This time, Rubens did not have his pigeon to save him. He and Gislaine sat huddled together in a small dark room. They had agreed that they would do everything possible to stay together. Gislaine wisely made it known to their captors that Rubens could do very little for himself, and she would be needed constantly as a nursemaid to feed, dress, and help him get about. Rubens, for his part, made himself as helpless and dependent on Gislaine as possible. For the moment, this plan seemed to be working. Gislaine was a tough young girl approaching adolescence. She had her mother’s eyes and facial expressions and the same thick brush of black hair. She put her arms around Rubens, who bounced between ideas of great courage and deep depression. “Quiet,” she said. “They’ll hear you, and then they’ll put those gags over our mouths again.”
Rubens whispered, “Maybe I could lay down in the doorway, and when the guy comes in, he trips, and you take something and bash his head.”
“I have to have something to bash his head with,” remarked Gislaine, looking around the empty room.
Rubens thought about this and felt depressed again. “Ginjinha, what do they want with us?”
Gislaine patted her brother’s head and tried to smile. “Mama will find us. Don’t worry.”
Rubens sighed and soon fell asleep.
In the midst of death, Radio Chico and the Foundation for Votive Pilgrimages were busier than ever. It was not because people in times of extreme suffering turned to God and prayer; the churches and the priests were, of course, overwhelmed by these people. It was because out of so many sufferers, some people, indeed, survived. After all, Radio Chico and the foundation were in the business of praising God for the victories, the miracles, the “answered” prayers. The rest was God’s will. In this typhus crisis, one out of ten people afflicted were reported to survive. If a hundred new cases of typhus were reported each day (and this rate of infection was expected to rise steadily to, some predicted, a thousand), Radio Chico and the foundation could expect an average of ten new calls per day from survivors of the epidemic, requesting votive pilgrims. Radio Chico was, amid this harsh tragedy, a singular voice of triumph and hope.
Despite Radio Chico’s expression of optimism, its offering of the chance of life, some people had begun to feel that the typhus epidemic was heralding the inevitable apocalypse, that the Matacão was the center of God’s storm, the very door that would soon open to release the cataclysm that would cause the ensuing devastation. These people were further convinced of the end when more and more bodies of people, who seemed to have been tossed out of airplanes in midflight, were strewn over the Brazilian countryside. Those feather worshipers must have been in cahoots with the devil, and this was part of the final judgment. In preparation for such finality, people began to reappear again on the Matacão but, now, in various acts of self-flagellation: people baring their backs under whips, fasting under the hot interminable sun, puncturing their hands and feet with nails, pulling their hair out from the roots, dipping their hands and feet in scalding water or actually burning themselves over smoldering coals, filling their mouths with hot peppers. Then there were those who began to crawl on their knees the length and width of the Matacão, holding various banners or votive pictures of saints or dead loved ones. The Matacão being a perfectly smooth surface, the first such knee-crawlers lugged bags of sand and gravel that they tossed in handfuls before them to roughen the way and eventually tear at the soft flesh of their knees. In no time at all, peddlers could be found selling everything from candles and small whips to bags of sand of varying coarseness.
Chico Paco watched these demonstrations of ardent suffering with a great deal of repugnance and personal pain. It seemed as if, daily, hundreds of people died from typhus, but those who survived or who were yet unclaimed believed that they had been saved for some greater suffering unless they could somehow purge themselves of sin. Chico Paco had gone on the radio again and again to denounce self-inflicted pain as a purgative for sinfulness. He invited these people, instead, to show their devotion by becoming votive pilgrims, telephone pilgrims, volunteers for hope. Chico Paco felt that there must be some way to pull them from this insidious dread. Fear permeated the social fabric, a cancer worse than any epidemic. It might turn into the lowest common denominator of human degradation; Chico Paco could not imagine what that might be, but it did not sound pleasant. He remembered his life on the sea on his jangada, that flat raft with sail, whose every rough-hewn board and characteristic he had once known. He looked out over the Matacão, at the stretch of sky and clouds, and felt confusion. Back in his home on the coast, he would have been able to wake at dawn and look out across the sky from east to west and north to south and read the day’s weather in that stretch of sky. It would say, for example, cloudy morning followed by mist and drizzle, winds at noon, clear by afternoon, cloudless sunset, crescent moon, starlit night, sudden gusty winds and heavy clouds, torrential rains by dawn. But the skies over the Matacão were a mystery to Chico Paco, unpredictable and inscrutable. He could read no weather, no future there.
