The Mystery of Rio

by Alberto Mussa

  Baeta thought to consult the cemetery’s records, to compare them with the number of dead buried in the grave. The answer raised even more questions: on June 9th, eleven sailors had been lowered into the pit, and exactly eleven bodies remained buried on the 27th.

  Nearby, the expert also identified remnants of candles and a pile of ashes containing pieces of a white sheet. It was a detail that incriminated Rufino, because a similar residue had been found during the first investigation and in almost the same place.

  Unfortunately, when the head gravedigger witnessed the attack of the vultures, he was overtaken by the impulse to fill in the grave before warning the police. This hampered the analysis of footprints, a problem exacerbated by the large number of people who visited the scene after the incident was discovered.

  Still, Baeta ascertained that at least one individual had been there in bare feet, and that it was probably the same person who had opened the grave. This footprint, of course, was one more clue against the old man, who had not lost certain habits from his time in captivity and never wore shoes.

  From investigations carried out in the vicinity, an old woman, a practitioner of macumba, reported that shortly after the Big Hour (midnight) she lowered gifts to the Lord Skull, at the gateway to Little Kalunga (the graveyard), consisting of manioc flour, firewater, snuff, and seven black candles.

  The Lord Skull had commanded her to sing and trace twenty-one quimbanda points (witchcraft lines), seven times each. And should she see anything, she should close her eyes. And should she hear anything, she should not respond.

  To visit a cemetery at that time, the Big Hour, is not for the faint of heart. But the old woman had faith in the catiços (the entities), especially in Lord Skull.

  So, when she finished tracing her lines with the pemba chalk at the gate, the last point having been traced at about 2 a.m., she heard footsteps getting closer and closer. She kept on singing, though almost at a whisper, lowered her face, and clenched her eyes shut. When she could almost feel the man’s breath, she heard a mocking voice:

  “Good evening, ma’am!”

  Her statement, of course, was never officially taken down. Baeta asked one more question: “Can you remember with certainty whether these were the footsteps of someone wearing shoes?”

  The witness did not have to think very hard before answering yes. However, her statement—which could have cast doubt on the intruder’s identity—did not prevent the captain of the First District, after receiving a note from the lieutenant who was accompanying Baeta, from taking the only reasonable measure in his opinion: ordering the arrest of the individual to whom the evidence pointed.

  Rufino was arrested by three officers that same day before 11 a.m., while walking down Santa Teresa Hill, at the corner of Riachuelo.

  At the precinct, the captain ordered some of his men to return to Santa Teresa in order to break into the suspect’s home and conduct a search.

  “I didn’t dig up those bodies.”

  Rufino’s denial did not convince the captain.

  “Were you or were you not at the English Cemetery last night after the gates closed?”

  Rufino did not answer, claiming that his profession demanded complete secrecy. The sergeant insulted him, threatened him, and even kicked at him violently, but the officers restrained the sergeant. When push came to shove, they would defend the old man. Such was their fear of his power.

  “He didn’t do it, boss. The old man doesn’t lie.”

  The captain doubted Rufino, and the claim that he never lied, for the simple reason that he considered it impossible for human beings to withstand the weight of the absolute truth. But he developed a very logical line of reasoning, beginning with the following premise: if he did not lie, if he was incapable of lying, his silence was tantamount to a confession. Therefore, the old sorcerer had been at the English Cemetery the night before to commit the crime specified in Article 365.

  The officers, however, protested, and a major meeting was called to prevent the issuing of an arrest warrant. The captain respected his men, his brothers in the First District. He did not want to act without consensus, and he tried to convince them that something major was afoot in the Mauá Square jurisdiction, and that they were being kept in the dark by the chief of police.

  Just then, the sound of loud voices interrupted the discussion: the officers tasked with entering and searching the sorcerer’s house had just returned, and they brought with them a man they had arrested trying to enter the shanty after calling the old man’s name.

  “That’s the man who gave me the earrings.”

