Crimes Of August Part 5

"Go to Nova Iguacu and subpoena the old man to come to the precinct to talk with me. The mother comes here every day to see her son, so does his wife. It's just the father who doesn't appear."

"He's taking care of the oranges."

"These Portuguese families are very close. For them, not all the oranges in the world matter more than a son."

"The grove is, pardon the expression, in the middle of nowhere."

"I want the old man here day after tomorrow."

"I have to go to the Senate to talk to senator Freitas."

"I'll do that. You're going to leave here directly for Nova Iguacu. Now."

Cosme had been brought from the holding area and taken to the room where he normally received visits from his wife. The two were sitting, silently holding hands, when the inspector entered. The woman wiped her face, swollen from crying and her eighth-month pregnancy. Beside the bench was a lunch pail with food that she brought daily for her husband. The woman knew she owed those meetings to the inspector and tried to smile but didn't succeed.

"You brought some nice food for him?" said the inspector. "One of these days I'm going to try those delicacies."

"Whenever you like, sir. Today it's a cheese turnover," said the young man, taking it from the lunch pail. The woman remained silent. The two were young and unattractive. Cosme's ugliness had afforded Rosalvo the opportunity to repeat to the inspector other lessons learned in school: Cosme was a Lombrosian type with physical stigmas of criminality such as recessive forehead, prominence of the zygomas, sharpness of the facial angle, prognathism, plagiocephalism. "Sir, don't laugh at me, that means an oblique, oval head, asymmetric, pressed between the two halves so that the right side, more developed in front, corresponds to a greater development of the left side in back."

Looking at Cosme, the inspector saw none of that. Just a scared youth.

"I had your father summoned to come here to talk to me," said Mattos.

Cosme jumped up from the bench.

"Don't do that, sir, please, my father is a sick man."

"I need to speak with him."

"Please! Isn't everything already decided? Everything decided? Please," said Cosme, holding the cheese pastry.

Could the cause and effect relations.h.i.+p be essential to the nature of all the reasoning relevant to the facts? Mattos asked himself. What good were inferences resulting from a chain of suppositions? He knew that propositions allusive to the facts could only be contingent. The conclusion to which he was coming, observing the tremulous couple before him, resulted merely from the senses, from impressions of the moment, which might be false. Everything could be false. My G.o.d, my mind is becoming as bizarre as Rosalvo's.

"I'm very sorry, but I need to question your father."

The inspector left the room after saying this, not wis.h.i.+ng to see the couple's other reactions. He had no desire to further confuse his ideas and perceptions. For better understanding, he wanted to have more facts available-and more perceptions and more ideas. The attempt to understand things always led him to a frustrating vicious circle.

Mattos stopped beside one of the two lions flanking the stairway of the Monroe Palace. He turned to look at the imposing So Borja Building on the other side of Avenida Rio Branco. The senators had chosen a very convenient place for their dalliances.

The Senate was in session, but Senator Freitas wasn't on the floor. His aide Clemente Mello Telles Neto, an elegantly dressed young man in a white three-piece linen suit, said the senator was busy at a meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee.

"What's this about, Inspector?"

"I prefer to tell the senator himself what this is about."

"It's going to be difficult for you to speak with him. The senator is a very busy man. Is it anything personal?"

"No. It's not personal."

"Then you can speak with me."

"I want to speak with him."

"Then you'll have to wait for the right time." Pause. "Look, let's agree on this: you leave me your phone number, and when the interview is possible, I'll call and let you know."

Mattos gave the precinct's number to the aide. "Tell the senator it's in his interest to speak with me."

"I'll tell him," said the aide, formally.

The inspector took a small pad from his pocket.

"What's the senator's phone number, please?"

After hesitating, Clemente gave the inspector the number of the senator's office.

Leaving the Senate, Mattos walked along Rio Branco to Rua Sete de Setembro. He turned to the left onto Rua Uruguaiana. The Cave was on the corner.

