The Mystery of Rio (12 page)

Aniceto sneered, as he passed:

“Still jealous, little boss?”

It was too much for Baeta. Beside himself, he flung Aniceto against the wall and pointed his gun at him. Aniceto simply wiped his shirtsleeve clean, and, almost whispering, made the following wager:

“Ten
contos de reis
, if boss man can take one of my women from me!”

Baeta nodded and returned the prisoner to his captors. His anger was such that he did not notice the intense glare of the Brotherhood hanging over him.

The next day, all were released: the drowned girl's mother implicated her husband, a fisherman in Niterói, who had walked in on his daughter practicing manual obscenities with the other victim.

In the First District, however, the case did not die down completely. The new twist was the strange presence of the expert alone at night by the piers.

 

When the Visitator General Heitor Furtado de Mendonça refused to come to Rio de Janeiro, in 1591, there was no capoeira yet. There is much debate about its origins, both the word and the martial art. The first problem is easy: “capoeira” comes from the Tupi word
cäapuera
, which means sheared grass. Cutting weeds consists of sweeping an ax or scythe, striking low, near the roots, which perfectly describes capoeira's most elemental and characteristic blow.

“Capoeira,” was thus the name of this sweeping move, which can also be called
arranca-toco
,
rapa
,
corta-capim
, and, almost universally,
rasteira
. It was only in the early 19th century that the name “capoeira” came to designate the martial art as a whole and, soon afterward, the martial artist himself.

On the other hand, writing the history of the martial art itself is impossible. One legend links capoeira to a secret brotherhood organized around the cosmogonic thoughts of Queen Jinga Mbandi. Another turns to prehistoric times and tells us that capoeira was a secret society of men who joined forces to fight the Amazons.

In fact, there is something to be said for all of these, because there is the abstract capoeira, which coincides with the very concept of Rio de Janeiro, and the concrete capoeira, the corporal and philosophical expression of this concept, coined by Africans.

According to Father Anchieta, slaves from Guinea had been present in the city since at least 1583. However, until the mid-17th century, what impressed travelers most were the many natives. It was only in the 18th century that the nations of the Congo, Camundongos, Angolas, Ganguelas, Benguelas, Quiçamas, Rebolos, Monjolos, Cambindas, Cabundás, and Caçanjes took over the landscape. Accounts of the martial art of capoeira appear precisely around this time.

The oldest capoeira we have news of was the slave Adão Rebolo, who alone routed a detachment of regular troops in front of the palace, in the Terreiro da Polé, during the reign of Count da Cunha. The feat is remarkable not only because the African handily kicked and head-butted soldiers, knocking them all to the ground without suffering a single bruise himself, but because the attack was not initiated by the guards.

Before moving ahead with the narrative, I want to inform you that the slave was never arrested, either at the scene or after the fact. For the history of capoeira, though, what is important is Adão Rebolo's motives in perpetrating such a bold act.

The capoeira Adão had a wife—a free woman, the daughter of a judge and his slave. The young woman received an annuity from her father and opened a small grocery store on Latoeiros Street. Adão Rebolo would go there to eat soup. The judge's daughter took him as a lover, though she would not consider marriage.

At that time, in Rio de Janeiro, to seduce and bed a free woman was almost unthinkable for an African. Especially because there was a scarcity of women, especially African women. But Adão Rebolo had courage, he was brash—and few male qualities are as valued as brashness.

For almost one full year there was no trouble at the grocery store on Latoeiros Street. All lewd comments directed at the owner were avenged on the streets; customers began offering to pay their debts, and runaway slaves passed through the house only once.

But women are an unpredictable lot. And the African Adão found out, or rather witnessed, the unfaithfulness of the grocery store owner with an army sergeant. If he were Portuguese, he would have slapped her, but Adão Rebolo was a capoeira, and his response confirms the capoeira's ethical foundation in Rio: no woman can be guilty of adultery. Any dispute of this nature is to be dealt with among men.

Adão Rebolo was hurt, but he left the grocery store without breaking a single mug. Then, as soon as he identified the sergeant who commanded the unit at the Terreiro da Polé, he moved against him, and, consequently, against all of his subordinates.

