Eight sixteen. He blew air through his mouth, turned around. Not halfway up the steep Rua Branca and the city below already looked miniature, the web of streets and alleyways radiating out from downtown like tiny tidy spokes, the kinks in the roads ironed out by distance. The rows of orange boxy houses, too, improved from this height, looking more like concerted complexes of houses, like freight cars running parallel to the roads. The whites on the teeming clotheslines shaded blue, and the river, dark brown since the sun had set, kept traces of the afterglow, warm seepages, like gold dust at the bottom of a prospector’s tray. The scene was tranquil, quiet, and utterly at odds with Elder Passos’s mood. Most of the people on Rua Branca weren’t home, or at least didn’t answer their doors; the few who did begged off in short order. It was an ordinary stretch of tracting, in other words, but tonight it was almost unbearable to Passos. The only solid presence in their teaching pool had sunk, and who could take her place on this street?
