“Hey, look at that!” He pushed his tractor hat up on his head and bent to his reel. When Marcelina looked back, from the shaded green of Flamengo Park, the Brotherhood of Dawn Fishers were unhooking the catch and returning it to the sea. Fish from Guanabara Bay were tainted, but it pleased Marcelina to imagine the old men offering it in honor to Yemanja.

She could hear the electric organ from the bay where the taxi dropped her: Aquerela do Brasil; samba-exaltação rhythm, heavy on the lower manual, wafting down over the balconies, among the satellite dishes and water tanks. Her mother’s favorite. She found her step quickening to the rhythm as she nodded past Malvina on the concierge’s desk. The music swirled down the stairwell. Malvina was smiling. When Dona Marisa played organ, the whole building smiled. Even the music in the elevaror was unable to defeat Dona Marisa on the manuals as her chords and chachachas boomed around the winch drums and speeding counterweights.

Every child thinks her childhood is normal. Wasn’t everyone’s mother Marisa Pinzón the Organ Queen of the Beija-Flor? Queen Marisa’s most lustrous days, when she ruled the land beyond midnight, Venus arising from the Art Deco shell of the Beija-Flor Club Wurlitzer, were already fading when Marcelina was born. Her two older sisters shared increasingly bitter and resentful memories of grandmothers and tias, cigarette girls and gay cleaners sent to babysit while their mother, swathed in satin and rhinestones, diamante tiara on her brow, gilded shoe tapping out the rhythm, played rumbas and pagodes and foros to the discreet little silver tables. There were photographs of her with Tom Jobim, flirting with Chico Buarque, duetting with Liberace. Marcelina had only the unfocused memory of staring up at a glitterball turning on the ceiling, dazzled by the endless carnival of lights.

She had no memories whatsoever of her father. She had been a primitive streak when Martim Hoffman put on his suit and took his leather briefcase and went our to do business in Petropolis and never returned. For years she had thought Liberace was her dad.

Marcelina shivered with pleasure as the elevator door opened to a sweeping glissando up the keys. Her mother played less and less frequently since the arthritis that would surely turn her knuckles into Brazil nuts had been diagnosed. She hesitated before ringing the bell, enjoying the music. Her alt dot family would have mocked, but it’s always different when it’s your mother. She pressed the button. The music stopped in midbar.

“You don’t call, you don’t visit…”

“I’m here now. And I sent you an SMS.”

“Only because I sent you one first.”

They hugged, they kissed.

“You’re looking tight again,” Marcelina’s mother said, holding her daughter at arm’s length to scrutinize her face. “Have you been on the Botox again? Give me his number.”

“You should get a chain on that door. Anyone could be in here, they’d just brush you aside.”

“You lecture me about security, still living in that dirty, nasty old Copa? Look, I’ve found you this nice little two-bed apartment down on Rua Carlos Góls; it’s only two blocks from me. I got the agent to print out the details. Don’t go without them.”

The organ stood by the open French windows, lights glowing. The table had been set on the little balcony; Marcelina squeezed into her plastic patio chair. It was safest to look at the horizon. Golden surfer boys played there on the ever-breaking wave. She could never look at surfers without a painful sense of another life she could have lived. Dona Marisa brought stacked plates of doces: lemon cake, toothachey peanut squares from Minas Gerais, little honey wafers. Coffee in a pot, and an afternoon vodka for the hostess. Her third, Marcelina judged from the empties on the organ and the arm of the sofa.

“So what is it you have to tell me?”

“No no no, let’s have your news first. Me, I live up here fifteen floors above contradiction and excitement.” She offered the Minas Gerais peanut cookies. Marcelina opted for the honey wafers as the least deadly to her daily calorific intake.

“Well, I’ve got a commission.”

Her mother clasped her hands to her chest. Unlike every other mother of whom she had heard at Canal Quatro, Marisa Pinzón understood completely what her daughter did for a living. Marcelina was her true heiress; Gloria and Iracema disappointed in their successful marriages and expensively clad families. Mundanity as the ultimate teenage rebellion. In Marcelina’s informal casual name-droppings, professional brushes with stellar celebrity, and occasional affairs with a smart man on a pale blue screen who told the country terrible things every night was the lingering perfume of an age when the Queen of the Keyboard ruled from the Copa Palace to Barra. Time for men and babies when you are older while the stars are low enough for you to still touch and magic works yet.

Marcelina could never deflate her mother’s flight over the thousand lights of Ipanema with her aching doubt that her sisters had made the right choice, that she had sold her eggs for edginess and a two-second producer’s credit. Marcelina explained the premise. Her mother sipped her clinking vodka and scowled.

“Barbosa, that bad black man.”

“Don’t tell me you remember the Fateful Final?”

“Every carioca remembers what they were doing at the Maracanaço. I was having a stupidly giddy affair with Dean Martin’s lawyer. Dino gave five shows in the Copa Palace. He deserves what you do to him, he made us a laughingstock. ”

“What? Who?”

“Barbosa. Evil man.”

Dona Marisa was Marcelina’s infallible one-woman focus group. She drained her vodka.

“Querida, would you get me another one?” Marcelina quartered lemon and spooned ice into the glass. Her mother called, “I’m going to have a little feijoada.”

“What’s the occasion?”

Dona Marisa was the kind of cook who used excellence at just one dish to absolve her of every other culinary wrong. A sous-chef in the Café Pitú had given her his recipe for feijoada ten years ago when she was freshly moved to Leblon and she had produced this prodigy on the closest Saturday to every family high-day since.

“Iracema is pregnant again.”

Marcelina felt her grip tighten on the pestle as she carefully pounded the ice.

“Twins.”

A crack, a crash. The bottom of the glass lay on the floor in ice, lime, and reeking vodka, punched out by an overheavy blow from the marble pestle.

“Sorry about that. My hand slipped.”

“Never mind never mind I drink too many anyway. The ruin of many a good women, drinking at home. But twins! What do you think of that? We’ve never had twins in our branch of the family. Now Patricía and that lot down in Florianopolis, they dropped doubles all over the place, as alike as beans in a pod.”

“Play something for me. You never play these days.”

“Oh, no one wants to hear me. It’s old, that kind of stuff I play.”

“Not to me it’s not. Go on. It was lovely hearing you when I was coming up; I could hear you right down in the car park.”

“Oh dear oh no what will everyone think?”

You know full well, Queen of the Fifteenth Floor , Marcelina thought. Like me they’ve seen you playing on your balcony in your tiara and pearl earrings. You make them smile.

“Oh, you talked me into it.” Dona Marisa straightened herself on the bench, ran her feet up and down the bass pedals like an athlete warming up for high hurdles. Marcelina watched her fingers fly like hummingbirds over the tabs and rhythm buttons. Then she caressed the red power switch with a flick of her nails, and “Desafinado” swelled out like angels bursting from the heavenly spaces between the apartment towers of Leblon.

Liberace winked at her from the top of the sideboard.

Feijão the Bean wore a packet of American cigarettes tucked into the top of a pair of Speedos. Speedos, a pair of Havaianas, and his own hide, tanned to soft suede. He padded, restless and edgy as a wasp, about his luxuriant verandah, settling on a wooden bench here, the tiled lip of a plant bed there, a folding table there. He was thin as a whip and comfortable with his body; she was nevertheless thankful that he was devoid of all body hair. The very thought of the gray, wire-haired chests of sixty-something men gave her cold horrors.