“Don’t worry. You’ll see if it’s useless or not.”
“You’re just being stubborn! Listen, if you let me have those sixty feet out back, the boundary on your own property would run straight to the quarry and I wouldn’t have a strip of someone else’s land in back of mine. In any case, I’m not going to build a wall until you change your mind.”
“Then you’ll never have a wall, because I already said everything I have to say.”
“But my God, why? Think what you’re saying! You can’t build anything there. Or do you think I’ll let you have windows right up against my property?”
“I don’t need windows up against anyone’s property.”
“And I won’t let you build a wall that’ll block off my windows.”
“I don’t need a wall on that side.”
“Then what the hell are you going to do with all that land?”
“That’s my business. You’ll find out in good time.”
“You’ll be sorry you didn’t sell me that land.”
“I can stand it. All I have to say is anyone who tries to fool with my business is going to wish he hadn’t.”
“Good day.”
“Good day.”
A cold war then broke out between the Portuguese who sold dry goods and the one who sold groceries. The former decided not to build a wall around his property till he had bought the plot between his house and the hill; and the latter still hoped to pry loose at least a few yards from his neighbor. Those few yards would be worth their weight in gold once he carried out a scheme he had been hatching lately: to construct a huge, unprecedented warren of two-room houses, a slum that would overshadow the smaller ones scattered around Botafogo.
This was his goal. For a long time, João Romão had lived for this idea alone. He dreamed of it every night. He showed up wherever construction materials were auctioned, buying used lumber and secondhand tiles, bargaining for bricks and lime. He dumped it all in his backyard, which soon began to look like an enormous barricade, so varied and bizarre were the objects piled up there: boards and slats, tree trunks, masts from ships, rafters, broken wheelbarrows, clay and iron stovepipes, dismantled braziers, piles and piles of bricks in every shape and size, barrels of lime, mountains of sand and red earth, heaps of tiles, broken ladders and everything else under the sun. And joão, who knew how easily such things could be stolen, bought a fierce bulldog to stand watch over them at night.
This watchdog was the cause of constant quarrels with Miranda’s family, which was forced to stay indoors after ten to avoid being bitten.
“You’d better build that wall,” João said with a shrug.
“I won’t!” replied his neighbor. “If you want trouble, you’re going to get it.”
On the other hand, whenever one of the tavern-keeper’s hens wandered onto Miranda’s property, it immediately vanished. João Romão protested vehemently against these thefts, warning that he had a gun and threatening retribution.
“Well, then build a wall around your coop!” Estela’s husband replied.
A few months later, João Romão, after trying one last time to buy a few square yards of his neighbor’s property, decided to start building.
“Never mind,” he told Bertoleza as they lay in bed. “Never mind; I’ll still get my hands on that land. Sooner or later I’ll buy it—not just ten square feet but thirty, fifty, his whole yard and his house too.”
He spoke with the conviction of one who feels he can accomplish anything through perseverance, through mighty efforts, and through the power of money—money that only left his clutches to return multiplied a hundredfold.
Ever since this fever to possess land had taken hold of him, all his actions, however simple, had pecuniary ends. He had one purpose only: to increase his wealth. He kept the worst vegetables from his garden for himself and Bertoleza: the ones that were so bad that no one would buy them. His hens were good layers but he himself never ate eggs, though he loved them. He sold every single one and contented himself with the food his customers left on their plates. It had gone beyond ambition and become a nervous disorder, a form of lunacy, an obsessive need to turn everything into cash. Short and thickset, always unshaven and with his hair cropped short, he came and went between his quarry and his tavern, between his tavern and his garden, glancing hungrily about, seizing with his eyes what eluded his claws.
Meanwhile, the street filled with people at an astonishing rate. The construction was shoddy, but there was a great deal of it: Shacks and small houses sprang up overnight. Rents rose, and properties doubled in value. An Italian pasta factory was built, and another that made candles. Workers trudged by each morning, at noon, and again in the evening, and most of them ate at the cheap eating-house he had set up under the veranda behind his store. Other taverns opened, but none was as crowded as his. Business had never been so good; the rascal had never sold so much—far more than in previous years. He even had to hire two clerks. Merchandise wouldn’t stay put on his shelves, and the counter where it was sold grew shinier and more worn. The coins rang as they tumbled into his till, whence they flooded into his strongbox in larger denominations and finally to the bank as contos.
