The Mystery of Rio (20 page)

It would be a blatant lie to say that Tião Saci went to Deodata's expressly seeking her. No, he had heard stories about the
jongueiro
Lacraia, and he went there looking for him.

Those who know
jongo
know it is a spell, a song, and an initiation dance. A verse of
jongo
never says what it seems to say: it is always an encrypted message that even a good
jongueiro
cannot understand. In a
jongo
circle when someone ties a stitch, that stitch (which is a verse) only ceases to be sung if someone else unties it—in other words, if he interprets it. That is why it is called a “stitch” in the sense that it is synonymous with a “knot.”

Lacraia, who had been born limber of body and mind, would untie one stitch after another on Madureira Hill. He knew the entrails of words, he saw what lay behind them. It was a talent he had possessed since birth, an inheritance from the ancient spirits.

Laypeople are greatly impressed by esoteric things: fetishes, rituals, and mystical symbols, demonic images, sacrificed animals. They ignore that the real magic lies in speech, in human language.

So, being the
jongueiro
that he was, having mastered the secret of words, Lacraia also became a
porteira
, a gatekeeper. I took such a tortuous route to say one simple thing: in Deodata's backyard they built a shack where Lacraia channeled a shadowy entity.

Before the famous pronouncement by the
caboclo
Seven Crossroads, the founder of Umbanda, which took place in the hinterlands of São Gonçalo in 1908, and which codified some of the laws of
jira
, the spirits of that religion were all anonymous. We do not know, thus, exactly who possessed Lacraia's body.

If, for Seven Crossroads, there were never any closed paths, the
jongueiro'
s entity had the opposite line: fewer openings and more locking of paths.

Tião Saci often went to Deotada's to consult the spirit that possessed Lacraia. Although he continued to be lame, dragging his left foot wherever he went, Tião Saci was still able to resolve many personal issues during these sessions. However, everything has its price.

One night, all three were in the shack in the backyard. The details are as follows: Tião Saci, Deodata, and the disembodied spirit were present—technically speaking, Lacraia's soul was suspended, and he was totally unconscious. Deotada was the
cambona
, the assistant, and she tended to the spirit in whatever way she could. Suddenly, Tião Saci, who was splayed out on the floor listening, heard:

“Beware of my horse.”

The sepulchral tone of the warning, coming from so terrifying an entity, terrified the two.

“My horse has already seen you.”

So, it was true what they had been grumbling about around Formiga: Tião Saci had fallen for Deodata, head over heels—and it was reciprocal. What amazed and disgusted people was not just the fact that Tião was lame (while Lacraia had such a sensual swing to his body); it was that the cheating had occurred in the house, in the backyard, of his benefactor.

Tião Saci, however, had a clear conscience—he owed nothing to Lacraia, only to the disembodied spirit. And it was the spirit itself that had warned him:

“He will set a trap for you. Up the hill, near the crossroads at Timbau.”

He even stated the date and the time; there was no need to state the motive. But the mention of the hill left Deodata in a panic. It was a ghastly place, and she had a foreboding sense of doom. She would look at the disembodied voice, but only saw Lacraia's face, flushed, unrecognizable. She had been a
cambona,
a priest's assistant, for a long time, but she had never heard of anything like this. And, in a sense, the way the disembodied spirit treated its own horse, or its medium—warning an enemy that the medium had a legitimate right to kill—absolved her of guilt. Deodata had preferred Saci's mutilated gait, to the sprightly step of the
jongueiro
.

Knowledge is always an advantage: Deodata knew Lacraia did not know that she already knew. And she noticed how he had become increasingly impatient and sly with Saci Tião. A short while later, Deodata heard a snippet of a conversation between the two men, and she probed her lover the next day.

“He asked me to go with him up the hill, to Timbau.”

The request made sense: Lacraia would offer a goat at the crossroads, and needed someone to hold down the animal. Tião Saci was lame, but he had strong arms. The problem was the date and time, which coincided with the withdrawal of the disembodied voice. As a matter of fact, the spirit had spoken of a blade: the same one used to bleed the goat would be used on him, Tião Saci.

