Rubem Fonseca - Winning the Game and Other Stories

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?”