by Frei Betto
Cândido was lost for words. Lassale had just admitted that he didn’t believe in his own editorial project.
“The Song of Songs,” said Cândido, defending himself, “speaks of this unity and is an erotic text found in the Bible. It’s considered the word of God by the faithful.”
Lassale fixed his eyes on Cândido; he needed time to process what he’d just heard. But he wasn’t ready to let up yet. He returned to more pragmatic terrain.
“What did you do to the parables I gave you?”
“As you’ll have seen, I edited and improved them.”
“You edited them?! I’m the senior editor here. Anyway, you didn’t just rephrase them – you changed them!”
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing?” Cândido protested. “Didn’t you say that for the spiritual parts I should employ my own knowledge?”
“Sim. But what you’ve done is change their meaning! Have you any idea how much I paid for them?”
“Paid?” Cândido said, surprised. “What do you mean, paid?”
“Two or three self-help manuscripts land on my desk every week. As a rule, they’re badly written regurgitations of old ideas, mere transliterations of ancient Oriental parables. But in among the froth, I find the odd hidden gem. I’m not prepared to publish the whole book, but I buy the story from the author. That’s what I passed on to you.”
“Sim, and I read them all carefully,” Cândido replied. “Then made them appropriate to the content of the instalment.”
“They were great parables,” Lassale exclaimed. “How dare you adulterate them!”
Lassale was starting to stutter. Cândido decided to let the man blow off some steam instead of arguing back.
“You changed the stories!” the publisher complained once more. “Take the parable of the miser.”
Lassale dug it out from among the papers on his desk. He held the sheet of paper in his hand and sat back, resting his elbows on the arms of his chair.
“It’s a great story, full of wisdom! And you had the nerve to alter it!”
The parable told the story of a man who stored gold bars in his house. A great famine befell the region and when his supply of food ran out he died, desperately trying to eat the gold.
“Ora, Lassale,” objected Cândido, “how can a story like that mean anything to our readers? For a start, the misers of today don’t keep their money at home. That’s what banks, safes and tax havens are for.”
RECIPE FOR SUCCESS
“I think it’s important that the first instalment includes this New Age thing,” said the publisher.
Cândido leaned back and scratched his head.
“I’m not very good on the latest fads, Lassale. The way I see it, a new age is a new phase in our lives. I, for example, seem to be entering one now.”
Lassale offered him a complicit smile.
“Falling in love?”
“Não sei. For now, it’s probably just wishful thinking on my part,” Cândido said. Not prepared to open up any further, he returned to the main argument. “I don’t know about New Age. The Good News, on the other hand, has existed for at least two thousand years – it’s there for all to see.”
“Perhaps New Age is too broad a spectrum,” admitted the publisher. “Why not just focus on the area of medicine, given that so many people are paranoid about their health these days.”
“Paranoid about their bodies, you mean,” corrected Cândido. “Getting old is seen as having something seriously wrong with you, as if it were an illness.”
“My thinking,” Lassale went on, “is that we ought at least to mention alternative medicines, something that touches on herbs and physical exercise, diets and transcendental meditation, controlled breathing and spiritual well-being.”
Cândido moved about nervously in his chair.
“Lassale, remember the domestic maid you were just talking about?”
The publisher furrowed his brow, squinted his eyes.
“Bem,” Cândido continued, “how’s she supposed to improve her spiritual well-being on her pittance of a salary? Expect her to watch her diet and breathing when she eats in a matter of seconds, anxious to get on with doing the dishes from lunch? Is she to exercise after she’s worked all day and spent hours stuck in traffic to get home? Will she have the time and resources to learn transcendental meditation? Can someone who lives in a room too small for physical or psychological intimacy expect a healthy sex life? Ora, I prefer the Sermon on the Mount: it’s not so elitist.”
7Crossfires
He took the bag from the man sitting at the bar and left, vigilant of everything around him. The man tipped his head back and sank the rest of his chope. Beatriz ducked behind a lamp post, fearing she might be seen.
