Heliopolis (21 page)

I think I’ve lost my way, and feel a squirt of panic in my stomach. Then somehow I manage to find the steps to the low door that leads to Flávia’s home. Unsure of what is polite, I knock on each door and surface that I can find, quietly announcing myself between each home. I make my way through, clutching my gift of Polaroid film.

The old man is out, and I know Flávia isn’t here either. She’s still pacing the corridors at work, furious with me.

‘Come in,’ says the girl.

She’s doing homework. I have time to notice that the exercise book she is writing in is one that I designed two years ago as part of a Books In Schools campaign.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘What are you doing here?’ Something is wrong. The look on her face is very different from before. She looks almost scared to see me.

‘I brought you these.’ I hand her the packets of Polaroid film. ‘You said you had run out.’

‘You came all the way back here just to bring me camera film?’

‘It’s not far.’ I shift awkwardly in the low, cramped doorway.

‘I work nearby.’

‘That’s kind. Thank you. But now you have to leave.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re in danger here. I mean it. Get out.’

‘Why?’

‘My brother is about to come back. And I swear he will kill you if he finds you.’

‘Your brother?’

‘Milton. Flávia’s son.’

Shit.

‘He’s your brother?’

‘Half. Same father.’

‘Shit.’

‘What did you
do
to him? You should have seen what happened when he came home this morning and found the photograph of you and Flávia pinned to the wall. I’ve never seen anyone flip out like that before.’

I try to keep calm. ‘I want to see him. It’s part of the reason I came here. I need to explain what happened between us.’

‘I don’t think you should do that. He is not in a good mood, he’s been drinking since this morning, and he has a terrible temper. Did you think you could just come in here and talk to him?’

‘Sister, sister,’ says a voice from the street. And then the curtain parts, and in he comes: quick, athletic, etched with intent.

He looks older than I remember. There are heavy bags under his eyes, though he seems to have put on weight in the last couple of days. He’s probably been fed restorative meals while out of town. He’s also washed his hair and put on a decent T-shirt. Were it not for the fact that I was expecting him or for the sling that hangs across his arm, I might not even have recognised him. But there isn’t a chance in hell that he will fail to recognise me.

At first he’s incredulous. He thinks he’s dreaming. Then he weighs in, screaming and pushing. He wants to get started before I even have the chance to say anything.

‘What is this, man? What are you trying to do to me?’

‘Let me explain.’

‘There is no explain!’ he roars. ‘You got me shot in the street.’

‘It wasn’t my fault. I tried to stop it happening. You didn’t have to try and mug that guard.’

‘And now you’re in my
house
?’

‘Listen to me for a minute.’

‘There is no listen. And I’ll tell you why.’ He rips aside the curtain and ducks into Flávia’s room, emerging immediately with the photo in his hand, the drawing pin still stuck through it from where he plucked it off the wall. ‘This is why. I don’t care what this is. All I know is I don’t ever want to see you again.’

‘Listen—’

‘No you listen, you son of a bitch. You are not safe. Understand me? You could disappear in here if I wanted it. So get out while you have the chance. Final warning.’

‘If you’ll just let me talk to you for a moment—’

‘You don’t get it, do you? I’m trying to control myself.

But this . . .
photographic evidence
, man. It’s enough to drive me crazy.’

He’s waving the picture in my face, and as I’m staring at it, at those saturated Polaroid colours, at Flávia’s smile and mine, at the ghost shape between us, something shifts in my mind. Something enormous.

I feel as if I might pass out.

Photographic evidence
.

‘OK, I’m going,’ I say. ‘Let me just tell you that I regret what happened. OK?’

‘Get the fuck out of here.’

My head is still spinning by the time I reach the alley. I break into a run down the steep hill, trying to remember the way out, but I take a wrong turning. I follow a drainage ditch choked with plastic bags, assuming for some reason that following the sewer will flush me away from danger. Looking up through chaotic bundles of electric wire, I see shadows against the sky—the shape of someone running across the rooftops, hurdling the aerials and satellite dishes and bright blue-water tanks, tracking me. I hear the metallic squawk of voices spoken through a walkie-talkie, and the panting of athletic bodies on the move.

