The Fugitivities, стр. 50
It seemed something bad might happen then; even Barthes began to lose her composure, her voice breaking into a panicked plea. But the boys, excited by the presence of Americans, were tripping on Hollywood now, calling Octavio “Taxi Driver,” toying with the muzzles as they cackled to an improvised version of De Niro’s lines. Perhaps Angelica felt how stricken Jonah was with fear, or perhaps she simply felt momentarily more mature than the clearly floundering adults around her. She must have passed through checkpoints every day of her life, and here these Americans couldn’t even do it once. She grabbed Jonah’s hand, gripped it tight, and spoke to the gun boys in a tiny voice. When he heard her name, the boy with the gun shouted in surprise and lowered the Kalashnikov enough to signal a détente. Angelica talked with the boys for a minute. They were asking about her family. After a moment, they shrugged, gave a thumbs-up, and waved them all through, laughing.
Jonah’s legs felt heavy; his jaw clenched. His hands were trembling, but he focused on his pace, on keeping it even and rigid. Tripping over a stone, making any false movement, anything unpredictable or unexplained might set off a nervous trigger finger attached to a boy who was high and hearing things. It was worse with the boys behind them now. The feeling of a gun possibly aimed at the back of one’s head.
They moved deeper into the favela, rising along narrow streets that were lit in spots and where there was more life and the sounds of children and babies crying and hundreds of families preparing dinners. They dropped Taìs off first, and then made their way to Angelica’s home.
Angelica’s mother, who addressed Barthes as though she was part of the family, insisted they all stay for dinner. An aunt was helping to cook some chicken and rice. In the far corner Angelica’s older brother was sitting on a wooden stool watching a soap opera about drug lords and their love lives on Globo, apparently the only television station in Brazil. Angelica helped her mother and her aunt and brought them soft drinks. The older women spoke with Barthes as though she were saintly. Not a spiritual saint, not a figure of salvation, but saintly in her ability to do no harm, to say nothing wrong, to bring only good. Did Barthes feel that way? Sometimes it seemed to Jonah as if she was driven by a tremendous guilt that she had recast in an armor of irreproachability.
While the visitors ate, Angelica looked up from time to time and asked the Americans to teach her new words for the things they were eating. Octavio talked animatedly with Angelica’s mother, showing off his Portuguese and trying to make a good impression. Despite the terror of the ascent, there was a spectacular peacefulness in Angelica’s home. It looked out over a ziggurat of corrugated roofing and down to the bright lights of the city below. A balmy breeze lilted inland from the ocean.
After dinner, Angelica and her mother thanked the visitors profusely for coming to visit and made them promise to come back. When they stepped back into the alleyways, Jonah noticed that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. The favela cascaded down below like a river winking with isolated lamps. Somewhere farther above in the honeycomb, the distinctive propellant of American rap sent down snapping echoes of growling bass and syncopated voices interlocking call and response.
They followed Barthes back down a different path that took them into a gully and then across a narrow walkway made of wooden planks and back up a new set of stairs as they made their way along the side of the neighboring hill. They came up to a small roundabout with streetcar tracks. Largo das Neves. The Square of Snows. A strange name for a roundabout in these parts, Jonah thought. The night, with its sudden brushes with death and pockets of eerie tranquility, had turned surreal. His mind jumped from Nas rapping from the point of view of the gun to Villon’s mais où sont les neiges d’antan? Criminal lingo for those in the know. Bold steel shoved in your face runs the blood hot; the mind ice-cold. Enough of this, Jonah thought, and Rio would get to feeling like Paris in January.
They were ambling gingerly now through streets marked by snaking entranceways to baroque and once ornate villas that were now caving in on themselves and smothered in knotted arboreal growth. They passed a disquieting mauve facade. Barthes said it used to be a dance hall where people came for the Samba de Gafieira and stayed late into the night. There were plans to reopen it, she said, as a hookah lounge.
Eventually they arrived in the neighborhood of Catumbi, where Barthes’s friend Teresa lived. Barthes had met her at the Universidade Federal, where she took her language classes, and Teresa had more or less become Barthes’s best friend in Rio. Teresa’s house was set back from the road and covered with a fragrant mousse of flowers. Laundry was hanging from the fruit trees on her porch. Inside, an older man with a wizened head of dreads pulled back tightly in rows was rolling a joint on a mouse pad. Teresa introduced him as her boyfriend Lazaro.