“Nothing does make any sense.” Heitor sat heavily on the opposing creaking leather minimalist sofa-cube across the glass coffee table.
“That doesn’t matter. Do you want to see the DVD again and tell me that isn’t rea!?”
“Some error of timing?”
“Ask my entire development team. They were smoking my blow at the time.”
“Well, if your evil twin is barefaced enough to get deliberately caught on camera at Canal Quatro, why did she disguise herself at terreiro?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe there’s another player. I’ll find out.” Marcelina fiddled with her coffee cup. “Do you think I have an evil twin? Do you think my mother… ? She had her glittering career — she was Queen of Beija-Flor — and I always felt I was inconvenient. Could she have … no. Not even her at her most fucked up.…”
But it seduced, a great archetype: the twins separated at birth, one spun into the neon and sequins of the Copacabana; the other to obscurity hungry, and now she had returned to claim her birthright. Had she seen this in a telenovela once?
“Ask her,” Heitor said.
Perhaps the coffee, perhaps the psychotherapeutic arrangement of the sofas, perhaps just the bell-like clarity of a friend listening and asking the one quesstion that made it fall apart into brilliant facets. Suddenly the face in the freezeeframe, the papers scattered across the floor, were clear and simple. Of course there was no spirit-Marcelina woven out of stress and wisps of axé blowing between the morros. There was no magic in the hills or in the city: Heitor’s bleak philosophy allowed no magic into the world at all. No ghosts no Saci Pererés no doppelgangers no parallel universes. Just an old family secret come to take her due. But you don’t know Marcelina Hoffman. She is the capoeirista; she takes down the smart boys with jeito and malicia: she is the malandra.
She had dried her clothes at midnight in Heitor’s tumble dryer-his cleaner believed in laundry on a Monday and it was no use asking Heitor; white goods hated him. He could not even properly operate his microwave and certainly his oven had never been used. Her jeans were tight and stiff as she forced her way into them, the top shrunken to overclinginess and her shoes still damp, the insoles stained. She swung her bag over her shoulder.
“Where will you go?”
“I’ll find somewhere. Not home.”
“How will you let me know when you’ve done whatever it is you need to do?”
“You’ll know, newsboy.” She stood up on tiptoes to kiss Heitor, old big growly bear-man. So easy to stay among the books and the minimalist leather, the picture glass and the slinky little playsuits, so easy to drop everyything onto him and burrow down into his mass and depth. So dangerous. No one was safe until she had the mystery under her foot in the roda. “How exactly do you go about asking you mother, ‘Mum, do I have a secret twin sister you gave away at birth?’”
Heitor’s Blackberry chirruped. It was not the first time sex had been interrupted by his RSS headline feed. She felt him tighten against her, muscle armoring.
“What is it, big bear?”
“That guy you went to see at the terreiro.”
“Bença Bento?”
“He’s been found dead. Murdered. Cut to pieces in the night.” Heitor hugged her to him, that strong-gentle crush-fearful delicacy of big men. “You be careful, oh so careful.”
The hat was shaped like an enormous upturned shoe, the sole brimming low over the kiss-curl, the heel — solid, chunky, Cubano even — a brave crest. Marcelina lifted it with the reverence of the host.
“Go on, try it,” Vitor urged, his face silver-screen brilliant.
Marcelina almost laughed at her reflection in the long mirror, put her hands on her hips and struck vampish, Carmen Mirandaesque poses, pout pout. Mwah. Then the light shifted, as it did dramatically in this old dream-theater, and in the sudden chiaroscuro she saw the Marcelina Hoffman her mother had dreamed: a silvery, powered night-moth, the toast of the Copacabana stepping out of the deep dark of the mirror. Marcelina shivered and snatched off the hat, but the sun grew strong again through the glass roof and she saw in the flaking silvering a pair of silver wings, and silver muscle-armor — pecced and abbed and burnished — and there a bloated, chinoiserie horror-baby mask.
“It’s … ,” she said, wondering.
“The wrong Brazil,” Vitor said. “They were striking set after the shoot, and it was all a dreadful kerfuffle and someone thought it was the shipping destination. ”
Vitor was of a generation whose duties and obligations went beyond those of alt dot families and honored still the carioca tradition of providing a bed and a beer for a night or a year and asking no questions. He had flung open his little shop of kitscheries to Marcelina, blown up the air mattress for her in the box room cluttered with boxes of old movie magazines and soccer programs, and when she had asked if there was a place where she could see her apartment without being seen, had without a word unlocked the door at the end of kitchen and ushered her through into the only true magic that Rio still knew. Marcelina had always wondered where Vitor had found the art deco treasures that had so perfectly topped off the interiors in Kitsch and Bitch. His apartment, odd-proportioned, impractical rooms, strange staircases, and inteerior balconies, was the converted foyer of a lost cinema, a jewel box of the 1940s smothered in cheap, shoving blocks like a forest tree within a strangler fig. Beneath the vaulted ceiling all the old movies had come to die. Props, sets, flats, lighting rigs, and costumes, entire World War Two fighter aircraft, pieces of ocean liner, cafes, and casas were jammed and piled together.
“They put everything in here, just in case they ever needed it again,” Vitor said as he led Marcelina up to the top gallery. “And then someone locked the door and walked away and everyone forgot about it until I did a bit of digging into the Jornal records. Mind your step there, the damp’s got in.”
There’s a program idea in here somewhere, Marcelina had thought; and it was grounding, it was sanity, it was the ineluctable truth of the trivial. There was a sun still in the sky and Jesus on a mountain. Now, even as she laid down the surreal shoe-hat, she gave a little cry: perched on a polystyrene head, all waxén pineapples and bananas be-dusted, was the original tutti-frutti hat.
“Here’s a good place.” Vitor opened a door into blinking, blinding light; a small room one side of which was a great circular window, leaded as if with vines. He patted a wicker chair. “You can see everything from up here, and no one will see you because no ever looks up. I’ll bring you tea by and by.”
It was a fine belvedere, part of a former bar, Marcelina theorized, commanding a sweep of street life: the convenience store, the two bars, the kilometric restaurant and the dry cleaners, the video store and the Chinese restaurant, and the lobbies of thirty apartment blocks, her own among them. So near, so secret. How many times, she wondered, might Vitor have watched her comings and goings? A freeze of fear: might her enemy have watched from this very seat and noted down her routines? Vitor would not have known; Vitor had met her already, when she snubbed him on the street, and had not known the difference. Paranoia. Paranoia was understandable.
Once, twice, three times Marcelina jerked herself awake, nodding into a doze in the comfortable, dusty warmth of the cupola. Investigative work, surrveillance, had never been her thing. Running around with cameras and sound booms, PDAs and release forms; that was the game. Vitor brought tea, twice. He never asked what she was doing there, watching the silver door of her apartment, never once mentioned her brief notoriety in the Sundays — a proper World Cup scandal had swept her into the center pages on all but the Globo papers. The old men and women came back from the beach. The street vendors worked the intersection. The bars put out tables and lit up televisions, a steady line of home-shifting workers went into the 7-Eleven and came out with bottled water and beer and beans. She learned the timetables of the metro trains arriving at Copacabana Station by the pulses of pedestrians down the streets. She saw Vitor take his accustomed seat by the street, order his tea, and open his paper. Friends and acquaintances stopped to chat for a moment, a minute, an hour. That looks a good life , Marcelina thought. Uncomplicated, investing in relations, humane and civilized. Then she thought, You’d be bored bored bored within half an hour. Give me Supermodel Sex Secrets and How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.