Heliopolis (15 page)

‘I am a rare exception, but we’ll overlook that.’

‘Rare? You’re unique.’

‘I know that. Go on.’

‘What’s more, many of them don’t want to live outside the favelas. It’s where all their friends and family are. You can live well these days, and there’s a freedom from rules that is attractive.’

‘That’s romanticising things a little, in my opinion, but carry on.’

‘The point is that every one of them has been brought up to believe that nobody is going to change his destiny but him or herself. It’s what they are told, and what every experience they’ve ever had has taught them. The idea that someone might walk into their lives one day and offer help in exchange for nothing at all is just a fairy tale. It’s not going to happen. There will be a catch.’

‘OK.’

‘So. Starting any kind of charitable initiative in this situation would be difficult enough, but then you hit another problem, which is that every single favela is controlled by one gang or another. They fund the municipal services. They pay the bills. And nothing happens without their say.’

‘I know that.’

‘But you don’t realise the extent of it. If you want to do anything for these communities, whatever you do for them has to be converted into a benefit that the gangs can feel straight away. It’s not enough just to offer education for their kids or to teach their people new skills. What you offer them needs to be in a currency that they can spend, otherwise the dialogue never even gets started. You’re expelled, or worse, you’re dead.’

‘What currency are you talking about?’

‘The situation is so mixed up,’ he goes on, ‘that there are no good and bad sides. Two weeks ago in Paraisópolis the police got so fed up with how little control they had over the community that they held up the bank. It was the
traficantes
who defended it.’

‘That’s very funny. But it’s not entirely surprising.’

‘My point is that I have spent a long time gaining the trust of the people I work with, something that MaxiBudget and Zé just don’t have the time to do. He likes to build quick alliances through grand gestures and incentives.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘That part of my remit for MaxiBudget involves a guarantee that I will do certain . . . extra business deals for key figures in the community, in order to ensure the security and success of the stores.’

I get it. ‘They want you to sell drugs? Where?’

‘Angel Park. My parents are still there, so I can get in without any problems.’

‘And what?’

‘Marijuana. Cocaine. I drew the line at crack. And believe me, there’s no shortage of demand.’

I take a deep breath. ‘Amazing. Does Zé know?’

‘He knows everything that goes on in his businesses. But he would think it was . . . uncouth of me to bring it up. He would just want me to do it, discreetly, like all the nasty things I’m sure he’s done over the years. And I don’t think I can.’

‘Don’t, then.’

‘It’s not that simple.’ He sighs, and his arms hit the table like felled trees, causing the remaining tempura vegetables to jump in their dish.

‘How do you even know this is expected of you?’ I ask.

‘There’s a guy. A gang member. Part of a gang called the Shadow Command.’

‘I know them. Their tags are all over our office.’

‘You and your frozen ghetto. Anyway, this guy, he’s known as Jeitinho. He’s not the leader, but he seems to be high up.’ ‘What’s he like?’

‘Powerful. Calm. He’s younger than us—no more than twenty-two—but you can tell he’s seen a lot, that there’s not much he wouldn’t do. And he carries a machine gun.’

‘Difficult to refuse someone like that.’

‘I don’t think the leader is ever far away, either—my guy gets instructions from him all the time by phone.’

‘And he wants you to do these deals for him?’

‘Yes. It’s all set up for me. All I have to do is make the drops.’

‘Why can’t they get someone else to do the legwork?’

‘They could. They don’t need me—there are hundreds of little foot soldiers they could send to do it—but it’s about complicity. They want something on me, so I’m controllable.’

‘And have you done it?’

‘Twice,’ he says, miserably. ‘Please, don’t say anything.’ He holds up a hand. ‘There’s no name you can call me that I haven’t already called myself.’

I know him well enough to know how much he will have been punishing himself for this. No wonder he’s only just got round to noticing my hairs in his bed.

‘So you’re a drug dealer. This is quite something.’ I can’t help breaking into a smile.

