The Mystery of Rio (14 page)

Aniceto lived on Harmonia Street, near the square, in a rooming house just a notch above a tenement (therefore the building had escaped the fury of the city's sanitary engineers at the turn of the century). It was a sober building, originally one-story, to which a second story was added, with eight rooms on top and four below, leaving ample space for the kitchen and bathroom. The expert's probes began there in mid-September, on a day when Aniceto was not there.

A policeman in Sáude asking questions scares people. Baeta was not well received. And he had to win over the Portuguese landlady, patiently assuring her that he did not have anything against the tenant, that in truth he was actually there looking for one of his girlfriends. The expert evaluated what kind of regard the landlady seemed to have for Aniceto:

“He doesn't bring them home out of respect for me. But his collection's been growing ever since he came back.”

This was an important fact: the landlady had no recollection of Aniceto being such a womanizer before his time in Alagoas. This information was consistent with Dr. Zmuda's statement of July 24th. It was clear, therefore, that the capoeira's talent had been acquired after Rufino had rendered his services. The conversation ended with the landlady giving Baeta two or three addresses.

The expert would not, of course, knock on these girls' doors. But the leads clarified a fundamental feature of the capoeira's ethics: in that region, at least, no one knew of his involvement with any married women. This facilitated things, apparently. First, however, Baeta needed to lay the groundwork, making himself even better known in the area, lessening the resentment that his position as policeman inspired in everyone.

In subsequent days, Baeta made incursions into very many bars and dives in the area—anywhere he might find Aniceto's women, while at the same time avoiding his rival. He even ventured into a drumming circle on Proposito Street.

However, it was at an old warehouse in Santo Cristo—where codfish, sausage, and dried beef were sold off of hooks from the ceiling, infesting the air with a suffocating smell of salt and fat—where he met the capoeira's first avowed enemy.

“Stinking bastard. One day he'll be dead, and no one will have a clue why.”

His tone was one of pure hatred. Baeta also detected a foreign accent. The man turned his back to the expert and returned to his conversation with two companions lounging on potato sacks. That's when a fourth man from the same group folded his hand in a round of
sueca,
and motioned to Baeta, indicating that they should go to the rear to talk.

Antonio the Mina, the man with the accent, owned his own home on Hospício Street and was one of the last African
babalaôs
of Rio de Janeiro. The other Ifá priests disliked him intensely because he went around saying that he was the sole legitimate heir to the tradition, the only one who knew the two hundred fifty-six paths of each of the two hundred fifty-six
odus
(or individual destinies), which equaled more than sixty-five thousand memorized poems he could recite.

The man who explained these things was the African's apprentice. Baeta had never heard that the Mina people had a god of knowledge, and a kind of alphabet—represented by complex symbols whose meaning could be deciphered by arithmetic analysis of their strokes—used to write the
odus
. He began to realize that these sorcerers had their own principles and methods. Perhaps for that very reason, because of the rational nature of that activity, all of those men, including the Galician, the owner of the warehouse, venerated Antonio the Mina, the
babalaô
.

And the expert went on listening, paying for more and more rounds of cachaça and chorizo, until finally Antonio joined them to narrate what he knew about Aniceto.

Antonio had consulted for Aniceto forever. The capoeira had been abandoned by his mother as a newborn, and then lost his father, which was when his brothers disowned him. At the time the
babalaô
, out of the kindness of his heart, helped support him. They did not know or even remember a sister named Fortunata—which was natural, considering the age when the two would have been separated.

Incidentally, no relative, except his father, had ever shown any interest in the capoeira. For this reason, the Mina could not forgive Aniceto's betrayal. As he explained it, before the capoeira disappeared for a while up north, he had sought out another sorcerer from a different line, an old
macumbeiro
, a charlatan and a scam artist.

That was the reason for the fight: Antonio had refused to initiate Aniceto as a
babalaô
because the
odu
prohibited it.

“He came up
Odi-Otura
. They say that whoever performs
Ifá
on this individual will attract shame or disgrace.”

