Winning the Game and Other Stories (5 page)

1.

Detective Miro brought the woman to see me.

“It was her husband,” Miro said, uninterested. In that precinct in the outskirts, husband-and-wife squabbles were common.

Two of her front teeth were broken, her lips injured, her face swollen. Marks on the arms and neck.

“Did your husband do this?” I asked.

“He didn't mean to, sir, I don't want to file a complaint.”

“Then why are you here?”

“At the time I was angry, but not now. Can I go?”

“No.”

Miro sighed. “Let the woman leave,” he said between his teeth.

“You've suffered bodily harm; that's a prosecutable crime independent of your lodging a complaint. I'm going to send you for questioning to see if a crime has been committed,” I said.

“Ubiratan is high-strung but he's not a bad person,” she said. “Please, don't do anything to him.”

They lived nearby. I decided to go have a talk with Ubiratan. Once, in Madureira, I had convinced a guy to stop beating his wife; two others, when I worked in the Jacarepaguá precinct, had also been persuaded to treat their wives decently.

A tall, muscular man opened the door. He was in shorts, shirtless. In one corner of the room was a steel bar with heavy iron rings and two weights painted red. He must have been doing exercises when I arrived. His muscles were swollen and covered with a thick layer of sweat. He exuded the spiritual strength and pride that good health and a muscle-packed body give certain men.

“I'm from the precinct,” I said.

“Ah, so she did file a complaint, the stupid bitch,” Ubiratan grumbled. He went to the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, opened it, and started drinking.

“Go tell her to come home right now or there's gonna be trouble.”

“I don't think you understand why I'm here. I came to ask you to make a statement at the precinct.”

Ubiratan threw the empty can out the window, grabbed the barbell and hoisted it overhead ten times, breathing noisily through his mouth as if he were a locomotive.

“You think I'm afraid of the police?” he asked, looking admiringly and affectionately at the muscles in his chest and arms.

“There's no need to be afraid. You're just going there to make a statement.”

Ubiratan grabbed my arm and shook me.

“Get the hell outta here, you lousy cop, you're starting to get on my nerves.”

I took my revolver from its holster. “I could arrest you for insulting an officer of the law, but I'm not going to do that. Don't make things worse; come down to the precinct with me, you'll be out of there in half an hour,” I said, calmly and politely.

Ubiratan laughed. “How tall are you, midget?”

“Five-eight. Let's go.”

“I'm going to take that piece of shit outta your hand and piss down the barrel, midget.” Ubiratan contracted every muscle in his body, like an animal making itself bigger to frighten the other, and extended his arm, his hand open to grab my gun. I shot him in the thigh. He looked at me, astonished.

“Look what you did to my sartorius!” Ubiratan screamed, pointing to his own thigh, “you're crazy, my sartorius!”

“I'm very sorry,” I said, “now let's go or I'll shoot the other leg.”

“Where you taking me, midget?”

“First to the hospital, then to the precinct.”

“This isn't the last of it, midget, I got influential friends.”

Blood was running down his leg, dripping onto the floor of the car.

“You bastard, my sartorius!” His voice was more piercing than the siren that opened a path for us through the streets.

2.

A warm summer morning on São Clemente Street. A bus struck down a ten-year-old boy. The vehicle's wheels ran over his head, leaving a trail of brain matter several yards long. Beside the body was a new bicycle, without a scratch on it.

A traffic cop caught the driver at the scene. Two witnesses stated that the bus was moving at high speed. The site of the accident was carefully roped off.

An old woman, poorly dressed, with a lit candle in her hand, wanted to cross the police line, “to save the little angel's soul.” She was stopped. Along with the other bystanders, she contemplated the body from a distance. Separated, in the middle of the street, the corpse appeared even smaller.

“Good thing it's a holiday,” a cop said, diverting traffic, “can you imagine if it was a weekday?”

Screaming, a woman broke through the barrier and picked the body up from the ground. I ordered her to put it down. I twisted her arm, but she seemed to feel no pain, moaning loudly, not yielding. The two cops and I struggled with her until we managed to pull the dead boy from her arms and place him on the ground where he should be, waiting for the coroner. Two cops dragged the woman away.

“All these bus drivers are killers,” said the coroner, “good thing the scene is perfect, it means I can do a report that no shyster can shake.”

I went to the squad car and sat in front for a few moments. My jacket was dirty with small remnants of the victim. I tried to clean myself with my hands. I called one of the uniforms and told him to get the prisoner.

