The Mystery of Rio (13 page)

“When exactly did this street thug come here for the first time?”

Miroslav Zmuda recalled the date because it had been a scandal for him and Madame Brigitte: the presence of Palhares, so enamored with Aniceto, a few days after the one-month mass for her dead husband.

“It was the end of July . . . if I'm not mistaken, by my count . . . the 24th.”

To Baeta, all of this was starting to make sense.

 

I interrupt the narrative here to remember another predicate crime, appearing in a Carioca
novel called
The Throne of Queen Jinga
.

I will summarize it briefly so as not to waste time, especially for those who have already read it. There was, in Rio de Janeiro around 1626, a series of crimes perpetrated by a secret brotherhood of African slaves and Creoles, but which also included emancipated slaves and even Indians. The most obvious characteristics that these crimes had in common were their cruelty and apparent lack of motive.

This brotherhood promulgated the renowned heresy of Judas (in the ignorant parlance of the free people), according to which the redemptive mission of the Crucified One had failed miserably despite such immense suffering. For the great betrayer Judas Iscariot had also suffered from regret and shame, having hanged himself on a fig tree—which is the Devil's tree, according to many traditions.

In fact, the brotherhood and its heresy were based on the metaphysical thoughts of the Queen of Matamba, Jinga Mbandi, who considered evil to be one of the physical quantities of the universe, being finite, measurable, and constant. Manifestations of evil were, naturally, emotional or physical sensations, such as pain, disgust, fear, sadness, anger, or guilt.

So, the more physical pain felt by a group of individuals, the less pain, consequently, would be felt by others. Therefore, the crimes of the brotherhood were barbarous and bloody. Because they were slaves, subject to the highest possible punishments, they sought to eliminate that possibility, inflicting on the free a very intense preventive suffering.

None of the crimes of the brotherhood, however, concern us here. I want to mention the incidental episode of one of those heretics, a certain Cristóvão—a slave for hire, a blacksmith from Congo or Angola (now I cannot remember which).

Cristóvão was in love, madly in love, with the brotherhood's leader, the slave Ana, also known as Camba Dinene in Kim­bundu, the group's liturgical and official language.

Ana, however, was the lover of an enslaved Indian who Cristóvão despised. This Indian, known in the brotherhood as Lemba dia Muxito (born Boicorá, though he channeled Cobra Coral when possessed during ceremonies), was versed in the science of the forests and taught Ana the active principle of poisons.

What made Cristóvão indignant, and suffer even more, was that Lemba dia Muxito would have his way with Ana as he would have his way with any other woman: with contempt, as if it made no difference to him if he had her or not. What Cristóvão failed to understand was that this was precisely why, because of this premeditated contempt, Lemba had become so desirable, to Ana and to others.

Caught in the dilemma of impossible love, Cristóvão was unfaithful to Camba Dinene. He tore his own eyes out, so as not to see her; he cut out his own tongue, so as not to kiss her; he inflicted a series of punishments on his own body, so as to become repulsive; and, like Judas, he assumed all of the blame, not just his own.

I presumed, when I read this story, that he wanted to draw to himself all the pain, all the evil in the world, and thus redeem humanity, fulfilling the ideal never attained by Jesus Christ.

However, I now see another intent: Cristóvão was jealous of the
caboclo
. And he made the following association: he concluded that love, too, was constant and finite, that it was one of the quantities of the physical universe. So if he, Cristóvão, felt the most love, an absolute love, there would be no more love in the world for anyone else.

This crime, this suicide, of course, was insane. Nonetheless, there has persisted among people the saying that the one who loves less has the most power.

 

Of course, Dr. Zmuda had not told all. So, after bidding the expert farewell, he took out a black notebook from a locked bookcase and sat at his mahogany desk with ivory details.

On the cover, at the top, there was a label, and written on it in flowery handwriting was the German title
Das Aníketos Problem
, which I have ventured to translate as “The Aniceto Problem.”

