Heliopolis (14 page)

Although skyscrapers still towered in every direction, behind the gates the school was a refuge of whitewashed walls and cool corridors. Its windows had dark green shutters to keep out the light and the heat; to focus the pupils inwards, on their learning, and not outwards at the reeking injustice beyond the gates.

Every day, as Melissa and I were dropped off, I glimpsed kids my own age in the favela across the street. Un-shirted, unselfconscious, underweight, they seemed always to be laughing. I swung between guilt at the thought that I should be among them, and envy at their apparently simple, joyful existence. Some days I wished I could join in—playing with stuff they had salvaged from the rubbish, or kicking around a rag football; others, I was grateful for the safety of the compound, with its water-polo lessons, its basketball courts, its chilled drinking fountains.

Melissa and Ernesto were casually indifferent to the facilities at their disposal. It had never occurred to them that an education could transform a life. And they did not, like me, feel the constant burden of how much had been sacrificed on their behalf. So I did their homework for them, and I paid attention, and I did well. I was a successful experiment—one that justified every gram of Rebecca’s compassion and Zé’s magnanimity—whatever effect it may have had on my relationship with my real mother, on my perception of what constituted ‘home,’ and on my state of mind.

It took a careless joke from Zé for me to realise what was happening back on the farm, something said over dinner one Thursday, about how he wondered whether everything would be ready for the guests he had staying that weekend, or whether the ‘hot young lovers’ would be too distracted.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘He’s joking,’ said Melissa, shooting her father a look.

‘Am I?’ said Zé, his nostrils flaring. ‘Love is no joke, Meli.’

‘Well, I think it’s wonderful,’ said Rebecca. ‘They deserve to be very happy.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I said.

Rebecca cleared her throat. ‘Zé thinks that your mother and Silvio might be having some sort of romance.’

‘Is that right?’ I asked.

Zé contained his smile. ‘I think it might be, Ludo. But it’s a good thing, isn’t it? It’s good that your mother might no longer be alone.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘She probably hasn’t told you because she’s been waiting for the right time,’ Rebecca said. ‘And we don’t know for sure. Zé is just making mischief.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘From what I saw they might not have had much time yet to speak to anyone,’ Zé muttered, sniggering to himself. ‘They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Silvio looked like a dog caught humping the sofa.’

Everyone laughed, including me, before I remembered at whom I was laughing. Even now it’s difficult to articulate how I felt that evening.

M
y life is a maze with ever-narrowing paths. It’s only a matter of time before the walls hem me in so completely that I won’t be able to move at all. Ernesto is the client; but of course he is. I should have known that even his self-righteous sanctimony would yield eventually to Zé’s irresistible, steamrolling desire to include. This family—it is walled in, blind to the majority. It’s how their connections stay strong. The inevitability of it all makes me weary.

Oscar stands back to watch the embrace between me and my brother-in-law, pleased with himself and the trick he’s played.

‘You knew about this?’ I say.

‘I wanted to surprise you,’ he replies, and turns to his client. ‘Didn’t I tell you I had just the guy for you on this project?’

‘You did,’ says Ernesto, beaming.

After the meeting, which flies by unnoticed, Ernesto takes me aside and embraces me again.

‘It’s good to see you! How long has it been? Are you hungry?’

‘All the time.’

‘Let me take you to lunch, on me. Or rather, on Zé.’

Since Ernesto’s paying I direct the taxi to one of my favourite restaurants, a Japanese place on the top floor of a new bank. Its walls are clad in clean, rustic-looking wood, as if you were eating in a rural
ryokan
and not capping off a resplendent skyscraper. Its longest wall is entirely taken up by an ice bar heaped with sea creatures, dead or dying.

And here he is. Ernesto, struggling with his table manners as usual, spilling stuff all over the place, eating like a child. I’d forgotten his enthusiasm, how he eats like a big bear with poorly coordinated paws. Watching him grapple with the chopsticks, I remember how, when Melissa and I were still living together, I used to set his place with a smaller set of cutlery when he came for dinner. Childish perhaps, but I wanted to watch his big hands fumbling around, trying to cope, to make him feel as out of proportion and awkward as possible. Forks laden with my rich sauces would clatter to the polished wood floor from his hands, and he’d mumble his apologies as he crammed his frame under the table to collect them.

How could I have blamed those phone messages on him? As well as scanning pruriently for information about how regularly he fucks his wife, I’ve also dipped into Ernesto’s diary to see if there was any hint of negativity about me, some snobbery that was there from the beginning, which he’s concealed out of respect for Melissa, and which I can use to justify deceiving him. I’ve found nothing. He appears to love me, and judge me only for who I am. He doesn’t even call me a sellout for what I do for a living. How I could have imagined that he had somehow changed completely and started leaving me hate voice-mail, I do not know.

