Phenotypes E-Book

Paulo Scott

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 346

Beschreibung

Paulo Scott's second novel to appear in English probes the old wounds of race in Brazil; and in particular the loss of a black identity independent from the history of slavery. Exploratory rather than didactic; a story of crime; street-life; and regret as much as a satirical novel of ideas; Phenotypes is a seething masterpiece of rage and reconciliation.

Leseprobe

‌

This edition published in 2022 by And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New Yorkwww.andotherstories.org

Originally published in Portuguese by Alfaguara as Marrom e Amarelo in 2019

Copyright © Paulo Scott, 2019. Published by arrangement with Literarische Agentur Mertin Inh. Nicole Witt e. K., Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Translation and translator’s note copyright © Daniel Hahn, 2022

All rights reserved. The rights of Paulo Scott to be identified as author of this work and of Daniel Hahn to be identified as the translator of this work have been asserted.

ISBN: 9781913505189 eBook ISBN: 9781913505196

Editor: Jeremy M. Davies; Copy-editor: Fraser Crichton; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Cover Design: Tom Etherington. Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s PEN Translates programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

Obra publicada com o apoio do Ministério da Cultura do Brasil / Fundação Biblioteca Nacional. This work was published with the support of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture / National Library Foundation.

Contents

PHENOTYPESPhenotypes in Particular: A Translator’s Afterword

‌For my father

The official came up, opened the door without pausing to ask permission, stepped inside and gestured for me to join him. I stood in front of eight unfamiliar people waiting for me, those eight who made up the commission devised by the new government to find an adequate solution, just the latest in the new government’s long list of mistaken adequate solutions, to the chaos that had resulted, suddenly, from implementing a policy of racial quotas for students in Brazil, that sleepwalking country, the giant ex-colony of the Portuguese crown in South America, branded across the world as a place of ethnic harmony, of oh so very successful miscegenation, a place where the practice of white men raping black and indigenous women had been allowed to run wild for centuries, and, as in almost all those lands christened the New World, had been assimilated, mitigated, forgotten, a place where, in the twentieth century, nobody ever dared, let alone seriously, to propose a law forbidding a black from getting together with a white, white with indigenous, indigenous with black, a country that’s number one in the rankings of the planet’s so-called racial democracies, an emblem of a kind of friendliness that is unique, indecipherable, and which people who don’t know any better tend to generalise as being a sign of the unrivalled warmth of Brazil. Without waiting for me or one of the eight to speak, the official just started right in on introducing me, making a mistake straight off the bat, the same mistake so many other inattentive people make, with my first name, calling me Frederico rather than Federico, despite the fact that he was actually looking at an A4 page printed in fourteen-point Arial with a short CV, giving my correct name, a CV that he, disregarding the existence of that old thing called Wikipedia, could only have assembled from announcements he’d picked out of a totally indiscriminate online search. He reported that I had been one of the founders of the Global Social Forum in Porto Alegre, that I was an important researcher into the so-called hierarchy of skin colours, on pigmentocracy and its logic in Brazil, on the perversity of colourism, on compensatory policies and their lack of understanding among the Brazilian élites, that I’d advised NGOs in Brazil, in Latin America and the rest of the world, that I’d consulted for Adidas, oh yes that’s right, Adidas, the famous German-founded company making high-performance sportswear, the man was foolish enough to emphasise, as if that were the high point of my biography, and I did consider interrupting him, saying like hell did I ever consult for Adidas, that I’d merely acted as intermediary for an agency that did advertising for them with some graffiti artists from the streets of Brasília for this series of videos they were making to stream on Vimeo, on YouTube, on Instagram, an action inspired by an old campaign produced in the US in the nineteen eighties around the slogan skateboarding is not a crime, but I ended up biting my tongue, I let him continue in the interests of keeping my blood pressure down as a forty-nine-year-old man already taking five milligrams of Naprix every morning to keep it under control, and the last person to be nominated by our distinguished new President of the Republic to be a part of this group of supposed worthies, and then, only then, when he reached the end, and not till he had given me a little good luck pat on the back, did he, the official who had got my name wrong, withdraw.

