São Paulo Noir

by Tony Bellotto

  The Final Table

  by Marcelo Rubens Paiva

  Baixo Augusta

  One truth for those who live at night: where there’s amusement, there’s blood. Where there are excesses, everything can be expected. Where there’s happiness, there’s pain, there’s death. Hedonism is deceptive, it’s a fantasy: that’s why everything is fake in Las Vegas and Disneyland. That’s why on the most bohemian and merrymaking street in Brazil, Rua Augusta, pain is too close to happiness and entertainment.

  Chief Detective Marcelo Santana couldn’t believe that a heinous crime had been committed right under his nose. The girl, without any clothes or ID, had already been there in the thicket of the gigantic plot, 24,000 square meters, across from the 4th Precinct, for four days, according to forensics. A plot in dispute because activists wanted to make it into a park, and the owner into high-rises, signed and sealed by the courts to be known as Augusta Park.

  The detective descended the ramp leading to the precinct, through the gate forced open by his assistants, into the thicket, and lamented seeing such a young girl naked and dead. No one had witnessed anything. It was the strong smell of the decomposing body that drew attention. Detective Santana was furious: not only had a homicide been committed, the girl barely even out of her adolescence, but they hadn’t even buried or burned her. Left her to the elements. Like a warning!

  “Right across from my precinct!” he shouted on Marquês de Paranaguá. “On this shitty, controversial piece of land, just to attract the press! To challenge me!”

  His highly esteemed team of investigators didn’t know how the body in such an advanced stage of putrefaction had ended up there either, and they were as outraged as their boss.

  She was a dark-skinned girl, pretty. Painted fingernails and toenails. She had been strangled. Had anyone reported a missing young woman in recent days? Nothing. It was as if she had fallen from the sky, though if her dental records or prints were in some file in some system, it wouldn’t be hard to identify her.

  “Check street vendors, residents, whores, gas station attendants.”

  “We did, sir. Nothing.”

  “Check again! Do the buildings have security cameras? Get the tapes.”

  “Yes. We found nothing.”

  “Trash collectors?”

  “They didn’t see anything.”

  “Doormen.”

  “No sir, no one saw anything.”

  It wasn’t possible to determine if she was a resident or just a night worker in the area. The activists who sometimes staged protests and occupied the park that was not yet a park and, depending on the size of the bribes distributed by the construction firm that owned the land and its lobbyists, never would be, didn’t recognize the girl, didn’t see anything, didn’t know anything. The most perturbing part was that, despite it being the busiest area in the city, despite the comings and goings of a precinct that dealt with the confusion of a conflict-filled district, no one saw anything.

  The girl paid a severe price. She was where she shouldn’t have been. She saw what she shouldn’t have seen. And they had been merciless: it’s not a region for amateurs or the adventurous. If every city has an arterial thoroughfare that summarizes and unabashedly exposes its disorder, from glamour to the darkness of the saddest dive, I doubt anyone in São Paulo would disagree we’re referring to this feminine street of unstable moods, ever in transformation and conflict, Rua Augusta, which cuts the city from downtown to the districts, the Jardins, begins at the intersection of Martins Fontes and Martinho Prado—an homage to the Prados, a billionaire family that amassed its fortune in the nineteenth century, through coffee of course, and brought the railroad to the state. It is a street that crosses Franklin Roosevelt Square, or just Roosevelt Square, ascends, passes by nightclubs, whorehouses, dives, cantinas, ethnic restaurants (Greek, Spanish, Italian, Bahian), hotels, theaters, colleges, art-film houses, record stores, street vendors selling pirated DVDs of classic films, street vendors selling pirated DVDs of films that haven’t yet been released or have just appeared in theaters (including the theater in front of them), street vendors selling pirated software, another selling T-shirts, incense, handicrafts, a street vendor selling pirated copies of gay films, another selling pirated DVDs of leftist films, and bookstores; the street crosses Avenida Paulista, the most important avenue in the city, the Brazilian Fifth Avenue, and begins to descend to what was once known as the Cordilheira da Paulista, the high part of the city that houses radio and TV antennae, data transmission, cell towers, then descends again, leaving behind the sourness, another art-film house, more restaurants, traditional stores like Casa Tody, which has sold footwear to the São Paulo middle class for over seventy years; it goes past Americanized luncheonettes, luxury supermarkets, a French restaurant, crosses Rua Oscar Freire which once had luxury designers like Ermenegildo Zegna, H. Stern, Gucci, Chanel, Bulgari, Rolex, Cartier, to emerge in the Jardins, as if from a turbulent polluted sea with a countercurrent that becomes a calm and prosperous delta, which begins at Rua Estados Unidos, a neighborhood of houses worth millions, where the wealthiest people in the country live, a country that is home to both the richest on the continent and the poorest.

