Heliopolis (2 page)

I
am less than a year old. The hunger has been at full pelt from the beginning. Wails rip out of my wide-open mouth on behalf of a panicked, churning stomach. Quietly, my mother sings, trying to calm me down. Somebody came by earlier and asked if she would consent to be photographed with her baby. She doesn’t understand why this rich white woman, the wife of the supermarket man, wants to visit her, but it would be impolite not to offer her something when she comes. She puts on her best blouse and prepares some beans and rice.

As I am rarely allowed to forget, I was born in Heliópolis. Exactly how I came into being has never been satisfactorily explained, but I have heard enough versions to last a lifetime of the key moment, when Dona Rebecca, Zé’s English wife and Melissa’s mother, came to the slum on a mission of mercy and found my proud, beautiful mother nursing her newborn child.

Today, things have improved: the district is called Vila Heliópolis, and has the official status of a neighbourhood rather than a favela. The fact that it has a name at all gives you an idea of its size: names confer legitimacy, and slums don’t make it on to maps or the destination boards of buses unless they are unavoidably sprawling. Many of the larger ones, cities in themselves with apartment blocks and tens of thousands of inhabitants, now have full sanitation, electricity, internet access, banks and shops. But there are always starter slums, which appear overnight under bridges, in corners, in wrecks and ruins. And when I was born, every one was a shithole.

I know what it was like: I’ve seen pictures. From a distance, you can’t imagine anyone living in such a place: the area has the chaotic texture of a landfill site, a rubbish dump. Zoom in a little, and the teeming detail begins to emerge: tangled outbreaks of TV aerials; dense thickets of unofficial power lines; walls and roofs of remaindered breeze-block and stolen brick and found-iron sheeting and repurposed doors; structures that should never work but somehow do because they must. Inside, a mattress; a gas ring; electric current tapped from somewhere but seldom paid for; cold food when the gas runs out; no food when there is no cold food. And from each dwelling, the constant, slow trickle of
água preta
: the seeping shit and piss and wastewater of people, with nowhere for it to go.

At that time, the Uproot Foundation did not exist, so Rebecca did not have an entire charity to act on her behalf. She was just the wife of a supermarketeer with political aspirations who did not like what she saw. She requested a favela visit to check out the conditions firsthand, and Zé sensed an opportunity for publicity. He arranged the trip right away, and sent along a photographer and a journalist to make sure it was properly reported. The first photograph of me ever taken shows Rebecca and my mother exchanging awkward flashlit smiles over bowls of beans and rice.

Ever risk-averse, for all his willingness to exploit his wife’s good nature for political ends, Zé made several decrees to Rebecca before her visit, all of which she ignored. Chief among them were that she should drench herself with insect repellent to ward off dengue fever, that she should on no account consider eating or drinking, and even that she should stop her nose with cotton wool on account of the smell.

But Zé had reckoned without his wife’s compassion, and my mother’s determination. A lightning flash connected them as they locked eyes over my bawling form—a shared longing to get this boy out of there. When my mother’s gaze met Rebecca’s over the outstretched bowl of food, Rebecca accepted it without hesitation, said her prayers, and sat down to eat. And this is where the miracle occurred. For although she didn’t know where her next meal was coming from, or maybe because of that fact, this defiant young woman had somehow cooked the most delicious bowl of
feijão
that Rebecca had ever tasted. How, Rebecca asked, had she infused the beans with so much flavour when she could afford so little to flavour them with? The answer, my mother replied, was in plenty of cooking time, a few scraps of onion or tomato, some bacon fat if you were lucky, and a good measure of raw determination to make sure your son didn’t go hungry.

When Rebecca got up to leave she wished us luck and planted a kiss on me as I lay in my mother’s arms. But even as she closed the door, Rebecca was assailed by visions of the hardship my mother would endure to provide for me. Recently a mother herself, she probably had the infant Melissa in mind. The sight of us had plunged a knife into her heart, and every step she took away from us gave its hilt another twist. She turned back, stepped neatly over the trickle of effluent that snaked over the concrete outside our hut, and offered to take us away to her farm in the countryside.

