The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (28 page)

Raquel assumed that Rob was using his job to take care of the bills he had stockpiled, most likely filtering in small cash deposits along with his paychecks like most prudent people would. Had she known of the specifics, she would have surely questioned the selfishness, arrogance, and stupidity at work. If he were to be caught and subsequently present the police with all these receipts, the next thing they would do would be to question his colleagues and superiors. The cancer research lab might be accused of shoddy financial procedures; the professor who had invested so much in Rob's education would be embarrassed by any controversy. “What the fuck?” she would have asked, braving the anger that Rob unleashed in the face of anyone questioning his intelligence, his larger plans. But here was Rob at his most elusive, and he kept his roommate in the dark. In the meantime, Raquel had fallen in love and so wasn't prone to noticing any activity in and around Rob's black trunk.

Simon Rodriguez was a quiet, organized Yale graduate, working at Bayer for a year before he began med school in Manhattan. Raquel was a self-described “hot mess” with cornrows who had just been locked out of her apartment after working in a photo lab all day. She'd joined Rob at a friend's house, where everyone told her to clean up her photo equipment before Simon came home and flipped out at the mess. When he did enter, her throat closed up and her heart began pounding, and she pulled Rob aside. “I think I love him,” she said.

“You want him, you go get him, girl,” Rob replied, though to his knowledge a pairing of two more opposite personalities had never occurred in the world before.

To aid her pursuit, Rob proceeded to rally the others in the apartment for a spontaneous Mohegan Sun trip, knowing that Simon would never want to go. Five years later, Raquel and Simon would be married.

On Valentine's Day of 2003, after staying in New Haven for nine months following graduation, Rob left for Rio. He had no place to stay, no friends there, no plan. All he had was a portion of his savings set aside for these weeks and a burning curiosity to see the place. He left most of his things at Raquel's—he left a mess, actually—along with a few ounces of marijuana hidden in jars of formaldehyde to “take care of her while he was gone.” The only major items he moved were Dio's tank (to Chapman Street, stoking his mother's terror) and the black trunk containing his cash and drug paraphernalia, not wanting Raquel to be in danger on the off-off-off-off chance that police entered the apartment. This he left with Carl, heavily padlocked, with instructions to keep it hidden. Carl shrugged and told him that this was no problem, and not the first time he'd been asked to look after a container of something with no questions asked and only one order given. Presumably, the latter response was the reason Rob had chosen his father's old friend and colleague as the trunk's keeper.

“You stay safe now,” Jackie said in parting to her son. They were standing on the front porch by the two Adirondack chairs. She still had no idea why he was going to South America, only that he could never be talked out of it. She didn't know when he was coming back, either; the ticket was one-way.

“Always,” he replied.

“I hear they have people down there that cut your pocket open with a razor, and your wallet just drops out, and you never feel a thing. So, you keep your wallet in your front pocket, with your hand on it.”

“C'mon, Ma, I grew up in the hood.”

“Okay, then. Whatever you say.”

“You're my heart, Ma.”

Tavarus dropped him off at Newark International Airport. “When I get back,” Rob told him, “we'll start looking at houses. We'll do it. We'll make it happen.” Tavarus began counting the days.

T
HERE IT WAS
, Copacabana. The white sand rolled out on either side,
and the green water before him stretched a few thousand miles to Antarctica, which at the moment sent a cool breeze north over the city. Sugarloaf Mountain thrust up sharply in the distance to his left, and the Cristo Redentor statue loomed open-armed behind and far above him. Across the water to the west, the Vidigal favela (favelas are the Brazilian version of slums) cut into the rain forest, where the densely stacked tin roofs and narrow alleyways ascended the hills and the squalor contained therein somehow appeared gorgeous from this long angle. He stood and watched the people. Thousands of them covered the hundred yards of sand between the city and the beach, beautiful people descended from a combination of European immigrants, Amerindian indigenous people, and enslaved Africans, all that blood and culture mixed and evolved into a city of people who seemed genetically engineered to relax and enjoy the scenery. Rob had no doubt imagined this very picture on the flight here, and the picture proved strikingly accurate as he waited, duffel bag slung over his shoulder and with no place to stay, for his first Rio sunset. The orb touched down over Vidigal, and Rob found that what he'd heard was true: people did applaud.

