Winning the Game and Other Stories (13 page)

“What about your aunts?” Ermê asked as I placed her on the sofa.

“They never come here. Don't worry.” Her body had the firmness and scent of a tree of many fruits and flowers, the strength of an animal wild and free. I shall never be able to forget her.

“Why don't you find a job and marry me?” Ermê asked. I laughed, for the only thing I knew how to do was write poems. And why work? I was quite rich and when my aunts died would be richer still. “I'm rich too but I plan to work,” Ermê said. “All right, let's get married,” I said. I got dressed, left the library, and went to the pantry.

Without a word, Dona Maria Nunes handed me the bottle of champagne and two glasses. I took Ermê to the Small Parlor, pushed aside the books that still occupied the antique table, and placed the champagne and glasses on it. Ermê and I sat down, side by side.

I took from my pocket the black crystal flask that Aunt Helena had given me that night, and I recalled our conversation behind the door: I myself must choose and sacrifice the person I am to eat on my twenty-first year of life, isn't that it? I asked. Yes, thou must kill her thyself; use no foolish euphemisms; thou wilt first kill her and then eat her, today, the day thou thyself hast chosen, and that is all, Aunt Helena replied. And when I said I did not want Ermê to suffer, Aunt Helena said: Do we ever make people suffer? And she gave me the black crystal flask decorated with wrought silver, explaining that it contained an extremely powerful poison, the smallest drop of which was enough to kill; as colorless, tasteless, and odorless as pure water, it would cause instant death—we have had this poison for centuries and it grows even stronger, like the pepper our ancestors brought from India.

“What a lovely bottle!” Ermê exclaimed.

“It's a love potion,” I said, laughing.

“Really? Do you swear?” Ermê was laughing too.

“One small drop for you, one small drop for me,” I said, letting a drop fall into each glass. “We're going to fall madly in love with each other.” I filled the glasses with champagne.

“I'm already madly in love with you,” Ermê said. With an elegant gesture she raised the glass to her lips and took a small sip. The glass fell from her hand onto the table and broke, and Ermê's face fell against the fragments of crystal. Her eyes were still open as though she were lost in thought. She never even knew what happened to her.

My aunts came into the room, along with Dona Maria Nunes.

“We are proud of thee,” said Aunt Helena.

“Nothing will be wasted,” said Aunt Regina. “The bones will be ground up and given to the pigs, along with corn meal and cobs. We'll make sausage from the intestines. The brains and the choice cuts thou shalt eat. Where dost thou wish to begin?”

“With the tenderest part,” I said.

From the window of my room I could see the beginning of daybreak. As commanded in the Decalogue, I donned my dress coat and awaited my summons.

At the great table in the Banquet Hall, which I had never in my life seen in use, my mission was fulfilled amid great pomp and circumstance. Every light of the immense chandelier was burning, making the black formal attire of my aunts and Dona Maria Nunes glow.

“We seasoned it very lightly in order not to spoil the taste. It's almost raw. It's a piece of rump, very tender,” said Aunt Helena. Ermê was slightly sweet like veal, but tastier.

As I swallowed the first mouthful, Aunt Julieta, who had been watching me attentively, seated like the others around the table, removed the Ring from her forefinger and placed it on mine.

“It was I who took it from thy father's finger on the day he died, and kept it for today,” said Aunt Julieta. “Now art thou head of the family.”

In a word, the state of immorality was general. Clergy, nobility and the common people were all perverted.

JOAQUIM
MANUEL DE
MACEDO,
A Walk Through the Streets of Rio de Janeiro
(1862–63)

AUGUSTO, THE WALKER, WHOSE REAL NAME IS EPIFÂNIO,
lives in a space above a women's hat shop on Sete de Setembro, downtown, and he walks the streets all day and part of the night. He believes that by walking he thinks better, finds solutions to his problems;
solvitur ambulando,
he tells himself.

