“I do not need to go out among the worlds to find the answer to that,” Quinn said. “Dr. Falcon.”
The Frenchman pushed his glasses up his nose. “It is very simple. The dam must be destroyed.”
The young, aggressive men all started to bellow questions.
“Silence,” Zemba shouted. “How may this be achieved?”
“This also is quite simple. A sufficient charge of powder, placed in proximity to that part of the dam under greatest hydrostatic pressure, would effect a breach that would swiftly carry all away.”
Zemba squatted on his hams, supporting himself with his stick. “How much powder would be required?”
“I have done calculations on this as well. It is a simple linear analysis; every hour the pressure on the dam increases, thus decreasing the amount of explosive we require. However, every hour we wait makes an attack more likely; if we attack within the next day, I believe our magazine of powder would suffice to breach the dam.”
“All our powder.”
“That is what I have calculated.”
“Our artillery, our musketry … ” Falcon had helped the quilombistas haul the massive mahogany cannon up the greasy, mud-slick hill called Hope of the Saints. Now he was telling Zemba they were useless, worse than useeless; they squatted on valuable strategic positions. “And if it is not sufficient, we would be defenseless.”
“That is not my calculation to make.”
Zemba laughed, a deep, house-shaking chuckle. “Aîuba, you offer me some chance and no chance, which is better than damnation by a hair. How would this charge be delivered?”
“Our magazine could be transported in six large war canoes.”
“You shall have the best navigators,” Zemba said, gesturing to his lieutenant, who at once loped from the observatory.
“They would of necessity travel by night-without doubt, our enemy has moved his basilica and war-fleet upstream. At the dam … ” Falcon shook his head. “Once I see it I believe I could quickly calculate the weakest point of the structure.”
“Of course, Father Gonçalves would not fail to have posted guards against just such an eventuality,” Luis Quinn said. “There will be a fight while you make your calculations, Doctor. No, what is needed is someone who can in an instant know where to set the explosive.”
Cries of dismay and protest rang out around the circle of the aîuri. “Silence!” Zemba roared again. He beat the heel of his staff of office on the floor planks. “The Mair is correct.”
“I will know where best to site the powder; I will know where Gonçalves should set his guards. And, though I have forsworn the way of the sword, there must be a time for the setting aside of oaths. Would God hold me in greater contempt if I renounced my word or failed to protect His people?” Then he murmured in Irish, “I should wish for a task most difficult.”
“It’s decided,” Zemba said. “The Mair will lead the attack on the dam. The powder will be ready with canoes and good fighting men, with what steel we can spare. I will prepare for the defense of the Kingdom of God. Christ and Our Lady bless us.”
The aîuri broke up, old men stiff from the floor.
“Luis.” Falcon held out a short, thick bamboo tube with a plaited lanyard to Quinn. “Take this for me, would you?”
“What is it?”
“The history of the quilombo of Cidade Maravilhosa; partial and poorly styled, overly emotional and lacking in any academic objectivity, yet true nonetheless. If the dam cannot be breached; if the charge is insufficient; if you, God between us and evil, should fail, surrender this to the waters downnstream and pray to whatever God is left to us that it will find a safe landfall.”
The glow of early light leaked through the woven walls. Quinn lit a cigar. “The last I shall enjoy for some time,” he quipped. Falcon felt a touch on his arm; Caixa, her golden face telling him he had done right for her and that was all this woman wanted. He wondered if she might be with child. A distant cry, like a bird but no bird of the varzea, came across the lightening sky. A second voice picked it up, a third until the canopy rang as if to the roars of the howler monkeys. Zemba rushed to the railing, snapped out his glass, but Falcon had already swiveled the great observatory telescope in its mount and was scanning the skyline beyond the eyries of the Cidade Maravillhosa’s lookouts. He let out a cry. In the objective, distant yet kindling in the rising sun, angels-vast angels in red and green and heaven’s blue, the instruments of divine warfare in their hands-advanced over the distant treetops.
OUR LADY OF ALL WORLDS
JUNE 11, 2006
The burned skeletons of construction machines still smoked, the orange paint blackened and bleached down to bare metal. The pichaçeiros had already been at work with their busy little rollers. Me me me. A shout out to the world from Rocinha. The slab concrete of the wall resisted fire, resisted even sledgehammers, chipped down to the reinforcing rods but still adamant. So it had been colonized. Every dozen paces the black tag of the ADA, Amigos dos Amigos, laid claim to the territory within. The red CV stamp of the Comando Vermelho challenged it: graffitis struggled to overtag each other. Lord wars: the great favela was one of the last surviving medieval city-states. One hundred and twenty-five thousand people lived draped over this saddle between the two great morros; the apartment blocks rose eleven floors high, balconies flying with laundry, looking down from their mountainside on the lesser towers of comfortable São Conrado and Gávea. The alleys and ladeiras were busy as rats with white plastic waterpipes, the black power cables festooning the sagging poles dipped so low children in their smart school T-shirts and track-suit bottoms ducked under them.
The police barely glanced at Marcelina Hoffman as she joined the throng moving up toward the street market. White was no less rare within the new favela wall than without. Anyone could go in — the São Conradeiros had to buy their cheap meat and cocaine somewhere. The walls were only there to protect passing drivers from ricochets and stray bullets. No other reason but the gunplay, the stray bullets. Anyone could leave, any time, during working hours. Surf boys with great muscles strolled, boards under arms, down to the beach at the Barra da Tijuca. Their Havaianas crunched broken glass and empty cartridge cases. The police looked them over more in envy then enmity. The sun was hot the sky was blue the surf was up and there was peace, of its Rocinha kind.
Ten reggaes bounced from as many windows and verandahs; ram had fallen again that morning and pooled water on the plastic stall roofs turned into treacherous rivers, pouring over the edges of the weather-sheets on to startled, laughing shoppers. Marcelina pressed up against a trestle across which two lambs lay in absolute dismemberment as a tour passed, wheyfaced gringos in two olive-drab open-top Humvees, armored for the Baghdad green line. Devil-incisored teeth grimaced in the stripped sheep-skulls, eyeeballs glared, loira. They were right; she had been around the green globe and even across the Tijuca Bridge but this was the first time she had set Manolo in a favela. Marcelina had grown up at the foot of great Rocinha, but she was as much as tourist as the ianques in their armored tour-buses. And she thought, Why are we ashamed? We decry those tourists in their roll-bar Jeeps bouncing down through the market as if they’re on safari; Brasilia rails against the unstoppable wave of favelization; we tear down shacks and put up walls and declare bairro status like tattooing over the scars from a terrible childhood illness, one the ianques eradicated decades ago. Don’t visit them, don’t look at them, don’t talk about them, like idiot siblings taped to the bed in the back room; but they are not stumbling blocks on Brazil’s march to the future. They are the future. They are our solution to this fearful, uncertain century.