I sat down in the nearest chair knowing that the eight were waiting for something from me that might justify my arrival in the closing minutes of their first meeting. In my head, however, what predominated was the discomfort caused by the distance between my chair and theirs, the eight clumped together at the opposite end of the gigantic oval table, and also the contrast between my XXL skateboard freestyle T-shirt that sported the face of Ice Blue, the rapper from the Racionais MCs, Brazil’s best rap group ever, printed really big on the chest, my Drop Dead trousers in orange with navy-blue thread and my Rainha VL Paulista sneakers in black with grey that were totally wrecked, which was in no way accidental, and their clothes, not to mention my canine distrust towards them, the flashbacks that were surfacing now and getting all jumbled up in my head, like the talk my mother had with me and my brother Lourenço when I was seven and he was six to try to lessen his confusion at the insults that had come out of the filthy mouths of three of his little bastard classmates from pre-school, classmates who, as early as the second day of school, called him Golliwog, Sambo, Magilla Gorilla, because in a game of tag during recess he hadn’t submitted to their commands the way a Brazilian child who was considered black, according to the imaginary common law of those Brazilian children considered white in that year of nineteen seventy-three, was supposed to submit. Those sermons of my mother’s became commonplace in that same year of seventy-three, because I, wanting to defy her, wanting to make her responsible for this difference that hadn’t previously existed with any particular aggressiveness in my life and my brother’s, a difference that came to be reiterated through the mouths not only of a trio of irrelevant little pre-school demons but the mouths of older pupils, of some employees and possibly even the occasional careless teacher, about how we weren’t brothers really, not blood brothers, saying things about one of us being adopted, despite both him and me replying, in that way children do, withholding nothing, that yes we were, we were real brothers, never mind that by the standards of those who were asking, by the standards of Porto Alegre, by the standards of that Brazil of that year nineteen seventy-three, I, with my very fair skin and straight brown hair verging on the blond, was considered white, and he, my brother, with dark skin, dark brown curly hair verging on the black, albeit with the same hooked nose, kind of wide, as mine and the same mouth with a thinner upper lip and thicker lower lip like mine, was considered black, insisting on asking my mother what race we really were, ignoring her responses about how colours and races didn’t matter, that deep in our bones we were all the same, paying no mind to her assurances or to the fact that on the birth certificates drawn up at the Zone 2 Notary Office of the Porto Alegre Civil Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, according to the notary criteria implemented in the decade of the nineteen-sixties in the far south of Brazil, both he and I were registered as being mixed, while for her part, my mother, who knows, perhaps she was acknowledging all the while to herself that this business of one son being subjected to a kind of violence that the other son would never experience was a real piece of bad luck, just a seriously shitty quirk of fate, but of course speaking aloud the same words that would be repeated many times not only in the year seventy-three, but throughout my childhood, that we were all black, that she with her light skin and straight brown hair and my father with his dark if less dark than my brother’s skin and really curly black hair, and then my brother and I as well, that our family was a black family, even at my eighth birthday, when my aunt, my mother’s sister, showed up with her two kids, both considered white by the standards of nineteen seventy-four, not to mention the decades that followed, and with a cousin of theirs too, a proper little menace, oh so proud of his whiteness at that party of dark people, a kid my age, who, at a certain noisy interval in the process of children bonding at a birthday party, selected me as his adversary and started going on about how, in spite of my having hair that could be plastered down and lightened by the sun, my father’s hair was still all fuzzy, all frizzy, and it was only good for cleaning the mud off the sole of his own father’s shoe, his father who was white and had proper straight blond hair, and on account of which I watched for the conclusion of the series of games at that stage in the process of children bonding at a birthday party, when everyone was tired, bored or distracted, waiting for the moment when he, the menace, would let his guard down and move away from the area that was subject to adult observation and rescue, to approach him and, just like in all the thrillers I’ve ever watched on the three channels Brazil had in those days, bring my hands to his neck, push him against the wall and start choking him, growling I’m gonna kill you, then my dad’s gonna kill your dad, and only failing to carry the strangling through to more serious consequences because my two cousins, a few years older than me, if physically far less substantial, grabbed my arms, forcing me to abandon the only reaction that had seemed appropriate to me, that is, to finish that kid off once and for all, to finish off any white who talked shit about my father, and then that start of a long weekend with my father getting ready to leave the house for the Ararigboia Park football pitch where he was going to compete in a four-way contest between the civil police team and the military police team, and my mother asking him to take me along, and him saying there was no way because it was going to be a pretty tense competition, since any interactions between the two police forces were usually pretty tense, and besides there wouldn’t be anyone there who could look after me, and her saying she was sure he’d figure something out, and him getting annoyed but ending up surrendering to her request, and then, at the Ararigboia, him, my father, hearing that his team’s coach wasn’t going to show up because he’d had an attack of kidney stones and he was home on medication, meaning that the only person with enough good sense to take the coach’s position, which according to the rules couldn’t be left vacant, was my father himself, which meant in turn that he had to leave me with four guys who were already wearing the team kit while he went off to deal with the practical nuts and bolts of the substitution, replacing the name of the coach who hadn’t shown up and writing in the new guy who would be playing in my father’s place on the sign-up forms and on the squad list, and then the tallest of the guys wearing the team strip, a balding white guy, the moment my dad moved away to the other side of the pitch, asking hey is this kid really Ênio’s boy, and one of the other three answering well he looks like Ênio, the final two keeping quiet, and the tallest balding white one insisting but he’s too white, and a fifth guy dressed up in the same kit appearing behind me and immediately saying to the others so we got a new recruit on the team have we, and then, without giving me time to react, asking what’s your name kid, and me answering that it was Federico, trying to look at his face but finding it hard because he was standing