Shivering, I passed the gun over to him. He got up by himself.
“Now, let’s find our way out of here.”
Chapter 24
We walked out of Camila’s house and changed our plans once again. Instead of walking down the steps to the bottom of Gloria Santa, Renato said the safest, easiest way to reach the lower grounds would be through the cable car that linked the top of the slum to the bottom.
The heat in Rio created a goo in the air that made it heavy and difficult to breathe. But for the first time, I noticed the sky had an overcast of dark clouds about to dish out an ocean of rain above. Gusts of wind swooshed in and out of windows, pushed garbage cans to the ground, and stirred roof tiles that seemed about to rip apart.
Renato acted as though his energy had been replenished. Maybe this sudden twist in his physical condition was from how his body reacted to the herbs Fátima had given him. Perhaps it was due to the absence of the scorching sun in the sky, which dried out the life force of living beings.
Such a change might also have been related to the gun, because once he took hold of it, he went into an improved, self-assured state of mind. His physical condition, even his walking posture, soared once had the pistol in his hand.
Either way, Renato had gotten better after spending less than an hour stretched over Camila’s couch. And that was good enough for me.
When I asked about the cable car, or why he hadn’t suggested it before, Renato said it was because it was the most well-guarded entrance to the slum. A direct way to its summit, to the place where narcotics were kept hidden before being dispatched to the black market.
“And why are we going there now?” I asked.
“Because of the crowd rioting. There’s too much going on for the police to worry about us going down the cars.”
The sky dimmed to barely black, mostly because of overcast clouds, but also due to being late in the evening. We trailed along corridors of damp and blotched walls. While we marched over seedy paths, I remembered when Marlon and I had visited the Loretto Chapel, in New Mexico, where the marvelous engineering and the sanctity of faith met. Inside the chapel, a spiral wooden staircase towered up without a single nail being hammered. Rumor is that St. Joseph, patron of carpenters, blessed a stranger with the plans to build the structure that even today gets engineers flabbergasted.
Gloria Santa was no marvelous work of art, even though its not-caving-in could certainly be regarded as a miracle. It was a place where no engineer had ever set foot, aside from assembling the cable car and setting up its supporting towers. Yet, Gloria Santa sparked a resemblance to Loretto Chapel inside my mind.
Both had been built by unnamed strangers. Both had been towered up and held together in inconceivable ways. Both had stairs leading up and down.
And both had death as a recurring visitor. They only diverged in God’s presence. While one seemed to be a bold statement of his earthly affairs, the other was the exact opposite. Gloria Santa had been taken over by monsters.
Renato walked ahead of me, carrying the pistol in his hand. He went on slowly, not hopping over two steps on each stride, but certainly straighter on his feet as I followed behind. We crossed the hill sideways, toward the cable car upper entrance. Night slid into the sky, dawning the veil of darkness over the whole of Rio. But for whatever reason, in Gloria Santa, the night seemed darker, and certainly louder due to the rumbling at its feet.
The cable car top platform, as though willing to preserve consistency with local architecture, appeared to be altogether makeshift, blending itself into the uneven walls and crooked roofs that populated the favela. Its foundations crossed random buildings in diagonal lines, splitting the sight of poverty in two.
The platform had its pillars and walls coated in red paint. Weak white lights that surrounded the setting reducing the red to a taint of diluted blood, just like the blemishes on the ground of the clinic. I didn’t notice any ticket window from where we might find our entrance to the cars. As a matter of fact, even if there was a ticket window, we wouldn’t be able to buy anything from it. We were both broke.
Silence engulfed the platform, its support cables swaying slightly under wind gusts, but not carrying trolleys in nor out.
“Is it closed?” I asked Renato. I tugged at the corner of a peeling wall and pulled myself over the steps. I looked down from an upper vantage point over the cable car station. Buildings draped the face of Gloria Santa in its entirety. They tightly streamed down the hill, rooftops poking out here and there, threatening to cascade down the steep rocky slope after any minor nudge—a castle made out of poker cards.
Filtered through the layer of a drizzle that had started falling, bonfires blazed over at the bottom of the slum, its shine bouncing up against the brick walls more vividly than any light bulb in the alleyways.
“Trolleys are probably under a halt. Let me look around,” Renato replied. We went up more steps. They led into a coverage that resembled a waiting place for trolleys. And a gate locked up with chains stated that service was shut for the day.
Renato walked toward the gate and leaned his good arm against it, producing a rattling that gave me chills. We were still two people being hunted, and even though we hadn’t come by any drug soldier between Camila’s house and the cable
