São Paulo Noir

by Tony Bellotto

  On those occasions, Margot would take a leisurely bath in the river, put on some perfume, slip on the necklace of açaí beads that her father had given her, and don the only clothes she considered nice. It was her favorite day. They would return with bagfuls of lumpy flour, beans, rice, noodles, potatoes, dried beef, and a two-liter bottle of guaraná to share on Sunday.

  She followed this routine for four years, until her mother found work in the home of a family in a condominium in Ponta Negra, a district of Manaus where the population with the highest purchasing power was concentrated.

  Life at the edge of the river improved. They had more money for expenses, the younger children were in school, and their mother came home every Sunday.

  At sixteen, Margot fell in love with Edinaldo, a muscular youth who worked as a stevedore at the port of São Raimundo, from which the barges linking Manaus to Iranduba departed. To avoid malicious gossip, they would meet in the most deserted places in the neighborhood.

  One Sunday, she waited for her mother to fall asleep and quietly left to meet her boyfriend. Fuinha, the grandson of Baré Indians, who at fifteen roamed around the area drunk, caught them in a dark corner, she with her mouth on Edinaldo’s sex.

  The couple hoped that the meddler’s state of intoxication wouldn’t allow him to discern or remember the scene he had witnessed. They were wrong. The next day, she awoke to shouts of “Cocksucker!” coming from three boys not yet ten years old.

  Life became hell. When they saw her, neighborhood women would whisper and laugh, men would make gestures alluding to the scene in the alley, street urchins would grab her rear and run away. She was given the nickname Catfish Mouth. Her mother, a fervent evangelical, accused her of disgracing the family.

  Intimidated, Margot locked herself in the house. The few times she needed to go to the store, she heard insults and provocations that she bore in silence. The afternoon she lost patience with a group at the door of a bar and replied that the cocksuckers were their mothers, she went home with the taste of blood in her mouth and her face swollen. Her mother blamed her for having provoked the men.

  The aggression caused such revolt in her spirit that she decided to carry a sharp knife in her waistband, hidden under her T-shirt.

  For weeks she avoided passing by the bar, until she was forced to do so one afternoon in the Amazonian heat. Two of the aggressors were drinking beer at the counter. Her precaution of changing to the opposite sidewalk was futile: they crossed the street, wanting to know if the little whore was happy with the beating she had received.

  Her head lowered, she tried to move around them and continue on her way, but they blocked her path.

  The shorter one laughed when he saw the knife. He was the first to fall. The fatter one tried to run but was overtaken in the middle of the street.

  She ran home, put her clothes and hammock in her backpack, got the money she had saved up as a washerwoman, and left without saying where she was going.

  At the port of Iranduba she caught the barge, crossed the Rio Negro, and disembarked at São Raimundo, where Edinaldo found her a spot on a small fishing boat that took her to the port of Manaus, next to the market. There, she bought a second-class ticket on one of the boats that travel the Amazon as far as Belém do Pará.

  On the deck, a painted sign indicated the different sides for women and men, some of whom were blond and were speaking unfamiliar languages. She walked past them without anyone bothering her, and went behind a corner to set up her hammock in the women’s wing. She needed the help of a crew member to find a spot on the overloaded vessel.

  She was enchanted to see the muddy waters of the Solimões travel for kilometers side by side with the Negro, without mixing. And for the first time in her life, she saw a river that didn’t have dark waters.

  Four days’ journey crossing the jungle, to the sound of forró music on deck, voices from transistor radios, and endless conversations between passengers in colorful hammocks, docking in isolated communities and larger cities. In each port, the commotion of cargo, boxes and more boxes of soft drinks, men, women, and children descending with packages, plastic shopping bags with red and blue stripes, television sets in crates, bags of flour on their backs, and cans of paint, while another wave quickly boarded in search of nooks in the wooden ceiling from which to hang their hammocks and mark off their personal space.