with the sun right behind him, and the tall balding white guy saying I was Ênio’s son, and the new arrival saying whoah, that’s cool, a big strong kid, just like his dad, and running his weighty hand over my head saying whoah, Federico, you look like someone who’s gonna be a centre-forward-crushing defender, look how thick this kid’s legs are, fellas, my money’s on him, then heading off in the same direction as my dad, and me turning my attention back to the tall balding white guy, and the tall balding white guy with a dead-fish smile just looking at the other three while he scratched his chin and, at frantic micro-intervals, looking at me too, and what about that day in that week when there was no water for five days in Porto Alegre’s eastern zone, including our street, and my father was taking us, for the third night in a row, to one of the buildings where he worked as a civil police forensics expert, where we’d fill up two large containers with drinking water and have a shower, and it was late at night, and my brother and I were excited, an excitement that came from the fact that it was the fourth day running we didn’t have water back home, from it being late, about 11 p.m., but also from this argument we were having, the sort of pointless argument we were always getting into in those days of being brothers in their confrontation phase, an argument that started with an I’m having my bath first, which was answered with a no way you’re so not, you had yours first yesterday and the day before yesterday too, today it’s me going first, an argument that stretched out and which by the time my father emerged from the bathroom had already turned into shoves and insults, me attacking my brother with go fuck yourself, stupid little black dumbass, and him counterattacking with go shove it up your fag ass, desperate whitey wannabe, my father used to use that word wannabe when he wanted to refer to blacks with lighter skin who straightened their hair and were terrified of being taken for mulatto or of being recognised as black by someone who wasn’t black, and this ended up being enough for him to put down his wet towel, grab us by the collars of our T-shirts and drag us to the training and weights room of that civil police building, a mini-gym where in addition to the workout equipment there was a padded-floor ring for judo and boxing matches, for him to turn on the lights, make us climb into the ring, pick up a skipping rope saying that if we wanted to fight then he’d make us fight, tossing two pairs of gloves at our feet, telling us to put them on, telling us if we didn’t fight and while we fought didn’t keep on insulting one another he was going to wallop us with that rope, me looking at him saying sorry, him telling me not to say sorry to him, saying that I, being the oldest, was the one who had to set an example, telling us to just put the damn gloves on already and hug, taking the rope and tying us up tight saying we’d be staying there stuck to one another to think about what it was that made one brother belittle another brother like we were doing, turning out the lights of the mini-gym and leaving, locking the door, returning twenty minutes later to find us untied, lying on the floor of the ring, next to each other, or the Wednesday morning when a guy from my eighth-grade class, a shy sort of guy and a good student I actually got on with kind of well, without anybody noticing, put two bananas into the rucksack of a classmate in the break between lessons and she, one of the few black students in that school, when she came back to the classroom with two other classmates, realising her rucksack wasn’t in the position or the place where she’d left it, opened the zip and found the brown paper bag with the fruit inside, a paper bag on which somebody had written in magic marker Zoo Express, and one of the girls who was with her screamed oh, Jesus Christ, and went on repeating zoo, bananas, how horrible, so cruel, so disrespectful, ensuring there was no way the situation could possibly pass unnoticed by the rest of the class, a guy who ended up being exposed because he was on the school basketball team and I was also on the school basketball team, and the day after the banana incident, before practice started, when I went into the locker room to change into my kit, I caught him boasting to two other students, two of the ones who were on the handball team, which practised right before us, definitely the two most disturbed kids on the handball team, which was definitely the most disturbed of all the sports teams in the school, and when one of them asked whether she stank a lot or a little, that was when they noticed me, realising I was there doing nothing except listening to them, and me not bothering about them, and going off to practice like nothing had happened, but the next day, totally cool all of a sudden, walking over to the deputy principal’s office and reporting him, which led to his being suspended from school and then my summary exclusion from the circle of basketball team jocks by most of the other guys on the team, guys who started calling me traitor or snitch and freezing me out in every way until, two months later, I, who was basically the toughest bastard in the whole fucking jock hierarchy on the school basketball team anyway, quit going to practice, quit basketball entirely, and then one Saturday in October nineteen eighty-two I lied to my parents and to Bárbara, with whom I was starting to develop the kind of relationship that meant she could perhaps be characterised as my high-school girlfriend, claiming that I was getting a lift with two other school friends to the family house of one of them up in the city of Gramado and that I was going to be coming back on Sunday night, when really what I did was take a bus on my own up to Caxias do Sul for the Cio da Terra festival, an event that was taking place in the pavilions of the Grape Festival Event Park and which had been promoted by the organisers as the first open gathering of the local ‘gaúcho’ youth, a festival of arts and talk where there would be no censorship, there would be no sexual repression, there would be no police, there would be no military types carrying rifles and being a pain in the ass, and there I got together with some guys I met at the bus station to split a few big bottles of wine, a few German kuchen, a piece of Colony cheese and a few whole pork salamis, sating my thirst, my hunger, and then I split off from them and wandered among the groups of people scattered around the park, listening to the shows from a distance, observing, trying to learn what it was that those hippies who were all older than me knew and I hadn’t figured out yet, and it was only when it was time for Ednardo’s set, round about three in the morning, that I decided to go over and watch, standing about fifty metres from the stage, captivated by his lyrics, until, when the performance was nearly over, a white man aged about fifty, in a kind of trance, walked past me saying, on a loop, I’m not seeing all the black youth here, and me, negotiating with the sobriety which in that year was the norm for my life, pretty dull aside from the chaos introduced by Bárbara’s insanities, trailing after him, keeping my distance, also saying I’m not seeing all the black youth here, going around and reproducing his words, even after he, realising there was some total pain of a kid following in his footsteps, had given up on his trance, his walking around and his words.

