Free Heliopolis by James Scudamore

it might lead her into bad habits, it caused my mother to do something unprecedented: to criticise her saviour.
    ‘Dona Rebecca should be talking to the child more. She should be holding her tight, and not letting her go,’ she said quietly, into the sink, as if even to give voice to such disloyal thoughts was tantamount to blasphemy. And then, so faintly that I wondered whether she had said it at all, she added, ‘Only an Englishwoman.’
    Later, accompanying Rebecca on her orphanage visits, I noticed that when dealing with the kids she tended to disdain affection in favour of problem solving: dressing wounds, taming hair, treating warts. When the children wanted a hug and nothing more practical, she would stand up, smooth down her linens and find a pretext to leave, the impression being that if her kindness were to be widely distributed, it could not be frittered away on single physical encounters. Her husband, by contrast, would reserve all his charm and tactility for the person he was talking to, even as he conducted his life with total ruthlessness.
    But an event like that doesn’t just go away. However unaffected Melissa might have seemed, an arrow had been fired high in the air by what happened, and it had to come down eventually. That I was the only person to realise this is directly attributable to the fact that it was
feijoada
day.
     
    If cooking
feijão
is an exercise in loading the beans with whatever flavour you can summon, then
feijoada
is about overkill: freighting them with everything and seeing what comes out. Every mouthful is different, and the dark, glossy sauce is enriched by every dried, salted, fresh or smoked cut you throw in. On
feijoada
day, Zé could spend the afternoon poring over the shuddering, bubbling clay pots my mother brought out, from the ‘new’ cuts which he liked well enough—smoked pork sausages, loin chops and belly, jerked and salted beef, salt pork—to the ‘old’ cuts to which he was devoted, and which for him were the main event—ears, tails, noses, trotters, tripe. Then there were the accompaniments: heaps of finely shredded green kale fried in garlic and oil, toasted cassava flour, pork rinds, plantains, rice, glistening slices of orange. And endless ice-cold jugs of passion fruit,
cajú
or lime
batida
to help it all on its way. On
feijoada
day my mother could not rest—she was on duty the whole time, keeping everybody topped up with fat and protein and alcohol.
    An invariable aftereffect of this ritual was that it put everyone to sleep for hours, which is the only possible way we could have managed to go missing for a whole afternoon so soon after Melissa’s ordeal. If they’d lunched lightly they would have been scouring the farm for guerrilla kidnappers when we didn’t turn up. Instead, guests reclined on loungers under the eaves of the pool house, some drinking coffee and brandy and watching the rain outside, others groaning or snoring, while Zé browsed the table for any remaining worthwhile morsels. And we disappeared.
    The storm had been building all morning. Clouds heavy with rain massed over the valley; hummingbirds flickered from plant to plant, getting their business out of the way before the onslaught. Rebecca was not enjoying her weekend. Two of her lunch guests were significant donors to the Uproot Foundation whom she wanted to impress, and one of them was a high-ranking Church official. Fearing that her husband and his friends, who invariably got drunk on
feijoada
day, might let her down, Rebecca compensated by concentrating as much as possible on those elements of the lunch that she could control. She asked my mother to clean down every surface several times in advance of the visit, and to make sure that the
feijoada
be more spectacular than ever.
    Just before her special guests were due to arrive, Rebecca was on the veranda aligning magazines and setting down dishes of peanuts and
pão de queijo
when Melissa, who had been quiet since the kidnap but