Rubem Fonseca: Crimes of August

MEANWHILE, DOWNTOWN, Salete Rodrigues, wearing a wool two-piece jersey outfit that the magazine A Cigarra said had been launched by existentialists, took the elevator in a building on Avenida Treze de Maio and got out on the twelfth floor, the location of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation.

“May I help you?” asked a receptionist behind a counter.

Salete said she wanted to enroll in the secretarial training program. She was informed that the courses were Portuguese, mathematics, and typing. There were night classes and day classes. To enroll, the candidate had to have a middle-school diploma.

Salete’s face turned red when she heard this. She thanked the woman and left hurriedly.

She was nervous as she waited in the hall for the elevator. She felt sure the receptionist, seeing her flushed cheeks, had guessed everything, that she had only gone through elementary school and had no middle-school diploma to show. In July, she could have gotten a job in the Senate. She was with Magalhães at the Beguine nightclub, watching a show by the existentialist Serge Singer, when Magalhães had told her, “I’m going to get you a job in the Senate.” Magalhães had lots of buddies among the senators, and it would be easy to arrange a job. “You don’t even have to go there, just pick up your check at the end of the month.” She had told Magalhães that she “had little education,” and he had replied that the Senate was full of people who had “come in through the window” and boarded the happiness train, as it was called. She had become frightened and asked Magalhães not to do anything. Now, whenever she heard her favorite program on the radio, which was called The Happiness Train, she repented of not having accepted the offer. After all, she could have learned how to type; she had even gone to a typing school in a house on Rua da Carioca and seen a bunch of scrubby mulatto women banging away at keyboards. If those wretched women could learn to type, so could she.

When she got to the street, she felt great consolation in noting that men turned their heads to watch her go by. She killed some time in the downtown area in order to catch the two o’clock showing of The Robe , with Victor Mature, at the Palácio theater. She cried during the film.

It was still early to go to Mother Ingrácia’s spiritualist center, in the Rocha favela. In a pharmacy she bought a bottle of Vanadiol, which the radio claimed was good for the nerves. She walked down Gonçalves Dias, Ouvidor, and Uruguaiana, looking at the shop windows. She entered the A Moda clothes store and asked to try on a dress she saw in the window.

“The store doesn’t live up to its name,” she told the saleslady. “It’s very démodé.”

Since there was little movement in the store, Salete and the saleslady soon began trading confidences in hushed tones. The saleslady confessed she couldn’t take working in that place anymore; the manager was a shrew. Salete said that neither was her life anything great. She loved one man and was living with another; what saved her was having money to buy clothes. When she felt really unhappy, she explained, she would buy a new dress, one of those models that made people look at her on the street. She liked to have people look at her when she was well dressed. That helped her feel a bit more, a bit more, uh, free.

“Elegant clothes have helped me get ahead in life.”

Seeing that the woman was understanding, Salete spoke of her past, even knowing that it was mean to put ideas in the head of a woman with neither the face nor the body to advance in life.

If she weren’t always elegant, she’d still be in Dona Floripes’s house on Rua Mem de Sá, near the Red Cross hospital, fucking bank tellers and salesmen. She told how she’d had the strength to disdain bad advice and bad influences, like those of the madam Floripes, who told her to save her money for the lean years: “Whores have a short shelf life. The breasts can sag overnight. And then there’s cellulite. Stop spending everything on clothes and accessories.” If not for the clothes and accessories, she wouldn’t have been noticed by the important men she came to socialize with, politicians, people from high society, big shots in government, and today she would be wearing toilet water instead of French perfume.

“But you have to have a nicely formed body for clothes to fit well.”

Around 12:30 p.m. she went for lunch at the Colombo. Magalhães said the Colombo was no longer frequented by upper-class people like in the past, but she loved to enter that large dining room with its high mirror-covered walls, was moved by the small orchestra playing Strauss waltzes. She had seen such lovely things only in Europe, when she traveled with Magalhães.

After the movie, she took a taxi to the spiritualist center. She handed Mother Ingrácia the undershorts that she had taken from Mattos’s apartment for the old woman to work her magic.

When she got to her apartment, she called Magalhães and said she’d like to go to a nightclub that evening. Salete wanted to go to the Beguine, but Magalhães said he needed to meet someone at the Night and Day.

The nightclub was housed in the mezzanine of the Hotel Serrador, in Cinelândia on the corner of Rua Senador Dantas, between two movie theaters: the Odeon, on the left, and the Palácio, on the right. From the glassed-in window of the nightclub could be seen the eastern side of the congressional building, the Monroe Palace, deserted at that hour. Further to the right, the dark stain of the gardens of the Passeio Público stood out amidst the lights of the movie theater façades.

“Can you arrange for me to go to the tea at the Vogue, on Sundays? Yesterday I tried and wasn’t allowed in.”

“What do you want in that thé dansant ?” Magalhães knew that only rich young men and women frequented Sunday afternoons at the Vogue. They would never let a whore in.

“I wanted to hear Fats Elpídio’s band.”

“There are a thousand other places where you can hear Fats Elpídio’s band. It doesn’t have to be in the middle of those shitty bourgeois canapé eaters.”

Shortly before the beginning of the midnight show, the maître d’ brought to Magalhães a man whose dark bookkeeper’s suit clashed with the tussahs, linens, and white Panamas of the other men present.

“Sit down,” Magalhães said.

The man sat down, after nodding in Salete’s direction in a small gesture of courtesy.

“Did the Japanese send the parcel?”

“Mr. Matsubara asked me to give you this,” said the man drily, taking an envelope from his pocket. Only then did Magalhães realize, in the dim light of the nightclub, that the recently arrived man was a Nisei.

“Did you come directly from Marília?” asked Magalhães, putting the envelope in his pocket? “Did you have a good trip?” he added, trying to be amiable.

The Nisei didn’t reply. He stood up. “Any message for Mr. Matsubara?”

“Tell him his contribution won’t be forgotten.”

The man turned his back, this time without acknowledging anyone, and left.

In the envelope was a check for five hundred thousand cruzeiros, a contribution to the campaign of Deputy Roberto Alves, private secretary of the president. Recently, Matsubara had obtained a loan of sixteen million from the Bank of Brazil.

Magalhães gestured to the maître d’, who came over.

“Champagne,” Magalhães said.

“Any preference? We have Veuve Cliquot, Taittinger, René Lamotte, Moët et Chandon, Krug, Pol Roger,” recited the maître d’ proudly.

GREGÓRIO FORTUNATO WAS SURPRISED that only a few politicians, like Gustavo Capanema, noticed the mood changes that were occurring lately in the president. He had heard Capanema, who had been Mr. Getúlio’s secretary of education during the time of the dictatorship and was now leader of the government party in the Chamber of Deputies, whisper at a gathering, “In the twenty years I’ve known Getúlio, he’s gone from a happy and outgoing man to sad and reserved.” Everyone thought the cause was age, which made people unhappy, but the president wasn’t old, he was Getúlio Vargas, one of those men who are ageless. Gregório knew the reasons for the president’s unhappiness: the hurt caused by all the betrayals he had suffered, the heartbreak over the cowardice of his allies. Major Fitipaldi, one of his military advisers, said that the friends of the president, who had been the beneficiaries of honors and rewards, were nothing but hypocrites and traitors. If there was a man in the world who deserved to be happy, because of all he had done for the poor and humble, that man was Getúlio.