Lockdown

by Drauzio Varella

  With his mother dead, Cigar hadn’t had any visitors since he’d arrived in the prison, for the second time, four years earlier. In the first few months, he still read the newspaper and asked for news from the outside, but he soon came to the conclusion that satisfying his curiosity only brought him more suffering and he alienated himself from events on the other side of the wall, as do many men without families who are serving long sentences.

  He didn’t miss his relatives, with the exception of his oldest son. ‘I don’t want to see the little one, ‘cause he’s fine with his grandmother, Rosirene’s mother. Now, the big one, I don’t know, because he lives with Rosane, my other wife, and she smokes crack.’

  After serving ten years the first time he was in the Casa, Cigar was set free. When he got out, he discovered that Rosane, the mother of his first son, had just been sent to prison. One Sunday, he went to visit her in the Tremembé penitentiary. He took his son to see his mother along with five grams of cocaine, as a present. On the bus home, with his firstborn on his lap, he was approached by a classy-looking lady.

  ‘Listen, dear, I’m in the business too, you know. I came to visit my sister and saw you giving your wife some stuff. That was your wife, wasn’t it? Look, I’m a dealer. Is there any chance you could fix me up with about ten grams? You can trust me because I’m in the business too!’

  Cigar felt he could trust her. On the Tuesday, he caught two buses to get to Jardim Míriam. ‘I took a bit of snow. I didn’t know that part of town; it was really hard to find her place.’

  In the woman’s bedroom, Cigar handed over the drugs and sat down to talk to Machado, an elderly man who lived with her.

  That was when temptation walked through the back door, smiling, wearing a strappy dress: Rosirene.

  ‘A mulatta with delicate lips, a perky little nose, a samba-school ass and there I was doin’ cold-turkey, just out after ten years inside. I thought to myself, I need to bed that chick no matter what! I don’t know if it’s ever happened to you, Doctor; it was love at first sight! I was head over heels!’ He was so taken with her that he had a word on the side with Machado.

  ‘Tell me about that girl there.’

  ‘That girl there . . . yours if you want her.’

  ‘Then tell that girl there that I’m gonna take her to Santos tomorrow.’

  He returned the next day, but he didn’t need to take her as far as Santos. ‘We went straight to the Hotel Flor da Lapa, where we partied and spent money like there was no tomorrow. Then, I thought OK, so I’ve tasted the fruit, and now that’s it. Except she didn’t leave.’

  Since they couldn’t afford the Flor da Lapa every night, they rented a room in a slum tenement near the old bus station, so they could live together, madly in love. ‘Although I sometimes had to smack her around a bit, ‘cause the lady had a lot of cheek.’

  One night, Cigar went to bed completely stoned and woke up to shouting.

  ‘Hey, wake up, your place is on fire!’

  It was the neighbours.

  ‘There was smoke everywhere. I raced out of the room at a million miles an hour.’

  Rosirene had thrown all of his belongings, clothes, flip-flops, shoes, onto the double bed and set it on fire. The neighbours were threatening to call the police and he wasn’t sure whether he should put out the fire or try to calm the neighbours first. If the police got there, they’d arrest him on the spot, as he had only just been released from prison. The firebug was watching everything on the other side of the street, laughing cynically. ‘She torched everythin’, even my good trousers! It took a lot of convincin’ to get the neighbours to let it go. The cops wouldn’t have listened to me.’

  When the fire was out, Cigar went out barefoot to get some air. Rosirene followed him. He stopped at a campfire someone had made.

  ‘I was fuming; I wanted to break her bones.’ He sat down. She followed suit, though she wisely sat on the opposite side of the fire, in front of him. After a while, Cigar got up slowly with his unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth, picked up a cinder as if he was going to light it and walked towards Rosirene. ‘I poked her about thirty times with the cinder. There were sparks flyin’ everywhere. It looked like we were in hell!’

  Once avenged, he holed up in a bar and had a few drinks to wind down. Later, when he got home, he found the room in silence. ‘The first thing I see is her asleep on the burnt bed! For fuck’s sake, “Get the hell out of here,” I shouted. “No,” she said. And we were going, “Get out now,” “No,” “Out,” “No,” so she ended up not going and we went back to bein’ all lovey-dovey.’