Capoeiragem
, therefore, came to introduce in Rio de Janeiro a new way of dealing with adultery, transforming the mores that had prevailed since 1591.

Although these early capoeiras were Africans, the institution is legitimately Carioca, because it was conceived in the city. Why here and not there? The reason is simple: with slavery, there were profound changes in the patterns of relationships between men and women brought from Africa, the result of the numerical discrepancy between the sexes and the dissolution of traditional family relationships.

Thus, the Rio de Janeiro capoeira—the only one that genuinely deserves that name—did not emerge as a game or exhibition of acrobatics, as is the case of similar martial arts in Bahia, Cuba, Martinique, Pernambuco, or Venezuela; Carioca capoeira is a tactic of war—one in which fighters vie for, and win, the favor of the female sex.

We do not know exactly how the art spread, but the process was rapid. By the time of the reign of the Marquis of Lavradio, between 1769 and 1779, there was already a Brown Regiment, made up of capoeiras, foreshadowing, in a way, Emperor Pedro II's famous Black Guard.

Also dating from this time is the legend surrounding the viceroy himself, a product of the imagination—or the self-indulgence—of novelist Joaquim Manuel de Macedo. He wrote of how the Marquis Lavradio used to go out at night, in disguise, and visit homes hoping to win over false maidens and married women while pretending to be Lieutenant Amotinado, an officer of the militia and an extraordinary capoeira, whose reputation prevented fathers and husbands from seeking revenge. What Macedo did not realize is that the marquis trailed a path that had actually been blazed before by the very same Lieutenant Amotinado.

Many powerful individuals and members of the nobility were, or said they were, capoeiras—for example, Major Vidigal, auxiliary of the superintendent of police of the Royal Court and, ironically, charged with rooting out the evil of capoeira; Emperor Pedro I and his adviser Chalaça; the generalissimo Duke of Caxias, whose military strategy owes much to capoeira; Marshal Floriano; and other historical figures like Father Perereca, Paula Brito, André Rebouças, and José do Patrocínio.

But the stories of men like these, although interesting, overshadow the art's true protagonists: African slaves and Creoles, who, in the early decades of the 19th century, gave capoeira its definitive form.

Immediate heirs of the Tupi philosophy, by then already ingrained in the city, according to which an individual only becomes whole if he has an enemy, the capoeiras began splitting up into gangs, with defined territories and specific emblems like colored ribbons, whistles, and guardian spirits. The female population of these territories, naturally, was the property of the local gangs, and wars would break out on account of women seduced in enemy territory, or as revenge for adultery committed.

Great effort was also invested in wresting control of churches and public buildings away from other gangs, but there were never any reports of capoeiras assaulting women or hiding in ambush to attack their victims from behind.

On occasion, however, there were deaths during these clashes, which allowed for the use of white arms and sticks, and even thefts—for, as is commonly known, some women are very fond of gifts. For these reasons, capoeira was ruthlessly persecuted since before the exile of the Portuguese crown in Brazil.

But the power of these gangs, the
maltas
, was so devastating that it was only during the republic, over a century later, that the police action had some success against them, with the offensive led by Sampaio Ferraz.

Even though he managed to arrest and deport hundreds of capoeiras to the island of Fernando de Noronha, he failed to eliminate them; by that time, eliminating capoeira would have meant destroying the city itself.

Names like Prata Preta, Ciriaco, Manduca da Praia, Master Canela, Gabiroba, Bernardo Little Hand, Mano Juca, Cabacinho, and Madame Satan (who also fought for the love of young men) are testament that capoeira survives, and even evolves, into the 20th century.

There is no need to extol its greatness as a martial art here, nor the importance of its legacy to the ethics of
malandragem
. But it does not hurt to remember, to honor those who nurtured it, that the capoeiras were the western world's first feminists.

 

The bet—or, perhaps better said, duel—that pitted Baeta against Aniceto did not include, as would have been natural, the necessary witnesses, or even an individual to hold the prize, for that matter. It was, above all, a question of their word.

