Winning the Game and Other Stories

by Rubem Fonseca

  I remained awake, holding the needle, without the courage to act. Then Nelly started snoring, and I believe that was what led me to do what Amancio recommended.

  The next morning Nelly said she had a scratch on her leg, and I suggested she put a Band-Aid on it. Band-Aids don’t do a goddamn bit of good, Amancio had told me. “Shut off the water so Nelly doesn’t take a bath; if she washes the wound with soap and water, everything’s ruined; soap and water kill any type of infection.”

  Nelly went to her office without taking a bath, with the Band-Aid on her leg. I stayed at home, suffering, judging myself a damnable murderer, a reprobate of the worst kind. I called Amancio’s office.

  “Take it easy, take it easy. Stop by here and we’ll talk,” he said.

  “You two got married under community property,” Amancio said. “When Nelly dies you’ll get everything, you’ll be able to write in peace, and if necessary, pay for publishing your book. Several writers who later became famous and important paid for the first printing of their books. Everybody knows that.”

  Amancio explained that the incubation period of tetanus could vary from three to twenty-one days; the further away from the nervous system the wound, the longer the incubation period, and the longer that incubation period, the greater the probability of death, which is why he ordered me to make the scratch in the leg.

  “God forgive me,” I said.

  “What’s done is done,” said Amancio.

  When you want time to go by quickly, it goes by very slowly. After ten days, nothing happened. But on the thirteenth day, Nelly began to experience contractions in her jaw muscles. I called Amancio.

  “Ah, that’s good,” he said, “it’s the first sign of tetanus, what’s called trismus. Nelly’s going to be unable to open her mouth. Call me to examine her.”

  “Nelly, my love, I’ve called Dr. Amancio; he’s coming here to examine you.”

  Amancio examined Nelly at length.

  “It’s nothing,” Amancio said, “just nervous tension. You must be having some problem at work. I’m going to give you a tranquilizer, an injection.”

  He applied an injection in Nelly’s vein.

  “Wonderful,” Amancio said. “Just look at her face.”

  I looked. Nelly was laughing.

  “She’s laughing,” I said.

  “Exactly. It’s called risus sardonicus, a spasm of the muscles surrounding the mouth. Wonderful. Now we’ll wait for diaphoresis. She’s going to sweat, sweat, sweat, her temperature will rise, she’s going to suffer tachycardia and die of asphyxia caused by spasms of the diaphragm.” (I forgot to mention that Amancio abused the word wonderful—the food was wonderful, the film was wonderful, the shoes were wonderful, and so on.)

  Amancio himself wrote the death certificate: general failure of multiple organs, which is what doctors put on the death certificate when they’re unsure of the causa mortis. Nelly had no other relatives, and since visits were forbidden, no one saw the risus sardonicus stamped on her face while she lay dying in bed, but I confess that I always remembered her Joker’s physiognomy and even had nightmares of Nelly sitting at the dinner table looking at me with a scornful or disdainful smile as I ate a plate of onions, the food I hate most.

  Nelly owned countless properties and a variety of investments. I took part of the money I got and bought a two-story penthouse at the beach in Michele’s name. That was her dream, a penthouse on the oceanfront in Leblon. (In reality, I also had to spend a reasonably large amount to remodel the penthouse. The apartment was highly livable, but women are crazy about remodeling, and it was done: a new kitchen, two new baths, some walls torn down, a new sauna, a different floor—all in all, a new apartment. Plus the furniture … I spent a lot of money.)

  “Look,” she told me when the work was finished, “you go on living in your house, and I’ll live in mine. The thing that kills love is two people living together, rubbing against each other all day. I know over a thousand cases. Another thing, nobody can show up at the other’s house without calling ahead.”

  She was right. Since there was no friction, our relationship continued as perfect as before. Maybe it got even better, because we fucked in more comfort.

  Amancio was constantly demanding. “You owe me,” he would say. Amancio might be a good tetanus contaminator, but it seems as a doctor he was nothing special. He had few patients and spent much of his time in nightclubs and houses of ill repute; as he himself confessed, he was fond of fucking whores.