She knew the ruse: the bag contained a takeaway lunch, but the gear was hidden under the feijão, rice and eggs. She took a bottle of nail polish out of her pocket, unscrewed the cap, held it up to her nose and inhaled deeply. She grew inside herself, her head expanded and a brief dizziness made way for courage. She’d sniffed shoe glue for kicks all her life. Nail polish was for work.
She followed the boy, her sweaty hands tucked into the pockets of her green jacket, her whole being ready to explode with tears of fury. She’d see this battle through to its conclusion. She had a score to settle, a monkey to get off her back. Graças a Deus, I’m still alive, she thought. But I should be dead.
He looked back behind him, first over his right shoulder, then over his left. He was jumpy, but he didn’t notice he was being followed.
He’s probably drunk, she thought. He usually was by that time of day.
The boy slowed his pace as he came on to Rua São João Batista. He held the packed lunch close to his body when he saw a police car pass. He paused at the kerb, checked for traffic in both directions, then crossed. Half a dozen people were queuing outside Santa Rosa cinema. He joined the back of the line.
She hurried, so as not to lose sight of him, causing a bus to sound its horn as she ran across the road. Her heart was racing. She stopped at a news stand opposite the cinema and feigned interest in a magazine on sertanejo music. The boy reached the front of the queue and went through the turnstile. She ran over, waited for a couple to pay, then bought a ticket for herself and went in. He’d vanished.
She stood still at the curtain by the door, letting her eyes become accustomed to the light given off by Kevin Costner and the Sioux Indians up on the screen. She’d recognize the boy half blindfolded. She just had to be patient. She knew he was there to pass the gear on to someone else and she knew the drill: the addict never stayed until the end of the film; he paid, picked up, pushed off, desperate to sample the merchandise. She had to keep an eye out for anyone who got up during the film, then look at who was sitting next to the empty chair.
The cinema exploded to the sound of a herd of buffalo running across the screen. Distracted, she almost missed the silhouette as it passed in front of her. He must have been in the toilet. The boy now hovered around the back aisle, craning his neck in search of a particular place or person.
It was now or never. She pulled the gun out of her waistband, held it firm with two hands and screamed:
“Soslaio!”
Rifle fire and stampeding buffalo smothered the cry of her voice, but the boy heard and turned. She fired her first shot. He threw himself to the floor between the guard rail and the last row of seats. She fired again and hit him in the head. The audience didn’t know what was going on. It took them a few moments to realize that real shots had mixed in with the ones from the screen, by which time Beatriz had reached the emergency exit and was able to mingle in with the panicked rush to get out of the auditorium.
From the steps of the Primeira Igreja de Batista de São João de Meriti, Beatriz watched as police cars and ambulances surrounded the cinema. She took the bottle of nail polish out of her pocket and painted her nails.
DEPARTURE
Bramante went into the house and closed the do
or behind him. He took off his shoes and made for the stairs, guessing at shapes in the shadows. He climbed, careful steps combined with false ones, and headed for the bedroom. His head was saturated with alcohol, as if his brain was floating in an aquarium. He was surprised to see a thread of light under Paloma’s door. He looked at the hall clock: 2.30 a.m. He made for his bedroom, undressed, went to the bathroom and hauled himself under the shower. He didn’t want Paloma seeing him like this. She usually went to bed early. Never before had there been any sign of her being awake when he’d got home in the middle of the night.
He brushed his teeth, wrapped himself in a damp towel and gently knocked on his wife’s bedroom door.
“Paloma, you OK?”
The door opened. She was dressed in blue dungarees and a pink shirt and was wearing make-up. He noticed a couple of suitcases open on the bed.
“What’s all this?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
Paloma went back to packing the suitcases. She answered without looking at him. “I’m leaving, Roberval. I’m catching a seven-o’clock plane.”
“Leaving? What do you mean?”
