Hours earlier, from the window of the plane, I had seen that same sea, camouflaged by a diffuse fog, and the images of a distant umbrella: Christ the Redeemer, Sugar Loaf, the whitish Maracanã Stadium, and the circular shores of foam, sand, and buildings. All of that dissipated in the heat at the airport, the chaotic wait to get a cab, where the attendants laughed among themselves or spoke on cell phones while men in suits broke in line. I left in an old Santana with dark windows and damp seats, clutching my backpack, and we plunged into the other end of the city, in heat that would strip the bark off trees (the air-conditioning went out today, the driver said, without the slightest effort to sound convincing), stuck on the congested highway on the way to Barra, amid nightmarish hovels and prisonlike walls that reminded me of the stories of people from São Paulo who get lost upon arriving in Rio and end up in a favela where they’re robbed and ultimately shot.
I wasn’t shot; I didn’t go where I shouldn’t; I didn’t flee from gunfire or have a gun stuck in my face, and yet a day later there I was, with an enigmatic girl, sandwiched between sun and cement in an enormous parking lot in Barra, with our author still missing in some part of Rio, and her and me fleeing hand in hand from a police car, with her sweaty and leading the way, without listening to my pleas, until she stopped suddenly and let go of my hand, took three steps, and stopped again, as if in a trance, her straw-colored hair tousled around her freckled face, squinting against the brightness, she began to rock lightly, panting, more whirling than turning now, among the white stripes like ancient inscriptions on the scorched pavement. Then she opened her trinket-colored eyes that glowed against the sun, she moaned, and my heart almost burst. With quick steps I covered the distance that separated me from her and caught her before she could fall, near a concrete gutter. She held onto me as best she could — her thin arms had almost no strength — and stuck her face in the hollow of my shoulder and I ran my hands over her tangled hair, she made an effort not to faint and then whispered in my ear, I know what happened to him, I know.
It took me some time to identify the color of her eyes, and what they seemed to be saying when she stared at me with dry lips and an expression of discontent. She paid no attention to me, or pretended not to, the first time I saw her, coming out of the elevator in dark glasses, tapping disinterestedly on a cell phone. She came just behind the person I was really there to greet. She vanished, probably accustomed to his small displays, as soon as he stepped forward and occupied all the available space, agitating the air molecules around him. His name was Greg Nicholas, MD, and he was in every sense just who he appeared to be. Compact, tanned, with dark hair clinging to his scalp like a new doormat. He wore beige pants, hitched a little above the waist, and a blue shirt that emphasized his well-defined pecs. A small silver chain hugged his powerful neck. He had a square chin, hard professional eyes that shone mechanically when he saw me. He extended his hand, which I shook, but it was like grasping a stone, a stone that in turn shook back. He gave me a lingering look. “How are you?” he said, and took from his pocket a blue pen, which he presented to me as a gift. Greg Nicholas Institute of Positive Knowledge. I smiled, looked at the pen again, got confused a bit at the greeting, the sweat running down my back wetting the waistband of my loose-fitting jeans.
With the nervous muffling of my ears I didn’t notice that there were others with me: two onlookers, the manager, a very young journalist, and a platinum-blonde in dark glasses with her likely driver, a scowling unshaven guy in a suit too big for him. The blonde advanced and to the sound of tinkling jewelry extended her slender fingers, which Greg took delicately. “How are you?” he said, with slightly more warmth, and a sly smile appeared in the right-hand corner of his mouth. He handed her a pink pen, without breaking eye contact. I began to explain that I was from the publishing company, that I — the blond woman had started talking over me, in Portuguese (while I was getting tangled up in schoolboy English), about how honored she was by his presence and how she was sure he wouldn’t be so unkind as to decline the invitation to dine at her house that evening.
Greg Nicholas enjoyed considerable success in Brazil with his method of losing weight: You Can Do It — How to Lose Those Extra Pounds by the Power of Thought. It had been launched by our publishing house without much fanfare — marketing was an alien concept to Natsume — and no one could explain how it had been successful here when that hadn’t been the case anywhere else in the world. Two months after publication, among our other random titles (The Ten Cruelest Leaders in History, 101 Microwave Cupcake Recipes), Greg’s book had slowly begun climbing the list of best sellers, settled into a solid sixth place in the self-help category, and stayed there. His method, according to the website of the Greg Nicholas Institute of Positive Knowledge, had been adopted by the rich and famous, among them the actress Lindsay Lohan and one Mimi Lesseos, a longtime wrestling star and stunt double for the protagonist in Million Dollar Baby.
I know this because I wrote the text for the book’s flaps, and both names were important to sweeten the press release. To cite the lead paragraph of my text:
Greg spent two months in Tibet, where he learned Buddhist monks’ age-old technique of concentration. By studying the energy that flows from our mind and courses through our body, Greg developed ten steps to channel this positive energy into radical weight reduction. Tested with patients around the world, You Can Do It is revolutionizing Western medicine.
Greg currently lived in Belize, where he conducted cutting-edge research at his institute. I didn’t know anything more, and I wouldn’t have access to him during his stay in Brazil. His schedule was rigidly controlled by the girl who, while Greg was led by the hand through the lobby, stared at me with anger and incomprehension. It took me some time, lost in those eyes, but I was finally able to identify their hue. They were amber-colored, a bit yellowish. Her name was Ellie.
She had scheduled three heavily packed days for Greg Nicholas. That afternoon he would give his first interview. Afterward, he would take part in a fitness and health program and continue, in early evening, to the main event: a debate in the grand salon of the book fair with Tatá Mourinho, a journalist and student of female behavior; Laura Ruiz, nutritionist to the stars; and the retired judge Gilberto Mendes Albuquerque (Mendes Albuquerque had written a folkloric saga with spicy elements). Later Greg would sign copies in our tiny booth, with me beside him preventing access from the fans. In the days following, he would have two more interviews; visit the TV Globo studios, where he would demonstrate live one of his mentalization recipes — as he called them — and give an exclusive talk for subscribers to the newspaper O Globo; climb up Rocinha with a TV crew, where he would watch a show of children’s capoeira; eat feijoada in the company of a society columnist; and conclude by autographing his book at a shopping center in Barra before embarking for Belize, with connections in Panama.
In the few minutes he was unaccompanied in the VIP section at the book fair, Greg sat at a small table and ate compulsively from a bowl of colored peanuts while his assistant was stern, very stern with me. She wanted to know who the devil that woman was who had spoken to Greg earlier, and what was that dinner invitation that Greg had been forced to accept, and said Greg didn’t like being harassed by unauthorized individuals, Greg needed his rest, Greg wasn’t comfortable with the pillows at the hotel, Greg’s towels weren’t as she had specified (one of the things Natsume had cut from the budget), Greg needed a neutral room to radiate his positivity before the talk, Greg found it very annoying not to be able to use his PowerPoint presentation, and Greg was upset at having to share the stage with three other people. I merely looked at the horde of uniformed schoolchildren down below, sweeping through the booths like termites, asking myself why I had accepted such a job.