  The first record in the history of Rio de Janeiro of the desecration of a cemetery is a 1551 letter by an anonymous Jesuit priest addressing the Provincial Superior in Lisbon, a document that Serafim Leite attributed to Father Nobrega.

  The story is more or less as follows: a group of Tamoio Indians, proud and well-armed, left the village of Uruçumirim to capture Maracajás who lived in Paranapuã. They landed in what is now Ribeira Beach and soon spotted the enemy.

  The fighting was fierce, but the Tamoios had the advantage right up until more Maracajás from other regions arrived and began repelling the invaders. The Tamoios then fled, taking a few prisoners with them. The scene is described in very lively fashion, complete with the whistling of arrows and the thump of war clubs—proof of the “furor with which the Brazilian natives attack their adversaries.”

  But what most impressed Father Nobrega—if indeed he was the author of the letter, because there is evidence that he was in Pernambuco at the time—was not the violence of the combat, but rather the ignominy of the revenge.

  A brief digression is in order. The Tupi, contrary to other peoples—such as the Portuguese, the Gypsies, and the Ethiopians—do not accept that death occurs simply when life is interrupted. With the exception of the great Tuxauas—avengers and cannibals, like Cunhambebe, for example—a person dies only when the skull is fractured. From that moment on, the soul begins a dark journey through death’s paths, battling the anhangas, the cannibal spirits, so as to overcome annihilation and achieve absolute eternity in the Land of No Evil.

  So, the Maracajás (Father Nobrega tells us)—knowing or sensing that the Tamoios would return to the battlefield in order to break the skulls of their fallen comrades, and thus guarantee their tally—instead of burying their own dead, buried the Tamoios that they had slaughtered as if they were Maracajás.

  Thus, the skulls that the Tamoios split five years later, on that same battlefield, were those of their own relatives.

  It was said later that it was this act of fratricide that weakened them, until they were finally vanquished by the Temiminós of Arariboia (who are Maracajás too), in the war that culminated in the founding of the city.

  Rio de Janeiro, thus, arose from a desecrated cemetery. And the tradition continued. By 1567, even though the city’s founding landmark had been transferred from Sugar Loaf Beach to Castelo Hill, the modest little mud-and-thatch church (which also housed the sacred icon of Saint Sebastian, the city’s patron saint) remained in the old town. And this little church was almost ruined in a landslide during heavy December rains. In rebuilding the church, it was discovered that the tomb of Estacio de Sá, who had been buried with a huge gold cross on his chest, had been violated.

  The cross, of course, had vanished. And years later, in 1583, when the mortal remains of the founder were finally transferred from the original chapel to the city’s new site, they noticed the second outrage: Estacio’s head had been shattered—surely revenge by a Tamoio defeated at Uruçumirim, who had opened the grave not to steal but to obtain credit for one more dead.

  And the city’s fate continued to unfold. In the 1660s, shortly after the Cachaça Revolt, a cult of fanatics emerged who were in the habit of digging up slaves, since they did not recognize their right to a burial. They would scatter their bones in publi
c places as an affront. These sacrilegious attacks mainly targeted the cemetery created by the Franciscans for the burial of the order’s own slaves.

  I have already mentioned the case of the obscure French alchemist who traveled with du Clerc’s fleet and caused similar disturbances. But the great terror begins in the nineteenth century, when a wave of necrophilia hit, whose apogee was during the Parnassian period. It was perhaps this coincidence that gave rise to the charges against the poet Bilac. His detractors never understood him, and make an analogy that seems a bit cruel: that Parnassians and necrophiliacs care only about form, ignoring content.

  This era also saw the systematic trading of corpses, stolen from graves and then sold to the schools of medicine and surgery. The most interesting case was that of Paiva, a recently graduated medical student and a close friend of Álvares de Azevedo, who unknowingly dissected the remains of his own sister.

