The Body Snatcher

by Patricia Melo

  I sometimes still dream about my salesgirl who committed suicide, her pale face, and wake up at the sound of the slap, as if someone were attacking me. But now I think of São Paulo as a kind of atomizer that transformed me into something tiny, weak, and breakable, capable of slapping my employee in the face. A true sickness, that city. Like those that attack soldiers when they put on a uniform and head off to war. Or subordinates, when they follow orders. Not that you like being on the battlefield or obeying orders. It’s more a question of consistency; after all, you’re there to accomplish certain things. You’ve got to adjust. And fast, we fit in. It could have been worse, I think. I could have killed a driver in traffic. Cooked the books. Stolen money. Or thrown myself from the tenth floor. In any case, I had fallen into the well, sunk, and rotted like a tomato dropped on the ground at an outdoor market. I had barely gotten away. It was in those terms that I thought about that city. I promised myself never to return to that life. Never again, over.

  It was Rita, my cousin’s wife, who helped me out of the hole. The first time I saw her, she was sunbathing in a bikini, near the gasoline pump, and already at that moment I could sense sparks of electricity coming from her body to burn mine. She was twenty-six and sold cosmetics door to door. She wasn’t pretty. But there was something about her face that pleased everybody at first sight. When Carlão spoke to me about her the first time, saying that for her he had left his wife and daughters, he spoke precisely of that aspect of Rita, her curiosity, her smile, her laughter, and he described her very well. Her nose was a bit large; her hair was dyed; her feet small and bony; but you didn’t pay attention to any of that when you were beside her.

  When Carlão went shopping or traveled, she would come down to the pump and keep me company. She would come up to my room with fresh coffee. We would go swimming in a nearby lake. This place is the end of the world, she said. Last stop. Just look where you ended up. Take one more step, you’ll drop into the beyond. If you go in the wrong direction, you’ll wind up in Bolivia.

  We sometimes remained quiet, side by side, smoking and gazing at the empty highway, until one day she asked me who the girl was who called me every day. Our faces were so close together that I could almost smell the coffee on her breath. My girlfriend, I said. And Sulamita is the name of a person? she asked. I thought it was some kind of mineral found in the region. Aluminum phosphate, those things. I laughed. She remained serious and said she was falling in love with me.

  I moved out the next day. I didn’t want any problems with my cousin.

  Now there I was, unemployed and with a kilo of cocaine hidden in the crawl space.

  Before taking a shower, I went downstairs, crossed through the hallway beside the bicycle shop, and offered the fish to the old Indian woman, the bike shop owner’s mother. Serafina was her name.

  There were other Guatós in the neighborhood. I saw them there, with their slanted eyes, their flip-flops, playing football in the late afternoon, doing labor of every kind, bodywork on cars, security, cleaning. They were no longer accustomed to life on the island from which they had been expelled by the army and to which they were later able to return when priests in the region began raising a fuss to defend them. Serafina preferred the city after her husband was hospitalized with heart problems.

  The only problem was living with her son, she said, now that the old chieftain had died. The family lived crowded into two rooms. Serafina slept in the kitchen with her three grandchildren, jammed against the couple’s bedroom. There were small mattresses leaning against the walls and clothes drying behind the refrigerator. Grease from the bicycle shop was gradually making its way into the house and up the walls.

  The daughter-in-law wasn’t part of the tribe and got irritated when the old woman spoke Guató. Their mother would slap the little Indians for any reason, and now and then would hit Serafina, who would be expelled onto the sidewalk as punishment.

  On those occasions I took her to my room. She would be confused, disoriented. Do you think, she asked, it was because I went into the refrigerator? I got a banana. Was it because of the banana?

  They all went to the supermarket, she said that night. They’ll be back soon, with cans and crackers, she added, sighing. I have some fried sausage here. Do you want it?

  I thought it would be better not to leave the house, with all that powder going tick-tock in my head like a time bomb.