My life was transformed by that moment, and Rebecca’s decision to knock on our door a second time probably saved me from an unpleasant, predictable fate. The
favelado
who becomes a foot soldier for a drug gang may be a cliché, but that’s because it happens every day. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that Rebecca saved my life.

Look what can happen in a generation: my mother lived in a flimsy shack, and I have my own place and my own car, and I can speak and read and write better than most of the playboys you’ll meet, because I paid attention in school. But this is no normal case study. What happened to me does not happen. And unless you’re extremely good with a football, it definitely doesn’t happen if you’re male.

I sometimes wonder whether Rebecca would have turned around again if my mother’s cooking hadn’t been so good. What if she had not been able to conjure something delicious from a handful of beans? I ask myself that question, allow myself to contemplate an alternative outcome for a moment, and then I go back to my business, grateful that this lucky path is the one I was asked to tread, and secure in my belief that a life dedicated to the preparation of good food is a life well spent.

Favelas are subversive by definition. A community stops being classed as one when its streets make it on to official maps, which is never allowed to happen so long as the land is occupied without being owned. The result is whole cities of squatters with strong fingers and dirt under their nails from clinging on—the fingers of second-thought suicides who try to claw their way back up the cliff. But these people never made the decision to jump: they woke up on the edge of the precipice, with nowhere to go but down. Consequently, the way we left Heliópolis stamped out the possibility that my mother might ever again relax. Because she had cooked our way out of the slums, and because cooking was what had caused the miracle of our new existence, she feared that to stop preparing food might send us back, and that it was therefore safer never to stop.

And stop she did not: she became a production line of cakes, stews, roasts and soups, mastering the signature dishes of Italian, French and latterly even Japanese cuisine. Food had saved her, and food became her mode of expression. Her hatred and determination, her relief and joy, were beaten into soufflés, stirred into risottos and baked into pies. I could gauge her mood through what she was making: something simple but soothing, like
pão de queijo
, cheese bread fresh from the oven, meant contentment, equanimity; richer treats, such as
brigadeiros
, tiny chocolate bombs with payloads of condensed milk, signified something closer to happiness. If she was frustrated or angry, the conflict would emerge in bold clashes of spice and sugar: clove and orange, chilli and ginger, coconut and saffron. When these exotic pasties and sweetmeats came my way I kept quiet, loving the sparks they generated on my taste buds even as I knew they meant I should keep a low profile.

She spoke about what she wanted to speak about, or she did not speak at all. Whatever my father, or life in general, had inflicted upon her, she had reacted to it not with bitterness but by retreating into this world of industry, of calloused hands, of blood and flour, of sweat and cinnamon. It was as if she feared that to speak unguardedly about herself would release something she could never take back; that any admission of suffering would weaken her permanently.

When I think of her now, tending her hives in the sunshine, threading chicken hearts on to skewers in the steam of the kitchen, or picking figs against a backdrop of green foliage, what I see most clearly are her dark, brown eyes—eyes that seemed always to be looking down, as though she lived in a permanent state of deference simply for being alive. But, at least when I was a boy, it meant that her eyes always found me.

We lived together in the kitchen, so I was always within earshot. I became used to speaking without looking up, knowing that the reply would come as surely as if her voice were in my head. If she was working hard, the replies were short and blunt, particularly on Thursdays and Fridays, when the weekend was imminent. But occasionally, when she was relaxed, she spoke for hours, in a soft voice that seemed to come from a different person.

