Heliopolis (5 page)

However much I dreaded its departure, the sight of the machine never failed to excite me—seeing it surge upwards and spin carelessly around with lights flashing in its underbelly made adrenaline burst in my stomach. Every week, I stood there until the lights and the sound had disappeared, and the family in its smug flying capsule was enfolded by the night-blue horizon.

I would speculate on what was happening up there, imagining the conversations they might be having as they sharked away across the trees. Did they talk about me, about the weekend just gone? Or was I already forgotten? I would feel momentarily lonely, and then head for home, where I knew that my mother would be preparing something comforting from the weekend’s leftovers.

Whatever impression was given on the surface, we were there to provide a service: a weekend fix of excitement and authenticity; of being ‘down to earth.’ Back in the city, it was as if we didn’t exist. But my week was another world too. While Melissa slept soundly in their fortified compound—I pictured flags fluttering on a turreted castle—I would lie awake, listening to the disputes and confrontations of the natural world outside, projecting stories on to the sounds I heard. Loneliness should be hard to come by in the forest, but the white noise of animals getting on with their business was never a consolation. It only reminded me how sure most living things were of their place in the world, while I was not.

B
ack at the high-rise car park I hand over the pink ticket, now almost illegible from the sweat of my palm. The attendant is gone for ten minutes, and does not look me in the eye when he finally drives my car out of the lift and presents me with the bill. I am too dazed to remonstrate with him.

The Marginal highway: eight lanes of stewing anger and alcohol vapour beside an evil trickle of green water in a ditch that was once a river. Amid the rubbish, where the water is deep enough, floats a one-man favela: a platform on old lashed-together tyres bearing a body, huddled in sleep, free from everything except the foul liquid that surrounds him. In my rearview mirror, a gallery of demons flashes past—the faces, contorted with emotion, of those trying to beat the traffic by suicidally cutting through it on mopeds. Frantic to clock in, they contribute their energy to the city in the hope that it will offer them something in return. Meanwhile, kings and princes roar overhead, skimming towards the horizon, perusing the morning newspapers.

Sweating on to my plastic seat, I am dreaming up an excuse for being so late to work when the freeway provides one: a crash, four vehicles ahead. I hear the bang of hot, colliding metal and see a rising black wisp of tyre smoke. The cars in front brake hard, slowing and swerving into a vehicle concertina.

We are experts at traffic jams. We’ve taken them to new levels. Even when there aren’t accidents, traffic lights on sagging metal arms blink and change while car soup simmers beneath them. But the energy doesn’t disappear just because the flow is blocked; as in a human artery, it is re-routed. A grid of trapped vehicles activates every vendor, huckster, implorer and charity case within a kilometre-radius, and the resulting teeming sideshow makes you forget you had anywhere to go. The incident up ahead is barely two minutes old when five young boys materialise to wipe windscreens, sell peanuts, peddle flowers. One, barefooted, juggles fire on the shoulders of another, both grimacing with concentration. Everything is an opportunity.

Guilt begins to wring out my guts like a wet cloth. I thrust cash at the boy with the peanuts, averting my eyes from his face. Instead, I look upwards, at two black vultures congregated on the high X-bars of a streetlamp, hoping for carrion. Everything is an opportunity.

I have had enough of this. I pull out between the traffic and put my foot to the floor. The car lurches forward, and the wing mirror loudly slaps the car in front. The driver honks his horn and swears through his open window. I keep driving, tearing open the package of nuts with my teeth and tipping them wildly into my mouth. Somehow I make it through without hitting anyone else and I drive past the accident, where blame is being tossed about in loud voices over broken glass. The two drivers look over in astonishment, as if I have broken some unspoken rule of the road by presuming to drive through their argument.

I have a recurring nightmare in which Melissa probes around in my belly button with one of the sharp metal skewers my mother used for weekend barbecues. She stares intently into my navel, manipulating the skewer, and I feel its cold metal point enter my stomach. Eventually, she achieves her objective, and unknots my umbilical cord. My intestines gush to the floor like a string of raw sausages.

Not a complex dream—just a recurring one.

Last night’s stopover was a rare treat. I don’t get the call so much now they are married. I am not permitted even to have the idea that Melissa and I should see each other; it has to come from her. I had finished work for the day and was contemplating a solitary evening on my balcony when she rang.

‘My husband has abandoned me,’ she said. ‘Want to come over and order a pizza?’

‘I’ll cook,’ I said.

