Winning the Game and Other Stories

by Rubem Fonseca

  The end of the month was approaching, and Anísio, more and more irritated, argued frequently with his companions. That day he was more exasperated and nervous than ever, and his friends, ill at ease, were looking forward to when the card game would end.

  “Who’s for an even-money bet with me?” Anísio asked.

  “What kind of even-money bet?” asked Marinho, who had won more frequently than any of them.

  “I’ll bet that this month the squad kills a young girl and a businessman. Two hundred thousand bills.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Gonçalves, thinking of his money and of the fact that the squad never killed girls and businessmen.

  “Two hundred thousand,” Anísio repeated in a bitter tone, “and you, Gonçalves, don’t call other people crazy, you’re the one who’s crazy for leaving your homeland to come to this shithole of a country.”

  “You’re on,” said Marinho. “You don’t have a prayer of winning; it’s almost the end of the month.”

  Around eleven o’clock the players ended the game and quickly said goodnight.

  The waiters left and Anísio was alone in the bar. On other nights he would rush home to be with his young wife. But that night he sat drinking beer until shortly after one a.m., when there was a knock at the rear door.

  The False Perpétuo came in and sat down at Anísio’s table.

  “Want a beer?” Anísio asked, avoiding either the polite or familiar form of address with the False Perpétuo, uncertain of the degree of respect he should show.

  “No. What’s this about?” The False Perpétuo spoke quietly, in a soft voice, apathetic, indifferent.

  Anísio told him about the bets he and his friends made every month in the game of Dead Men. The visitor listened in silence, erect in his chair, his hands resting on his legs; at times it seemed to Anísio that the False Perpétuo ran the edge of his jacket through his fingers the way the true one did, but he must have been mistaken.

  Anísio began to regret the man’s gentleness; maybe he was nothing more than a bureaucratic functionary. God, Anísio thought, 200,000 down the drain; he’d have to sell the lunch counter in Caxias. Unexpectedly he thought about his young wife, her round, tepid body.

  “The squad has to kill a young girl and a businessman this month for me to get out of the hole,” Anísio said.

  “And what does that have to do with me?” Smoothly.

  Anísio summoned up his courage. He had drunk a lot of beer; he was on the verge of ruin and felt awful, as if he couldn’t breathe properly. “I think you belong to the death squad.”

  The False Perpétuo remained inscrutable.

  “What’s the deal?”

  “Ten thousand if you kill a young girl and a businessman. You or your colleagues, it’s all the same to me.”

  Anísio sighed unhappily. Now that he saw his plan close to realization, his body was overcome by a feeling of weakness.

  “You got the money here? I can do the job right now.”

  “It’s at home.”

  “Where do I start?”

  “Both at once.”

  “Anybody special?”

  “Gonçalves, the owner of the grocery, and his daughter.”

  “That Portuguese friend of yours?”

  “He’s not my friend.” Another sigh.

  “How old’s his daughter?”

  “Twelve.” The image of the girl having a soft drink in his bar flashed through his head, like a twinge of pain.

  “All right,” said the False Perpétuo, “show me his house.” That was when Anísio noticed that above his waist he also wore a wide cartridge belt.

  They got into the False Perpétuo’s car and headed for Gonçalves’s house. At that hour the city was deserted. They stopped fifty yards from the house. The False Perpétuo took two pieces of paper from the glove compartment and drew two crude death’s-heads with the initials D.S. below.

  “It’ll be quick,” the False Perpétuo said, getting out of the car.

  Anísio put his hands over his ears, closed his eyes, and curled up on the seat until his face touched the plastic seat cover, which gave off an unpleasant odor that reminded him of his childhood. There was a buzzing in his ears. A long time went by, until he heard three shots.

  The False Perpétuo returned and got into the car.

  “Let’s get my money. I took care of them both. I threw in the old woman for free.”

  They stopped at the door to Anísio’s house. He went in. His wife was in bed, her naked back facing the bedroom door. She usually slept on her side, and the view of her body seen from behind was prettier. Anísio got the money and left.