After a while, he began to buy less from wholesalers and ordered some products directly from Europe—wine, for example. Before, he had purchased it in demijohns, but now he bought barrels straight from Portugal. He turned each barrel into three by adding water and rum. Likewise, he ordered kegs of butter, crates of canned goods, big boxes of matches, oil, cheese, crockery, and much else besides.
He built a storeroom and a new bedroom, abolishing Bertoleza’s stand and using the extra space to expand his tavern and store, which doubled in size and acquired two new entrances.
It was no longer a simple general store but a bazaar where everything could be bought: dry goods, hardware, china, paper and pens, work clothes, fabric for women’s garments, straw hats, inexpensive scents, combs, kerchiefs with love poetry embroidered on them, and cheap rings and jewelry.
All the neighborhood riffraff ended up there or in the eatery next door, where men from the factories and quarry would meet after work, drinking and carousing till ten at night amid the mingled smoke from their pipes, the frying fish, and the kerosene lamps.
João Romão supplied all their needs, even lending them money to tide them over until payday. The workers’ entire salaries ended up in his pockets. Almost everyone borrowed from him at 8 percent monthly interest—a little more than they would have paid had they possessed something to pawn.
Although those small houses were badly built, they filled up as quickly as they were finished and tenants moved in before the paint was even dry. For workers, they were the best places to live in Botafogo—especially for those at the quarry, which was a stone’s throw away.
Miranda was beside himself with rage.
“A slum!” he bellowed. “A slum! God damn that son of a bitch! A slum right under our noses! The bastard’s ruined our new home!”
He spewed forth curses, vowing vengeance and howling with rage over the dust that invaded his rooms and the infernal noise of those masons and carpenters who worked from dawn to dusk.
Miranda’s protests, however, didn’t stop the houses from rising, one after the other, and filling with tenants as they inched toward the hill and then turned and advanced on his yard, like a stone-and-mortar snake threatening his home.
Miranda hired some men to build a wall around his property.
What else could he do? The devil was capable of extending that slum right into his sitting room!
The two-room houses finally stopped when they reached Miranda’s wall and turned again to create a large quadrangle, one side of which was right up against his backyard. The space in the middle resembled the courtyard at a military barracks, large enough for an entire battalion to drill in.
Ninety-five houses made up the huge slum.
When they were finished, João Romão had a wall ten feet high built on his side of
those sixty feet in back of Miranda’s house. Topped with pieces of glass and broken bottles, the wall had a large gateway in the middle. Next to it, a red lantern hung above a yellow board, on which the following words were clumsily lettered in red paint: “São Romão: Houses and Washtubs for Rent.”
The houses were rented by the month, and the tubs by the day. Each tub, including water, cost 500 réis, not counting soap. The women who lived there were allowed to use them free.
Thanks to its abundant fresh water, found nowhere else in the neighborhood, and to that large courtyard in which clothes could be hung to dry, all the tubs were soon in use. Washerwomen came from all over town. Some traveled great distances; and as soon as a house, a spare room, or a corner to throw down a mattress became vacant, a horde of would-be tenants sallied forth to fight over it.
The place took on the air of a huge, open-air laundry, bustling and noisy. Wattle fences surrounded small gardens planted with vegetables and flowers: brightly colored patches amid the gray slime from overflowing washtubs and the sparkling white of raw cotton on rubbing boards. The wet clothes drying in the sun sparkling like a lake of molten silver.
And on the muddy ground covered with puddles, in the sultry humidity, a living world, a human community, began to wriggle, to seethe, to grow spontaneously in that quagmire, multiplying like larvae in a dung heap.
II
For two years the slum grew from day to day, gaining strength and devouring newcomers. And next door, Miranda grew more and more alarmed and appalled by that brutal and exuberant world, that implacable jungle growing beneath his windows with roots thicker and more treacherous than serpents, undermining everything, threatening to break through the soil in his yard and shake his house to its very foundations.