I haven’t been to the penthouse much lately, but I lived there for years, and I still have my key, so it seemed ridiculous that I was regarded with such suspicion when I arrived. Like any stronghold of the wealthy, Melissa’s building is defended by bored young guards reading comics behind bulletproof glass, craving melodrama and an excuse to let off their weapons. Even though Melissa had told them to expect me, they insisted on looking through my groceries from the Municipal Market before they let me through.

I knew something was wrong when she met me at the front door and kissed me on the lips. She only does that when Ernesto has pissed her off.

‘It’s been so long,’ she said, when we separated.

I took in the dazzling, infinite city behind her, and put the food on the counter. ‘This view,’ I said. ‘You forget. Especially at night.’

‘What’s in your bags?’ said Melissa, pouring me a glass of wine.

‘Santa Catarina oysters, and pork chops.’

She made an appreciative noise, and handed me the drink.

‘What have you been doing?’ I said. ‘You look almost as if you’re . . . shimmering.’

Melissa has a lot of her mother in her, and is very white. But unlike Rebecca, she is never pale. At the beach she sets herself out to bake all day, though her genes protest. When she returns, her freckled skin glares with outraged heat for twenty-four hours before it swallows the damage and moves on. But last night, she seemed to be positively emitting light.

‘I’ve been working,’ she said. ‘There’s a new spa treatment at the shopping mall: gold, frankincense and myrrh. I’m doing a piece on it.’

‘It sounds gruelling.’

‘It isn’t as pleasant as it sounds. The gold exfoliation process is very abrasive.’

Melissa calls herself a lifestyle journalist, but she seems only to write about the kind of lifestyle that very few—herself among them—can afford. Zé was keen for her to become a political journalist after college, but in her own words, she ‘got sidetracked.’ She tends to say that this is OK, because ‘Ernesto does the socially responsible stuff for both of us.’ It’s a consolation I sometimes offer myself when I contemplate the vacuity of my own work, so I can hardly blame her for it. Ernesto’s shoulders are so broad that everybody feels entitled to perch on them.

‘Abrasive or not, you look . . . nice,’ I said, trying not to let on how exciting it was to see her again. ‘If a little thin.’ Her blue-green eyes flash when she’s angry—mermaid-infested waters. ‘Don’t start on that.’

When we lived together she would eat nothing for days, then command stacks of burgers and toasted sandwiches. She also can’t sleep alone with the light off and showers about five times a day, which means her hair is more often wet than dry.

The wet hair is just one of the things that get me. There are others: her perfect teeth; her short, clear-polished nails; her white jeans; the sprinkling of freckles on her nose; the striped shirts she wears at home. Traditionally these were Zé’s cast-offs, but, lately, they’re Ernesto’s, which I like less, although his are too big for her to use as anything other than nightwear. I also love her continued devotion to the plastic watch she has worn since we were kids—a constant, tiny reminder of our shared childhood.

‘I don’t want to talk about me,’ she said. ‘Tell me about your day.’

‘Why are you acting as if I’m your husband? I haven’t even seen you for months. Where’s Ernesto?’

‘He’s away in the interior. Something for work. I don’t know.’

Her lingering pause invited the question. ‘Is everything OK between you?’

And that’s how it started. She was always going to get me in the end.

Ernesto is an anthropologist. For years, he has been studying for his doctorate, the thesis of which looks into the motivations of the hordes of desperate migrants who come to the city each year looking for work, and their (usually dismal) experiences on arrival. He spends long periods of time in rural villages, amassing an ever-expanding quantity of interview material, and shows no sign of stopping. It’s as if he intends to keep going until he has heard the personal story of every single person who has either moved to the city or is contemplating doing so. When at home he divides his time between interviewing favela inhabitants, fulfilling the demands of his teaching post at the university and organising various community projects. His wife pines at home in her tower, and he stays away for days before returning stinking of sweat and the slums. But his commitment to the welfare of others is the bedrock of Melissa’s love for him, and she has fought many battles with her father on his account.

He has never accepted a job working for Zé—not even indirectly, for the Uproot Foundation, which would suit him. At some point during his transformation from Spoilt Rich Kid to Academic with Troubled Conscience he came to the conclusion that he needed to make his own way in life, which infuriates Zé, because it means he has a son-in-law he can’t control. Ernesto’s self-righteousness works to my advantage, so I’m not complaining, but normally Melissa wouldn’t hear a word against it—which is what made last night so unusual.

Normally, it goes like this:

‘You never see him,’ I point out.

‘His work is important,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t want to be the one to stop him doing it.’

‘What about his marriage? What about you?’

‘I don’t need saving. I have everything I could want. Thanks to you.’