In the days when he worked for the water and sewerage department, he thought of giving up everything to live off writing. But João, a friend who had published a book of poetry and another of short stories and was writing a six-hundred-page novel, told him that a true writer shouldn't live off what he wrote, it was obscene, you couldn't serve art and Mammon at the same time, therefore it was better for Epifânio to earn his daily bread at the water and sewerage department and write at night. His friend was married to a woman who suffered from bad kidneys, was the father of an asthmatic child, his mentally defective mother-in-law lived with them, and even so he met his obligations to literature. Augusto would go home and find he was unable to rid himself of the problems of the water and sewerage department; a large city uses a lot of water and produces a lot of excrement. João said there was a price to pay for the artistic ideal—poverty, drunkenness, insanity, the scorn of fools, affronts from the envious, lack of understanding from friends, loneliness, failure. And he proved he was right by dying from a sickness caused by fatigue and sadness, before completing his six-hundred-page novel. Which his widow threw in the trash along with other old papers. João's failure did not dishearten Epifânio. When he won a prize in one of the city's many lotteries, he resigned from the water and sewerage department to dedicate himself to the task of writing, and adopted the name Augusto.

Now he is a writer and a walker. Thus, when he isn't writing—or teaching whores to read—he walks the streets. Day and night he walks the streets of Rio de Janeiro.

At exactly three a.m., when Haydn's
Mit dem Paukenschlag
sounds on his Casio Melody, Augusto returns from his walks to the empty upstairs apartment where he lives, and sits down, after feeding the rats, in front of the small table occupied almost entirely by the enormous notebook with lined pages where he writes his book, under the large skylight through which a ray of light enters from the street, mixed with moonlight on nights when there is a full moon.

In his walks through the city's downtown, since he began writing the book, Augusto looks attentively at all there is to be seen—facades, roofs, doors, windows, posters stuck on walls, commercial signs, whether luminous or not, holes in the sidewalk, garbage cans, sewer drains, the ground he steps on, birds drinking water from puddles, vehicles, and especially people.

Another day he went into the theater-temple of Pastor Raimundo. He found the theater-temple by chance; the doctor at the Institute had told him that a problem in the macula of his retina demanded treatment with vitamin E in combination with selenium and had sent him imprecisely to a pharmacy that prepared the substance, on Senador Dantas Street, somewhere near the intersection with Alcindo Guanabara. Upon leaving the pharmacy, and after walking a little, he passed the door of the movie theater, read the small poster that said
CHURCH OF JESUS SAVIOR OF SOULS FROM 8 TO 11 DAILY
and went in without knowing why.

Every morning, from eight to eleven, every day of the week, the theater is occupied by the Church of Jesus Savior of Souls. Starting at two in the afternoon it shows pornographic films. At night, after the last show, the manager puts the posters with naked women and indecorous publicity slogans away in a storage area next to the bathroom. To the church's pastor, Raimundo, as well as the faithful—some forty people, most of them elderly women and young people with health problems—the theater's usual program is unimportant; all films are in some way sinful, and none of the church's believers ever go to the movies, because of an express prohibition from the bishop, not even to see the life of Christ at Eastertide.

From the moment that Pastor Raimundo places a candle, actually an electric light bulb, on a pedestal that imitates a lily, in front of the screen, the locale becomes a temple consecrated to Jesus. The pastor hopes the bishop will buy the theater, as he has done in certain districts in the city, and install a permanent church there, twenty-four hours a day, but he knows that the bishop's decision depends on the results of his, Raimundo's, work with the faithful.

Augusto is going to the theater-temple that morning, for the third time in a week, with the idea of learning the songs the women sing,
Flee from me, flee from me, O Satan, my body is not thine, my soul is not thine, Jesus has defeated thee,
a mixture of rock and samba. Satan is a word that attracts him. It has been a long time since he went into a place where people pray or do anything like it. He remembers as a child having gone for years on end to a large church full of images and sad people, on Good Friday, taken by his mother, who forced him to kiss the feet of Our Lord Jesus Christ lying with a crown of thorns on his head. His mother died. A diffuse memory of the color purple has never left him. Jesus is purple, religion is linked to purple, his mother is purple, or was it the purple satin lining her coffin? But there is nothing purple in that theater-temple with bouncers who watch him from a distance, two young men, one white and one mulatto, thin, small, short-sleeved dress shirt and dark tie, circulating among the faithful and never coming near the chair in the rear where he is sitting, motionless, wearing dark glasses.

