difficult, normal, grief-smudged, passion-fuelled human existence. A fierce sunball hangs low over Rio, French- kissing it, upending day and night. Against it, an aerial view of the city blanketed by a swirl of cloud silhouettes the white statue of Christ the Redeemer on the mountain, with his outstretched arms blessing land, ocean and sky. Absurd, but it has never properly struck me before that the figure itself is standing to form a giant human cross. There’s something both terrible and poignant about the scale of it, as if its vastness and grandiosity is in reverse ratio to the economy that raised it, concrete testimony to a grandeur of spiritual ambition not matched on the ground.
‘It’s a credit to the foresight and expertise of the statue’s designer, Heitor da Silva Costa, that Christ has withstood the force of the three-hundred-kilometre-per-hour winds,’ says a commentator. ‘More than ever, in these terrible times, the Redeemer is a symbol of hope ’
‘Hey, watch this, Wheels,’ says Bethany excitedly. ‘Here comes the good bit.’
‘What do you mean by
‘Shhh!’ she commands. I watch her sharp little profile. From the attentive, bright-eyed way she’s observing the events unfolding on the TV, you might think she’d had a hand in orchestrating them. The picture has flipped to another angle. It’s shakier footage this time, live, taken from high above the city, across from the statue. The picture zooms in on the white-robed figure of Christ high above the forest below. ‘A figure of eternal peace,’ says the news commentator. ‘Standing on the mountain-top of Corcovado, in the world’s biggest urban park, encapsulating the spirit of Rio itself and the hopes of a hundred million Brazilians that one day the devastation wrought today by Stella will be…’ The camera seems to jolt, and he hesitates, only to be cut off by a disembodied Portuguese voice which interrupts him in a fast, excited burst. Apart from the earlier camera-jolt, or what seemed to be a camera-jolt, it’s not clear immediately from the image that anything is wrong. Have I missed something? More voices join in, in several languages, all suddenly talking at once, in apparent confusion, as though a hundred TV channels have merged. The image flickers and resettles, the zoom pulls out then hurtles back in. Technical problems.
Then the knowledge slams in, and my heart misses a beat, leaving a time-vacuum in my chest. I say sharply: ‘Oh Bethany, no.’ I can’t look at her because I know she’ll be grinning. I think,
The figure of Christ, now pictured in profile, sways and tilts forward.
Vertigo. Then a brief, yawning silence.
There are certain moments which you know you will recall for the rest of your life with perfect clarity. They are stamped with the blood’s instructions: you will remember because you have no choice. There’s a microsecond when the statue seems to do nothing, as if frozen in mid-decision, before it tips into its long and hallucinatingly beautiful death-dive, the white figure falling head-first in what starts as a slow lunge downwards as it disconnects from the plinth, then surrenders to the terrible grace of physics. I catch my breath. Its operatic scale is at once monstrous and riveting. The commentary has stopped. The only backdrop is a profound quiet. And then, with the stretched momentum of a fantasy or a lucid dream, the figure crashes into the mountainside, bouncing like a giant skittle and shattering into fragments as it goes: first one arm cracks and flies off, and then the other, then the torso itself snaps in two, the pieces tumbling at angles to drop into the thick smear of gas below, a mixture of smoke and oil and rain and cloud. A liquidised mirage of a place that might be Heaven and might be—
Watching it, and recognising it, I go hot and cold.
Bethany’s sky-diver.
‘Oh please no,’ whispers a man’s voice on the TV. ‘No, no, no, no, no.’ The silence broken, they all begin talking at once, shock-stimulated into a babble of disbelief, excitement and despair.
I belong to a generation that has seen statues and icons and buildings come tumbling down on TV: Lenin in Russia, the Berlin Wall, Saddam in Baghdad, the Twin Towers. But those topplings meant something to those who caused them. What does this mean? Who is to blame? What can one read into a random catastrophe, an out-of- the-blue event, an ‘act of God’?
Nothing. In place of an explanation, however grotesque, there is a void.
Without a word to Bethany, because I am unable to speak, I swivel round and roll out at high speed, a ball of revulsion trapped in my throat.