His voice came out husky and bedraggled. Inebriated and naked, he felt fragile in front of this determined woman.
“I’ve met someone else,” Paloma said.
“What?” Bramante exclaimed. “Are you telling me, at this outrageous hour of the morning, that our marriage is over?”
Paloma placed blouses and dresses neatly in the case.
“Do you really need me to tell you that our marriage has been over for a long time?” she said. “If you’d come home last night, you’d have found me ready to talk. So let’s avoid scenes and hypocrisy. If your macho pride is wounded, it’ll soon heal. My life’s with Mário now. We’re off to Paris first thing in the morning, on our honeymoon.”
Bramante slumped down in a chair. The drink inside him was having a stupefying effect. He would have liked it all to be a bad dream. He stretched out a hand and grabbed a bottle of mineral water from the dresser.
“You’re never coming back?” he asked, his voice barely audible.
He felt depressed for the first time since he and Paloma had drifted apart. A sense of bitterness filled his chest. His eyes glistened with tears.
“I’ll be back in two weeks,” Paloma said. “Sim, I’ll come back here; there are lots of things we need to sort out together, the house, the car… But não, I won’t be coming back here to live.”
“Paloma, don’t you think —”
She interrupted him.
“Sorry, Roberval, but now is not the time. I’m in a hurry and you’re in no fit state.”
Bramante dabbed his eyes with the tip of the towel, inadvertently revealing his flabby body. His hair hung loose down to his neck, making him look younger than he really was.
“Who’s Mário?”
“A colleague, a Lacanian psychoanalyst. We’ve been lovers for several months.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“The same reason you never mention the women you get your leg over with before coming home at dawn.”
Bramante started to feel cold. His hands shook and sweated at the same time.
“Do you love him?”
“Very much,” said Paloma, turning to face her husband for the first time.
“I’ll miss you,” he said.
Paloma didn’t react. She went on arranging clothes in the two suitcases. She was torn between remembering the good times she’d had with Bramante and thinking about what she now felt for Mário. Professional interests had brought her and Mário together in what had seemed like friendship, albeit a very agreeable friendship that had been sucked on like a never-ending sweet. But at a party a few months previously that friendship had expressed itself as an attraction, an attraction that began by showing them that their bodies, though middle-aged, were very much alive, and that their emotions were just waiting to be revitalized. After that, love blossomed like a well-tended plant. There was no mad passion, ecstasy, demands or promises. Just tender gestures, small daily displays of attention, phone calls… the harmonious notes of a symphony in which every instrument played its precise part.
When Paloma called Mário to say she was ready, Bramante was fast asleep, snoring, curled up in his wet towel. She kissed him on the forehead before leaving, like a mother saying farewell to an errant child.
NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK
When Cândido ordered yet another caipirinha, Mônica couldn’t contain herself.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough? Let’s pay the bill and get going.”
Every day for a month, they’d gone looking for Beatriz together after work. They’d searched Central do Brasil railway station, Praça XV, around the Igreja da Candelária, Passeio Público, Largo do Machado and from Praça General Osório to the end of Leblon. Now they were covering Copacabana, from Forte to Leme.
“You know, Mônica, I feel like such an idiot,” Cândido said, once they were back outside on the pavement. “Lassale is demanding another draft of the texts, but all I can think of is finding Bia. I might go out to Itaguaí.”
Mônica stopped and stared at him.
“What for?”
“Bia was raised there,” he told her, “in a nun’s orphanage.”
Mônica set off walking again, her eyes glued to the ground.
“If you ask me, you’d be wasting your time,” she said. “Bia wouldn’t be so stupid as to go to the one place the police know to look.”
INTERLUDE
“Why not open up, man? Admit it: Bia is just a pretext for you to spend time with this woman!”
“OK, Odid. I’ll have another drink in a minute and then get everything out in the open. I’ll tell it to her straight: for some time now, I’ve been a man with a one-track mind, a man in love with a beautiful woman, a beautiful woman who tells me I’ve had enough to drink in that wonderful crisp voice of hers, a beautiful woman who fills my heart so much it’s no longer me living, but her living inside me.”