He only kicked me out so he could hunt me down—so that his sister wouldn’t see what’s about to happen.

I start running faster. The low doors and rusty staircases and the music from the open windows close in on me. I no longer know which way I’m going. I’m just running. When I emerge panting into a tiny courtyard that I haven’t seen before, I know for sure that I’m lost. A fat dog in a doorway lifts his head to look at me. I return his gaze. And the sack comes down over my head.

I
am twenty-two. My new friends look on as I perform my signature trick of drinking tequila from the cavity of the stuffed caiman I keep on a shelf in my apartment. The guests have gorged themselves on a four-course meal, and spirits are high.

A roar of approval crashes round the room as I swallow the final dregs and hold the desiccated, laminated creature mouth-side down to show that it’s empty. Things will get worse before they get better.

Stepping on to the campus was like entering a film set. I felt I had lived through this cold autumn before, with its fallen leaves, its spotless pavements, and its cast of effortlessly entitled characters. Which does not mean that I felt at home.

My English was good when I arrived, but not fluent—and my character changed as a result. This is the personality transplant of a language barrier. Severed from your mother tongue, you resort to slapstick and other clownish behaviour to make friends. My classmates were generally rich, older than me, and supremely confident of getting what they felt they deserved out of life, which was nothing more or less than inheriting the universe—or at least the helm of a multinational company.

I had nothing in common with them at all, and yet I found myself wanting to impress them. So I turned myself into a sideshow. It was I who drunkenly ate live goldfish for a bet, I who took reckless quantities of drugs for the diversion of the others, I who won money for sticking my fingers in plug sockets.

But I learnt, and capitalised on the opportunity in a way that Melissa never would have. My English improved. I honed my cooking skills. I participated eagerly in all the mindless group team-building exercises. I read voraciously. I learned a little about the workings of corporations. I bought popularity with flamboyant meals and raucous parties. Even so, it was a lonely time. The people around you define you. And if you spend enough time alone you forget who you are.

I spoke to my mother every week, happily supplying what she wanted to hear: tales of the magic of the United States and the transformative effect my time there was having on me. I listed the books I was reading, wowed her with half-learned facts, and let her picture me in collegiate, first-world splendour, never letting on how out of place I was. And she told me to wrap up warm and be sure to eat well, and kept me up to date with what was happening with the family—from whom I heard little.

I had written Zé a long, formal letter shortly after arriving. It sought to thank him for all he had done for me. ‘I will never be able to repay the debt I owe to you, for this, and for every other opportunity you have given me,’ it read. ‘But I hope at least to make you feel that in choosing me, you made a wise investment.’ Something about the finality of the tone might perhaps have made him think that this was the end of our transaction—that he had sent me off into the world to succeed. For whatever reason, the fact is that after I sent the letter I heard nothing from Zé or Rebecca for almost four months.

When I spoke to Melissa she was breezy, spilling over with some new comment on pregnancy or marriage, and apparently perfectly happy. I spoke to Ernesto too, when he answered the phone, and he always sounded delighted to hear from me. They sent me joint letters, some of which contained photographs, so I could see how big she was getting, and watch from afar her growth into a radiant mother-to-be.

Something about the distance was healing. Now that I did not see Melissa, and our contact was restricted to platitudes exchanged over thousands of kilometres, I realised how much of my life she had dominated, and what I stood to reclaim. It was for that reason that I let the frequency of our calls drop off, and started to feel self-sufficient for the first time in my life. As a result I only found out from my mother two weeks after the event that Melissa had gone into labour early, and that her baby had been stillborn.

‘Are you OK?’ I said into the phone. I had been calling every couple of minutes for three hours since hearing the news.

Her voice was cracked and tired. ‘It wasn’t very nice. I wouldn’t recommend it.’

‘I’m sorry I’m not there.’

‘Looks like I could have done the business degree after all,’ she said. ‘Is it worth it?’

‘I’ll let you know.’