That night, at home, I turn on the TV and they are showing it again, and again and again because they know from experience that we can never get our fill, that it cannot become real until every detail has been absorbed and digested and processed and re-imagined. And sure enough, the swell of chatter in the wake of Christ’s epic fall has burgeoned into an international, interfaith Babel of opinion and emotion. There are weather experts, structural engineers, geophysicists, stonemasons, religious leaders, psychologists and even a conceptual artist dissecting the event. It’s established that soapstone, from which the statue was made, is highly weather-resistant, and unlikely to give in to strong winds, even at massive accelerations. But an engineer argues that if the base had been hit by a heavy object — not impossible given the colossal amount of debris sucked into the sky — then the statue could have become dislodged, balancing only by force of its weight. ‘Just look at where the statue stood: you can’t get much more exposed than on a mountain-top. Winds at that speed, and at that height…’ Another expert weighs in: it was not an accident waiting to happen, but ‘a freak convergence of weather and structural physics’. The net is buzzing with conspiracy theories. Christ’s fall was caused by a remotely triggered mini-bomb, part of a ‘9/11-style Jewish plot’. No, it was executed by Muslims on a hate mission. It was Iran’s revenge. Clashing opinions and interpretations vie for dominance in an atmosphere of excitement tipping into mass panic. The statue was slammed into by a flying object. It wasn’t struck by anything: it had merely eroded more than anyone realised. The Brazilian government knew this but covered it up. It was in extraordinarily good condition. No velocity of wind could wreak that damage on an object weighing a thousand tonnes. A toddler could have felled it with a single swipe.
Depressingly, the ‘fall of the Redeemer’ debate gathers momentum, obliterating the hurricane story. A radical Islamist cleric has claimed it’s ‘the judgment of Allah’, which has set a predictable chain of events — outcry, counter-attack, death threats — in motion. Anti-Muslim rioting flares across the world, countered by anti-Christian demonstrations and the burning of crosses: a war of ideologies, sparked by a falling chunk of stone. There are arguments about the dangers of iconography, the dangers of religion, the dangers of literalism, the dangers of scaremongering. Again and again, along with millions, I watch the fall of Christ, mesmerised.
But slowly, as the hours pass, sanity creeps back and the statue’s fall — which killed no one — is finally put in the context of the wider destruction the weather has caused. By the time Hurricane Stella concludes its two-day rampage, conservative estimates say that it has wiped out four thousand lives in Rio de Janeiro. The aerial images show hectare upon hectare of residential suburbs, of industrial estates and sprawling favelas laid waste, littered with slowly drying debris, corpses and rubble. The disaster relief agencies pour aid in, doing their utmost to prevent the spread of disease. But already, there are reports of typhoid. These are images I cannot bear. But I know that Bethany will be watching, chewing her green gum, soaking up the horror like a sunbather who can’t catch enough rays.
When I eventually get through to Frazer Melville he assures me that Hurricane Stella hitting Rio on the date Bethany predicted is, to use the jargon, ‘statistically insignificant’. Meteorology, he insists eloquently, is a notoriously inexact science, and much of it is simply guesswork. There are plenty of freak forecasts on the internet: Bethany could well have been trawling those. It’s easy enough to be taken unawares — as many were with Stella. But it’s just as easy to say you knew it was coming.
‘It’s like trying to second-guess a bucking bronco. Bethany got lucky, that’s all.’
‘If lucky’s the word. But what about your phone call? You sounded excited.’
‘Coincidences are exciting. So exciting I had to wake someone up at an ungodly hour. You were the obvious person. For which my apologies.’
‘A thousand to one, you said,’ I persist. ‘Is that statistically insignificant too?’
He sounds unfazed. ‘The good news is, I owe you dinner.’
Three evenings later Bethany’s sky-diver drawing, which I have ripped down from the wall of the art studio, lies in a folder at my feet in La Brasserie des Arts. I hate to eat alone only marginally less than I hate to microwave ready-meals or order takeaways. But by now I know the staff at La Brasserie well enough to have a favourite table, and to be greeted personally by the manager. Who smiles at me encouragingly when he hears that tonight, for once, I will have company other than Psychiatry Today.
