This expedition would not cover nearly the same distance as the first, and they would not need to spend two months in the wilderness. In fact, it was meant to last no more than a fortnight and was confined to city’s natural boundaries: the Guanabara Bay to the east, and the Sepetiba Bay to the west.
But they were not be trusted, these convicts. Pero Lopes was actually counting only on the natives’ loyalty; however, since he had not mastered the language of the natives, he did not notice a certain tension, a certain estrangement among the natives in the group.
The expedition followed an old aboriginal trail, approximately parallel to the coast, that extended as far as Angra dos Reis. It is likely that the adventurers had coordinates, or even a copy of part of Lourenço Cão’s map—hence, they supposedly asked about the Piraquê River. However, when they reached the vicinity of said place in Marambaia, the Indian escorts simply stopped.
There was no discussion: they simply claimed that if they continued along that route, they would end up at an undesirable location, where they would certainly not be welcome. The convicts insisted on knowing what was going on, and one of the guides answered that, if they were to continue in that direction, they would go very near a native village ruled by women, which it was best to avoid.
Unfortunately, I still have not obtained a copy of Lourenço Cão’s map, so I really do not know how important it was to keep on the path recommended by Pero Lopes. But I suspect that the mention of women—sovereign women—must have excited the imagination of the adventurers, who by nature were predisposed to risk.
The agreement reached was as follows: the natives stayed back, waiting, while the convicts went ahead to see what fate had in store for them.
The village did, in fact, exist. It was on an elevated stretch of ground, surrounded and protected by mangroves. The hut—because it was not, strictly speaking, a house—combined native and European traits: it was tall and spacious, twelve fathoms wide and six long, covered with foliage and able to accommodate a hundred people in its wall-less interior. The entrance was through a single door, low and in the middle. But the structure was composed of straight lines and it had windows along the edge of the roof, for ventilation and light. I do not know whether it was made clear that this one house was, in essence, the entire village.
The convicts, however, seemed unimpressed by any of this. The savages had spoken of a village made up solely of women, yet there were men there. What’s more: with the exception of about one third of the female population, who were very native-looking, the rest of the inhabitants were mestizos, mamelucos all of them. Although some women walked around naked, clothing for both sexes consisted of a kind of thick cotton fabric with a hole in the middle to pass their head through, covering their front and back like a clergy’s surplice, and tied at the waist with a simple string.
They remembered one or another Portuguese word, but they were unable to understand a full sentence in that language. They claimed to be descendants of the Perós, who came from across the sea in huge igaraçus. The three men were taken to the beach, to a sacred spot of sorts, where the ruins of what they recognized as a caravel lay.
In one corner of the hut, the convicts could still see the spoils of that shipwreck, which the mamelucos saw no value in at all, and kept as mere relics. There were nautical instruments, such as a quadrant and an armillary sphere; garments, including a tall pair of boots with heels, a doublet of threadbare baize, and two half-corroded belts; weapons, such as a Turkish saber and an inoperative Dutch musket; and all sorts of junk, like shards of mirrors, hooks, clamps, pulleys, mugs, candlesticks, and very ancient coins, to the astonishment of all, many of copper and silver.
The adventurers were amazed with their discovery. But one thing puzzled them: the natives had mentioned a government of women, but so far they had only seen women weaving, preparing food, and even working the land, from where they returned in the evening with beans.
Then came the big surprise: before they could react, the mamelucos, with imperious expressions and energetic gestures, disarmed the foreigners and shoved them into the hut, where they had their hands and feet bound and were left abandoned in that state under a tangle of hammocks and storage platforms that constituted all of the interior furnishings of the structure.
At night, the apparent tranquility of the village gave way to great agitation and aggression, harsh discussions and what seemed like fighting, involving men and women alike.
It was the new moon and the darkness only made things worse. No one knew why, but the mamelucos decided not to light any bonfires that night; and, in that agitated and harsh environment, the convicts were afraid. Just when they imagined that something very serious was about to happen, it did.
The whole village, filled with a palpable sense of expectation and anxiety, had already retired to their hammocks in complete silence. The voice they heard, which shook a hundred hearts, came from outside:
“Ajaguajucá jeibé! Äé reriguara ixé!”
It is hard to describe the horror of the convicts—who understood the words, but could make no sense of the meaning.
The physical despair that they perceived among the mamelucos, however, told them that they were not the only ones in danger. They barely noticed, though, the reaction of the womenfolk, who let out muffled cries:
“Possupara ojur! Possupara ossyk!”
And the voice from outside—guttural, wild, threatening, fascinating—then echoed inside the hut, making the terror reach a fevered pitch.
Naturally, they could not make out the identity of the voice, but he was a man. He wore the rags of what perhaps had once been the noble outfit of a navigator, but he also had huge indigenous plumes strapped to his back, a kind of enduape. And this man, this beast, came sniffing and snorting throughout the hut, until he stood right above the convicts. Suddenly, he threw himself into one of the hammocks.