For the first time he could remember, he had nothing to do and no one to worry about.

He found a room in the South Zone, where the good beaches and most of the parties were. For $400 a month—less than the basement apartment in New Haven, less even than Tavarus was paying for his dilapidated one-bedroom in East Orange—he had a decent-size studio with French doors that opened directly over Ipanema Beach, rippling white curtains that parted onto a semicircle of marbled balcony perched above sand the color of pearls. He would wake up, drink coffee beachside while reading the news in Portuguese, and then walk along the ocean, sometimes for hours, past the entire length of the city. Then he would have a few drinks, also beachside, and people-watch—­primarily the women, whose thongs he learned were famous worldwide for a reason. Then he would walk some more, on the hard sand down by the water, warm waves lapping over his ankles. And the sun would arc across the sky, and at some point he would find a spot of dry sand and
smoke a blunt, sharing with any passerby who asked, knowing that this was part of the culture here—nobody cared, they just let you be—and he would wait for sunset so that he could stand up and clap his hands with everyone else. He'd swim while it was still light enough, straight out for half a mile with his strong choppy strokes, his eyes open and pointed into the depthless green, weaving through fishing boats and yachts, until he stopped to turn around and tread water for a moment, gazing at the city from afar as the dusky light thinned and the shoreline began to glow with multicolored pinpoints of electricity before plunging his head again into the now-dark water and swimming back toward civilization. He didn't stand out for being a nerd in a pink school uniform here, as he had in East Orange. He didn't stand out for being black and wearing a skully, as he had at Yale. He didn't have to keep track of bills exiting and entering his wallet (kept in the front right pocket), as he had always. He was just a man on vacation, cutting a broad, muscular silhouette against the southern horizon as he walked along the beach. Once cleaned off, he struck out into Rio each night, on foot or by bus, to drink and smoke at whatever party looked the most pleasing in passing, and within a week he had made friends—some tourists passing through, some transplants from America or Europe, most of them lifelong residents from all the various neighborhoods, each of which he would explore over the coming weeks.

Rio was almost evenly split between Cariocas (the light-skinned descendants of European settlers) and Pardos (the brown-skinned descendants of native Brazilians and African slaves). Like Newark, the city had experienced a massive influx of rural minorities looking for industrial work during the 1950s. Like Newark, a large number of these minorities had been segregated into the favelas. Like Newark, the city had attempted to incorporate these slums into public housing projects, which—like Newark—had only exacerbated racial tensions and violence. Like Newark, the decline of the manufacturing sector had cast these outlying neighborhoods into permanent poverty that became a breeding ground for drug traffic. Unlike Newark, the various socioeconomic groups within the city intermingled fluidly in public spaces, and
a person like Rob could travel almost anywhere he wanted without fear of confrontation, without having to watch his back.

A friend from Yale, now on spring break from the Teach for America program, happened to be traveling through South America with his girlfriend and came to crash with Rob. The girl watched the two men ride horses along Leblon Beach, their silhouettes passing to and fro across the sunset. She'd known Rob at Yale, had been curious about him but never intimate. The fact that almost a year after graduation found this man—whom she'd always thought to be an irritable, cynical boy from the hood—riding a horse along a South American beach, literally shouting, “Yahoooo!” again and again, was mind-boggling to her. The next day, Rob took them in the cable car to the peak of Sugarloaf Mountain, where they had a view of the unique sprawl of the city, like fingers poking into the impenetrable jungle. They followed the excursion with samba dancing at a club.

A week later, Curtis flew down from Atlanta. He hadn't needed much cajoling to do so; the serenity in Rob's voice that rose above the static of the international call had been sufficient. On his first day, they hiked up Corcovado, at the top of which the soapstone Cristo Redentor statue, that worldwide symbol of peace, stood a hundred feet tall. The steps were covered with brightly colored mosaic tiles, a hypnotic collage of religious and cultural imagery. The tourists constantly stopping to bend down and look more closely created a logjam. Curtis was out of shape and trying to push his way to the top, wondering why they hadn't just taken the elevator.

