The Mystery of Rio

by Alberto Mussa

  For this reason, their officers continuously pitted the mother against Relação Street, and they made the rounds, asking questions, wanting to know who had seen the girl and whom she had been with before entering the muquiço.

  On the point of the dead girl’s partner, nobody said a thing, though they may have actually known his identity. The less shy, those daring enough to confess they had been at the muquiço, insisted on one thing: that the deceased had groaned abnormally throughout the whole act, ending with a scream so piercing, never before heard in that tone and at that intensity, that everybody shut up and stopped to admire it.

  What followed was total, absolute silence. And after that, a man’s voice, who seemed to be whispering something, as if trying to awaken someone—a man who then (noises indicated) stood and walked away. It was Jereba who found the girl, after everyone had left.

  It was the cry, that cry, which led everyone to claim—even though the body did not show any signs of aggression—that it had been murder.

  The reader surely will remember that on September 11th, at the House of Swaps, Baeta recognized that the widow Palhares’ new lover was Aniceto, and that Baeta was quite upset not only with the capoeira’s success with the audience, but particularly with the look Guiomar gave him, eyeing his rival as he left, arm in arm with the widow.

  The crisis actually began two weeks earlier, when for the first time, Guiomar expressed that desire, that inclination, to be hit that her husband grudgingly complied with.

  A fascinating woman, Guiomar. Not just because she was pretty, and had those shapely ankles, but because she was highly sexual, very excitable, a level of lust verging on debauchery. At the same time—and perhaps precisely for that reason—she was faithful, even in her innermost thoughts, and I have described how the Baetas’ fantasy operated at the House of Swaps.

  Guiomar did not work outside the house, but she had girlfriends and neighbors who visited her often, and helped ease the boredom and unpredictability of the life of a policeman’s wife.

  Women talk a lot about sex when they are alone among themselves, and Guiomar and her girlfriends were no different. Such conversations, of course, can get quite lively, and when certain taboos are confessed they can really go all out—as if it the mere act of narrating were a compensation for the unfulfilled desire.

  One of the neighbors, for example, on one of those afternoons they spent together after August 21st, told how she yearned to give herself to a famous, rich, tall, blond man who could speak French, a language that she did not speak. As far as he was concerned, she would be just another stranger, but she would wear the sexiest lace lingerie, like the cabaret dancers.

  And he would speak his incomprehensible French, dressed in the most luxurious tailcoat of the day, and he would have his way with her, without undressing her, exposing only the necessary organ. And she would stroke the tailcoat, relish the majestic texture of the expensive cloth, and feel the varnish from his shoes on the bare soles of her feet. And they would come to ecstasy without sweating a single drop, without dissipating the aroma of imported essences.

  And a second neighbor would weave even more absurd plots: she wanted to be surprised by her husband as she masturbated, or while she slept, uttering the names of others. And her husband would get furious and be rough with her the next day, never commenting on the incident.

  Guiomar was always the quietest. She only said things that could not be considered extravagant, even though she was the only one who ever really ever did anything sordid. That day she went a little farther:

  “What I really like are strong men.”

  And Baeta was strong. Her confession (which revealed little, as always) did not raise eyebrows. No one found it unusual that Guiomar yearned for a little rough play. Besides, it was with her husband, the neighbors thought, since he was the only man in the few fantasies she shared with them. What was new about her statement, though, was the subtle use of the plural, which went unnoticed.

  A few days later, on account of these same conversations, a girlfriend—who crackled with passion—asked for Guiomar’s company to pay a forbidden visit to an old palm reader on Marrecas Street. Not even I, the author, can explain exactly why Guiomar, after her friend had finished, decided to have her own palm read.

  They say soothsayers in general—palm readers, fortune-tellers, necromancers, augurers, astrologers, kabbalists, babalaôs, seers, prophets, caraíbas, pythonesses, presagers—have a talent for predicting the future. No one today disputes the validity of the concept of destiny, or that a lifeline really does exist, dating from time immemorial, for each individual.

  However, in Rio de Janeiro (and this remains one of the city’s mysteries), soothsayers do not predict the future. Fortune-tellers never predict, never anticipate coming events. They do something even greater: they change destinies. They alter the course of the lives of the people who consult them. It is closer to gambling than prophecy. You need to be willing to take risks to play; to be willing to change the course of your existence, without knowing what that change will be.

  With her palm open, Guiomar listened to the woman who stared at it with almost blind eyes, but who nonetheless could identify very distinctive traits in one of the grooves:

  “Over the lifeline, there’s a cross; next to it, five lines: two up, three down. You’re about to cheat on your husband.”

  This was an outrage. Guiomar left the cubicle regretting even having come, having succumbed to her curiosity. In disbelief, she dropped ten mil-reis in the wicker basket awaiting her on the sideboard as she exited.

  September 11th would come, and Guiomar—who had since forgotten the omen—stared for a few seconds too long at Aniceto (without knowing who he was as he walked by haughtily, arm in arm with another woman). It was perhaps the third symptom, or effect, of the words of the Marrecas Street palm reader.