Some of them looked straight at me, others looked at the screens of their phones, probably giving my name to Google in order to discover whatever they could discover about me, since I hadn’t appeared alongside them on the nominations list published in haste in the Federal Gazette the previous week by the new government, on the list that had been checked over for publication, on the list that in theory was meant to pacify the black students, the indigenous students and the white students who were in conflict in the country’s universities, but which, after it was confirmed and released to all the media, ended up having exactly the same effect as throwing petrol onto a bonfire. And then I felt ready to give at least a partial airing to the ghosts occupying my thoughts, ghosts that had also been those times when I felt uncomfortable being who I was, raised on the idea of being from a black family, an idea that became my identity, but moulded into a phenotype that jarred brutally with that identity, two factors that, when combined, expelled me forever from the generalisations of the game of he’s black and he’s white, giving me a huge non-place to manage, ghosts that made me, even according to the astonishing short-sightedness of the new government, simply the most convenient person to be there.

I have retained no memory of what I said at the start of my speech, but I do remember the moment when, after a few minutes, noticing in their eyes that, like me, they weren’t quite sure what they were doing on that commission, cutting through our ritualistic first interaction, I took a deep breath and said I only had the authority to appear before the eight of them because there’d been a day, an unforgiving August the tenth nineteen eighty-four, which, despite the years that had passed, continued to spin about in my head, a whirlwind in an eternal present, a day when I witnessed and experienced as I’d never witnessed and experienced before all the cowardice of the hierarchisation of skin colours practised in Brazil, all the cowardice of a psychological massacre, of a psychic disturbance of broad social reach, and which wasn’t going to be over any time soon, a day that had left me crazy for a good while, but afterwards had made me react, first violently, and then with some clarity. That was when the eight of them started to listen to me.