  In Óbidos and Santarém, the federal police came on board to inspect the baggage, looking for the cocaine paste that goes down the Negro and the Solimões toward Manaus and then follows the Amazon to Belém. One of them stopped in front of her.

  “You got drugs in that backpack?”

  She didn’t answer, she simply opened the zipper and began to remove her belongings. The policeman interrupted: “You can close it. You look like a good girl.”

  The journey, which had begun Wednesday afternoon, ended in Belém on Sunday morning under a merciless sun.

  Alone in an unknown city, she looked for the cheapest boardinghouse she could find. After walking for hours, following directions given by passersby, she stopped before a place in Terra Firme, the most populous district in Belém, formed thanks to an invasion of federal lands on the banks of the Tucunduba River.

  In the small, stuffy room, she did the arithmetic: her money would last five days, if she didn’t eat.

  The next morning, there was a knock at the door. It was Kézia Giselle, the tenant in the room next door. Almost six feet tall, Kézia empathized with her neighbor’s story and was willing to help her.

  “Dear, you have the body and the age that men like. I’ll arrange some clothes for you. My part is 30 percent.”

  At the hands of her companion, at sixteen years of age, Margot debuted as a street prostitute.

  Kézia taught her to get paid before performing her services, to refuse drunks, not to do drugs, to charge extra for unusual sexual favors, and to identify by their eyes the perverts who might beat her. According to the agreement, of the thirty reais she usually charged, nine went to her companion.

  On good nights she would have five or six dates. At the end of the night, she would sit at the counter of the bakery, order a coffee with bread and butter from the grill, buy a chocolate bar, and go home with money in her purse and the certainty that she was getting ahead in life.

  The exceptions were the nights when the police showed up to extort. She was outraged at having to give them the money earned through so much sacrifice, but what was the alternative? To be hauled to the precinct as a dealer of the cocaine they put in your bag so they can claim they caught you red-handed?

  One night an older man with gray hair pulled up to the curb in a sports car. Unlike her usual clientele, he was well dressed, cultivated, and polite, which made her feel safe.

  Instead of stopping the car on a side street, as was the norm, they went to a motel. En route, he asked if she knew Rio de Janeiro, spoke of Sugar Loaf, Corcovado, Copacabana, the bars and restaurants along the beach, Carnival, and the samba schools. Margot listened eagerly to the description of that world she knew only from soap operas.

  The client went into the room carrying a bag. He took out a small envelope of cocaine, which she refused, meticulously divided it into lines with the sharp blade of a red pocketknife, and took a long snort.

  The drug left him with an agitated look in his eyes. He opened the bag and took out a pair of red patent-leather shoes with high heels. He removed his shirt and pants. Instead of undershorts he was wearing black lace panties, triangular, that barely concealed his sex. He put on the shiny shoes and paraded back and forth in front of her as she lay on the bed.

  Then he lay down on his stomach, handed her the belt from his trousers, and ordered her to whip him. With each stroke he asked for more force, in an authoritarian tone that intimidated her. With his back marked, he opened the bag again, took out a plastic penis, and handed it to her. She hesitated; it was large and thick and would hurt him, but he begged her, almost in tears.

  Relucta
ntly, Margot stuck the plastic penis in her client, who screamingly implored her to use more force. Blood ran from his butt and stained the sheet. He asked her to whip him again.

  In the midst of the whipping, with the dildo rammed as far as it would go, the client came.

  She dropped the belt, rose from the bed, and went into the bathroom. When she returned, he was snorting another line of coke. Seeing her ready to leave, he said: “Where do you think you’re going? The best part of the party comes now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Now you lie down and I’m going to stick this dildo in you.”

  She replied that she wouldn’t do such a thing for any amount of money. The man insisted, he’d pay double, promised he wouldn’t hit her, he just wanted to see the penetration. Adamant, Margot moved toward the door.

  She already had her hand on the knob when she was grabbed from behind, the knife blade against her throat. Forced back onto the bed, she felt the heat of blood descending between her breasts, there was no way to resist; she thought he would cut her throat.

