City of God Read online

  CITY OF GOD

  PAULO LINS

  Translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin

  For Mariana, Frederico, Sônia, Célia, Toninho, Celestina, Amélia (in memory), Antônio (in memory) and Paulina (in memory).

  A special thank you to Maria de Lourdes da Silva (Lurdinha), without whose valuable help this novel would not have been written. I dedicate the poetry of this book to her.

  I thank Alba Zaluar for her constant encouragement over a period of nine years. The idea for this book arose from our conversations, and her support made it possible for me to write it.

  Paulo Lins

  Contents

  Introduction

  Hellraiser’s Story

  Sparrow’s Story

  Tiny’s Story

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  A Word from the Translator

  A Note on the Translator

  A Note on the Author

  Introduction

  By Katia Lund

  When Paulo Lins said, ‘I wrote this book as a gift for the middle class,’ we could hardly hear him, he was speaking so indistinctly. Suddenly realising, he stopped. ‘Sorry, I’m very nervous. This is my first interview!’ We said, ‘Well, get ready then: this is only the first of hundreds … your book is going to be an enormous success.’ He didn’t believe us.

  That was when João Salles and I were making a documentary about violence in Rio de Janeiro, News from a Private War. We interviewed people from the favelas, and we interviewed police. We wanted to talk to Paulo Lins because we’d read some of his manuscript and were intrigued by it. A year later, in 1997, the manuscript was to become the published novel, Cidade de Deus (City of God).

  The novel became a best-seller and received wide critical acclaim. At least ten directors wanted to make it into a film. Paulo was swept up in a tide of publicity.

  City of God sparked an intense debate in Brazil about the relationship between violence, drug-dealing, social injustice, political action and the role of civil society. I participated in many of these public discussions alongside Paulo. They were often very emotional, ending in tears and sometimes near shoot-outs! For the first time ordinary citizens were openly exchanging views on these painful issues.

  Just as the furore was dying down, City of God was made into a feature film, directed by Fernando Meirelles and me. It was first shown in Brazil in 2002, reigniting the debate and embracing an even wider audience. The film went on to travel the world, and the novel to be translated into many languages.

  City of God is a departure. It is the first Brazilian novel effectively to convey the poetry, strength and sophistication of favela colloquialism. The reader is organically drawn in to the thoughts, feelings and trials of a community. The language carries a depth of nuance and metaphor, which is what gives the novel its universal impact.

  City of God is the name of the favela in western Rio de Janeiro where Paulo Lins grew up. From its beginnings in 1966 as an idealistic government housing project, it went into rapid decline. Time proved the project to be little more than a trap, designed to draw poor people out of the city centre and keep them out of sight and out of mind of the wealthy. Paulo’s experience of living in that community provided him with rich material.

  Before becoming a novelist, Paulo was a salesman, a waiter, a construction worker, a chauffeur. Unlike most of his friends and relatives, he managed to finish high school, thanks to the support of his family. In 1982 Paulo went to the federal university in Rio de Janeiro, where he studied Portuguese and Brazilian literature and language.

  Paulo was already writing lyrics for Carnival samba competitions when he started a university poetry group. He set up a film club in his neighbourhood, and started writing for a university newspaper. At the same time he was doing research on local crime for an anthropologist, Alba Zaluar. His first book of poetry, Sob o Sol (Under the Sun) was published in 1986. On leaving university he became a teacher of Portuguese.

  Encouraged by Alba Zaluar and Roberto Schwarz, Paulo began work on the novel. Financial difficulties meant that it took nearly ten years to complete. The rest is history.

  On a personal note, I am both honoured and delighted to be writing this introduction. Paulo Lins has been an integral part of my life and work since we met in 1997 and became the closest of friends. Since then we have worked together writing and directing on a number of projects: music videos, television mini-series and feature films. We have travelled together to Yale and Brown Universities, and we have shared a limo to the Oscars. His friendship and support have kept me sane.