  “You don’t need to use a rubber if you fuck a whore. You need to use a rubber if you fuck a married woman, ’cause they catch diseases from their husbands, who’re bisexual,” he said.

  Knowing his proclivities, I wasn’t concerned when he and Michele would go to art exhibitions together, which they did often.

  I gave him a large amount of money and also a full power of attorney to buy, sell, subrogate, everything.

  One day Amancio said he needed my help. He had a place in the mountains, a little past Teresopolis, and wanted to invite an acquaintance of his to spend a few days there, but in reality he wanted to imprison him in the cellar.

  “What then?” I asked.

  “After a few days I’ll let him go. It’s just to scare him. He’s a nobody.”

  “What if he yells for help?”

  “He can yell as much as he wants, no one’s going to hear. I don’t have a caretaker, and I lock the place up tighter than a drum. Take it easy.”

  “Shit, you’re going to kill the guy?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “he’s a son of a bitch. And he’s screwing up my life. He doesn’t let me be with the woman I’m in love with.”

  “I didn’t know you were in love too. Is she a whore?”

  “No, she’s not a whore.”

  The place in the mountains was in an isolated location. The house was old, made of stone, very pretty.

  “What about the guy?” I asked.

  “He’ll be here soon,” Amancio answered. “Come on, I’ll show you the cellar.”

  A trapdoor was opened in one of the rooms, and Amancio pointed to the opening.

  “See? We go down that wooden ladder and then pull the ladder up, leaving the son of a bitch to rot in there. Go on down to see.”

  The ladder had countless steps. The cellar was very dark. When I got to the final step, I said, “Shit, this place is really deep.”

  “There’s a lantern and kerosene there. Please light the lantern.”

  Using my lighter, I illuminated the cellar. I found the lantern on a small table beside a bed with a straw mattress.

  “It’s a cubicle,” I shouted.

  At that moment, I saw the ladder being raised.

  “Our visitor has arrived, I’ll be right back,” said Amancio.

  After a time, I heard a female voice.

  “Hello, Pedro.”

  “Michele?”

  “In the flesh,” she replied, her face appearing at the trapdoor.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  I was in a state of shock, for I suddenly understood everything. The nobody that Amancio wanted to starve to death was me. I was fucked. I knew neither he nor Michele was joking. Now I understood those art exhibitions the two of them went to together, several times a week. And once they went to Paris to see an exhibition, and I thought nothing of it, they were my best friend and the woman who claimed to be madly in love with me. I was a naïve fool. The woman Amancio was in love with was Michele.

  “What are you doing here, Michele?” I repeated.

  “I came to help Amancio bury you. Bye-bye, sweetheart.”

  Before the trapdoor could be closed, I shouted, “Michele, Michele, please, call Amancio, call Amancio.”

  Amancio appeared at the trapdoor opening.

  “What do you want?”

  “Amancio, you’re my best friend. Get me a thick notebook, several pens, and a little more kerosene. Before I starve to death, I want to
write a novel. I have the feeling it’ll be my masterpiece.”

  “I’ll get it for you,” I heard him say.

  It took him some time to return. I thought about my power of attorney with subrogation rights. Then I remember who it was that once told me that causing a tetanus infection was a good way to get rid of any enemy. Michele.

  Later, the trapdoor opened and several pens and a thick notebook were dropped down. And also several cans of food and drinks. I saw Amancio’s face in the trapdoor opening.

  “Amancio, did you subrogate to Michele the power of attorney I gave you?”

  “Yes, why—?”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. I heard a shot and the thud of a body falling to the floor. Michele was a genius, an evil genius. She slammed the trapdoor shut.

  Was Amancio lucky enough to have a quick, maybe painless death, or was Michele going to leave him bleeding like a pig? But there’s nothing worse than starving to death, I thought. Those cans of food wouldn’t last long. I had to find a way less slow and painful to dispatch myself. Using the lantern, I looked around the cellar for something sharp to cut my wrists. I didn’t find anything. Perhaps I could tear open my veins with my teeth. It wouldn’t be easy to do. But it didn’t have to be that day. Another hypothesis was to set fire to the straw mattress and die of asphyxiation. But it didn’t have to be that day.

