“It’s him!” she thought, her heart pounding within her breast.
She imagined Firmo standing before her, drunk, screaming for Jerônimo, whom he would slit open before her eyes. She lay in bed listening, afraid to open the door.
A moment later, the knocking started again. She thought it strange that it was so soft. It wasn’t like Firmo to be so cautious. She rose, went to the window, and peeked through the shutters.
“Who’s there?” she whispered.
“It’s me,” Jerônimo said, approaching.
She recognized him and ran to open the door.
“What are you doing here, Jerônimo?”
“Sh!” he replied, placing his finger on his lips. “Talk more softly!”
Rita began to tremble. In his gaze, in his hands, stained with blood, in his entire aspect, drunk, soaked and filthy, she saw the evidence of his crime.
“Where are you coming from?” she whispered.
“From making sure no one’ll bother us—here’s the knife he stabbed me with.”
And he threw Firmo’s knife down on the table. The mulatta knew that weapon like the palm of her hand.
“What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
“Who killed him?”
“I did.”
They both fell silent. Only their heavy breathing could be heard.
“Now . . .” said Jerônimo, finally speaking. “I’ll do anything to stay with you. We’ll leave and go wherever you like . . . what do you say?”
“What about your wife?”
“I’ll give her the money I’ve been saving for years and I’ll keep paying for our daughter’s school. I know I shouldn’t leave her, but I swear that even if you don’t come with me, I won’t stay here. I don’t know what’s come over me, but I just can’t stand her anymore! She turns my stomach! Luckily, my clothes are still at the hospital and I can pick them up tomorrow morning.”
“But where will we go?”
“That’s the last thing we have to worry about; anyplace will do. I’ve got five hundred mil-réis we can use to get started. I can stay here till five; it’s two-thirty now. I’ll send a message saying where I am and you can come meet me. How about it?”
Rita threw her arms around him, devouring him with kisses.
That new sacrifice, Jerônimo’s willingness to throw away his family, his dignity, his future—everything, everything for her sake alone—drove her into a frenzy of excitement. After all her anxieties that day and night, her nerves were stretched taut; she seemed to bristle with electricity.
Ah, she hadn’t been wrong. That Hercules, that man built like an ox, was capable of all the tenderness on earth.
“Well?” he insisted.
“Yes, darling,” the Bahian murmured, brushing her lips against his. “I want to go with you, to be yours, to make you happy. You’ve put a spell on me!” Rubbing his chest, she exclaimed; “But you’re soaked! Wait a minute! One thing I’ve got plenty of is men’s clothes! I’m going to light the stove so this stuff can dry out before five. Take off those boots! Just look at your hat! Listen, drink some rum to take the edge off that chill! Otherwise it’ll get into your bones! I’ll go fix some coffee!”
Jerônimo took a swig of rum, changed his clothes, and lay down on Rita’s bed.
“Come here,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Wait a minute! The coffee’s almost ready!”
Finally she went to him, bearing a cup of the fragrant, steaming beverage that had been the messenger of their love. She sat down on the edge of the bed and, holding the cup in one hand and the saucer in the other, she helped him drink, sip by sip, while his eyes caressed her, shining with anticipation.
Then she took off her skirt and, clad only in her blouse, embraced her beloved.
Jerônimo lay there, feeling her whole body against his, feeling her warm skin, feeling her cool black hair flow against his face and shoulders in a wave of vanilla and coumarin, feeling her round, soft breasts pressing against his broad, hairy chest, her thighs against his thighs. His soul melted, bubbling like metal on a fire, seeping incandescent from his eyes, mouth, and pores, searing his flesh and drawing forth stifled moans, irrepressible sobs that made every sinew in his body tremble in the extreme agony of angels violated by devils amid the blood-red flames of hell.