“That’s deep, man.”
RAGS
“Mônica, there’s something I need to get off my chest. But before I tell you, let me have a nightcap in that bar over there.”
She looked at him tenderly. The girl’s disappearance had unsettled him. He was afraid Beatriz would fall into the hands of the heavies out to avenge the reformatory breakout and Coronel Troncoso’s death.
“Tudo bem, Cândido, but let’s have the nightcap at my place. It’s right around the corner and it’s easier to talk there.”
They walked on to Lido, scanning the faces of the gangs of kids scattered about the Copacabana pavements: scruffy boys and girls with dirty feet stuffed in flip-flops, busy in violent play, children whose covetous eyes honed in on tourists’ handbags and cameras, whose aggressive smiles begged for money from cars at traffic lights and people drinking under awnings outside terrace cafés. The kids all had the same profile – runny noses, burning eyes, soiled skin, sticking-out bones and malnourished bodies that hid their ages – as if they were all exactly the same.
SHOWER
By the time they got to Mônica’s apartment, Cândido’s shirt was drenched in sweat. The stench of his skin embarrassed him. Mônica showed him into the living room, then disappeared to the kitchen to get some water.
Cândido remained standing for fear of getting the furniture dirty. He looked around the room, taking in the details: a herd of trinket elephants, all with their backs turned to the door, a lush fern spilling out from the window sill, several paintings on the walls.
Mônica came in with two glasses and a bottle of cold water on a tray.
“Sit down, make yourself comfortable,” she said.
She bent over to put the tray on the coffee table and Cândido got a glimpse of her breasts. Two ripe fruits. She passed him a glass of water and he gulped it down.
“Mind if I use the bathroom?” he asked, shyness betraying his nerves.
“Out into the
corridor, first door on the left,” Mônica said, pointing. “Why don’t you have a quick shower while I make us a drink?”
For a moment he didn’t know how to react. What he’d heard sounded like an invitation to feel less like a guest and more like an intimate friend.
“Or would you prefer a hot coffee after a shower?”
“A coffee would do me some good,” he said, watching her open a cupboard in the hall and reach for a towel. She reminded him of Osíris as she stretched. Arms above her head, hands splayed, fingers clawing, she stood on the tips of her toes, her chest pressed flat against the shelves and her back arching in a sensual curve. This feline Mônica stoked his fantasies.
He had never seen a bathroom like it: the walls were lined with Portuguese tiles, watercolours of vintage brands of French perfume hung by the door and glass bottles of cosmetics and talc filled the shelves; there were plants everywhere and the whole place smelled of fresh lavender. Cândido felt overwhelmingly comforted, as if the cleanliness had taken him in its arms and washed away his insecurities.
He undressed with tremendous care, not wanting a single drop of sweat to fall on the ceramic floor. There was nowhere to hang his clothes. He thought about putting some of the bottles on the floor and clearing a space by the sink, but decided instead to fold up his trousers so small they’d fit on the toilet seat and to hang his pants and shirt on the door handle.
He heard Mônica call to him.
“I’ll leave you a clean T-shirt outside the door,” she said.
“Ah, OK, obrigado.”
He got into the shower cubicle and was momentarily fazed by all the taps. He tried one. A squirt of water sprayed against his legs. He turned another. A cold gush came down onto his head. He twisted the next knob along and managed to moderate the flow until he was finally able to give his body over to the shower. He soaped his hair and face, threw his head back and opened his mouth underneath the jet as the water rinsed away the foam. He scrubbed soap into his neck and shoulders, under his armpits and down his arms, across his chest and navel, and around his sides as far as his hands could reach. When he was soaping his penis and buttocks, he got excited imagining that Mônica might suddenly come in, naked, asking if he wouldn’t mind if they bathed together.