The three adventurers could not believe what their senses were telling them: while other women seemed to chirp like macucos on a perch, the noise coming out of the hammock was unmistakably that of copulation—violent, savage, animalistic—and they had no doubt that the woman chosen by the visitor was not, in fact, a victim.
And they were right: that village of mamelucos, descendants of shipwrecked Perós, was ravished, every month, every new moon, by this visitor: the possupara—who women, it was later discovered, competed for.
Who he was and where he came from, no one could say. And that is what most outraged the convicts, who did not understand such laxity, such unmanliness among those fathers and husbands, who outnumbered him thirty to one.
You would be sadly mistaken to think that the reason the adventurers remained in the village for one more moon cycle was to try to find ways to steal the coins. The native escorts did not wait any longer, and at the Carioca, they reported that all three convicts had fled. Because it had been a secret mission, Pero Lopes omitted these facts from his diary.
Back at the Marambaia, the convicts found out who was really in charge. The invitation came from the womenfolk: if they were to stay, they would receive, as wives, the next three virgins who menstruated.
Certain male instincts, however, are predictable. The adventurers accepted the proposal, but they did not agree, in their hearts, with the implied clause imposed by the night visitor.
So, one week before the new moon—without much fanfare—the convicts began a hushed campaign with every male in the village, delineating the simple plan to kill the visitor. The men seemed to want this death, but all listened with downcast eyes, not daring to act. For the convicts, however, simple consent was enough.
If they were to sharpen the Turkish saber, they would raise suspicions. Therefore, they obtained from the mamelucos strong ropes of embira fibers with which to restrain and strangle the enemy. There was only one problem: at the chosen moment, there had to be a minimum amount of light.
So,
in the new moon, the whole scene, the whole anxiety-ridden experience was repeated. The visitor announced his arrival—today I killed a jaguar, but I’m an oyster eater—and entered the hut, sniffing, snorting, until he selected his hammock.
Suddenly, someone waved a glowing piece of wood. The convicts jumped the invader in unison. Nobody knows who died first: three arrows, shot by three females, knocked all three of them down at once.
The mameluco who gave the signal was killed, too, plus a few others who had conspired in braiding the rope. But that was the next day, after the visitor had left, after he had peacefully made his selection.
Rufino was able to prove he was not lying. Escorted into the forest by an entourage of policemen, which included Baeta and the captain, he took the trail that led to the majestic gameleira tree, the sacred meeting point, or the dwelling place of terrible unnamed witches, night ladies, possessors of bird spirits, and guardians of mysteries of the left side of the world, unable to discern good from evil. And—now I can add—man from woman.
It was there, at that gameleira, a place where one fulfills religious obligations, that the old man assumed that Aniceto had sought refuge, since it was the only place in the forest he might be able to reach without getting lost.
“He must be dead now.”
This, too, was true. But it was not the labyrinth of the rainforest that had killed Aniceto: he had fallen off a pirambeira. His head revealed a bullet hole from a shot fired by Officer Mixila, who also never returned.
The capoeira’s corpse was carried to Relação Street, and it is not necessary to inform you that the problem of the caltrops became secondary.
“He’s like a seahorse. Cut him open, you’ll understand.”
No one knows why, but they did not allow Rufino to attend the autopsy that he himself had suggested. This, of course, did not change the crucial, inexplicable fact: Aniceto was not a hermaphrodite. But he did have a uterus. And he was pregnant.
This phenomenon caused great speculation among the coroners. But the fate of the case was the fate of all the great truths, the truths that are unbearable: they turn into legend.
How, I am not certain, but Baeta’s old ideas about the presence of the alleged siblings, Fortunata and Aniceto, at the House of Swaps began circulating, and the story of the secret passageway came back with a vengeance, and Rufino’s treasure was miraculously forgotten, replaced by the Marquise’s treasure.
It was not an unreal treasure, though—those of the city of Rio de Janeiro never are. Nobody imagined, however, that the treasure was merely comprised of black notebooks, filled with scribbling in German and stored, after Dr. Zmuda’s death, in a secret compartment under the stairs, behind a stone wall, in a tunnel that once connected the Marquise’s house to the palace at the Quinta da Boa Vista.
After Aniceto’s autopsy, Baeta experienced a feeling of tremendous anguish. He remembered the things he had done in bed with Fortunata, without knowing she was a man. He had kissed the whore on the mouth, had put his mouth in places—and he was no longer sure if they were exactly those places or not. The expert, in fact, lacked the complete explanation to the mystery: how could that ambiguous body have existed, if it did exist?
It was in order to try to understand these things that Baeta interceded and obtained permission from the police chief to release Rufino into his custody so he could interview him. The old man, who had been a member of a runaway slave community, who had been the head of the Cambada Quilombo, consented to the expert’s request.
Aniceto, the old man explained, started in the Ijexá lineage, at the house of the babalaô Antonio the Mina. Since the Mina was not widely accepted by the colony of Bahia (who lived closer to Cidade Nova), he sought out adherents among the people of Saúde.
It was Antonio the Mina who first told the capoeira stories of men who were also women. And Aniceto, schooled in the ethics of capoeira, speculated on the sexual powers of a man who had physically known what it was like to be a woman.