  They lived together for two years. He forgot his son and wife in jail because of her. They got along so well that they’d wake up smoking crack, brush their teeth with the same toothbrush, have lunch at a bar and eat off the same plate.

  ‘I stole and she hustled.’ According to him, it didn’t work: even when he’d steal enough money for them to spend a few days without any worries, he’d go out in the morning and when he’d come back at the end of the day, where was Rosirene? ‘She’d be down at the Estação da Luz hustling. They get addicted, you know, and don’t want to give it up. I couldn’t do a thing. Wanna bit? She’s your girl. The only thing I’d say was, “Just don’t fuck a friend of mine or I’ll break your neck.”’

  Fate caused them to part when he was in a bad way from smoking too much crack and she went back to live with her mother, with their baby boy who had been born.

  One night, they ran into one another in downtown São Paulo and Rosirene confessed that she was going out with a friend of his, Mato Grosso, and that they had plans to move to the town of Ponta Porã together. ‘Well there you go, she was fucking a friend of mine and the two of them were makin’ plans together!’

  Later, he recognised that he had lost her because there is no harmony immune to crack. Even so, he was determined to settle things with violence. ‘When I get out,’ he told me, ‘I’m going to kill Mato Grosso. Not her, ‘cause he’s the one in the wrong. He knows me and knows she’s mine; he has no business puttin’ the moves on her and takin’ her away. He’s the one crossin’ me, not her.’

  The decision to spare Rosirene’s life, however, was the fruit of more recent considerations, because when he first arrived in the prison he had wanted to lure her to a deserted place, chop off her feet with an axe and tell her:

  ‘I’m not gonna kill you ‘cause we’ve got a son, and I don’t want him to come tell me that I killed his mother. Later, he’s gonna see you with no feet, and he’s gonna ask why and you’re gonna tell him, “I had sex with another guy.” And then he’ll know his dad was right.’

  His intention was to do something so nasty that Rosirene would never forget it. After all, he had left Rosane, whom he still liked at the time, because of her; in fact, the first time he had been locked up, he had thought he’d go crazy if Rosane left him. He had even made threats.

  ‘If you don’t visit me, I’ll poke your eyes out.’

  She smiled and reassured him.

  ‘Who said I’m the sort of woman who abandons her man inside?’

  She kept her promise. She visited him every weekend for almost ten years with bags of supplies and the boy. Until she was sent to prison herself. He was the one who betrayed her, because of Rosirene. ‘I was an ungrateful dog. I left Rosane locked up in Tremembé.’

  His punishment came swiftly when Rosane got out of jail before the date expected.

  One night, he was sleeping peacefully in a little hotel with Rosirene, certain that his first wife was still behind bars, when Rosane, recently released, headed downtown to confront him. She enquired about the ingrate’s whereabouts in a bar.

  ‘He’s asleep with his wife in Copa 70.’

  ‘Really, his wife? The dog!’

  When she entered the room she started breaking everything; she threw the TV on the ground and flew at Rosirene, who was twice her size. Cigar quickly pulled on his clothes and made himself scarce. He sat in a bar waitin
g for the dust to settle. Half an hour later, the Portuguese hotel owner appeared.

  ‘Go see what that girl did. She beat up your wife, stuck a pin in her bum, which drew blood, tore up her clothes and set fire to them!’

  Cigar had fevers and night sweats; he was thin and his lungs had been compromised. He laughed, and his memories seemed to make him happy. In spite of his eternal gratitude to Rosane, he couldn’t stop thinking about Rosirene. ‘Doctor, if I die inside, I won’t have any peace. I have to see that woman again. Then I’m gonna kill Mato Grosso, but the first thing I have to do is see Rosirene, just one more time. She’s beautiful, Doctor! Jesus . . . that mulatta cast a spell on me.’

  Not-a-Hope

  Not-a-Hope said he wasn’t a thief. A short, thin mulatto with a broad smile, the youngest of his siblings, he turned nineteen without ever having held a job. His parents did their best to give him what he wanted, within their possibilities. ‘They really pampered me.’

