Winning the Game and Other Stories

by Rubem Fonseca

  “What time is it?” Augusto asks.

  “Look at your watch,” says the man with the dog, the two of them, man and dog, observing Augusto with curiosity.

  “My watch isn’t working very well,” claims Augusto.

  “Ten hours thirty-five minutes and two, three, four, five—”

  “Thank you.”

  “—seconds,” the man concludes, consulting the Seiko on his wrist.

  “I have to go,” Augusto says.

  “Don’t go yet,” says the dog. It wasn’t the dog; the man is a ventriloquist, he wants to make me look like a fool, thinks Augusto; it’s better for the man to be a ventriloquist, dogs don’t talk, and if that one talks, or if he heard the dog talk, it could become a cause for concern, like seeing a flying saucer, for example, and Augusto doesn’t want to waste time on matters of that sort.

  Augusto pats the dog’s head. “I have to go.”

  He doesn’t have to go anywhere. His plan that day is to remain among the trees until closing time, and when the guard starts blowing his whistle he’ll hide in the grotto; it irritates him to be able to stay with the trees only from seven in the morning till six in the afternoon. What are the guards afraid will happen at night at the Campo de Santana? Some nocturnal banquet of agoutis, or the use of the grotto as a brothel, or cutting down the trees for lumber, or some such thing? Maybe the guards were right and starving criminals go around eating agoutis, and fucking among the bats and rats in the grotto, and cutting down trees to build shacks.

  When he hears the beep of his Casio Melody alerting him, Augusto goes into the farthest point of the grotto, where he remains as motionless as a stone, or rather, a subterranean tree. The grotto is artificial; it was built by another Frenchman, but it has been there so long that it appears real. A loud whistle echoes through the stone walls, making the bats flap their wings and squeal; the guards are ordering people to leave, but no guard comes into the grotto. He remains immobile in the total darkness, and now that the bats have quieted down he hears the delicate little sound of the rats, already used to his harmless presence. His watch plays a rapid jingle, which means an hour has passed. Outside, it is surely nighttime and the guards must have gone, to watch television, to eat; some of them may even have families.

  He leaves the grotto along with the bats and rats. He turns off the sound on his Casio Melody. He has never spent an entire night inside the Campo de Santana; he has walked around the Campo at night, looking at the trees longingly through the bars, now painted gray with gold at the top. In the darkness the trees are even more disturbing than in the light, and they allow Augusto, walking slowly under their nocturnal shadows, to commune with them as if he were a bat. He embraces and kisses the trees, something he is embarrassed to do in the light of day in front of other people; some are so large that he can’t get his arms around them. Among the trees Augusto feels no irritation, nor hunger, nor headache. Unmoving, stuck in the earth, living in silence, indulging the wind and the birds, indifferent even to their enemies, there they are, the trees, around Augusto, and they fill his head with a perfumed, invisible gas that he senses and that transmits such lightness to his body that if he had the aspiration, and the arrogance of will, he could even try to fly.

  When day breaks, Augusto presses one of the buttons on his watch, bringing back the drawing of a small bell on the dial. He hears a beep. Hidden behind a tree, he sees guards opening one of the gates. He looks with affection at the trees one last time, running his hand along the trunks of some of them in farewell.

  At the exit is the one-armed man selling one or two cigarettes to guys who don’t have the money to buy an entire pack.

  He walks down Presidente Vargas cursing the urban planners who took decades to understand that a street as wide as this needed shade and only in recent years planted trees, the same insensitivity that made them plant royal palms along the Mangue canal when it was built, as if the palm were a tree worthy of the name, with a long trunk that neither gives shade nor houses birds and looks like a column of cement. He goes along Andradas as far as Teatro Street and stands once more in front of his grandfather’s house. He hopes that someday his grandfather will appear in the doorway, absent-mindedly picking his nose.

  When he enters his walk-up on Sete de Setembro, he finds Kelly pacing back and forth under the skylight.

  “I looked for coffee and couldn’t find any. Don’t you have coffee?”

  “Why don’t you leave and come back tonight, for the lesson?”

  “There was a rat, and I threw a book at it but didn’t hit it.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “To kill the rat.”

