Crimes of August: A Novel: 5 (Brazilian Literature in Translation Series)

by Rubem Fonseca

  “Thank you, Lourival,” said Freitas, hanging up the phone.

  eleven

  ALICE AND PEDRO LOMAGNO lived in a spacious mansion on Avenida Oswaldo Cruz that had belonged to his father.

  Alice was first to arrive at the breakfast area. The pantryman, as always, had set the table for two and was serving Alice when Lomagno entered. He was dressed for tennis and had a racket in his hand. He greeted Alice, kissing her affectionately on the cheek, put the racket away on the buffet, and sat down on the opposite side of the table.

  “Has the Correio da Manhã arrived yet?”

  “Yes, sir,” answered the pantryman. “I’ll bring it right away.”

  The pantryman brought the newspaper. Lomagno picked up the silver coffeepot and placed it in front of him. He folded the paper and rested it against the coffeepot. He read as he spread jam on a piece of toast.

  From the other side of the table, Alice saw only her husband’s forehead and carefully combed hair. Lomagno folded and unfolded the paper several times as he ate, looking for items that interested him, without even once glancing at his wife. When he finished, he rose from the table, picked up the tennis racket.

  “I may have to make a trip abroad.”

  “May I ask where you’re going?”

  “Europe.”

  “Europe has lots of countries.”

  “France. Any more questions?”

  “Are you taking that woman?”

  “What woman?”

  “You know very well what woman.”

  “I’m going by myself.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Have you been to the doctor this week? Are you taking your medicines?”

  “I’m fine.” Pause. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “What is it, dear?”

  “I told that police inspector friend of mine that you were Luciana Gomes Aguiar’s lover.” Alice’s voice quivered.

  Lomagno spun the handle of the racket in his hand, as tennis players do. But his expression remained impassive.

  “I didn’t know you had police inspector friends,” said Lomagno calmly.

  “Alberto Mattos. He was my boyfriend.”

  “Ah, yes, I know.” Lomagno knew that Mattos was investigating the murder of Paulo Gomes Aguiar. He looked at Alice, interested in seeing the reactions on her face.

  “Where did you two meet?”

  “At his apartment.” The tremor in her voice had subsided, now that she was taking revenge against her husband, and she felt pleasure in it. She would feel even greater pleasure if he lost that disturbing tranquility.

  “What did he say? The policeman? Did he ask any questions?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to see him again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re an idiot. Why’d you do such a thing?”

  “He asked if a Negro frequented our house,” exclaimed Alice, hoping without reason to destroy the control displayed by her husband.

  Lomagno turned his back on Alice and left without looking back.

  LUCIANA GOMES AGUIAR was waiting for Lomagno at the Country Club, in Ipanema, seated at one of the tables around the pool, dressed for tennis. Luciana was nervous, as they had agreed after Gomes Aguiar’s death to go a few days without seeing each other and had merely spoken by phone.

  “I paid the doorman not to say anything, but the fool couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”

  “Love, I had told you we could use the macumba priest as cover.”

  “Can he be trusted?”

  “The rabble can’t ever be trusted. There’s only one type of people worse than the rich: the poor.” Many nouveaux riches were emerging in society, and Pedro and Luciana detested the vulgarity of those arrivistes.

  “It so happens that the macumba priest is a blunderer incapable of keeping dates straight. Remember, he was in your apartment the night before, on the 30th. It’s easy to confuse things; I’ll take care of that. I’m going to see the inspector. I think the time has come to face him. I’ll confirm to him the story of the macumba priest. If necessary, I’ll speak of Alice’s health problems . . .”

  “But we have to get rid of that doorman. Chicão can handle that. He adores you, he does anything you ask . . .”

  “I’m going to call him now,” said Lomagno. “We can’t waste any time.”

  Lomagno returned after a few moments.

  “Everything’s taken care of. Now let’s play our match.”

  “Today I’m going to beat you,” said Luciana.

  “No doubt. You’re getting better all the time. But don’t think for a minute that I’m going to throw the match.”