  I could take advantage of the silence, the solitude, to write. That was it: leave a message for posterity, a masterpiece that would surely be found one day beside my skull, which would generate great publicity for my book.

  I sat down on the bed, placed the table in front of me, picked up one of the pens, opened the notebook, and began to write furiously.

  Publishers would fight like hyenas over the right to publish my book.

  the brotherhood of swords

  I WAS ONCE A MEMBER of the Brotherhood of Swords. I still remember when we met to choose the name of our Brotherhood. I argued, at the time, that for our survival it was important to have a respectable name and purpose and gave as example what had happened to the Brotherhood of São Martinho, an association of wine fanciers who, like the character in Eça de Queirós, would sell their soul to the devil for a bottle of Romanée-Conti 1858, but which came to be known as a fraternity of drunks and, discredited, closed its doors, while the Brotherhood of the Most Holy, whose declared objective is to promote the worship of God through invocation of the Holy Sacrament, remained in existence. In other words, we needed a worthy title and objective. My colleagues replied that the society was a secret one, that in a way it was born (this was said ironically) discredited, and that its name didn’t matter in the least, as it would never be made public. They added that the Masons and the Rosicrucians originally had nice titles and respectable objectives and ended up suffering accusations of every kind, from political manipulation to kidnapping and assassination. I insisted, asking them to suggest names for the Brotherhood, which in the end was done. And we began to examine the various proposals on the table. After heated discussions, four names were left. Brotherhood of the Good Bed was discarded because it sounded like an association of layabouts. Brotherhood of Fanciers of Feminine Beauty, besides being too long, was considered reductionist and aesthetical. We didn’t consider ourselves aesthetes in a strict sense; Picasso was right in hating what he termed the aesthetic game of eye and mind manipulated by connoisseurs who “appreciated” beauty and, after all, what was “beauty”? Our brotherhood was one of Fuckers and, as the poet Whitman said in a poem correctly entitled “A Woman Waits for Me,” sex encompasses everything: bodies, souls, meanings, tests, purities, gentleness, results, promulgations, songs, commands, health, pride, maternal mystery, seminal fluid, all the hopes, benefits, donations and concessions, all the passions, beauties, and delights of the earth. Brotherhood of Roving Hands, suggested by one of the poets in our group (we had lots of poets among us, obviously), who illustrated his proposal with a poem by John Donne—“License my roving hands, and let them go before, behind, between, above, below”—although pertinent because of its simplicity in privileging knowledge through touch, was rejected for being an elementary symbol of our objectives.

  Finally, after much discussion, the name Brotherhood of the Swords was adopted. The richest of the Brothers were its main defenders: aristocrats are attracted by things of the underworld, fascinated by lawbreakers, and the term Sword as a symbol of the Fucker came from the criminal world. A sword penetrates and wounds, and is thus the penis as, erroneously, outlaws and the ignorant in general see it. I suggested that if some symbolic name were used by us, it should be that of an ornamental tree grown for its flowers, for after all the penis is commonly known in our language as wood or club, and wood is the generic name of any tree in many places in Brazil (but, correctly, not of bushes, which have a fragile trunk), but my reasoning came a cropper when someone asked what name the Brotherhood would have—Brotherhood of the Woods? the Stalks?—and I had no answer. Sword, according to my opponents, had vernacular power, so once again the riffraff made their valuable contribution to the enrichment of the Portuguese language.