The expert was impressed with this schism between sorcerers—similar in many ways to what one encounters between scientists advocating divergent theoretical tangents.

“Now he struts around like a big shot. They say he has lots of women and money. People think it's the work of
macumba
. Don't believe it. If he has women, it's because he got rich. And if got rich, it's because he's a thief!”

By then, Baeta had already knocked back a few cachaças. But he could still easily deduce the identity of the old
macumbeiro
: power like that—money, women—really was worth a pair of gold earrings shaped like seahorses.

 

It was not the first time Baeta had been draw into a world of fantastic realities, of esoteric knowledge, and of magic. His mother, a laundress, had been permeated by the supernatural in her daily life. She liked to recite supernatural incidents, mostly crimes, which she had heard from neighbors at the grocery store and at street fairs.

In Catumbi, Baeta's birthplace, they had lived next to a fortune-teller, Mrs. Zeze, who took in an old man who channeled the spirits of dead African slaves, a
preto velho de quimbanda
. Young Sebastião had been with that old man, Father Cristóvão das Almas, only once, secretly taken there by an aunt when they said he had rabies after a dog bit him.

He never forgot that scene: Mrs. Zeze, possessed by the spirit, wrinkled skin, her body all bent with age, contorted, sitting on her adductor muscles, her legs folded back, a position that in theory should have been unbearable for anyone her age. And Father Cristóvão, with his ancient and pentatonic voice, channeling chilling melodies while wielding a machete and knife, puffing bitter smoke from his pipe, exploding huge
fundanga
wheels, drinking liters of cachaça, and staying clearheaded all the while.

The washerwoman's son was healed and heard even more stories, about people who died on the day and in the manner predicted by the old man; about messages from beyond the grave, with details so precise and so intimate that they could not be mere coincidence; about diagnosed diseases, which were later confirmed by medical doctors; plus many other wonders.

But he never paid much heed to any of these things. His father had been an engineer who, even from a distance, had instilled in him the illusion that everyone who came out of this universe was a failure. The engineer, seeing the boy's extraordinary intelligence, invested heavily in his formal education and inculcated in him a mindset we might call “scientific.”

Perhaps this was why Baeta had never given any credence to the more heterodox strands of science. His vehement rejection of Lombroso's criminal anthropology, for example, stemmed not only from numerous counterproofs collected in Baeta's own work, but also because the Italian doctor had studied spiritualism, having attested to the veracity of the mesmeric and magnetic experiments that were all the rage in Europe at the time. The expert found such an interest incompatible with the scientific mentality, and therefore disqualified it as theoretical.

The
babalaô
Antonio the Mina was both a disturbing and conciliatory element for Baeta. First, because Baeta realized that magical thinking surprisingly sought support in numbers theory, and second, because the expert now had no doubt whatsoever that Aniceto's seductive power had been obtained supernaturally. The testimonies of Antonio the Mina, and of the Portuguese landlady, and of Miroslav Zmuda himself confirmed that those feats were recent, and that they coincided with the date of the services rendered by Rufino at the English Cemetery.

We know that great mathematical minds have a great propensity toward mysticism: Baeta was the son of an engineer, and he had grown up on supernatural stories from the laundress. At that moment, these lineages merged; logic and magic began to inhabit the same world, and all of the fantastical inclinations of his intellectual constitution blossomed inside of him with great energy.

The expert felt that if he resorted to witchcraft to win the bet, he would not be betraying his essentially rational nature.

Consulting Mrs. Zeze, however, was impossible—Baeta had gone to her funeral, years earlier, in the company of his mother. Antonio the Mina was even less of an option. Although he had not clearly understood the
babalaô's
objections to Aniceto's plans, Baeta intuited that the capoeira had only sought Rufino because he could not accept the Mina's rejection.

Therefore, the one who possessed that power, the one who could transmit the power he so coveted, was the scam artist, the charlatan, the
macumbeiro
Rufino.