  Having found a solution to the problem, they turned their attention to the center tennis court, which had been reserved for them.

  EVERY TUESDAY Salete would go downtown to look at the displays in the high-fashion shops. Though some of the dresses in the A Imperial and A Moda caught her attention, she only tried on a little jersey dress she saw in the window of A Capital. But she felt the dress looked better on the mannequin than on her body.

  “I know my face is ugly, but I have a perfect body. If this dress looks bad on me, just imagine the average woman.”

  “Your face is also very pretty,” replied the saleswoman.

  “I have a mirror at home, dearie, so don’t think that by flattering me you’re going to sell this dress with a defect in the sleeve. As a saleswoman you should’ve seen that.”

  “It looks very nice on you,” said the woman, ignoring Salete’s aggressive tone.

  “You really think so?”

  “It’s wonderful on you.”

  Salete tried several poses in front of the mirror before deciding to buy the dress. Happily carrying the brightly wrapped package from the shop, taking care to avoid wrinkling its contents, she walked to the minibus stop in Carioca Square, a short distance from A Capital. She boarded the first one for Copacabana. While the vehicle remained at the stop, waiting for passengers, Salete looked out the window. Across from her was a low-end fabric shop. A woman was coming out of the shop. When she saw her, Salete, frightened, ducked down in the seat, her head almost touching her knees. She felt dizzy, as if about to faint. It can’t be her, she thought.

  She cautiously raised her head and took another look. The woman was standing there, as if she didn’t know where to go. It was her, all right, the wretched woman hadn’t died! My God, she’s blacker and uglier than ever!

  Finding out that her mother was still alive made Salete’s heart ache with unhappiness. What if Luiz saw her? Worse yet, what if the black woman were to show up someday in front of Alberto and say, “I’m Salete’s mother”? She crouched down again in the seat, afraid her mother would look toward the bus and see her inside.

  The bus finally pulled away, heading for Rua Senador Dantas. When it stopped at the corner of Evaristo da Veiga, Salete kneeled on the seat and looked back. Relieved, she saw that the ghost of her mother had disappeared. A tall, muscular black man carrying a package crossed the street, signaling to the bus driver. He got on and took the only empty seat, in the rear, having to bend over to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling.

  Until a few minutes earlier that man had been in the Cassio Muniz store, where he had bought, on the installment plan, a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson, for 520 cruzeiros a month, and a French MAB pistol, 7.65, with a ten-bullet clip, for only 220 a month. The total price didn’t matter; credit accounts were invented precisely so no one would have that type of concern. He had thought of also buying a Winchester .22 carbine but decided against it. He already owned a 12-gauge shotgun, a veritable lethal jewel with silver engraving on the butt and the breech housing.

  Chicão—that was the Negro’s name—had been contracted by Pedro Lomagno to kill Raimundo, the doorman at the Deauville Building. He planned to do so that evening. But first he would take the firearms he had bought for temporary storage in the home of a woman he slept with from time to tim
e, on Rua Almirante Tamandaré, not far from the Deauville.

  CHICÃO HAD MET PEDRO LOMAGNO in January 1946, at the Boqueirão do Passeio club on Santa Luzia. Two years earlier he had been drafted into military service and incorporated into the Ninth Engineering Battalion, one of the first units of the FEB, the Brazilian Expeditionary Forces, to go to Italy, in July 1944, and one of the last to return, on October 3, 1945. He had risen to the rank of corporal. Chicão had enjoyed the war. He’d never eaten so well in his life; the Brazilian soldiers had access to the abundant resources and services of the American Fourth Army. The rations, the cigarettes, and everything else he received facilitated his relationship with the Italian ragazze. For a pack of cigarettes or a chocolate bar he had gotten some good pieces of ass. The possibility of dying didn’t worry him, and after seeing two comrades die beside him, one hit by mortar fire from the tedeschi and the other blown apart by a booby trap, without anything happening to him, Chicão had come to the conclusion that he was invulnerable. His athletic build had led to his being called to serve as sparring partner for American colleagues and take part in boxing exhibitions. He had fucked and boxed and disarmed landmines and not caught gonorrhea like everyone else and all that without breaking his delicate white man’s nose and without getting blown apart: yes, the war had been a good thing. People died suddenly in war, but didn’t they also die that way in São João de Meriti, where he lived?