  “You know, I don’t know your name,” Anísio said in the car, while the False Perpétuo counted the money.

  “It’s better that way.”

  “I gave you a nickname.”

  “What?”

  “The False Perpétuo.” Anísio tried to laugh, but his heart was heavy and sad.

  Could it have been an illusion? The other man’s expression had suddenly become alert and he was delicately fingering the edge of his jacket. The two looked at each other in the half shadow of the car. As he realized what was about to happen, Anísio felt a kind of relief.

  The False Perpétuo took an enormous weapon from his waist, pointed it at Anísio’s chest, and fired. Anísio heard the roar and then an immense silence. Forgive me, he tried to say, tasting the blood in his mouth and attempting to remember a prayer, while at his side the bony face of Christ, illuminated by the streetlight, faded rapidly.

  the blotter

  1.

  Detective Miro brought the woman to see me.

  “It was her husband,” Miro said, uninterested. In that precinct in the outskirts, husband-and-wife squabbles were common.

  Two of her front teeth were broken, her lips injured, her face swollen. Marks on the arms and neck.

  “Did your husband do this?” I asked.

  “He didn’t mean to, sir, I don’t want to file a complaint.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “At the time I was angry, but not now. Can I go?”

  “No.”

  Miro sighed. “Let the woman leave,” he said between his teeth.

  “You’ve suffered bodily harm; that’s a prosecutable crime independent of your lodging a complaint. I’m going to send you for questioning to see if a crime has been committed,” I said.

  “Ubiratan is high-strung but he’s not a bad person,” she said. “Please, don’t do anything to him.”

  They lived nearby. I decided to go have a talk with Ubiratan. Once, in Madureira, I had convinced a guy to stop beating his wife; two others, when I worked in the Jacarepaguá precinct, had also been persuaded to treat their wives decently.

  A tall, muscular man opened the door. He was in shorts, shirtless. In one corner of the room was a steel bar with heavy iron rings and two weights painted red. He must have been doing exercises when I arrived. His muscles were swollen and covered with a thick layer of sweat. He exuded the spiritual strength and pride that good health and a muscle-packed body give certain men.

  “I’m from the precinct,” I said.

  “Ah, so she did file a complaint, the stupid bitch,” Ubiratan grumbled. He went to the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, opened it, and started drinking.

  “Go tell her to come home right now or there’s gonna be trouble.”

  “I don’t think you understand why I’m here. I came to ask you to make a statement at the precinct.”

  Ubiratan threw the empty can out the window, grabbed the barbell and hoisted it overhead ten times, breathing noisily through his mouth as if he were a locomotive.

  “You think I’m afraid of the police?” he asked, looking admiringly and affectionately at the muscles in his chest and arms.

  “There’s no need to be afraid. You’re just going there to make a statement.”

  Ubiratan grabbed my arm and shook me.

  “Get the hell outta her
e, you lousy cop, you’re starting to get on my nerves.”

  I took my revolver from its holster. “I could arrest you for insulting an officer of the law, but I’m not going to do that. Don’t make things worse; come down to the precinct with me, you’ll be out of there in half an hour,” I said, calmly and politely.

  Ubiratan laughed. “How tall are you, midget?”

  “Five-eight. Let’s go.”

  “I’m going to take that piece of shit outta your hand and piss down the barrel, midget.” Ubiratan contracted every muscle in his body, like an animal making itself bigger to frighten the other, and extended his arm, his hand open to grab my gun. I shot him in the thigh. He looked at me, astonished.

  “Look what you did to my sartorius!” Ubiratan screamed, pointing to his own thigh, “you’re crazy, my sartorius!”

  “I’m very sorry,” I said, “now let’s go or I’ll shoot the other leg.”

  “Where you taking me, midget?”

  “First to the hospital, then to the precinct.”

  “This isn’t the last of it, midget, I got influential friends.”

  Blood was running down his leg, dripping onto the floor of the car.

  “You bastard, my sartorius!” His voice was more piercing than the siren that opened a path for us through the streets.

  2.