He went into the tea room and sat down facing the door. It was ten minutes before five. For a few moments he thought of leaving. Why stay there and see the woman who had rejected him? What did Alice want from him? Help? He didn't want to take revenge on her by refusing to help her, or take revenge by helping her, which would be even more petty. He sat there, staring at the art-nouveau drawings on the wall.

He stood up when Alice arrived and pulled out a chair for her to sit. They sat on opposite sides of the table, without looking at each other, silent.

The waiter approached.

"Tea and toast?" asked Mattos.

Alice nodded.

"Are you still in the, the Department?"

She doesn't even want to say the word police, he thought. Federal Department of Public Safety is a bit less shameful.

"Yes."

Alice opened her purse and took out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, which she placed on the table. She tried to smile. "I smoke now."

Mattos picked up the lighter and lit her cigarette.

The waiter brought the tea. Alice put out her cigarette in the ashtray.

"I have an appointment at 5:30. With the maestro. You remember the maestro?"

"Maestro?"

"The old man who ran the claque, Mr. Emilio. Remember?"

She vaguely recalled Mattos having said that as a student he'd been part of the claque at the Munic.i.p.al Theater in order to attend operas free while making some pocket money.

"I haven't seen him for some time . . . The last time, I cut cla.s.s to meet him by the Chopin statue . . . That's where the claqueurs gathered . . . That day we were setting up the claque for Parsifal . . ."

Alice stuck another cigarette in her mouth. Mattos picked up the lighter and lit the cigarette.

"Wagnerian operas were always a lot of work for the claqueurs. In Parsifal you're never supposed to applaud at the end of the first act, and making the audience keep quiet was much harder than making them clap hands. I remember Mr. Emilio saying, 'We're not going to ask some second-rater for an encore.'"

"I saw Parsifal in-" Alice stopped. In London.

"I didn't get to see it. It ended up not being staged. The claque was dissolved soon afterward. Finished. It went out of style. A thing of the past."

Alice would have liked to be able to say something. She had lost the courage to speak about the matter that had led her to suggest that meeting. Why had Mattos told her that story? Because, like her, he didn't know what to say? Or did he think she wanted to get back together, and he was telling her that like the claque she, too, was a thing of the past? He had always been very odd.

"Have you been going to the Munic.i.p.al?"

Some time after the breakup with Alice he had gone to see La Boheme at the Munic.i.p.al with Di Stefano and Tebaldi. He was used to sitting in the peanut gallery because it was cheaper and because it was where the claque stationed itself, and he was accustomed to the location. But on that occasion he had bought a ticket in the orchestra section, near the dress circle, where a man and a woman dozed the entire time. He also noticed that other people fell asleep in their boxes, even when Di Stefano hit a fabulous high C in the aria "Che gelida manina." It irritated him greatly; at the time he was feeling the initial symptoms of his duodenal ulcer and his hatred of the rich. Going to the opera, to concerts, to museums pretending they read the cla.s.sics, it was all part of a grand scheme of playacting by the rich, whose objective was to show that they-he thought mainly of Alice and her family-belonged to a special superior cla.s.s that, unlike the ignorant rabble, knew how to see, hear, and eat with elegance and sensitivity, which justified their having money and every privilege they enjoyed.

"I'm not interested in opera anymore," replied Mattos. He picked up his knife and read the word stainless engraved on the blade.

Alice looked at the teacup before her.

"My mother died."

"I'm very sorry."

"Why? She didn't like you."

Stainless.

"I got married."

"I know."

"Pedro is a good person. He knows about us."

"Knows what? There's nothing to know."

"He knows there's nothing to know." Pause. "What about you? Did you marry?"

"No."

Their gazes met for a few instants.

"Are you going to tell me what you wanted with me?"

"I think I'll leave that for another day . . . I don't know how to say what I want to say. . . Will you meet me again? Tomorrow? Tomorrow I'll be braver . . ."