Seeing our character so absorbed while leafing through this notebook, we begin to unveil a new and even more mysterious universe among the various ones that coexisted in Dr. Zmuda's house.

A curious man, the Polish doctor: he could have been one of the most famous scientists of the late 19th century, had he committed himself to this purpose. At seventeen, he entered the University of Vienna, where he obtained his medical degree in 1879. He was, as you can see, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, sharing with him an admiration for the same professor, the famous physiologist Ernst von Brücke.

Miroslav the student, as I said, from the beginning of his studies showed interest in the physiology of coitus, guiding his research from the female angle. One of his first articles linked Darwin's theories to the characteristics that he imagined distinguished the various human races, proving woman's sexual role to be the determining factor.

In this paper, now seen as obsolete, Zmuda claimed that steatopygia among African women—associated with the “on all fours” position, typical of inferior cultures and most mammals—evolutionarily produced a higher than average penis size in Africa.

On the other hand, institutions like the geishas of Japan and other forms of female sexual servility existing in East Asia would have generated, due to the absence of orgasm in women, a progressive reduction of the male members in that region.

Along the same lines, the higher performance indices among Arab males, as measured by “rigidity,” “erection time,” and “recovery time,” would be linked to the ancient polygamous traditions of the Semitics, preserved by Muslim civilization, based on a conditioning bordering on insatiability.

The Europeans, on the other hand, stood out for an absolute balance of sexual functions (i.e., pleasure and procreation), which corresponds to the high evolutionary stages attained by the Aryans, manifested in their almost universal preference for the “face to face” position, dictated by the imperative of monogamy (at least after Rome and Christianity), and by the respect for motherhood.

This led him to then study the Myth of the Large Penis, to better understand the female reaction to the relative dimensions of the male member. By measuring length and girth, Miroslav Zmuda identified five penile categories: minuscule, modest, respectable, robust, and colossal. The first and last were pathologies, and their effects were inconvenient because they either produced pain or did not provoke a reaction.

The three intermediate categories, in turn, showed interesting differences: modest sizes were capable of inducing orgasms on occasion, depending on several competing variables of an emotional nature.

Meanwhile, respectable and robust were more consistently successful, but with one difference: several female patients reported that, even if the orgasms produced by these two types were of equal intensity, if they had to choose, they preferred the robust size.

This fact was so important that it helped explain an apparent contradiction in the research: being that minuscule and colossal were organic deformities, one would expect for them to be rejected in the same percentages. However, colossals were more accepted and in some cases even preferred, which never was the case with minuscule.

Miroslav Zmuda thus concluded in favor of the Myth of the Large Penis and wrote the classic passage for which he would forever be criticized: “The human spirit was molded for great things, to idolize immensity; we admire palaces, cathedrals, monuments, mountain ranges, and oceans, and for that same reason women prefer a well-endowed phallus.”

It was around this time, while strolling in Vienna, that Dr. Zmuda met the Brazilian woman whom he would marry and with whom he came to Rio de Janeiro in 1883. And it was in Rio, a true melting pot of races and a major destination for immigrants, that his theories were perfected.

I have stated that Dr. Zmuda was a Pole, a Slav. Hence, he held to the superstition of Aryan superiority. Therefore, he added certain elements to the first version of his theory surrounding the Myth of the Large Penis, giving more emphasis to the affective phenomena of sexuality (which his colleague Freud would call psychological). These were the subjective aspects of attraction between couples that would prepare or predispose women more to a man's contact, greatly increasing the likelihood of orgasm.

Thus, penile volume did not merely have a physical or sensory aspect. It was the vision of the member, the optical seduction, that was the key element, which explained the success of the colossal among some women, even when anatomically uncomfortable. And this also explained the preference for robust with respect to respectable, when they were equivalent on the physiological plane.

