What the Hill Sings

The favela sings before it speaks. The bass comes up through the floor of the bar on the second turn, where Carlinhos plays a guitar that has four strings and should have six but makes do. Everything here makes do. The guitar. The wiring. The wall between my kitchen and Dona Rosa's kitchen, which is thin enough that I know when she's making feijoada by the smell and the radio station she puts on when she cooks, which is always Rádio Globo, which is always too loud, which is fine. I used to want to leave. Every kid says that. You look down at Copacabana from the top of the hill and the beach looks like a place where your life would be different, which it would be — mostly more expensive. My mother cleaned houses in Leblon for twenty years. She took the bus at five, came back at eight. She could describe every room in those houses, the size of the closets, the color of the tiles. I asked her once if she wanted to live there. She looked at me like I'd asked if water was wet. Of course, she said. And then: But I'd miss the music. She wasn't being romantic. She was being accurate. Here, the sound comes up the hill and collects in the alleys and you hear everything — samba, funk, gospel from the church on Rua Quatro, a kid practicing trumpet badly, dogs, motorcycles, someone arguing about football with a passion that borders on theology. In Leblon the sound goes out. Over the water. Into the money. It dissipates. Here it stays. It bounces off the concrete and comes back louder and someone turns up the radio and Carlinhos adds a fifth string he borrowed from God knows where and the guitar sounds better, actually. Five strings turns out to be the right number. Not six, not four. Five. The guitar knew. We didn't.