Deodata said to Tião Saci that he should try to back out, saying he had another commitment. But the man had mettle, and he planned a second betrayal.

On the appointed day, Tião Saci, with a borrowed revolver (not easy to get back then), stood in front of Deodata's door and clapped loudly. Lacraia appeared, but he said Deodata was sick, and that he would be late. It was his cue: Tião Saci, realizing that she was pretending in order to facilitate the ambush, volunteered to go ahead, carrying the bowl, the machete, the candles, and the cachaça. He would just have trouble dragging the goat all the way up the hill due to his miserable defect.

Lacraia agreed, and Tião Saci proceeded up the hill. The Timbau Hill crossroads was a terrible place because, as I have mentioned, it led into blind alleys, and at that time of night the silence was so great, the darkness so absolute, that Tião Saci was scared he might miss his target.

Thus, taking every precaution, he decided to throw his machete into the bushes to avoid any unexpected move on Lacraia's part. So he went into one of the alleys, lurching all the way, and tossed the blade meant to execute the goat, and then probably himself, as far as he could over the quarry.

When he returned, he had arrived at the appointed time and place.

“Put the money on the ground, and come down, but don't turn your face.”

Tião Saci could not make out the face, but he was able to deduce where the voice was coming from—and it was certainly not Lacraia's. Not knowing who he was dealing with, not knowing what it was about, he made a subtle motion with his right hand toward his waist, where the gun was.

The stranger, however, fired first.

Later, Deodata—even though she had managed to keep her husband at home much of the night—spread the rumor that it had been a crime, plotted by the perfidious spirit of the cunning Lacraia.

In Formiga, however, the saying goes that God is the Devil from behind. So they did not believe her. These were people already accustomed to dealing with spirits. They knew that strange things happened, especially in those bad places, at a crossroads, on a hillside such as Timbau.

 

We are now only a few days from the end. This, of course, is the point at which the narrative speeds up and events become jumbled together, and the best technique is to lay out the facts in chronological order (with a few exceptions, here or there), in order not to ruin or frustrate the effect of the last great revelation.

Between October 7th and 9th three important incidents occurred, all figuring prominently in the city's police annals. My difficulty as an author is to choose which of the three I should begin with.

Let us then report the case of the second woman who died under mysterious circumstances. This time it was not a poor young girl, but rather a lady, who was set up with her own business on Ouvidor Street. Her body was found naked on the second floor, in between the small office and a storage room. She had that same orgasmic expression and the same intriguing features: the sphincter, the buttocks, the thigh and face muscles exhibited signs of rigor mortis—even more than twenty-four hours after death.

There were no signs of bodily injuries, and there were no signs of burglary—nothing had been stolen from the shop. It was also impossible to find witnesses: nobody saw or heard anything in the nearby buildings.

They knew that since she was French she had a lover right under her husband's nose. The lover was one of those bums, one of those capoeiras, who had appeared three or four months before at the store, offering his services as security, mainly to provide protection against thieves. He won the “job,” and, shortly thereafter, won over his employer. Of course, we are speaking of Aniceto, Madame Montfort, and La Parisienne.

However, forensic tests were never performed because, technically, there had been no murder, and because finding fingerprints or other evidence of the presence of individuals who could enter the facility without needing to break in (for example, Aniceto or the victim's husband) would not mean much.

The forensic examiners thought that the two women—the poor girl and the rich woman—must have ingested some kind of drug capable of causing those surprising symptoms, but since they were dealing with an unknown substance, drug tests were inconclusive.

Unfortunately, physicians in Rio de Janeiro were still under the spell of scientific superstitions, and although ancient African and native beliefs still survived in the city, and many healers still sold potions and other preparations, all of this ancient knowledge of the manipulation of herbs, leaves, and roots was no longer incorporated into the officially accepted medical canon, which hindered the experts' actions.

