Rubem Fonseca - Crimes of August

At 2:30 a.m., forty-six members of the presidential personal guard arrived at the barracks.

“The full complement of the guard is eighty-three men,” said Major Enio Garcez dos Reis, chief of the Catete Palace police, who accompanied the president’s personal guards. “But given the sudden call-up asked of me, I was only able to locate forty-seven men.”

Someone questioned whether the number making up the personal guard was two hundred and not eighty-three, as Major Enio claimed.

Faced with these affirmations, the major explained that the number of effectives was eighty-three, but admitted the existence of a supplementary contingent of an additional one hundred and seventeen men.

In groups of five, the guards paraded in front of Lacerda and the authorities who had accompanied him.

It was four a.m. when the inspection ended. Two guards had been called aside by Lacerda.

“I recognized in Antonio Fortes Filho,” said the journalist, “the physical type that most resembled the short, fat individual who was posted at the corner of Paula Freitas and Tonelero. And in José Pombo Pereira, known as Pombo Manso, the individual most resembling the one who shot the major.”

THE BEGGAR RUSSO, arrested by officers of the air force, indicated the person who had bought the revolver he had found on Avenida Beira Mar on the day of the assassination, an employee of Standard Esso. He and the beggar were brought face to face in the offices of the national aviation authority. The weapon was confiscated.

DAY WAS BEGINNING TO BREAK when Climerio abandoned his small place in the country, Happy Refuge, carrying a small suitcase with clothes, a few papers, a revolver with six bullets, and the fifty-three thousand cruzeiros Soares had given him two days earlier when he met with him in Republic Square downtown, beside the Campo de Santana. The money had been picked up by Valente from Gregório’s drawer in the Catete Palace, following the orders of the head of the personal guard himself. Valente had charged Soares with getting the money to the fugitive.

Before leaving, he watered his fruit trees and the small garden where he grew kale, tomatoes, pumpkins, and manioc. Whenever he visited the farm, he watered the plantings daily, even on days when atmospheric conditions presaged rain.

He fed the three hogs.

He arrived, exhausted, at nightfall, at the farm of his friend Oscar Barbosa, on Taboleiro Hill, in the Tinguá mountain range.

Oscar and his wife Honorina were sitting at the table, having dinner, when they were surprised by the arrival of Climerio.

Climerio said he’d got into some trouble in the capital and needed a place to hide.

Oscar didn’t ask what his friend’s troubles were and invited him to sit and share with them the corn mush and beef they were eating.

After eating, Oscar told Climerio that the following day he would take him to hide out in a shack in the middle of a banana grove in the mountains. In the shack was only an old mattress, but he would be safe there and no one would find him. Daily, either Oscar or Honorina would take food to him.

FREITAS WOKE UP ON THE FLOOR to a light touch on his shoulders. The pantryman, bending over, asked: “Are you all right, sir?”

The senator looked at his wristwatch. Half past noon.

“I’m fine. Go run my bath.”

The pantryman, whose name was Severino, a poor young man of twenty-two, accepted the senator’s rude treatment without complaining. His salary and the tips he got when the senator was in a good mood helped to support his widowed mother and his eight younger brothers and sisters back in Caruaru, Pernambuco.

He ran the hot bath, dipping his elbow in the water in the tub to check that the temperature was as the senator demanded. He placed two large fluffy towels and the newspapers on a small bench next to the bathtub.

The senator himself sprinkled aromatic bath salts into the water. “If there are any calls, tell them I left for the Senate.”

The hot water enveloping his body gave him a feeling of well-being. He clutched between his fingers the rolls of fat of his belly. He had to do something to get rid of those undesirable accumulations of adipose. Exercise, diet, anything. He would like to have a belly like Lomagno’s, hard-muscled and well defined. Clemente, his adviser, had once had such a belly, but the sedentary life he was leading had left his body more and more flaccid. He made a mental note that he needed to get rid of Clemente. The adviser had gone from merely impertinent and inopportune to dangerous. But it was necessary to carry out the operation with great skill in order to avoid irritating him and provoking an unreasonable reaction.

He picked up the newspapers. No confirmation of the rumors circulating in the Senate, that Getúlio Vargas, in an effort to divide the armed forces, had named General Zenóbio da Costa to replace Air Force Secretary Nero Moura, who had waffled on the open insubordination of those under his command. Secretary Nero Moura had emphatically denied the phrase attributed to him in Última Hora that Major Vaz had not been killed as an officer of the air force. The secretary was obliged to deny this, whether he had said it or not, and could not repeat what supporters of Getúlio were spreading around the city, that Vaz was a kind of hired gun for Lacerda and had been killed as such. In the Chamber, Deputy Ivete Vargas, grandniece of the president, had asked, “Why are those guarding the president called gunmen and those guarding Lacerda called friends?”

Cardinal Jaime de Barros Câmara had sent a message to Brigadier Eduardo Gomes. It said: “With the thought of the generous traditions of the Brazilian people, formed by the stimulus of Christian civilization, it is directed to priests of all Brazil, through their most excellent bishops, the request that on the same day and hour they unite in prayer for the soul of the sacrificed aviator, a sincere Catholic, raising prayers to God for the conciliation and peace of the Brazilian family.”

The senator was convinced there was a well organized campaign under way to discredit Vargas, in which participated the church, sectors of the armed forces, elements of the business community, opposition parties, and the press. The more mud thrown onto Vargas, the better. Earlier, it was shady dealings of members of the administration that were denounced. Now, it was crimes. In January 1920, according to newspaper reports, Getúlio Vargas, with his accomplice Soriano Serra, were said to have killed Tibúrcio Fongue, chief of the Inhacorá Indian tribe. The inquiry had been quashed. Facsimiles of pages from the various inquiries were reproduced in newspapers. In 1923, Vargas, still with the complicity of Soriano Serra, was alleged to have murdered the engineer Ildefonso Soares Pinto, the secretary of public works of the then governor, Borges de Medeiros. “Soriano was arrested, but the other assassin, Getúlio Vargas, remains free to this day.”

“Vargas’s past is marked by monstrous crimes. Still a boy, he had already committed homicide,” said the Tribuna da Imprensa . In Ouro Preto, in Rio Grande do Sul, three were said to have been “slaughtered by the Vargas men and their hired guns”: the student Almeida Prado, the medical doctor Benjamim Torres Filho, and Major Aureliano Morais Coutinho. “All were killed under conditions of treachery similar to the ambush on Rua Tonelero.” The Vargas gunmen, it was alleged, “ripped Major Coutinho apart in the middle of the street after a savage mutilation of his body.” All these accusations were corroborated by a mass of documents reproduced in the newspapers.

Ripped apart. Treacherous ambush. Savage mutilation. Lacerda knew the power of words, thought Freitas; he had a good schooling in the Communist Party, where he’d been the young leader of a group known as Red Aid. An interesting path from exalted sectarian communist to reactionary Host-eating UDN leader, even more fire-breathing. In both factions he had proven unequaled in the creation of incendiary slogans. Such as “the Rat Fiúza,” which had destroyed the aspirations of the Communist Party candidate in the 1946 presidential elections, and now the “sea of mud” catch phrase that had discredited the Vargas administration.