Alone in the Crowd

by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

  Irene arrived dressed with an elegant simplicity, but even so the whole restaurant noticed her. Espinosa got up to greet her and help her with the files and the purse she held in her hands.

  “I’m going straight to work from here,” she said, smiling as if to apologize.

  They looked at each other, holding hands on top of the table, clearly happy to be in the other’s company, despite the phone call a half hour before.

  “So, babe, who were you annoyed with? Me or my friend?”

  “I wasn’t annoyed with you. I just didn’t call yesterday. As for Vânia, I didn’t like what she did.”

  “You didn’t like that she went sailing?”

  “She didn’t go sailing. She left on Saturday at noon and came back at midnight on Sunday without saying a word, without leaving a note with the doorman, without a phone call. I don’t believe that, on a supposed boat that could go from Rio to Angra and return in that same amount of time, there was not a single cell phone, or that the boat itself didn’t have any means of communication. Not having told us anything was a way of worrying us and punishing us for spending the weekend together, without her. She decided to punish you for not staying with her; and me too, for being responsible for your not staying with her; and both of us, ruining our weekend. It’s not only vengeful, it’s irresponsible. Today it’s Tuesday. She came to spend a week. We’ll see what she gets up to before Saturday or Sunday. As for the sailing, it doesn’t matter in the least whether it really happened.”

  “You really think that’s what it was?”

  “I do. But I don’t hate her for it. The problem is just that she caught me unawares.”

  Irene didn’t try to defend her friend. Even if only because she thought that Espinosa’s theory could be right.

  “Fine,” she said. “Let’s eat.”

  They didn’t order wine since both had to work that afternoon, but they did have the codfish risotto.

  Espinosa put Irene into a taxi and walked back to the station, going up the Rua Hilário de Gouveia. Three themes kept bouncing around his head: Irene and Vânia, Dona Laureta, Hugo Breno. The day had begun with his unannounced visit to the Caixa Econômica branch, and at the window was the man who had talked to the retiree on the day she died, a conversation that had gone on longer than he had described to Welber and Ramiro. The man’s features reminded Espinosa of someone he knew was close to him, familiar, though strangely enough he couldn’t identify him. The name Hugo Breno also rang a bell. He tried to recall some former colleague, someone who might have started with him on the police force and then decided to work at a bank instead; he tried to remember his colleagues from the time he worked at the First Precinct, in the Praça Mauá, but he realized that he was on the wrong track—that vague memory didn’t have anything to do with the police. Then he started thinking about fellow students in college, but there again he didn’t remember anyone who fit the description. Hugo Breno lived on the Rua Siqueira Campos, close to the Peixoto District, so the two of them might have crossed paths countless times without leaving a clear impression in his memory. He might have been some unknown neighbor. Nothing more than that. Espinosa kept walking; he was almost at the station. The fact that they lived so close also suggested, for some odd reason, that he was getting closer to the man. He kept walking. He walked by the door to the station without pausing and without going in, his eyes cast down to the sidewalk, like a dog who has lost his owner. Two detectives who were chatting on the sidewalk greeted him and watched as he kept walking up the street, as if the station had moved to a different block. But they knew the chief well enough not to be surprised by his eccentricities.

  Espinosa walked in no particular direction, though he noticed, after he crossed Siqueira Campos, that he was being drawn toward the Peixoto District. Minutes later, he crossed the square on his way to his building. But instead of going all the way there, he stopped in the middle of the square and started walking in circles across the grass. He immediately remembered the dust thrown up by the soccer games of his childhood and the cries of the little players; he saw himself sweeping the earth with a tree branch to get the ground ready for a game of marbles, remembering also the discussions about whether this was going to be a real game or just for fun. His memories emerged spontaneously, without any effort, and among the many faces of his childhood friends one grew sharper and sharper. It wasn’t a visage that quickly came to mind; rather, an image came to mind, but not so much the individual faces within it. His own group of friends appeared like a group of bodies without defined physiognomies. And he didn’t know if it was the past that was coming up through that image or if his current imagination was filling in the gaps in his memory, giving every member of that group an identity. One of the first faces to turn up was a boy’s … and it was his … Hugo Breno, the man from the Caixa. Not the image of him now, but of a boy like him. The cashier as a boy. He had a body and a face, but not a name. Despite that, Espinosa had no doubt. He remembered that the boy was a little younger than he was, maybe a year or two. He was also the smallest one. That’s why they called him Little Hugo. He wasn’t very close to Espinosa, they weren’t friends, but they saw each other often. It made sense. If Hugo had been living in the building on Siqueira Campos since he was a boy, he would have been ten or eleven at the time. More than thirty years before, an eleven-year-old boy could perfectly well have gone by himself to the Peixoto District, only two blocks away, to play in the square. That was why Espinosa had that particular impression of familiarity but not intimacy. Since he was younger, the boy belonged to the younger group, even though for certain games they might get together. But there was something else that had to do not so much with the image of the boy but with the feeling he got from the image of the boy. A feeling of strangeness. The vague idea that something had happened to that boy or to someone connected to him. Espinosa didn’t remember (or didn’t know) what it was, but something strange was connected to the memory. He tried to force himself to think, but the memory got more and more hazy. He kept walking slowly around the square for another fifteen minutes; then he finally headed back to the station. The rest of the afternoon was dedicated to childhood memories, trying to clear out the more recent ones, which covered up the older ones. It didn’t work. At least not that afternoon.