  I ate in a hurry, thanked her, and went back to my room to see if there was anything on television about a missing plane.

  6

  The news I was waiting for didn’t appear till mid-morning. The reporter affirmed that the pilot had been missing since Sunday. His name was José Beraba Junior, which I knew from the documents I’d found in his backpack. What I didn’t know was that the young man was the son of a wealthy cattle rancher in the region. The images showed the pilot in an equestrian competition, skiing in Aspen, and vaccinating cattle with his father. They said the search for the disappeared single-engine plane would focus on the area in the vicinity of Corumbá where, according to radar, the last contact had been made at around four o’clock on Sunday afternoon. Concluding the coverage, a statement from his girlfriend. I know Junior is alive, she said, and I ask everyone to pray for him.

  So far so good, I thought. Everything under control, over.

  I dragged up a chair, reached the crawl space, and took out the pilot’s backpack.

  Calmly, I spread the contents on the table and once again carefully noted each of the objects: watch, glasses, wallet, keys, cell phone, two pens. And the package of drugs.

  In the wallet I found several credit cards, two hundreds and three tens in cash, and the pilot’s personal documents. There was also a membership card from the Cattle Raisers Association of Mato Grosso do Sul.

  It would be wise for me to get rid of everything, toss the pack in the river after weighting it down with stones.

  I decided I would do that the next time I went fishing.

  I put the watch on my wrist and stored the other objects in the backpack before returning it to the crawl space.

  As I was getting dressed, I remembered a pawnshop that belonged to an old Arab, near the Santa Cruz cemetery, where I had hocked my mother’s wedding ring when I first came to Corumbá.

  At eleven, the city shuttered under the sun. I parked behind the cemetery, and as soon as I got out of the car my glasses fogged up. I arrived at the pawnshop bathed in sweat, and offered the Arab the watch.

  He carefully examined the green sticker with a hologram on the back of the watch, where the serial number was.

  Then he ran some figures on his calculator and offered me an amount that I promptly accepted, happily signing the pawn ticket.

  I went back to the car patting the money in my pocket, thinking that at least for the time being I could get by.

  Before going home, I bought a precision scale, plastic bags, adhesive tape, and a sackful of red stars.

  They would be my trademark, over.

  Around seven o’clock, I parked in front of the police precinct and waited for Sulamita. She came out, accompanied by detective Joel. Ciao, Sweetheart, he said. Ciao, Tranqueira, a nickname that means albatross. That was how they addressed each other. Sweetheart and Tranqueira.

  On the way home we bought a pizza. We ate with the television on, drinking beer, with me paying careful attention to the news.

  Later, in bed, I tried to get some information out of Sulamita that was important to my new undertaking. I lined up questions one after the other, calmly, so as not to draw attention to them. Along the way, I embedded some words of praise. And kisses, over. And then the questions started up again.

  That was how I learned that the drug setup in Corumbá was no different from the rest of Brazil, which meant there were no more cartels or mafias, only a network of businessmen who mixed in a single bundle auto dealerships, cattle ranches, auto parts retailers, slaughterhouses, chop shops, warehouses, air taxis – all with the aim of facilitating th
e drug traffic. It was hard to break into that setup. You had to have things, and I had nothing. You had to know the right people, and I wasn’t even from Corumbá. That’s how it works in wholesale, Sulamita said, adding that in retail the traffickers didn’t follow any specific pattern. That’s my approach, I thought. Small-scale, over. There are people who work alone, said Sulamita, mules recruited here in the backlands, the unemployed, people in debt who agree to haul the drugs wherever. Those are the ones we catch in a bust. I mean, I’m not talking about myself. I don’t do any of that. Administrative assistant is a position without any specific role. You plug holes doing what the others don’t want to do or don’t like doing. That’s my routine. I’m always up to my neck in investigations and taking statements, dealing with what I call the “I dunno” crowd. The guy doesn’t know anything. Never saw the victim. Never killed. Never robbed. Wasn’t even in the city the day of the crime. Nothing to declare. I’m sick of all that, Sulamita said. I’m getting out; I’ve taken the exam for chief of autopsy.