  This is not an easy book to translate, with its slang, double and triple meanings, its cultural specifics, its rhythms and cadences. I would like to pay tribute to the brave translator, Alison Entrekin, who was crazy enough to accept the challenge and who more than rose to it.

  Hellraiser’s Story

  The 1960s

  Seconds after leaving the haunted mansion, Stringy and Rocket were smoking a joint down by the river in the Eucalypt Grove. Completely silent, they only looked at one another when passing the joint back and forth. Stringy imagined himself swimming beyond the surf. He could stop now, float a bit, feel the water playing over his body. Foam dissolved on his face and his gaze followed the flight of the birds, while he gathered his strength to return. He would steer clear of the troughs so as not to be swept away by the current and wouldn’t stay in the cold water too long so as not to get a cramp. He felt like a lifesaver. He’d save as many lives as he had to on that busy beach day and then he’d run home after work. He wouldn’t be one of those lifesavers that doesn’t get any exercise and ends up letting the sea carry people away. You had to work out constantly, eat well and swim as much as possible.

  Clouds cast raindrops on the houses, the Eucalypt Grove and the open fields stretching out to the horizon. Rocket felt the hissing of the wind in the eucalypt leaves. To his right, the buildings of Barra da Tijuca were gigantic, even from afar. The mountain peaks were wiped out by the low clouds. From that distance, the blocks of flats he lived in, on the left, were silent, although he fancied he could hear the radios tuned to programmes for housewives, dogs barking, children running up and down the stairs. His gaze came to rest on the river, the pattering raindrops opening out in circles all the way across, and his irises, in a hazel zoom, brought him flashbacks: the river when it was clean; the grove of guava trees, which had been razed and replaced by new blocks of flats; a few public squares, now choked with houses; the myrtles that had been murdered along with the haunted fig tree and the castor-oil plants; the abandoned mansion with its swimming pool and the Dread and Bastion pitches – where he had played defence for the Oberom under thirteens – had given way to factories. He also remembered the time he had gone to collect bamboo for his building’s June festivities and had to run for it because the farm caretaker had set the dogs on the kids. He remembered spin-the-bottle, hide-and-seek, pick-up-sticks, the model racetrack he’d never had and the hours he’d spent in the branches of the almond trees watching the cattle go past. He recalled the day his brother got all cut up when he came off his bike over at Red Hill, and how lovely Sundays had been when he went to Mass and stayed behind at the church to take part in the youth group activities, then the cinema, the amusement park … He remembered the Santa Cecília choir rehearsals of his schooldays with joy, which suddenly fizzled, however, when the river’s waters revealed images of the days when he sold bread or ice lollies, pushed trolleys at the street market and the Leão and Três Poderes supermarkets, collected bottles and stripped copper wire to sell to the scrapyard so he could help out his mum a bit at home. It hurt to think of the swarms of mosquitoes that had sucked his blood, leaving lumps
to be picked at with fingernails, and the ground with open sewers he had dragged his arse across as a little kid. He’d been unhappy and hadn’t known it. He resigned himself in silence to the fact that the rich go overseas to live it up, while the poor go to the grave, jail or fuck-knows-where. He realised that the sugary, watery orangeade he had drunk his entire childhood hadn’t really been all that nice. He tried to remember the childish joys that had died, one by one, every time reality had tripped him up, every day he had gone hungry. He remembered his primary-school teachers saying that if you studied properly you might make something of yourself, but here he was, disillusioned about his chances of getting a job so he could continue his studies, buy his own clothes, and have a bit of money to take his girlfriend out and pay for a photography course. It’d be nice if things were the way his teachers had said, because if all went well, if he landed a job, soon he’d be able to buy a camera and a shitload of lenses. He’d photograph everything he found interesting. One day he’d win a prize. His mother’s voice whipped through his mind.

  ‘This photography game is for folks with money! What you need to do is get into the Air Force, the Navy, or even the Army to guarantee yourself a future. Soldiers are the ones with money! I don’t know what goes on in that head of yours!’

