The wind had come down from the hills and was carrying away the low, weeping clouds, blowing away the tops of the gray waves. Gulls hovered over the spray line, webs outspread, wings tilting a breath here, a feather there to hold them over the wave tops. Handsome boys in cute rubber suits lounged on the sand and waited for the sky to clear. On the black-and-white patterned sidewalk of Avenida Delfim Moreira, Marcelina realized she still had her saturated flowers clutched in her fist. She drew an orchid from the cellophane and launched it at the surfer boys. They laughed and waved. She speared flowers into Leblon’s rain-pocked sand until she had no more. Surf’s up. That noise was back in her head, the whistle of world’s end; tears wrung out of the hollows of her skull.

You said that you said that you said that. But it wasn’t me, it wasn’t me. Then what was it? A reality television show? At her most cruel, most desperate for shock, Marcelina would never have done anything like that card. The family, you never touch the family. But didn’t you do that in Filthy Pigs? Friendships ended mothers and daughters sundered, families at war?

At the bridge over the canal that drained the lagoon into the ocean, where Leblon ended and Ipanema began, she chewed the plastic seal off the bottle of wine, pushed the cork in with her thumb, and swigged down hundred-real imported French Margaux. Cyclists and rollerbladers in wet spandex stared as they whirred past, wheels throwing up narrow wakes of rainwater. Stare at me, stare all you like. She had downed the entire bottle by Arpoador, sent the empty bottle arcing up into the air to smash among the power walkers. Marcelina peeled the saturated hair back from her face to scowl at the staring faces.

“So? So?”

The brief woo of sirens sent Marcelina down with a wail onto her ass. She sat gaping at the police cruiser as if it had fallen from an angel’s purse. A policewoman helped her to her feet. Rain spilled from the peak of her cap onto Marcelina’s upturned face.

“You’ve got your pants tucked into your boots,” Marcelina said.

“Come on, now. How much have you had?”

“Only wine officer, only wine.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself, in public too. Come on, now.”

’’I’m a corda vermelha, you know,” Marcelina said. “I could make you look very very silly.” But the policewoman’s grip on Marcelina’s elbow was irrefutable. She steered her toward the car. Her partner, a broad-faced mulatinho, shook with laughter.

“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” Marcelina said as the policewoman pressed her down into the seat. “Oh, I’ve gotten all your upholstery wet.” She tried to wipe away the drips with her sleeve. “Where are you taking me?”

“Home.”

Marcelina seized the policewoman’s shirt.

“No, don’t take me there, I can’t go there, she’s there.”

The policewoman quickly and firmly unhooked Marcelina’s fists.

“Well, you’re in no condition to be out on the street. Would you rather I took you in?”

“Heitor,” Marcelina said. “Take me to Heitor. Heitoooor!”

He thanked the officers patiently, who were genuinely awed to be in the presence a television celebrity and delighted at the prospect of profitable gossip. Marcelina sat on the topmost of the terrace steps, runoff from the morro that rose sheer behind Heitor’s apartment block cascading around her.

“This is going to be all over Quem by Monday,” Heitor said. There was the discreet exhibitionism of a woman in a sheer playsuit parading under the lenses across the lagoon; that same woman drunk and shrieking on his back steps was quite another thing. “Jesus. Are you going to come in? My car’s going to be here in five minutes and I’m going to have to change, this suit is ruined.”

“Well boo hoo for your suit,” Marcelina shouted to Heitor’s rain-soaked shoulders as he stepped through the sliding doors into his bedroom. “It’s my fucking life that’s over, that’s all.”

Heitor threw a towel out to her. She wrapped it round her head like Carmen Miranda but got to her feet, glitter pumps careful careful on the treacherous waterfall steps and stumbled into the bedroom. Heitor stood in his shorts and socks, knotting a knitted silk tie Marcelina had brought him back from New York. She stood dripping onto his carpet.

“Do you think it’s like axé, that power can go out and take shapes?”

Heitor pulled on his pants, checked the propriety of his creases.

“What are you talking about?”

Marcelina staggered out of her shoes as Heitor pulled his on with a tortoiseshell shoehorn. Her Capri-cut jeans followed; she fell back onto the bed as she tried to disengage her feet.

“Like some very strong feelings or stress or wanting something too much can go out of you and gather together and take on a life and body of its own,” she said. “Like the umbanda mestres were supposed to be able to tear off part of their souls and make it take the shape of a dog or a monkey.”

Marcelina put her arms up and slid off the bed out of her saturated strappy top. Her bra followed. Heitor studied her small, tight-nippled breasts in the full-length mirror. He shrugged on his jacket.

“That’s legend. Magic. Superstition. We live in a scientific, entropic universe.”

“But suppose suppose suppose. … ” Marcelina said in her tanga. The intercom buzzed. Taxi. Heitor kissed her, circled his thumbs over her nipples.

Marcelina pressed close, tried to slip the tongue. Heitor gently pressed her down to the bed.

“I’ll see you in there later. And do try and get some water down you.”

“Heitor!”

The rain streaking across the coffin-narrow concrete garden was now stained ochre with eroded soil. Marcelina sat up under the sheet, knees pulled to chin, watching the morro wash between the potted plants and down the steps, shivering at the horror. Sleep was impossible. She scuffed around on Heitor’s polished hardwood floor in her bare feet, looking for water. Marcelina slowly bent over and bared her ass to the telescopes across the lagoon. Wipe your lenses, boys and girls. She slapped her backside.

But she had still wished her own sister’s twin babies aborted in the womb.

Marcelina flicked on the plasma screen. Noise, chatter, brainpan jabber. Stop you thinking about yourself. And there was Heitor, the remote control camera moving in for a close-up as the title graphics rolled. The headlines tonight. Burning cars, police helicopters, corpses in Bermudas. The walls around the favelas another course of bricks taller. Lula rocked by fresh corruption allegations. Brazil, the nation of the future. Then Marcelina saw Heitor scan the next line on the autocue and his eyes widen. There was the tiniest of pauses. Heitor never did that. Heitor was the old-school public-service commitment to the Truth Well in a jungle of eighteen-to-thirty-four demoographics and noisy edginess. Heitor was professional down to the shine of his shoes. All her attention was focused on the screen.

“And Canal Quatro finds itself in the news with the allegations by journalist Raimundo Soares to be published in the Jornal de Copacabana tomorrow that it is to make a television program about the Maracanaço. He alleges that he received a confidential e-mail from a Canal Quatro producer that the entertainment program will track down the eighty-five-year-old Moaçir Barbosa, seen by many as being chiefly responsible for the Maracanaço, and publicly humiliate him in a mock trial reality show.”

VT insert of Raimundo Soares in surf shirt and shorts on rain-swept Flamengo Beach, his brotherhood nodding over their lines behind him. Cynicism. Lied to. Pillorying an old man. Then Marcelina could not hear anymore because the sound in her eyes in her head in her ears squeezed out into the world.

It was all ended. Our Lady of Production Values had abandoned her.

She pointed the remote and sent Heitor into the dark. Her heartbeat was the loudest sound in the room.