‘It’s not funny. I could get killed. What should I do?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say, truthfully. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

I gaze out across the city, at a helicopter that flits from building to building like a mechanised bee after pollen. The rich nectar of blackmail mixes on my tongue with the salty oil of salmon roe. Finally, I’ve got something on him.

‘You’re going to think I’m being ridiculous,’ he says, ‘but initially I thought that I could help by doing what I’ve been doing. By keeping them separate. The street kids don’t have to brave the security of somewhere like Angel Park, and the rich kids don’t have to get shot in the favelas trying to score. I thought, the buyers and the sellers are going to find each other anyway, so why can’t I just make that process as free from confrontation as possible and concentrate on solving the bigger problem?’

‘Do I have to tell you what’s wrong with that?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘But thank you for not saying anything judgemental. I know what you must be thinking.’

‘You might be surprised.’

I call over the waitress and ask for a portion of
uni
.

‘What have you ordered?’ he says. ‘Nothing more for me.’

‘This is special. It will calm you down. It’s something so good that it can only take your mind off what you’re telling me.’

‘Nothing could possibly do that.’

‘Wait and see. Now then, let’s talk about this. You feel guilty because you’re supplying the rich kids with their drugs?’

‘Not particularly. They could get the stuff anywhere they wanted. But by dealing for the gangs to gain their trust I’m cancelling out all the good that trust is supposed to buy me.’

‘What happens to the money you make in these deals?’

‘Half of it goes straight to prison—to people you can’t imagine and will never see, who run half the city from their cells. The other half goes to the
traficantes
, and from them, filters back into the community. It puts people through school. It pays doctor’s bills. It covers sewers.’

‘So in the end, you’re helping,’ I say. ‘The gang leaders can choose what to do with their money just as much as the rich kids can. You should stop worrying about it.’

A dish of three sea urchins, accompanied by carefully sculpted shards of daikon, is placed before us. An involuntary sigh escapes me, they’re so beautiful. The spiky blue-black shells in which they have been served resemble perfect miniature bird’s nests. The gloopy yellow pods inside quiver as they are set down—jellied gold. I’m reminded of how the central cavity of a crab is known in some languages as the ‘purse.’

‘You’re oversimplifying things,’ says Ernesto, seeming not to notice what’s been put before us. ‘What I have been doing is weak—an easy way to win their favour so I could look as if I was doing my job when in reality all I have done is undermine it.’

‘I do that every day of the week. Stop talking for a while and try this. It’s
uni
, sea-urchin roe. It’s delicious.’

He reaches forlornly over the carnage of his previous efforts for the dreaded chopsticks.

‘Don’t bother with that. Here.’

Not leaving anything to chance, I reach down, lightly holding the spiky shell, and collect one pad of roe with my chopsticks to deliver it to his lips. Nothing transforms the mouth like that delicate flavour: a taste that breaks in a creamy, briney wave over your tongue. For ten seconds, the expression on his face is blissful, as the uni washes through him and spirits him away to the sea.

‘Amazing,’ he manages, his voice coming from a different place.

‘The Japanese consider it a great aphrodisiac,’ I say. ‘Partly because it contains high levels of naturally occurring cannabinoids.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. So my advice is that you stop worrying about all this, eat these urchins and get home quickly so you can bang your wife.’

I am genuinely trying to make him feel better, but by bringing up cannabis and Melissa in the same breath I have undone the transformative good work of the sea urchin. He pays the spectacular bill mechanically, in a trance-like state brought on by all that resurgent stress.

‘Send her my love,’ I say as we part.

Reflecting on these developments, I take a taxi back to the office, the dull thud of too much sake behind my eyes. Ernesto the drug dealer, would you believe it. At least he’s doing something real with his life, which is more than I can say for his wife, or her lover. Not that I’m technically her lover, given how infrequently we’ve actually consummated the relationship. As for that side of things, my adventures in Melissa’s bed will end permanently if Ernesto goes in for any more detective work. I’m just lucky that he’s so well-intentioned that the idea of him divining the true origin of those hairs in his bed is simply unthinkable. Not unless somebody spells it right out for him, anyway.