  As a member of the Brotherhood of Swords I believed, and I still believe, that copulation is the only thing that matters to the human being. To fuck is to live, nothing else exists, as the poets know very well. But was a Brotherhood needed to defend this absolute axiom? Of course not. There were prejudices, but they didn’t interest us; social and religious repressions didn’t affect us. So what was the objective in founding the Brotherhood? Very simple: to discover how to obtain, fully, orgasm without ejaculation. The queen of Aragon, as Montaigne relates, well before that ancient realm united with Castile, in the 14th century, following mature deliberation by her private counselor, established the rule, keeping in mind the moderation demanded by modesty within marriages, that the number of six copulations per day was the legal limit, necessary and suitable. In other words, in those days a man and a woman copulated, in a suitable and modest manner, six times a day. Flaubert, for whom “une once de sperme perdue fatigue plus que trois litres de sang” (I spoke of that in one of my books), thought six copulations a day humanly impossible, but Flaubert was not, we know, a Sword. Even today it’s believed that the only way to come is by ejaculation, despite the Chinese for over three thousand years affirming that a man can have several consecutive orgasms without ejaculating, thus avoiding the loss of the ounce of sperm that is more tiring than hemorrhaging three liters of blood. (The French call the exhaustion that follows ejaculation “small death,” which is why one of their poets said that the flesh was sad, but Brazilians say that the flesh is weak, in all senses, which strikes me as more poignant; it’s worse being weak than sad.) It is calculated that a man ejaculates on average five thousand times during his lifetime, expelling a total of a trillion spermatozoa. All that for what and why? Because in reality we are still a species of monkey, and all of us function like a rudimentary genetic bank, when it would be enough for only some to operate that way. We of the Brotherhood of Swords knew that man, by freeing himself of his simian atrophy, backed by the peculiar virtues of his mind (our brain is not, I repeat, that of an orangutan), could have consecutive orgasms without ejaculating, orgasms that would give even more pleasure than those of the seminal kind, which make the man merely a blind instrument of the instinct of preservation of the species. And that result filled us with joy and pride; we had succeeded, through elaborate and difficult physical and spiritual exercises, to achieve the Multiple Orgasm Sans Ejaculation, which became known by the acronym MOSE. I cannot reveal what these “exercises” were, for the vow to maintain secrecy prevents me. Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t even mention the subject, even in this limited way.

  The Brotherhood of Swords functioned very well during the six months following our extraordinary discovery. Until the day that one of the Brothers, like me a poet, called for the convening of a General Assembly of the Brotherhood to relate a matter he considered of the utmost importance. His wife, noticing
the nonoccurrence of emissio seminis during copulation, had concluded that there could be various reasons for it, which in summary would be: either he was saving up the sperm for another woman, or else he was feigning pleasure when in reality he was acting mechanically like a soulless robot. The woman even suspected that our colleague had an implant in his penis to keep it always rigid, an allegation that he easily proved to be groundless. In short, the poet’s wife had stopped feeling pleasure from copulating. In reality she wanted the viscosity of sperm inside her vagina or on her skin; to her that white, sticky secretion was a powerful symbol of life. Sex, as Whitman would put it, after all included seminal fluid. The woman didn’t say so, but surely the exhausting of him, the male, represented the strengthening of her, the female. Without those ingredients she couldn’t feel pleasure, and, this is the worst part, if she felt no pleasure neither did our Brother, for we of the Brotherhood of Swords want (need) our women to come too. That’s our motto (I won’t cite it in Latin in order not to appear pedantic; I’ve already used Latin once): Come by Making Come.

  At the end of our Brother’s explanation the assembly fell silent. The majority of the members of the Brotherhood were present. We had just heard disquieting words. I, for example, no longer ejaculated. Ever since I had succeeded in dominating the Great Secret of the Brotherhood, the MOSE, I no longer produced a single drop of semen, even though all my orgasms were much more pleasurable. And what if my wife, whom I loved so, asked me, as she could at any moment, to ejaculate on her alabaster breasts? I asked one of the doctors in the Brotherhood—there were several doctors among us—if I could go back to ejaculating. Medicine knows nothing about sex, that’s the regrettable truth, and my colleague replied that it would be very difficult, in light of the fact that I, like all the others, had created a strong dependency on that physical and spiritual conditioning; he had already tried, using every scientific resource to which he had access, to counteract that process, without success. All of us, upon hearing that frightful reply, became extremely dismayed. Immediately, other Brothers said they had encountered the same problem, that their wives were beginning to see as unnatural, or even frightening, that inexhaustible ardor. I think I’ve turned into a monster, said the poet who had raised the problem for our collective consideration.