Chico Paco’s mother, Dona Feliz, continued to wander barefoot around her son’s carpeted apartment, just as if she had never left her home on the beach, oblivious to the human tragedy surrounding her. As I have said before, Dona Feliz spent most of her days on the Matacão at the riverside, washing the clothes the only way she knew—by beating and pounding the dirt out of them. “Clothes need to be beaten to learn to stay clean,” she would say. The hired driver who accompanied Dona Feliz would carry her basket of dirty laundry to the river side and then sit and sun himself on the rocks or smoke languidly while staring out across the river. Daily, the driver would recognize the same two people in a small boat for hire rowing out to the distant center of the river to dump a package into the water. He guessed every day that this package was another corpse. The two people in the boat no longer waited for the furious swell which eventually occupied the waters where the body had been deposited, the piranhas snatching wildly at the flesh to expose the bones, soon to be bleached flotsam bobbing at the river’s edge. The driver tossed his cigarette stub into the flotsam mixed with Dona Feliz’s soapsuds, picked up the heavy basket of tightly wrung clothing and followed her to the car. Back at the apartment, Chico Paco’s mother carefully spread the wet pieces out on the patio Astroturf to dry in the sun.
Chico Paco continued to be traumatized by Gilberto’s inexhaustible energy and his dance with danger. Nightly, he would find himself coaxing Gilberto, who liked to straddle the railing of the balcony overlooking that gross display of torment on the Matacão twenty floors below, to come away. “Please Gilberto. Not tonight. I can’t take any more accidents. I need some peace.” After some amount of begging, Gilberto would be coaxed into a round of video games, pinball, or some fast-paced movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark, which Chico Paco had now seen one hundred times. At some unexpected but inevitable point, Gilberto would suddenly drift off to sleep. Chico Paco would take one long, loving glance at his wild friend and close his eyes in relief. Dona Feliz, used to waking at dawn, might find the two young men wrapped snugly in each other’s arms, swinging on the balcony hammock, and cover their sleeping bodies. They were momentarily huddled together against an unknown doom, and although Chico Paco insisted that they were a part of the lucky 10 percent, his own insistence betrayed him. He clung to the former invalid and slept fitfully, always hearing the distant sound of waves.
When the construction of Chicolándia was completed and most of the contraptions and confabulations had been tested or broken by Gilberto, a date was set for the inauguration. Chico Paco chose Carnival, that devil-let-loose time of the year, which would provide the people with a genuine experience of surfeit and intense celebration, something to release—with some finality, he hoped—the dismal atmosphere of gloom which had settled everywhere. Wouldn’t this be the sort of thing that would make people forget their suffering, promote that ray of hope, that they might just be one of those lucky people in the surviving 10 percent? The people, Chico Paco felt, were desperately in need of a change of spirit. By opening the doors of Chicolándia, Chico Paco hoped to turn the ugly presentation of suffering on the Matacão into a new dance of hope. Once again, the Matacão, lately so grossly stained, must become a stage for celebration. In preparation, the government had hired a nightly cleaning crew, which consisted of a couple hundred men and women with brushes and mops followed by a tank which sprayed a roaring torrent of water, to cleanse the Matacão, that would-be polished road leading to a paradise of plastic delights.