On the way to the station I looked at him. He was a thin man who appeared to be about sixty, and he looked weary, sick, and afraid. An old fear, sickness, and weariness, which didn't come from just that day.

3.

I arrived at the two-story house on Cancela Street and the cop at the door said, “Top floor. He's in the bathroom.”

I climbed the stairs. In the living room a woman with reddened eyes looked at me in silence. Beside her was a thin boy, cringing a little, his mouth open, breathing labored.

“The bathroom?” She pointed me toward a dark hallway. The house smelled of mold, as if the pipes were leaking inside the walls. From somewhere came the odor of fried onion and garlic.

The door to the bathroom was ajar. The man was there.

I returned to the living room. I had already asked the woman all the questions when Azevedo, the medical examiner, arrived.

“In the bathroom,” I said.

It was getting dark. I turned on the living room light. Azevedo asked for my help. We went into the bathroom.

“Lift the body,” the M.E. said, “so I can undo the rope.”

I held onto the dead man by the waist. A moan came from his mouth.

“Trapped air,” said Azevedo, “funny isn't it?” We laughed without pleasure. We placed the body on the wet floor. A frail man, unshaven, his face gray, he looked like a wax dummy.

“Didn't leave a note, nothing,” I said.

“I know the type,” said Azevedo. “When they can't take it any longer, they kill themselves fast; it has to be fast before they can change their minds.”

Azevedo urinated into the toilet. Then he washed his hands in the basin and dried them on his shirttails.

I WAS WORKING FOR A POPULAR NEWSPAPER
as a police reporter. It had been a long time since the city had seen an interesting crime involving a rich, young, and beautiful society woman, along with deaths, disappearances, corruption, lies, sex, ambition, money, violence, scandal.

“You don't get crimes like that even in Rome, Paris, New York,” the editor said. “We're in a slump. But things'll change soon. It's all cyclical. When you least expect it, one of those scandals breaks out that provides material for a year. Everything's rotten, just right, all we have to do is wait.”

Before it broke out, they fired me.

“All you have is small-businessmen killing their partners, petty thieves killing small-businessmen, police killing petty thieves. Small potatoes,” I told Oswaldo Peçanha, editor-in-chief and owner of the newspaper
Woman.

“There's also meningitis, schistosomiasis, Chagas's disease,” Peçanha said.

“Out of my area,” I said.

“Have you read
Woman?”
Peçanha asked.

I admitted I hadn't. I prefer reading books.

Peçanha took a box of cigars from his desk and offered me one. We lit the cigars, and soon the atmosphere was unbreathable. The cigars were cheap, it was summer, the windows were closed, and the air conditioning wasn't working well.

“Woman
isn't one of those colorful publications for bourgeois women on a diet. It's made for the Class C woman, who eats rice and beans and if she gets fat, tough luck. Take a look.”

Peçanha tossed me a copy of the newspaper. Tabloid format, headlines in blue, some out-of-focus photographs. Illustrated love story, horoscope, interviews with
TV
actors, dressmaking.

“Think you could do the ‘Woman to Woman' section, our advice column? The guy who was doing it left.”

“Woman to Woman” carried the byline of one Elisa Gabriela.
Dear Elisa Gabriela, my husband comes home drunk every night and—

“I think I can,” I said.

“Great. You start today. What name do you want to use?”

I thought a bit.

“Nathanael Lessa.”

“Nathanael Lessa?” Peçanha said, surprised and offended, as if I'd said a dirty word or insulted his mother.

“What's wrong with it? It's a name like any other. And I'm paying homage to two people.”

Peçanha puffed his cigar, irritated.

“First, it's not a name like any other. Second, it's not a Class C name. Here we only use names pleasing to Class C, pretty names.

“Third, the paper only pays homage to who I want it to, and I don't know any Nathanael Lessa. And finally”—Peçanha's irritation had gradually increased, as if he were taking a certain enjoyment in it—“here no one, not even me, uses a masculine pseudonym. My name is Maria de Lourdes!”

I took another look at the newspaper, including the staff. Nothing but women's names.

“Don't you think a masculine name gives the answers more respectability? Father, husband, priest, boss—they have nothing but men telling them what to do. Nathanael Lessa will catch on better than Elisa Gabriela.”

“That's exactly what I don't want. Here they feel like their own bosses, they trust us, as if we were all friends. I've been in this business twenty-five years. Don't come to me with untested theories.
Woman
is revolutionizing the Brazilian press; it's a different kind of newspaper that doesn't run yesterday's warmed-over television news.”

