I made six copies and sent them to six publishers. Only one answered, asking if I couldn’t cut the parts of the book that spoke of the life of Machado de Assis, claiming they were unnecessary and the cuts wouldn’t harm the book, that six hundred pages was a lot, that publishing houses in general were going through a difficult period because of the financial crisis, etc. The guys just didn’t want to invest in a brick by some unknown author. Pretexts, that’s something I understand.
I paid for a private edition. Wasn’t that what all those boring prolix writers did? Nobody reads a six-hundred-page book, but its size is impressive. I didn’t spare costs. I paid an expert to write the jacket flaps, my photo for the book was done by the best professional available, the cover was created by the best artist in the field. I ordered only a thousand copies printed and told the publisher to distribute five hundred. I thought, when I received the first copy with my name on the colorful cover, this piece of shit is worth as much as my tooth implants. Seeing things the way they are, that’s something I understand.
For a month, nothing happened. But then the critic for a weekly magazine discovered me, said I was the greatest literary newcomer in recent years, and the five hundred copies sitting on the back shelves in bookstores sold out in a day. The publisher brought out a new printing of ten thousand copies, and another, then another. I was famous, overnight. I gave interviews to all the papers. I gave interviews on television. People asked for my autograph. My book was discussed at dinners. Who was the dummy now? Revenge, that’s something I understand.
Tomás Antônio: I’m going to go on calling you that. I need to talk to you, personally. Set a time and place. Ghostwriter.
Did that surprise me? No. I was prepared for something of the kind. I had predicted that the wretched poor devil, semi-tubercular and suffering from the blunder he’d committed by selling me a book that everyone considered a masterpiece, would look me up to settle accounts.
Ghostwriter: Meet me in Nossa Senhora da Paz square, Thursday at five o’clock. You’ve seen my picture in the papers. I’ll be sitting on one of the benches, waiting. Tomás Antônio.
That day, twenty minutes before the appointed time, I got to the square and sat on a bench near the entrance. From where I sat I had a perfect view of everyone who arrived. A guy came in carrying a newspaper, a couple came in, then a beggar, another guy in a beret, a nanny with a child, another nanny, another beggar. Time was passing and none of the people arriving came in my direction.
“Good afternoon.”
The woman had appeared suddenly and stood there beside the bench, extending her hand.
“Good afternoon,” I replied, shaking her hand.
“May I sit down?”
“Of course. I didn’t see you come into the square.”
“I was already here when you arrived. Sitting on that bench over there.”
“Stupid of me not to think of it, that you might show up early. Are you Ghostwriter?”
“Yes.”
“M. J. Ramos?”
“Maria José.”
She spoke shyly, seemingly constrained.
“Sit down. Can you prove it?”
“That’s easy. I have the whole book in my head. I’m going to tell you how I wrote it.”
Cutting what she said, fifteen minutes later I said, “That’s enough, I believe you. What is it you want?”
She fell silent. She must have been about thirty, delicate legs and brown eyes. She was wearing a skirt and blouse, unfashionable shoes with low heels and was carrying a small plastic purse. Her teeth were yellow from smoke.
“I feel—”
“Nonsense. You can speak.”
“I need an operation.”
“You or your mother?”
“Me.”
“How much?”
“Well, there’s the doctor, the hospitalization … I don’t have any health insurance …”
“What type of operation?”
“I’d rather not say. But I’ve already scheduled the operation. I knew I could count on you.”
A con job, that’s something I understand.
“Okay, I have a proposal for you. I’ll give you some dough today for your urgent expenses. I’ll deposit in a bank account of your choosing all the money the book has brought in so far and will bring in later, for the rest of my life. Give me the number of your account.”
“You know it; you’ve already made deposits to it. I shouldn’t ask for anything else. A deal’s a deal.”
“Don’t worry about it. You deserve much more.”
I signed a check and gave it to her. “This is just the first payment.”
“I don’t need this much,” she said, putting the check in her purse. “And I don’t want anything more.”
“With what’s left, buy yourself some clothes. Would you like a lift? Where do you live?”
“It’s out of your way. Jacarepaguá.”
“I’ll take you.”
It was getting dark when we got the car. We took Avenida Niemeyer. When I was a nobody, I used to dream about having a car to drive around the Barra. Now that I lived in the Barra, driving on that avenue was a nuisance. She sat mutely beside me. What could be going through her head? That I was street smart and had tumbled to her story about an operation, but that the scam she had pulled on me wasn’t enough to repair the error she had committed by selling me the book? Or maybe that I was a generous guy who had put an end to her difficulties? Or—?
“How many commissioned books have you written?”
“This was the first. I mean, I’ve always written since I was a girl, but I tore them up.”
“The first? We could write another. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to do it anymore.”
“Regrets?”
“Something like that.”