  Everything became clear the following Saturday, when they were at home in Catete. Guiomar had just bathed, and lay facedown, almost naked, ready for the taking. Baeta approached, more or less as he always did, with that air of a man ready to take what is his. And then she evaded him slightly and, pointing to her own body, as if selling a piece of merchandise, asked:

  “How much would you pay for all this?”

  Baeta was not playing along. She insisted:

  “How much would you pay, if I were a whore?”

  Baeta—a good lover, an experienced man—would have played along if it had been any other woman. But it was inescapably Guiomar. At that moment, he felt as if he had just lost something. And he had a feeling (do not ask me to give his reasons) that this unprecedented behavior had to do with September 11th.

  He was high-handed with his wife, and he did not satisfy her, which for a man is a serious offense. Nonetheless, when she got ready to go to the next party at the House of Swaps (the following Thursday, the 18th), her tears had already dried, and she was actually thrilled at the prospect. The expert, though, was even more ill-mannered by then, saying flatly that they would stay home. In the early morning hours, it was Guiomar who tried to reconcile:

  “Hit me! Go ahead!”

  Hitting a woman is an art. This time Baeta actually tried. It was not the strength, though, that was missing—it was the attitude.

  The next day after work, Baeta—who truly loved Guiomar—searched through items stored in a reinforced locker marked “Confidential,” to which only he had the key. Not all of the objects collected at the House of Swaps were significant and indispensable to identifying the murderer. So, in a brash move, in order to appease his wife’s lust, he took the silver-handled whip back with him to his home in Catete.

  Another fantastic story that influenced Baeta’s reunion with his primitive world happened in the Formiga neighborhood. The case became infamous in the northern part of town, and if this were a separate short story, it would be called The Timbau Hill Crossroads.

&nb
sp; There is no Timbau Hill anymore in Formiga. At the time, that hill was an eerie place. It ended in the outer confines of the neighborhood, at a dead-end crossroads, deserted, dark, abandoned, haunted by the memory of sad people who went there to die. Since it was a crossroads, it was also a place where offerings were left.

  The story involves two main characters: Tião Saci—a troublemaker, quizumbeiro, a matchmaker, and an inhabitant of Quersoene—and Lacraia—a jongueiro, drummer, macumbeiro, born and raised in the hills of Madureira, who moved to Formiga for a woman, Deodata, who offered him lodging in her home.

  Calling him Tião Saci, deep down, was mean-spirited: the mythical trickster Saci Pere had only one leg; Tião had both legs, though he was lame and dragged his left foot. He was not loved, and he was not a person held in high esteem. But he was not a bad person. It was during his wanderings in the hills that he came upon Deodata’s house.

  It would be a blatant lie to say that Tião Saci went to Deodata’s expressly seeking her. No, he had heard stories about the jongueiro Lacraia, and he went there looking for him.

  Those who know jongo know it is a spell, a song, and an initiation dance. A verse of jongo never says what it seems to say: it is always an encrypted message that even a good jongueiro cannot understand. In a jongo circle when someone ties a stitch, that stitch (which is a verse) only ceases to be sung if someone else unties it—in other words, if he interprets it. That is why it is called a “stitch” in the sense that it is synonymous with a “knot.”

  Lacraia, who had been born limber of body and mind, would untie one stitch after another on Madureira Hill. He knew the entrails of words, he saw what lay behind them. It was a talent he had possessed since birth, an inheritance from the ancient spirits.

  Laypeople are greatly impressed by esoteric things: fetishes, rituals, and mystical symbols, demonic images, sacrificed animals. They ignore that the real magic lies in speech, in human language.

  So, being the jongueiro that he was, having mastered the secret of words, Lacraia also became a porteira, a gatekeeper. I took such a tortuous route to say one simple thing: in Deodata’s backyard they built a shack where Lacraia channeled a shadowy entity.

  Before the famous pronouncement by the caboclo Seven Crossroads, the founder of Umbanda, which took place in the hinterlands of São Gonçalo in 1908, and which codified some of the laws of jira, the spirits of that religion were all anonymous. We do not know, thus, exactly who possessed Lacraia’s body.

  If, for Seven Crossroads, there were never any closed paths, the jongueiro’s entity had the opposite line: fewer openings and more locking of paths.

  Tião Saci often went to Deotada’s to consult the spirit that possessed Lacraia. Although he continued to be lame, dragging his left foot wherever he went, Tião Saci was still able to resolve many personal issues during these sessions. However, everything has its price.

  One night, all three were in the shack in the backyard. The details are as follows: Tião Saci, Deodata, and the disembodied spirit were present—technically speaking, Lacraia’s soul was suspended, and he was totally unconscious. Deotada was the cambona, the assistant, and she tended to the spirit in whatever way she could. Suddenly, Tião Saci, who was splayed out on the floor listening, heard:

  “Beware of my horse.”

  The sepulchral tone of the warning, coming from so terrifying an entity, terrified the two.

  “My horse has already seen you.”

  So, it was true what they had been grumbling about around Formiga: Tião Saci had fallen for Deodata, head over heels—and it was reciprocal. What amazed and disgusted people was not just the fact that Tião was lame (while Lacraia had such a sensual swing to his body); it was that the cheating had occurred in the house, in the backyard, of his benefactor.