  Demobilization and the return to Brazil had been the worst thing ever to happen to him. He soon spent the money he had saved and needed to find a job. Before being drafted, Chicão had worked in construction. But now he considered that service unworthy of a man with his experience. A former private, a comrade from his regiment, told him the Boqueirão do Passeio club was looking for a boxing instructor.

  He appeared at the club wearing a wool-lined American military jacket and black ankle-high boots with thick laces and soles of hard rubber that he called batbut, the combat boot of the field uniform worn by enlisted men. Along with a German steel helmet and a Walther pistol, the boots and the jacket were his trophies of war. After a quick interview with Kid Earthquake, a former Rio de Janeiro middleweight champion who ran the Boqueirão do Passeio boxing school, Chicão was hired. Two days later, he and Pedro Lomagno became acquainted. Lomagno had decided to learn to box, and the club was conveniently near the office of his father’s coffee exporting firm, on Avenida Graça Aranha, where Pedro was doing an internship in preparation for one day taking over the businesses of the elder Lomagno.

  Pedro and Chicão were the same age, twenty-two. Each immediately felt an attraction to the other. Lomagno, who was a taciturn and introverted youth, admired Chicão’s enthusiasm and joie de vivre. Chicão respected the education, wealth, and whiteness of the other man.

  For a year, they saw each other three times a week at the gym. Despite the intimate relationship established between them, they never socialized. Pedro’s parents would not have accepted a friendship with a Negro, and his friends would have thought it quite strange if he showed up with Chicão at the elegant parties he frequented. With the death of his father, Pedro Lomagno assumed the family business and stopped going to the Boqueirão. But that didn’t mean he abandoned his friend. He hired Chicão to oversee the coffee warehouse in his firm, on Avenida Rodrigues Alves. But Chicão lacked the necessary qualities for that job. Lomagno gave him the money to open his own boxing school. After some months of loss, and feeling uncomfortable asking his sponsor for more money, Chicão decided to close down the school. Pedro Lomagno, who missed the boxing matches because his body was starting to acquire an undesirable flaccidity around the waist, appeared at the gymnasium in the Rio Comprido district the day that Chicão was removing from the façade the plaque bearing the name Brazilian Boxing Academy.

  “What happened?”

  “I failed. I’m not even making enough to pay the rent on this damned place.”

  “You should’ve talked to me.”

  “I was too embarrassed.”

  Lomagno went into the gymnasium. It was six p.m., and the space was dark. A single lightbulb, at the entrance to the dressing room, was burning.

  “Turn on all the lights,” Lomagno said.

  The ring, official size, stood out in the middle of the gym.

  “You got trunks and gloves for me?”

  “Here there’s everything you need. Even helmets.”

  “Let’s fight without helmets.”

  They fought vigorously, until Lomagno tired. It had been a long time since Lomagno had felt that sensation of well-being.

  “I was missing that.” The two were naked, in the dressing room. The nudity of the sweating muscular bodies imparted a sense of confidence, partnership, complicity. They went into the shower. The water made Chicão’s body even blacker. In contrast, Lomagno’s skin, even after the violent exercise, continued pale, as if his powerful muscles were made of marble.

  “Ask the owner of the gym how much he wants for it. I’m going to buy it for you.”

  “It won’t do any good to buy it. Know how many students I had? Two.”

  “How many would you like to have?”

  “At least twenty.”

  “You’ve got the twenty.”

  “I do?”

  “I’ll be your twenty students.”

  Chicão bought the gymnasium, with money lent by Lomagno. They made an agreement: Chicão would have no other students. Twice a week, Lomagno would leave his office in the afternoon, without telling anyone where he was going, to train at the gym, now deserted and closed, on Rua Barão Itapagibe, in Rio Comprido.