"Tomorrow . . . The fourth . . . I can't. I go on duty at noon. A 24-hour s.h.i.+ft. I get off at noon on the fifth."

"Then day after tomorrow. Thursday."

The old man was waiting for him beside the Chopin statue. As always, he was wearing a Panama hat and a bowtie, but the hat was crumpled and the suit was of cheap material. The collar was dirty. The silver-handled cane that he held in his hand, instead of making him look elegant, as before, now gave him a fragile, sickly appearance.

"My young man," said Emilio, embracing Mattos and biting his dentures, "I'm so pleased with your success."

Success. There came to Mattos's mind the precinct lockup full of smelly, sick men.

"And how are you, sir?"

"Don't call me sir. You're no longer that boy who asked me to teach him everything about opera."

"How are things going?"

"Going . . . When I saw your picture I said, That's him, it's that boy who worked with me in the claque . . . He's come up in life, I thought, now he's traveling in high circles . . . Then I said to myself, I'm going to call him. I never imagined you'd come . . . I thought success had gone to your head . . ."

Emilio took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his damp eyes.

"Want something to drink? A beer?" asked Mattos.

"Let's go to that bar on lvaro Alvim at the corner of Alcindo Guanabara."

The man behind the counter greeted Emilio.

"Good afternoon, maestro."

"This is Mr. Mattos, police inspector and an old friend of mine."

The man cleaned his hands on a dirty cloth. "Pleased to meet you, sir." Mattos shook the guy's wet hand.

"Two beers. Would you care for something to eat?" asked Mattos.

"I'm thinking about the roast pork sandwich they serve here. The best pork sandwich in the whole city. Isn't it, Robledo?"

"All modesty aside, it really is the best. One for you too, sir?"

"I'm not hungry. Just one."

"A beer with a head of foam and a Steinhager, to raise the spirits," said Emilio. He was suddenly happy and was biting his dentures less.

The sandwich was placed on the counter. Emilio took off his hat, put his cane on the counter, and dedicated himself to the difficult task of chewing the enormous quant.i.ty of roast pork that Robledo had put between two pieces of French bread. Meanwhile, he drank several beers, accompanied by gla.s.ses of Steinhager.

Finally, Emilio finished eating. He picked up the beer gla.s.s and rubbed its cold surface against his temples. "They all died," he said. "This country is going badly. These days, Gigli wouldn't set foot here. Remember Gigli? It was in '45, you were part of the claque . . ."

"I remember."

"Neither Gigli nor Scotti set foot here anymore . . . No, no, my head isn't working right, Scotti died a long time ago, you never got to see him, but I saw him, with these eyes that the earth will yet consume, singing Falstaff at the Teatro Lirico, which was torn down, a beautiful theater with better acoustics than La Scala in Milan. It was the twenty-ninth of July, 1893, I remember it as if it were today, I was nineteen years old and was very happy . . . The 'Sir John' that night never was and never will be equaled . . . Pay attention to what I'm saying, Scotti was more than just a great singer, he was a great artist! Another beer, Robledo, and another Steinhager. Do you know how old Verdi was when he composed that masterpiece, when he turned the history of opera upside down with his Falstaff? Eighty, my age, boy. But in Brazil anything eighty years old has to be destroyed, thrown in the trash. That's why in the past all the great singers would come to Brazil, and now no one comes here, not even a Del Monaco, not even a Pinza, who doesn't know how to read a single note of music, no one!"

Emilio wiped his damp eyes. "I don't have a friend left in the world. They've all died." Pause. "Tutto nel mondo e burla." Pause. "But let's not lose heart."

The old man began to sing, ignoring the others in the bar. "Tutto nel mondo e burla, l'uom e nato burlone, nel suo cervello ciurla sempre la sua ragione. Tutti gabbati! Irride l'un altro ogni mortal. Ma ride ben chi ride la risata final."

Mattos detected something of the astuteness of Sir John in the tearful gaze the old man directed at him while singing.