LORI PASSED WITH HIGH MARKS. She was just as Amanda had described her: a clear mind and natural goodness. Discreetly and efficiently, she lightened the load for the rest of us, resolved annoying details, and soothed inevitable frictions. She had good manners, fundamental for sane coexistence, long legs, never a negative, and a frank smile that undoubtedly would seduce Nico. She had the advantage of being a few years older than he, since experience is always helpful, but she looked very young. She was striking, with strong features, a stupendous head of dark, curly hair, and golden eyes. None of that was relevant since my son doesn’t place any importance on physical appearance; he scolds me because I use makeup and does not want to believe that when my face is washed clean I look like a rifleman. I observed Lori the way a hyena observes its prey, and even set a few traps for her, but I could not catch her in any fault. That made me a little uneasy.
After a couple of weeks, exhausted, we returned to Rio de Janeiro, where we were to take a plane to California. We stayed at a hotel in Copacabana, and instead of sunning on the white sand beaches, it occurred to us to go visit a favela, to get an idea of how the poor live, and to look for another seer to cast the jogo de búzios, since Tabra kept annoying me with her skepticism about my goddess Yemayá. We went with a female Brazilian journalist and a driver, who took us up to the hills of the unimaginably poor, an area where the police never went, to say nothing of tourists. In a terreiro much more modest than the one in Bahía, we were greeted by a middle-aged woman wearing jeans. The priestess repeated the ritual of the shells that I’d seen in Bahía, and without hesitation said that I belonged to the goddess Yemayá. It was impossible that the two seers had reached some kind of accord. This time, Tabra had to swallow her sarcastic comments.
We left the favela and on the way back saw a modest café where they sold typical food by its weight. It seemed to me it would be more picturesque to have lunch there rather than eat shrimp cocktail on the hotel terrace, and I asked the driver to stop. He stayed in the van to look after the photographic equipment while the rest of us stood in line at the counter where they were dishing stew onto paper plates with a wooden spoon. I don’t know why I walked outside, followed by Lori and Amanda; maybe to ask the driver if he wanted something to eat. When I looked out the door, I noticed that the street, which had been bustling with traffic and activity, had emptied; no cars were driving by, the shops all seemed to be closed, people had disappeared. Across the street, some thirty feet away, a young man wearing blue pants and a short-sleeved T-shirt, was waiting at the bus stop. At his back, a man not unlike him was advancing toward him; he, too, was young, wearing dark pants and a similar T-shirt. He had a large pistol in his hand, making no effort to hide it. He raised the weapon, aimed at the first young man’s head, and fired. For an instant I didn’t know what had happened; the shot wasn’t explosive like those in the movies, but a muffled kind of cough. Blood gushed from the victim’s head before he fell. And when he hit the ground, the murderer shot four more times. Then, calm and defiant, he walked on down the street. Like an automaton, I ran toward the man who lay bleeding on the ground. He shuddered convulsively once or twice, and lay quiet, as a pool of luminous blood grew around him. Before I could kneel to help him, my friends and the driver, who had hidden in the van during the crime, dragged me to our vehicle. In minutes the street was again filled with people. I heard screams, horns, and saw clients come running out of the restaurant.
The Brazilian journalist forced us to get into the van and told the driver to take us to the hotel by way of the side streets. I thought she wanted us to avoid the blocked traffic that undoubtedly would follow, but she explained that it was a strategy to avoid the police. It took us forty minutes to get back to the hotel, which seemed eternal. On the way I was assailed by images of the military coup in Chile, the dead in the streets, the blood, the sudden violence, the sensation that at any moment something fatal could happen, that no one was safe anywhere. The press was waiting at the hotel with television cameras; inexplicably, they had learned what had happened, but my editor, who was also there, didn’t allow us to speak with anyone. She led us quickly to one of our rooms and ordered us to stay inside until they could take us directly to the airplane. The assassination might have been a settling of accounts among criminals, but the way it happened, outdoors and in broad daylight, it seemed more like one of the infamous executions by agents of the police, which at that time had taken the law into their own hands with full impunity. The press and the public commented on these kinds of events but there had never been proof, and had there been any, it would have opportunely disappeared. When they learned that a group of foreigners—I among them, my books are reasonably well known in Brazil—had witnessed the crime, the journalists supposed that we could identify the assassin. If that were the case, we were told, any number of people would make it their business to see that we didn’t testify. Within a few hours we were on the return flight to California. The journalist and the driver had to go into hiding for weeks.
This incident was Lori’s test of fire. When we scrambled into the van, Lori was trembling in Amanda’s arms. I admit that the sight of a man bleeding to death from five pistol shots is terrible, but Lori had been assaulted two or three times in New York and had traveled through much of the world, this wasn’t the first time she had found herself in a violent situation. She was, however, the only one who was having an extreme reaction; the rest of us were mute, but processing it. Her reaction was so intense that when we reached the hotel, we had to call a doctor to give her a tranquilizer. That serene young woman who through all the previous weeks had smiled under pressure and had demonstrated good humor when inconvenienced, had dared to swim in the piranha infested river, had firmly dealt with the drunken Russians who though they had treated Tabra and me with the respect due two Ukrainian grandmothers had pressed Amanda and her with unwelcome attention, had crumbled at the time of those five bullets. Perhaps Lori could assume responsibility for my three grandchildren and hold her own with our strange family without bodily injury, but when I saw her in that state, I realized that she was more fragile than she had appeared at first view. She would need a little help.