Chapter 7, section 6: Raising the Bar

They passed a spot where a heavily armed municipal police unit had rounded up two dozen kids of no more than eight years old each and shot them all point blank. The unit then continued into the favela, shooting at any children it found, until it came to a sanctuary that belonged to a local drug lord’s lieutenant. There they threw grenades into the fragile structure and ran. The resulting conflagration burned for two days and killed dozens of the favela’s residents who were either too ill or too strung out to get out of the way. The city’s fire department only responded when the fire threatened to jump beyond the favela’s border. Anything capable of carrying water was rounded up and bucket brigades lined up through Lagoa from the lagoon between Ipanema and Leblon to the fire. By the time the flames had turned into smoldering embers, the thousands of residents had lost everything. Most had owned very little to begin with, but all began again with nothing.

It didn’t take too long to rebuild, fashioning the ashes and flimsy red brick given by the city into a new favela. Now it was akin to any barren, squalid section of the poor from the earliest human slums Persephone could remember. The city looked the other way while residents siphoned off electricity, drank untreated water, and added their waste to the open canals running down the mountainsides to the ocean.

To counter the rawness of this existence, residents gathered in open bars like the one up ahead. One bare bulb hung from the ceiling in a small wood and packed earth structure. A paper cutout poster of a woman in a mini red bikini on the wall hawked beer, but the walls were lined exclusively with bottles of a clear alcohol marked ‘51’. Seven patrons, four men and three women, stood around in front of the counter drinking, smoking and playing cards with the bartender. Their laughter was a welcome relief to the rest of what her senses screamed at her.

She walked up to the bar, and a little space was made for her. The patrons looked askance, but not too much. Strangers in the favela were rare, and a topless stranger with a raven perched on her shoulder at three in the morning was even rarer. People who had gone over the edge of sanity, however, were everywhere, so her appearance didn’t make too many waves.

One of the men made a long and familiar-sounding greeting. She didn’t understand a word of it, and when she opened her mouth to reply the sound that emerged was clearly not from a mortal’s throat.

A cat screamed in reply.

Looking at the bottles on the wall, she was hit by a powerful thirst. She pointed at one.

The bartender twisted the cap off of a half-empty bottle sitting on the bar and wiped down a small glass.

She shook her head and pointed to the bottles on the wall.

The bartender said, “Um real” very slowly.

She reached into the pocket she kept her money in, but it had been ripped in two along with the rest of that pant leg. Then she remembered that she had put some change on the other side earlier that night. She reached in to the other pocket, pulled out a small handful of coins, and stared at them blankly.

One of the women burst out in a rapid-fire scolding of the other gawkers around the bar. She pulled a couple of coins out of her bra and set them on the bar. One of the other women did the same, and by the time everyone had pulled change out of wherever they kept it there was apparently ‘um real’ on the bar, or close enough to satisfy the bartender. He pulled down one of the bottles marked ‘51’ and set it in the middle of the bar, alongside the glass he had polished earlier.

The scolding woman put an arm around Persephone’s shoulder and offered her a space at the bar expansively. Persephone let herself be guided and shaped her lips in a smile. She opened her mouth, and in something close to human speech said, “Obrigada.”

The bar patrons looked surprised, and the bartender responded with a nod. There were general murmurs, and the apparent invoking of deities.