When they sing
Flee from me, O Satan, Jesus has defeated thee,
the women raise their arms, throwing their hands backwards above their heads, as if they were rebuffing the demon; the bouncers in short sleeves do the same; Pastor Raimundo, however, holding the microphone, directs the chorus by raising only one arm.

Today, the pastor focuses his attention on the man in dark glasses, missing an ear, in the back of the theater as he says, “Brethren, everyone who is with Jesus raise your hands.” All the faithful raise their hands, except Augusto. The pastor, very disturbed, sees that Augusto remains immobile, like a statue, his eyes hidden by the dark lenses. “Raise your hands,” he repeats with emotion, and some of the faithful respond by standing on tiptoe and extending their arms even higher. But the man without an ear does not move.

Pastor Raimundo came from the state of Ceará to Rio de Janeiro when he was seven years old, along with his family, who were fleeing drought and hunger. At twenty he was a street vendor on Geremário Dantas Street, in the Madureira district; at twenty-six, pastor of the Church of Jesus Savior of Souls. Every night, he gave thanks to Jesus for this immense gift. He had been a good vendor, he didn't cheat his customers, and one day a pastor, hearing him selling his merchandise in a persuasive way, as he knew how to speak one word after another at the correct speed, invited him to enter the Church. In a short time Raimundo became a pastor; he was now thirty, had almost lost his Northeastern accent and acquired the neutral speech of certain Rio natives, for it was like that, impartial and universal, that the word of Jesus must be. He is a good pastor, just as he was a good vendor and a good son, since he took care of his mother when she became paralyzed and dirtied her bed, until the day of her death. He cannot forget the senile, failing, and moribund body of his mother, especially the genital and excretory areas that he was obliged to clean every day; sometimes he has disgusting dreams about his mother and regrets that she didn't die of a heart attack at fifty, not that he remembers what she was like at fifty; he only remembers his mother as old and repellent. Because he knew how to say words rapidly one after the other, and with correct meanings, he was transferred from the outlying Baixada district to downtown, as the Church of Jesus Savior of Souls wanted to bring the word of God to the most impenetrable districts, like the center of the city. The center of the city is a mystery. The South Zone is also difficult; the wealthy disdain the evangelical churches, the religion of the poor, and in the South Zone the church is frequented during weekdays by old women and sickly young people, who are the most faithful of the faithful, and on Sundays by maids, doormen, cleaning workers, dark-skinned and poorly dressed folk. But the rich are worse sinners and need salvation even more than the poor. One of Raimundo's dreams is to be transferred from downtown to the South Zone and find a way into the heart of the rich.

But the number of faithful going to the theater-temple hasn't increased, and Raimundo may have to go to preach in another temple; perhaps he will be forced to return to the Baixada, for he has failed, he has not been able to take the word of Jesus convincingly where the Church of Jesus Savior of Souls most needs to be heard, especially these days, when the Catholics, with their churches nearly empty, have abandoned their intellectual posture and are counterattacking with the so-called charismatic movement, reinventing the miracle, resorting to faith healing and exorcism. They, the Catholics, had already gone back to admitting that the miracle exists only if the devil exists, good dominating evil; but it was still necessary for them to perceive that the devil is not metaphysical. You can touch the devil—on certain occasions he appears as flesh and blood, but he always has a small difference in his body, some unusual characteristic—and you can smell the devil, who stinks when he is distracted.

But his, Raimundo's, problem is not with the lofty politics of the relations of his Church with the Catholic Church; that's a problem for the bishop. Raimundo's problem is the faithful of his parish, the dwindling collection of tithes. And he is also disturbed by that man in dark glasses, missing one ear, who didn't raise his hand in support of Jesus. Since that man appeared, Raimundo has begun suffering from insomnia, having headaches, and emitting gases with a fetid odor from his intestines that burn his ass as they are expelled.