After that we resumed our regular conversations. I knew that what had happened had affected her, but felt that it was not my role to console her. Another three months passed. Deposits of cash arrived in my bank account every month, but they were not generous enough that I could have afforded a flight home. And still there was nothing but silence from my adoptive parents. I was not invited back for the holidays, so I assumed that I was to stay put.

When, just as I was about to start my third semester, I answered the phone and heard Zé’s voice at the other end, I jumped.

‘Ludinho, my boy.’

‘It’s
you
,’ I said, absurdly.

‘We never hear from you. You went completely silent after writing that sweet letter. We’ve been wondering how you are getting along. How is your English? Are you ready to come and run my business yet?’

‘I am having a wonderful year, Senhor,’ I said, resorting to formality, at once pleased and nervous that he’d called. ‘I don’t know how I can repay you.’

‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘Now, Ludo—’

There was a pause. His sigh broke over the long distance line like a crackling, static wave.

‘Ludo, Ludo, Ludo.’

‘What is it?’ I said.

My first thought was of Melissa. There had been further complications. She was hurt. She had been taken again. Because I had abandoned her, she had lacked protection, and someone, or something, had pounced.

‘I regret that I am phoning with bad news.’

Here it comes
, I thought.

But Melissa was perfectly safe.

It started with an accident in the forest. Silvio was away visiting relatives in the northeast, but you can’t blame him for what happened. There were dozens of people on the farm who could have helped if she had been the kind of person to ask.

It was a Sunday; almost a year to the day after Melissa and Ernesto were married. A sudden storm came, and just as before, the power cut out. Zé and Rebecca had not come for the weekend, so there had been no guests to cook for, and no Silvio to feed either. I see her preparing for the week ahead, doing what can be done in advance, planning how she will feed the workers in the coming days. I see her settling down in front of the TV when the power goes down. I see her curse as the lights flicker out, then head down the hill to start the emergency generator, surprised as she steps outside by the intensity of the wind and the hot rain.

She slipped, landing on a sharp, protruding branch of a fallen tree and slashing open her thigh. Unable to stand, she crawled the remaining distance to the generator house, which was flooded with water as usual during heavy rains. By the time she was found the next morning she had contracted pneumonia.

But this was my mother. She could have survived anything, I tell myself. And I am right. She could have shrugged all of it off, were it not—and here is the fact that makes me want to scream at the sky and beat my chest, because how can this be true, how can a world exist where this can happen—were it not for the fact that she had
not been eating properly
. With nobody to cook for, she had simply forgotten to feed herself. She was too weak after her night bleeding in the generator house to fight off the pneumonia, and she died three days after the fall.

It is a simple enough fact: the forest, which always threatened to step forward and reclaim some of its territory, finally did so, and took my mother when nobody else was around. But the fact is also that the spot where she fell was only metres from where Melissa and I had made our jungle camp all those years before—and only metres, therefore, from the spot where a year before to the day I had promised the forest anything if it would bring Melissa and me back together.

When I flew home, the family were already out at the farm, so I took the bus there for the first time. During the six-hour journey, I imagined my mother’s first trip out here, on these very roads, to take up her employment. I pictured myself lying in her arms, and imagined her nervousness as the bus left the city behind and headed into the wild. I had heard the story enough times for it to have acquired the feeling of a legend—something that had happened to somebody else.

By the time I reached the town nearest to the
fazenda
and alighted from the bus, my satanic pact with the forest had become an incontrovertible truth. I sat with my luggage under a concrete bus shelter shaped like a question mark, waiting for Silvio to collect me, staring at the bright red earth of the road and the dark-green foliage behind it, wondering how I would ever atone for having killed her, and resolving never again to speak to the person who was my motive.

I am twenty-three. No extreme weather has blown in to lend drama to this occasion. It’s simply a beautiful day: strong hazy sunshine, the noise of crickets and birds, my mother’s body in a coffin.

I feel Melissa’s presence in the cool church, but I do not look around. Melissa is not what I should be thinking about.

Melissa is what brought us here.

I must never look at her again.