  “We start out by killing a rat, then we kill a thief, then a Jew, then a neighborhood child with a large head, then a child in our family with a large head.”

  “A rat? What’s the harm in killing a rat?”

  “What about a child with a large head?”

  “The world is full of disgusting people. And the more people, the more disgusting ones. Like it was a world of snakes. Are you gonna tell me that snakes aren’t disgusting?” Kelly says.

  “Snakes aren’t disgusting. Why don’t you go home and come back tonight for the lesson?”

  “Let me stay here till I learn how to read.”

  “Just for two weeks.”

  “All right. Will you help me bring my clothes from home?”

  “You have all that many clothes?”

  “Know what it is? I’m afraid of Rezende. He said he’d slash my face with a razor. I stopped working for him.”

  “Who’s this Rezende?”

  “He’s the guy who—He’s my protector. He’s gonna get me the money to put in a tooth and work in the South Zone.”

  “I didn’t think there were any pimps these days.”

  “A girl can’t live by herself.”

  “Where’s your place?”

  “Gomes Freire near the corner of Mem de Sá. Know where the supermarket is?”

  “Show me.”

  They walk along Evaristo da Veiga, go underneath the Arches, turn onto Mem de Sá, and immediately find themselves at the building where Kelly lives with Rezende.

  Kelly tries to open the door to the apartment, but it’s locked from inside. She rings the bell.

  A guy in a green T-shirt opens the door saying “Where’ve you been, you whore?” but draws back when he sees Augusto, gestures with his hand, and says politely, “Please come in.”

  “Is this Rezende?” Augusto asks.

  “I came to get my clothes,” says Kelly shyly.

  “Go get your clothes while I chat with Rezende,” Augusto says.

  Kelly steps inside.

  “Do I know you?” Rezende asks uncertainly.

  “What do you think?” Augusto says.

  “I’ve got a rotten memory,” Rezende says.

  “That’s dangerous,” Augusto says.

  Neither says anything further. Rezende takes a pack of Continentals from his pocket and offers Augusto a cigarette. Augusto says he doesn’t smoke. Rezende lights the cigarette, sees Augusto’s mutilated ear and quickly averts his gaze to the interior of the apartment.

  Kelly returns with her suitcase.

  “Do you have a sharpened razor?” Augusto asks.

  “What do I need with a sharpened razor?” Rezende says, laughing like an idiot, avoiding looking at the remains of Augusto’s ear.

  Augusto and Kelly wait for the elevator to arrive while Rezende smokes, leaning against the apartment door, looking at the floor.

  They are in the street. Kelly, seeing the bookie sitting in his school desk, says she’s going to place a small bet. “Should I bet on the lamb or the stag?” she asks, laughing. “He didn’t do anything because you were with me. He pulled in his horns because he was afraid of you.”

  “I thought you women were organized and there weren’t any more pimps,” Augusto says.

  “My friend Cleuza invited me to join the Association, but—Five on t
he stag,” she tells the bookie.

  “The Whores’ Association?”

  “The Prostitutes’ Association. But then I found out there are three different prostitutes’ associations, and I don’t know which one to join. My friend Slackmouth told me that organizing criminals is the most complicated thing there is; even crooks who live together in jail have that problem.”

  They take the same route back, passing under the Arches again, over which a trolley is crossing at that moment.

  “Poor man, I was the only thing he had in the world,” Kelly says. She’s already feeling sorry for the pimp. “He’ll have to go back to selling coke and marijuana in the red light district.”

  On Carioca Street, Kelly repeats that in Augusto’s place there’s no coffee and that she wants coffee.

  “We’ll have some coffee in the street,” he says.

  They stop at a juice bar. They don’t have coffee. Kelly wants a coffee with cream and bread and butter. “I know it’s hard to find a place that serves coffee with cream and bread and butter, especially toasted,” Kelly says.

  “There used to be luncheonettes all over the city, where you’d sit down and order: ‘Waiter, please bring me right away a nice cup of coffee that hasn’t been reheated, some bread straight from the oven and butter by the ton’—do you know the song by Noel?”

  “Noel? Before my time. Sorry,” says Kelly.