The houses were becoming less frequent, and we drove along a dark deserted highway. I pondered about a way to solve my perplexity once and for all. In case of doubt, don’t hesitate. That’s how you make money. I could grab her by the neck, strangle her and dump her body by the beach. But that wasn’t how I did business. Buying and selling, that’s something I understand.
“Look,” I said, “I can’t let you go without settling our matter.”
“I thought we’d already done that.”
In the dark Maria José wasn’t so plain. For some moments I imagined what she would look like in Gisela’s clothes. There are those who say that to be elegant a woman has to have slim legs.
“We won’t settle the matter just yet. I’m going to tell you how the story can have a happy ending.”
I spoke for half an hour. She listened in silence.
“Well?” I asked.
“I never could have expected that you—that someone would propose that to me … I never—When I was a girl, boys didn’t look at me, later, men didn’t look at me … You just met me today, how is it that—”
“Symbiosis,” I said.
She lit a cigarette, and examined my eyes by the light from the match.
“I know you’ll be patient and delicate with me. Symbiosis,” she said.
“Then we agree. One question: were you really going to have an operation? A man and a woman have to trust one another.”
I heard her answer, and the answer wasn’t very important.
It’s complicated having two mistresses. Logistical problems. Not forgetting the woman you married, she has to enter into the things you do with the others, and those things are many: there’s the distribution of endearments and laughter, you can’t do without that, and then there’s the buying of jewels, which is easy, it’s enough for a jewel to be very expensive for it to be appreciated, and there’s the buying of clothes, which is very complicated—some like to show their legs, others like to show their breasts—and there are visits to friends, which is even more convoluted; certain friends can’t meet certain other friends, and then there are trips, it always happens that all three like the same
city that you hate, and the premiere on Friday of the musical all of them want to go to, and there’s the confidential and embarrassing visit to the gynecologist that you can’t get out of, and there’s the painter and the carpenter and the electrician, women love remodeling, and there’s the decorator and the relatives, I shudder just thinking of the relatives, and even if you manage to set up all these things in perfect order, like a tile roof or the scales of a fish, so as to let the water flow without making puddles or getting swept into the whirlpool, you’re going to have to program your life the way a general plans a war.
I came to an agreement with Gisela; I don’t like to see anyone suffer.
Maria José stopped smoking and her teeth are no longer so yellow.
The new book is almost completely written. It’s going to be even better than the first.
Success, that’s something I understand.
the hunchback and botticelli’s venus
FLUTTERING LOCKS OF REDDISH HAIR whipped by the wind and rain, smooth and radiant skin, she is Botticelli’s Venus walking down the street. (The one in the Uffizi, born from a seashell, not the one in the Staatliche Museen, with a black background, which is similar but has dry hair arranged around the head, descending evenly down the body.)
Don’t think that I boast any extraordinary perspicacity, but the fact is that if the woman I observe is as motionless as a statue, I can still tell the rhythm of her steps when she moves. I understand not only muscles, but also skeletons and, according to the symmetry of the bone structure, can predict the articulation of the ankles, knees, and ilium, which determine the rhythm of the body’s movement.
Venus walks unbothered by the rain, sometimes turning her head toward the sky to wet her face even more, and I can say without the slightest poetic stuffiness that it’s the walk of a goddess.
I have to create an elaborate strategy to get close to her and achieve what I need, a difficult task, as women, at first contact, feel repulsion towards me.
I follow her to where she lives. I watch the building for several days. Venus likes to walk in the streets and to sit in the square near her home, reading. But she stops all the time, looks at people, especially children, or else feeds the pigeons, which in a way disappoints me; pigeons, like rats, roaches, ants and termites, don’t need any help. They’ll be around after bacteria finally put an end to us.
Looking at her from a distance, I am more and more impressed by the harmony of her body, the perfect balance among the parts that make up her wholeness—the extension of the members in relation to the vertical dimension of the thorax; the length of her neck in relation to the face and head; the narrowness of her waist in combination with the firmness of the buttocks and chest. I need to approach this woman as soon as possible. I’m racing against time.
On a day with heavy rain, I sit beside her under the downpour, on a bench in the square. I have to find out right away if she likes to talk.
“Too bad the rain doesn’t allow reading today,” I say.
She doesn’t answer.
“That’s why you didn’t bring a book.”
She pretends not to hear.
I insist: “He makes the sun shine on the good and the bad, and sends the rain on the just and the unjust.”
The woman then stares at me quickly, but I keep my gaze on her forehead.
“Are you talking to me?”
“God makes it rain on the just and the—” (My eyes on her forehead.)
“Ah, you were speaking of God.”
She gets up. Standing, she knows she’s in a favorable position to thwart the advances of an intruder.
“Don’t take it wrong. I saw that you must be one of those evangelicals looking to save souls for Jesus, but don’t waste your time; I’m a lost cause.”
I follow her as she walks slowly away.
“I’m not a Protestant pastor. In fact, I doubt you can guess what I do.”