He was so irritated that I didn't ask exactly what
Woman
was out to accomplish. He'd tell me sooner or later. I just wanted the job.

“My cousin, Machado Figueiredo, who also has twenty-five years' experience, at the Bank of Brazil, likes to say that he's always open to untested theories.” I knew that
Woman
owed money to the bank. And a letter of recommendation from my cousin was on Peçanha's desk.

When he heard my cousin's name, Peçanha paled. He bit his cigar to control himself, then closed his mouth, as if he were about to whistle, and his fat lips trembled as if he had a grain of pepper on his tongue. He opened his mouth wide and tapped his nicotine-stained teeth with his thumbnail while he looked at me in a way that he must have considered fraught with significance.

“I could add ‘Dr.' to my name. Dr. Nathanael Lessa.”

“Damn! All right, all right,” Peçanha snarled between his teeth, “you start today.”

That was how I came to be part of the team at
Woman.

My desk was near Sandra Marina's, who wrote the horoscope. Sandra was also known as Marlene Katia, for interviews. A pale fellow with a long, sparse mustache, he was also known as João Albergaria Duval. He wasn't long out of communications school and constantly complained, “Why didn't I study dentistry, why?”

I asked him if someone brought the readers' letters to my desk. He told me to talk to Jacqueline in the office. Jacqueline was a large black man with very white teeth.

“It won't go over well being the only one here who doesn't have a woman's name; they're going to think you're a fairy. Letters? There aren't any. You think Class C women write letters? Elisa made them all up.”

DEAR DR. NATHANAEL LESSA.
I got a scholarship for my ten-year-old daughter in a fancy school in a good neighborhood. All her classmates go to the hairdresser at least once a week. We don't have the money for that, my husband drives a bus on the Jacaré-Caju line, but he says he's going to work overtime to send Tania Sandra, our little girl, to the hairdresser. Don't you think that our children deserve every sacrifice?
DEDICATED MOTHER. VILLA KENNEDY.

ANSWER:
Wash your little girl's head with coconut soap and wrap it in curling paper. It's the same as the hairdresser. In any case, your daughter wasn't born to be a doll-baby. Nor anyone else's daughter, for that matter. Take the overtime pay and buy something more useful. Food, for example.

DEAR DR. NATHANAEL LESSA.
I am short, plump, and shy. Whenever I go to the outdoor market, the store, the vegetable market, they trick me. They cheat me on the weight, the change, the beans have bugs in them, the cornmeal is stale, that kind of thing. It used to bother me a lot, but now I'm resigned to it. God is watching them and at the day of judgment they will pay.
RESIGNED DOMESTIC. PENHA.

ANSWER:
God doesn't have his eye on anybody. You have to look out for yourself. I suggest you scream, holler, raise a scandal. Don't you have a relative who works for the police? A crook will do also. Get moving, chubby.

DEAR DR. NATHANAEL LESSA.
I am twenty-five, a typist, and a virgin. I met this boy who says he really loves me. He works in the Ministry of Transportation and says he wants to marry me, but first he wants to try it out. What do you think?
FRENZIED VIRGIN. PARADA DE LUCAS.

ANSWER:
Look, Frenzied Virgin, ask the guy what he plans to do if he doesn't like the experience. If he says he'll dump you, give him what he wants, because he's a sincere man. You're not some Kool-Aid or stew to be sampled. But there aren't many sincere men around, so it's worth a try. Keep the faith and full speed ahead.

I went to lunch.

When I got back Peçanha called me in. He had my copy in his hand.

“There's something or other here I don't like,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“Ah, good God, the idea people have of Class C,” Peçanha exclaimed, shaking his head pensively while he looked at the ceiling and puckered his lips. “It's Class A women who like being treated with curses and kicks. Remember that English lord who said his success with women came from treating ladies like whores and whores like ladies.”

“All right. So how should I handle our readers?”

“Don't come to me with dialectics. I don't want you to treat them like whores. Forget the English lord. Put some happiness, some hope, tranquility, and reassurance in the letters, that's what I want.”

DEAR DR. NATHANAEL LESSA.
My husband died and left me a very small pension, but what worries me is being alone and fifty years old. Poor, ugly, old, and living a long way out, I'm afraid of what's in store for me.
LONELY IN SANTA CRUZ.

ANSWER:
Engrave this in your heart, Lonely in Santa Cruz: neither money, nor beauty, nor youth, nor a good address brings happiness. How many rich and beautiful people kill themselves or lose themselves in the horrors of vice? Happiness is inside us, in our hearts. If we are just and good, we will find happiness. Be good, be just, love your neighbor as yourself, smile at the clerk when you go to pick up your pension.