I
sometimes want to run away from this life to which I have been promoted, and live in a small town on the coast, where there are horses tethered on every street corner, where the dirt roads have numbers instead of names, where the local shop sells nothing but Fanta and outboard motors. But then I think of where I might be if it wasn’t for Zé and Rebecca. Would I be a scavenging
catador
, running between the traffic pulling a trailer full of scrap metal? A barefoot sweet-seller, wandering the park with a tree of candy floss? Watching over parked cars, or bagging produce at the MaxiMarket? And my mother: would she now be the hag with the caved-in mouth, setting sail through the traffic with her cart of rubbish, and sleeping in a lean-to shelter under a bridge, or behind an advertising billboard? Would we be just two more of those wrecks that rage on street corners?

Rebecca and Zé were our salvation. But am I at least allowed to wonder what might have happened if we hadn’t been saved? I believe that my mother was strong enough to see us through anything the favela could have thrown at us—and that had we not been rescued, she would have made it through with her pride intact. Of all the ways in which I hurt my mother, I look back on my failure to snuff out her conviction that she wasn’t the person best qualified to raise me as the most shameful. She took the outstretched hand that was offered to her, but then she felt she owed it everything, making a mockery of her self-sufficiency. It’s a pan-American story: when she had nothing but a handful of beans to her name, the tough nugget of pride at her core sustained her. Then along came Zé and Rebecca, and took away that pride, replacing it with impotent gratitude. Like the mythological pelican slashing open her breast to sustain her young, my mother fed me her blood, and she took a mortal blow for me in the process.

‘Didn’t I tell you we’d go off and live in a tower together?’ says Melissa. She’s eating mango with a knife and fork, her coffee-cream legs topped off by the briefest pair of white shorts and a baggy old sweatshirt of her father’s. I am seventeen.

‘What?’

‘You remember. Down at the pool, when you first moved?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m eighteen next month.’

‘So?’

‘So I’m getting an apartment for my birthday, and there’s no way I’ll be allowed to live in it alone. You’ll have to come and take care of me.’

In this way I discovered where the next act of my life was to play itself out: the penthouse of a brand new, cylindrical block; the same penthouse that has lately become the scene of all this unbecoming cuckoldry and incest.

It was still possible at this stage to think of my time in the city as an excursion, a lengthy but finite deviation from my ultimate destiny back on the farm. I had changed a lot in three years, but life on the farm had not, and I remained convinced that I would one day return there, whatever the city was doing for my intellectual and social ‘development.’ What’s more, in spite of her newfound happiness with Silvio—which was genuine, and welcomed by me—my mother had started to sound frail on the telephone. I had also overheard an abruptly terminated conversation about her health between Zé and Rebecca that worried me. But once again, events were out of my hands.

It was billed as Zé’s ingenious compromise solution. Melissa wanted to leave home, and Zé was concerned for her safety in the city, but he knew better than to smother her. In a plan with all the latent horror of a fairy tale, the princess would live high above the streets, and the king could drop in on her any time to make sure that all was well.

As is so often the case with Zé, the extent to which this was all calculated in advance is impossible to assess. He was so clinical with his forward planning that I could even believe he knew when he chose to adopt me that Melissa would be striking out from him before too long, and wanted to send a trained member of staff along to watch over her.

So, I wasn’t always an interloper in the tower. I had a ringside seat as Melissa and Ernesto’s relationship developed beyond the friendly childhood stuff, and got serious. People rationalise it now. They are even referred to as childhood sweethearts. That’s bullshit. It’s just what people like Zé and Rebecca and Gaspar and Olinda want to believe. It happened in the penthouse. I saw it.

From the day I arrived in the city at fourteen, the three of us grew into a powerful, close-knit group, inseparable both at school and in Angel Park. We didn’t exactly shun others, but neither did we need them, and I managed to go through my entire school career without a proper friend of my own age. Then, when I still had a year to go, Melissa and Ernesto left school and enrolled at the university. It put distance between us, whether we wanted it or not. They had embarked on the next stage, Ernesto developing his anthropological interests and Melissa studying journalism, while I was left behind, and instantly rendered younger. It was only a matter of time.