  At the intersection of Augusta and Paulista, playboys of the rebel-without-a-cause stripe from a 1960s-style “gang that knew no fear” ran red lights at high speeds. They called it “São Paulo roulette.” I don’t know how, but they laughed at this. And the homage in an ingenuous rock song by the Young Guard, that even the Os Mutantes recorded: “I raced up Rua Augusta at seventy-five miles an hour, scattered the pedestrians, took the curve on two wheels without honking, stopped inches from the show window. Cool . . .”

  Cool, really, is the sensitive and cultured samba, not at all ingenuous, that the Bahian Tom Zé of the Tropicália movement would perform: “Augusta, how I miss you. You were vain, how I miss you, and I spent my money, how I miss you, on imported clothes and other foolishness . . .” Much other foolishness. And what other foolishness . . . In the rotten part, the central region, anything can be bought: expensive sex, cheap sex, same-sex sex, sex you think is with the opposite sex but holds a surprise between the legs, pure cocaine, adulterated, cheap, false, marijuana, crack, Ecstasy, weapons, fights, watered-down wine and amusement, if the customer’s liver holds up. In an American city it would be known as the red-light district. In São Paulo, it’s Baixo Augusta.

  It’s not known with any certainty when the street’s prostitution began to spread to the south side of Avenida Paulista. The girls did well, while on the other side of Paulista, the luxury boutiques also did well. A portion of the population of the city contaminated with AIDS in the 1980s contracted the virus in those alleys, saunas, and nightclubs. The trail from 1875, bearing the well-behaved and pious name of Maria Augusta, which crossed the lands of the Chácara do Capão belonging to the Portuguese Manuel Antônio Vieira, saw the arrival in 1890 of horse- and mule-drawn streetcars. In 1891 they changed to electric. Division into parcels brought houses, commerce, small residential buildings, small hotels, large ones, flophouses, fitness centers, a traditional Italian confectioner, even ice-skating rinks, workout and aerobic centers, all under the vigilance of the 4th Precinct at 246 Marquês de Paranaguá, responsible for combating and investigating lawlessness and serious crimes in the region, especially focused on the always tense relationship between transvestites, prostitutes, and their customers, drug traffic, and robbery, sometimes followed by death, death that always left Chief Detective Marcelo Santana furious. Not to mention the perennial cunning of drunk customers and nightclub bouncers with no notion that they almost invariably overstepped the rules of behavior and the ethics of professionals of the night by using excessive brute force against the perfect jaws and teeth of their rich young clientele.

  It was in the decade of the seventies that Augusta began to lose its glamour. Shopping centers came on the scene, and the stores moved there. Prostitution, previously limited to below Roosevelt Square, began to rise and
spread. Houses and hotels profited from the new market. Nightclubs in the 1960s featured the cream of MPB, Brazilian popular music, even Elis Regina, and catered to young men looking for strippers with Americanized names like Shirley, Brooke, and Daisy. Congestion took over the street, from Paulista to the city center. Wretched losers in search of amusement, like humiliating girls and cross-dressers, caused confusion that Chief Detective Marcelo Santana didn’t know how to handle, and sometimes abusing his authority, he simply blocked off the street with sawhorses and police cars, a blockade that lasted for hours and infuriated the nightclub owners.