I avoided her afterwards, too, circulating away whenever I perceived her dark suit making its way towards me through the wake. Luckily there were farm folk queuing up to offer me their condolences, and Silvio to talk to at length.

We stood around the pool during the muted party, eating bowls of a
moqueca
that my mother had prepared before she died. The farm workers and other locals who were present probably had no idea, but I could tell it was hers, and tried to chew every mouthful of the sumptuous, spicy fish as slowly as I could, to draw the experience out as long as possible. Zé gave a dignified, warm address. I was offered the chance to speak but remained silent. I had nothing to say. Silvio chose not to speak either, but paid tribute by constructing a bonfire from the wood of the tree that had wounded her. It might as well have been her pyre, so painful was it to watch the flames.

Somehow, through trying so assiduously to avoid Melissa, I ended up alone with her father, standing on the lip of the hill, not far from my mother’s kitchen, gazing down the valley towards the river. I held an untouched glass of wine. He had just finished eating a short, stubby banana, and now he was drinking a caipirinha and smoking a cigar.

‘I shall miss her so much,’ he said. ‘It feels like the spirit of this place has been taken away.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘I hope this isn’t too painful a day for you, Ludo. If there is anything I can do . . . ’

‘It’s odd,’ I said, truthfully. ‘I hadn’t seen her properly for so long, even before I went away. I hadn’t been living as her son for years.’

Zé coughed gently on his cigar, and chewed ruminatively. ‘I know that we took you away from her, but she was always your mother. You know that, don’t you?’

I nodded.

‘I don’t know how we will ever replace her,’ he went on.

‘Replace her?’

‘Or even whether we should. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but often your mother’s delicious food went to waste here. She was cooking like crazy seven days a week, and we were hardly ever here more than two days a week to eat it.’

I pictured her, sweating in the kitchen, working, as she saw it, for her life. I thought of the mountains of cakes she must have made over the years, the oceans of soup. I tried to calculate how many animals had been raised and murdered to fuel this entertaining machine.

‘Naturally we were delighted to take her on,’ Zé went on. ‘To have given her employment out here. And a safe place to raise you. But that doesn’t mean that it is necessarily cost-effective to replace her.’ He took a large swig of his caipirinha and crunched on the ice, like a horse chewing sugar cubes.

‘And it wouldn’t be the same,’ I offered.

‘No, it wouldn’t be the same,’ Zé agreed, swallowing. ‘Your mother should not—could not—be replaced.’

He pulled on the cigar. ‘It was extravagant in any case to have two cooks. And now that you young people don’t get out here as often as you used to. . . I think that what we will do instead is to start travelling with Claudia, from the city. She can just come with us when we go away forthe weekend. She knows all the recipes.’

‘Good.’

I could see him looking sideways at me, working out how long he needed to pause before changing the subject.

‘The other question,’ he said eventually, ‘is what you want to do. You may not want to talk about this now, but you ought to think about whether you actually want to go back to the United States after this.’

‘I can tell you what I think now.’

‘And?’

‘I want to stay here. Will you mind if I don’t go back?’

He gazed down the valley. ‘No, I won’t mind. What do you want to do instead?’

I paused. ‘Maybe I could stay here, on the farm. I could help Silvio. Take over from him when he retires. What do you think about that?’

His laugh echoed off walls and caused mourners to look over from the fire.

‘You don’t want to be stuck out here for the rest of your life! We can find you something better than that. In the city. Something with prospects.’

‘What do you have in mind?’

‘I have already thought about it. Do you remember a man called Oscar Cascavel? He used to come and stay here regularly, for a time.’

‘I remember. You used to play tennis with him.’

‘I still do. He’s a big shot in the world of marketing now. Runs his own agency. I could probably get you a job working for him.’

‘Zé. You overwhelm me.’

‘Let’s give it a try. See if you like it. Then maybe you can come and work for me later on. Be my marketing director.’

He flung the crushed lime halves from his empty tumbler into the bushes with a casual flick of the wrist and ground his cigar into the earth, where it mingled with bracken and leaf litter. Individually, either one of these actions would have signalled the end of the conversation—together, they buried it.