  “I just meant that there were an endless number of luncheonettes all over downtown. And you used to sit down, not eat standing up like us here, and there was a marble-top table where you could doodle while you waited for someone, and when the person arrived you could look at her face while you talked.”

  “Aren’t we talking? Aren’t you looking at me? Doodle on this napkin.”

  “I’m looking at you. But I have to turn my head. We aren’t sitting in chairs. This paper napkin blots when you write on it. You don’t understand.”

  They have a hamburger with orange juice.

  “I’m going to take you to Avenida Rio Branco.”

  “I’m already familiar with Avenida Rio Branco.”

  “I’m going to show you three buildings that haven’t been demolished. Did I show you the photo of how the avenue used to be?”

  “I’m not interested in old stuff. Cut it out.”

  Kelly refuses to go see the old buildings, but since she likes children she agrees to visit little Marcela, eight months old, daughter of Marcelo and Ana Paula.

  They’re on Sete de Setembro, and so they walk to the corner of Carmo, where, on the sidewalk under the marquee, in cardboard shacks, the Gonçalves family lives. Ana Paula is white, as Marcelo is white, and they are just satellites of the family of blacks who control that corner. Ana Paula is nursing little Marcela. As it is Saturday, Ana Paula was able to set up the small cardboard shack in which she lives with her husband and their daughter under the marquee of the Banco Mercantil do Brasil. The board that serves as wall, some five feet in height, the highest side of the shack, was taken from an abandoned subway construction site. On weekdays the shack is dismantled, the large sheets of cardboard and the board from the subway excavation are leaned against the wall during work hours, and only at night is Marcelo’s shack, and the Gonçalves family’s cardboard shacks, reassembled so that Marcelo, Ana Paula, and little Marcela and the twelve members of the family can go inside them to sleep. But today is Saturday; on Saturdays and Sundays the Banco Mercantil do Brasil doesn’t open, and Marcelo and Ana Paula’s shack, a cardboard box used to house a large refrigerator, has not been disassembled, and Ana Paula luxuriates in that comfort.

  It is ten in the morning and the sun casts luminous rays between the black, opaque monolith of the Cândido Mendes skyscraper and the turret of the church with the image of Our Lady of Carmona, she standing up as Our Ladies usually do, a circle of iron, or copper, over her head pretending to be a halo. Ana Paula is giving the naked girl a sunbath; she has already changed her diaper, washed the dirty one in a bucket of water she got from a chicken restaurant, hung it on a wire clothesline that she puts up only on weekends by attaching one end to an iron post with a metal sign that reads TurisRio—9 parking places and another to an iron post with an advertising sign. Besides the diapers, Augusto sees Bermudas, T-shirts, jeans, and pieces of clothing that he can’t identify, out of consideration, so as not to appear nosey.

  Kelly remains on the corner, unwilling to approach the small shack where Ana Paula is taking care of Marcela. Ana Paula has gentle eyes, has a narrow, calm face, delicate gestures, slim arms, a very pretty mouth, despite the cavities in her front teeth.

  “Kelly, come see what a pretty baby Marcelinha is,” Augusto says.

  At that instant, Benevides, the head of the clan, a black man who’s always drunk, comes out from one of the cardboard boxes, followed by the two adolescents Zé Ricardo and Alexandre, the latter the most likable of them all, and also Dona Tina, the matriarch, accompanied by some eight children. There used to be twelve minors in the family, but four had left and no one knew of their whereabouts; they were known to be part of a juvenile gang that operated in the city’s South Zone, acting in large bands to rob the elegant stores, well-dressed people, tourists, and on Sundays the patsies tanning on the beach.

  One of the children asks Augusto for money and gets a cuff from Benevides.

  “We’re not beggars, you brat.”

  “It wasn’t charity,” says Augusto.

  “The other day some guy came by saying he was organizing beggars in a group called Beggars United. I told him to shove it. We’re no beggars.”

  “Who is the guy? Where does he hang out?”

  “On Jogo da Bola Street.”

  “How do you get to that street?”

