Luna: New Moon

One of the girls catches him: Hey, you’re Lucasinho Corta, great dress, show me the cash. Says, Do you want to come to a party?

Where?

She gives him a location and it’s only when he’s back in Kojo’s on his own that Lucasinho realises that it’s in Twé, the capital of the Asamoahs and that Abena Asamoah might be there. And that what he wants, what he really really wants, has only ever been the girl who put the spike through his ear.

‘This is a strange room,’ the musician says.

Lucas sits on a sofa. The room’s only other piece of furniture is a chair, directly facing the sofa.

‘It is acoustically perfect. It’s designed for me but it will still be the best acoustic you have ever heard.’

‘Where should I …’

Lucas indicates the chair in the centre of the room.

‘Your voice,’ the musician says.

‘Yes,’ Lucas says, quietly and without emphasis and his words fill the room. He doubts there is a sound room in the two worlds to match his. He had acoustic engineers flown up from Sweden to supervise its construction. Lucas loves its discretion. There are sonic marvels hidden in its micro-grooved walls, beneath its absorbent black floor and re-shapable ceiling. The sound-room is his only vice, Lucas believes. He controls his excitement as the musician opens his guitar case. This is an experiment. He has never tried the room with live music before.

‘If you don’t mind.’ Lucas nods at the open case on the floor. ‘It will interfere with the wave forms.’

The case removed, the musician bends over his guitar and picks a soft harmonic. The notes come as soft and clear to Lucas as if they were breathing.

‘It is very good.’

‘You should come over here and try it,’ Lucas says. ‘Except then who would play the guitar?’

Tuning, then the musician rests his hands on the wooden body of his instrument.

‘What would you like to hear?’

‘I asked you play a song at the party. My mama’s favourite.’

‘Aguas de Marco.’

‘Play that for me.’

Fingers float across the board, a chord for every word. The boy’s voice is not the strongest or the most refined Lucas has ever heard – an intimate whisper, as if singing only for himself. But it caresses the song, turns its dialogue into pillow-talk between singer and guitar. Voice and strings syncopate around the beat; between them it vanishes, leaving only the conversation: chords and lyrics. Lucas’s breathing is shallow. Every sense is tuned as precisely as the strings of the guitar, harmonically alive and resonating, focused on the player and the song. Here is the soul of saudade. Here are holy mysteries. This room is his church, his tereiro. It is everything Lucas hoped.

Jorge the musician ends the song. Lucas composes himself.

‘Eu Vim da Bahia?’ he asks. An old João Gilberto song with difficult descending chord progressions and a heartbreaking turn. Jorge nods. Lua de São Jorge. Nada Sera Como Antes. Cravo e Canela. All the old songs his mother brought from green Brazil to the moon. The songs of his childhood, the songs of bays and hills and sunsets he has never seen and can never see. They were seeds of beauty, strong and sad, in the grey hell of the moon. Lucas Corta realised young that he lives in hell. The only way to transform hell, to even survive it, is to rule it.

Lucas feels a tear run down his face.

Por Toda a Minha Vida ends. Lucas sits silent and unmoving, letting his emotions settle.

‘Thank you,’ Lucas says. ‘You play beautifully.’ A thought sends the fee to Jorge’s familiar.

‘This is more than we agreed.’

‘A musician argues about being overpaid?’

Jorge fetches the case and stores his guitar. Lucas watches the care and love with which he handles the instrument, wiping sweat from the strings, blowing dust from under the end of the fingerboard. Like laying a child in a cradle.

‘This room is too good for me,’ Jorge says.

‘This room was made for you,’ Lucas says. ‘Come again. Next week. Please.’

‘For that money, I’ll come when you whistle.’

‘Don’t tempt me.’

And there it is, in the flicker of smile, the flash of exchanged looks.

‘It’s good to find someone who appreciates the classics,’ Jorge says.

‘It’s good to find someone who understands them,’ Lucas says. Jorge hefts the guitar case. Toquinho opens the door of the sound room. Even the muffled footfalls, the creak of the guitar case, sound perfect.

Shafts of light fall around the fighting figures. The Hall of Knives is a tunnel of bright, dusty pillars of sunlight. The two males, one tall, one short, lunge and dance, feint and follow, barefoot across the absorbent floor, now lit, now shaded. It is as beautiful as ballet. Rachel Mackenzie watches from a small spectators’ gallery by the door. Robson is quick and brave but he is eleven years old and Hadley Mackenzie is a man.