Sitting here on this plank-style wooden bench, one of those ones you still see in church community halls in neighbourhoods on the periphery of the city, for the first time in so many years, it’s obvious that what I’m feeling is a fear of this place, the Little Goat, better known as Billy’s Xis, the snack van serving meat and cheese ‘xis’ sandwiches on the plot of land at the corner of Bento Gonçalves Avenue and Humberto de Campos, the street with the state school where I studied until sixth grade, where I received ear-slaps, noogies, shoves from behind, trips, toe-kicks in the back, blows to the neck, at recess, on the way out of class, at school parties, where I took two proper beatings, beatings that, in hindsight, ought to have been significant moments in my learning about the fragmentation of the pre-adolescent moral code in the general trajectory of adolescence, but which, besides the physical pain, taught me nothing, least of all about being in the position of somebody who’s been defeated, somebody who can’t avoid feeling the acid rain of humiliation coming down upon them, humiliation at having failed to be quick or aggressive enough, and where I got stabbed with pencil points, which sometimes broke and stayed embedded in the flesh of my forearm, and where I was hit with a balloon full of piss without having any way to react because the guy it came from was with five other guys and he was also holding a serrated blade in his hand, looking me straight in the eye and daring me once and for all to throw the brick I was holding or turn around and get out of there immediately if I didn’t want to die or wind up crippled, the same school where I once went completely out of control and knocked a kid down with a haymaker punch, and where, more out of shock than technique, I doled out a well-placed leg sweep to another boy who out of nowhere called me son of a bitch Galego blondie, a trip that made him lose his balance, fall and hit his head and spend a few seconds unconscious. But my fear isn’t due to Billy himself, that’s the billy-goat Fernando, owner of the van, a friendly sort, a good guy, like his two employees, Salete and Mara, both good people too, nor because of the van’s being located on that plot of land on the south side of Bento Gonçalves Avenue, the hardcore side of Bento, the side where the hill is, at the foot of the hill, the side of the favela, the unpaved streets, the open-air sewers, nor is it because of the civil police, the military police, the army all patrolling by in their vehicles, watching the kids on the street, even riding up onto the sidewalk, braking hard on this gravel of the car park to give them a bit of hassle, demanding to see their papers, slapping them around, nor is it because of the local cartel lieutenants, guys half a dozen years older than me, who come down here to get a beer, eat a xis with chicken hearts and egg, best in the neighbourhood, leaving that suspense in the air, because they arrive all calm, their guns more or less in view, and eat with their eyes peeled, scanning sidelong every person there, nor is it because of my having a cop for a father, an important cop no less, a big name in the Rio Grande do Sul police force, the big boss of all their forensic investigators, a brand I carry on my forehead and which is perfectly visible for a lot of people who come here, a mark that, in theory, makes me kind of untouchable, because you don’t, not around here, fuck with the son of a policeman lightly, but which, you never know, could also prompt an unexpected attack from somebody who doesn’t like the police. No, I’m afraid of Billy’s Xis Van because I’m afraid of being contaminated by this place’s way of thinking and talking, I’m afraid of ending up taking pride in this neighbourhood, of being just one more streetwise kind of guy doing the rounds down here, just one more guy who doesn’t care if he’s going to spend his whole life in the neighbourhood, is going to die in the neighbourhood, I’m afraid of getting used to Salete’s chumminess, to Mara’s jokes, to the mute violence that is the macabre presence of the handful of lone street brats that are always showing up here, always kind of dirty, always at random, always keeping the required distance so as not to bother the customers, kids of nine, ten, eleven years old who Billy helps out, giving away a cheap toasted sandwich, a soda, and then conveying, subtly, which is kind of Billy’s brand, that they’re to get out of his sight, I’m afraid of thinking it might be cool to spend a night on one of these rough benches, wasting time with a bottle of guaraná in my hand, resigned to the insignificance that’s the trademark of this place, used to it like Bighead, big-headed Cláudio, who just sat next to me, an old friend who’s been stuck to me and Lourenço since we showed up on foot from over in Moinhos de Vento fifteen minutes ago, watching the merry-go-round of people circulating, just talking crap.