“Yo, Paolo!” Rob suddenly stepped out of the crowd, over the precarious railing and onto the slope, where a man who might have been a hundred years old was on his hands and knees, regrouting a cluster of chipped tiles. They embraced and began speaking in rapid Portuguese. Curtis gradually gleaned that Paolo was not simply a custodial employee of the city tourism department. He'd actually built the stairs himself, with his father, sixty years earlier. Now he lived with his wife in a one-room cabin near the base of the steps, and every day he worked to maintain the stairway. Later, Rob and Curtis ate dinner in that cabin,
spicy stewed pork served over rice. Rob and Paolo kept a running conversation in Portuguese that Curtis couldn't understand as Rob finished bowl after bowl of stew.

“What were you talking about the whole night?” Curtis asked when they left.

“Nothing much,” Rob replied. “Just asking questions about his life.”

“He fixes stairs. How many questions can there be?”

Rob laughed. “Over a million people a year walk up those stairs. And he built that shit. The man has seen a lot of things, met a lot of people.” There were notes in Rob's voice that approached envy of the simplicity of it all. “Also, I needed to get that recipe.”

He made the recipe a few nights later, for two women they had met, Kaliana and Iris. They were curvy—too much so, in Curtis's estimation, but Rob thought they were just about the most beautiful women he'd ever met. He told Curtis to pick one; which girl didn't matter to him. Rob ended up sitting next to Kaliana. As he set dinner down on the table on his balcony, Kaliana noted, wide-eyed, that a man had never served her before. In Brazil, even in the modern city, the woman served the man. By the time the entrée was set down, Curtis realized that these girls would probably marry them tonight if asked. And he didn't put it past Rob to ask, so entranced was his friend—not necessarily by Kaliana herself but by the lifestyle she represented. Both girls spoke some ­English, but Rob preferred to talk in their language, slowing his cadence, enjoying it when she laughed at him for flubbing a tense. Curtis, left on his own, conversed awkwardly with Iris. He hadn't seen Rob much over the last four and a half years, just Thanksgivings and a few weeks during the summers, reunions that had thinned as the years had gone on. Observing him now, having somehow forged an existence in this city in the Southern Hemisphere where winter was summer, Curtis suddenly understood what the word “peace” meant to Rob Peace. The four of them went out that night. Rob drifted away with Kaliana, saying he'd check back in tomorrow. Curtis didn't see him for two days.

When he did come back to the studio in Ipanema, he hadn't gotten married, but he did want Curtis to come up into the Rocinha favela with him.

“Nah,” Curtis said. “As if we don't get enough ghetto back home—you want to drag me into the hood on my vacation? Don't think so.”

“It's cool people,” Rob said. “It's real. And Rocinha isn't even a bad one. There are tourism buses that go up there.”

“Sightseeing in the favela?” Curtis asked.

“Yeah. It's called ‘slum tourism.' Fucked up, ain't it?”

“How do you know people over there anyway?”

Rob shrugged. “I'm good at meeting people.”

Curtis still didn't go. He had one day left and wanted to spend it on the beach. Rob came home that night with Kaliana and more marijuana than even Rob could smoke during the month further he was planning to stay—even during Carnival, which Rob was keen to spend completely stoned around the clock for a week. The quantity made Curtis wonder if Rob was dealing here, if he was selling drugs in a place and culture he didn't fully know, governed by a legal system with far fewer safety nets than even Newark had.

But he didn't ask, not wanting to spend his last day here in the precarious position of trying to tell Rob to be careful. Curtis had one of the best nights of his life.

Carnival was ten million people, dressed in very little, dancing in the streets as
micareta
bands played from moving truck tops. It was a never-ending buffet of spicy food, fruity drinks, and masked faces perched on dancing bodies. It was hair, glitter, flesh, and all of it in constant motion. It was a choreographed parade of costumes, a chiaroscuro of color worthy of Kandinsky. The sheer scope of the party, and the avidness with which the people—musicians, dancers, cooks, tourists, rich, poor, young, old, Carioca, Pardo—descended onto the streets was beyond anything Rob had ever hoped to experience. As a child, books had been his passageway into foreign, sometimes utopian worlds. Carnival wasn't just an incarnation of that passageway in reality; it was everything that lay on the other side, where the only thing that mattered was the moment, and millions of people were able to inhabit that moment with ease and, predominantly, with bliss. People back in the States talked about Woodstock this way, or Burning Man, or the Kentucky Derby, or Hal
loween in Greenwich Village. But none of them had ever been to Carnival. Rob had now, and he didn't want to go home.