  It was almost eleven when my cell phone rang. It was Rita.

  I feel sad, she said, I can’t even eat. Can I come over there? I had the impression she was drunk.

  Wrong number, I answered.

  Are you with Sulawhatshername?

  No one here by that name, I said.

  I doubt that you don’t think about me.

  She hung up.

  Sulamita was nearby and I was afraid she had overheard.

  Wrong number, I said.

  I don’t know if she believed me. At least, she didn’t say anything.

  We slept together that night. Or rather, Sulamita slept. I stayed awake, staring at the ceiling and thinking. About the cadaver, over.

  A horrible thing, falling out of the sky and dying like that.

  7

  The sun reigned over everything without pity. People ran as if it were possible to escape the heat. Here and there you could see asphalt melting. In that city, life was like that, the sky blue, the ground steaming, and people trying to flee the furnace. Here things rot faster, that’s what they say. More worms, over.

  I parked the car at the corner and observed the mansion that occupied the entire block, with its palms positioned geometrically, as if they were soldiers. I counted twelve soldiers. Toward the rear, the door to the barracks. They were there, I thought, gathered and desperate. Waiting for the fallen warrior.

  A uniformed guard opened the iron gates, and a police car left the locale.

  In the garden, two dogs who looked more like sheared goats sluggishly watched the youth cleaning the pool with a long pole. Flies buzzed.

  What the hell was I doing there?

  At night, tossing in bed, the idea that I was beside the pilot at the exact moment of his death and, worse still, that I had been capable of robbing the dead, came back to haunt me, frighten me, fill me with terrible foreboding. It was as if it had made us partners, over. Me and the cadaver. Suddenly, he was one of my problems. Him and all that cocaine in my crawl space. And that was when it struck me as an excellent idea to go to the family’s house and leave an anonymous letter with a map showing the site of the crash. Follow the Old Highway, take the trail with the carnaubas. The path dotted in red with precise markings would guide the family. It took me almost an hour to draw the map. An X marking the spot. Your son died here. P.S. He didn’t suffer, over.

  More than the image of the cadaver abandoned in the river, what agonized me was thinking what was going on inside that house. We’re sure he’s all right, his girlfriend had said on television. The mother crying. That I understand, over. Mothers who deteriorate like that, rotting away from so much crying. Before learning that people die, I learned that they disappear. They move away from home and evaporate. They leave us perplexed, looking at the empty bed, which is almost like a scream, a clubbing in the morning. You dream about them every night. Dream they’re alive, dream they call, dream they’re coming home. Always the same dreams; you end up actually believing they’re alive. And there’s also the research, which says that seventy percent of the disappeared return. You may no longer believe in God, but you believe in research. You cling to those percentages as if they were a prayer. And the numbers, along with the dreams, make that person into a kind of living-dead. A zombie. I knew all of that very well.

  Even today I couldn’t think of my mother as someone who made wedding cakes, decorating with icing the steps that lead to the rococo top where the sugar bride and groom smile eternally. I remembered her as almost a bleeding attachment of the telephone that was constantly close by. Waiting for my father to call and say he hadn’t died or abandoned us or lost his memory. That he was alive. That he was going to return. Almost twenty years later, more dead than alive, my mother still kept the phone in her lap and waited.

  The truth is that the dead need to really die. They need to be put in the coffin and buried. Or incinerated. You have to be there when the last shovelful of dirt is tossed in.

  What the hell was I doing there? The ideas that come forth in the night, all of them, the ones that seem good and the ones that seem bad, are always terrible. False alarms. Deceptive advertising. Consumer alert: don’t try to do this while awake. A map of the site of the accident? What did I care if they were suffering? I didn’t even know those people.