I only came here with my brother because Billy’s is the xis burger place that’s closest to my street, Colonel Vilagran Cabrita, whose surname, meaning little goat, was what indirectly gave the van its name, because tonight there was no way I could go straight home, because I need to eat a xis with chicken hearts and egg, I haven’t been able to eat any solid food all day, and then, not being a big drinker, trying to take a few swigs of a beer, listening, sitting next to my brother, who’s much more ‘in’ with the locals, him talking to the guys and girls who’re always telling me oh your brother’s supercool, a real solid guy, fuck, good people, man, Lourenço this, Lourenço that, man, comments that come as no surprise because ever since we were kids, within our invisible impervious bubble, even with my being the oldest, I was always watching that way he had about him, the way he fitted into parties faster than me, made friends more easily than me, was loved by other people the way I could never be loved, I was always watching, watching until one day I started to copy him, his mood, his casualness, two things I could barely understand but which I learned to perform convincingly enough to finally incorporate them into my own way of operating.

Bighead decided to have a go at Joaquim Cruz, who, four days earlier, on Monday, won the gold medal in the eight hundred metres in the Los Angeles Olympics, he’s been talking about the guy non-stop for several minutes now. What it takes to get Bighead to shut up is the arrival of Ivanor with his turbo-charged Chevette, famous for its golden paintwork and for being one of the frequent winners at the illegal Saturday late-night drag races down at the end of Ipiranga Avenue, the bit between Antônio de Carvalho and Cristiano Fischer. Ivanor gets out of the car and heads over. This is some impressive trio here, huh, he says, shaking Bighead’s hand, mine, and then Lourenço’s, The two brothers together, and in the presence of the neighbourhood gigolo-major, he concludes. Bighead having shut his trap was also due to the burden of being permanently in love with Kátia, also known as Mumu after that brand of light brown doce de leite, Kátia Doce de Leite Mumu, Ivanor’s girlfriend, who gets out of the car shortly afterwards. Kátia walks up behind Ivanor and, without looking directly at any of us, says hi, just a curt hi, then she takes her boyfriend’s arm and drags him over to the van. Bighead waits till the two of them are some distance away, Mumu just does me in, Bighead says, She gets more goddess-like every day, more gorgeous, how’s that even possible. Lourenço says nothing, I say nothing, then Bighead resumes his slanders. You guys mark my words, Joaquim Cruz isn’t getting one more Olympic medal in his life, He’s got no humility, He’s going to start to ease up, Even having all the perks of someone who lives in the US, The best equipment, The best trainers, Mark my words, Store’s closed, It’s not gonna be opening up again, he predicts. I can’t follow the Olympics, I can’t be bothered, Olympics in the US especially, I reply. Bighead gives me a disappointed look. But, get this, I reckon if this guy, a guy who’s come up from nothing, from the poor part of Brasília, if he wants to be proud of being one of the big names in global athletics, that’s his right, I’m totally in favour, I say. I don’t agree, in the interview I saw yesterday on TV, he wasn’t just being proud, He was arrogant, Athletes got to set an example, got to be humble, Doesn’t matter what he’s had to suffer through in his life, That old story about a poor young boy who came up from the slums in a country that shits on any sport that’s not football, it doesn’t give any fool who wins a gold medal at the Olympics the right to be arrogant. If you say so, I say, restraining myself so as not to leave the bounds of camaraderie and start a serious argument with him, because what he’s saying has no basis in reality. If I could, I’d have been up in Los Angeles since the first day of these Olympics, says Lourenço. If I could, I’d have been in Los Angeles since the first day of my life, says Bighead. I’d have loved to be able to watch the basketball games, says Lourenço. A basketball guy like you, you’d be at all the games, you wouldn’t miss one, says Bighead, kissing my brother’s ass as usual. He also played basketball at school but like me he didn’t keep it up. He idolises Lourenço because of how Lourenço’s on the gaúcho basketball youth team, he catches rebounds and assists better than nearly anybody in Brazil in his category, and because he’s one of the rare athletes with an athletic scholarship from the Grêmio Náutico União, the biggest social club in the city, and because he knows how to get along with the guys from Moinhos de Vento and Auxiliadora, the guys with money, the guys who’d never set foot here in Partenon, and can do it without getting an inferiority complex and with no aggression. You were born for basketball, brother, Bighead says. I’m not tall enough to play on the wing if I want to go pro, I’m not as good playing point guard, which would be my only option, Pretty soon now I’m done, Lourenço says. One metre eighty-eight isn’t that little for a small forward so long as you’re as good on rebounds and good on assists inside the key as you are, there’ll always be a place for you in basketball, I say.