  The nineteenth century also saw the first appearance of the living dead—or cazumbis—who have nothing to do with Semeão de Arganil’s golem. True cazumbis are dead who are resurrected in order to be their creators’ slaves.

  Some experts say that they come from the jeje kingdoms of Dahomey. No one can ignore the power of jeje magic. Both mummification and the resurrection of cazumbis were sciences of ancient Nubia, which were assimilated by the pharaohs of Egypt and various secret societies that began to flourish in the region of Lake Nyanza, particularly the blacksmith clans of Bantu-speaking tribes.

  In their tremendous march south, the Bantus spread. Although much was lost in this diaspora, certain peoples were formed based on all of this knowledge and on these secret associations. The most notable example being the caçanjes, from Angola.

  That was the race of the walled-in witch, but neither the captain nor Baeta suspected that Rufino also belonged to these people.

  Ever since he had ordered Rufino’s release on the 23rd, the chief of police instructed that the men of the seventh district in Santa Teresa should keep him under observation, and should always communicate to him any strange occurrences, any actions that broke with the legendary sorcerer’s well-known routines. This would not be an overt surveillance; the aim was to know who he was looking for, or who was looking for him, and whether he was frequenting different locations than his usual ones.

  So, on the morning of the 27th, as soon as the officers of Mauá Square arrested the old man on the corner of Riachuelo, the police chief was notified, and knocked on Baeta’s office door, which was in the same building on Relação Street. It was then that he learned of the raided graves and of the somewhat vague clues used to justify the warrant.

  If he were not forceful, even despotic, with the First District, he would lose control of the case. And he resolved matters with one phone call, which caught the captain by surprise just as this new individual was being brought in.

  “I’ll interrogate the two of them. Personally. Right here on Relação Street.”

  The statement by Aniceto—the man arrested trying to enter Rufino’s house—would close promising avenues and would virtually shut down the entire investigation, increasing the mystery surrounding the murder at the House of Swaps.

  Aniceto was born on San Antonio Hill and had lived in Gamboa, Saúde, Pinto Hill, and Pedra do Sal. He was born to a single mother, who gave the child to his godmother to care for when he was not even ten days old, and disappeared shortly thereafter into the far-flung corners of Bangu. The boy’s name was Aniceto Conceição—and his last name was not the only coincidence he shared with the prostitute Fortunata. Baeta, who sat next to the chief during the interrogation, detected in Aniceto many features of Fortunata’s physiognomy.

  “She’s my sister, boss. Twins. She left with my mother. I stayed behind.”

  It was a typical story. Aniceto became an assistant typographer, in his father’s company. His father took him in without ever acknowledging that he was his son. When his father died, his brothers threw him out. From then on, he lived around the docks, doing odd jobs. He never saw his mother again, and only recently had he reestablished contact with his sister.

  He did not have a police record, but the officers who escorted him to Relação made sure to mention that Aniceto was well known in capoeira circles, although he had been missing from the rodas de pernada lately.

  “I was up in Alagoas, boss. It’s been about a month since I’ve been back.”

  The capoeira confirmed what Rufino had said: the seahorse-shaped earrings were payment for a service rendered, and before that they really had belonged to his sister. Obviously, such a statement, even if it did not directly cast suspicion on the witness, demanded plenty of explanation. The expert wanted to understand the relationship between the twins, since the nurses and the landlady were completely unaware of Aniceto’s existence.

  Aniceto told the story as follows: Between June 3rd (the day of his arrival) and 13th (the day of Fortunata’s disappearance) he resided in her room, and in fact she had given him the keys, giving him access to the entire second floor. His days were spent in the room, with the door locked (the landlady could not suspect his presence), and late at night he would go out to stretch his legs and have his fun, always returning before dawn.

  Fortunata had promised to help him secure some type of job through influential clients of hers. At this point in the interview, in a very suggestive tone—but a veiled threat, nonetheless—the capoeira revealed that his sister’s other life was no secret to him.

  “I knew where she worked, boss. I know very well what she did there.”