  One day, he had a fight with his family and ran away. ‘Just to spite them.’

  After two days, going hungry, in the very district where he lived, he stopped at a campfire where a few friends were keeping warm. ‘They weren’t thieves either, but they were thinkin’ about takin’ the revolver from the watchman at the quarry.’ Not-a-Hope went with them, not out of any conviction, but because he didn’t have anywhere else to go. Just so he wouldn’t have to stay there alone at the campfire.

  They all entered the quarry except for Not-a-Hope, who kept watch outside. When he noticed the trespassers, the watchman panicked and started shouting. One of them fired and hit the poor man in the head. They grabbed his radio, jacket and revolver, and fled.

  The crime resulted in a trial for armed robbery that ruined his life. He was sentenced to twelve years and eight months. ‘We were so naïve, Doctor, that we stole where everyone knew us. We grew up there. Not a hope.’

  Behind bars, he learned the tricks of the trade, and was released in 1987. ‘I started robbing properly.’ He held up businesses, bakeries and mugged people in the streets. He specialised in the ‘Adam’s apple’, a method in which he’d get a passer-by in a headlock, while his cohorts would relieve the victim of his belongings. He says he never killed anyone. He’d approach them saying ‘This is a stick-up’ and, if his victims didn’t believe it, he’d thump them over the head with the butt of his gun to intimidate them. He never mugged women on their own, for fear of winding up in prison with a reputation as a rapist.

  ‘I came back to the Casa in August of ‘91, ‘cause of the Adam’s apple and about fifty to a hundred robberies around the place. I landed another nineteen years, ‘cause the judge didn’t want to know about attenuatin’ circumstances. Not a hope.’

  He had already served five years of this sentence. Since he had arrived, no one had brought him even a packet of cigarettes. He got by with the help of his acquaintances. He sold watches and clothes for fellow inmates who were in debt; the owner of the item would ask for five, and he’d resell it for seven or eight. Everything he earned ended up in his crack pipe. ‘One of my virtues is that I only smoke what I can pay cash for! You’ll never hear that Not-a-Hope bought a crumb of crack on credit. I can walk through the galleries with my head high, not owin’ nothing to any con. In here, with me, it’s all about respect!’

  After his mother died, he ceased to exist for his family. ‘To society, I’m the scum of the earth, rejected like a mangy dog. If the guys here inside don’t treat me with respect, why would anyone else? I’m nothing in this world. I’ve lost my identity as a human being. Not a hope.’

  I treated him for a serious case of tuberculosis installed in his lymphatic system, causing swollen lymph glands in his neck and armpits. He was gaunt and almost died. After a month, having recovered from his fever and regained his appetite, he was discharged from the infirmary. I stressed the importance of keeping up the treatment and that it was imperative that he lay off the crack for a while.

  In the pavilion, he did exactly the opposite and came back worse than ever. He was wasting away; the disease had spread to his lungs and the slightest effort caused him to huff and puff. The bacteria had become aggressive and resistant to medication. Within a matter of days he was weak, his breathing laboured, and he would lie in bed all day long. Nevertheless, he always smiled when I went to examine him.

  One afternoon, I went to see him before heading for the consulting room. The cell was filled with a beautiful orangey light, caused by the sun reflecting off the naked woman on the wall. In a coma, curled up on the trundle bed, skin and bones, he looked like a child. There were breadcrumbs around his dry mouth and a column of ants was scurrying back and forth across Not-a-Hope’s contorted face to retrieve them.

  Valdomiro

  Valdomiro, or Valdo, was a mulatto with a wrinkled face and tips of grey in his tight curls. In his prisoner’s eyes, there was sometimes a light that brightened up his entire face. His seventy years of age and stories alongside legendary criminals such as Meneghetti, Quinzinho, Seven Fingers, Red Light and Little Promise made Valdo a man respected throughout the prison.