“I’m very good at that. But I don’t have time today; I have to get to an art exhibit.”
Her voice displays less displeasure. She possesses the virtue of curiosity, which is very good for me. And another essential quality as well: she likes to talk. That’s even better.
I offer to accompany her and, after a slight hesitation, she agrees. We walk, with her a short distance away from me as if we weren’t together. I try to be as inconspicuous as possible.
At the exhibit there is a single attendant, sitting at a table, filing her nails. Negrinha, my current lover, says that women who file their nails in public have trouble thinking, and filing their nails helps them reflect better, like those women who reason more clearly while removing blackheads from their nose in front of the mirror.
While I look at the paintings with studied indifference, I say to her, “Avant-garde from the last century, spontaneous abstract vestiges, subconscious, sub-Kadinski; I prefer a Shakespearean sonnet.”
She doesn’t reply.
“I’m trying to impress you.”
“It wasn’t enough, but mentioning poetry helped a little. I’d like to understand poetry.”
Poetry isn’t to be understood; poetry is no pharmaceutical instruction sheet. I’m not going to tell her that, not for the time being.
“How about getting an espresso?” she asks.
I look for a place where we can sit. Being taller than I, Venus makes my hump look larger when we’re standing side by side.
“Now I’m going to find out what you do,” she says, appearing to be amused by the situation. “You do something, don’t you? Don’t tell me, let me guess. Well, we already know you’re not a Protestant pastor, and you’re not a teacher; teachers have dirty fingernails. Lawyers wear ties. Not a stock broker, obviously not. Maybe a systems analyst, that hunched-over position in front of the computer … Uh … Sorry.”
If I had looked in her eyes, what would I have seen when she referred to the spinal column of a guy bent over in front of the computer? Horror, pity, scorn? Now do you understand why I avoid, in the initial contacts, reading their eyes? True, I might have seen only curiosity, but I prefer not to risk glimpsing something that could undermine my audacity.
“And you, do you know what I do?”
“Clean nails without polish. You like to read on a park bench. You like getting wet in the rain. You have one foot larger than the other. You want to understand about poetry. You’re lazy. Disturbing signs.”
“Does it show?”
“You could be a photographer’s model.”
“Does it show?”
“Or an idle, frustrated housewife who goes to a fitness center where she does dance, stretching, bodybuilding, specific exercises to strengthen the gluteus. The, the—”
“The ass. Is that the word you’re looking for? What about the ass?”
“After the breasts, it’s the part of the body most exposed to danger,” I add.
I’m a bit surprised at her naturalness in using that vulgar word in a conversation with someone she doesn’t know, despite the fact that I know from long experience that no one employs euphemisms with hunchbacks. Or other niceties: it’s common for people to belch and fart absentmindedly in my presence.
“Does it show?” she repeats.
“Or else it’s none of that, and you have a bookbinding workshop in your house.”
“You didn’t answer. Does it show?”
“What?”
“That I have one foot larger than the other?”
“Show me the palm of your hand. I see you’re planning a trip. There’s a person that has you concerned.”
“Right again. What’s the trick?”
“Everyone has one foot larger than the other, is planning a trip, has somebody who makes life difficult for them.”
“It’s my right foot.”
She extends her leg, shows her foot. She’s wearing a flat leather shoe styled like a sneaker.
“But, anyway, what’s my profession?”
“Bookbinding. A woman who works with books has spec
ial charm.”
“There you’re wrong. I don’t do anything. But you got one part right. I’m lazy. Is that one of my disturbing signs?”
“It’s the main one,” I reply. “A famous poet felt laziness to be a delicious state, a sensation that relegated poetry, ambition, and love to a secondary plane. The other unique sign is enjoying reading on a park bench. And finally, liking to get wet in the rain.”
I don’t tell her that lazy people suffer from the instinctive impulse to achieve something but don’t know what. The fact of Venus being lazy was, to me, great luck. All the women I’ve seduced were lazy, dreaming of doing or learning something. But, especially, they enjoyed talking—speaking and listening—which in reality was what was most important. I’ll get back to that.
“You’re a professor of some kind; your clean fingernails threw me off.”
“You can call me professor.”
“All right, professor. And what about you? What’re you going to call me? Lazy girl?”
“I already have a name for you. Venus.”
“Venus? Horrible.”
“Your Venus is the one by Botticelli.”
“The painting? I can’t remember what it’s like anymore.”
“Just take a look in the mirror.”
“Silly flattery. Why is liking to get wet in the rain a disturbing sign?”
“That’s something I’m not going to tell you today.”
“Here’s the book. I couldn’t read it in the rain,” she says, taking a book from the pocket of her raincoat. “Ciao.”
It was only then that I saw her blue eyes: neutral. She had already become accustomed to my appearance and, perhaps, managed to see that my face wasn’t as ugly as my body.
Winning the Game and Other Stories Page 2