by Peter Robb
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READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT FROM
Death in Brazil
Available from Picador
Copyright © 2004 by Peter Robb
I
MIXED BLOOD
MURDERS happen anywhere and mine most nearly happened in Rio. Twenty years later only the scar of a small knife wound on my arm reminds me that this is a memory and not a dream. The night went on and on like a dream, with a dream’s ungraspable logic, or a Brazilian soap’s. Details become wonderfully vivid, like the old carving knife with a long curved and darkened blade carelessly left earlier on the kitchen bench of the Copacabana flat, in the moment it was being held at my throat. My Portuguese lost its rudimentary awkwardness and became unreally fluent very fast. Words I’d never known I knew came pouring from my throat. Things flowed with a dream’s weightless speed. The danger lay in the speed. A flailing knife blade moves faster than thought. Movement had to be slowed, the heat lowered. It was the one thing I understood. Let nothing happen. Respond to violence, speed and noise not with violence, speed and noise but with ponderous torpidity, envelop each new threat in slowness. The beautiful Portuguese periods began to roll, slowly, slowly, but with what baroque grace, from my amazing tongue. Obtuse fearlessness stayed the hand with the knife, impassive calm put a little wobble in the spin of violence.
Chance put the knife in Adelmo’s way. Chance, or Brazilian entropy, had saved me a moment before we worked our way to the kitchen. The hideously old-fashioned Brazilian furniture, in the sitting room where it started, was a wasteful mass of dark stained solid tropical woods and dark brown cowhide upholstery and rows and rows of little brass studs. Adelmo grabbed a lamp and then a chair to smash my head. The lamp’s base was cast iron and the chair too heavy to wield. When we got to the kitchen and he grabbed the knife, a tiny part of the first fatal impetus had been lost.
There—elaborately, ponderously, holding his eye hypnotically—I laid out the options. I told him that since he held the knife, if he wanted to kill me he probably could. Yet there was nothing of value in the flat. This looked likely. There were a couple of pairs of jeans and a few faded polo shirts flung around and that was all. The American dollars under the mattress would have been to Adelmo a huge amount, but I didn’t mention them. If Adelmo started looking he would find the money in seconds and kill to leave with it. It was important that Adelmo’s mind be kept off looking for cash. The baroque periods surged and crashed, like the thunder of surf in the night, as Adelmo learned that the noise of any assault would be heard by the neighbors in the next apartment. The neighbors, Adelmo heard in an elaborately inserted parenthesis, were close friends of mine. There were several of them next door, young, physically vigorous, and holders of a spare front door key to the apartment we were in. The apartment was vacant, but what was baroque prose for, if not to put a spin on simple realities? Finally, the doorman downstairs—armed of course, and a family friend—was the only person able, from within his reinforced glass booth, to activate the mechanism that unlocked the heavy glass doors that opened onto Our Lady of Copacabana Avenue, and the doorman had strict instructions never to let visitors out of the building unless they were accompanied by myself. A strange order, improbable even, but a slight cause for concern to anyone who might be planning to kill and leave. By name I mentioned the particularly hideous Rio jail where Adelmo would spend the rest of his life.
This little touch kicked in to great effect. Nobody likes to feel trapped, and Adelmo knew all too well the experience of being locked in. He hated it. Later, when the emotional cycle had turned again, he showed me the scars on his legs that had been made by the bullets fired at him by the reform school guards as he ran off. Adelmo had been fending for himself since he was very young. And for the next couple of hours he held the carving knife to me in the kitchen. And talked. He laid out his life in words. The flashing-eyed knife-waving anger dissolved in tears of unhappiness at his lot. The only reason he hadn’t killed me, he said with an unexpected sob, was that I’d been so good to him. The restaurant, the respect. He would have killed anyone else. Then the knife was at my throat again. Still holding the knife, he threw his arms around me. Kiss me, he said, and I did. It was a very charged and prolonged kiss. The illusion of hieratic distance conjured by ornate prose suddenly vanished. I already saved you tonight, Adelmo said. The guy on the bus was going to knife you.
Very likely. As the juddering, madly speeding late night bus had swung and hurled us to our destination, a giant of a black man, an amazingly tall and muscular figure in running shorts and running shoes and a tank top, had been toward the end of the journey the only other passenger. He seemed to know Adelmo. They had talked apart for a while, and the stranger glanced across at me from time to time. You didn’t understand what we were saying, Adelmo said now. We were talking carioca slang. He wanted to roll you. He wanted to knife you and I said no. What I remembered was that in one of his huge hands the black man was kneading, while he and Adelmo talked inaudibly, a rather finely made gold spectacle frame, an elderly person’s spectacle frame. The lenses were gone, and his hand was reducing the frame to a tiny compact ball of twisted gold wire. I wondered what had happened to the owner of the glasses.
Adelmo didn’t often get the chance to talk about himself and in those days I was a good listener, even without a knife at my throat. Adelmo was happy that, maybe for the first time in his life, he had an audience. Through all the moods and phases of the night, however, the kitchen knife was always there. Once, as if to remind me of my place, Adelmo slashed my arm with the knife. The cut wasn’t deep but the flowing blood raised feelings of danger, violence, and panic. You’ll tell them I attacked you. Adelmo slashed his own arm and started bleeding too. He calmed down. I’ll tell them you knifed me first. He was pleased at the logic of his self-wounding. The danger passed and he went back to telling me about himself, between declarations of love and spasms of murderous rage. We went on for
hours, standing in the little kitchen. In the end we were clinging to each other and too exhausted to go on. We wiped off some of the sticky blood and went downstairs. The doorman hardly woke as he buzzed us out. The sky was getting lighter over the Atlantic.
