The Mystery of Rio (15 page)

No father or holy person had a solution to his problem. The
batuqueiro
was a hopeless case, until a new Holy Saturday came along.

Dito was at the Terreirão, fighting off the blues, when it happened: the
malandro
, the crook, this evil and murderous thug, suddenly jumped into the center of the circle, hands on his twisting hips—dancing in the exotic, seductive, and unmistakable style of the late Maria do Pote. They say even his laughter had the exact same timbre as the girl's.

 

Let us get back to Rufino now. The house, atop Santa Teresa, seemed to be carved out of the forest right above where Antonio Valentim had once built his imposing castle, in an area that was being settled little by little, and already had a dozen shacks on it.

Rufino's house was the most isolated of them all. But it was not built from scrap lumber and demolition materials like the others: it was of a much older construction, made of wattle and daub, low and without windows. The precarious ventilation was achieved by way of a small gap between the walls and the palm fiber that covered the roof. A meandering coral snake was painted on the front door, which was shut with a wooden latch. There was a second door in the back, with just enough room for a crouched man to enter. This door faced the dense forest.

This was an important difference: while the other residents tried to clear the forest around their homes, to make the environment increasingly urban, Rufino preferred the shade and humidity of the jungle. And that was not all—he threatened anyone who appeared with a scythe, a machete, or an ax, saying that the exuberant nature that surrounded them had not been the work of God, but rather that it was he, Rufino, who had built that forest, just like Antonio Valentim had built his castle. The old man claimed he could identify all of the palm trees, the
jequitibás,
the
jatobás
, the
jacarandas
, the
tapirirás
, the cinnamon trees, the cedars, the
perobas
,
ipês
, begonias, orchids, the
angelins,
and
gameleiras
he had planted there in a labor that had lasted forty years.

It was one more story that circulated about him: that he had been one of the slaves utilized by Major Archer during the reforestation of the mountains of Tijuca, an effort which started in 1861, by order of the emperor, with the intent of recovering the sources of the Comprido, Maracanã, and Carioca rivers to end the city's chronic water shortages.

Rufino actually completed his duties, but only after leading his fellow slaves to escape into the surrounding hills. Thus emerged the mysterious Cambada Quilombo, a community of runaway slaves never destroyed or located, which Rufino headed.

While the major continued with the work (this time with salaried employees), the fugitives did the same thing, replanting the forest at different points on the hillside.

The replanting of Tijuca Forest, for Rufino, served to rescue not only the rivers but also his favorite prey: pacas, peccary, the macuco, and the lizards. The old man also wanted to create a maze, inside of which the Cambada Quilombo could resist forever.

Thus, Rufino's house, which was built in the
quilombo
style, was from an architectural standpoint more important than the castle, because it was one of the last of its type in the city.

When Baeta arrived at the house, Rufino was not in, and it was raining. It had been a long hike up from Guimarães Square, where he had jumped off the streetcar. He would have preferred to wait a little before approaching the house, but there was nowhere to stay dry there, especially since the neighbors, who lived just down the hill, did not seem to like the old man very much, and pointed the way very grudgingly.

Just when the rain began really coming down, when it was turning into a full-blown storm, the expert noticed a movement in the bushes, and he walked around the house, gun in hand, expecting find an animal of some kind. Then he saw that the back door, protected by a fence of bromeliads, was open. He could not resist.

The furniture consisted of a mat, covering a bed of leaves, and a wooden stool covered with tapir leather. There was also the stump of a jackfruit tree, which must have doubled as a chair, and a stove with an iron trivet over it. The rest were various wicker baskets hanging from the roof, a
candongueiro
drum made of
jararaca
skin, and the skulls of animals hanging from the walls. The expert thought he recognized fourteen: a jaguar, a giant anteater, an agouti, an alligator, a peccary, a pygmy owl, a howler monkey, a capybara, a sloth, a spider monkey, an armadillo, a toucan, an ocelot, and a paca. Finally, objects lay scattered on the floor: ropes, candles, bottles, primitive tools, knives, a rapier, and even a large shiv, which could be used in hunting or even warfare.