  Rocket refocused his eyes, stared at Our Lady of Sorrows Church at the top of the hill and felt like going to Father Júlio to ask for all his confessed sins back in a shopping bag, so he could recommit them with his soul strewn across every corner of the world around him. One day he’d accept one of the many invitations to hold up buses, bakeries, taxis, any fucking thing … He took the joint from his friend’s hand. His girlfriend’s ultimatum that she’d break up with him if he didn’t stop smoking dope echoed in his ears. ‘Screw it! The worst thing in the world has to be to marry a square. It’s not just the no-goods who smoke dope, otherwise rock singers wouldn’t do it. Jimi Hendrix was the biggest head of all! And what about the hippies? The hippies were all crazies from so much smoking.’ He was sure Tim Maia, Caetano, Gil, Jorge Ben, Big-Boy – the big names in music – all enjoyed a bit of weed. ‘Not to mention that nutcase Raul Seixas, singing: “People who don’t have eyedrops wear shades.”’ Smoking dope didn’t mean he was going to go out looking for trouble. He didn’t like squares, and the worst thing was that they were everywhere, noticing if your eyes were red, or if you were laughing at nothing. When he argued with squares about dope he always ended the argument by saying that dope was the light of life: it made you thirsty, hungry and sleepy!

  ‘Want another one?’

  ‘Uh-huh!’ answered Stringy.

  Rocket insisted on rolling the joint. He liked this job; his friends always praised him. He made the joint as stiff as a cigarette without using much paper. He lit it himself, took two tokes and passed it to his pal.

  On rainy days, the hours pass unnoticed for those at a loose end. Rocket mechanically checked the time and saw he was already late for his typing class, but what the fuck! He’d already missed heaps of classes, so one more wasn’t going to make any difference. He really couldn’t be bothered to spend an hour banging away on the typewriter, and he wasn’t going to school either. ‘The square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides, my arse.’ He was really pissed off with life. He suppressed a sob, got up, stretched to relieve the pain of having spent so long in the same position, and was about to ask his friend if he felt like rustling up another bundle of weed, when he noticed the river water had gone red. The red preceded a dead body. The grey of the day intensified ominously. Red swirling into the current, another corpse. The clouds blotted out the mountains completely. Red, and another stiff appeared at the bend in the river. The light rain turned into a storm. Red, yet again followed by a carcass. Blood mixing with stinking water accompanied by yet another body wearing Lee jeans, Adidas trainers and leeches sucking out the red liquid, still warm.

  Rocket and Stringy stumbled home.

  It was the first sign of the war to come. The war that imposed its absolute sovereignty and came to claim anyone who didn’t keep their wits about them, to pump hot lead into children’s skulls, to force stray bullets to lodge in innocent bodies and make Knockout Zé run along Front Street, his heart pounding like the Devil, holding a blazing torch to set fire to the house of his brother’s killer.

  Rocket arrived home afraid of the wind, the streets, the rain, his skateboard, the simplest things; everything seemed dangerous. He knelt by his bed, threw his head on the mattress, clasping his hands together, and in infinite supplication begged Exu to go and tell Oxalá that one of his sons felt doomed to eternal desperation.

  In the past, life was different here in this place where the river, carrying sand, innocent water snake heading for the sea, divided the land on which the children of the Portuguese and the slaves trod.

  Soles of feet grazing petals, mangos swelling, bamboo thickets shredding wind, a big lake, a lake, a pond, almond trees, myrtles and the Eucalypt Grove. All this on the other side. On this side, the hills, the haunted mansions, the vegetable gardens of Little Portugal, and the cows on both sides living the peace of those who don’t know death.

  The branches of the river, which split over near Taquara, cut diagonally through the fields. The right branch cut through the middle, while the left – separating The Flats from the houses and crossed by a bridge over which the traffic of the neighbourhood’s main street flowed – cut through the lower part of the fields. And, as the good branch returns to the river, the river, branching off, zigzagged along its watery path; a stranger who travelled without moving, carrying away loose rock crystals in its bed, allowing its heart to beat on rocks, donating water to the bodies that braved it, to the mouths that bit its back. The river laughed, but Rocket knew well that every river is born to die one day.

