"Rio runs on samba, feathers, and one spiral staircase that has carried a crowd before"
Thiago Reis, a repinique drummer from Belo Horizonte who can't stop counting the tempo of everything, has been called up at the last minute to play in the Sambadrome on Carnival Sunday with the AcadĂȘmicos do Engenho, all two hundred and eighty drums of it. He arrives with his grandfather's sticks and forty-eight frozen pĂŁo de queijo from his mother. On the open yellow tram over the Arcos da Lapa he meets Hannah from Ohio, a year sober and counting exits, and it turns out they're headed to the same place: Hostel Bloco Loco, a peeling guava-pink mansion in Santa Teresa whose Wi-Fi password translates as the year only starts after Carnival. Because Thiago booked over WhatsApp, the Hub prints him out as a variable not modelled, and the owner nicknames him o penetra, the gatecrasher.
The house is full of people Thiago can't help liking. Dandara, the manager, studies the Civil Code at the front gate and keeps a folder of emails to the owner, each one headed SAĂDAS DE EMERGĂNCIA. There's Facundo from Rosario, who has been asked to leave four bars; Rahul from Pune, who simulates video-game crowds and measures every door; Liesl from Graz, with a spreadsheet of the world's carnivals; Sato-san, a retired accountant who came for eight nights before the pandemic and plays the cuĂca very badly; and Jordan Pike from Tampa, eleven thousand followers and climbing, whose four-thousand-dollar phoenix costume jams in the tower door on the way in. The neighbours call the place the House of the Snail and won't say why. The garden gate is chained shut 'only for Carnival'. And at seven one morning the alarm goes off with no warning and sends fifty-three hungover guests down the spiral stair, where the eighty-centimetre door wedges shut on them and a guest's shoulder comes out of its socket.
Hannah takes her numbered list to the owner, and he takes her forty reais for a wristband. By Fat Tuesday there are two hundred tickets sold for the Baile do Bloco Loco: a live bateria in the old ballroom, fog machines, orange wristbands, and twenty thousand nuns from the last Carmelitas bloco pouring past the gate, some of them over the wall. Jordan is in full plumage, dancing for his livestream at the top of the stair. Rahul has done the maths on the door, Hannah has counted every exit, and Thiago, as always, is keeping time.
Age: 25
Type: Mineiro repinique player on a last-minute call-up
Fatal Flaw: Measures the whole city in beats per minute, and was once a minor meme
Role: Protagonist
Age: 27
Type: 'Pike Goes Big' influencer from Tampa
Fatal Flaw: Thinks vibes got his family through six hurricanes
Role: Victim
Age: 23
Type: Ohio 911 dispatcher, a year and twenty days sober
Fatal Flaw: Counts exits the way other people count calories
Role: Ally
Age: â
Type: Hostel manager and law student
Fatal Flaw: Her folder of urgent emails is very, very big
Role: Keeper of the house
Age: 52
Type: Owner and former Barra nightclub promoter
Fatal Flaw: Believes fire exits are only for fires
Role: Owner
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Penetras"
Jefferson Santos had feet like two canoes, and he had been called PezĂŁo, Bigfoot, since the day a nurse at the Hospital Souza Aguiar held him up by the ankles and said, "Meu Deus, look at the size of this boy's feet." He was now thirty-four, and six foot five, and wore a size forty-eight shoe that had to be ordered from a man in SĂŁo Paulo, and every single person in the neighbourhood of Santa Teresa knew him by his feet before they knew him by his face.
This was useful in a doorman. People saw the feet first, then they looked up, and up, and by the time they got to his face they had decided not to try anything.
At twenty to midnight on the Wednesday before Carnival, PezĂŁo sat on his plastic stool beside the front gate of the Hostel Bloco Loco with a bag of Biscoito Globo in his lap, and watched Rio de Janeiro warm up.
You could hear it. That was the thing about the city in the week before Carnival: you didn't have to see it. It came up the hill at you like weather. From down in Lapa, somebody's sound system was playing a funk remix of a samba-enredo, bass so deep it moved the leaves on the jacaranda. From the Largo dos GuimarĂŁes, where the bars spilled across the tram tracks, came a cheer every forty seconds, for no reason. A bloco was rehearsing somewhere below the convent: surdos, the big bass drums, going boom . . . boom, and the tamborims chattering over the top like a thousand people typing. Every so often a firework went up over the GlĂłria, a green one, a pink one, and hung above the bay, and the whole hill said "Ahhhh" together.
Santa Teresa did everything together. It was a village on a hill in the middle of a city of seven million people, and it had never quite accepted that it was part of the city at all. Its streets were cobbled and steep and curled around the mountain like the peel of an orange. Its houses were old and big and falling beautifully to pieces, mansions from the days when the coffee barons built up here to get away from the yellow fever in the port. Artists lived in them now, and old ladies, and dogs, and the kind of French couple who opened a restaurant with six tables and no menu. And, because it was Rio, and because the view from the top of any wall was worth a fortune, hostels.
Fictional reviews of the fictional Hostel Bloco Loco, quoted from the book.
â "carnival capacity: optimised. secondary exits: secured. the old stair has been measured. it has carried a crowd before. variable noted. see you on tuesday. risk accepted. â " â @HostelReaper
â "exposure: high. wings: 2.80 m. door: 0.80 m. variable noted." â @HostelReaper