‘Do as you wish. Then I will begin.’
THREE
My name. Begin with my name. Corta. It’s not a Portuguese name. The word is Spanish: it means a cut. It’s not really a name in Spanish either. It’s a sound that has rolled around the world, from country to country, language to language and become a word and then a name and finally washed up on the shores of Brazil.
When you apply to go to the moon the LDC insists on a DNA test. If you plan on staying, if you plan on raising children, the LDC doesn’t want chronic genetic conditions showing up in later life, or in your descendants. My DNA is from all over Earth. Old World, New World; Africa, eastern Mediterranean, western Mediterranean, Tupi, Japanese, Norwegian. I’m a planet in one woman.
Adriana Corta. Adriana after my Great-aunt Adriana. My clearest memory of her is that she played the electric organ. She lived in a tiny apartment and there in the middle of the room was this huge electric organ. It was the only thing of any value she owned. It was theft-proof: no one could have got it out of the apartment. She would play and we would dance around it. There were seven of us. Byron, Emerson, Elis, Adriana, Luiz, Eden, Caio. I was the middle kid. The worst place to be, the middle kid. But you get away with things when you’re in the middle. Your brothers and sisters are your camouflage. There was always music in the house. My mother couldn’t play any instruments but she loved to sing and a radio was always on somewhere. I grew up with all the classics. I brought them with me. When I worked on the surface, I’d play them in my helmet. Lucas is the only one who has my love of music. It’s a pity he has no voice.
Adriana Arena de Corta. My mother was Maria Cecilia Arena. She was a health worker for a Catholic social charity. Childcare and no contraception. I’m being unfair to her. She worked up in Vila Canoas; when she retired the whole favela turned out. My father burned his hand welding a car one day. He went to my mother to have it treated and ended up welded to her. She was a big, slow-moving woman; stiff in the hips and after Eden she gave up work and rarely went out of the apartment. She couldn’t hope to catch all of us so she shouted. She had a great booming voice that always found exactly whichever one of us was meant to hear it. She was so kind. Papa adored her. She had bad circulation and a sickly heart. Why are health workers always the least healthy?
I miss her still. Of all the ones back there, I think about her most.
Adriana Mão de Ferro Arena de Corta. Mão de Ferro. Iron hand. What a name, yes? All of us were Iron Hands, as was my father and all my uncles. It was the nickname of my grandfather Diogo, from Belo Horizonte. He died before I was born, but he worked in the iron mines from the age of fourteen until they laid him off because he was a danger to himself and others. Ten million tons he shovelled. I’ve shovelled more than that. A thousand times more than that. Ten thousand times. If anyone is Iron Hand, it’s me. Mining and metal. My father was a car dealer. He could strip and rebuild an engine before he could drive. He came to Rio when a recession hit Minas Gerais and he got a job in a cut-and-shut shop – you take two insurance write-offs, cut the front of one, the end off the other and weld them together. New car! He never liked the work – he was a very honest man, my father. Any news of corruption or graft on the news and he would shout at the screen. In Brazil in the tens and twenties he was shouting all the time. That graft on the Olympic stadiums! Working people can’t afford to ride the bus! He got into dealing cars – whether that is more honest than building ringers is a moral hair I can’t split. But he worked up quickly to a dealership, then gambled and bought a Mercedes franchise. It was the best decision he ever made – after marrying Mãe. My father, it seemed, had a gift for business. He moved us to Barra de Tijuca. Oh! I had never seen anything like it! A whole floor of an apartment block just for us. I only had to share a room with one sister! And if we leaned out of the window, and craned around, there, down between the other apartment blocks we could see the sea!
Adriana Maria do Céu Mão de Ferro Arena de Corta. Mary of Heaven. Our Lady of the Starry Skies. My mother worked for the Abrigo Cristo Redentor and sent us all to catechism and mass but she was very far from being a good Catholic. When we were sick she would light a candle and slip a holy medal under the pillow but she also bought herbs and prayers and icons from mãe-do-santo. Double insurance, she called it. The more deities on the case the better. We grew up with two invisible worlds overlapping us; saints and orixas. So I was named after a Catholic saint who was also Yemanja. I remember my mother taking us down to the beach at Barra for Reveillon. It was the one time of the year she would go to the beach. The ocean scared her. We spent the week after Christmas making costumes – blue and white, the holy colours. Mãe made fantastic head-dresses out of wire and old pairs of tights – Pai would spray-paint them in the back of the workshop. That for me is the smell of New Year – car paint. Mãe would dress all in white and everyone treated her with great respect as she walked down to the beach. I felt so proud – she was like a great ship. Millions went to Reveillon up at Rio but we weren’t so shabby down at Barra. This was our festival. Everyone hung out palm fronds on their balconies. Cars drove up and down Avenida Sernambetida playing music. There were so many people milling around they could only drive slowly so it was safe even for very small kids. There were DJs and lots of food. All the things that Yemanja loved. Weed. Flowers. White flowers, paper boats, candles. We went down to the edge of the water with the ocean at our toes. Even Mãe, ankle deep in the breaking waves, sand running out from under her toes. Flowers in our hair, candles in our hands. We were waiting for the moment the edge of the moon rose over the sea. And there it was – the tiniest edge of moon, as thin as a fingernail clipping. It seemed to bleed over the horizon. Huge. So huge. Then my perceptions moved and I saw that it wasn’t rising beyond the edge of the world; it was forming out of the water. The sea was boiling and breaking and the white of the waves were being pulled together into the moon. I couldn’t speak. None of us could. Still we stood, thousands of us. A line of white and blue along the edge of Brazil. Then the moon rose clear and full and a line of silver reached across the sea from it to me. The path of Yemanja. The road the Lady walked to reach our world. And I remember thinking, but roads lead both ways. I could walk out along that road to the moon. Then we threw our flowers into the water and the waves drew them out. We set our little tea-lights in the paper boats and put them in to follow the flowers. Most drowned but some were drawn out along the moon path to Yemanja. I have never forgotten the tiny boats bobbing out along the line of the moon.
Mãe never believed that people had walked there, up on the moon. It was inconceivable. The moon was a person, not a stone satellite. People could not walk like fleas on the skins of other people. She still did not believe that people were walking there, years later, before I left, when I took her down to the beach. By then she could hardly move. I hired a car and drove the couple of hundred metres to the beach. Pai had lost the dealership. We weren’t car people any more. We had the apartment because Pai had paid off the mortgage early. It was full of us again: Byron, Emerson, Elis, Luiz, Eden, Caio. Adriana. All the birds back to roost.
Mãe was huge as a moon by then, but all the people down for Reveillon paid her respect and the cars on the Avenida hooted their horns to her. She was great and holy. I took her by the hand down to the water and we saw the moon seem to form out of the sea and I said, I’ll be there soon. She laughed and could not believe it, but then she said, well, it’ll be easy for me to go on to the balcony and wave to you.