long as you took care of the first three first, just about everything else was boa vida—the good life.
Although he joined the army and loved being a ground soldier, he would always be drawn to life on the docks. He loved the smell of the mountains of burlap bags of coffee or boxes of bananas on the wharf awaiting loading onto the rows and rows of ships from all over the world, the scent even overpowering the big diesel and oil engines; he loved the power and brutish efficiency of the cranes, tenders, tugs, and barges, all fighting for position and attention like bees in a hive; and he especially loved the grimy, gritty resolve of the men and women who worked the docks. Loading hundreds of tons of produce aboard a ship in just a couple hours might seem impossible for most men, but the workers did it day in and day out, in any kind of weather, for laughably low wages. They griped, groused, swore, fought, threatened, and complained every minute, but they got the job done because it was their way of life and they loved it.
Sometimes Pereira wished he could go back to the hard but fulfilling life of his boyhood. The people of the docks taught him how to be a man. It was not an easy tutelage, nothing he would ever want to experience again, but something he could look back on and be proud of how he got through it, proud of how well he learned and adapted, and anxious to pass along his knowledge and experience to his children.
“Manuel?” Pereira turned. His wife of two years, Lidia, stepped into the room, breastfeeding his son, Francisco. “Should you be sitting in the window like that?”
“You’re right,” he said, and moved his chair back into the shadows. They lived in a little two-room fourth-floor tin and wood shanty over the Onassis Line Southeast Pier, one of the busiest and oldest sections of the Porto do Santos. Almost five thousand families lived in this roughly one-square-kilometer shantytown, the homemade wood and tin cottages stacked and jumbled atop one another like thousands of cockroaches in a box. He knew he should be more careful—it would be ridiculously easy for the Policia Militar do Estado to scan hundreds of windows in just a few seconds from the harbor, an aircraft, or a nearby wharf.
But Pereira felt very safe here among the other shanties and thousands of people all around him. There was no question that one third of his neighbors would gladly turn him in for the reward he knew was on his head—but he also knew that the other two thirds of his neighbors would avenge him on the spot, and the next morning the informant’s body would be found floating in the harbor, minus his tongue and testiculos. The people here were permitted to destroy themselves, not assist the government in destroying others; everyone survived by helping their neighbors, not ratting them out. Justice was swift and sure here on the docks—and justice belonged to the people, not the government, as it should.
Lidia sat on the arm of his chair, bent down, and kissed her husband deeply. “My sexy little chief of security,” he told her after their lips parted.
“I am nothing of the kind,” she said. “But I will be your nagging bitching wife if that is what it will take to keep you alive.”
Manuel smiled hungrily. Sniping at each other was how their love game usually started, and it delighted him. Lidia was barely one generation removed from her native Bororo Indian relatives from the interior, people who both lived off the land and worshiped it, people who were spiritually attuned to the forest, the wildlife, and the very vibrations of the interior regions. The Bororo, especially the women, were fiery, brash, and emotional—the three things that Pereira most desired in women. They lived for one thing: attracting a mate and having as many children as possible before age thirty. Most Bororo women were grandparents by age forty-five.
Manuel had met her while he was in the army, in Mato Grosso state. Lidia’s nineteen-year-old husband was a drug smuggler; she had just turned twenty, mother of a seven-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter. Manuel had never met the daughter…because he had accidentally killed her when the husband used her as a shield during a pursuit when they tried to serve a warrant on the husband.
Manuel was devastated by the daughter’s death. He had, of course, seen many dead children in his military career—children were an inexpensive and highly disposable commodity in most of Brazil, especially the interior. Even so, Manuel would never have knowingly raised his weapon against a child. But he was also struck by the way Lidia handled her grief. She didn’t blame the military as he expected—she put the blame squarely where it belonged, on her husband and on herself for allowing her bastardo husband to have any contact at all with the children, especially with drugs, large amounts of cash, and wanted criminals around. She was a tough, strong, principled woman, yet she tore herself apart with grief.