Along with Chico Paco’s preparations for the inauguration of Chicolándia, bands, samba schools, costume contest organizers, famous singers, and announcers flooded onto the Matacão to add to the long list of twenty-four-hour, four-day entertainment planned. Chico Paco’s proclamation of a new era had spurred thousands of survivors into a flurry of creativity, song, and dance. Now there was the constant beat of the congas flowing over the Matacão while people walked and bounced to its rhythm. Occasionally, the trio elétrico, a truck strung with enormous speakers and a band of balancing musicians, rolled along the Matacão, everything blaring at maximum volume. The trio elétrico was surrounded and trailed by an enthusiastic crowd of jumping people, sweat streaming from their bodies, everyone bounding after the truck in one agitated mass. Gilberto would hear the music from the twentieth floor and scramble down all the flights of stairs to join the excitement, but Chico Paco, watching from above, would often see a funeral procession solemnly passing the trio elétrico in the opposite direction, and in and among the dancers, there were always people with the rash-ridden signs of the inevitable disease. Many people would dance their last dance, drink their last drink, suffer their last hangover.
Still, Chico Paco insisted on the answered prayers. As the day of the inauguration approached, Chico Paco himself walked a pilgrimage for a little boy saved from the ravages of the disease. Chico Paco and the foundation planned for his triumphant arrival on the Matacão on the inaugural opening of Chicolándia and first day of the Carnival festivities. Radio Chico purposely hailed Chico Paco’s historic walk, speaking of his prayers for a new era. People clung to their radios and the message from Radio Chico as if it were their last piece of salvation. Many people claimed that if it were not for Chico Paco, more people would be dead, as if Chico Paco, himself, were more than a messenger, more than a simple angel of good news.
But many people at Radio Chico and the foundation, not to mention the personnel who now administered Chicolándia, were beginning to gossip openly about Chico Paco and the former invalid, Gilberto. Some pilgrims were secretly envious of Gilberto and the special attentions Chico Paco, they said, showered on that frivolous child. The guards were more than aware of Chico Paco’s obsession with Gilberto. What if, they thought, we fail to save Gilberto from himself? What miracle, what pilgrimage could possibly save Gilberto from falling off a roller coaster or drowning inside a sea lion suit? If things continued like this, Gilberto might send everything and everyone flying off together on that roller coaster. Perhaps, Chico Paco needed to be saved from Gilberto. For the moment, the gossip was fettered by an undercurrent of guilt. Chico Paco was a sort of saint, an angel, was he not? He was the very salvation of thousands of believers. So what if he were gay. So what if he were gay?
But these speculations were strangely unknown to Chico Paco, who had inherited from his mother a certain obliviousness. It had never occurred to him that his affection for Gilberto might be interpreted as sinful, even though more than one of his pilgrims had walked to the Matacão for so-called reformed homosexuals. “Praise the Lord,” the letters had proclaimed. “My son is normal.” Normal. Chico Paco had never thought much about what was normal. Miracles. Answered prayers. The lucky 10 percent. There was more to Chico Paco’s life than normality. And Chico Paco had never been happier in his life. He walked briskly toward the Matacão, thinking of Gilberto, praying that Gilberto was keeping his promise to stay out of trouble, and imagined the glow of childish surprise on Gilberto’s face under the spectacle of fireworks slated for the grand opening.
Despite the intense arrangements for the opening of Chicolándia and Carnival, Lourdes had not lost hope that Kazumasa would somehow hear her call for help. Kazumasa and I saw the writing on the wall while waiting at a stoplight. Kazumasa’s name was scrawled in big letters on the side of a building. So was, for that matter, my name, “The Ball.” Kazumasa memorized the telephone numbers as our car sped off.
Hiroshi had inserted into the radio station’s telephone system a message which would be understood by anyone speaking Japanese, most hopefully by Kazumasa, if he happened to call. The kidnappers had set a deadline for receiving the goods (Kazumasa and me) in exchange for Gislaine and Rubens, and time was running out. The exchange was to be made on the Saturday of Carnival at 9 PM on the Matacão. The reason for choosing the Matacão was that the kidnappers assumed that my attraction to the great slab would be proof of Kazumasa’s authenticity. Hiroshi was himself ready to go to the Matacão on the intended Saturday evening and to press a replica of me and his own forehead into the Matacão, in hopes of saving Gislaine and Rubens. As it happened, Kazumasa made that call.