Nevertheless, a large penis produced this effect because it evoked the perception of power—a perception that could be aroused, even jointly, by other manly traits subject to admiration, such as strength, intelligence, eloquence, sophistication, artistic skills, social projection, wealth, or (and here the Aryanism comes in) the superiority of a race, perhaps the most expressive quality (in the opinion of the doctor), because it was directly associated with natural selection.

Miroslav Zmuda found that sexual attraction reproduces power relationships: a dominant woman will not accept a subservient man. On the other hand, men in general crave to dominate the highest number of females possible. Therefore, an Aryan, being the member of the superior race, would have an advantage and would not need to be robust or colossal, provided he is not minuscule. He will always be preferable, and will better predispose his partner to orgasm.

So it was with the Brazilian he met in Vienna, and so it was with Brigitte from Espirto Santo. The doctor smiled slyly, remembering that he was not only Aryan, but also belonged to the class of the robust.

What Dr. Zmuda did not want to tell Baeta were all these scientific secrets, which he could no longer publish. Especially because—and it is important that this be made clear—he would have had to commit an unspeakable indiscretion, he would have been forced to reveal another mystery concerning the House of Swaps.

For you see, in the shelves and drawers of Dr. Zmuda's office, under lock and key, were all the data on the intimate sexual secrets of the clients of the House of Swaps, transcribed into black notebooks, identical to the one he was leafing through.

Contained in these notebooks were all the fantasies clients had requested of Madame Brigitte, descriptions of firsthand observations gathered during the communal sessions and on couples' night, and (herein lies the crime) transcripts of the verbal reports regularly required of all nurses concerning everything they had done with their clients.

Sebastião Baeta, his wife Guiomar, and all of the other people who had passed through there had their names very safely stored in these notebooks, in which their sexual behaviors and predilections were described in painstaking detail.

The former house of the Marquise of Santos was not only a gynecological clinic, a maternity ward, a brothel, and a place for clandestine affairs and orgies. It was also, we now know, the most secretive and complete observation laboratory and repository of records of the sex life of a city anywhere in the world.

Thus, Miroslav Zmuda could not reveal to the expert the details of the “The Aniceto Problem”—which had subverted crucial points of his theory.

 

Since early July, when Baeta first began tracing Aniceto's wanderings, the map that emerged contained vastly different, and even contradictory, areas of the city. Each one with their own chain of lovers, antagonistic and isolated, which made his rival's amazing talents even more apparent.

The first one had Ouvidor Street as its epicenter. It was where, at one of the most elegant and sophisticated addresses in Rio, Aniceto had seduced the French owner of La Parisienne, Madame Montfort. From this conquest, he initiated a network of relationships with store customers, such as the wife of the industrialist residing in Botafogo, and the widow Palhares, a resident of Laranjeiras (where rumors were beginning to emerge about a certain neighbor, happily married, who was cheating on her husband with a shady type).

From Ouvidor Street, Aniceto would bridge into the rich neighborhoods and operate within the highest social circles. Moreover, Palhares helped him open another vector, which led the capoeira to São Cristovão—more specifically, to the House of Swaps.

From there, his potential for seduction grew exponentially. But so did the possibilities for the expert, who needed to have access to places where the capoeira had conquered his lovers so he could then take them away from him.

However, while the House of Swaps was a territory where Baeta had traditionally had great success, the fear of losing in front of witnesses caused in him a certain inhibition. And it led the expert instead to the second zone in which Aniceto operated.

It was the poor side of town, where washerwomen, maids, street vendors, cooks, candy makers, seamstresses, factory workers, and newsgirls lived. This was not an unknown universe for Baeta. As a matter of fact, he had actually had lovers there himself, as was the case with the flag-bearer. Uncon­sciously, perhaps, he felt this environment was more conducive, because, in theory, women such as these should prefer a policeman to a street hood.

The capoeira's stomping grounds in this sector, excluding the port itself, were essentially comprised of the neighborhoods of Saúde and Gamboa, the streets of Senador Pompeu and Barão de São Felix, more or less following the western edges of Livramento and Favela up to Pinto Hill—including the actual hills themselves, of course.