  Tião Saci, however, had a clear conscience—he owed nothing to Lacraia, only to the disembodied spirit. And it was the spirit itself that had warned him:

  “He will set a trap for you. Up the hill, near the crossroads at Timbau.”

  He even stated the date and the time; there was no need to state the motive. But the mention of the hill left Deodata in a panic. It was a ghastly place, and she had a foreboding sense of doom. She would look at the disembodied voice, but only saw Lacraia’s face, flushed, unrecognizable. She had been a cambona, a priest’s assistant, for a long time, but she had never heard of anything like this. And, in a sense, the way the disembodied spirit treated its own horse, or its medium—warning an enemy that the medium had a legitimate right to kill—absolved her of guilt. Deodata had preferred Saci’s mutilated gait, to the sprightly step of the jongueiro.

  Knowledge is always an advantage: Deodata knew Lacraia did not know that she already knew. And she noticed how he had become increasingly impatient and sly with Saci Tião. A short while later, Deodata heard a snippet of a conversation between the two men, and she probed her lover the next day.

  “He asked me to go with him up the hill, to Timbau.”

  The request made sense: Lacraia would offer a goat at the crossroads, and needed someone to hold down the animal. Tião Saci was lame, but he had strong arms. The problem was the date and time, which coincided with the withdrawal of the disembodied voice. As a matter of fact, the spirit had spoken of a blade: the same one used to bleed the goat would be used on him, Tião Saci.

  Deodata said to Tião Saci that he should try to back out, saying he had another commitment. But the man had mettle, and he planned a second betrayal.

  On the appointed day, Tião Saci, with a borrowed revolver (not easy to get back then), stood in front of Deodata’s door and clapped loudly. Lacraia appeared, but he said Deodata was sick, and that he would be late. It was his cue: Tião Saci, realizing that she was pretending in order to facilitate the ambush, volunteered to go ahead, carrying the bowl, the machete, the candles, and the cachaça. He would just have trouble dragging the goat all the way up the hill due to his miserable defect.

  Lacraia agreed, and Tião Saci proceeded up the hill. The Timbau Hill crossroads was a terrible place because, as I have mentioned, it led into blind alleys, and at that time of night the silence was so great, the darkness so absolute, that Tião Saci was scared he might miss his target.

  Thus, taking every precaution, he decided to throw his machete into the bushes to avoid any unexpected move on Lacraia’s part. So he went into one of the alleys, lurching all the way, and tossed the blade meant to execute the goat, and then probably himself, as far as he could over the quarry.

  When he returned, he had arrived at the appointed time and place.

  “Put the money on the ground, and come down, but don’t turn your face.”

  Tião Saci could not make out the face, but he was able to deduce where the voice was coming from—and it was certainly not Lacraia’s. Not knowing who he was dealing with, not knowing what it was about, he made a subtle motion with his right hand toward his waist, where the gun was.

  The stranger, however, fired first.

  Later, Deodata—even though she had managed to keep her husband at home much of the night—spread the rumor that it had been a crime, plotted by the perfidious spirit of the cunning Lacraia.

  In Formiga, however, the saying goes that God is the Devil from behind. So they did not believe her. These were people already accustomed to dealing with spirits. They knew that strange things happened, especially in those bad places, at a crossroads, on a hillside such as Timbau.

  We are now only a few days from the end. This, of course, is the point at which the narrative speeds up and events become jumbled together, and the best technique is to lay out the facts in chronological order (with a few exceptions, here or there), in order not to ruin or frustrate the effect of the last great revelation.

  Between October 7th and 9th three important incidents occurred, all figuring prominently in the city’s police annals. My difficulty as an author is to choo
se which of the three I should begin with.

  Let us then report the case of the second woman who died under mysterious circumstances. This time it was not a poor young girl, but rather a lady, who was set up with her own business on Ouvidor Street. Her body was found naked on the second floor, in between the small office and a storage room. She had that same orgasmic expression and the same intriguing features: the sphincter, the buttocks, the thigh and face muscles exhibited signs of rigor mortis—even more than twenty-four hours after death.

  There were no signs of bodily injuries, and there were no signs of burglary—nothing had been stolen from the shop. It was also impossible to find witnesses: nobody saw or heard anything in the nearby buildings.

  They knew that since she was French she had a lover right under her husband’s nose. The lover was one of those bums, one of those capoeiras, who had appeared three or four months before at the store, offering his services as security, mainly to provide protection against thieves. He won the “job,” and, shortly thereafter, won over his employer. Of course, we are speaking of Aniceto, Madame Montfort, and La Parisienne.

  However, forensic tests were never performed because, technically, there had been no murder, and because finding fingerprints or other evidence of the presence of individuals who could enter the facility without needing to break in (for example, Aniceto or the victim’s husband) would not mean much.

  The forensic examiners thought that the two women—the poor girl and the rich woman—must have ingested some kind of drug capable of causing those surprising symptoms, but since they were dealing with an unknown substance, drug tests were inconclusive.