I couldn’t cross the kitchen within range of her without receiving a light touch on the arm, or a tousling of the hair, as if I were a battery that charged her in quick, opportunistic fixes. More often than not these caresses were accompanied by the silent dispensation of something delicious: a spoonful from the
feijão
pot, a hot
empada
, an outstretched fingertip coated with thick, sweet
doce de leite
. In this way, whether she felt like talking or not, her love arrived constantly in spiced biscuits and sticky cakes, in slowly simmered stews and flash-fried garlicky greens, in piquant sauces and hot, salty chips. I had the services of a gourmet chef at my disposal seven days a week, whereas the family, for whom she was there and by whom she was paid, only got to enjoy her work on weekends. I ate like a prince but ran free as only the child of a servant can. And I had no father to tell me otherwise.

Rather than offer one definitive version of him, and create one specific repository for my resentment or my longing, my mother offered shadowy, multiple fathers, who floated over the table, conjured by her words. Sometimes he was a Portuguese nobleman she had met in Oporto, with whom she had lived when learning how to cook. This father she painted as a distinguished gentleman, playing the clarinet in his dressing gown, a glass of sticky green liqueur by his music stand, while my mother danced slowly in front of a popping fire to the high, mournful sound. I imagined them together in musty, shuttered rooms; on a lumpy bed with an iron bedstead; in a choked garden outside with a broken fountain. But he wasn’t always European; at other times he was variously a Berber tribesman or a Sephardic Jew with whom she had led a nomadic desert existence, learning her trade in plush silk tents that flapped in the breeze. I knew that she had no more been to Oporto or the Sahara than I had, but it didn’t matter. In this way, we travelled the world together, with our missing husband and missing father by our side.

It was a fine game to play as I sat in the doorway of the kitchen listening to the twitter of songbirds in cages, but no more than that. Only once, at the age of five, did I ask the question, although I don’t remember it as being the moment when some urgent desire for the truth finally burst through. I recall it rather as an idle enquiry, something that occurred to me with the same naïve level of interest as if I were asking who had planted the trees in the forest outside. She was kneading dough, and had scattered the kitchen tabletop with flour that puffed out in tiny clouds in time to her strong, insistent movements.

‘You’re a lucky boy,’ she said, smiling grimly. ‘You have no father to boss you around—you just slipped down a rainbow.’

At the time, it seemed as credible an explanation as any of the others.

Once she let slip a genuine fact. It was my birthday, and she revealed that it was my father’s birthday too. I knew it had to be true because of all the fantastic claims she had made, this was the only one she ever tried to retract.

‘That was just a joke,’ she said. ‘Forget I said it.’

I did not forget. If she didn’t take back palpably false stories about fathers who were pilots and nomads and thieves, then why take back this one? And I have clung to the fact that my father’s birthday was the same as mine ever since, certain that it is the only thing I know about him, without knowing why my mother so regretted telling me.

It was a mixed farm: palm hearts, bananas and a small Brahma beef herd. Zé bought it partly as a way of establishing some agricultural credentials in preparation for his bid for office, but mainly as a place to spend weekends. Silvio, the farm manager, had been apprenticed as a young man to the previous owner, and he knew the land better than anyone. His job was to run the place, without ever letting Zé feel that he wasn’t in charge—a diplomatic posting on top of all the back-breaking work of the everyday.

Weekend guests might never have known that it was a working farm at all. All the equipment was kept out of sight by Silvio’s house, so it wouldn’t interfere with the serious business of the weekend’s fun. The only time any machinery came out was when it was required for the administration of leisure apparatus: when a goalpost had fallen over, or to clear a mudslide from the side of a plunge pool after heavy rain.

And whatever else he might be doing, if the power went down at weekends Silvio knew where his priorities lay. Whether he achieved it by climbing poles to get at the power lines, cursing waist-deep in storm drains or kick-starting the back-up generator in the forest, keeping the electricity going was all that mattered—lest Silvio face Ze’s outrage at finding the light over his pool table extinguished, his caipirinha ice melted.

Although he sometimes muttered dark things about the guests who came to mess the place up, Silvio held an antique, feudalistic respect for the system that infuriated me. I wanted him and my mother to lock all the doors and take control of the land—they who made it work. One day, when I was twelve and had heard of Che Guevara, I suggested it.