I am seventeen. Loaded with shopping bags and drenched, I clatter through the door. Above the city, the sky is iron-grey with rain. Single strands of lightning flicker on the horizon, impossibly distant. A yellow bar of light under the door to Melissa’s bedroom. Loud music. Laughter. I’m unpacking the shopping when she bursts out of the room, wearing only a man’s shirt.

‘Something ridiculous is happening,’ she laughs, giving me a hug. ‘I think I’ve fallen in love with that idiot Ernesto.’

The tower rears up in gleaming silver sections, like robotic vertebrae, and is constructed in an oval shape, which means there isn’t a straight line in the place. The furniture has to be arranged in the middle of large open spaces, which gives the penthouse a permanently transient air, as if the removals men have only just left. There’s a plunge pool on every balcony, and the great black disc of a helipad sits on the roof like a crown.

Zé knew when he bought the place that there were benefits for him that Melissa would overlook in her enthusiasm for independence—the principal one being that he could drop in and check up on her whenever he wanted. Sometimes he would get his pilot to hover outside the window, so Melissa or I could wave and show him it was worth his while to land. Other times, he would swoop in unannounced. Either way, you couldn’t have failed to know he was coming: the walls would begin to vibrate, and the sound would roar above your head until the engines were cut, leaving the descending whine of slowing blades. Then he’d be at the door, suited and sweet smelling, bearing cigars, or a bottle of something. When Melissa wasn’t expecting him, I sometimes had to cover for her and Ernesto, frantically scrambling into their clothes next door.

‘Ludo,’ he would say, beaming his best business smile. ‘Ludo, Ludo, Ludo.’ He would gaze out of the window, puffing his big cheeks out, grinning, pretending to examine me in depth, though there was nothing in the eyes. He loves being in tall buildings and is always distracted by the view. ‘My boy, it’s good to see you. How are you? Studying hard?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good for you. Enjoying the apartment?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Good, good. I’m happy. That’s what it’s here for. Now where is Melissa, do you suppose? She can’t still be in bed. These women and their showers, I will never understand it.’

‘She’ll be out in a minute. Can I pour you a drink while you wait?’

Those were the days. Now it is I who cower in the bed while Zé struts around outside, and Ernesto who is king of the tower. It mystifies me.

But there’s no denying it. Melissa and Ernesto were a fact not long after we moved in, and Ernesto a full-time, if covert, resident. The apartment was Ernesto’s escape route as much as ours. He and Melissa might have plotted the situation as carefully as Zé himself. Without me there as a chaperone, Zé would never have let her move out. With me along for the ride, she had a respectable brother-sister thing going on and the added benefit of someone who cooked and cleaned to earn his place. I felt in the way from the start.

The thing that gets me is that I
know
they’re meant to be with each other. The picture of them together, it works. Ernesto, the perfect father with the worthy job, who for all his unwavering commitment would never go to work on his kids’ birthdays; Melissa, his eye-poppingly beautiful wife, her inheritance supplementing Ernesto’s income, her figure seeming to tighten up with every child she squeezes out. In the middle of that vision, I look like I’ve come to steal their TV—or at least repair it.

During those years I became expert at being part of the background while discreetly adding to the foreground; of requiring nothing but being ready to supply anything. I cooked every meal. I cleaned shoes. I cultivated my herbs. I performed tasks that they took for granted to such an extent that I wonder whether they notice now how much worse everything tastes. I made sure their wine breathed; I chilled their beer to the perfect temperature. Quietly, I improved every meal, smoothed over every domestic transaction, and kept out of their way. And I might have been able to stand being that person, inheriting my mother’s position and retaining for the next generation, were it not for events that made me look on them both with new eyes.