  A warm summer morning on São Clemente Street. A bus struck down a ten-year-old boy. The vehicle’s wheels ran over his head, leaving a trail of brain matter several yards long. Beside the body was a new bicycle, without a scratch on it.

  A traffic cop caught the driver at the scene. Two witnesses stated that the bus was moving at high speed. The site of the accident was carefully roped off.

  An old woman, poorly dressed, with a lit candle in her hand, wanted to cross the police line, “to save the little angel’s soul.” She was stopped. Along with the other bystanders, she contemplated the body from a distance. Separated, in the middle of the street, the corpse appeared even smaller.

  “Good thing it’s a holiday,” a cop said, diverting traffic, “can you imagine if it was a weekday?”

  Screaming, a woman broke through the barrier and picked the body up from the ground. I ordered her to put it down. I twisted her arm, but she seemed to feel no pain, moaning loudly, not yielding. The two cops and I struggled with her until we managed to pull the dead boy from her arms and place him on the ground where he should be, waiting for the coroner. Two cops dragged the woman away.

  “All these bus drivers are killers,” said the coroner, “good thing the scene is perfect, it means I can do a report that no shyster can shake.”

  I went to the squad car and sat in front for a few moments. My jacket was dirty with small remnants of the victim. I tried to clean myself with my hands. I called one of the uniforms and told him to get the prisoner.

  On the way to the station I looked at him. He was a thin man who appeared to be about sixty, and he looked weary, sick, and afraid. An old fear, sickness, and weariness, which didn’t come from just that day.

  3.

  I arrived at the two-story house on Cancela Street and the cop at the door said, “Top floor. He’s in the bathroom.”

  I climbed the stairs. In the living room a woman with reddened eyes looked at me in silence. Beside her was a thin boy, cringing a little, his mouth open, breathing labored.

  “The bathroom?” She pointed me toward a dark hallway. The house smelled of mold, as if the pipes were leaking inside the walls. From somewhere came the odor of fried onion and garlic.

  The door to the bathroom was ajar. The man was there.

  I returned to the living room. I had already asked the woman all the questions when Azevedo, the medical examiner, arrived.

  “In the bathroom,” I said.

  It was getting dark. I turned on the living room light. Azevedo asked for my help. We went into the bathroom.

  “Lift the body,” the M.E. said, “so I can undo the rope.”

  I held onto the dead man by the waist. A moan came from his mouth.

  “Trapped air,” said Azevedo, “funny isn’t it?” We laughed without pleasure. We placed the body on the wet floor. A frail man, unshaven, his face gray, he looked like a wax dummy.

  “Didn’t leave a note, nothing,” I said.

  “I know the type,” said Azevedo. “When they can’t take it any longer, they kill themselves fast; it has to be fast before they can change their minds.”

  Azevedo urinated into the toilet. Then he washed his hands in the basin and dried them on his shirttails.

  lonelyhearts

  I WAS WORKING FOR A POPULAR NEWSPAPER as a police reporter. It had been a long time since the city had seen an interesting crime involving a rich, young, and beautiful society woman, along with deaths, disappearances, corruption, lies, sex, ambition, money, violence, scandal.

  “You don’t get crimes like that even in Rome, Paris, New York,” the editor said. “We’re in a slump. But things’ll change soon. It’s all cyclical. When you least expect it, one of those scandals breaks out that provides material for a year. Everything’s rotten, just right, all we have to do is wait.”

  Before it broke out, they fired me.

  “All you have is small-businessmen killing their partners, petty thieves killing small-businessmen, police killing petty thieves. Small potatoes,” I told Oswaldo Peçanha, editor-in-chief and owner of the newspaper Woman.

  “There’s also meningitis, schistosomiasis, Chagas’s disease,” Peçanha said.

  “Out of my area,” I said.

  “Have you read Woman?” Peçanha asked.

  I admitted I hadn’t. I prefer reading books.

  Peçanha took a box of cigars from his desk and offered me one. We lit the cigars, and soon the atmosphere was unbreathable. The cigars were cheap, it was summer, the windows were closed, and the air conditioning wasn’t working well.