  He had done time in a number of prisons. In one, after four months in Solitary in complete darkness, broken only when the window in the cell door was opened to pass plates of food through, which he had to swallow quickly before the cockroaches could get to it, Valdo pretended to have lost his mind. To convince the warders that he had gone insane, he tore up money and ate his own excrement. ‘I had to make a mess to get out of that place. In those days, Solitary taught you the limits of a human being.’

  Valdo was born on a sloping dirt road, the grandson of a racist grandmother who discriminated against his black-skinned mother. ‘My dad was weak-minded and kept bad company. He took off and left me on my own, with my mother and two little sisters.’

  His mother took her three children and went to live with her mother, who gave them a warm welcome. ‘My granny on my mother’s side, who had her own brothel, took us in with open arms.’ This grandmother’s home, in São Paulo’s red-light district, was a small three-storey building, where twelve women worked. Behind it was their house. ‘With the money that granny made with her little massage parlour, we bought a travelling fair and started to move around.’

  Valdo was a strapping lad of sixteen by this time. He looked after the target-shooting stand and was shacked up with Betina, one of his grandmother’s former employees.

  One day, as fate would have it, the fair burned down and the family moved into a small house owned by the grandmother, near the Guarapiranga Reservoir, on the outskirts of São Paulo.

  Valdo got a job as a septic tank cleaner, built a little house of his own and led the life of a worker until events changed the course of things. His wife was the cause of everything, according to him. ‘She was really jealous, of my dogs even. I love dogs and couldn’t even treat them properly ‘cause she’d get all irate, sayin’ I paid more attention to them than to her. How absurd, Doctor, a human being tryin’ to compete with an animal.’

  His wife’s temperament brought him strife. If he so much as said ‘hi’ to a female neighbour, from then on she’d call her a whore, and every time he was late home he’d hear about it for the next four hours at least. She created problems with the husbands and sisters of the women she insulted. He would try to calm her down, but it was an inglorious task.

  ‘There was nothing to be done, Doctor. When a woman gets jealous, she’s the Devil in a skirt. At night, you wanna go to bed ‘cause you have to work early and she won’t stop pesterin’ you. You wanna have a drink after work, then you suck on some mint to disguise it, but when you get home she sniffs your breath and that’s it! She automatically assumes you were with another woman, ‘cause all men are worthless. And nothing’ll convince her otherwise!’

  One day, a beautiful mulatta moved in nearby. ‘Gorgeous, Doctor, with legs shaped by God himself and swayin’ hips to stop the traffic.’ In the street, whenever he saw her coming, Valdo would discreet
ly lower his head. ‘So as not to provoke the wildcat at home.’

  And also to avoid provoking the ire of her husband, who was notorious for his own jealousy and had got into many a scrap over his wife.

  One sunny Sunday, Valdo was at the front gate trying out the first pair of sunglasses he had ever owned when the mulatta went past, hips swaying. He was so distracted that he didn’t notice Betina at the window behind him shaking out the dust rag.

  ‘The troublemaker took it into her head that I was eyein’ up the mulatta. She slipped out the door, sweetly, as if she was going to give me a hug, and wham! She grabbed my tackle. The cheek!’

  In an instant, Betina assessed the hardness at hand and concluded that Valdo was a shameless lowlife and not worth the beans with which she filled his lunchbox.

  The screaming brought the neighbours out of their houses. Valdo wished he could disappear. In the end, convinced that it was impossible to calm her down, he went to a bar, burning with shame. ‘The slander followed me to the corner without lettin’ up, carryin’ on in that shrill voice of hers.’

  In the bar he found Joca, who bought him a drink for his nerves and invited him to a game of snooker. Experienced with the cue and women, Joca was giving Valdo advice when the mulatta’s husband appeared. He wasn’t happy.

  ‘What did you do to Cida?’

  ‘I’ve never even looked at your wife, my friend. I apologise in any case, but what happened isn’t cause for offence. My wife is the jealous, possessive sort and always makes a scandal. The whole district knows what she’s like.’

  ‘Your own wife said in front of everyone that you can’t take your eyes off Cida when she goes past. I’ll teach you to respect your neighbour’s wife, you black layabout!’

  He pulled out a knife used for gutting fish. Joca, a true friend, didn’t care for the insult and pulled out his revolver.