Kazumasa and I walked away from that phone with a sense of mission. We would not allow Gislaine and Rubens to come to any harm. We did not consider the danger to our own lives. We were tired of hiding and running. And all Kazumasa could think of lately was Lourdes. If he could see her again, he would embrace her, dance with her, sing with her, laugh, kiss, and love her. Yes, he admitted to himself, he loved Lourdes. He promised himself, if he lived to see her again, he would tell her everything, but she must not lose her children on his account.
But there was treachery all around us, and even as we walked away from the telephone booth, an undercover bodyguard with a clip slipped into the booth and surreptitiously removed a small electronic device hidden in the mouthpiece of the receiver. Someone would be watching us every step of the way.
As the days approached for Chico Paco’s triumphant arrival on the Matacão, Gilberto thought about a genuine surprise for Chico Paco. He had once seen in a magic show how the magician had been stuffed into a gigantic cannon and fired out to a spot behind the audience. He imagined himself being fired out of such a cannon into the clear night air above Chicolándia and miraculously wafting down to the Matacão to personally greet Chico Paco. Such a cannon was secretly arranged with the help of the guards, whom Gilberto thought had been hired to tape his escapades for Chico Paco’s delight. “This will be the greatest thrill of his life,” Gilberto sighed, racing around to put together a suitable costume for such an appearance. He settled on a glittering silver spacesuit with matching boots and helmet, all of which glowed in the dark. The parachute would also be a glittering phosphorescent silver. He planned his spectacular arrival, rehearsing over and over in his mind the details without ever questioning whether a trick like this was even feasible. The guards shrugged their shoulders innocently. They were only there to protect and humor Gilberto. The thing wasn’t supposed to work anyway, they thought.
On Saturday, the first day of Carnival, people began milling around on the Matacão early in the morning. Batista had released thousands of Djapan pigeons into the skies to hail the opening ceremonies. The trio elétricos rumbled up and down the Matacão, and several samba schools had already demonstrated a certain amount of frenzy, even in those early hours. By nightfall, things were getting hot. Chico Paco supporters were pacing the Matacão with ghetto blasters, the Radio Chico deejay’s voice crashing into its own voice in a myriad of stereo reports. The costumed carousers were beginning to arrive as well. There were dozens of people sporting my replica, the “Kazumasa ball,” secured by transparent headbands. Some had even cut and dyed their hair jet black to imitate Kazumasa’s. And there were also dozens of people with third arms or third breasts, not to mention people with third eyes or third legs and so forth. Then there were the usual crowd of masqueraders, pirates, clowns, Arabs, Indians, cartoon characters, Hawaiians, gypsies, Candomblé priestesses and gods, Carmen Mirandas, malandros, transvestites, and many who simply sported skimpy attire. Breasts and buttocks, in big demand as always at Carnival, were in abundance on the Matacão.
Lourdes and Hiroshi, also sporting my ridiculous replica and ready at any moment to smash his head into the great slab, marched through the revelers with determination. Behind them, following first at a distance and then more closely as the crowds grew, were two people Kazumasa might have recognized. But Kazumasa and I, too, were being watched and followed. We were used to this and had rather lost track of the number of people who surrounded but never really befriended us in a way Kazumasa would have appreciated.
We, too, were intent on keeping this appointment. Kazumasa did not consider that it might in fact be a trap. He promised himself that only when he saw Gislaine and Rubens safely in Lourdes’s arms would he give himself and me up. Kazumasa did not have to ask my forgiveness for deciding my fate in this way, but he did so anyway. “Forgive me,” he said, “but it is for a good cause.”
