Brasyl (GollanczF.) Page 20

  ‘Light and fast, please God,’ Quinn said in Portuguese now. ‘And sure the paddles of three willing men are worth a whole fleet of pressed slaves.’

  The black man grinned broadly. Determination set in his face, Falcon picked his way up the rocking canoe to his seat in the center under the cotton awning. He could feel the silent derision of his crew, the more audible laughter of Quinn’s small outfit, in the flush of his face. He settled delicately into his wicker seat, the sunshade hiding him from insects and scorn. Falcon raised his handkerchief.

  ‘Away then.’

  The golden river broke into coins of light as the paddles struck and pulled. Falcon gripped the sides as the bow-water climbed the flanks of the canoe. A moment’s fear, then his fleet fell in around him, paddlers slipping into unconscious unison, an arrow formation curving out into the Rio Negro. Quinn’s smaller, lighter craft, frail as a leaf on water, surged ahead. Falcon noticed how easily Quinn’s massive frame, despite the terrible blow it had sustained so recently, learned the paddle’s rhythms. Falcon could not resist the infantile urge to wave his kerchief to him. Quinn returned the acknowledgment with a wide, careless grin.

  Time vanished with the rolling stream; when Falcon glanced back around the side of his shade São José Tarumás had dropped from view behind a turn of the stream so subtle that it had been beneath even his trained regard, so vast that the walls of green seemed to close behind him. Against will and reason, Falcon found the spirit of the river entering him. It manifested itself as stillness, a reluctance to move, to lift any of the instruments he had set in his place to measure the sun and space and time, to engage in any action that might send thought and will rippling out across the black water. The calls of birds and canopy beasts, the splash of river life, the push and drip of the paddles and the hum of the water against the hull, all seemed to him parts of a greater chorale the sum of which was an enormous, cosmological silence. The still spires of smoke from across the green canopy, the riverside settlements, the squat thatched cones of churches, their wooden crosses erect before them, the frequent river traffic that hailed and waved and smiled - all were as far from him as if painted in aquarelle on paper and Falcon were a drip of rain running down the glass. His hands should be measuring, his hands should be sketching, mapping, annotating; his hands gripped the sides of the canoe, river-tranced, hour after hour.

  Quinn’s hail broke the spell. His pirogue had drawn ahead, hour on hour, until it seemed a mosquito on the surface of the water. Now, where the channel divided into a braid of marshy islets and eyots, he bade his steersman turn across the current and waited in midstream. As he drifted toward Falcon’s phalanx, Quinn raised his paddle over his head in his two hands and thrust it into the air three times. On the instant every paddler in Falcon’s fleet put up his oar. Impetus lost, the inexorable hand of the Rio Negro took the boats, checked them, turned them, scattered their line of order into chaos.

  ‘Paddle, you oxen!’ Falcon roared, and, to Juripari his Manao translator, ‘Command them to paddle, this instant.’ The translator remained silent, the paddles unmoving. Falcon struck at the back of slave kneeling immediately before him. The man received the blow with the stolidity of a buttressed forest tree. Quinn and his crew were stroking swiftly toward the drifting canoes. He hauled in along side the swearing, berating Falcon.

  ‘Apologies, my friend, but this is as far as you travel with me.’

  ‘What have you done? What nonsense is this? Some wretched Jesuit plot.’

  ‘More that fabled Jesuit gold to which you alluded, Doctor. The Society has never feared the power of lucre, like some others. But you will come no further with me, Dr Falcon. Ahead lies the Arquipelago das Anavilhanas, which Manoel tells me is a mapless maze of ever-shifting sand bars and lagoons. I have instructed your crew to make camp on an island for five days. In that time I will have so far outstripped your expedition that you will never find me. My friend, it is not safe for you to go with me, and to be truthful, my own mission may lead me to actions that I would not wish witnessed by one outside my Order. Neither was it safe, even for you, to remain in São José Tarumás. But in the Anavilhanas, no one will ever find you.’ Quinn lifted the Frenchman’s sword from the bottom of the pirogue and offered it to him. ‘This is your weapon, not mine; and if I do not have it, Grace of Our Lady I shall not be tempted to use it.’ He tossed the sword; Falcon caught it lightly in his two hands. The canoes rocked on the still water, all bound together in the dark current. ‘Argument is futile, my dear friend, against Jesuit authority, and Jesuit gold.’ Quinn nodded to his índio pilot; paddles dipped, the pirogue drew away from the helpless Falcon. ‘I must confess a further crime against you, Doctor, though, as I have returned your sword, it is more in the nature of a trade. Your device, your Governing Engine; in this land it would become a tool of the grossest human subjugation conceivable. Forgive me; I have removed it from your baggage, together with the plans. It is an evil thing.’

