Ian McDonald - Brasyl

Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie. Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire series. Whore. But the joy began in the lobby with Luesa the receptionist in her high-collared white dress saying “Good afternoon, Senhora Hoffman,” and the smell of the beautiful chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and brightness of the frosted glass panels and the bare wood floor and the cream-on-white cotton wall hangings, the New Age music that she scorned anywhere else (Tropicalismo hippy-shit) but here told her, “You’re wonderful, you’re special, you’re robed in light, the universe loves you, all you have to do is reach out your hand and take anything you desire.”

Eyes closed, lying flat on the reclining chair, she felt her work-weary crow’s-feet smoothed away, the young, energizing tautness of her skin. Two years before she had been in New York on the Real Sex in the City production and had been struck by how the ianqui women styled themselves out of personal empowerment and not, as a carioca would have done, because it was her duty before a scrutinizing, judgmental city. An alien creed: thousand-dollar shoes but no pedicure. But she had brought back one mantra among her shopping bags, an enlightenment she had stolen from Jennifer Aniston cossmetics ad. She whispered it to herself now, in the warm, jasmine-and-vetiver-scented sanctuary as the botulin toxins diffused through her skin.

Because I’m worth it.

“Oh, I love the World Cup.” Dona Bebel visited twice a week. Mondays the dry cleaning: dusting, vacuuming, putting things away. Thursdays the wet cleaning: bathroom and toilet, dishes and the laundry Marcelina strewed across her bedroom until by Wednesday evening she could not see the floor. She was a round woman in the indefinable late-fifties, early-sixties; hair heaved back into a headache-inducing bun; eternally in leggings, baggy T-shirts, and Havaianas; and Marcelina treasured her beyond pearls gold cocaine commissions.

“Querida, she comes twice a week, does your disgusting pants, and it’s still all there when she leaves?” Vitor was an old gay man, a former participant in a daytime makeover show Marcelina had produced, who lived a handful of streets from her decrepit apartment block with its back hard to the sheer rocks of the morro. An old and unrepentant Copa-ista, he took tea in the same cafe in the same evening hour every day to watch his bairro pass by. Marcelina had taken to meeting him once a week for doces and bitching as part of her extensive alt dot family, all bound to her in different degrees of gratitude or sycophancy. “Whatever she asks, you pay her.”

After a succession of Skinny Marias who had thieved all around them as if it were an additional social security levy and hid warrens of dust bunnies under the bed, Marcelina had been reluctant to take on another cleaner from Pavão. Bur price was price — the favela tucked away like an infolded navel into the hills behind Arpoador was that that unspeakable elephant of cheap labor upon which the Copa depended. She left the glasses twinkling like diamonds, the whites blinding, and when she discovered what it was that Marcelina did for her money, pitched a program idea: “You should do a show where you go and clean up people’s houses while they’re out at work. I’d watch that. Nothing people like better than looking at someone else’s filth.”

Filthy Pigs had on-screen screamfests, fights, camera-smashings; destroyed friendships of years; opened generational rifts children against parrents; ruined relationships; wrecked marriages; and provoked at least one shooting. Audiences watched through their fingers, faintly murmuring, “No, no.” Raimundo Sifuentes had thundered upon it in the review pages of O Globo as “the real filthy pigs are at Canal Quatro.” It was Marcelina’s first water-cooler show.

Over three years many of Marcelina’s best commissions had come from Dona Bebel. Kitsch and Bitch , which had brought Vitor to prominence and turned his small store of immaculate twentieth-century kitschery into a must-shop destination featured in in-flight magazines, had come from a commment as Dona Bebel slung the washing over the line in Marcelina’s precious roof garden that she always knew which men she cleaned for were gay because they had always had 1950s plastic around the place.

Guilt and remorse were as alien to Marcelina as a nun’s habit, but she honorably put a sliver of her bonus into Dona Bebel’s weekly envelope for every commission she won. She never asked what Dona Bebel thought when she saw her casual aside up in sixteen-by-nine with full graphics. She did not even know if Dona Bebel watched Canal Quatro. She was right off its demographic.

“Oooh, World Cup.” Marcelina’s whites went round in the washing machine on Wets Thursday. The apartment’s bare, tiled floors smelled of bleach and pine. “They’re going to put a big screen up down at the Gatinha Bar. I’m going to watch them all. Brazil versus Italy in the final, I say. I’d put money on it. This time we’ll beat them. They may have the best defense in Europe, but our Magic Quadrilateral will go through them like a knife. I think a program abour the World Cup would be a very good idea — I’d watch it. But if you want controversial, you have to go for the Fateful Final.”

“The what?” Marcelina said over the twelve hundred rev spin cycle gearing up.

For the first time Dona Bebel was taken aback.

“You mean, you don’t know about the Fateful Final? Every true Brazilian should have July sixteenth 1950 engraved on her heart. This wasn’t a soccet match. This was our Hiroshima. I don’t exaggerate. After the Fateful Final, nothing was the same again.”

“Tell me,” said Marcelina, settling down on top of the upturned plastic laundry basket.

Well, I was a very little girl at the time and we didn’t have a television, no one did, but…”

This is not history. This is legend. We built the Maracanã for the 1950 World Cup — then, as it is now, the greatest stadium in the world — and in front of two hundred thousand people, we were going to show the world the beauty and the poetry of Brazilian futebol. A war had ended, a new world had risen from its ashes; this was the World Cup of the Furure in the Nation of the Future.

This was the team: it was as great as any Seleção, as great even as the squad of 1970, but you won’t see it listed on the statue outside the Maracana. Coach: Flavio Costa. Front to back: Chico, Jair da Rosa Pinto, Ademir, Zizinho, Friaça; Bigode, Danilo, Bauer; Juvenal, Augusto; Barbosa. Five three two. Beautiful. Moaçir Barbosa: you hear much more about him. Now, in 1950 the system was different from the way it is now; it was a group system all the way to the final.

My father was working then on a bridge and had money, so he bought a radio just for the World Cup. He wired it into the streetlight. It was the only radio on the street, so everyone came around to listen. You could not move in our good room for people come for the game.

We kicked off the World Championships on the twenty-fourth of June against Mexico. Bam! Down they went. Four-nil. Next! Switzerland. Here we had a bit of a wobble — but that’s the best time to have a wobble, early on. A draw, two all. Now we had to beat Yugoslavia to qualify for the finals group. There can be only one from each group. We played it at the new Maracanã and we won: two nil. We’re through to the final group!

In the final group are Sweden, Spain, and Uruguay, the Sky-blue Celestes.

Now we have to put the radio in the window, because we couldn’t fit all the people who wanted to listen into the house. My father set it on an oil drum, and people lined up all the way down the hill.