  This land was once covered in green with oxcarts defying dirt roads, Negro throats singing samba, artesian wells being dug, legumes and vegetables filling trucks, a snake slipping through the grass, nets set in the water. On Sundays, football matches on the Dread pitch and drinking wine under the light of the full moon.

  ‘Mornin’, Lettuce Joe!’ Cabbage Manoel had said one day at dawn. But Lettuce Joe had not answered; he had just watched the first flight of the herons to the sound of roosters crowing and cows lowing.

  The two Portuguese descendents tended the Little Portugal vegetable gardens on the inherited land. They knew that blocks of flats were to be built in that area, but not that work was to begin so soon. They worked as they did every day, from five in the morning to three in the afternoon, talked about nothing, laughed at everything, whistled impossible fados, loved the different types of wind, ate dinner together, and together then heard the men in the car with the white licence plate, in first gear, say:

  ‘We intend to build a new place on your land.’

  ‘Come, good wind! Put another smile on my face!’ Lettuce Joe was to think later. ‘Another wind, without homeland or compassion, has taken away the smile this soil gave me, this soil where men with boots and tools arrived, measuring everything, marking the land … Then came the machines, destroying the Little Portugal vegetable gardens, scaring the scarecrows, guillotining the trees, landfilling the marsh, drying up the spring, and all this became a desert. All that is left is the Eucalypt Grove, the trees on The Other Side of the River, the haunted mansions, the cows that know nothing of death, and sadness in the wake of a new era.’

  City of God lent its voice to ghosts in the abandoned mansions, thinned out the flora and fauna, remapped Little Portugal and renamed the marsh: Up Top, Out Front, Down Below, The Other Side of the River and The Flats.

  Even now, the sky turns blue and fills the world with stars, forests make the earth green, clouds whiten landscapes and mankind innovates, reddening the river. Here now a slum, a neoslum of concrete, brimming with dealer-doorways, sinister-silences and cries of despair along its lanes and in the indecision of its
crossroads.

  The new residents brought rubbish, bins, mongrel dogs, exus and pombagiras in untouchable bead necklaces, days on which to get up and struggle, old scores to be settled, residual rage from bullets, nights to hold wakes over corpses, vestiges of floods, corner bars, Wednesday and Sunday street markets, old worms in babies’ bellies, revolvers, orixá pendants, sacrificial hens, sambas, illegal lotteries, hunger, betrayal, death, crucifixes on frayed string, racy forró to be danced, oil lamps to shed light on saints, camping cookers, poverty to want to get rich, eyes to see nothing, speak nothing, never the eyes and guts to face life, to sidestep death, to rejuvenate anger, to bloodstain destinies, to make war and to get tattoos. There were slingshots, photo novels, ancient floor cloths, open wombs, decayed teeth, brains riddled with catacombs, clandestine graves, fishmongers, bread-sellers, seventh-day Mass, smoking guns to erase all doubt, the perception of facts before acts, half-cured cases of the clap, legs for waiting for buses, hands for hard work, pencils for state schools, courage to turn the corner and gambler’s luck. They also brought kites, arses for the police to kick, coins for playing heads or tails and the strength to try to live. They also brought love to ennoble death and silence the mute hours.

  In one week there were thirty to fifty new arrivals a day; people bearing the marks of the floods on their faces and furniture. They were put up in the Mario Filho Football Stadium and came in government trucks, singing:

  Marvellous city,

  full of enchantments …

  Then people from a number of favelas and other towns in the state of Rio de Janeiro came to inhabit the new neighbourhood, which consisted of rows of white, pink and blue houses. On the other side of the left branch of the river, The Flats were built: a complex of blocks of one- and two-bedroom flats, some blocks with twenty and others with forty flats each, all five stories high. The red shades of the beaten earth saw new feet in the hustle and bustle of life, in the stampede of a destiny to be fulfilled. The river, the joy of the kids, provided pleasure, sand, frogs and eels, and was not completely polluted.