Onto the corkscrew road, scraping the ochre and yellow-painted walls of the compounds.
“You want to be down a gear,” Marcelina said, troubled by the knocking, laboring engine. “You’re taking it too low.”
“And since when have you been Rubens Barrichello?”
“I watch my taxi drivers. So; that woman with the knife, who was she?”
“Who did it look like she was?”
“Me.”
“Then that’s who she was. There’s a way to explaining this that makes sense. Otherwise, trust me, in this game nothing is coincidence.”
Then the stolen Ford drew up before the graffitied walls of the fundação with its brightly colored, rumbling, happy capoeiristas; and Mestre Ginga, with a haste and tension Marcelina had never seen in him before, unlocked the gates and showed her round the back into the patriotic kitchen.
“The book’s some kind of expedition journal by an eighteenth-century French explorer on the Amazon. I didn’t read very much of it; I find that old stuff kind of hard to read.”
“I didn’t ask what it was. I asked you, what did you notice?”
“Well, it’s been rebound several times, and the contents are handwritten but they’re not original, I suspect; the illustrations inside the cover had coded wtiting on them, and knowing the way Brazil was in the eighteenth century, I reckon it’s a good guess that it was originally written in code as well.”
“Good guess. Anything else.”
“Like I said, I didn’t read much of it. Now, I’m sure this old eighteenth-century book has something to do with my evil double trying to kill me, but it might be a whole lot simpler if you just got to the point.”
“Anything else.”
Marcelina shrugged; then a realization of strange, a sense of cold wonder, shivered through her. In the blossom-perfumed heat of Mestre Ginga’s kitchen, she saw the gooseflesh lift the fine, blonde hairs on her forearm.
“There was a plague, a plague of horses.” She knew the look on Mestre Ginga’s face; so many times she had seen it in the roda as he squatted in the ring, leaning on his stick. Go on, my daughter, go on. “All the horses, the donnkeys, even the oxen, they were wiped out by the plague. That never happpened. It’s fiction, it’s a story.”
“No, it’s true. It’s a history. It’s just not our history.”
“This is insane.”
“Lick the book,” Mestre Ginga ordered. “Pick it up and just touch the tip of your tongue to it.”
Sense of cold wonder became vertiginous fear. Favors and privileges had flowed around the Organ Queen of the Beija-Flor, one of them free and unlimmited access to the private pool and beach of the Ilha Grande Hotel at Arpoador, the rocky point between the golden curves of Copacabana and Ipanema. Dalliances and liaisons blew through the airy corridors and cloisters, but the children who splashed round the rocks were as oblivious to this as they were to satellites. The big thrill was the Leaping Point, a five-meter rock that overhung a Yemanja-blue plunge pooclass="underline" a hold of the nose, a quick cross, and down like a harpoon into the clear cold water. Marcelina — age eight — had always envied the bigger girls who filled their swimsuits and the gawky boys who could make the leap. For hot holiday weeks she had tried to call up the courage to go up on to the Leaping Point, and then at the last day of summer before school resumed she had worked up sufficient force of soul to climb up the rock. Her mother and sisters, racked out on the wooden sun loungers, waved and cheered, Go on go on go on! She crossed herself. She looked down. The deep blue water looked back up into her soul. And she couldn’t do it. There was swallowing madness down there. The climb back down the rock-cut steps, backward, feeling her way one hand, one foot at a time, was the longest walk of her life.
Marcelina looked into the book. The golden eye of the frog held her.
Where would the walk back down from this painted sanctuary take her? Not back to any life she could recognize. The old capoeiristas, the great mestres and corda vermelhas, taunted her with their jeito. Our Lady of Production Values, who is our Lady of Jeito, aid me.
Marcelina lifted the book to her face and touched the eye of the golden frog with the tip of her tongue. And the book opened the room opened the city opened the world opened.
Marcelina lifted a hand. A thousand hands bled off that, like the feedback echo of visual dub. The table was a Church of All Tables, the green and blue cabinets a Picasso of unfolding cubes. And Mestre Ginga was a host of ghosts, an Indian god of moving limbs and heads. The book in her hand unfolded into pages upon pages within pages, endless origami. Voices, a choir of voices, a million voices, a million cities roaring and singing and jabbering at once. Marcelina reached for the table — which table, which hands — and rose to her feet through a blur of images. Then Mestre Ginga was at her side, prising open her mouth, pouring strong, hot, startling black coffee down her throat. Marcelina coughed, retched up bile black cafezinho and was herself again, lone, isolate, entire. She dropped into the aluminum kitchen chair.
“What did you do to me?”
Mestre Ginga ducked his head apologetically.
“I showed you the order of the universe.”
Marcelina slung the book across the table. Mestre Ginga caught it, squared it neat to the end of the galvanised tin top.
“You drugged me!” She accused him with a finger.
“Yes. No. You know my methods. Your body teaches.” Mestre Ginga sat back in his chair and laughed. “And you accuse me?”
“There’s a difference. That was a spiked book.”
“The book is bound in the skin of the curupairá, the sacred golden frog.” Marcelina had been to the Amazon to research Twenty Secret Ways to Kill Someone and had seen the murderous power of brightly colored forest frogs.
“You could have killed me.”
“Why should I do that? Marcelina, I know what you think of me — you don’t have anywhere near as much malicia as you think, but believe me when I say, what you do have, you are going to need. Every last drop of it. So stop thinking stupid and start acting like a malandro, because stupid is going to get not just you killed but everyone else around you.”
The room shivered around Marcelina, spraying off multiple realities like a dog shaking water from its coat.
“So it’s some kind of hallucinogen, like ayahuasca.”
“No, nothing like ayahuasca. The iâos of the bença believe that the Daime stimulates those parts of the brain that generate the sensations of spirituality. Cutupairá shows the literal truth. The eye of the frog is so sensitive that it can perceive a single photon of light, a single quantum event. The frog sees the fundamental quantum nature of reality.”
The snap was on Marcelina’s lip: And what does a capoeira Mestre know about quantum theory? In surliness was security; she was in a place as familiar and comfortable as home, yet the step from the yard where she played the great game into the green, blue, and yellow kitchen was the step from one world to another. Rio had always been a city of shifting realities, hill and sea, the apartment buildings that grew out of the sheer rock of the morros, the jarring abutments of million-real houses with favela newlywed blocks, piled one on top of another. And where the realities overlap, violence spills through. Heitor, whose private life you entered through books, had so many times tried to explain quantum theory to Marcelina, usually when she just wanted him to tell her how hot her ass looked in the latest little mesh number. All she understood of it was that her career depended on it and that there were three interpretations (as she tried to get him to take a line from the glass-top table), only one of which could be true; but whichever one was, it meant that reality was completely different from what common sense told us. So shut up the mouth and listen to Mestre Yoda.