  “From here? You go in a straight line to Candelária Church, once you’re there you take Rio Branco, from there you go to Visconde de Inhaúma Street, picking it up on the left side, go to Santa Rita Square where it ends and Marechal Floriano starts, that’s Larga Street, and you go down Larga until you come to Andradas, on the right-hand side, cross Leandro Martins, get onto Júlia Lopes de Almeida, go left to Conceição Street, follow it till Senador Pompeu, take a right onto Colonel something-or-other, and stay to the right till you get to Jogo da Bola Street. Ask for him, his name’s Chicken Zé. A black guy with green eyes, all the time surrounded by suck-ups. He’s gonna end up on the city council.”

  “Thanks, Benevides. How’s business?”

  “We’ve hauled in twenty tons of paper this month,” says Alexandre.

  “Shut up,” says Benevides.

  A truck comes by periodically to pick up the paper that’s been collected. Today it came early and took away everything.

  Dona Tina says something that Augusto doesn’t understand.

  “Shit, ma, keep your mouth shut. Shit,” shouts Benevides, furious.

  His mother moves away and goes to put some pans over a dismountable stove made of bricks, in the Banco Mercantil’s doorway. Ricardo combs his thick hair using a comb with long steel teeth.

  “Who’s the babe?” Benevides points to Kelly, in the distance, at the street corner. Kelly looks like a princess of Monaco, in the midst of the Gonçalves family.

  “A friend of mine.”

  “Why doesn’t she come any closer?”

  “She must be afraid of you, of your shouts.”

  “I have to shout. I’m the only one here with a head on his shoulders … Sometimes I’m even suspicious of you …”

  “That’s silly.”

  “At first I thought you were from the police. Then from the Leo XIII, then somebody from the bank, but the manager’s a good guy and knows we’re workers and wouldn’t send some spy to rat on us. We’ve been here for two years, and I plan to die here, which may not be that long, ’cause I’ve got this pain in the side of my belly … You know this bank’s never been robbed? Only one in the whole area.”

  “Your presence keeps robbers away.”

  “I’m suspicious of you
.”

  “Don’t waste your time on that.”

  “What do you want here? Last Saturday you didn’t want to have some soup with us.”

  “I told you. I want to talk. And you only have to tell me what you want to. And I only like green-colored soups, and your soups are yellow.”

  “It’s the squash,” says Dona Tina, who is listening to the conversation.

  “Shut up, ma. Look here, man, the city’s not the same anymore. There’s too many people, too many beggars in the city, picking up paper, fighting with us over territory, a whole lot of people living under overhangs; we’re all the time throwing out bums from outside, and there’s even fake beggars fighting us for our paper. All the paper thrown away on this part of Cândido Mendes is mine, but there’s guys trying to grab it.”

  Benevides says that the man on the truck pays more for white paper than for newsprint or scrap paper, dirty paper, colored paper, torn paper. The paper he collects on Cândido Mendes is white. “There’s a lot of continuous computer forms, reports, things like that.”

  “What about glass? It can also be recycled. Have you thought about selling bottles?”

  “Bottle men have to be Portuguese. We’re black. And bottles are giving out, everything’s plastic. The only bottle man who works these parts is Mané da Boina, and he came by the other day to have some soup with us. He eats yellow soup. He’s in deep shit.”

  Kelly spreads her arms, displays an impatient expression, at the corner across the street. Augusto says good-bye, embracing everyone. Benevides pulls Augusto to his naked torso, bringing his alcoholic mouth close to the other man’s, and looks at him closely, curiously, shrewdly. “They’re saying there’s going to be a big convention of foreigners and that they’re going to try to hide us from the gringos. I don’t want to leave here,” he murmurs menacingly. “I live beside a bank, there’s safety, no crazy man’s going try to set us on fire like they did with Maílson, behind the museum. And I’ve been here for two years, which means nobody’s going to try and mess with our home; it’s part of the atmosphere, you understand?” Augusto, who was born and raised in the downtown area, although in a more lustrous era when the stores’ facades sported their names in glowing twisted glass tubes filled with red, blue, and green gases, understands completely what Benevides is telling him with his endless embrace; he too wouldn’t leave downtown for anything, and he nods, involuntarily brushing his face against the face of the black man. When they finally separate, Augusto manages to slip the clever little black boy a bill, without Benevides seeing it. He goes to Ana Paula and says good-bye to her, to Marcelo and to little Marcela, who is now wearing a pair of floral-patterned overalls.