The Ijexás, although they had always been ruled by queens, could also be inconceivably narrow: Antonio the Mina would never allow Aniceto to advance very far. And he even refused to initiate him as babalaô for fear of things that he might come to know.
That was when the capoeira sought the macumba line. And he, Rufino, prepared the ritual, which first began as a pact, signed under a certain gameleira tree in Tijuca Forest, with the night ladies, possessors of the spirits of birds.
On a Friday the 13th, the old man took Aniceto to the English Cemetery. Baeta, who by now no longer doubted anything, was impressed by this narrative. After incinerating his clothes and administering certain potions, the sorcerer, with the very bag he used to carry his implements, smothered the capoeira to death.
The old man must have extraordinary strength, for Aniceto struggled mightily, even though he had not forgotten the sacrifice he had agreed to undergo. Aniceto’s body was lowered into the pit, where there must have been at least one other recently buried body.
Fourteen midnights, fourteen big hours, went by, and Rufino reopened the tomb, exhuming Fortunata. That was three years before.
It was not necessary to explain to the expert who Fortunata was. On Friday, June 13th, of that year, 1913, what the old man did was simply begin to reverse the process: Fortunata was killed and buried in the same manner to then be reborn as Aniceto after the big hour of the 26th.
The problem was the opening of the mass grave on the 23rd.
Very quickly, the body began decaying inside the grave (helped along by the concoctions ingested). And, just as quickly, it resumed its previous form, reversing only the gender. They were essentially the same person. Hence, the identical (as per the expert’s conclusions) fingerprints and handwriting, not to mention the physical resemblance.
Baeta acknowledged that Aniceto had exploited that similarity extremely well. The same was true of the forged note, which mentioned the secretary by name, and the story that it should not be delivered to Madame Brigitte so as not to incriminate his “sister,” plus all the lies based on the real facts of his life. The end result was that Baeta had accepted his version without suspecting a thing.
Then there was the issue of the opening of the trench. A metamorphosis, according to Rufino, needed total darkness, a deep immersion into the underworld of death.
The corpse unearthed on the 23rd—although already a man, as forensics had substantiated—had suffered a brief interruption in the transformative cycle, and the resulting defect manifested itself later. Aniceto suffered pain, constantly needing to take potions, because he retained a uterus and a dead fetus, mummified inside of his male body.
Baeta thought back to every sentence the old man had uttered, and indeed, none of them were ever lies: a man had given him the earrings, and he never did dig up a corpse in the English Cemetery.
By now, Baeta could already guess what Aniceto’s, or Fortunata’s, intentions were when he chose that life, in the House of Swaps.
Rufino simply confirmed the suspicion: the man who plunges deeply into the critical experience of death, and survives, and then, as a woman, completely penetrates the left side of the world, gets to know the secrets of women, acquires the gift of sorcery—but at a level so deep that this man has the power to enchant, to bewitch, to seduce, to intuit, and to know exactly what happens inside of the mysterious and intimate world of women.
The sorcerers who had taught this magic to Rufino warned of the dangers; a man with such powers would be able to have all the women in the world. And what’s more, he could even kill them if they were ever to reach an orgasm of maximum intensity—the sensation would be simply unbearable.
“If you divide pleasure into a thousand parts, of that number, surely, nine hundred and ninety-nine belong to women.”
The expert still could not understand why Fortunata, or Aniceto, had strangled the secretary precisely on the day when t
he ritual of return would be performed.
“When the time comes, they are very violent. It’s as if the male inside were revolting.”
Baeta remembered how witnesses had spoken of the nervous and aggressive behavior of the prostitute in the days leading up to the crime. The one thing he found strange, though, in Rufino’s sentence was the use of the plural.
“I’ve done this with many people already, sir.”
And the old man, sensing exactly what the expert was about to ask, went on:
“Aniceto was vain. He wanted to be the best of men. He was the first, though, ever to want to come back. None of them ever wanted to before. Not one.”
Rufino never mentioned the old African traditions linking man to light, to odd numbers, to forests, and to the right side. Women are therefore the night, even numbers, deep water, and the left side. They are, as we can see, two completely incommunicable worlds.
In primordial times, however, there was one exception: a hunter, a kind of oxóssi, a cruel and powerful sorcerer, who made a pact with the Night Women and acquired the ability to transform himself into a woman, hence adopting the emblem of the seahorse.
This deity inhabits the forest but also the rivers, particularly the flooded banks, the areas where the waters mix with the forest.
And Rio de Janeiro—a city built on swamps and mangroves, from the early shell mounds of the Itaipus to the crude palisades of Estacio de Sá—was fated to belong to this sorcerer, this hunter. So the same adventure is endlessly played out: the ageless struggle of humanity to control one another by controlling the orgasm—which, we now know, is the greatest power of all.
There is a scene from the novel that I have not narrated: when Rufino finished recounting his story, knowing that Baeta sought the same gift that Aniceto once possessed, he offered him that possibility. He asked whether he would like to go through the same experience. However, before Baeta responds, this book will have ended.
The Mystery of Rio Page 20