social networking sites about have you heard Tita Maria and Duane Duarte and Bonde do Role? I’ve already moved on to the next thing after the next thing. I could take you to the clubs and the bars and the sound systems but once I’d taken you, that would be the end of it, you know? For four decades I’ve surfed the sea of music that breaks around the rocks of this most lovely of cities. It’s tiring and relentless and it’s no way for a middle-aged man to live, but the moment you lose the wave, you go under.
Because I’m a middle-aged man still living on teenage overhang, when I hear the word “masters” I expect tape. I expect digibeta, DAT; the romantic part of me hopes for reels. The masters for
“Can I hear some?”
“It’s a hard drive.” When Guinle left the police, like most of the cops who paid enough to be safe up in the favelas, he set up a private detective agency. His specialism was kidnappings: footballers’ mothers and pets. Now he runs a successful stable of gumshoes so he no longer has to hack security cameras or go through anyone’s garbage with chopsticks and only tackles those cases that interest him. I know him from the days when the New Bossa swept through the city. There’s an old musicians’ gaydar: we recognised each immediately at our tables on opposing sides of the dark, noisy club. It’s the set of the body, the sit and slight lean, the tilt of the head that says that whatever else you are hearing, you are always listening to the music.
I say, “I could be buying someone’s collection of boy-porn.”
Guinle holds out his phone. A set of white earbuds is plugged into it.
“Do you want to listen to it?”
“Have you listened to it?” Panic snatches sudden and cold at my heart. I can’t bear it that Guinle could have listened to the masters before me. It makes it dirty, used. It’s almost a sex thing, like someone else’s girlfriend after an indecently short interval.
“Not a note. What do you take me for? I just copied it because I knew you’d ask me that.”
“Promise me you won’t…” The need in my voice is ridiculous. Have some dignity man.
“I’ll give you until tomorrow morning. Once you’ve remembered that other little matter.”
I slide the envelope of cash across the table. It’s a big envelope, A4, too full to seal down the flap. There’s a pheromone of notes, of ink and hands and trade. Guinle scoops it into his briefcase. He’s too much a carioca to count the notes and too much a pro to query his clients’ cash calls.
“I make no representations about the state of the contents. You asked me to get the masters, I got them.”
“I must ask you how you did that sometime,” I say but I can hear my voice go off the moment, the way you hear it when a singer loses a cover of a song he doesn’t really understand or believe in. Just words. Because I have it. I have the lost
“Yes, you really must,” says Guinle.
I have a ritual. Everyone has a ritual. I know a great great singer who can only face an audience if he’s masturbated. You’d know him too. He’s a household name. There are footballers who have to put on one boot first, or never wear two the same colour, or carry a picture of the Pope or Our Lady next to their hearts. Truckers bless their rigs, coders bless their keyboards, policemen bless their guns. And then there is sex. There is always sex. Some have times and places and positions; some have foreplay that’s scripted and rehearsed as a high mass. Some cannot achieve anything with the lights on. For some it’s clothing: something they have to wear, or have the other wear, without which they cannot be remotely aroused.
I practice my ritual in the best room in the apartment. It’s not the biggest or the best aired or the quietest but it has a breathtaking view out over Botafogo and Guanabara to the hills of Niteroi beyond. Out of the right-hand window are Leme Morro and the Sugarloaf. In the evening, in the sudden lilac twilight when the lights come like a necklace around the shoulders of the moros, it is heartbreakingly beautiful. Here’s what I keep in this room. A chair of course; an old, deep leather armchair with the springs going so I can sag into it. A beer fridge. A small side table for the beer and the remote. The sound system, in the holy corner where the two views meet. This is my listening room. This is my church. I take my place in the chair. I’ve had it positioned scientifically to get the best surround sound separation. My cleaner is under orders never to move it on pain of instant dismissal. I settle my fat ass deep into the seat. It’s important to get comfortable. I’m going to be there for a while. I take one Antarctica from the fridge and pop the can. Rio spreads like wings on either side of me. I love her so hard it hurts. Then I lift the remote control and start Seu Alejandro’s
On the first listen through I never do anything. I need to get the whole recording. The whole concept, entire, the song order, the big idea. Marcelo from the Tuesday Afternoon Boys calls it the gestalt. He’s some kind of therapist in it. Call that first pass the
But there are holes. There are hideous holes. Trans-Amazonian-Highway holes, that can swallow an entire truck. The main vocals are unmixed. On some of the songs Seu Alejandro sounds like he is bellowing like an old and angry beach bum, others like he is humming to himself trying to find his car in a supermarket car park. Arrangements are fragmentary; there are suggestions of ’70s funk horn sections or his signature trip-hop rhythms, which he lifted from another age, another culture and made unmistakably Tropicalismo. Back vocals are either non-existent or too far to the front and the bass is painfully low in the mix. There is a screamingly frustrating twenty three second gap in the middle of “Immaculate Conception” and track 8: “Bottle Club”, just ends, full stop, whether by fire or intention I can’t tell. The title track doesn’t exist beyond an opening carnaval blast of drums, brass and what sounds like sampled traffic noise. Astonishing, but a shard. Again, this could be a Seu Alejandro joke or the effects of the fire. The last two tracks are sketches: “Breakfast News” is an acoustic guitar piece—few ever tugged the heart so with his strings than Seu Alejandro, with suggestions of lyrics muttered into the mike; scraps and lines and euphonies. The final track, provisionally titled [a ghost samba] is his joyfully melancholy guitar with a severely simple cello line.
But it is Seu Alejandro. Unmistakably, gloriously Seu Alejandro.
I crack a fresh Antarctica and start the third listen. My hand is shaking. As I listen with the ear of savouring, the shake becomes worse until I can hardly hold my beer. My whole body is tight, every muscle like a drumskin; I am quivering as if trying to keep back tears. Not just tears, but the kind of uncontrollable, on-the-floor howling and quaking that leaves phlegm pouring from your nose and mouth, the kind men must never be seen doing, the kind men do when love walks away from them and they realise their lives have been lies. It’s the holes, those Amazonian holes; they join together into a void. How dare Seu Alejandro die and leave it incomplete and damaged? How dare Seu Alejandro leave me with just this? It is as abandonment as complete as any of my brief wives and girlfriends. I am bereft, I am furious with him.
It’s full dark now. The lights draw the curves of the bays and the breasts of the hills.
We are the Tuesday Afternoon Boys and every Tuesday afternoon we play at the Lagoa futsal court. We’ve been playing every Tuesday for seven years, ever since the first of us turned forty. In the afternoon the only other teams are skinny kids in basketball vests and baggy shorts. We don’t play them, they can dribble the ball around us