Salete calls our number. Lourenço and I get up to go collect our burgers. Bighead keeps our places. Salete hands over my xis with chicken hearts and Lourenço’s xis with salad. You good, ’derico, Lourenço asks, You’re calmer, and he takes the squirty bottles with ketchup and mayonnaise. I think I am, I say. We go back to the bench, where Bighead is waiting for us. You guys hear about Chump, Bighead doesn’t even give us a chance to sit down. I don’t think Bighead knows this, but Chump’s had it in for me since that time in sixth grade when he pinched a nylon Parmalat promotional sport jacket of mine I totally loved, a jacket you could only get by collecting thirty Parmalat long-life milk cartons and then taking them to exchange at Zaffari on Ipiranga, a big store that at the time was the best supermarket in the city and a place my mother avoided because it was an establishment where you never saw a single black employee on the tills, at the bakery, at the butchers, working as a packer, collecting the shopping trolleys in the car park, on security, you never saw any dark-skinned people employed anywhere, nothing, my father didn’t notice that and he still doesn’t but my mother didn’t hesitate and she still doesn’t hesitate, if she can buy something someplace else she’ll go buy it someplace else. Chump always said no, he claimed he’d traded in the milk cartons for the jacket just like me. But one day, when he wasn’t paying attention, I took the jacket and checked, and showed him and everybody around the piece of almost imperceptible darning my mother had done on the right-hand seam of the jacket which had arrived unstitched and which I’d only noticed when I got home and opened up the packaging. She’d used a burgundy thread that clashed with the brown, beige and orange of the jacket. I didn’t stick with the fight because I got along really well with Chump’s girlfriend at the time, Lídia, who was getting nervous about my insisting he was a thief. After that day, Chump stopped wearing the jacket to school. What, Chump got arrested, Lourenço asks while he spreads ketchup on his xis. No, the Zulu kid got together with this woman who owns one of those five funeral homes in Santana, one of the ones that’s near the Institute of Forensic Medicine, He’s a partner now, Can you believe it, He must be screwing the old lady, He’s got to be screwing her, That coal-black kid of ours does like running honeytrap cons on filthy-rich old white ladies, says Bighead, he’s got the knack like nobody else. You’re not much different, Lourenço jokes. Seems he put two Opala station wagons converted for transporting coffins into service in the business, Bighead said. Must have stolen them, I said. And it seems he put in a good bit of cash too, But check it out, This time Chump’s not going to make it, That old lady from the undertaker’s is smarter than him, says Bighead. No way you can be a police notary, a partner in a scrap-metal dealership and a partner in an undertaker’s, that’s too much work for him to be putting one over on other people, I say. But mostly he’s just a receiver of stolen motorbike parts, Lourenço puts in, chewing with his mouth open. I don’t know where that con artist gets the money, I say. Yeah, Chump’s in the bike game, nothing he won’t do, Totally someone it’s best to keep your distance from, says Bighead. At that moment Anísio pulls up at the roadside, right in front of us, with his white Yamaha TT125. Engine on, headlamp on, without lifting the visor of his helmet, he beckons Lourenço over. Lourenço gets up, xis in hand, and goes to meet him. The two of them talk for almost a minute. Lourenço heads back. All right, I ask. All right, ’derico, Look, just finish your xis, he says, and checks the time on his wristwatch, Meet me at home in fifteen minutes, he says. I can tell from the expression on his face that now’s not the time to be asking questions. We’ll talk, Cláudio, I’ll see you around, says Lourenço to Bighead. Take it easy, Bighead says. Lourenço takes two bites of his xis, tosses the rest into the bin, returns to Anísio, gets onto the back of the bike. The two of them head off into the neighbourhood, I can see they’re still talking, and then, just a little farther on, right before the corner with my road, Anísio swerves to the left, mounts the central reservation, doubles back in the direction of the centre to turn, against the one-way system and with his headlamp off, onto Veríssimo Rosa. I go back to eating my xis, thinking about what might have happened, I don’t say another word to Bighead. A few seconds later, Bighead tires of my silence and gets up and wanders over to some people he knows who just arrived. I think about asking for a beer, then decide against it. I finish my xis, get up, I give Billy a wave from a distance, he’s got his radar on all the time, I head up Bento Gonçalves on foot, I go the slightly more than two hundred metres to my street, Cabrita, and head in.