The next day Peçanha called me in and asked if I could also write the illustrated love story. “We turn out our own stories, not some translated Italian
fumetti.
Pick a name.”

I chose Clarice Simone, two more homages, though I didn't tell Peçanha that.

The photographer of the love stories came to talk to me.

“My name is Monica Tutsi,” he said, “but you can call me Agnaldo. You got the pap ready?”

Pap was the love story. I explained that I had just gotten the assignment from Peçanha and would need at least two days to write it.

“Days, ha ha,” he guffawed, making the sound of a large, hoarse domesticated dog barking for its master.

“What's so funny?” I asked.

“Norma Virginia used to write the story in fifteen minutes. He had a formula.”

“I have a formula too. Take a walk and come back in fifteen minutes; your story'll be ready.”

What did that idiot of a photographer think I was? Just because I'd been a police reporter didn't mean I was stupid. If Norma Virginia, or whatever his name was, wrote a story in fifteen minutes, so could I. After all, I read all the Greek tragedies, the Ibsens, the O'Neills, the Becketts, the Chekhovs, the Shakespeares, the
Four Hundred Best Television Plays.
All I had to do was appropriate an idea here, another one there, and that's it.

A rich young lad is stolen by gypsies and given up for dead. The boy grows up thinking he's a real gypsy. One day he meets a very rich young girl, and they fall in love. She lives in a fine mansion and has many automobiles. The gypsy boy lives in a wagon. The two families don't want them to marry. Conflicts arise. The millionaires order the police to arrest the gypsies. One of the gypsies is killed by the police. A rich cousin of the girl is assassinated by the gypsies. But the love of the two young people is greater than all these vicissitudes. They decide to run away, to break with their families. On their flight they encounter a pious and wise monk who seals their union in an ancient, picturesque and romantic convent amidst a flowering wood. The two young people retire to the nuptial chamber. They are beautiful, slim, blond with blue eyes. They remove their clothes. “Oh,” says the girl, “what is that gold chain with a diamond-studded medallion you wear on your neck?” She has one just like it! They are brother and sister! “You are my brother who disappeared!” the girl cries. The two embrace. (Attention Monica Tutsi: how about an ambiguous ending? Making a non-fraternal ecstasy appear on their faces, huh? I can also change the ending and make it more Sophoclean: they discover they're brother and sister after the consummated fact; the desperate girl leaps from the convent window and creams herself down below.)

“I liked your story,” Monica Tutsi said.

“A pinch of Romeo and Juliet, a teaspoon of Oedipus Rex,” I said modestly.

“But I can't photograph it, man. I have to do everything in two hours. Where do I find the mansion? The cars? The picturesque convent? The flowered wood?”

“That's your problem.”

“Where do I find,” Monica Tutsi continued as if he hadn't heard me, “the two slim, blond young people with blue eyes? All our models tend toward the mulatto. Where do I get the wagon? Try again, man. I'll be back in fifteen minutes. And what does Sophoclean mean?”

Roberto and Betty are engaged to be married. Roberto, who is very hard working, has saved his money to buy an apartment and furnish it, with a color television set, stereo, refrigerator, washing machine, floor polisher, dishwasher, toaster, electric iron, and hair dryer. Betty works too. Both are chaste. The date is set. A friend of Roberto's, Tiago, asks him, “Are you going to get married still a virgin? You need to be initiated into the mysteries of sex.” Tiago then takes Roberto to the house of the Superwhore Betatron. (Attention Monica Tutsi: the name is a pinch of science fiction.) When Roberto arrives he finds out that the Superwhore is Betty, his dear fiancée. Oh heavens! What a horrible surprise! Someone, perhaps a doorman, will say, “To grow up is to suffer.” End of story.

“One word is worth a thousand photographs,” Monica Tutsi said. “I always get the short end of things. I'll be back soon.”

DR. NATHANAEL.
I like to cook. I also like to embroider and crochet. And most of all I like to wear a long evening gown and put on crimson lipstick, with lots of rouge and eye shadow. Ah, what a sensation! What a pity that I must stay locked in my room. No one knows that I like to do these things. Am I wrong?
PEDRO REDGRAVE. TIJUCA.

ANSWER:
Why should it be wrong? Are you doing anyone harm? I had another reader who, like you, enjoyed dressing as a woman. He carried on a normal, useful, and socially productive life, to the point that he was chosen a model worker. Put on your long gowns, paint your lips scarlet, put some color in your life.