Tonight, while Raimundo doesn't sleep, Augusto, sitting in front of his enormous notebook with lined pages, jots down what he has seen as he walked through the city and writes his book
The Art of Walking in the Streets of Rio de Janeiro.

He moved upstairs over the hat shop to facilitate writing the first chapter, which comprises only the art of walking in the downtown area of the city. He doesn't know which chapter will be the most important, when it is done. Rio is a very large city, protected by hills from whose top you can take in the whole of it, in stages, with a look, but the downtown is more diversified and dark and old, the downtown has no true hill; as occurs with the centers of things in general, which are flat or shallow, the downtown has only a single hillock, unduly called Saúde Hill, and to see the city from above, and even then only poorly and incompletely, you must go to Santa Teresa Hill, but that hill isn't above the city, it's somewhat to the side, and from it you don't get the slightest idea of what the downtown is like. You don't see the streets' sidewalks; at best, on certain days you see the polluted air hovering over the city.

In his wanderings Augusto still has yet to leave the downtown, nor will he do so any time soon. The rest of the city, the immense remainder that only the Satan of the Church of Jesus Savior of Souls knows in its entirety, will be traversed in due time.

The first owner of the hat shop lived there with his family many years before. His descendants were some of the merchants who continued to live downtown after the great flight to the districts, especially to the South Zone. Since the 1940s, almost no one lived in the two-story houses on the major streets of the downtown area, in the city's commercial core, which could be contained in a kind of quadrilateral with one of its sides Avenida Rio Branco, another a meandering line beginning at Visconde de Inhaúma and continuing along Marechal Floriano to Tomé de Souza Street, which would be the third side, and finally, the fourth side, a rather twisted course born at Visconde do Rio Branco, passing through Tiradentes Square and Carioca Street to Rio Branco, enclosing the space. The two-story houses in this area have become warehouses. As the hat shop's business dwindled year by year, for women had stopped wearing hats, even at weddings, and there was no further need for a storage space, as the small stock of merchandise could all fit in the store, the upstairs, which was of interest to no one, became empty. One day Augusto passed by the door of the hat shop and stopped to look at the wrought iron balconies on its facade, and the owner, an old man who had sold just one hat in the last six months, came out of the store to talk with him. The old man said that the house of the Count of Estrela had been located there, in the time when the street was called Cano Street because the water pipes for the fountain of Palace Square ran through it, a square that later would be called Dom Pedro II Square and then Quinze Square. “The habit people have of changing the names of streets. Come see something.” The old man climbed to the second floor with Augusto and showed him a skylight whose glass was from the time the house was built, over ninety years old. Augusto was enchanted by the skylight, the enormous empty room, the bedrooms, the bathroom with English porcelain, and by the rats that hid when they walked past. He liked rats; as a child he had raised a rat that he had become attached to, but the friendship between the two had ended the day the rat bit him on the finger. But he continued to like rats. They say that the waste, the ticks, and the fleas from rats transmit horrible diseases, but he had always gotten along well with them, with the exception of that small problem of the bite. Cats also transmit horrible diseases, they say, and dogs transmit horrible diseases, they say, and human beings transmit horrible diseases, that much he knew. “Rats never vomit,” Augusto told the old man. The old man asked what they did when they ate food that was bad for them, and Augusto replied that rats never ate food that was bad for them, for they were very cautious and selective. The old man, who had a sharp mind, then asked why lots of rats died of poisoning, and Augusto explained that to kill a rat it was necessary to use a very potent poison that killed with a small, single bite from the rodent, and, in any case, not many rats died from poisoning, considering their total population. The old man, who also liked rats and for the first time had met someone who had the same affection for the rodents and liked old skylights, invited him to live in the space, despite having inferred from the conversation that Augusto was a “nihilist.”