  ‘Quinn, Quinn!’ Falcon shouted. ‘My engine, my Governing Engine, what did you do with it, you faithless blackrobe?’

  ‘Look for me around the mouth of the Rio Branco,’ Quinn called back, and the river carried them apart until the pirogue, pitifully small and fragile against the green wall of the varzea, was lost among the narrow mud-choked channels.

  Only when the sudden clap of flighting birds or the soft clop of a jumping fish or the sun brilliant in the diamond of a water-bead dropping from paddle-tip summoned him did Father Luis Quinn start from rapture to find that hours had passed in the reverie of the river. He had ceased counting the days since the parting at Anavilhanas; morning followed morning like a chain of pearls, the great dawn chorus of the forest, then the run out into the misty water and the time-devouring stroke of the paddles; the simple sacrament of physical work. No need, no desire for speech. Never in all his disciplines and exercises had Quinn found so easy and complete a submergence of the self into the other. The indolent slide of jacaré into the water; the sudden scatter of capybara as the pirogue entered a marshy furo between river loops, noses and tiny ears held above the surface; the dash of a toucan across the channel, a nestling in its outlandish beak, pursued by the plundered mother. Once - had he imagined, had he truly beheld? - the wide prideful eyes of the solitary jaguar, kneeling warily at a salt lick. Their unthinking, animal actions were of one with the automatic obedience of his muscles to the paddle. In physicality is true subjugation of the self.

  On and on and on. As Quinn’s spirit went outward into the physical world, as often it was cast backward. Memory became entangled with reality. Luis Quinn knelt not in the waist of a pirogue, a frail shave of bark, but stood at the taff-rail of a Porto carrack beating for the Spanish Gate of Galway under a spring sky of swift, gray-bottomed shower-heavy clouds. Fifteen years and his first return since childhood; he had thought he would barely remember the old language, but as Suibhne the captain led him from warehouse to port-merchants to tavern and the men had greeted him like a sea-divided relative, he found the grammar and idiom, the words and blessings swinging into place like the timbers of a house. Seamus Óg Quinn’s son; big strapping lad he grew up to be, grand to see a Quinn back among his old people and lands. Again, recollection: the great hall on the upper floor of the casa in Porto; Pederneiras the tutor taking him by the hand down from the schoolroom on the top floor to this great, light-filled hall lowering with allegories of wealth, and power crowning the merchants and navigators of Porto. As he had peered down through the colonnaded window into the rattling street Pederneiras had opened a long, narrow shagreen-bound case. Within, bound in baize, the blades. ‘Go, take one, feel it, adore it.’ Luis Quinn’s hand dropped around the hilt and a thrill burned up his arm, a belly-fire, a hardening and pressing he now knew as sexual, a feeling that twenty years distant, kneeling in supplication, still stirred him physically.

  ‘I see you need no encouragement from me, Senhor Luis,’ Pederneiras had said, observing the precocious pride in his pupil’s
breeches. ‘Now, the garde.’

  Bright metal in his hand once again, the flattened silver of a stout tankard, crushed by repeated blows to the skull of a man. The master has commanded me to serve you no more. Still his body remembered that deep, exultant joy.

