Carioca Fletch

On the wall, either side of a battery radio, were magazine pictures of Jesus and the Pope.

A vast crowd was collecting outside the house.

Marilia said, “Idalina would like to know if you’d like coffee.”

“Yes. Thank her.”

Idalina flicked her wrist, and more children darted out.

Then she sat in a tall-backed wooden chair with wide arms. She gathered the hems of her long white dress around her ankles.

She indicated with a sweep of her hand that Marilia and Fletch should be seated in chairs of their choosing.

Fletch took a humble seat in a kitchen-styled chair.

As they waited silently, children brought them cups of very strong, very sweet coffee.

A few adults came into the room, four women, two men. They were introduced to Fletch as Idalina’s children and grandchildren. Fletch stood to greet each of them and didn’t really get their names.

Each stared at him, round-eyed. They didn’t seem willing or able to breathe normally. They backed into chairs along the walls.

Finally, the one for whom everyone apparently had been waiting arrived: a man in his fifties, shirtless, in proper black shorts and sandals. His hair was neatly combed.

“I speak English,” he said, shaking Fletch’s hand. “I am Janio Barreto Filho. I have worked many years as a waiter, in Copacabana.” He stared into Fletch’s eyes a long, breathless moment. Then, old enough to be Fletch’s father, he said, “I am your son.” In one movement, he hugged Fletch to him and embraced him hard. There was a choked sob in Fletch’s ear. “We are so glad you have come back.”

Twenty-three

“I will speak English so good as I can,” the middle-aged Janio Barreto Filho said. “Mother says to me you want me to bring to life for you the facts of what happened.”

“Yes,” Fletch said. “Please.”

“If this will help you tell us who murdered you …”

Barreto Filho sat in a cushioned chair along the back wall of the house. Stately as a duchess, Idalina Barreto sat in her tall chair along the side wall. Fletch and Marilia sat along the other side wall.

Adult relatives sat in the other chairs. Four stood near the door. Children sat on the dirt floor. The windows were filled with people listening.

The area in front of the house was crowded with people.

From somewhere in the neighborhood the distinct sound of a television ceased.

But, of course, practicing drums could still be heard.

As Janio Barreto Filho spoke, he was interrupted, questioned, reminded, and corrected by his mother and other adults inside and outside the house. Marilia helped to translate the difficult parts.

Listening intently, as the room under the tin roof in the sun became hotter, the air thicker, Fletch put together a continuous narrative to take away with him, to dissect and analyse later.

This may be a story, Janio Barreto Filho said, of a father who may have been right.

After all these years, my mother would like to know.

My father, Janio Barreto, was a handsome man, fair of hair and skin, well built, very lively, believed to be the best dancer in all the favela, maybe all of Rio de Janeiro. At least people say they enjoyed watching him the most. Sometimes, serving young people from North America, one or two from Chile or Argentina, in the hotels of Copacabana, I have thought of him, as this was always as he was described to me, light in color and as unconcerned with the sad little things in life as a rich person.

It is said he came from near Sao Paulo, perhaps the descendant of one of the North Americans from the South of the United States who came to that area at the end of your Civil War, to try to continue their plantation, slave-owning lives there. Many such came, and, of course, such is the beauty and seductiveness of our women, it was not long before they too became a part of the Brazilian population, their children having black and Indian blood and therefore unable to keep their brothers and sisters in bondage.

But you were truly fair, and came to the favela Santos Lima like a welcome thunder-storm in midwinter heat, casting your bolts of lightning everywhere. Why you came here, perhaps you could tell us now.

You were fourteen or fifteen when you arrived, full of your juices, full of laughs and smiles, being here, there, everywhere at once. As soon as you came to the favela, everyone could not have enough news of you: Where is Janio? What has Janio done now? Did you hear what Janio did last night? When the pantaloons of the corrupt policeman were pasted on the statue of Saint Francis, when the new bicycle of the storekeeper was found in a bedroom of the brothel, when the shit-dam suddenly appeared around the big house a few of the faithful had built for the strict North American missionary, everyone knew you did it, and laughed with you, and stroked your fair hair.

The prestige of any girl you lay with rose in the favela. I suppose some of the girls lied about this, as it seems impossible to me—a man who enjoys life as much as any other—that one boy could have granted such prestige to so very many girls. In my own youth, being your acknowledged son, too much was expected of me. Going down the street I had to protect myself, not only from girls, but from their mothers as well. It is true that the favela Santos Lima is known to have many more fair people than any other favela in Rio de Janeiro.

Of course you took on friends, a gang of three or four boys, two of whom were Idalina’s brothers. Together you spent the days on the beaches, wrestling, swimming, playing soccer, the nights drinking and dancing and gambling, increasing the prestige of girls individually and raising mischief.

Now, Idalina’s father was a man of great dignity. Although he worked as a conductor on a trolley car, he spent his life studying to be a bookkeeper. He never succeeded in finding work as a bookkeeper, but he prepared himself. It was his fervent wish at least to hand on to his sons the idea of being a bookkeeper.

He did not share in the favela’s general idolatry of Janio Barreto. He felt you were leading his sons astray, giving them a liveliness that was not natural to them or in keeping with the idea of keeping books.

Through people he knew at the samba school, finally he succeeded in getting his sons jobs on a fishing boat. But the old men who owned the fishing boat made the condition highly irksome to old Fernando that they would only hire his sons to work on the fishing boat if they could hire Janio Barreto as well. Whether the idea was that they believed my uncles needed your leadership and brains, even though at first you knew nothing about the sea, being from the interior of Brazil, or whether it was the idea of the elders to get you to sea and therefore away from the favela some hours of the week and therefore cut down on the mischief and population growth, or whether they wanted, by being your employers, to be the first to know and tell of your pranks is unknown to me. To get his sons employed, Fernando had no choice but to agree.

So you went on the fishing boat with the Gomes brothers, and soon there were stories of a dead cold fish five feet long being put in the bed of the most precise bachelor in the favela while he slept (it was sad he never slept in his bed or ate fish again), of a fishing-boat race which caused an older captain, whom you had taunted unmercifully, to become so determined to win at any cost that he rammed his own dock under full sail at such high speed he smashed his boat to slivers.

Fernando put up with all this with resignation. At least his sons had jobs, and there was hope that after a while working hard at sea, they would come to the idea of bookkeeping.

But when you began to call upon his daughter Idalina, coo to her through the window, spread flowers you stole from the cemetery all over the roof of the house, Fernando went into a rage.

Nor did he consider it funny when, on the night of his Saint’s Day and perhaps he had had a bit too much to drink and lay in a stupor, you came along and shaved off only half of his mustache.

Then, at the age of eighteen, when most young men consider it wise and appropriate to be humble, apparently goaded by Fernando’s open disapproval of you, you announced to the whole favela your intention of making Idalina your wife.

The favela was delighted. They knew marriage would do you no harm, not slow you