On the first listen through I never do anything. I need to get the whole recording. The whole concept, entire, the song order, the big idea. Marcelo from the Tuesday Afternoon Boys calls it the gestalt. He’s some kind of therapist in it. Call that first pass the hearing. This second pass is the listening. It’s then you notice the details of the arrangements, the engineering, how the lyrics work with the melody. Is that a horn section there? He’s pulled the bass up here, pushed it back there. Why has he used a cello line, for God’s sake? The third time is the savouring. You know how the songs work, what they are trying to achieve and the way the music is constructed and how it works on your heart. Now you can appreciate the details. The way drum and bass syncopate against each other. The complex time signature—11/8—that always eludes your four-square tapping toe. That ever-shifting harmony line that disguises a very simple, almost folk melody and gives it a dress of carioca sophistication. The twists, the false starts and surprise endings, the games you can play with middle eights, joys you can only appreciate after a lifetime of immersion in MPB.
But there are holes. There are hideous holes. Trans-Amazonian-Highway holes, that can swallow an entire truck. The main vocals are unmixed. On some of the songs Seu Alejandro sounds like he is bellowing like an old and angry beach bum, others like he is humming to himself trying to find his car in a supermarket car park. Arrangements are fragmentary; there are suggestions of ’70s funk horn sections or his signature trip-hop rhythms, which he lifted from another age, another culture and made unmistakably Tropicalismo. Back vocals are either non-existent or too far to the front and the bass is painfully low in the mix. There is a screamingly frustrating twenty three second gap in the middle of “Immaculate Conception” and track 8: “Bottle Club”, just ends, full stop, whether by fire or intention I can’t tell. The title track doesn’t exist beyond an opening carnaval blast of drums, brass and what sounds like sampled traffic noise. Astonishing, but a shard. Again, this could be a Seu Alejandro joke or the effects of the fire. The last two tracks are sketches: “Breakfast News” is an acoustic guitar piece—few ever tugged the heart so with his strings than Seu Alejandro, with suggestions of lyrics muttered into the mike; scraps and lines and euphonies. The final track, provisionally titled [a ghost samba] is his joyfully melancholy guitar with a severely simple cello line.
But it is Seu Alejandro. Unmistakably, gloriously Seu Alejandro.
I crack a fresh Antarctica and start the third listen. My hand is shaking. As I listen with the ear of savouring, the shake becomes worse until I can hardly hold my beer. My whole body is tight, every muscle like a drumskin; I am quivering as if trying to keep back tears. Not just tears, but the kind of uncontrollable, on-the-floor howling and quaking that leaves phlegm pouring from your nose and mouth, the kind men must never be seen doing, the kind men do when love walks away from them and they realise their lives have been lies. It’s the holes, those Amazonian holes; they join together into a void. How dare Seu Alejandro die and leave it incomplete and damaged? How dare Seu Alejandro leave me with just this? It is as abandonment as complete as any of my brief wives and girlfriends. I am bereft, I am furious with him.
It’s full dark now. The lights draw the curves of the bays and the breasts of the hills. Pretty Petty Thieves comes to its third ending and I am all right. I’m all right. I’m already starting to think of how I might put it all together and complete what the Seu left broken.
We are the Tuesday Afternoon Boys and every Tuesday afternoon we play at the Lagoa futsal court. We’ve been playing every Tuesday for seven years, ever since the first of us turned forty. In the afternoon the only other teams are skinny kids in basketball vests and baggy shorts. We don’t play them, they can dribble the ball around us like Garrincha tying a left-back in knots; we play each other. We play futsal to show we’re still alive, we play in the afternoon to show we’re masters of our own time.
I’m on the subs bench. When the average team age is in the low forties, you spend most of the game on the subs bench, but everyone gets a turn on court. That’s the point of turning up on a Tuesday afternoon. But the real work gets done on that bench.
The ball goes out and Carlinhos, our manager for this week, calls Captain Spooky off. He looks like he’s dying. Face so red it could explode, chest heaving, the sweat lashing off him. He crashes down on the bench beside me and it’s a full two minutes before he can get a word between the death-gasps.
“Jesus and Mary,” I tell him. “You should listen to your doctor sometime. He said this is going to be the death of you.”
He shakes his head, smiling through the panting.
“The person. Most likely. To kill you. Is your own. Doctor.”
Captain Spooky claims he is a real doctor. MDs are not real doctors. It’s all hand waving and wizardry. MD-ing is about instinct and opinion and subjective thought. There’s no science, no objectivity, nothing empirical or evidence-based about medicine. It’s a package of received knowledge, opinion and status-plays. Physicians, from the word physic: that makes it sound like a science. Proper science has hypotheses, experiments, statistical analysis, proof and margins of certainty and error. Physics, now that is science, and that’s what Captain Spooky is: a real, true, proper physicist. With angina.
His real science is theoretical physics. It’s a young man’s game, he’ll tell you—like futsal—but he’s kept his tenure, no lean feat for a man pushing fifty. Five more years, he says. Five more years and he’ll take the retirement package. His field is so complex and abstruse it makes my head swim even thinking about it. It sounds like esoteric nonsense to me, but he swears that theoretical quantum computing has millions of everyday applications and implications that will change our lives beyond recognition. I bow to his experience—he’s beaten off a lot of young dogs snapping from below; all I know is that he’s tried to explain it to me in the Rodrigo de Freitas Bar and Grill over the post-match caipiroskas with which we replace lost body-fluids, and I still don’t get it. When things get really really small and really really short in duration they behave in ways that seem impossible to us; that seems to be the gist of it. And because of that, there isn’t one me, there are billion trillion mes, and there isn’t one world, there are a billion trillion worlds, all different: every possible world and me that can exist, exists somewhere. If you thought about that too much you’d fry your head. And that’s why we call him Captain Spooky.