  Luis Quinn turned the disciplines of his exercise to expunge the luxurious memory of sin. Preparatory prayer: ask of Christ his grace that all intentions, actions, and works may be directed to his greater glory. First point: the sin of the angels. Naked they were, and innocent, dwelling in a paradise of bounty and clemency, yet still in their forests and great rivers the Enemy corrupted them. They consumed human flesh, they rejoiced in the meat of their enemies, and so we condemned them as pagan, animal, without soul or spirit, fit only for slavery. In so doing we condemned ourselves. Second point: the sin of old Adam. Quinn’s memory turned from the battered shell of metal in his fist to the smashed skull on the floor. He heard again the hooting animal howls of his friends cheering him on through the fire of lust and drink. Third point: the sin of the soul condemned through mortal vice. Father Diego Gonçalves, what do you know of him? Manoel the pilot, a diligent altar boy, dared say nothing against the Church, but his hunched shoulders and bowed head, as if cowering from the vastness of the Rio Negro, spoke old dread to Luis Quinn. Zemba, a freed slave who since his manumission at Belém had worked his way up the river to the rumors of an El Dorado in the immensity beyond São José Tarumás, a land of future where his history would be forgotten. The City of God, he said. The kingdom of heaven is built there.

  Luis Quinn turned the three sins beneath his contemplation and saw that they were indivisible: the pride of kings, the pride of the spirit, the pride of power. Now I understand why you sent me, Father James. Conclude the meditation with the Paternoster. But as the comfortable words formed the river exploded around him, dashing him from contemplation: botos, in their dozens, spearing through the water around the pirogue, curving up through the surface to gasp in air, some bursting free from their element entirely in an ecstatic leap. Quinn’s heart leaped in wonder and joy; then, as he followed a flying, twisting boto to the zenith of its arc, to wordless awe. Angels moved over the varzea, striding across the forest canopy, their feet brushing the treetops. Angels carmine and gold, Madonna blue and silver, angels bearing harps and psalteries, drums and maracas, swords and double-curved warbows: the host of heaven. We strive not against men but against principalities and powers.

  The pirogue shot clear from the narrow gut of the furo to rejoin the main channel, and Quinn involuntarily rose to his feet in wonder. From bank to bank the channel was black with canoes; men perched in the stern driving their bobbing wooden shells onward, women and children in the waist. Some were entirely crewed by grinning, spray-wet children. At the center of the great fleet rose the object of Quinn’s awe. A basilica sailed the river. Nave, chancel, apses, buttresses and clerestory; in every detail a church from the wooden-shingled dome to the crucifix between its two towers. Every inch of the basilica was covered in carved, painted reliefs of the gospels and the catechisms, the martyrdoms of saints and the stoopings of angels; the illumination caught and kindled in the westering light as radiantly as any rose window. Each wooden roof-slat was painted with the representation of a flower. Figures stood on the railed balcony above the porch, tiny as insects. Insect was the image caught in Quinn’s reeling mind; the great church seemed to stride across the water on a thousand spindle legs. A second, colder look revealed them to be a forest of sweeps propelling the towering edifice down the channel. The basilica did not move by human muscle alone; the finials of the wall-buttresses had been extended into masts slung with yardage and brown, palm-cloth sail; the towers too bore sprits, stays and banners. One pennant was figured with Our Lady and child, the other a woman, standing on one foot, her body entwined with forest vines and flowers. Naked red bodies patterned black with genipapo swarmed the ropes and ratlines. Then Luis Quinn’s attention rose to the mastheads. Each mast was capped with a titanic carving of an angel: trumpet, harp, lozenge-bladed sword, shield, and castanets. Their faces were those of the people of the canoes: high-cheeked, narrow-eyed, black-haired Rio Negro angels.

  Now bells sounded from the basilica. The figures on the balcony moved with sudden activity, and a large canoe was pushed out from the line of mooring poles at the church-ship’s bow. Quinn read the inscription over the main portal, though he already knew what it must say: Ad maiorem Dei gloriam.

  OUR LADY OF THE FLOOD FOREST

  JUNE 6-8, 2006

  Silver rain woke Marcelina Hoffman. Her face and hair were dewed; her sleeping bag gleamed beneath a mist of fine droplets like the pupa of some extraordinary Luna moth. A ceiling of soft, ragged cloud raced above her face, seemingly low enough to lick. The morros were abruptly amputated, their tops invisible in the mist. Marcelina watched the streaming gray tear around the spines and quills of antennae and aerials that capped the taller apartment towers. She put out her tongue, a taste not a kiss, and let the warm drizzle settle on it. The noises from the street were subdued, baffled; car tires slushy on the wet, greasy blacktop. Gulls sobbed, hovering seen and unseen in the mist; the rain-sodden Copacabana lay beneath their yellow avaricious eyes. Raucous weather-prophets. Marcelina shivered in her bag; gulls calling had always disturbed her; the voice of the sea calling her out over its horizon: new worlds, new challenges.