  Starting with the new millennium in 2000, flouting the rigid laws of silence passed by conservative administrations who wished to “clean up” the city, some professionals of the night began opening nightclubs with shows in an area where everyone was accustomed to the commotion, noise, lack of control, and the insanity of bohemian life. From this came the nickname Baixo Augusta, or Lower Augusta, an allusion to those spots most often associated with Rio de Janeiro—Baixo Leblon and Baixo Gávea. Venues with English names opened, such as Vegas Club and Studio SP, coming from Vila Madalena, repressed by corrupt city officials, the Pub, Club Noir, Inferno, Play, Fire. They were “ballads,” as the spaces for dance, shows, and amusement came to be known, which attracted a more elite public and students to the moral chaos. On parallel or perpendicular streets, excitement also became professionalized. Some whorehouses closed. Their neon lights disappeared. They were bought by the owner of the Vegas, who opened a bar called Neon. The press celebrated the revitalization of Rua Augusta.

  A detail known to few: a guy is partner in a club, which has another guy as partner, who has participation in another club, forming a domino effect with influence in high spheres of power. The first clubs were founded by friends. Friends who would win or lose money at night basically because they liked the night. They won or lost money on Mondays, the day the clubs were closed, in a poker game in which few knew the rules, which began at the home of Plínio, a journalist specializing in music, a bohemian, a bachelor, a former addict, former alcoholic, who hosted the game of poker dice with male and female friends, married, single, fathers, mothers with nannies, idlers, those less interested in betting than in gossiping, seeing friends, drinking, snorting a few lines, witnessing some drag races, and having a few laughs. Nights that became the stuff of legend.

  Poker dice would earn its winner at most fifty bucks. To participate, players threw five thousand reais on the table. Gradually it turned into poker with cards, first the traditional exclusive game, later a sloppy open session, until it adopted all the rules and principles of Texas Hold’em, in which there is room for ten players (as many as twenty-two can play), which some knew and taught to the others. Amateurs, little by little, became familiar with terms like blind, popularly known as pingo until that decade, small blind, big blind, all-in. Cacife became buy-in. The pot. To pass, check.

  New residents moved into the apartment next to Plínio, which had been vacant for a while. They were a weird family, not at all trustworthy, who seemed modern, made friends with everyone in the building, but deep down were hypocrites: they detested noise after the ten p.m. limit established in the condo regulations. A couple with two small children. The wife dressed like a punk: torn fishnet stockings, heavy makeup, leather skirts, and T-shirts featuring hardcore bands. The husband had the face of a psychopath: he would go downstairs in a Speedo to pick up the pizza and lock his unruly son in the hall as punishment. Beyond a doubt, it must have been the wife who started calling the doorman’s desk on Mondays to complain that the poker game was exceeding the limit of forty-five decibels allowable in residential zones after ten at night, quieter than a crying baby (fifty decibels), which under Article 42 of federal law governing penalties for infraction (Law No. 3.688, of October 3, 1941) carries a fine or a sentence of two weeks to three months—disturbing the peace of others with shouting and racket.

  After the third night in which “a neighbor” complained of noise, according to the doorman speaking over the intercom, Turquinho, an owner of Fire, one of the first nightclubs on the “new” Augusta, dedicated to fans of Brazilian music—a place that Plínio and his friends frequented, where they knew all the employees’ names, and routinely skipped ahead in line—suggested they move the game there. On Mondays the nightclub was closed for the workers’ day off; on Mondays only Amaral, a combination of doorman, bouncer, and amiable manager, who lived on the second floor of the club, monitored the place. The area was semideserted. A perfect solution. It wouldn’t be a meeting at a friend’s home, whose purpose in reality was seeing one another and badmouthing friends who happened to be absent that Monday. It had bathrooms, space, a wet bar, even a VIP room with sofas, a parking lot where you could hold onto your car key, and Amaral to keep watch on comings and goings. Not to mention the numerous restaurants for sandwiches, health food, vegetarian fare, pizza, and cocaine dealers who delivered.

