“You have seen my commission; you are aware of the license Father Maggalhaes has given me.”
“Really? Do you really imagine you could? Against me? Almost, almost I might try it. But no, it would be a waste.” An index finger lifted a fraction, and directly a dozen crossbows were trained on Luis Quinn. Quinn let his hands fall meekly open: See, like Christ I offer no resistance. How soon he had forgotten the guile and skill of the people of the rain forest.
“’I ask for a task most difficult,’ — you said that once.” Was there no limit to this man’s information’ “I have such a task for you. I had hoped you might embrace it willingly, even gladly; recall. Now it seems I must compel you.”
“I do not fear martyrdom at your hands,” Luis Quinn said.
“Of course not, nor do I imagine I could coerce you by threat to your life. Merely consider that for every bow pointed at you, three are trained on Dr. Robert Falcon as he sleeps in his hammock at the meeting of the White and Black rivers.”
The two men knelt unspeaking. The compline of the forest spoke around them: insects, frogs, shrieking birds of night passage. Luis Quinn gave the barest of nods. Father Diego’s finger scarcely flickered, but the bowmen dissappeared like thoughts.
“Your task most difficult.”
“There is a tribe beyond the Iguapárá River, a vagrant people, the Iguapá, forced from their traditional terrains as other peoples flee the bandeirantes and lesser orders. You will be interested to note that their language is neither a Tupi derivative nor an Aruak/Carib variant. Among all the people of the Rio Catrimani and Rio Branco, they are known as a race of prophets. They seem to believe in a form of dream-time, akin ro real time, inverted. All tribes and nations consult them, and they are always right. Their legend has bought them immunity: the Iguapá have never been involved in any of the endemic warfare that so delights these people. It is my burden to bring the Iguapá the love of Christ and his Salvation, but they are a fugitive, elusive nation. The tribes protect them, even those assimilated into my City of God, and my missionaries have so far been unsuccessful.”
“My predecessors,” Luis Quinn said. “The ones you said departed from you hale in will and wind. You sent them to martyrdom.”
Gonçalves pursed his lips in contemplation.
“Why, I had not considered it in that fashion, but you are right, yes, yes, martyrdom I suppose it is. Certainly none survived.”
“They returned to you?”
“Burning with visions and ravings, insanities and impossibilities. Their minds were quite destroyed; some were babbling and incoherent; a few even had lost the power of speech or were completely insensate.” Gonçalves pressed his hands into unconscious prayer, touched them to his lips in wonder and devotion. “Most succumbed after a few days. One individual, a stout German, endured two weeks. Father Kaltenbacher led me to speculate that an individual with even more highly developed mental faculties might survive, even with the mind intact to communicate what they had seen among the Iguapá.”
“Your overweening pride leads you to madness if you believe that my coming was anything other than at the order of Provincial-General de Magalhães.”
“Is that what you believe?” Gonçalves asked. “Truly?” Again he touched his praying hands to his lips. “Tomorrow you will leave with your native slave and a crew of my Guabirús and travel up the Catrimani and the Iguapára. The peoples who make use of the Iguapás’ talents know how to find them when they need them. You will understand if I do not take you upon your honor to travel unescorted.”
“Manoel is not my slave. Neither is Zemba; he has papers of manumisssion, he is a free man.”
“No longer; he will become a member of my personal entourage. Now I bid you a good night, Father; you have a long and arduous journey tomorrow, and you would do well to refresh yourself. Eat, rest, and devote yourself to prayer and contemplation. Rejoice, Father, you will behold glories none have ever seen and lived.”
Again, the merest twitch of a finger and crossbows emerged silently from the darkness. Luis Quinn, a giant among his painted captors, glanced back. Gonçalves knelt at his desk, the quill again moving steadily over the paper. Sensible of Quinn’s regard, he looked and smiled in pure, broad pleasure.
“I envy you, Father. Truly, I envy you.”
OUR LADY OF THE TELENOVELAS
JUNE 9-10, 2006
O Dia had it on the front page. It was relegated to page two in Jornal do Brasil , pushed off the cover by a photograph of the wife of the head of CBF in just a pair of soccer socks and a strategically held ball. O Correio Brasilense likewise carried the scoop on page two, with a recap in the entertainment pages and a three-page analysis in the sports section, concluding that maybe it was time to look objectively at the Maracanaço and that it had swept away a swaggering complacency and so led to the mighty Seleçãos of 1958 and 1970 and that Carlos Alberto Parreira might well heed the lesson of 1950. Even Folha de São Paulo , which deigned anything carioca as beneath serious regard, carried the story in the bottom of the front page: RIO REALITY SHOW TO PUBLICLY TORTURE MARACANAÇO VICTIM. Jornal Copacabana’s Sunday Special splashed a full front page of “Professional Carioca” Raimundo Soares, arms folded, a look of righteous disgust on his face with the Sugar Loaf behind him and the lead-line SHE MADE ME BETRAY A FRIEND. O Globo opted for the full nuclear. Its cross-media network was ten times the size of Canal Quatro, yet it saw the upstart, adolescent independent channel as a grave threat to its key demographic and never wasted an opportunity to shit on it. A sixty-point screaming banner headline declared WELCOME BACK TO HELL. Beneath it was the lead photo of Barbosa, kneeling as if in prayer in the mouth of the Brazil goal, the ball sweetly in the back of the net. In the bottom left column was a picture of Adriano in surf shorts taken at the Intersul Television Conference in Florianopolis. Adriano Russo, responsible for bad-taste youth-oriented shows as Gay Jungle, Jailbait Superstar, and Filthy Pigs, said that the show was in the early stages of development among a raft of World Cup Season programming and that it had not yet been green-lit. When asked if the program intended to drag the eighty-five-year-old disgraced former goalkeeper out of retirement and subject him to “trial by television” and public humiliation, Canal Quatro’s director of programming said that the channel would maintain its position as the leading producers of edgy, noisy, and controversial popular television but that it was not, nor ever had been, its policy to hold older or weaker members of society up to shame.
They had called Adriano at dinner with his wife and guests in Satyricon, made him talk in front of the diners and all the waiting staff.
Page two ran a picture of the headquarters on Rua Muniz Barreto under the headline THRONE OF LIES. Beneath, the LIST OF SHAME ran down a chart of Canal Quatro’s sleaziest shows, from Nude Big Brother to Queen for a Day: I’m Coming Out!’ And there she was on page three, a grainy cellular snap of her at the commissioning party in Café Barbosa (a sign, a sign it had been, but against all she had assumed it to be) up on the table shaking it with her liter of Skol in its plastic cool jacket in her hand and Celso rolling his eyes as he pretended to lick her ass.
Queen of Sleaze
This is the Canal Quatro producer responsible for the Barbosa outrage, snapped during a drink- , drug- , and sex-fueled media party. Marcelina Hoffman is one of Canal Quatro’s most controversial program makers: her Jailbait Superstar, a talent show for inmates of a women’s prison, created a record number of complaints when it was revealed that the winner would be released, no matter what she had done. Ironically, it was Senhora Hoffman herself who gave the game away by accidentally sending an e-mail revealing the true purpose of the program to crusading journalist Raimundo Soares, after she lied to the King of the Cariocas in return for his help in finding Barbosa. Senhora Hoffman is a well-known Zona Sui party girl, infamous for her drinking and consumption of cocaine, and is described by work colleagues as a “borderline plastic surgery addict.” Her name has recently been linked with Heitor Serra, Canal Quatro’s respected newsreader…