We’re distracted by the range and quantity of dishes that I order—tartares of salmon and tuna, glistening heaps of roe from three different species, a mosaic of raw fish and a stack of vegetable tempura—so at first we restrict ourselves to a post-mortem on the meeting. But even down on this conversational level there’s a lot going unsaid. I order a carafe of chilled sake to try and loosen him up.

‘Think about it,’ he says. ‘The way these communities work is that everything is hijacked. Their cable TV is siphoned off everybody else’s. Their electricity, their water, and even, these days, their internet access. It’s all “unofficial.” Their entire lives are unofficial. And what happens with their shopping isn’t that different. The way to get the freshest meat is to buy a live animal and kill it yourself at home. You don’t want the spoiled cut that’s been hanging above the butcher’s block crawling with flies for six hours. With MaxiBudget, we’re going in after them—to take food to them. Affordable food. Designated food. Official food.’

‘To stop them from coming and staring hungrily through the windows of our own supermarkets.’

‘No!’ He smiles, knowing I’m being deliberately provocative. ‘To nurture their communities. To acknowledge what the government has spent years ignoring. So we can turn them away from things “unofficial” and start them down the road of becoming integrated citizens. Why is that so difficult for you, of all people, to accept?’

I slam down my cup. ‘I wish people would stop saying
“You, of all people”
! Why am I supposed to know more about this than anybody else?’

There’s an uncomfortable pause. I’m breathing heavily. Plates and chopsticks clink around us. Two diners look over. Then the tension is broken by the noise of a huge crab clattering off the ice bar and on to the floor. Whether it fell off because the ice is melting under it, or whether it is still alive and making a bid for freedom, I don’t know. Two waiters leap over to replace it.

‘Remember when you took me shooting on my first morning in Angel Park?’ I ask, trying to recover my cool.

‘I’ve grown up since then.’

‘So have I.’

‘I know. I’m sorry, Ludo—’

‘I overreacted. But listen, fill me in, because I don’t understand. How long have you been working for Zé?’

‘A couple of months now.’

‘Nobody told me.’

‘You know how bad the family is at communicating things.’

‘But I . . . I spoke to Melissa yesterday, and she didn’t seem to know you were working on it. She hadn’t even heard of it. Your own wife doesn’t know where you work?’

‘I haven’t told her yet,’ he says. ‘I hate keeping things from her, but I haven’t had the courage.’

‘Why not?’

He drops a beautifully assembled piece of sushi into his dish of soy sauce, splashing flecks of brown all over his shirt, then, abandoning all pretence of eating with the chopsticks, rescues it with his hand.

‘I suppose I’m ashamed,’ he says. ‘I spent years telling Melissa I wouldn’t work for her father.’

‘But it’s a good cause, as you keep telling me. There’s no shame in it.’

‘It’s not that, it’s the nepotism. I’ve always hated the way Zé has to keep everybody pinned down. All that control-freakery. I fought off his job offers for ages, but with this project, because it’s charitable, he finally found a way to get me to say yes. The trouble is that no matter how worthy it is, I feel uncomfortable. There’s something almost. . . incestuous about it.’

My throat feels dry. I drain my cup of sake too quickly, so that the alcohol overwhelms the taste, and order another carafe straight away.

‘You’re different,’ he goes on. ‘You’ve managed to escape it somehow. But I’ve married into it.’

I think about Zé threatening to take away Oscar’s biggest account if he didn’t give me my job, and say nothing.

There’s a pause as the new sake is delivered. I top him off.

‘We haven’t seen much of each other lately,’ he says. ‘And I know it’s been years now, but I don’t think I have ever told you in person how sorry I was about what happened to your mother.’

‘Thanks.’

Pause.

‘I didn’t know you were in touch with Melissa,’ he says, noticing in a burst of empathy that the previous topic was unwelcome.

‘We speak on the phone from time to time. She doesn’t tell you?’

‘To be honest, she doesn’t tell me a great deal.’

Here we go.

‘You’ve known her all your life,’ he says. ‘You know how difficult she can be. She closes everything down and goes into herself. And—I’m sorry, listen to me. It’s been so long. I’m sure you’ve got problems of your own.’

‘I want to hear this. Honestly.’

‘All her secrecy. I think it’s contagious. That’s probably another reason why I haven’t told her about this job. Especially because I think that her secrecy is also hypocritical. I don’t think she respects my right to privacy at all.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s unfair of me to talk to you about this. You’re her brother.’

‘I’m your brother too. I promise I’ll keep it to myself.’

‘I think she’s been reading my diary. It’s no big deal, of course. I have nothing to hide. But the thing is, I wouldn’t even know she’d read it if I hadn’t noticed that sometimes the date on the file name changes, which means she must be . . . altering it as well.’

‘You must be imagining that. She probably doesn’t even know you keep a diary.’

