Disneylândia, Page 2

open-air bars where buckets of beer and empadas were spirited to tables on silver-colored trays.

  He was overwhelmed with the odd-sensation of déjà-vu as he took his first passenger from the front of the Palácio Duque de Caxias. He felt as if he were repeating not just days, but months and years and, possibly, generations. His father, Guilherme, had started with minibuses before eventually moving on to long-haul trucks. When he returned from his trips, after weeks or months away, Oswaldo dos Santos would recognize him only vaguely and greet him the way he did the mailman.

  A rosary necklace with a cross in the middle swung back and forth from the rearview mirror as he turned and accelerated on Avenida Presidente Vargas. The man in the back was old and quiet and traditional, with fine tufts of black and gray hair combed to one side. He wore a business suit and his eyeglasses reflected the sunlight so that Oswaldo dos Santos did not know if he was looking in his direction or not. His elegance was sanitary. There was no dust or color, as if he managed to live in this city and not be touched by its grime, as if he existed permanently within a vacuum. Even though he was in the backseat, the man seemed separated by leagues from his driver. Oswaldo dos Santos examined the creases on the man’s face and the stoicism in his grim lips and decided he was either a military or government official. The old man had asked for an address in Flamengo and when he handed over the fare and received his change, he said “Thank you” in a way that suggested a daily ritual. Another man of high self-regard might have felt slighted by his aloofness. Instead, Oswaldo dos Santos did not feel anything, and he rocked the gearshift and set the taxi down the road with a lurch once the door was closed.

  The sun had developed from an infant light into a stellar beacon pulsing in the upper-left corner of his windshield so he got back on the highway and continued south to Copacabana thinking that tourists love the sun. When he came down along Avenida Atlantica, he saw a couple standing in front of the Marriot Hotel. The man was tall and thin. He had denim shorts and a white t-shirt with a picture of the mouse. The woman was much shorter and seemed overly concerned with her hair, adjusting it with passion. The man held up one hand in the air, a single outstretched index finger, as if pointing to a shooting star. They climbed in to the taxi with lumbering, heavy movements. Oswaldo dos Santos was immediately aware of the waxen, faux-coconut scent of suntan lotion. The tall man had a rough growth of facial hair and was red in the face. She was a mountain of flesh, piling, oozing, shaking as she laughed at a joke the man had apparently told just before they entered.

  “Hey there, fella, how are ya?” the tall man said in English. Oswaldo dos Santos did not understand and gave an empty smile that suggested he was happy to see them. The lack of English prevented him from detecting the tall man’s accent from the Gulf Coast of the United States. His view from the driver’s seat did not afford him the image of the tall man’s fingernails, permanently black from sprocket grease and the efforts of working on an oil platform. The tall man turned and said, “Baby, do you have the address of the restaurant? Here—there it is, let me just give it to him.”

  It was a restaurant made popular by its feijoada and scenic views, perched atop a high hill in Santa Teresa. Oswaldo dos Santos thought of the cobblestones and hesitated for a second, then smiled again and started the car. He worried about the axles and suspension.

  With most passengers, the most appropriate route would have been to go back towards Flamengo via the tunnel and come up into Santa Teresa from Centro. Quicker, cheaper, much easier for all involved. But already the tall man had put an arm around the woman, was stroking her shoulder and talking to her in rapid-fire English, paying no attention to anything else aside from her spacious cheek, which he occasionally nuzzled. She was doing the same, burying her nose, her mouth, in his shoulder, as if too shy to show her face, and with her free hand, gently adjusting the back of her head. A camera hung from her neck. They absent-mindedly permitted their self-explorations and Oswaldo dos Santos felt like a voyeur. And so he turned north and decided to take the tunnel under Corcovado and then come in to Santa Teresa from the west. A longer, more complicated, more expensive, route.

