The Fugitivities, стр. 63

He told Arna about the things Octavio was relating to him about Francesca. How they would meet in the little barzhinos in Cidade Baixa with Francesca’s small band of rowdy friends and go out to tightly packed spots where they danced to the slinky languor of forró. How late into the night, they would follow the other couples spilling out of the clubs and drift down toward the love motels in Menino Deus. How returning to the Rialto at dawn, he passed teams of black boys collecting trash by hand and filling carts pulled by donkeys on their morning rounds.

On the appointed Friday, Euclides appeared at the Rialto to pick them up. Octavio and Jonah clambered in the front of an aging Ford truck. Inside it smelled like old tennis balls, and the engine roared and groaned as he handled the staff of the gearshift.

Their first stop was a discount grocery store where Euclides ordered the boys out to get supplies. The truck loaded, they drove out of the city, north and slightly west. When they turned off the highway half an hour later, they passed over a drainage ditch filled with garbage and then onto an unpaved road that led through an extensive network of dilapidated and unfinished housing. The place was teeming with life. Francesca’s father pulled over to talk to a young man who was kicking a soccer ball around with a little boy. An older woman came out of her home, shouted greetings, and went back inside. They continued farther into the settlement. “Where are we?” Octavio finally asked.

“This is Alvorada,” Euclides said. “My hometown, my baby, my district, my jewel…It’s a good place, good people. Some problems like everywhere, but good people, you know. Everyone you meet here, I know them. Everybody is who I work for. They know, I am the one.”

He insisted on taking them to see some of the things that he was responsible for. The first was the site of a five-story housing project unit. The building, a gray affair that sternly blockaded the horizon, was obviously in disrepair. He explained how he had fought off the speculators and owners who had tried to have the building razed so they could sell the land. How he had organized resistance groups that infiltrated and sabotaged the wrecking crews that came to do their bidding. The second site was a vague patch of land with a partly caved-in warehouse. Some gravel, dripping puddles of mortar, and loose bricks had been poured on the ground. The better part of it was covered in sprouting weeds.

“This,” Euclides announced, sweeping his hand over the spilled gravel like a wand, “will soon be Alvorada’s first youth sporting complex…my dream—and I’ve had to fight for it, but you know, we have to do something for the youth. Look around you…who else will do it? The politicians? You know what they are: pickpockets, my friends; thieves! They line their pockets and then put their smiling face on a billboard over the highway…ha! I spit in their eyes. Always watch the generals, I tell you. In this part of the world, it’s always the generals…Nothing that way has changed, nothing.”

When they arrived at his home, Euclides pulled up to the curb and honked the horn with two fierce jabs. Children were coming in and out of the house and chasing one another through the front lawn and down the street.

“I’ll stay in the car,” Euclides said. “You go in and get Francesca and help bring out her things.”

Jonah heard Francesca shout somewhere deep inside the house. From the doorway, he could hear through the living room to the kitchen, where someone was chopping vegetables. Paolina looked up at him from the floor by the television and continued ironing the rug vigorously with her wooden toy plane. It was a red airplane about the length of a pencil, and it had a slender white propeller. Just then Octavio stepped in the doorway. Paolina’s gaze fixed and widened, and the airplane stopped mid-flight.

Francesca came swooping into the room, taking the girl up in her arms, balancing travel bags and packs in her free hand.

“I’m glad you came,” she said, kissing Octavio on the cheek. “Paolina. Say hello, give the boys a kiss.”

The girl was reluctant, but her mother coaxed her. Jonah got a kiss first. Octavio got one too, and for the first time, Jonah saw him blush.

The truck climbed steadily and gruffly into the mountains. They were long off the highway now, climbing narrow switchbacks on a path of ochre-red dirt. Octavio sat in the front with Euclides, discussing soccer. The patriarch was recounting the glory days of the Colorados: the forties, a golden era when Internacional crushed Grêmio, their bourgeois Porto Alegre rivals. But, Euclides moaned, those days were past. Now the Gremistas were in a seemingly unstoppable ascendancy, a shift that could not be dissociated from the virulently bourgeois ideology of the present epoch, the grave malaise of the social situation; and one would have to mention the increasingly clear sense that even though the PT had come to power—and perhaps even for that very reason—the tide of class warfare had markedly turned in favor of the bourgeoisie. How could it be! When the Left came to power, they implemented the program of the Right. Madness. Under Lula the speculators in São Paolo had seen their fortunes inflate. The poor, of course, were being pushed down, shoved under the rug to make way for upscale shopping complexes, ostracized from the same cities they had built, cast out to the periphery, to places like Alvorada.

In the back seat, Francesca and Jonah had Paolina tucked in between them. Mostly she asked her mother about Jonah. Was he from Africa? He said no, that he was from America—North America. Paolina told Jonah that he should look out for the lions and zebras. Francesca was embarrassed and told her that she was confusing America and