  Downstairs the apartment felt chill and abandoned. The furniture was cold to the touch, damp and unfamiliar; the clothes in the closets belonged to a previous, fled tenant. The apartment had reverted to its natural smell, that distinctive pheromone of place that had struck Marcelina with almost physical force the moment the agent had opened the door, that she had worked so hard to banish with scented candles and oil burners and coffee and maconha but that crept back, under doors through air-conditioning vents every time she left it for more than a few days. Marcelina made coffee and felt the kitchen watching her. Carpet-treading in your own house.

  Her celular, charging on the worktop, blinked. Message. Received 2:23. The number was familiar but evoked no name or face.

  Bip.

  A man’s voice raged at her. Marcelina almost threw the phone from her. It spun on the bare, almost surgically clean worktop, voice gabbling. Marcelina picked up the phone. Raimundo Soares, furious, more furious than she had thought possible for the Last Real Carioca. She killed the message and called back straightaway.

  He recognized her number. Seven hours had not mellowed him; he was furious beyond even a hello good morning how are you?

  ‘Wait wait wait wait, I understand you’re angry with me, but what is it you’re actually angry about?’

  ‘What do you mean? Don’t you play any more stupid games with me. Bloody women you’re all the same, tricks and games, oh yes.’

  ‘Wait wait wait wait.’ How many times has she said these words in just seven days? ‘Pretend I don’t know anything, and start at the very beginning.’ She could never hear those words without recalling her mother’s medley of hits from The Sound of Music, Samba-ized. Christ on crutches; it was Feijoada Saturday: feijoada and organ, the happy Annunciation of the blessed Iracema. But it was marvelous indeed how the mind reached for the ridiculous, the incongruous in dark and panic.

  ‘Oh no, I’ll not to fall for that soft-soap; I know how you reality TV people work. That e-mail; it’s all a joke at my expense, isn’t it? There’s probably a camera over there watching me right now; you’ve probably even got one in my toilet so you can watch me scratching myself.’

  ‘Mr Soares, what e-mail are you talking about?’

  ‘Don’t you mister me, don’t you ever mister me. I’ve heard of these things; people hit the wrong button and the e-mail goes out to someone it’s not supposed to; well, I saw it and I know your game. You may have made a fool out of me, but you won’t make a fool out of the people of Rio, oh no.’

  ‘What was this e-mail?’

  ‘You know, maybe you can sound all innocent, maybe y
ou don’t know, seeing as how it was an accident. You wouldn’t deliberately have sent me the proposal for your Moaçir Barbosa show, would you?’

  The native smell of her kitchen assaulted Marcelina, cloying and dizzying. There was no help in words here. She had done it. She had lied, she had betrayed, she had joyfully schemed to send an old man to the pillory to build her career. Our Lady of Production Values had averted her eyes. But there was mystery still.

  ‘I didn’t send that e-mail.’

  ‘Look, little girl, I’m no silver surfer, but even I can recognize a return e-mail address. You just think you’re so fucking clever, and we’re all so old and slow and you can just laugh at us. Well, I still know a few people in this town, you know? You haven’t heard the last of this, not by a long long chalk. So you can fuck yourself and all your fucking TV people as well; I wouldn’t present your show for a million reis.’

  ‘Mr Soares, Mr Soares, it’s important, what time . . .’ Dead line. ‘What time did I send that e-mail?’

  You never were going to present that show, Marcelina raged silently at the dead celular. She knew it was a mealy little vice, her need to have the last word when her enemy had no possibility of reply. Not if you were the last fucking carioca on the planet. But it was bad, worse than she had ever known it. Christ Christ, Christ of Rio, Christ of the Hunchback Mountain with your arms held out to the sea, Christ in the fog; help me now. Marcelina glanced at the clock on the microwave, perpetually eight minutes fast. She had just time to get to the office and then out to her mother’s.