He tips sake into his cup. ‘She’s so odd sometimes. She leaves these cryptic messages written in steam on the bathroom mirror. I have no idea what they’re supposed to mean. And there’s another, more worrying thing.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I’m probably being paranoid.’

‘Tell me, and I’ll tell you whether I think you’re paranoid.’

‘I think she might be seeing someone else. Sometimes, after I’ve been away, I find—strange hair in the bed. Black. Wiry. Definitely not hers or mine.’ He leans across the thin wooden table, and gestures with the chopsticks that are tiny in his hands. ‘But you want to know what the worst thing is?’

This is it. He’s going to say,
The worst thing is that it’s you she’s doing it with
, and that will be that.

‘What’s that?’ I say.

‘The worst thing is that I can’t even drum up any sympathy for myself, because I think I probably
deserve
all this.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that I’m a bad person.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘This job.’

‘For the love of God! What’s wrong with working for your father-in-law?’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘How does an anthropologist come to be working for a supermarket chain, anyway?’

‘He said that my studies of the favelas could help him set up his subsidised supermarkets—which are funded, incidentally, by the Uproot Foundation as well as by the companies whose products are on sale. It’s basically a charitable venture.’

‘But if working for a charity was your only stipulation, Zé could have got you working for him years ago.’

He sighs. ‘It’s not easy, helping some of these people. They’re proud. They think that only someone who was born and suffered there with them is genuine. They don’t trust me for a second, and they don’t even know where I grew up. Can you imagine if I told them about Angel Park?’

‘None of this is helping me to understand why you suddenly decided to work for Zé.’

‘I wanted some muscle behind me. If you’re going up against an organisation like the Shadow Command then it doesn’t hurt to have Zé Generoso on your side.’

‘I don’t get it. “Muscle”? This doesn’t sound like you at all. I thought your point was always that progress depended on trust.’

He sighs. ‘You’re right.’

‘So what changed your mind?’

‘You mean
who
changed it.’

‘Ah.’

‘He came to see me at the university. You know when he does that thing of phoning, and asking , “Where will you be in ten minutes’ time?” and then you feel the walls vibrate?’

‘I know it well.’

‘The university campus isn’t exactly geared up for helicopters, but you know him. He landed on the recreation ground outside my office, barged right in and said he had a proposal for me.’

‘What kind of proposal?’

‘You can imagine it. He can’t bear anyone being too independent of him. He’d had enough of his son-in-law struggling along as a university professor, and working on these little youth projects. I don’t know how much you know about what I’m going to say—’

‘I told you, my lips are sealed.’

‘For a while now, Rebecca hasn’t been well. She’s been on antidepressants, and I think she might be drinking.’

‘Really?’

‘I don’t know how serious it is, or how much Zé was talking up the problem to make me feel bad, but he said that Rebecca had basically given up. That the work was taking too much out of her because she cared about it so much—and that he was trying to persuade her to step back from it and hand over the running of the foundation to somebody else. “Who better than you,” he said, “to take it on? You’ll have free reign to take it in whichever direction you want. I know you’re more than qualified. That way, Melissa needn’t know what a state her mother is in, and you can amalgamate your existing projects with the work of the foundation, and put some serious money behind them—carry on your good work with a decent budget. And best of all, you’re
family
. But, if none of those reasons persuades you,” he said, “then do it as a favour to the father-in-law who values you greatly and believes you are the only person who is in a position to help him in this hour of need.”’

‘He got you through emotional blackmail?’ I say. ‘He’s no fool.’

‘True.’

‘But it’s not such a bad place to earn a living. And what he says about integrating it with your work is true.’

‘It’s true up to a point, yes. And MaxiBudget isn’t such a bad idea. That part of it is fine.’

‘Then I don’t see the problem. Just have the humility to admit to Melissa that you’ve changed your mind about working for her father—that there is a reason now that you can accept. Be the
filho de papai
, and don’t beat yourself up about it. You’ve been stupidly proud about not working for the family until now.’

‘That would be fine, except . . . ’

‘Except what?’

‘Except that it’s
freaking me out
,’ he says, suddenly raising his voice in a way that is very out of character.

I smirk a salmon egg down my front. Ernesto gazes out at the view, looking desolate.

‘This isn’t a joke. I’m in serious trouble, Ludo.’

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh.’ I pick the orange bead off my shirt gingerly so it doesn’t burst and toss it to the back of my mouth, trying to look contrite. ‘Tell me about it.’

He sighs. ‘You need to understand how things work in these communities. You need to understand that the idea that their lives can somehow be changed for the better by some external initiative is simply ridiculous to these people. It is laughable.’

‘OK . . . ’

‘The Foundation’s basic principle is that their lives can be changed—that they can be uprooted—but that concept is alien to the residents themselves. Beyond the one-in-a-million stories of footballers playing their way to riches, or the odd politician or musician, there’s no evidence to suggest that their lives can be any different, because nothing ever changes for them.’