The Fugitivities, стр. 51

He was studying sociology at the State University, trying to document the living conditions of street kids. He smiled quickly and easily and talked in measured tones, often lingering on phrases in English, which he spoke quite well, as he worked the green buds between his thumb and forefinger.

The friends made a small circle on the floor, and Lazaro slid in a CD on his computer and lit up the joint as the samba of Cartola filled the room. Octavio asked Lazaro if he could recommend any Brazilian writers for them to read. Lazaro went into his bedroom and came out with a novel by Clarice Lispector for Octavio and one by Machado de Assis, which he handed to Jonah. Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas. Lazaro explained that Machado was one of the greatest Brazilian writers. A black man. Jonah looked up, met the other man’s fixed gaze, and nodded with grave approval.

This ceremonious moment led Lazaro to initiate a long conversation about Brazil and the way it had become a lagoon within the ocean of world literature. He was also deeply versed in candomblé and explained that he had written a paper about Nina Rodrigues’s anthropological studies on the religious practices of the Africans in Bahia, but so far had been unable to publish it. Given his paltry understanding of the deities whose exotic names Lazaro invoked, Jonah could barely make out what he was saying. But Octavio was deeply enraptured and kept pressing Lazaro for more, occasionally exclaiming in Spanish as he recognized the equivalent of a certain figure or ritual he knew by a Cuban alias.

Teresa held the joint precariously and learnedly, tilting her neck way back, as she steered their talk back in a direction Jonah could more readily follow: the Brazilian cinema of the sixties and seventies, the brilliant madness of Glauber Rocha. The Americans listened intently, and Lazaro nimbly set about preparing more smoke. By the second round, the conversation had gotten predictably hazy and garbled. Teresa, Lazaro, and Barthes were slipping more and more back into Portuguese. Octavio seemed annoyed at his inability to keep up. He started tugging at Barthes’s sleeve and when she pushed him away, they got into a playfully sloppy tussle. Teresa started hooting and yelling at them to get a room already. Everyone was high.

A long report of gunshots crackled through the house. There was a second of silence. Then more gunfire, louder, traveling in bursting echoes. Lazaro shoved the Americans to the ground. There were two loud bangs, then the sound of cries and the helter-skelter of human feet as a new hail of machine-gun fire sweltered the air with deafening metallic impact. People were screaming. Single shots ricocheted, loud enough to come through distinctly above the fray. Jonah looked over at Octavio. He was holding Barthes against him, covering her head with his hands. He looked over at Lazaro, who said something, but the gunfire came again even louder, and he couldn’t make it out. There were more screams, some close and some distant, disconnected, lost to each other, coming from indeterminate corners of the night. Then it got quiet. Lazaro looked over. “Catumbi,” he said, without lifting his head.

A tinny voice barked through a loudspeaker. It was coming from the top of an armored vehicle, climbing like a beetle up through the favela. They could hear crying now. Above all, they heard the voices of women screaming, calling names. The armored car was close, and they could hear the heavy diesel motor changing gears. The samba was still playing, and Cartola continued his song:

…Mas o pranto em Mangueira

É tão diferente

É um pranto sem lenço

Que alegra agente…

Jonah thought of Angelica hiding on the floor clasped in her mother’s arms. Of her being shot, or, more likely, it occurred to him, her brother being shot. Was this the cleanup operation for the Pan American Games? There was an astonishing quiet for a time, with only sporadic, isolated shouts. But as the machinery of the military police receded again, someone somewhere in Catumbi turned the rap back up.

Barthes, who hadn’t quite lost her composure, said calmly that they should go home. The acrid smell of the firefight was in the air, and there was an ambient tension all around them. Men shouted at each other in the darkness, and the sudden beam of search-patrol lights and gleaming muzzles clasped by paramilitary forces in balaclavas seemed to emerge from the darkness swift as roaches. Jonah and Octavio walked directly behind Barthes single file, at her own recommendation, as she was least likely to trigger a nervous shot. She had dealt with patrols before and she had a set pattern of phrases in both Portuguese and English to signal that they were American tourists. The soldiers barked at them and instructed them to proceed in the direction they were already heading. The sound of children crying came from the maze of shadows.

It was dawn by the time they got back to the rua Gustavo Sampaio. Coconut vendors were setting up their stands and adjusting their displays. Joggers headed out for their morning runs on Copacabana Beach.

13

Two days later, Teresa invited the three friends on an outing to an area south of Rio that was renowned for its beaches and popular with the locals, who preferred to avoid the iconic waterfronts like Ipanema. Everyone agreed it would be good to get out of the city.

They piled into Teresa’s blue Volkswagen Beetle and headed south on the highway, rounding the favela of Rocinha, then jetting past unfinished condominiums, the New York City Center on the Avenida das Américas, and the guarded entrances of gated communities built on the landfill of a newly dredged lagoon. The road broke away into higher altitudes as they followed the coastline, and the massive relief of the land came sharply into view. The green counterforts and protrusions guided them along, thumbing grandly into the glittering sheen of the ocean. The magnificent