  After the guard disappeared into the garden, with the dogs trailing him, I went to the gate and watched the guy cleaning the pool. He didn’t appear to be in any hurry. The tragedy inside there had nothing to do with his dead leaves. Or with the chlorine being thrown into the pool. And there was still a lawn that went on forever to tend to, with pergolas and clusters of plants that weren’t normally seen in Corumbá.

  If I wanted to help, the best thing would be to call the police. Anonymously. Or the family itself. At least it was a way of settling accounts with the cadaver, who had given me all that cocaine as a gift. Although he hadn’t really given me anything. As the saying goes, finding isn’t stealing. The truth is, I didn’t owe anyone. There was no reason for me to get involved with those people.

  I lit a cigarette, thinking that maybe, one day, someone would come by my house to say where my father’s body was. In an abandoned lot behind a cement factory. At the bottom of the river. With two bullets in his head. Buried in a backyard on the outskirts.

  Are you the driver? asked the guard, appearing suddenly before I had a chance to escape.

  I could say I was just looking at the garden. Beautiful lawn, isn’t it? My roses are parched. The daisies died. Nothing thrives in this sun. It wouldn’t have been at all difficult to start a conversation or get out of there, but out of fright I said yes and was led toward the mansion. On the way, I gathered my courage. That’s why I’m here, I thought. I’m going in there to tell everything. The image I had of them was like a dog that has to be put down. I’m going to end their dark hope. Go inside and do it right, I told myself. Go there and deliver the coup de grâce, over.

  Care for something to eat? Dalva, the cook, a short woman with thick legs, was eating roast beef and kale, her elbows supported on the table. She wiped her plate with pieces of bread. With her mouth full, she told me the story of the young man. He had gone to spend the weekend at the ranch of a friend. He called on Sunday after lunch advising that he would arrive in an hour. He liked to fly. He was always flying around the savanna. To buy drugs, I thought. From Bolivians.

  Half an hour later, I was taken to an office with lots of pictures of the family. And of cows exhibited at fairs. Prizewinners. I sat there, alone. Father and son embracing, on the wall. The boots of the two are identical, attention-grabbing, I noted. Hereditary boots. The watch I pawned is on the boy’s wrist.

  Suddenly, the screaming began. It was a woman’s voice. I don’t care a bit what they’re going to do, she said, you’re the father and it’s you, you, it’s you who have to do something, I want my son back, bring my son back.

  The door was shut, but it was still possible to hear the she-wolf howli
ng. They’re all alike, she-wolves. The same howls that cut deep down inside you like a razor.

  Shortly afterward, the man in the photo came into the office, wearing the same boots as in the picture. He seemed confused. He said we had already spoken by telephone. Yesterday, he said.

  I said that it must have been another driver. But he didn’t hear me. He was in a hurry. I already have information about you, excellent information.

  I was there to tell him about the accident. After all, that was why I had come into that house. To speak about the explosion and the crash. To kill the hopeless dog. I can take you to the scene, I thought of saying. It’s shitty to feel sorry for others. I stood there, my finger on the trigger, and ended up accepting the job and agreeing on a good salary.

  When can you start? he asked.

  Tomorrow.

  I left thinking that at any moment I could call and come up with some excuse. Or simply not show up. Disappear from the map.

  And it’s exactly because of this that we fuck up our lives. We always think we can get out in time.

  8

  Reeeck, the chain echoes. All that grease made Moacir even blacker. The noise was irritating me. Squatting on the sidewalk, the Indian was trying to fix the chain of the bicycle of the young man, drunk beside him, who was amusing himself with the neighborhood dogs. Listless squalid animals so ugly it pained you to look at them. The dogs and the men. Dirty tatters. They barked. They pissed against posts. Reeeck. The sun was murder.

  As Moacir was moving the pedal, jerkily turning the chain, the bicycle’s handlebars came loose. Damn, said the drunk, bursting out laughing. Better off tossing the whole thing in the trash, I thought.