Ernesto was evolving from the slack-fleshed kid who joyrode the private streets of Angel Park into someone with a conscience. He’d started to work on case studies of life in the slums, and to feel ashamed of the easy wealth of his situation. And the distractions of this new social purpose caused him to do something unthinkable: to take Melissa for granted. He would stay away for days at a time without offering much in the way of explanation, and when he returned he would spend whole evenings lecturing us on what he’d seen.

‘Do you even know how it starts, in the beginning? It starts with a single cell. Seeking shelter from the elements, a man leans a piece of plywood up against a wall. Picture it. Let’s say it’s the side of a packing crate. Let’s say he’s twenty, with no education, and only a pair of blue dungarees and a pocketknife to his name. Picture him. He cowers beneath the sheet of wood for the night. Nobody moves him on. So he stays. He improves his dwelling. One wall becomes four, then a watertight roof. Someone joins him. And if you think it’s bad, what they have here in the city, you should see what they’re escaping
from
.’

And so on. Melissa would never have said anything explicit about it because she believed in what he was doing, but I noticed that his self-absorption and absenteeism were beginning to affect her. Then one night, when he was away, we ended up watching a film together in her bed and falling asleep there. Somehow from then on it became the understanding that if she left her bedroom door ajar I would creep in and join her there when she was half-asleep. That way, she didn’t have to face up to what she was doing, and could sigh and clamp her arm around me as I crept in beside her. I knew I was being used to provide comfort, but I saw no reason not to oblige: at this stage our relations were still strictly fraternal. This was news, of course, that did not reach my rigid body as it lay there all night unable to sleep, as tensely sprung as if the contact of Melissa’s arm were passing an electric current through it.

Like my mother, I poured emotion into food. I translated my longing into culinary semaphore, using recipes to send frantic signals to Melissa over Ernesto’s dumb head. I made daring, all-or-nothing declarations through meticulous cocktails, and pledged myself at full volume in elaborate, anguished sauces. Melissa and I would eat in silence, communing through the food, while Ernesto sat between us, shovelling away as if he were stoking a boiler, prattling about the needy and making inane, ill-considered compliments about the cooking.

I couldn’t see how anyone could overlook Melissa. However hard your shell, she found her way in; she was like a truffle secreted in a basket of eggs, its perfume effortlessly pervasive. But not, apparently, for Ernesto.

One day a few months before my twenty-first birthday, I went to the shopping mall to buy clothes and run some errands. I remember the day perfectly for two reasons, and what happened at the mall is only the lesser of the two.

They had a pink dolphin captive in a huge tank that took up the space of an entire retail unit, slotted in between surf-wear boutiques, toy shops and hair salons. I found the poor creature fascinating. It swam in constant bewildered circles, sometimes bringing its high, domed head right up against the glass, and if you got in really close you could hear it making the occasional plaintive click or whistle, trying in vain to make contact with its population thousands of kilometres away.

The girl’s name was Anabel. She came into focus in the glass of the tank, standing behind me, watching the dolphin.

‘I wonder what he thinks of you,’ she said.

‘What do you think he makes of all this plastic?’ I said, to the reflection. ‘People walking around with bags. All the
retail
.’

She held my gaze in the glass. ‘You shouldn’t assume he’s unhappy. Perhaps he doesn’t mind being here at all. Maybe he just desperately wants someone to fetch him a drink from the burger bar.’

I laughed. ‘You think so? All these years, and nobody got that all he wanted was a chocolate shake?’

‘A chocolate shake—that’s not such a bad idea,’ she said. ‘Are you going to buy me one?’

She was eighteen, and skinny, with long brown hair and dark eyes. She wore tight jeans, boots and a denim jacket over a pink T-shirt. Rather then lift the milkshake to her face, she kept her arms by her sides and bobbed down to reach the straw. I watched the top of her head every time she leant over. It looked fragile as an egg.

We sat overlooking the ice rink on the ground floor of the shopping mall, and as we drank our chocolate malts she asked me if I skated. I told her I never had, and she was shocked.

‘There’s something called an Ice Party happening tonight,’ she said. ‘They put disco lighting on the ice and play music. Do you want to come?’