  Once he’d finished his shift, dealing with retirees and pensioners, and had done all he had to do in-house, Hugo Breno left the branch of the Caixa Econômica, still disappointed with Chief Espinosa’s hurried exit. It was a little past five and the movement of people along the sidewalks of the Rua Barata Ribeiro was nothing more than average. Instead of going straight home, he headed toward the Avenida Copacabana, where there were lots more people, though the thoroughfare still hadn’t reached the level of saturation it would attain at six. He crossed the Avenida Copacabana and kept walking toward the beach.

  He didn’t have any interest in seeing the ocean or appreciating the sunset. For him, the oft-praised beauty of Copacabana Beach would do nothing to put him in a better mood. Nature proved useless when dealing with human problems and feelings. Whether beautiful or not, it was useless either way. The only place man can feel good, he thought, is among humans. The only thing that resembles man is man himself. Man does not resemble nature. Among the crowd, the human individual can either lose himself in the homogenous mass or maintain his individuality. The feeling of belonging to something yet still keeping one’s difference is one of the supreme experiences of man among the crowd. In nature, whether the surroundings are beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant, man will always be different. Always a figure, never in the background. A tree in the forest gets lost and diluted in the forest, becoming a part of the undifferentiated background; a man in the middle of the forest will never be background but always be his own character, an irreducible and aberrant difference. That’s why nature didn’t interest Hugo. When dealing with human matters, human sentiments and fears, nature was irrelevant. That’s what he was thinking while he was walking, ki
lling time until he got back to the Avenida Copacabana. Once he got there, he let himself get lost in the crowd for more than an hour. Once he’d done that, he could separate himself out from them, refreshed, and head home.

  It was dark when he opened the door to his apartment. No surprises. There was nobody waiting for him, just as there was nothing different from when he’d left that morning. Nobody had come into the apartment in his absence. He couldn’t stand the thought of anyone having the freedom to go through every room, every wardrobe, every drawer, while he was out working. Not that there was anything special to be ransacked; there were no hidden secrets, no stashed-away valuables. And it was precisely for that reason that he would have felt invaded. Not because of what was hidden, but because everything was on display. It was the nudity of his life that would be exposed. That’s why he didn’t want a maid. He wouldn’t even allow an occasional cleaning lady. He himself cleaned the apartment. He had a washer and a dryer. He himself ironed his shirts and pants. With the exception of vegetables, everything he ate he bought frozen. In a word, he considered himself autonomous, independent, and almost wholly self-sufficient. Physical contact with others, men or women, made him uncomfortable. When something went wrong with his body, he had recourse to health professionals. Friends were unnecessary.

  As soon as he came in, he opened the windows in the front and the back of the apartment, as he always did, took off his clothes, put on some shorts, and started doing his series of abdominal exercises, push-ups, and bar exercises. He didn’t need musical accompaniment. Nothing to remind him of a gym. After a shower he went to the nearest supermarket to buy his dinner.

  After the meeting with his team at the end of the day, Espinosa called Welber and Ramiro into his office.

  “Any news?” he asked the two of them.

  “We think we’ve got something, boss, though it might make the case even more complicated than it already is,” Ramiro said.

  As an inspector, it was Ramiro’s job to lay out what he and Detective Welber had found. Espinosa trusted them and they almost always worked together.

  “Well, Welber confirmed with the National Institute for the Education of the Deaf that the cashier and the old lady talked much longer than what he had told us. That’s the first thing, and that’s not news to you. The second thing is that it wasn’t the first time they’d talked. They talked at least once a month for the last three months, as far back as the tapes go. And every time the conversation was just as extensive, or more extensive than what’s necessary to hand over some money at the counter.”

  “And did you, Ramiro, get anything else?”

  “I did. And this is news … as well as strange. Looking at Dona Laureta’s old address books, I found the number of a lady whose address is the same as Hugo Breno’s. At some date I didn’t manage to nail down, the phone and the address were scratched out, as if the person had moved … or died. In other words, Dona Laureta and Hugo Breno’s mother knew each other and spoke, at least on the phone. Of course, that might not have anything to do with our story. They lived nearby, they met at the market, they were more or less the same age, both widows, became friends, and …”

  “And?”

  “Well, that’s it, Chief—it’s difficult to infer anything about Dona Laureta’s possible murder from the simple fact that the two of them were friends,” Ramiro concluded.

