Prologue: Come un Lampo di Vita
A frown creased her features, eyes unopened. It was quiet, but light had fully permeated the room, making it impossible for her to sleep anymore. If there was something she hated more than inescapable light, it was inescapable sound when sleep was a priority, and if curtains allowed her to sleep past dawn, well, there were many inescapable sounds in the slums of Rio. Well, at least she lived alone. Then again, maybe that wasn't a plus. With a roommate she might relieve herself through screaming at whoever was making noise in the morning who lived with her. Whatever.
Heaving a sigh of someone who feels coerced (though by no particular force) to get out of bed, the slim twenty-eight-year-old rolled off the lumpy mattress, slipping her feet underneath her at the last second before she would have fallen to the hard floor. Rising up, she ran an old comb with many broken teeth through her long wavy hair, and pulled on a pair of faded jeans over the black underwear she'd slept in. The red tank top she left as it was. She didn't bring any money with her—she couldn't lose what had to muggers—when she headed for the door after tying her peeling black converse low tops.
The walk to the bottling plant where she worked wasn't long at all—about three miles—really. It was nothing next to the distance farmers walked to their jobs. Then again, farmers were higher paid than day laborers. She walked inside and got suited up in one of about seven hundred identical gray coveralls, zipping it up so that her collarbones but not her tank top were visible. She was about ten minutes early, and as she walked to her station she noticed a man out of the corner of her eye.
Ah. Him. She turned to look at him, and uttered a greeting in Portuguese. Nothing more substancial than that. She did not know him particularly well, by name or face, as he had only appeared some days ago. He was different, though. Well, of course he was something of an anomaly—the white man working as an unregistered day laborer raised certain questions. Just by the color of his skin he could be elevated, yet he was not. He interested her. She saw him look at her on occasion, but he made none of the lewd comments she had come to expect from men at the plant. Her job there was relatively boring. Watch the capping of the bottles, make sure no cracked ones got sent out with the rest. It paid, though.
The hours blended together until a brief lunch break which was more for the people who owned the place than for the actual workers. After pulling off her heavy gloves, she looked up to see him standing there. He kept a polite distance, which should not have surprised her, yet it did.
"Excuse me, miss," he said, extremely politely in a very poor accent that confirmed her suspicions of his being an American. "What is your name?" For some reason she smiled.
"Alegria."