  NOW, IN THE BUS, Chicão was thinking of the phone call from Lomagno and making his plans for that night. What Lomagno had asked of him was a piece of cake; anybody could do it with one hand tied behind his back.

  He let the bus pass Rua Almirante Tamandaré and got out at Rua Tucumã. He walked past the seat where Salete was sitting, without looking at her; immersed in her concerns, she in turn failed to notice him.

  He went up Tucumã to Rua Senador Vergueiro, from which he continued to Machado Square. He knew no one was following him, but he acted as if that might happen. From Machado Square he went to Almirante Tamandaré.

  His friend Zuleika was at home. He asked her to store the package.

  “What’s in it?”

  Chicão opened the package.

  “What you want those weapons for?”

  “I like looking at them. I think everybody who was in a war ends up liking guns.”

  “I get the creeps just looking at them. Wrap them up again.”

  Chicão asked Zuleika if he could borrow her car that night.

  “What you gonna do with the car? Some woman?”

  “You’re my woman,” said Chicão, picking up his friend and carrying her to the bed.

  “What’s that mark on your chest? It looks like a bite.”

  “It is a bite. I was fighting, in a clinch, and the other guy bit me.”

  “Weird . . .”

  In bed, Zuleika forgot about the bite. Chicão could stray once in a while as long as he was in love with her as he was that day.

  Chicão went out to do some shopping, and when he returned, with a small suitcase, it was already night.

  “What do you have in there?” asked Zuleika, who was a curious woman.

  “They’re barbells,” said Chicão, sticking his hand in the suitcase and taking out two ten-pound weights.

  Zuleika took one of the weights in both hands. “What a heavy thing. What are they for?”

  Chicão picked up a barbell in each hand and began to open and close his extended arms, exhibiting his strength. Then he grabbed both weights in one hand and easily raised them over his head.

  “Don’t you think there’s better ways of working off energy?”

  “Aren’t you the little devil, eh, Zuleika?”

  Chicão placed the barbells back in the suitcase, carefully closing it. He didn’t feel like fucking again, but he nee
ded the car, and when Zuleika took off her clothes the desire came.

  AT ALMOST ELEVEN P.M., Marshal Mascarenhas de Morais, chairman of the armed forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, received a telephone call from a member of the general staff, Brigadier Neto dos Reis, asking permission to come to his house accompanied by Deputy Amaral Peixoto and General Juarez Távora, superintendent of the Superior War College and a member of the Joint Chiefs, to discuss a matter of the utmost importance, relating to the political crisis the country was experiencing. Marshal Mascarenhas agreed to the request. He then phoned General Humberto Castello Branco, also a member of the general staff, who had been part of the general staff in Italy, relating the call he had received and asking that he, Castello Branco, come to the house to witness the meeting Brigadier Neto dos Reis had requested.

  Upon returning from Italy in July 1945, where he had commanded the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, Mascarenhas had suffered various setbacks. On October 29 of that year, his friend Vargas was deposed; General Gaspar Dutra, who had been Vargas’s secretary of war and with whom Mascarenhas did not have a good relationship, was elected president in the elections of December 3 and took office on January 31, 1946. On top of that, Góes Monteiro, his enemy, was appointed secretary of war. No command was offered him, which obliged him to retire. Thus, on August 27, 1946, his transfer to the reserves was published in the Diário Oficial.

  After seven years in the reserves, the marshal had been appointed by Vargas as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that capacity he conferred weekly with the president, as well as presiding at the meetings of the JCS.

  At the meeting requested by Neto dos Reis, the marshal was told that Vargas was said to be thinking of handing over the reins of government to General Zenóbio, according to information leaked from the palace.

  The one who answered the deputy and the generals there to sound out the marshal was General Castello Branco, a short man who, like his superior Mascarenhas, seemed to lack the minimum height demanded by military regulations to serve in the army. Castello Branco said, and none of his interlocutors had the courage to disagree, that if the president resigned, it would not be a general who should assume the office but the legal replacement, the vice president.