  “Woman isn’t one of those colorful publications for bourgeois women on a diet. It’s made for the Class C woman, who eats rice and beans and if she gets fat, tough luck. Take a look.”

  Peçanha tossed me a copy of the newspaper. Tabloid format, headlines in blue, some out-of-focus photographs. Illustrated love story, horoscope, interviews with TV actors, dressmaking.

  “Think you could do the ‘Woman to Woman’ section, our advice column? The guy who was doing it left.”

  “Woman to Woman” carried the byline of one Elisa Gabriela. Dear Elisa Gabriela, my husband comes home drunk every night and—

  “I think I can,” I said.

  “Great. You start today. What name do you want to use?”

  I thought a bit.

  “Nathanael Lessa.”

  “Nathanael Lessa?” Peçanha said, surprised and offended, as if I’d said a dirty word or insulted his mother.

  “What’s wrong with it? It’s a name like any other. And I’m paying homage to two people.”

  Peçanha puffed his cigar, irritated.

  “First, it’s not a name like any other. Second, it’s not a Class C name. Here we only use names pleasing to Class C, pretty names.

  “Third, the paper only pays homage to who I want it to, and I don’t know any Nathanael Lessa. And finally”—Peçanha’s irritation had gradually increased, as if he were taking a certain enjoyment in it—“here no one, not even me, uses a masculine pseudonym. My name is Maria de Lourdes!”

  I took another look at the newspaper, including the staff. Nothing but women’s names.

  “Don’t you think a masculine name gives the answers more respectability? Father, husband, priest, boss—they have nothing but men telling them what to do. Nathanael Lessa will catch on better than Elisa Gabriela.”

  “That’s exactly what I don’t want. Here they feel like their own bosses, they trust us, as if we were all friends. I’ve been in this business twenty-five years. Don’t come to me with untested theories. Woman is revolutionizing the Brazilian press; it’s a different kind of newspaper that doesn’t run ye
sterday’s warmed-over television news.”

  He was so irritated that I didn’t ask exactly what Woman was out to accomplish. He’d tell me sooner or later. I just wanted the job.

  “My cousin, Machado Figueiredo, who also has twenty-five years’ experience, at the Bank of Brazil, likes to say that he’s always open to untested theories.” I knew that Woman owed money to the bank. And a letter of recommendation from my cousin was on Peçanha’s desk.

  When he heard my cousin’s name, Peçanha paled. He bit his cigar to control himself, then closed his mouth, as if he were about to whistle, and his fat lips trembled as if he had a grain of pepper on his tongue. He opened his mouth wide and tapped his nicotine-stained teeth with his thumbnail while he looked at me in a way that he must have considered fraught with significance.

  “I could add ‘Dr.’ to my name. Dr. Nathanael Lessa.”

  “Damn! All right, all right,” Peçanha snarled between his teeth, “you start today.”

  That was how I came to be part of the team at Woman.

  My desk was near Sandra Marina’s, who wrote the horoscope. Sandra was also known as Marlene Katia, for interviews. A pale fellow with a long, sparse mustache, he was also known as João Albergaria Duval. He wasn’t long out of communications school and constantly complained, “Why didn’t I study dentistry, why?”

  I asked him if someone brought the readers’ letters to my desk. He told me to talk to Jacqueline in the office. Jacqueline was a large black man with very white teeth.

  “It won’t go over well being the only one here who doesn’t have a woman’s name; they’re going to think you’re a fairy. Letters? There aren’t any. You think Class C women write letters? Elisa made them all up.”

  DEAR DR. NATHANAEL LESSA. I got a scholarship for my ten-year-old daughter in a fancy school in a good neighborhood. All her classmates go to the hairdresser at least once a week. We don’t have the money for that, my husband drives a bus on the Jacaré-Caju line, but he says he’s going to work overtime to send Tania Sandra, our little girl, to the hairdresser. Don’t you think that our children deserve every sacrifice? DEDICATED MOTHER. VILLA KENNEDY.