  The drive, however, was made more difficult by the man’s shirt and the gleeful face of the mouse. Oswaldo dos Santos was quite sure the face was staring at him through the rearview mirror, an anthropomorphic mocking big-eared grin that suggested no matter how many tourists he took advantage of, he might never quite make enough money to send his daughter to see that mouse firsthand. The trip, at times, felt like an unending journey for Oswaldo dos Santos, a sisyphean definition of his life. He was perhaps like every father in the world who had a child with a dream, but what injected a degree of bitter pride in this quest was the sheer competition that the trip had become and the ease with which other fathers won it. The military or government man could have easily afforded it. When he was young, Oswaldo dos Santos had never wanted for Disney or a trip abroad. In his home with the walls like a house of cards, such elaborate and fanciful journeys had never been even a remote possibility. A soccer ball, a day at the beach with a sandcastle, a sheet of paper to fold into an airplane. Nothing more than a minor cost to his hard-driven and rarely-seen trucker father. Still, he did not ever, not once, resent Juliana for her desire to see the mouse. He was not brilliant, but he was dimly aware that her innocent envy of wealthier friends was natural in a country that seemed to be making more and more money. What also seemed painfully, unstoppably natural was his slow weight gain, the increasing lack of sexual attraction between him and Mariana, and the early death of parents who work too hard to give their children what they could never have.

  Up the cobblestone hills of Santa Teresa, his taxi rattled and rolled and shifted over its axles like a small ship running into a squall. The tall gringo had thrust one hand out to the window of the passenger door and with the other, he desperately tried to contain the loose, desultory body parts of the fat gringo woman. Oswaldo dos Santos released them at the corner, the tall man unfolded himself from the backseat: “Thanks, amigo!” Oswaldo dos Santos pocketed a full six or seven reals more than had probably been necessary and now he felt remorse. If he never achieved his goal of sending her to the mouse, then he had cheated those tourists for nothing! But the money in his pocket was already providing its comforting warmth and now the next passenger was already at his door, having lunged in before it closed. “I’m going to Barra,” the young lady said, raking her hair with the delicacy of an Italian chef handling thin pasta. “How much for two hours?”

  He did not work for-rent. He believed that moving around and picking up fares would yield him more money in the end. But most of all, he was dedicated to the idea that if nothing else, he owned his own freedom. His father had worked all his life as a private-company man, someone who owed his time and attention to someone else. The son would not have the same, and would not thus offer his daughter the same childhood memories. Rice and beans and small packets of farofa with the mother alone in the kitchen. Helping mother at night, fold and wash and iron clothes, far too many for such poor people living in a slum. Watching mother quietly from the sanctity of the bed as she wept silently for the warmth and company that a husband normally provides, one who does not spend three of every four weeks crossing roads from Belém to Curitiba. Oswaldo dos Santos looked into his rearview mirror, but not at the young lady. His age lines had developed prematurely. Only forty and already an old man.

  “Sorry, ma’am, I don’t work by the hour,” he said.

  She seemed to not have heard his objection. “I’m going to a wedding this weekend,” she said, holding a small make-up mirror in the air and tilting her chin left and right. “I’ll need to go to Barra Shopping first, they have a Calvin Klein store.”

  Here he collapsed in the face of her request. Yes, there was money there behind it. The mouse beckoned. He adjusted his rearview mirror so it did not show his face but hers. The foundation of makeup, the eyelashes, the high cheekbones and glowing eyes with dark centers like he
althy earth. He thought of a number and carefully said it aloud and she, not even flinching, nodded, “Okay, then let’s go.” She must not have been more than twenty-four, twenty-five. He wondered how many times she had seen the mouse. It was almost certain that she had gone for her fifteenth birthday. Judging by her confidence, in fact, it was quite likely she had made multiple trips, with her parents, her boyfriends. Her father was probably a senior man at Petrobras. And her mother likely prepared food to kill time, watched American television by satellite, and wandered along the roads of Leblon and Ipanema looking with boredom at the same expensive fashions.

  The traffic in Barra was light in the afternoon and they arrived quickly. He parked in front of the enormous façade of the shopping mall and gave her his card. “I’ll call,” she said, whipping around and marching off towards the entrance with an enormous handbag jutting from her left hand. He did not recognize that it was Louis Vuitton, that it had come from a late-season collection and cost just under half the price of his taxi. But he watched the dangling golden