  Finally, on the 13th, at around 7 a.m., Fortunata entered the room, desperate to get money and other objects, saying she needed to disappear immediately. Without any explanation, she gave him some of her jewelry and wrote a letter to be delivered to Madame Brigitte—a desire he was still reluctant to comply with, because the hastily written missive contained a confession.

  “I didn’t tear the letter up. It’s probably with the stuff she gave me.”

  Aniceto left the second-floor apartment shortly after his sister, and—since he had long harbored the desire to submit himself to one of old Rufino’s spells—he immediately sought him out, giving him the earrings as payment.

  The old landlady, who ran the sewing school and owned the apartment, was subpoenaed to testify. She was categorical:

  “I’ve never seen this scoundrel before.”

  Aniceto could prove otherwise. First, he described the house in detail: the rocking chair, the mahogany table, the statue of Saint George, facing the door, the niche in the bedroom with Saint Anthony; and the hallway niche with Saint Francis of Assisi. He also spoke of the flowerpot with its horrible yellow ribbon and of the rusty carving knife. What is more, he showed an extensive knowledge of the landlady’s habits: that she went to bed early and woke up at sunrise. He knew the names of two or three of her students, and that Sunday lunch was chicken with okra.

  The sewing teacher—who was not in the habit of prying into Fortunata’s life and did not have a copy of the key to her room—was speechless. Aniceto took the opportunity to return her keys to her. She exited, pale, trembling, cursing her former tenant’s treachery and lack of morals.

  The capoeira had recently moved into a rooming house near Harmonia Square. Officers escorted him there in order to examine the evidence. And, sure enough, there was the letter, which said the following: “I made a silly mistake. It wasn’t on purpose. Please forgive me. And thank you for all you’ve taught me.” It was signed, very visibly: “Fortunata.” Below, in a postscript of sorts, the prostitute prayed for the secretary’s soul, citing the deceased by name.

  Later on, witnesses from the House of Swaps recognized the jewels found in Aniceto’s possession as having belonged to the prostitute. Baeta was also able to attest that the signature on the letter was authentic by comparing it to the forged reports that Dr. Zmuda regularly asked the nurses to sign, as a preca
ution.

  The expert also asked if the capoeira could give the names of any of his acquaintances who were also friendly with Fortunata.

  “I never mentioned her, boss. Who mentions a sister who’s a whore?”

  In one of those old taverns in Santa Rita Square—or, more precisely, on the corner of old Cachorros Alley, in a dark and smoky room, where voices were never elevated above a whisper—the Brotherhood of the First District, sucking on their cigarettes and drinking cachaça after a strenuous day on the job, discussed the case of the English Cemetery.

  The first lieutenant, who had been present at the forensic analysis of the allegedly violated grave, was lamenting a fatal error, which, according to him, could definitely have compromised the investigation.

  “The first time around, we didn’t count the bodies. We just checked to see if they were male.”

  This was his thesis: the police had started from a false premise—i.e., that Rufino had killed the prostitute and hidden the body in the mass grave. After forensics had done their job, since no female cadaver had been exhumed, the conclusion was that no crime had been committed. However, the lieutenant had a different theory: the old man had opened the grave and robbed a corpse to carry out some abominable spell, and for this he received the pair of gold earrings. And then, before the 23rd, he returned the body to the grave. Therefore, during the second inspection, the number of dead matched the records.

  “And why didn’t you ask for a count?”

  It simply had not occurred to him. Perhaps the sinister environment, the fear of contracting the plague, the disgust of seeing those bodies piled up, explained the urgency with which everyone had dealt with the situation.

  “And where does Fortunata fit in?”

  She did not. For the lieutenant, such speculation was not acceptable. Rufino had to be arrested for multiple counts of grave robbery. And he reminded them of the public commotion over the recent cases, never solved, of stolen cadavers, in which suspicions were raised about the presence of necrophiliacs inside the police morgue.