And then she kisses me, and I forget what I was saying.

I know perfectly well that she is a hypocrite. All that talk of how much she values Ernesto and the work he does doesn’t stop her from frequenting shopping centres so exclusive that you need an appointment, and being almost as wary of the pavement as her father. I never point this out to her, of course. I might miss out on the kiss.

It may sound cold, but I don’t want the responsibility of working out how to deal with the kid I might have been—the one who lived in a wooden crate and spent his formative years playing in the sewage pipe, or jumping rubbish on his bike. Big ideas scare me. The thought of doing something that actually matters is enough to bring me out in a rash. Instead, I pay my taxes and I give to charity, in the hope that someone worthy like Rebecca or Ernesto will tackle the big issues on my behalf. Meanwhile, I spend my days gently informing women which cleaning products are most deserving of their hard-earned wages, and showing kids who want to be the next football hero how one choice of boot might be wiser than another.

The posture of cool that supposedly defines life in my office is belied by a corporate culture every bit as backbiting as you’d find outside a ‘creative’ industry. Our building may be a reclaimed squat, our reception desk may be the wing of a Vietnam-era American bomber, and my boss may sometimes wear designer trainers, but we might just as well be toiling away in some bureau of nightmares with acres of anonymous desk space and the façade of a Soviet ministry. At least that would be honest. Although a veneer of funky self-assurance coats every employee in the building, you don’t have to scratch hard before it chips off in your hand. Under the surface, everyone lives in fear. Fear of being found out, of not being found out. Fear of the possibility that the white goods, mobile telephones and confectionery they are paid to promote might be all there is to life.

But what a life! I marvel at what we achieve. Our communication for a certain vitamin-enriched, hormone-injected dairy brand is so successful that rural farmers are selling off their own milk and eggs in order to go down to their local MaxiMarket and buy the enhanced versions. Enraptured by what we tell them, people have been known to have perfectly good teeth knocked out of their mouths so they can benefit from the glamour of a false set. We are magicians!

Take cereal: our client bulk-buys the crop, which it gets at a knockdown price, converts it into air-dried flakes, adds flavouring (it’s more cost-effective to use artificial sweeteners than homegrown sugarcane), then sells it on, informing consumers exactly how and when the cereal should be eaten. In return for the addition of this lifestyle data, our client receives roughly fifteen times the worth of the original raw materials—and that’s where my fee comes from. Alchemy exists; we call it branding, that’s all.

Zé got me the job after my unexpectedly early return from the United States. Through his friendship with my boss, and a veiled threat that he might one day look elsewhere to advertise the MaxiMarket chain, which is by far the most profitable account the agency handles, he saw to it that I got to work on the most interesting brands in the building: a chocolate company owned by an American multinational, the nation’s leading detergent, and two children’s breakfast cereals. It can be a ruthless place, so this status as the
filho de papai
is invaluable, even if the Papai in question is only an adoptive one. I have known my boss, Oscar Cascavel, all my life. He plays tennis with Zé every other week, and he was a regular weekend guest on the farm. But he still makes me nervous. He’s an amoral little monster who dry humps you in the corridor when his serotonin is up, and trashes your day for fun when it isn’t. A guy who used to work here told me that Oscar actually fired him by telephone from a urinal. He said he heard the automatic flush kick in as the call ended. When you think you’re alone in the lift and his arm shoots in just as the doors are about to meet, it gives you a shock every time. But for the sour tang of sweat and coffee breath that precedes him, the first warning of an encounter is the sight of this fist, followed by his fist-sized Rolex, and before you know it the conversation has started.

‘Good afternoon, Ludo. Heavy night? Floor nine, please.’

Shit. I was sure he wouldn’t be around to see me arrive. The shooting in the square has made me very late.

I push his button, forgetting to hit floor two, which means I have to pass my own floor and ride with him all the way up.

‘Don’t joke, Oscar. At four
A
.
M
. this morning I wouldn’t have been able to recognise you.’

‘What I wouldn’t give for your stamina. How’s business?’

One of the few things I learned before my MBA was abruptly curtailed is that if somebody worth impressing asks, ‘How’s business?’ you should never reply, ‘Good.’ Your career prospects shrivel the instant the word is out of your mouth. Offer instead a cautiously optimistic statement, quantified by the fluctuations of some unexpected market force. The interrogator cannot fail to be impressed by your appreciation of the subtler factors affecting your business, and he or she will walk away thinking:
Hmmm. I’m lucky to have dos Santos on my team. He’s no fool
.