However, attention was soon turned in another direction because, at that same time, a dire scandal was exploding in police circles, one that it was no longer possible to suppress: one lieutenant and two officers stationed at the First District had gone missing. The captain was called in to give a statement as to why he had not referred the case to his superiors, and he provided an explanation only very grudgingly: he had preferred to act behind the scenes, and the mere announcement of the fact would lead—as was indeed happening—to a big commotion, which would only serve to endanger the success of the investigation.

At police headquarters, the matter was treated with the utmost seriousness, especially after Baeta, on the 9th, had personally gone to the office of the chief of police to report the strange attitude of Mauá Square and that his home, a street-level house in Catete with green doors and windows, had been robbed.

Baeta himself had surprised the officer known as Mixila near Baeta's home, apparently on a surveillance detail, on a Sunday. Baeta crossed the street and went to question Mixila, who responded by being evasive and outraged and walking away.

Baeta took no immediate action because he was having difficulty even conceiving of such brazenness. This, of course, was a serious accusation. His suspicions were confirmed by the fact that there were no fingerprints—he himself had done the forensics—other than his and his wife's on the broken window and the dresser drawers, which had been overturned, and from which some savings and a small jewelry box belonging to Guiomar had been removed.

In Rio de Janeiro in 1913, hardly anyone had any knowledge about the science of fingerprinting, or the revolution that this technique represented for forensic investigations. Only the police, probably using gloves, would have been able to commit a crime like this without leaving a trace.

These facts were sufficient to trigger an institutional crisis within the police. The expert only failed to mention that among the objects stolen from his home was the silver-handled whip—one of the pieces of evidence in the crime committed at the House of Swaps.

 

The second category proposed by Dr. Zmuda had to do with symbolizations of infidelity. It is important to distinguish here, as the Polish doctor had done, between adultery resulting from dissatisfaction—when the original partner is unsuitable or sexually inadequate—and the adulterous fantasy itself—which is a necessary, constitutive element of the primordial relationship. Fantasies of infidelity, as you can see, presuppose this primordial relationship, without which they would be meaningless.

Zmuda divided women who fantasized about infidelity into two almost distinct categories. The first were those with the desire to enjoy this pleasure secretly, because having a secret, carrying this crime in their inner depths, of course gave them a sense of power. These are the women who cheat for pleasure, because it is what excites them.

Although Dr. Zmuda did not focus so much on male symbolizations, he did have data and could compare the two. According to the doctor, unfaithful men often claimed to seek other women just to escape routines—in other words, for variety. This was not the case for the adulteress, however. Female fantasies of these types were actually quite elaborate.

In general, they involved very specific places, partners, or circumstances: women who spoke of being alone at home in the company of strangers or dangerous persons; of wanting to seduce beardless young men, or men in uniforms; who would easily allow themselves to be seduced by any great dancer (the type of artist to whom Madame Brigitte attributed the greatest power of seduction); who dreamed of a deserted beach or the dark trails of a secluded forest; who imagined meeting someone during a voyage in a city they would never return to.

Although one could say that the notion of jealousy has existed forever—and the primitives at times went to war over women—it was only with civilization that rigorous and definitive moral sanctions became associated with adultery. So, fantasies of infidelity in women, or rather this first subset of women, were also the result of a nostalgia for barbarism.

But there was a second group of cheaters. This was made up of those who cheated openly, in front of their partners or husbands. The couples' parties at the House of Swaps were places where this modality was given free rein—and it had many variations. There was a simple swap, where the pleasure was to cheat and to be cheated on—a practice of considerate people with a great sense of justice.

There were those who preferred to be the center of attention, making a point of being seen by their spouses—a group Baeta took advantage of. These women were of two types: those who wanted to humiliate their husbands by enjoying another man in front of them, and those who did the same thing, but who were sending another message alltogether. This second type wanted to prove that they were the most seductive, the most interesting, the most coveted, the wildest, and the most sexual. They wanted to demonstrate that their husbands really should be proud of them after all because they would try all men, lightly, fleetingly, but always ended up preferring their husbands, because their husbands were the best. It is curious how the same subject can be understood in such antagonistic ways.