Although his own business on Rua do Hospício was not doing badly, he found it hard to bear “that swine” the tavern-keeper’s scandalous good fortune—a filthy wretch who never wore a jacket and ate and slept with a Negress.
His irritation increased at night and on Sundays when, exhausted by his work, he stretched out on a chaise longue in his living room, listening against his will to the heavy breathing of tired beasts. He couldn’t approach the window without being struck by a dizzying wave: the rank, sensual stench of animals in rut.
And later, when he was alone in his room, indifferent and accustomed to his wife’s infidelities, freed from those fits of lust that had formerly tormented him, it was his neighbor’s prosperity that weighed upon his spirit, darkening it with a cloud of disgust and resentment.
He envied the other Portuguese who had made his fortune without being cuckolded, without marrying the boss’s daughter or the bastard child of some wealthy landowner.
But then Miranda, who deemed himself a model of astuteness and who shortly after his marriage had written, in answer to a letter of congratulation from an ex-colleague in Portugal, that Brazil was a pack horse, loaded with money, whose reins were easily seized by the quick-witted—he, who considered himself as foxy as they come, was nothing but a jackass compared to his neighbor! Instead of becoming one of the lords of Brazil as he had intended, he had turned into the slave of an unscrupulous bitch! He had thought he was cut out for glorious conquests, but he was nothing more than a ridiculous and long-suffering victim. Yes, when you came right down to it, what had his achievement been? He had become a little richer, it was true, but at what price? Selling his soul to the devil for eighty contos, plus an incalculable quantity of shame and sordidness. He had assured himself of a comfortable income, but he was bound forever to a woman whom he despised. And what good had it done him? What did his lordly existence amount to? He went from his hellish home to the purgatory of his store and back again! An enviable fate, no doubt about it!
Tormented by doubts as to whether Zulmira was his child, the poor devil didn’t even enjoy being a father. If instead of being Estela’s, the girl had been a foundling, he would have loved her with all his heart. His life would have been transformed. But as things stood, the girl was living proof of her mother’s contempt, and Miranda’s hatred for his wife overflowed onto the innocent.
“I was a fool!” he would exclaim, leaping out of bed.
And unable to sleep, he would begin pacing about his room, obsessed by the feverish envy that burned within his brain.
João Romão was a lucky bastard, by God! He hadn’t a worry in the world! The son of a bitch was as free and unencumbered today as when he had stepped off the boat from Portugal without a penny in his pocket. He was still young and could enjoy life, because even if he married someone like Estela he could always send her packing with a good kick in the backside! He could do it! Brazil was made for men like him!
“I was a fool!” he repeated, unable to stand the thought of Romão’s happiness. “A great big fool! When you tote it all up, what the hell do I possess? A business I can’t get out of without losing everything I put into it. My capital’s so tied up I’ll never get it free, and things have gotten so complicated that I’ll be stuck here for the rest of my life and end up buried in this stupid country! There’s nothing I can really call my own! My credit’s based on a dowry that slut gave me and that ties me to her just as my damned business ties me to this stinking jungle!”
Out of these festering thoughts, a new idea took shape in Miranda’s empty heart: a title! Indifferent to those vices that can fill a man’s life, without a family he could love and lacking the imagination to seek his pleasure with prostitutes, the drowning man clasped this plank like one who, knowing he will soon die, clutches at the hope of an afterlife. Estela’s fatuous airs, which at first had provoked his incredulous and mocking smiles, now delighted him. He managed to persuade himself that she was truly of noble blood, while he himself, though not from an aristocratic family, was an aristocrat by nature, which was better still. And so he began to dream of becoming a baron, making this his most cherished goal, deeply satisfied at having found a way to spend his money without having to give it back to his wife or leave it to anybody.
This new obsession radically altered his behavior. He pretended to be a fastidious snob, acting as haughtily as possible and hiding his jealousy of his neighbor behind a disdainful air of condescension. As he passed João’s tavern every day, he greeted him with a supercilious smile that quickly vanished from his lips.
Having taken the first few steps toward purchasing a title, he threw open his home and began to give parties. Estela, whose first gray hairs were beginning to appear, was overjoyed at this development.
Zulmira, now nearly thirteen, had turned into a classic Carioca: pale, slender, with lightly freckled cheeks and small purple blotches that were her nostrils, eyelids, and lips. She exhaled an air of moist, nocturnal flowers, of cold, white magnolias. Her hair was light brown, her hands were nearly transparent, her nails were soft and short like her mother’s, her teeth were scarcely whiter than the skin on her face, her feet were small, her hips were slender, but her eyes were large, dark, vivacious and sarcastic.
At just about this time, Miranda took in a young man from Minas whose father was a wealthy farmer and his best customer outside Rio.
The lad’s name was Henrique, he was fifteen, and he had come to prepare for the entrance examination at the Academy of Medicine. At first Miranda had put him up at his house on Rua do Hospício, but the student complained after a few days that he was not comfortable there. Miranda, who could ill afford to offend him, invited him to live in his house in Botafogo.
Henrique was handsome in a boyish way, shy in company, and as dainty as a girl. He seemed very serious about his studies and so frugal that he wouldn’t spend a penny on anything but absolute necessities. For the rest, except when Miranda accompanied him to his classes in the morning, he only set foot outside the house in the company of his host’s family. Dona Estela soon came to treat Henrique like a son and took charge of his monthly allowance, which was deducted from his father’s account.
But in fact, he never asked for money. Instead,
when he needed something he told Dona Estela. The desired object would then be purchased by Miranda, who charged a usurious commission. Henrique’s lodging cost 250 mil-réis a month, but he was unaware of this fact, nor did he wish to know. He lacked nothing, and the servants respected him as though he were their master’s son.
On balmy nights, he, Dona Estela, her daughter, and a pickaninny named Valentim would stroll down to the beach, or if Miranda’s wife was invited to a soirée at some girlfriend’s house, she would take him along.
Miranda had two servants: Isaura, a mulatta girl, scatterbrained and shiftless, who spent all her pay on soft drinks at João Romão’s bar; and a young black virgin named Leonor, very gay, lithe and mischievous as a child, mistress of a vast stock of obscenities and quick to reply, whenever the employees or customers at the bar got fresh with her: “Watch it! I’m an orphan! I’ll tell the family judge!” In addition, there was Valentim, the son of a slave whom Dona Estela had freed.
Dona Estela’s affection for this pickaninny was boundless: she gave him complete freedom, money, and presents. She took him for walks, dressed him well and fussed over him so much that it made her daughter jealous. She would scold Zulmira for things the black boy had done. If the two youngsters quarreled, she would always side with the boy. Nothing was too good for her Valentim! When he came down with smallpox and Miranda, despite his wife’s entreaties, sent him to a hospital, she wept every day and neither sang, smiled, nor played the piano till he returned. And poor Miranda, if he wished to avoid being insulted by his wife and scolded in front of their servants, had to show Valentim every consideration and humbly attend to all his wishes.
Besides Henrique, there was another guest under Miranda’s roof: old Botelho, who paid nothing for his keep.
He was a poor devil nearly seventy years old, bad-tempered, with short, white, bristly hair on his head, beard, and mustache; gaunt, with round glasses that magnified his pupils and made him look like a buzzard—an impression that sorted well with his hooked beak and thin lips. He still had all his teeth, but they were so worn that it looked as though someone had filed them halfway down to the gums. He always dressed in black, with an umbrella under his arm and a round felt hat pulled down to his ears. In his time he had been a commercial clerk, then a slave trader. He even claimed to have gone to Africa several times to buy slaves. He had been an avid speculator. During the war with Paraguay he had made a fortune, but then his luck had changed and, between one mishap and another, all his wealth had drained away. And now the poor fellow, old and rancorous, tormented by hemorrhoids, found himself penniless, vegetating in Miranda’s shadow. For many years they had worked for the same boss and Botelho had remained Miranda’s friend, first by chance and later by necessity.
The Slum (Library of Latin America) Page 3