If he were to lose, the capoeira would give his rival all of Fortunata's assets and an additional sum of cash, which Aniceto would obtain from Madame Montfort. However, should Baeta be defeated, he would be unable to pay, because ten thousand
contos
was a considerable sum, far superior to what he had in his savings at that moment, or could honestly obtain as a public servant.

Thus, the tranquility exhibited by the expert the day after the meeting at the warehouse was strange. If the reader remembers the scene, he can imagine a few reasons: first, at no point did Baeta expressly agree to the bet. In fact, the expert did not say a single word. His gesture was limited to putting his gun back in its holster before the officers took the capoeira to the precinct.

Clearly Aniceto took that motion—the silent placing of the gun in its holster—as a gesture of assent. For Baeta, it could not be otherwise: his pride and vanity prevented him from backing down.

Actually, my point was another one. In the strict construction of the bet, there was no time limit: Aniceto agreed to pay as soon as he, Sebastião Baeta, had conquered one of his women, but without specifying how long he would wait for this to happen. If it happened, say, after five years, he would still be entitled to the ten thousand
contos
.

I spoke of vanity, I spoke of pride. The expert was vain. He might not have thought he was the best of men, but he was sure he was among the most attractive. Even in London, even in Buenos Aires, and especially at the House of Swaps. This for him had an almost existential meaning: having his way with the women of others while seeing his woman spurn the advances of males was a kind of triumph that made life worth living for him. So, for there to be someone like Aniceto on earth, in Rio de Janeiro, simply annihilated in him what was supposed to be one of his greatest merits as a human being.

The flaw in the bet as it was set up, therefore, allowed the expert to plan the attacks calmly. It gave him the opportunity to study his adversary's terrain—i.e., to make a map of the women Aniceto had seduced. Baeta wanted his victory to be complete. Thus, the first address he paid a visit to, of course, was Doctor Zmuda's clinic on ancient Imperador Street.

The doctor was surprised by the expert's visit and somewhat upset with his insistence on rehashing the case of the secretary. For Dr. Zmuda, the crime was political in nature, and the individual who ordered it had to be a very powerful individual because the murderer had vanished without leaving a clue. This view was identical to that of the highest police authority in the city, who, incidentally, had since returned to the House and told Zmuda as much.

Baeta was a bit startled by the doctor's attitude. But he had no honorable way to get to what he wanted without the pretext of an investigation. Thus, he tried the less deceitful path: he told him he needed some information about Aniceto, who had been with Fortunata on the day of the murder (as the earrings proved), so as to illuminate some obscure information obtained in his forensic analysis.

Miroslav Zmuda was a foreigner, but he was not stupid. The expert's reaction at the last couples' party revealed that he had something personal at stake in this. But, since he was confident, he decided to reveal what he knew, which, in the end, was very little: Aniceto had been there three or four times, always for the evening gatherings, as an escort of the widow Palhares—a debauched Rio socialite whose husband probably had committed suicide in shame, although the death certificate stated pulmonary failure.

Palhares had frequented the House for many years, and she had had numerous lovers during that time. But a truly remarkable thing that Dr. Zmuda had realized was the widow's allegiance to her new partner—an unusual and unlikely phenomenon in such a dissolute woman.

Another fact, no less noteworthy (and which surprised everyone), was the scene between Palhares and the tall woman at the last orgy; no one had ever suspected that both women enjoyed pleasures of Lesbos.

As for the nurses, he had heard from them that he was an expert lover. One of them even confessed that Aniceto had been the first man (because she had always preferred girls in this respect) to give her orgasms with his tongue.

For Dr. Zmuda, that a man should please women so was not entirely surprising. What seemed far beyond the norm was his talent for seduction, the speed and vehemence with which he attracted the female sex, especially being such an ill-mannered and lowly type.

“It truly is supernatural.”

Words have a certain power: Baeta understood that the Polish doctor had employed the word in the sense of “unusual” or “extraordinary.” But he could not help but make some associations. And suddenly, changing his approach somewhat, he asked the question again: