At the end of one afternoon, he coveted my car parked on the dirt road in front of the grocery store: “Can I take it for a spin?”
I don’t like offending anyone, I take no pleasure in people’s handicaps or suffering, anybody acquainted with me knows that. It was automatic, I was unable to avoid it: my eyes lowered to his foot, a veritable paw encased in a custom-made orthopedic boot.
Marlon showed his overlapping teeth in a sad smile. “Don’t worry, I know how to drive.”
I apologized. And my penance was to grant him a drive through the neighborhood.
Marlon did in fact know how to drive, even if he had to twist himself in the seat to reach the gas pedal with his heel, a contortion he executed with a joy bordering on vanity. The wind blew through his hair, a residual sun reflecting off his dark glasses. Marlon was happy.
We slowly circulated through the business center, where the stores selling cheap items were lowering their doors, the bus stops filling up. A pair of policemen were drinking coffee at a corner bar and waved when we passed. There on his turf, Marlon was popular on both sides of the law.
Before ending our tour, he took me to the Afro-Dite, a hair salon specializing in African-inspired cuts—the “Black Power” hairdo had returned with a vengeance. In the salon, I was introduced to Luana, a black woman with an easy laugh and alabaster teeth, who Marlon was constantly trying to seduce. The ebony muse of his songs. It was obvious that the woman, flattered, accepted the wooing as a joke, pretending to reciprocate the flirting she received. I saw how she looked at Marlon as he got out of the car dragging his right foot. If they someday got together, the word compassion would have to be mentioned.
In any case, there was an obstacle, Marlon later explained to me. Luana had a husband confined to a prison farm in the interior, over four hundred miles from São Paulo. A bank robber who she visited every other week. Sometimes she missed, which, as might be expected, made the guy rather irritated.
Then rumors started that he was about to be released on parole. Or that he was involved in an escape plan. Marlon was scared to death that the man would suddenly show up at his door. He even made an anonymous call to the CrimeStop line, ratting out a tunnel being constructed at a penitentiary whose location he was unable to specify.
Once, I had the privilege—obligatory—of entering Marlon’s club of preferred friends, a group of people to whom he pushed a raffle he promoted for his own benefit. It gave the right to a button, one of those sold by street vendors for fifty cents a dozen, that read, Bosom Friend. It also gave the right to participate in a drawing for what was perhaps the most valuable item in Marlon’s collection of vinyl records: the very first recording made by Roberto Carlos, a 78 rpm from 1959, disavowed by the artist and never reissued. Marlon showed me the rarity wrapped in cheap plastic.
“It’s in perfect condition,” he guaranteed. “It’s priceless.”
I bought two numbers. Even though I didn’t even have a way to play the record, I was moved when I saw the look in Marlon’s eyes at relinquishing something precious to him. I asked what he planned to do with the money he collected from the raffle and the answer was an enigmatic smile.
“It’s a secret,” he said evasively.
That day, I thought he was planning to buy a car adapted to his physical limitation. I was wrong; the project was much more ambitious. Marlon was letting go of his beloved 78 rpm to pay for an operation to correct his bad foot.
In the end, the vinyl stayed at home: the winner of the drawing was beautiful Gorete.
Of course there were those who contested the result, and some even claimed trickery. I laughed. They were mistaken. The redhead’s luck was as uncommon as her ass.
4
I’ve never been overly tormented by the question of the invisible. We are what we are, it seems to me, nothing beyond some drives and fears. With a little luck, we end up as rose fertilizer. And that’s all.
But I must admit, and it’s annoying, the bothersome occurrence of signs and warnings that spring up around us with the beauty of trees in a forest.
Ambrósio Junior was taking a long time in the bakery’s bathroom, his coffee was getting cold on the counter. I thought something might have happened. Silêncio was smoking outside, distracted by the winter sun. I waved through the glass; he didn’t notice. I went into the bathroom.
In one of the stalls, Ambrósio Junior was sitting on the toilet lid, his back resting against the tank, one hand in his lap. With the other, he was holding the Taurus, pointing it at his face. And crying. Sobbing.
“Take it easy,” I said.
And I approached slowly, more fearful than confident. I saw the gun was cocked.
He let me take the revolver. Then he got up and, in an unexpected lunge, deposited on me the magnificent weight of his body, wrapping me in an embrace that put my vertebrae at risk. He went on crying, to the point of smearing my shoulder with spittle and mucus. He kept repeating, “I’ve got feelings too, goddamnit.”
Then a man came into the bathroom and witnessed the scene. He also saw the .38 in my hand and retreated, pale as paper. When Ambrósio Junior calmed down and I convinced him to wash his face so we could leave the bathroom, that man was having breakfast at one of the tables, accompanied by a woman with long hair, still quite young, almost a girl, who was nursing a baby at her tiny breast. The two were so pale they appeared washed out. They looked at us sidelong and whispered conspiratorially. Then I saw they weren’t just pale, they were albinos.
It had been some time since Ambrósio Junior had suffered one of those attacks. We even came to think he might be cured. A kind of absence that struck him, a lapse during which he forgot who he was, where he was, and what he was doing. Above all, what he was doing.
In the beginning, Ambrósio smelled fraud in his son’s disorder. Pretense. He classified them as attention-getting fits. Ambrósio Junior defended himself by saying they were the consequence of the blows to the head he had received from his father from the time he was young.
The duration and the intensity varied. Given Ambrósio Junior’s size and temperament, it wasn’t unusual for it to veer into some type of brutality. Once, in the period when he was living with a nightclub singer called Lana, Junior sent the woman running in the middle of the night; he chased her with a knife through the streets around the luxury condominium where they resided—both of them naked.
Old Ambrósio forced him to seek pyschiatric help, and for a time Ambrósio Junior took loco pills, as he liked to say. The problem was that he mixed them with alcohol and other stimulants.
It was a crazy time.
Over any disagreement, father and son would come to blows. They couldn’t be together. Sparks would fly. They would trade punches or head butts or roll on the ground in a bear hug, wrecking everything around them. Large-scale animals.
For third parties, the best thing was to not get involved. Nor try separating them. Just maintain a cautious distance.
They would finally give up. Either they would grow weary or stop when one of the two suffered a serious injury.
Junior broke his father’s nose in one of their encounters and on more than one occasion left his face bruised. His record, however, was inferior to the old man’s, who registered several knockouts of his son. In one of them, Ambrósio Junior lost a molar and was unconscious for hours. It caused concern, and emergency medical services were called. The EEG showed what it always did: he suffered from a relatively serious cerebral malfunction and needed constant monitoring and medication. Above all, he needed a different lifestyle. Calmer. But then he wouldn’t be Ambrósio Junior, he’d be another person.
Old Ambrósio had been a boxer in his youth, with some degree of success. He was a heavyweight who stood out in amateur tournaments in the meadows of Canindé, famous for his powerful left. Like a mule kick. On the walls of the freight company, yellowed pages from the Sporting Gazette related that promising career in dark photos (you could barely see the boxers’ faces) and article
s that compared the orthodox style of the husky Italian to that of a great champion from the past, Primo Carnera.
Mancino Ambrósio, as he was known, usually settled his matches in the first few minutes and, by what was said, could have gone further if he’d wished. He abandoned the ring at his wife’s request, as soon as they were married. Dona Rosa didn’t tolerate violence of any kind. Not even in films or TV. Father and son avoided any “low class” language in her presence. The degenerative disease that had kept her bedridden for years spared her from witnessing the episodes of brawling between the two.
You could bet, with a good chance of making a nice bit of money, that sooner or later they would end up killing one another.
Then, on his own account, Junior stopped taking his medications and, as if by magic, his attacks ceased. He entered a serene phase—serene, that is, for someone with a rap sheet like his. A phase that, for lack of a better word, could be called mystic. Ambrósio Junior began to communicate with the dead.
I remember that at the time, a different kind of cocaine appeared in the city, bluish. Extremely potent. Junior would snort long lines, enough to make his feet tingle.
In that state, he would receive messages from people already discarnate. Always souls of opaque light, such as Paulo Sansão, PS, a short, cross guy from Santos, Junior’s partner in a used-car business in Boca. What was known was that they’d had a falling out—the reasons were never clear. I heard people speculate that it had to do with Sansão’s wife, a former Miss Porchat Island with so much silicone in her body that it was dangerous to smoke near her. It was also said that Junior had discovered his partner’s embezzlement in a transaction involving cars with fake documentation.
Both are possible hypotheses. And one doesn’t rule out the other. What is undeniable was the event: on a Monday during Carnival, PS was approached by a biker at a traffic light on Anchieta as he was returning home late at night. He was shot five times, all in the face. The shooter fled without taking anything.
As soon as it happened, Ambrósio called to interrogate me about the matter. I told the truth: I only knew what the newspapers had published.
Ambrósio Junior testified twice at the hearing investigating his partner’s murder. His phone was tapped, and they tracked the GPS in the Mercedes. (And witnesses were threatened.) Nothing was ever proven against him. Actually, he emerged from the investigations better than before: it came to light that he had paid Sansão’s funeral expenses, something only the widow had known.
However, suspicion and the rumors continued to hover in Canindé’s polluted air that were less corrosive to the son’s reputation than to his father’s projects. Old Ambrósio had been trying for some time to become a member of the Rotary Club, and that desire turned into an obsession and came up against the rigor with which the Rotarians examined the candidate’s record. (Having brought Ambrósio Junior into the world, I believed, surely contributed to the veto.)
“A case of patent ill will,” opined Dr. Fontes, an illustrious member of the association, who had proposed Ambrósio’s name. “They’re unaware of the benefactor of the community, the citizen committed to social causes.” And, after a short drag on his cigarette holder—he was the only one authorized to smoke on the premises—he turned his lackey’s countenance to the old man and added, “They forget the most relevant business leader.”
Perhaps in the lawyer’s haughty oratory, beyond the habitual affectation, there was more than a little exaggeration. But lie? He didn’t lie.
If we consider only legitimate businesses, Ambrósio could be held up as an example of a successful midlevel entrepreneur. Never a leader, to be sure. The problem was his illegal activities: there, the old man occupied a position of prominence, to the point of attracting the attention of the law. It took a lot of work for the emphysemic Dr. Fontes to justify to the authorities the way Ambrósio and his son related to the world. So much so that the lawyer received no fee. He shared in the family’s profits.
What I know is that Dr. José Fontes was filthy rich; I was a regular at parties where women squirted champagne onto one another in the pool of the luxurious mansion he kept at the seashore, with a private pier and a fifty-foot vessel. He was a thin and powerful man, used to seeing his will executed without hesitation. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for him to swallow the Rotary’s rejection of someone he’d sponsored. It became a question of honor.
I was at a meeting on the mezzanine of the hauling company when Junior suggested an unorthodox solution to the impasse: coercing the Rotarians. “If not the easy way,” he said, “we do it the hard way: beat the shit outta the guys.”
Dr. Fontes, who was also the club’s counselor, and incidentally the sole vote in the old man’s favor, reacted indignantly: “That’s a stupid idea.”
Ambrósio Junior stared at him. The lawyer turned to Ambrósio for support. And found it. The old man stuck out his tongue in disgust. “Stronzo.”
Junior rose from the sofa and dragged himself like a pachyderm to his father’s desk. The structure of the mezzanine creaked. I remember thinking: A lousy place for a fight to break out. In a strategic move of self-preservation, I relocated to a position near the metal stairs leading to the ground floor. Dr. Fontes wasn’t as lucky and found himself penned between the boss’s desk and the edge of the mezzanine. Displeased, he estimated the distance to the ground, about nine feet, and looked at me. If I could have, I’d have shown solidarity by reminding him that things like this were why he was so well paid.
Ambrósio rose from his chair and studied his son with half-closed eyes. His body leaned subtly to the left, ready to throw his fearsome punch. Ambrósio Junior knew this—better than anyone, in fact. So much so that he kept his guard low, both hands resting on the desk, in a peaceful—and ultimately false—posture, for he immediately began to challenge his father by a different means. The insult.
“It’s a serious club,” he commented insidiously. “It doesn’t let just anybody in.”
Ambrósio observed his son for a time, not saying anything and not relaxing his muscles. His jaw twitched. I knew the terrain to which Junior was taking the assault but couldn’t predict how far they would go this time.
The old man’s ancestors were shepherds who lived in isolated mountain villages in Calabria. Coarse and ignorant men who “spent more time in the company of their animals than with their wives,” in Junior’s malicious words. There was a family anecdote, almost a racconto, that he always recalled when he wanted to provoke his father.
Ambrósio Junior’s uncle came to Brazil in search of “spiritual treatment” for cancer and spent a period lodged at his nephew’s home. Junior, who must have been ten or eleven at the time, never forgot the trials his dark-skinned, rough-handed relative confronted in order to adjust to the formalities of civilized life. In his recollection, the man was scarcely more than a barbarian. He refused to enter the bathroom, as if something there—perhaps the shower—threatened him, or to use the toilet, preferring to relieve himself on the balcony of the bedroom where he slept, which wasn’t discovered until his return to Italy.
Ambrósio Junior accompanied his mother in the reconquest of the veritable war zone into which the bedroom had been converted. The place reeked of offal, impregnating the sheets, curtains, and rugs. Dona Rosa ordered everything burned, even the mattress. Junior vividly remembered the expression of outrage on his mother’s face when she encountered the piles of excrement on the balcony. The gentle and aristocratic Dona Rosa was, that day, still light-years away from the treacherous illness that would transform her into a vegetable.
Dona Rosa descended from a line of mill owners in the interior of the state, rather uncultured people but with resources and the good sense to send their children to study elsewhere. She was a pretty, refined, independent woman who began to fight for her own money as soon as she arrived in São Paulo. It was never clear to me how much she knew about her husband’s illicit dealings. They met when they were both still
quite young; he was boxing and also took care of matters at the hauling company. All the rest, including activities as loan shark and slumlord and, later, gambling and smuggling, was handled personally by the legendary Dona Gina.
Ambrósio Junior removed his hands from the desk and straightened his body in an abrupt movement that made him pant and served to put the old man en garde.
“Your money doesn’t buy everything.”
The phrase, though trite, had several consequences. The most important was that old Ambrósio relaxed. He laughed and sat down again, bringing another protest from the structure of the mezzanine. Dr. Fontes replaced the cigarette in his holder and lit it, lofting a puff of gray smoke. I saw sweat exuding from his bald head.
Junior stood in front of his father’s desk, not breathing, looking him up and down, as if waiting for retaliation. Ambrósio nodded his head, amused.
“Did you hear that, Fontes? Look how he’s talking about money.”
Dr. Fontes straightened his tie and flicked away a flake of ash that had fallen onto his six-hundred-dollar Italian cravat, a gift from old Ambrósio to his beloved lawyer, whom he called “the saint of lost causes.”
Ambrósio looked at his son and then at his mother in the frame on the desk. Wrapped in shawls in an armchair, in a wintery pose, her white hair like snow, Dona Gina, very near the end, gazed out rancorously at the world with which she was perpetually engaged in battle.
“Know what she used to say?” The old man stopped to kiss his mother in the picture frame. He made the sign of the cross. “She used to say that to be considered a real man, a guy’s got to first earn his own money.”
Ambrósio studied his son’s reaction. Only his skin changed color. It reddened. The old man knew he was winning the fight, easily, on points. Junior let his breath out with the noise of a refrigerator compressor. His father gave no quarter and, in the manner of a left hook, asked: “Have you told Dr. Fontes the story of the widow?”
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