I wiggled away from it. The dog yanked back, a scruffy mutt with a black and white bristle that seemed desperate, even more lost than I was.
He smelled the pain in my flesh, the fear of losing it all, the thirst and hunger in my stomach. I heaved up and pulled my feet out of the bog into which I had been thrown, the dog lowered his head, as if a moving human were a threat. But then he wagged his tail.
“Hey, little boy. Do you have a name?” I said.
I looked around and saw no signs of officers Pinto and Rôla, no signs of the men in SWAT uniforms. A few paces away, the cliff from where I would have fallen led directly onto the rooftops of a wooden house—the first non-brick one I had seen—that for whatever reason hadn’t been carried away by the force of water. There was a sinkhole at the end of the gutter to protect the houses below, but it was not sufficient to the amount of rain that poured over the city last night.
I tucked the pistol in my pants. My jeans had been threadbare in many spots, my skin bruised in most of them. I found myself under a thick coat of brown mud. But the dog didn’t notice, or didn’t mind. I briefly pet his head, he jumped up at me, barked, and asked for more.
His happiness was like a piece of paradise in this hell called Gloria Santa.
“I’m calling you Barkley. What do you think?”
He barked again and wagged his tail. The happiness from that little animal was almost unknown to me. I had been away from cheerful moments for a long time, despite the fact I had only been in Rio for, what, five days?
I smiled deeply, truly, wholeheartedly.
Then I cried.
Chapter 27
The sun came up and before long it was boiling hot. I waded out of the bog, Barkley followed after me, we entered into a new alleyway as seedy as the others. I headed straight for the bottom of the slum. The Gloria Santa jigsaw now seemed easier. From up top I could see my way out. I just needed to go down. Down to the bottom.
Looking up I saw the cable car support cables stretching themselves down to the foot of the hill. No trolleys were moving. Maybe they were waiting for Renato’s body to be picked up. Or for the police to resume their search for me.
People leaving their crooked homes for another workday stared at me. Freshly baked bread teased my nostrils. I didn’t fret. I threaded my way down ragged, dirty, unrelenting.
“Emily!” someone shouted. I heard it clearly. A female voice, soft, tender. Who was calling me out?
I looked down a dark alleyway, one that forked sideways between buildings from the slope I was coming down. Its interior still a dense black hiding the sun poking out from the horizon. Was someone in there, hidden, searching for me?
“Joanne?” I shouted.
No one replied. A door slammed shut, already frightened early in the morning. I pricked my ears. Someone was around, someone looking for me, willing to help.
Barkley waited, staring at me, his tongue hanging out, thirsty. How come? A hailstorm had just fallen over Rio, yet the dog didn’t drink?
I continued on. The quicker I reached the bottom of Gloria Santa, the better.
“Come on, Barkley, we’ll find water for you along the way,” I said.
Down we went. Down the slope, steeper on each step. The whole slum seemed to be tilting up, as though vertical to the ground, willing to fold itself up, munch itself down, and spread brick crumbs all over Rio.
“Hey, sweetheart.” That voice again. No, not that voice. A man now, with the tone of someone that wants to hump me. Oh, wait, was it . . . ?
“Marlon? Where are you, Marlon?” I uttered.
I swept my surroundings with quick eyes and held my breath. Did Marlon fly into Rio to help find me? Was he inside Gloria Santa? If so, he loved me, he most definitely regretted cheating on me. I needed his heat, his arms to curl myself into and hide away. I could almost smell his cologne, musk and peppermint, coming into my nostrils, engulfing my body, taking me away. I forgive you, Marlon.
But he wasn’t there. Nobody was there. There were only lies woven into those walls.
I felt my strength leaving me. My knee buckled, the one that had been injured when I went down the gutters of that favela. Then a strong hand tugged on my shoulders.
After that, my next recollections are like pictures scattered over black chalkboard: my face bathed in water streaming out from a hole in the wall. My body slumped into a mattress, covered by light blue sheets. A piece of bread in my mouth. The bedsheet yanked aside after yet another nightmare haunted my nap.
In all those memories, there was the faithfulness of the dog that had tagged along with me, and the care provided by Fátima.
“Have they come for me?” I asked her, still half awake, half dreaming.
Fátima replied with a wavering body and a mouth shut. Then the nightmare took over. The nightmare of being awake. I was back inside a building, walls ricocheting with despair and wails. In which I wasn’t shackled by grip of iron, but by the frailty of my joints.
“Where’s my gun? Where’s my gun?” I said after recovering the sharpness of my conscious mind on what seemed to be hours later. “I need it, Fátima. They’ve killed Renato. Renato is dead,” I continued.
Fátima listened to my words with waving hands, uneased by the invisible barrier that separated our worlds. The great wall of language.
I hoisted my torso up. A certain dizziness, a