  There, the following Monday, playing over a plank resting on sawhorses that Plínio helped to get from the storeroom and cover with an old tarpaulin, was the same group. A group that had known one another for years. And were familiar with the tricks of each player: the heavy hand, the bluffer, the methodical kind, the wild man. Plínio almost always won. Because Plínio, on doctor’s orders and not from personal choice, had stopped smoking and given up marijuana, stopped drinking hard liquor, and gave a wide berth to the sink where the lines of cocaine were, sticking to the classic and stimulating Coca-Cola. While his friends went crazy, Plínio, more sober than ever, raked in the chips.

  On leaving, he would see hookers unhappy at a slow Monday leaning against lampposts, walls, gates, on the stairs of two-story houses, where who knows what transpired on the second floor: most of them were quite young, fake blondes, biracial women recently arrived in the big city. That kind of boredom is more depressing than arousing. Prostitution was one leisure activity that held no attraction for Plínio. He felt sorry for the girls, despite knowing, as did every denizen of the night, that many of them were not there by choice but because of the urgent need to earn some money.

  The Monday-night table was a delight. The smell of an old “ballad,” of past drink. The club they went to was packed from Tuesday to Sunday. The smell of happiness, of craziness. Sweating walls. Leaks. All dark with artificial light. A well-decorated nightclub. Mondays, it was all theirs. And a very fun poker game.

  They would spend the week trashing the losers on social media, reliving the unusual plays, the near victories, the bluffs. Nicknames emerged, Carnival music was sung in mockery, like “Grandpa’s pipe just won’t rise, for all his effort, Grandpa can only agonize!” Almost always the same players lost. But amateur poker follows the rules of horseracing: sometimes a beginner hits the jackpot. Often because he does crazy things that an experienced player wouldn’t do and unexpectedly claims the pot. The losers were the ones who drank too much and lost concentration. As in football, the winner is the one in best condition physically. If the player tires toward the end, if he keeps checking his watch, if he needs to get up early and the game drags on, he does mad things, commits suicide like a kamikaze, blows everything in a play that resembles a counterattack by a country that has already lost the war and goes for all or nothing. Ted, a photographer who worked with Plínio on the newspaper, was one of those. With two small children and a bossy wife who was constantly phoning him, at the end he would invariably go all or nothing. Drunk. And usually he went bust.

  The problem was that the game that started for small stakes began to have an impact on the losers’ pockets. The buy-in was fifty, with the right to two or three rebuys. A big loser could drop two hundred. Four hundred if he was unwise. Everyone there was a grown-up. If he wanted to lose five hundred, he did. If he couldn’t decide when to quit, he would wake up the next morning with a spiritual hangover worse than the alcoholic one. And poorer.

  Deal the cards, shuffle, remember whose turn it was to ante, or who was the small an
d big blind, cover the bet . . . It was no longer just a poker game. It demanded attention, some sobriety—go, your bet, go—it changed, required a professional dealer. So they hired one who, it was said, had even dealt cards in Ronaldo’s home. A phenomenon, himself a football player addicted to Texas Hold’em who became the spokesman for the Poker Stars site. With the pro dealer, the game picked up its pace. Someone was finally controlling the anarchy. And with the dealer, they bought a professional table. The dealer made a good bit of money during the night, plus a tip from the winner. More people wanted to get in the game, which was becoming known to friends of friends. Plínio was outvoted—No, let’s keep it among friends. But he’s so-and-so’s cousin, and the guy who owns the bar is a friend of mine since childhood . . . No problem. They hired another dealer, bought another professional table, and started charging money beforehand for pizza and drinks.

  Plínio and Ted noticed it right away. More expressions in English came to be part of the gambling, like bet. The verb betar acquired a conjugation (eu betei, ele betou, eles betaram), as did foldar, from fold, flopar (from flop), showdown, turn . . . Plínio was supremely irritated when flush draw entered the player’s vocabulary to stay, an expression he had to google to understand. To increase the bet became raisar (to raise). And, surprisingly, betting followed a pattern. If someone bet two, the next one bet four, always double. A guy only bet holding an ace if he was well positioned, after the big blind. The pattern was noticed. Something changed.