Luna: New Moon

He stands a moment in São Sebastião Pavilion, its streams now dry; their sediments caking and cracking into hexagons. This had been her favourite of Boa Vista’s pavilions. There was a pavilion for drinking tea, a pavilion for meeting social guests and one for business guests, a pavilion for receiving relatives and one for reading, the morning pavilion and the evening pavilion but this one, at the eastern end of Boa Vista’s main chamber, was her working pavilion. Rafa has never liked the pavilions. He thinks them affected and silly. Adriana built Boa Vista selfishly; the palace of her particular dreams. It’s Rafa’s now but it will never be his. Adriana is in the dry ponds and watercourses, the bamboo, the domes of the pavilions, the faces of the orixas. He can’t change a leaf or a pebble of it.

‘Water,’ Rafa whispers and feels Boa Vista tremble as waters stir in pipes and pumps; a gurgle here, a trickle there; pouring from freshets and faucets; runnels merging into streams, channels filling, water chuckling around rocks, drawing eddies and foam and dead leaves; water gathering in the eyes and mouths of the orixas; a slow swell into great teardrops quivering with surface tension then burst into slow waterfalls; showers and trickles first, then bounding cascades. Until he silenced them, Rafa had never realised how the splash and trickle of moving waters filled Boa Vista.

‘Papai!’ Luna exclaims, dress hitched up and calf-deep in running water. ‘It’s cold!’

Boa Vista is Rafa’s now but still Lousika won’t share it with him.

‘Do you think you’ll move back?’ Rafa asks.

Lucas shakes his head.

‘Too close. I like my distance. And the acoustics are terrible.’ A touch on the sleeve of Rafa’s Brioni jacket. ‘A word.’

Rafa wondered why Lucas had sought him out at the far end of the garden, risking wet trouser cuffs and stained shoes among the stepping stones and pools.

‘Go ahead.’

‘Mamãe and I talked a lot in the last hours.’

Rafa’s throat and jaw tighten with resentment. He is eldest, hwaejang, golden. He should have had these last words.

‘She had a plan for the company,’ Lucas says. The play of falling water masks his words. ‘Her will. She’s created a new position: Choego. She wanted Ariel to fill it.’

‘Ariel.’

‘I’ve been through this but she was quite obdurate. Ariel will be Choego. Foremost. Head of Corta Hélio. Above me and you, irmão. Don’t argue, don’t make suggestions. I have this already planned. There’s nothing we can do about the will. That’s set, locked in.’

‘We could fight …’

‘I said don’t argue, don’t make suggestions. It would be a waste of our time and money fighting through the courts. Ariel knows the courts, she would tie us up forever. No, we do this constitutionally. Our sister was badly wounded in a knife attack. She is effectively paraplegic. Her recovery will be slow, and by no means certain. The constitution of Corta Hélio contains a medical competency clause. The clause allows for a board member to be retired from office in the case of sickness or injury that would prevent them from fully discharging their duties.’

‘You’re suggesting—’

‘Yes I am. For the company, Rafa. Ariel is a supremely competent lawyer, but she knows nothing about helium mining. It wouldn’t be a board-room coup. Just placing her powers and responsibilities in temporary abeyance.’

‘Temporary until what?’

‘Until such time as we can restructure the company more in line with what it needs, rather than our mother’s whims. She was a very sick woman, Rafa.’

‘Shut the fuck up, Lucas.’

Lucas steps back, hands help up in appeal.

‘Of course. I apologise. But I tell you this; our mother would never have survived her own medical competency clause.’

‘No, fuck off, Lucas.’

Lucas backs off another step.

‘All we need are two medical reports, and I have those. One from the João de Deus medical centre, the other from our very own Dr Macaraeg, who is very pleased to have been retained as our family physician. Two reports, and a majority.’ Lucas calls back through the spray. ‘Let me know!’

Luna goes splashing down the stream, kicking slow-settling sprays of silver water into the air. They catch the light of the sunline and diffract it: a child crowned with rainbows.

The door of the tram closes, the door opens. Ariel looks out.

‘Well, are you coming?’

There is no one other than Marina on the platform that Ariel could intend, but she still frowns, mouths, Me?

‘Yes you, who else?’

‘I’m technically out of contract …’

‘Yes yes, you didn’t work for me, you worked for my mother. Well, you work for me now.’

Hetty chimes: incoming mail. A contract.

‘Come on. Let’s get out of the fucking mausoleum. We’ve got a wedding to arrange.’

ELEVEN