Together, Kazumasa and I ran among the crowds in the streets, trying to confuse those agents J.B. had trailing us everywhere. Luckily, there were so many odd representations of us on the streets, the agents found themselves spread out everywhere chasing mirages of the Japanese with the ball.
Chico Paco was already met several miles before the Matacão by a crowd of supporters all grasping candles, marching alongside the living angel in the decisive and fervent expression of an earthly but sacred mission. People wept openly, fell to the ground and wrung their hands, as Chico Paco passed.
From his private helicopter above, J.B. could see over the dark land a river of tiny lights approaching the Matacão. As Chico Paco’s feet touched the Matacão, fireworks broke into the night sky.
Under the lights of that suddenly radiant sky, Lourdes could see the outline of her two children, Gislaine and Rubens, propped ominously between two large men. Lourdes and the children all cried out together in recognition, but their cries were muffled by the thundering sky and the blaring music. Hiroshi sensed Lourdes’s tension and saw the men and the children as well. He made ready to throw himself onto the Matacão, but a hand grabbed his shoulder. Lourdes looked around and exclaimed, “Seu Kazumasa!”
Kazumasa and I walked forward. Kazumasa stopped and smiled at the children. He motioned to the men, who could see immediately that this was the real and true Kazumasa, that there could be no mistake. I was always very impressive in person. Hiroshi’s idea about pressing his replica ball and head into the Matacão was nonsense when confronted with the truth of my existence. I could see that the men themselves were quite astounded. They relaxed their grip on the children, who scuffled away as best they could and fell tearfully into Lourdes’s awaiting arms. When Kazumasa could see that the children were safe, he and I walked toward the men who readied their weapons with a certain fear of me. They did not know what a ball might be capable of.
Kazumasa had seen J.B.’s paper-clipped agents following Lourdes and Hiroshi. We could also sense their presence, and Kazumasa knew that they would not give up their assignment just because Kazumasa and I wanted to get involved in a little heroics.
At the same time, Chico Paco was trying to move forward into the oppressive crowd. His walk was joyous and purposeful as he saw the skies lit above Chicolándia. He felt, however, a passing touch of sadness. Where was Gilberto? Why hadn’t he come to meet him? Chico Paco pushed aside his sense of abandonment amid the glorious reception surrounding him. People were cheering, dancing, chanting. Confetti poured. Flowers were strewn.
Suddenly, Chico Paco sensed a vibration near his heart, the insistent buzz of his beeper in his shirt pocket, the warning signal of approaching danger. Chico Paco’s stomach churned, waves crashing in his inner ear, his knees wobbling at the thought of another episode in Gilberto’s continuing saga of mad escapades. The monitoring room. He must get there. What was that crazy former invalid up to now? Chico Paco pressed forward frantically.
Kazumasa and I were shoved aside by the approaching crowds. Chico Paco himself was only a few paces away. We tried to stand our ground yet another moment, hoping that Hiroshi was dragging Lourdes and the children as far away from danger as possible. The armed men approached us impatiently, but suddenly, the glint of a silver clip caught Kazumasa’s eye. Just as the agent withdrew his gun, Kazumasa whirled with me to the ground, tumbling across Chico Paco’s path. A shot was muffled under the sound of drums. One kidnapper fell away clutching some part of his wounded body, but the second kidnapper aimed for Kazumasa’s head. Kazumasa rolled under a three-legged masquerader, avoiding the bullet that pierced the heart of the great pilgrim.
Chico Paco clutched the beeper over his heart, the iridescence of his eyes flashing unspeakable panic. Blood poured from his heart, flooding the shattered beeper, as he sank to his knees on the Matacão. The crowd caught the kidnapper and pounced relentlessly on him, smashing every part of his body into the Matacão. Confetti dripping from his golden head, Chico Paco lifted his hand as if to protest the massacre, but it was to wave at the sight of a distant glow, the silken silver wings of an angel emerging among the crack and spray of a sky lit by gunpowder.