  She smiled and said she’d charge an extra fifty, with the condition that he use Vaseline. Dry, she wouldn’t do it. Without taking the knife from her wounded neck, he allowed her to reach for her purse on the nightstand.

  Margot handed him the tube and asked him to let her take off her shorts and panties. Busy opening the tube while his companion undressed, the man committed the indiscretion of setting the knife down on top of the pillow.

  The thrust caught him in the middle of the chest.

  Margot opened the door, descended the stairs, climbed on the hood of the car with her shoes in her hand, reached the top of the wall, and jumped into the vacant lot on the other side.

  The following week, two armed men appeared at the boardinghouse. They were searching Margot’s room when Kézia arrived. They wanted to know the whereabouts of her neighbor who had knifed an entrepreneur from the duty-free zone. When she said she didn’t get involved in the other girls’ lives, she took a blow to the chin that sent her reeling.

  Lying on the floor, she heard that the man had barely escaped with his life and had hired them to wreak his revenge on the assailant; they would go to the gates of hell after her. With a revolver against her head, Kézia confessed that, after the incident, her friend had changed her post to an avenue on the other side of the city.

  They had been gone only a few minutes when Margot arrived. With an ice-filled plastic bag against her chin, her friend recounted what had happened and advised her to disappear.

  She closed out her accounts and fled to Salvador—in her backpack, clothes thrown together in haste and the address of Vanessa, from the same area as Kézia, who worked in a nightclub in the Lower City.

  The two got along very well. Without asking anything in return, Vanessa arranged a vacancy in the rooming house where she lived, introduced Margot to her friends, to Soft Finger, owner of the drug site next door, to Raimundo, responsible for the safety of the girls whose post was the Largo de Roma, and to the madam who came by every Friday to collect the eighty reais owed for the right to that post.

  It was with Vanessa that she learned the badger game, a con in which the client is led to a tenement room, where the couple is surprised in the middle of sex by one of Raimundo’s henchmen, claiming to be a vice squad policeman charged with cracking down on prostitution in the district. The amount of the extortion was divided equally.

  The badger game brought in a good profit until it was used against a state prosecutor. Margot was sentenced to three years and eight months; Vanessa, a recidivist, to five years and two months.

  In the crowded cells of the prison, Margot met Mindinha do Pó, a trafficker in Soft Finger’s gang, caught in the act with five kilos of marijuana and three hundred grams of cocaine she was transporting to Porto Seguro, on the coast of Bahia.

  She left prison convinced she should start working in drug trafficking. Better to take chances in that millionaire world than to risk dying at the hands of some pervert in the poverty of prostitution.

  Soft Finger read the note signed by Mindinha: “Okay. There’s just one thing. If you’re caught, you take the rap by yourself. If you rat on any of us, you die; if you try to play us, you die sooner. Crime has its rules.”

  She was taken into the team of dealers who distributed cocaine in the Lower City bars. Loyal and able to keep a promise, she quickly won the confidence of customers and her bosses and was promoted to group coordinator. It was her job to weigh and distribute the drugs to the street dealers, check the money from sales, and serve as go-between with the police, an activity that won her a reputation as a skilled negotiator.

  She interacted so well with the cops that heads of other drug gangs hired her services to achieve less extortionary financial agreements.

  “Even the police trusted me.”

  The converse, however, was not true.

  “They’re the worst kind of people. They don’t invest money in purchasing, they don’t go to the trouble of selling, they’re never harassed, and they don’t end up in jail. They don’t risk anything, they only show up to collect the dough. When they don’t get paid, they arrest everybody.”

  She never imagined she would one day get her hands on so much money. She earned more in a night than prostitution paid in a month. She could buy dresses, jeans, designer sneakers, sunglasses, yogurt and cheese at the supermarket, imported cosmetics. She had her hair done at the best salon in the district. Twice a week she ate at a steakhouse. She took taxis. She had more pairs of shoes than would fit in her closet.