With a sudden, savage spasm, they both collapsed in each other’s arms, panting. Her mouth was wide open, her tongue hung out, her arms and fingers were stiff, and her whole body shuddered as though she were dying, while Jerônimo, flung far from life by that unexpected explosion, surrendered to a delightful intoxication, feeling the entire world and his own past vanish like vain shadows. Unaware of anything around him or even of his own existence, eyeless, earless, and senseless, he retained one clear, vivid, inextinguishable sensation: that warm, vibrant flesh that he deliriously pressed to his, that he could still feel pulsing beneath his hands, and that he still gripped like a baby who in his sleep clutches the breast that satisfies his thirst and hunger.
XVI
Piedade de Jesus was still waiting for Jerônimo. Sitting impatiently outside her door, she had heard a clock strike eight, eight-thirty, nine, nine-thirty. “Mother of God, what could have happened?” For her husband, who was still unwell, had rushed out into the cool night air as soon as he had finished supper. What could have made him stay away so long? It wasn’t like him to act so foolish!
“Ten o’clock. O Lord Jesus Christ, help me!”
She went to the front gate and asked if anyone had seen Jerônimo. No one had spotted him. She walked to the corner; a weary silence greeted her, like a yawning remnant of that Sunday afternoon. At ten-thirty she returned home with her heart in her mouth, her ears cocked for the sound of a turning doorknob. She lay down without taking off her skirt or blowing out the lantern. A snack of warm milk and baked cheese with butter and sugar still sat on the table.
She couldn’t sleep; her mind was working too feverishly. She started imagining brawls in which her husband received new wounds. Firmo figured in all these bloody scenes. Finally, after much tossing and turning on the mattress, she began to doze off, but the slightest sound made her leap out of bed and dash to the window. It wasn’t Jerônimo the first time, or the second, or any other.
When it started raining, Piedade felt even worse. She imagined her husband in a boat at sea, buffeted by storms, relying solely on the Virgin Mary’s protection. She knelt before a statue of Our Lady and prayed. Every thunderbolt added to her terror. Kneeling, her eyes fixed upon the holy image, she gasped and sobbed. Suddenly she stood up, astonished to find herself alone, as though till then she had not noticed her husband’s absence. She glanced about, frightened, wanting to weep or cry out for help. The lantern’s long, flickering shadows on the walls and ceiling seemed to be trying to tell her something. A pair of pants hanging on the door, with a jacket and a hat, looked like the body of a hanged man with dangling legs. She crossed herself. She wished she knew what time it was, but there was no way to find out; she felt that her torments must have lasted at least three days. She reckoned it must be nearly morning, if morning would ever come—or perhaps that hellish night would last forever and the sun would never rise again! She drank a glass of water, though a short while ago she had drunk another, and stood motionless, listening attentively for the sound of some clock.
The rain slackened, but the wind blew more fiercely than ever. Outside, the night whispered secrets through the keyhole, cracks in the roof, and around the door. At every gust, the poor woman expected to see a ghost coming to tell her Jerônimo was dead. She felt she would go mad unless she found out what time it was. She went to the window, opened it, and a gust of damp wind entered the room, blowing out the lantern. Piedade uttered a cry and, stumbling, began to grope for the box of matches without recognizing the objects she touched. She felt faint. Finally she found the matches, relit the lantern and shut the window. It had rained in a little. She touched her clothes; they were damp.
She poured another glass of water. A feverish chill ran down her spine, and she got into bed, her teeth were chattering. Again she grew drowsy and shut her eyes, but soon she sat up. She thought she had heard someone talking in the street. She began to sweat and shiver again; she tried to hear what they were saying. If she was not mistaken, they were men’s voices, muffled. Cupping her hands to her ears, she kept listening. Then she heard someone knocking, not at her door but farther away, at Das Dores’s, Rita’s, or Augusta’s house. “It must be Alexandre coming home from work.” She would have liked to go ask him if he’d heard anything about Jerônimo, but she felt too ill to get out of bed.
At five she woke with a start. There were definitely people outside! She heard a door creak. She opened the window, but it was still too dark to see a thing. The August night, foggy and clammy, seemed to fight the coming of day. Oh God, wouldn’t that damned night ever end? Meanwhile, the first signs of dawn began to appear. At the other end of the courtyard, Piedade heard two voices whispering excitedly. “Holy Virgin! That sounds like my husband! And the other one’s a woman! I must be imagining things! I’ve been so upset!” Those whispers in the darkness tormented her. “No; how could it be him? I must be going crazy! If he were here he would have come home!” The whispers continued; Piedade, all ears, felt she was about to explode.
“Jerônimo!” she shouted.
The voices stopped; nothing more could be heard.
Piedade stayed at the window. The darkness began to dissipate at last; a feeble glow illumined the east, slowly spreading upward through the sky, which was the ashy color of cement. The courtyard began to stir reluctantly, as it did every Monday. She heard people coughing and spitting, still hung over. Doors opened; yawning faces emerged, heading for the faucets. Chimneys began to smoke. She could catch the scent of roasted coffee.
Piedade threw on a shawl and went out into the courtyard. Machona, who had appeared at the door to number seven after letting out a bellow designed to awaken her entire family, yelled: “Good morning, neighbor! How’s your husband? Any better?”
Piedade sighed.
“Ah, don’t ask, S’ora Leandra!”
“Why honey, is he worse?”
“He didn’t come home last night.”
“Really? What do you mean? Then where did he stay?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can that be?”
“I don’t know! I didn’t sleep a wink all night! God, I’m so worried!”
“Maybe something happened to him . . .”
Piedade burst into tears, which she wiped on her woolen shawl, while the other woman, whose voice was more raucous than a rusty bugle, began spreading the news that Jerônimo hadn’t come home.
“Maybe he went back to the hospital,” Augusta suggested as she scrubbed her parrot’s cage in a washtub.
“But he just got out yesterday,” Machona objected.
“And they don’t let anyone in after eight at night,” another washerwoman added.
The commentaries multiplied on all sides, making it clear that Jerônimo’s absence would supply their daily dose of gossip. Piedade responded coldly to her companions’ questions. She looked very dejected; she didn’t wash or change her clothes. When she tried to eat, the food stuck in her throat. All she did was weep and lament.
“Oh God, I’m so unhappy!” she kept repeating.
“Listen, child; you’d better cut that out!” Machona said, standing in her doorway munching a piece of bread and butter. “What the hell? He’s not dead, so there’s no reason to get so upset!”
“How do I know that?” Piedade sobbed. “I saw so many strange things last night!”
“Did you see him in your dreams?” Machona asked anxiously.
“Not in my dreams because I couldn’t sleep. But I saw things like ghosts . . .”
She burst into tears again.
“Gee!”
“Everything’s going wrong!”
“That’s for sure, if you’re seeing ghosts; but trust in God, woman, and stop worrying yourself so. Things could be worse, and crying can bring bad luck!”
“Oh, my darling husband!”
That poor woman’s forsaken lowing added a sorrowful note to the courtyard’s usual clamor—a note like the sound of a distant cow, lost at nightfall in some wild and unknown place. But the pace of the women’s work was also quickening. They laughed, sang, and wisecracked. Others bought food for lunch from the vendors who came and went. The pasta factory’s machinery began to wheeze. And Piedade, sitting on her doorstep, howling like a long-suffering dog waiting for its master, cursed the day she had left Portugal and looked as though she were about to die right there, on that stone threshold where she had so often leaned against her husband’s shoulder, sighing happily as he played fados from their native land.
But Jerônimo didn’t appear.
Finally she rose and headed for the empty lot out back, where she wandered about aimlessly, talking to herself and gesticulating. Her despairing gestures, as she raised her clenched fists heavenward, seemed to express rage not at her husband but at that cursed blinding light, that crapulous sun that made men’s blood boil and turned them into randy goats. She seemed to cry out against that pandering country that had stolen her husband and given him to another, because the other was Brazilian and she was not.
She cursed the day she had left Portugal: that good and sleepy, old and sickly, kind and placid land where fits of passion and wild excesses were unknown. Yes, back in Portugal the fields were cool and melancholy, brownish-green and still, not ardent and emerald, bathed in brilliant light and perfume as in Brazil, that inferno where every blade of grass conceals some venemous reptile, where every budding flower and every buzzing bluebottle fly bears a lascivious virus. There, amid Portugal’s wistful landscapes, one didn’t hear jaguars and wildcats snarling on moonlit nights, or herds of peccaries foraging at daybreak. There the hideous and dreadful tapir didn’t crash through forests, snapping trees; there the anaconda didn’t shake its deadly rattles, nor did the coral snake lie in wait for the unsuspecting traveler, ready to strike and kill. There, no black thug waited to stab her husband; there Jerônimo would still be her modest, quiet, gentle husband. He would be the same sad and thoughtful peasant, like a farm animal that toward evening raises its humble, biblical, chastened gaze toward the heavens.
Damn the day she had come! Damn it a thousand times!
As she returned home, Piedade’s rage increased, for when she reached number nine she saw the Bahian mulatta, that chorado dancer, that evil snake who sang happily to herself, leaning out the window from time to time to shake the ashes from her iron, casting glances left and right, feigning indifference to everything that didn’t concern her directly and then disappearing, without interrupting her song, absorbed in her work. She had nothing to say about Seu Jerônimo’s disappearance, nor did she even wish to know what had occurred. She barely set foot outside her house, and when she did, she hurried back in without stopping to chat.
What did she care? Other people’s troubles weren’t going to feed her!
In fact, however, she felt very apprehensive. Despite her relief at Firmo’s death and her happiness to have found herself at last in Jerônimo’s arms, a vague uneasiness lay upon her heart. She was dying to know more about what had happened the night before—so much so that at eleven, as soon as she saw Piedade, after waiting in vain for her husband, set out in search of him, ready to visit the hospital, the police, the morgue, the devil, but determined not to return without finding out what had happened, she left her work, changed her skirt, threw a shawl over her shoulders and went out too, equally determined not to return without learning everything she could.
The women set off in opposite directions and only returned late that afternoon, almost at the same time. The courtyard was full of people stirred by the news of Firmo’s death and aware of its effect at Cat Head, where the murder had been blamed on the silver jennies, against whom terrible oaths of ve
ngeance had been sworn. A breeze laden with barely contained rage seemed to blow from the rival slum, rising with the approach of evening, making their yellow flag flutter ominously on its pole. The sun sank helplessly in the west, tinting the sky a sinister red.
Piedade returned glowering; she was no longer sad but furious. She had learned far more than she had expected to about her husband. First of all, she knew he was alive, for he had been seen that day at Bantam’s Bar and on Saudade Beach, wandering around pensively. She had also found out, through a watchman who was friends with Alexandre, that Jerônimo had been spotted making his way across the vacant lot by João Romão’s quarry, which led the watchman to suppose that he had just left home and had gone out the back gate. She even knew he had gone to pick up his trunk at the hospital, that the night before he had been drinking at Pepé’s Tavern with Zé Carlos and Pataca, and that the three of them, all more or less in their cups, had then headed for the beach. Still unaware of the murder, the poor woman nonetheless felt that her husband had not come home because, after that binge with his pals, he had returned late and drunk and had decided to spend the night with Rita, who had been only too glad to take him in. “Nothing strange about that! For a long time the slut’s been trying to get him in her clutches!” With this conviction, a knot of jealousy had formed in her stomach as she hurried home, certain that she would find her man and have it out with him, discharging all the accumulated rage that threatened to choke her. She crossed the courtyard without speaking to anyone, heading straight for her house. She was sure she would find it open, and her disappointment was bitter when she saw it was still locked.
The Slum (Library of Latin America) Page 19