 

One of the fantastic stories Baeta had heard his mother tell in his childhood was published under the title
Maria do Pote's Unexpected Revenge
, and it was still well known in 1983, when the late Beto da Cuíca transformed it into a samba.

It tells the story of Dito (short for “Benedito”), a trickster, drummer, and resident of Rato Hill who attended the samba circle of the sinister Terreirão, in San Carlos. This place—a sort of step, naturally cut out of the hill's steep slope—had been cursed ever since they cut down a
mata-pau
(or laurel fig) tree there, thus opening the ground as if it were the very gates of Hell.

Whoever walked through the Terreirão, and specifically dragged his foot over the area where the tree had once stood, was stricken by irreparable misfortune, and would be haunted until his dying days.

At the time of the events narrated, however, this phenomenon had not yet been perceived. For that reason, no one who lived nearby ever missed a jam session there, and even people from Andaraí came down to verify the reputation of the hotshots
from Estacio.

Dito was not just a drummer and a
malandro
. He was also, above all, a bandit. The robberies he committed were not of his own initiative, but were killings he would do for hire. The latter fact, of course, did not prevent him from performing some killings whose motivation was, shall we say, of a personal, rather than financial, nature. If he was not getting paid, Dito only killed for revenge.

There were certain rituals associated with each case. For example, when for hire, Dito complied with his client's calendar. Revenge killings, however, he performed only on Saturdays in March or April.

So much art, so much premeditation, went into these crimes that Dito was not concerned that future victims might get wind of their sentences. No one escaped—especially because they had not uncovered the principles underlying the choice of the fateful Saturday.

The consequences of having stepped onto the Terreirão, for Dito, began as soon as he laid eyes on a lively mulatta in the samba circle, who transfixed the
malandro
with a very eccentric, very provocative swing in her hips. As you may have surmised, it was none other than Maria do Pote.

After the samba, Dito, a bandit and a drummer, became intimate with the girl right there on the slope.

Maria do Pote was a local, but she attended a
candomblé de inquices
at Barão of Itaúna, and had been shaved for
sinhá Bamburucema
—similar to a Iansã or a Santa Barbara. They say the women of Santa Barbara are very hot-blooded—and better than those of Oxum.

Her friends warned her that she should reject him, that men like him were no good, that they were only trouble. They had no idea, these women, how good it is to be with a bad man. Dito claimed Maria do Pote as his.

In a story such as this, whose theme is betrayal, which begins with talk of revenge, which involves a man (a villain) and a woman (a seductress), there can be no outcome that does not involve adultery. And that is exactly what will happen.

First, however, it must be said that Maria do Pote was not a loose woman, a whore, as many insist. It is important to remember, first, that she was a young lady, and second, that she had danced on the spot where the root of the
mata-pau
had once been.

They are impressive, these fig trees. Their vast, confused, and irregular thicket of branches appears to reflect the very unpredictability of life. Contradictorily, the branches resemble roots, and they appear to extend deep into the earth. Because of this ambivalence, the trees are a gateway into the underworld and into the tombs where disembodied spirits dwell. The tree itself, the
mata-pau
, the “kill-stick,” feeds on death, as the name itself suggests, because it only germinates over the corpses of other trees.

Maria do Pote—like many others, like Dito himself—seemed infused by the spirit of the fig tree. And on one occasion, one single time, after a samba, when her man did not show up, she curled up with another man in that gully. Dito, being streetwise, got wind of everything, but he kept quiet, taking full advantage of the few days Maria had left.

It was April 15th, 1911—Holy Saturday, the day of the Great Revenge—where they would beat up on Judas and then go drink and beat their drums in the Terreirão, that Dito cut Maria do Pote's throat, right there in the middle of the circle.

Her girlfriends mourned, and no one else dared even touch the subject. What people did begin to talk about was the thug's behavior. First, he would go to great lengths not to pass by the São Francisco de Paula Cemetery, instead taking Doutor Agra to get to Itapiru Street, always avoiding Catumbi Square. Then he started fearing all intersections, which he only crossed with his eyes closed. It was then that it was revealed that Dito was seeing apparitions.