The invention of futebol
The crowd piled in around the São Cristóvão pitch and there were police and firemen, bacchanal experts and moonshine connoisseurs, employers and employees, handymen of every sort, pretty girls with cavityless smiles and a multitude of delicacies from Canal do Mangue and Ilhas dos Melões, said Tio Balela. The crowd was already in a frenzy,...
Eve’s mango
A long, sinuous highway cuts the town in half, stretching as far as the eye can see. The road connects and disconnects the southern and northern halves of the country, accentuating their differences, reawakening their desires. Adrift in the middle of nowhere, the town battles against boredom and oblivion. Old people in the streets and...
Inside the marvellous city
Relationships of all kinds – intimate, casual, professional – are the subject here, the Rio de Janeiro way, meaning you and whoever or whatever you are dealing with also witness history in the making, the city’s singular curvaceous geography that can and does shape lives, the cross-cultural fun of flirting with traditions that don’t belong...
Mariano takes stock
There was no doubt when the Castro & Castro Industries shares skyrocketed on the Stock Market: the family had sold control of the company to the Bank of Massachusetts. The long transaction, involving much back and forth, dashed the hopes of many investors. Rumour had it that Castro Sr. broke down in tears and actually...
The game of errors
Perhaps the haughty young woman who hastily climbed aboard the rented carriage parked at Rocio Grande was named Berenice. She had just watched the first stage adaptation of The Thousand and One Nights and was coming out of the theatre with her husband, a military engineer overseeing the work on the Aqueduct. This information would...
Alberto Mussa’s timeless fictions
My first introduction to Alberto Mussa’s writing was in 2008, when a mutual friend gave me a copy of his remarkable novel O enigma de Qaf (‘The Riddle of Qaf’) as a gift. I was immediately struck by the extraordinary literary quality; by the extensive research, imagination, and sensibility that had clearly informed the work;...
Ex cathedra
“Godfather, you’ll go blind from that, sir.” “What?” “You’re going to go blind. Reading is so sad. No sir, give me that book.” Caetaninha took the book out of his hands. Her godfather paced around and then went into his study, where there was no lack of books. He closed the door behind him and...
The will
Because the visit was urgent, I didn’t even finish my lunch hour. Before the clock struck two I was at the door of Otto Mayer’s old, twenty-something-storey building on Rua Tupis. The notary had told me with no uncertainty that we were doing him a favour and not to worry about protocol. “Forget the witnesses,...
Circus eroticus
It was afternoon. The hustle and bustle downtown masked the nervous coming and going of men in front of the old two-story house on Rua Primeiro de Março. On the façade of dusty drawn blinds, a plaque read ‘SECOND-HAND BOOKS – 2nd floor’. Beneath, in small letters, the line ‘Ring the bell’. The client obeyed...
Daughter
The skin, touching your skin with the tip of my finger, drawing your outline, I remember that this natural skin covering us can only capture our sensations on the surface, on which thousands of radars are planted; like roads, the skin is not depth but extension, tattooed dregs, the skin is not like the ocean,...
Living dangerously
Adriana Lisboa’s latest novel Crow Blue, her first to be published in the UK, is a lyrical and passionate account of a young girl on a roadtrip from Rio de Janeiro to Colorado in search of family ties. We catch up with her as the spirit of Carnaval sweeps the sleepy Suffolk coast. Author portrait...
The curse of Poe
I was the wrong guy in the right place. At least that’s what I thought when I opened the office door and the elderly gentleman asked me if I was Miranda, the private detective. I quickly realised that he was a rich client. Not so much because he was wearing a suit and tie, both...