  “From a hooker, I became one of those spoiled daddy’s girls.”

  Her social rise was interrupted when Soft Finger went to war to take over one of his competitor’s territories, and he lost his head, severed to serve as an example. Margot was arrested as a trafficker, sentenced this time to eight years, of which she served four.

  Upon being set free, she had no trouble returning to trafficking, but the police wouldn’t leave her alone.

  “I was a marked woman, it was raid after raid. One time, they took the cocaine and the dough I was carrying. I went hungry to pay the supplier.”

  Weary of persecution, she decided to come to São Paulo. A stranger in such a large city could relaunch her life without the permanent threat of the police. As she packed her bags, she concluded that, despite the setbacks, she had in fact improved her life: “I left Manaus with three T-shirts, an old pair of pants, and two pairs of cheap shorts; from Belém, a little better. I left Salvador with two suitcases full of shoes and pretty clothes. I was proud of myself.”

  She rented a room at a small hotel near the Estação da Luz, recommended by a friend who ran crack from São Paulo to Feira de Santana in the backlands of Bahia.

  Swearing to never again set foot in a jail cell, she went back to street prostitution.

  “Sure, it pays less than trafficking, but the chances of staying alive and free are much better.”

  Months later, she was invited to work in a house in Baixo Augusta, an area close to downtown and its concentration of bars and nightclubs with heavy nocturnal activity.

  “It was a chic place, a select atmosphere, lots of big spenders. I charged eighty per trick, sometimes more, depending on the person. There weren’t those gross, stupid men like in the Lower City.”

  Between the percentage she received from the customers’ bar tab and what she earned going up to the rooms on the second floor, she made more than two thousand a month.

  “Plus, it was all inside the house, without the dangers of the street.”

  In the anonymity of the city, she experienced the freedom she’d never had. She succeeded in renting a studio apartment to live in on her own, on Rua Dr. Teodoro Baima, near Avenida Ipiranga.

  “For the first time in my life, I had my own place, cramped but arranged to my personal taste.”

  She made friends with a group of clients from the club. On Saturdays she would go with them for feijoada
at a restaurant close to Paissandu Square. Now and then, at the end of the night, they would have dinner at Boi na Brasa, a traditional steakhouse that survived the disappearance of the dive bars near Rua General Jardim. One bright Sunday she was introduced to and fell in love with Ibirapuera Park: the ducks on the lake, the trees, attractive men and women on bicycles wearing colorful clothes, couples with their children in baby carriages, joggers in shorts and tank tops.

  “I walked among those people like a respectable woman. Nobody knew who I was or how I made my living.”

  She always avoided romantic involvement. In her years in the profession, she had witnessed the suffering of others like her, in love with men of low character interested only in exploiting them. The two or three boyfriends she’d had in Bahia hadn’t really touched her heart.

  “I stayed with them more out of need, I didn’t expect anything in return. When they went away, I missed them a bit, but I didn’t suffer.”

  With her more relaxed life in São Paulo, she let down her guard a little.

  Edu was five years younger. He was so delicate the first night when they went up to the bedroom that she found it odd.

  “I thought he was gay.”

  Two days later, he returned. The waiter served him whiskey and her a fruit cocktail. They talked and laughed. When Margot asked if he wanted to go upstairs, the young man said no, he was there just to invite her to go to a movie the following afternoon.

  After the movie and a sandwich, he accompanied her to the door of her building. She didn’t invite him in—it was her habit to avoid problems with the neighbors and maintain the intimacy of the home she had always dreamed of.

  They went out several other times. They traded confidences. He revealed he had been hooked on cocaine but had been clean for six months. Because of his drug use, he had been kicked out of his parents’ house and lost his job. Abstinence had brought back his self-esteem and a return to the parental home.

  “Before I realized it, I was in love. I never would have believed it. Since Edinaldo, in my adolescence back in Iranduba, it was the first time.”