Rubem Fonseca - Crimes of August

Demobilization and the return to Brazil had been the worst thing ever to happen to him. He soon spent the money he had saved and needed to find a job. Before being drafted, Chicão had worked in construction. But now he considered that service unworthy of a man with his experience. A former private, a comrade from his regiment, told him the Boqueirão do Passeio club was looking for a boxing instructor.

He appeared at the club wearing a wool-lined American military jacket and black ankle-high boots with thick laces and soles of hard rubber that he called batbut , the combat boot of the field uniform worn by enlisted men. Along with a German steel helmet and a Walther pistol, the boots and the jacket were his trophies of war. After a quick interview with Kid Earthquake, a former Rio de Janeiro middleweight champion who ran the Boqueirão do Passeio boxing school, Chicão was hired. Two days later, he and Pedro Lomagno became acquainted. Lomagno had decided to learn to box, and the club was conveniently near the office of his father’s coffee exporting firm, on Avenida Graça Aranha, where Pedro was doing an internship in preparation for one day taking over the businesses of the elder Lomagno.

Pedro and Chicão were the same age, twenty-two. Each immediately felt an attraction to the other. Lomagno, who was a taciturn and introverted youth, admired Chicão’s enthusiasm and joie de vivre. Chicão respected the education, wealth, and whiteness of the other man.

For a year, they saw each other three times a week at the gym. Despite the intimate relationship established between them, they never socialized. Pedro’s parents would not have accepted a friendship with a Negro, and his friends would have thought it quite strange if he showed up with Chicão at the elegant parties he frequented. With the death of his father, Pedro Lomagno assumed the family business and stopped going to the Boqueirão. But that didn’t mean he abandoned his friend. He hired Chicão to oversee the coffee warehouse in his firm, on Avenida Rodrigues Alves. But Chicão lacked the necessary qualities for that job. Lomagno gave him the money to open his own boxing school. After some months of loss, and feeling uncomfortable asking his sponsor for more money, Chicão decided to close down the school. Pedro Lomagno, who missed the boxing matches because his body was starting to acquire an undesirable flaccidity around the waist, appeared at the gymnasium in the Rio Comprido district the day that Chicão was removing from the façade the plaque bearing the name Brazilian Boxing Academy.

“What happened?”

“I failed. I’m not even making enough to pay the rent on this damned place.”

“You should’ve talked to me.”

“I was too embarrassed.”

Lomagno went into the gymnasium. It was six p.m., and the space was dark. A single lightbulb, at the entrance to the dressing room, was burning.

“Turn on all the lights,” Lomagno said.

The ring, official size, stood out in the middle of the gym.

“You got trunks and gloves for me?”

“Here there’s everything you need. Even helmets.”

“Let’s fight without helmets.”

They fought vigorously, until Lomagno tired. It had been a long time since Lomagno had felt that sensation of well-being.

“I was missing that.” The two were naked, in the dressing room. The nudity of the sweating muscular bodies imparted a sense of confidence, partnership, complicity. They went into the shower. The water made Chicão’s body even blacker. In contrast, Lomagno’s skin, even after the violent exercise, continued pale, as if his powerful muscles were made of marble.

“Ask the owner of the gym how much he wants for it. I’m going to buy it for you.”

“It won’t do any good to buy it. Know how many students I had? Two.”

“How many would you like to have?”

“At least twenty.”

“You’ve got the twenty.”

“I do?”

“I’ll be your twenty students.”

Chicão bought the gymnasium, with money lent by Lomagno. They made an agreement: Chicão would have no other students. Twice a week, Lomagno would leave his office in the afternoon, without telling anyone where he was going, to train at the gym, now deserted and closed, on Rua Barão Itapagibe, in Rio Comprido.

NOW, IN THE BUS, Chicão was thinking of the phone call from Lomagno and making his plans for that night. What Lomagno had asked of him was a piece of cake; anybody could do it with one hand tied behind his back.

He let the bus pass Rua Almirante Tamandaré and got out at Rua Tucumã. He walked past the seat where Salete was sitting, without looking at her; immersed in her concerns, she in turn failed to notice him.

He went up Tucumã to Rua Senador Vergueiro, from which he continued to Machado Square. He knew no one was following him, but he acted as if that might happen. From Machado Square he went to Almirante Tamandaré.

His friend Zuleika was at home. He asked her to store the package.

“What’s in it?”

Chicão opened the package.

“What you want those weapons for?”

“I like looking at them. I think everybody who was in a war ends up liking guns.”

“I get the creeps just looking at them. Wrap them up again.”

Chicão asked Zuleika if he could borrow her car that night.

“What you gonna do with the car? Some woman?”

“You’re my woman,” said Chicão, picking up his friend and carrying her to the bed.

“What’s that mark on your chest? It looks like a bite.”

“It is a bite. I was fighting, in a clinch, and the other guy bit me.”

“Weird. .”

In bed, Zuleika forgot about the bite. Chicão could stray once in a while as long as he was in love with her as he was that day.

Chicão went out to do some shopping, and when he returned, with a small suitcase, it was already night.

“What do you have in there?” asked Zuleika, who was a curious woman.

“They’re barbells,” said Chicão, sticking his hand in the suitcase and taking out two ten-pound weights.

Zuleika took one of the weights in both hands. “What a heavy thing. What are they for?”

Chicão picked up a barbell in each hand and began to open and close his extended arms, exhibiting his strength. Then he grabbed both weights in one hand and easily raised them over his head.

“Don’t you think there’s better ways of working off energy?”

“Aren’t you the little devil, eh, Zuleika?”

Chicão placed the barbells back in the suitcase, carefully closing it. He didn’t feel like fucking again, but he needed the car, and when Zuleika took off her clothes the desire came.

AT ALMOST ELEVEN P.M., Marshal Mascarenhas de Morais, chairman of the armed forces Joint Chiefs of Staff, received a telephone call from a member of the general staff, Brigadier Neto dos Reis, asking permission to come to his house accompanied by Deputy Amaral Peixoto and General Juarez Távora, superintendent of the Superior War College and a member of the Joint Chiefs, to discuss a matter of the utmost importance, relating to the political crisis the country was experiencing. Marshal Mascarenhas agreed to the request. He then phoned General Humberto Castello Branco, also a member of the general staff, who had been part of the general staff in Italy, relating the call he had received and asking that he, Castello Branco, come to the house to witness the meeting Brigadier Neto dos Reis had requested.

Upon returning from Italy in July 1945, where he had commanded the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, Mascarenhas had suffered various setbacks. On October 29 of that year, his friend Vargas was deposed; General Gaspar Dutra, who had been Vargas’s secretary of war and with whom Mascarenhas did not have a good relationship, was elected president in the elections of December 3 and took office on January 31, 1946. On top of that, Góes Monteiro, his enemy, was appointed secretary of war. No command was offered him, which obliged him to retire. Thus, on August 27, 1946, his transfer to the reserves was published in the Diário Oficial .