I caught sight of Adelmo again the following night, crossing a square in the centre of Rio. He was hard to miss. He was wearing, at a very rakish tilt, a beret in shocking pink angora. It set off his virile features in a striking manner. He waved cheerfully and seemed on top of things again. It was the last time I saw him. I left a couple of days later and it was years before I went back to Rio. The night in the kitchen at Copacabana with the carving knife felt like the logical and personal conclusion of various other things I’d seen and experienced on that and earlier visits in the early eighties. It was hard not to feel that visiting Rio was asking for trouble. Things were starting to break apart in Rio. The signs were everywhere.
In that very building, the day I had rented the apartment a few months earlier, I came home to a foyer full of military police. One grabbed me and threw me against a wall and a couple of others began, not gently, to search me. Someone said, That’s not him, and I was flung aside. Police were swarming all over the building. When I got upstairs, I glanced out of the window, which gave onto a kind of small enclosed garden. One or two stories below was a sloping roof that stopped at a wall on the garden. The wall was built up a little beyond the bottom of the roof to hide the slope, and in this gutter between roof and wall, partly hidden by some opulent green foliage, I was looking down on a poorly dressed black youth who was lying very low and very still. Later the police left and when I looked out again the boy was gone too.
Another time a boy raced barefoot across the promenade, the cycling track, the palm lined central island and the multiple traffic lanes of the Avenida Atlântica, away from the beach and heading for one of the transverse streets that led through Copacabana and, eventually, to the mountainside that rose behind the strip of apartment blocks, sheer out of the flat coastal strip, walls of rock, clefts of green. A watch bracelet was glinting in the boy’s hand and the military police were shooting at him, and into the crowd on the footpath. They missed the boy, and the schoolchildren and housewives and street vendors and the people heading home from the beach and the taxi drivers talking and smoking while they waited for fares. The police didn’t always miss, when they shot into a crowd of Brazilians.
The boy was making for the precarious jumble of shacks that clung to the rocky peaks. This was the favela and his home. In a reversal of the world’s more usual urban growth, which had the hovels of the poor clustered at the base of green hills where the rich lived in their big houses, Rio’s peculiarity had the twentieth-century apartments of the wealthy spread along the beachfronts—first of Guanabara Bay and then of the long ocean beaches to the south—while the unaccommodated poor, flooding to Rio from all over Brazil, made their flimsy homes on the breathtaking and dangerous heights of the monoliths looming over the concrete real estate. Shacks crashed into green crevasses with every downpour, but the view from Rio’s favelas was stupendous. I climbed up once to look around, and found a pastoral settlement whose most dangerous inhabitant was a huge brown sow wandering its paths. Twenty years later, no outsider would dream of entering a favela without protection. The name of the favela came from a long way away. In the remote hinterland of Bahia in the Northeast of Brazil there was a rocky peak rising by a flat riverbed called Monte Favella. At the end of the previous century thousands of Brazilian troops had been sent from Rio and other places south on a terrible punitive expedition and they had camped on Monte Favella, which gave its name, after they came back, to the encampments of the poor on the spectacular hills of Rio. But it would be years before I learned what happened at Canudos, the place overlooked by Monte Favella.
One day, changing some of the Yankee dollars I had smuggled out of Italy, I was given twice as many greasy wads of big red cruzeiro notes as even the day’s exchange rate warranted. The sheer distractedness about the value of money that Brazil’s rate of monetary inflation promoted was another symptom of social breakdown that was almost as vivid as the children on the streets and the police shooting into crowds. The supermarkets of Rio were being looted in those days by people who left the money and took the sacks of beans and rice. Money in Brazil was something you dealt in fistfuls. You didn’t bother to count it.
Brazilians were living through the long dragged out death of a military dictatorship that had lasted for nearly twenty years, though there was no sign then of an end to the agony of military rule. Brazil under the military had lacked the kind of drama that caught the world’s interest. There had been none of Chile’s bombing of the presidential palace, no murder of an elected leader, no massacres in the football stadium, no caravan of death. Neither had there been the disappearances of Argentina, the unmarked gray Ford Falcons, the unspeakable tortures, the still living bodies dropped into the sea from helicopters, the ignominy of a lost war in the South Atlantic. There was in Brazil no brilliantly sustained urban guerrilla resistance to match the exploits of Uruguay’s Tupamaros, no permanent guerrilla army in the jungle like Colombia’s or Peru’s. For the world there was something dispersive in Brazil’s hugeness, something that made it hard to focus on. When the Brazilian military had taken power a decade before the others, it happened so blandly that the world hardly noticed. The United States, poised between Kennedy’s murder and the Vietnam War, prized stability and acquiescence in its hemispheric neighbors and thought military rule in Brazil would be a good thing, and so in 1964 did a lot of people in Brazil. The governor of Rio tried to rally the troops against their leaders, but he failed and followed the president into exile.
Also by Peter Robb
M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio
A Death in Brazil: A Book of Omissions
Peter Robb has divided his time living in Brazil, southern Italy, and Australia for the last quarter century. He is the author of A Death in Brazil and M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio, which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year.
MIDNIGHT IN SICILY. Copyright © 1996, 2007 by Peter Robb. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robb, Peter.
Midnight in Sicily / Peter Robb.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42684-2
ISBN-10: 0-312-42684-4
1. Political corruption—Italy—Sicily. 2. Sicily (Italy)—Politics and government—1945– 3. Mafia—Italy—Sicily. 4. Political corruption—Italy. 5. Italy—Politics and government—1976–1994. 6. Organized crime investigation—Italy. 7. Andreotti, Giulio. I. Title.
DG869.3.R63 1998
945'.8092—dc21
97–41778
CIP
Originally published in Australia by Duffy & Snellgrove
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First Picador Edition: December 2007
eISBN 9781466861299
First eBook edition: November 2013
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