She also knew that no other man in her tribe would have her now: she’d lost a child, and as the only surviving family member was therefore responsible for the deaths of her husband and child and for outsiders coming into their village. Manuel could see the hatred building already in the villagers’ faces. If she didn’t commit suicide shortly after the funeral, she would either be gang-raped and turned into a lower-caste prostitute or servant, or driven out of the village. She would soon be nothing but a walking ghost.
Manuel attended the child’s funeral, a half-Catholic, half-animistic ritual cremation, then stayed to question the widow. Bororo Indians usually don’t cooperate with outsiders, much less with the authorities, but Lidia was ready to break that code of silence in order to rid her village of the drug smugglers. She became his secret witness, then a confidential informant—then, rather unexpectedly, his lover. They had their first child secretly—having a bastard child by someone outside their tribe was strictly forbidden and would have resulted in death for the child and banishment for her—and then he sent for her shortly after he left the PME. They were married in the Roman Catholic Church just days after she received her first communion.
Although native women were usually scorned by the mixed-race Euro-Indians of modern Brazil, Lidia wisely adapted herself: she became a Catholic, learned modern Portuguese and even some English, and taught herself to mask her own native accent. But more important, she discovered how not to belittle herself in the eyes of other Brazilians. Life on the docks of Porto de Santos became just another jungle to her, and she quickly made it her home.
While his son sucked hungrily on her right breast, Manuel opened Lidia’s white cotton shirt and began to suck her ample milk-swollen left breast. “Maybe I will be your baby now, Mama,” he said. “Go ahead and nag—I’m not listening anymore.”
“Leave some for your son, you greedy pig,” she said in mock sternness, but she did not move out of his hungry reach. The sensation of both her son and her husband nursing her was one of the most sensual experiences she’d ever had, and she felt the wetness between her legs almost immediately. She reached down and felt him beneath his cutoff canvas trousers, stiff and throbbing already, and she gasped as his left hand slowly lifted the hem of her dress and inched its way up her thigh. “Ai, ai, mon Dios,” she moaned as she spread her legs invitingly. “Let me put Francisco down, and then you may have all you wish, you big baby.”
“I think we are both happy right where we are, my love,” he said, reaching higher and finding her wet mound.
“If I fall off this chair it will be your fault, bastard.”
“If you fall off the chair I expect you to fall on me, lover,” he said, “and then I guarantee you will not be slipping off.”
“You filthy horny pig, you are disgusting,” she said breathlessly as she grasped him tighter through his trousers. He chuckled as he suckled—they both knew that Indian women were a hundred times hornier than any normal Brazilian male, which said a whole lot for the men in Brazil. “How dare you touch me there when you know your son might walk in on us at any moment?”
“I always thought Manuelo should learn from the best,” Manuel said.
“Carajo,” she gasped as she thrust her hips forward, impatiently driving his fingers toward her and pressing her breast tightly into his face. “Filthy horny bastard. You would shamelessly put your fingers into your wife’s chumino and continue to suck her breasts while your son watched? You are a monster.”
“I would do whatever I felt like to my wife and take great delight into pleasuring her any way I chose,” he said, roughly scraping his beard against her nipple.
“Pig. Fucking whoring pig.” There was only one other place where his beard felt better on her body than on her breast, and she couldn’t wait until he rubbed it down there. Thankfully she knew that Manuelo would probably not be home until dinnertime—they had at least an hour of privacy before the baby would awaken and her oldest son would return home. Her fingers started fumbling for the buckle on his belt. “Let’s see if this is really yours or if you just had a banana in your pocket this whole time, you filthy whoremonger.”
He moaned again as she worked on his belt…but then he heard steps on the wooden stairs outside, rapid-fire running steps, and his body froze. Lidia detected the change immediately, got to her feet, and wordlessly retreated to a curtained-off area of the second room with the baby. Manuel was on his feet, an automatic pistol that was
