Rubem Fonseca - Winning the Game and Other Stories

“She looks like a sailor, with her face all wrinkled and sunburned,” Ermê said. “She’s different from you, you’re so pale!”

“It’s so I can keep my poet’s face,” I said. “Let’s go to my favorite place in the house.”

Ermê looked at the shelves full of books. “I spend most of my time here,” I said. “Sometimes I sleep here on the sofa; it’s a kind of bedroom-library. It has a small bathroom off to the side.”

We were standing, so close our bodies were almost touching. Ermê wore no makeup on her face, her neck, her arms, but her skin shone with health. I kissed her. Her mouth was fresh and warm like mature wine.

“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.”

JOAQUIM MANUEL DE MACEDO, A Walk Through the Streets of Rio de Janeiro (1862–63) the art of walking in the streets of rio de janeiro

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.