, like a floater in the eye that, when
looked at, perrpetually flees the focus of attention, she was aware
of the anti-Marcelina, and that she was aware of her. The curupairá,
the gathering of the egbé, Barbosa revealing himself as Pae do
Santo of the terreiro were to prepare her for the inevitable
showdown. Marcelina stripped away the dry, dust-smelling banana
leaves. The leather scabbard was the length of her forearm, worked
with an image in ridged stitch work of the Lady of All Worlds. She
took the handle.