Brasyl Read Free Page B

yellow streetlight as Marcelina
waited for her taxi. Some drive, some are driven in this life.
Low-bowing tree branches and scrambling ficus cast a fractured,
shifting light on him as he leaned on his stick. The patua amulets he
wore around his neck to defeat spirits swung.
    You're not fucking Yoda , Marcelina thought. Or Gandalf the
Grey.
    "That was good. I liked that. The boca de calça, that's a
real malandro's move." Mestre Ginga's voice was an eighty-a-day
nicotine rasp. As far as Marcelina knew, he had never smoked, never
done maconha let alone anything more powdery, and drank only on
saints' days and national holidays. Nodules on the vocal cords was
the prevailing theory; whatever the biology, it was very Karate
Kid . "I thought maybe, maybe, at last you might be learning
something about real jeito, and then ... "
    "I apologized to him, he's cool about it. His ears'll be ringing
for a day or two, but he was the one wouldn't end it. I offered, he
refused. Like you say, the street has no rules."
    As she come up dancing out of her defensive crouch, she had seen not
Jair's face but the Black Plumed Bird in all her grace and makeup,
and her fists had at once known what they needed to do: the box on
the ears, the most humiliating attack in the jogo. A slap on the
face, doubled.
    "You were angry. Angry is stupid. Don't I teach you that? The
laughing man can always beat the angry man because the angry man is
stupid, acts from his anger, not his malicia."
    "Yeah yeah whatever," Marcelina said throwing her kit bag
into the back of the taxi. She had hoped that the dance-fight would
burn away the anger, turn it, as in Mestre Ginga's homespun Zen, into
the mocking laughter of the true malandro, carefree, loved by a world
that looked after him like a mother. The music, the chants, the sly
jig-step of the preparatory ginga had only driven it deeper until it
pierced a dark reservoir of rage: anger so old, so buried it had
transformed into a black, volatile oil. There were years of anger
down there. Anger at family of course, at her mother delicately,
respectably turning herself into a drunk in her Leblon apartment; at
her sisters and their husbands and their babies. Anger at friends who
were rivals and sycophants she kept in line-of-sight. But mostly
anger at herself, that at thirty-four she had walked too far down a
road, in such special shoes, to be able to return. "I can't see
children compensating for the career gain I stand to make." The
family Hoffman had been gathered in the Leopold Restaurant for her
mother's sixtieth birthday, and she, twenty-three, fresh into Canal
Quatro as a junior researcher, dazzled by the lights, the cameras,
the action. Marcelina could still hear her voice over the table, the
beer, the assurance: a declaration of war on her married older
sisters, their men, the eggs in their ovaries.
    "I don't want to go the Copa," she ordered, cellular out,
thumb dancing its own ginga over the text keys. "Take me to Rua
Tabatingüera."
    "Good," the driver said. "The Copa's crawling with
cops and militaries. It's really kicking off down at Morro do Pavao."
    It was not the first weekly briefing she had attended hungover. Canal
Quatro's boardroom—the communication-facilitating sofas and low
coffee tables, the curving glass wall and the bold and blue of
Botafogo with the smog low over Niterol across the bay—thudded
to an über-deep bass line. In keeping with the station's policy
of freshness and kidulthood, the boardroom's walls were giant
photomurals of Star Wars collectibles. Marcelina felt Boba Fett
oppressing her. She would be all right as long as she didn't have to
say anything; as long as Lisandra did not work out by her bitch-queen
spidersense that Marcelina was coming from two-thirds of a bottle of
Gray Goose, and then much much cold Bavaria from Heitor's chiller.
Another day, another chemical romance.
    She did wish she could stop crying every time she went to Heitor's.
Genre heads,