  “We’ll see,” Espinosa said. “Two widowed neighbor ladies become friends. One of them has a son who’s around forty who lives with her and works at the Caixa Econômica. The other doesn’t have children and lives alone. The one with the son dies. A year later, the friend dies in suspicious circumstances, after a tense conversation with her dead friend’s son, who is a cashier at the agency where she picks up her pension every month. You know that I don’t place much store in coincidences. And here there are too many coincidences. Of course, we have an explanation for that: they’re not coincidences. If the cashier’s mother was a friend of the lady’s, her son should know her. When, after the mother’s death, he discovers that her friend gets her pension at the same branch where he’s a teller, it’s only natural that they would exchange a few words. So there’s nothing strange about those facts. But then it so happens that she dies hours after talking to him and minutes after coming to the station to talk to the chief. Something’s not right here. Or missing. Find out what.”

  That night, at home, after washing the plate and silverware from a meal whose exact contents he could no longer precisely describe, Espinosa gazed out at the square from the little balcony outside his French windows. Ever since he was ten years old, when he moved to that apartment with his parents, whenever he was mulling over some problem (except for mathematics) he stepped onto that balcony and let his eyes wander through the movement in the square or onto the green of the hill in the distance. One of the differences now was the position of his body. When he was ten, he could rest his chin on an arm sitting atop the cast-iron balcony, and now his entire torso stuck out above the railing. The landscape had changed as well. The square had lost the bamboo grove akin to its original state and had acquired a few urban improvements. But the biggest change had been in the spirit of the neighborhood, which, like the city itself, had suffered a reverse metamorphosis: instead of transforming from a caterpillar into a butterfly, it had gone from a butterfly to a caterpillar.

  The current population of the city, and to a lesser extent of the neighborhood, lived under a curfew determined by the drug traffickers. Even the peaceful area around the Peixoto District was not free of the effects of its proximity to the Ladeira dos Tabajaras, where internal disputes for the control of the traffic sometimes burst the borders of the favela and spilled into the square and the neighborhood. That scenario, remote but not entirely unthinkable, was not easy for a police chief to contemplate, especially when he was trying to superimpose two moments from his personal history onto two moments in the history of his neighborhood. He didn’t know if the neighborhood and the city would recover, someday, a bit of its lost peace.

  But the neighborhood and the square were still recognizable to the adult Espinosa. The difficulty he was having was recognizing in Hugo Breno the boy who’d played soccer in the square. Espinosa forced his visual memory far beyond the present he had in front of his eyes and tried to visualize the boy, a little smaller than he was, struggling against his shyness and trying to make himself known and get invited to participate in the games. He remembered the boy being accepted. He remembered that even though he was little he tried his very best to do as well or better than the older boys. He also remembered that something had happened to that boy. Something bad.

  The phone must have been ringing for a while when Espinosa snapped out of his daydreams.

  “Espinosa, are you busy?”

  “No …”

  “It’s Vânia. Sorry for calling you so late.”

  “What do you mean, so late? It’s only eight-thirty.”

  “I thought you might be resting.”

  “I was trying to remember something that happened in my childhood.”

  “And did you?”

  “Only partially. It’s something important, one of those things that you don’t forget but that time distorts.”

  “Something bad?”

  “I still don’t know.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I’ve forgotten the most important part.”

  “Ah.”

  “Can I help you with something?” Espinosa asked.

  “You must think that what I did this weekend was stupid.”

  “Not stupid. Cunning.”

  “Cunning?”

  “Yes. Cunning.”

  “Espinosa, you really are an interesting guy.”

  “Is that a compliment?”

  “It depends on what you mean by ‘cunning.’”

  “Shrewd.”

  “That doesn’t help much.”

  “Wily, tricky, catty, crafty, deceitful …”

  “Ah …
”

  “Do you think that’s good or bad?”

  “It can be either, depending on what you mean by them,” Vânia said.

  “I think they’re attractive,” Espinosa replied.

  “Those adjectives?”

  “When applied to a woman like you.”

  “And would you like to see if they really do apply to me?”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Today?”

  “Now.”

  Espinosa could hardly believe it when, a half hour later, Vânia rang the bell and came up the stairs with the same energy Irene had several years before. That mood, however, gave way to an almost modest carefulness when she embraced him upon entering the apartment, a carefulness Espinosa noted when he felt the partial touch of their bodies, at least in the first moments of their meeting. And he also noticed that his own body was tense, all tense, but especially his legs. Slowly, however, they relaxed, until their bodies grasped each other entirely.

  Up to that point, neither had said a word. Only when they gestured to take off their clothes did Vânia look around, as if to find the way to the bedroom. That was when she started to undress, and even then she didn’t do so until she’d seen Espinosa unbutton and remove his shirt.

  She gave herself over to him slowly. First she allowed her body to be explored by Espinosa’s lips and hands, an exploration that began with her hair, continued along her face and neck, then went down her whole body all the way to her feet, without neglecting a single part in between. Only then did she start to explore Espinosa’s body, an activity that for him felt deliciously interminable. Vânia’s nudity was stunningly beautiful, but Espinosa thought that despite the freedom he felt caressing her, he ought to be careful, because the equilibrium of the moment was much more unstable than it would be if he waited for Vânia to take the lead.