“Looking to die, young man?”

Baeta turned to face Rufino, who was standing, drenched, barefoot, and shirtless, machete in hand. Some solemn looks can scare you more than a machete. Despite being armed, and despite being police, the expert trembled.

The old man recognized the expert. In his mind he was of the same ilk as the Mauá Square thugs. He stared Baeta down with a steely gaze, awaiting an explanation. The expert, very carefully, began apologizing before getting to the subject at hand:

“I came to talk to you about the man who gave you the earrings.”

Rufino, was skeptical. He settled down on the tapir skin bench, his legs open. Suddenly, he hurled the machete, lodging it into the jackfruit tree stump with a thud. It was his way of telling the policeman where to sit.

“What does the man with the earrings have to do with this story?”

Baeta did not understand. He knew nothing about any story. He had come with a very specific objective concerning Aniceto. That is what he intended to talk about.

“Don't think you can fool me, mister. You're all the same.”

It was clear to the expert, once again, that being police spoiled everything. But he didn't feel like justifying himself and went straight to the point: he spoke of the
babalaô
Antonio the Mina; of Aniceto's countless women, and of his own suspicion that the service rendered for the capoeira in the English Ceme­tery, and paid for with the earrings, had something to do with that power.

“I came to get myself the same thing.”

Rufino did not answer immediately. He dried his hands with a wad of tow, took a pipe from one of the
samburás
, filled it with a pinch of tobacco, and only after his third puff, declared:

“I don't strike deals with the police. Never again.”

That's when Baeta understood: his home had been broken into, his belongings had been ransacked and scattered like trash, he himself had been tortured. He still had bruises from the blows to his back, not to mention the burns on his face, hands, and the soles of his feet. All of this because of a treasure they said was his.

The officers who wanted to extort him (Baeta did not suspect the captain was one of them) were now poking around, prowling his house, following his every footstep and those of his clients.

The expert—who had already accepted the abstraction of magic—still could not believe in stories of such palpable wealth, in such vast quantities of stones and precious metals. And he told the old man as much, to try to convince him that he had not gone there to rob him. Rufino, however, remained interested only in his pipe, making it very clear that the subject was closed.

“So then, does this treasure really exist?”

It was just a taunt. When the old man opened his mouth it was only to spit on the ground. Baeta stood, angrily. Before slamming the door behind him, though, he played one last card:

“I'll take care of the police. We'll talk soon.”

Rufino, who up until then had maintained a fierce expression, laughed for the first time.

 

The Aniceto Problem—as Doctor Zmuda had termed it—was actually a set of observations that could be looked at from the prism of three distinct topics, related to the areas of female sexuality that had most interested the doctor in recent years.

We saw that in Vienna, Miroslav Zmuda emphasized the physiology of intercourse, the sexual evolution of the races, and the Myth of the Large Penis. His ideas at the time brought with them the implicit assumption that the action of the phallus in the vagina was the primordial element of female pleasure, albeit assisted by other factors.

By overly stressing one aspect, you run the risk of neglecting another one. Thus, the Polish doctor belittled the importance of clitoral functions, both in stimulation as well as during coitus, as he regarded manual induction of orgasms as secondary and dispensable, particularly in women. Who would have thought? Miroslav Zmuda, skilled masturbator, who had won over Brigitte at his former clinic in Gloria in precisely that manner.

It was Aniceto who began to change the doctor's thinking. It was couples' night. July 24th. The usual guests were there. Guiomar and the expert Baeta were there. Zmuda was shocked to see Palhares, with her new partner, less than two months after her husband's funeral. Few realized it was she, though, so the couple sparked little interest. Baeta, then in the throes of lovemaking, did not even glance at them.

But Aniceto was playing close attention. His gaze was firmly fixed on the women, especially the nurses. He soon attracted one, and, with Palhares, took her into one of the bedrooms that guests were allowed to lock from inside. It was this nurse who narrated the following series of events to Madame Brigitte.

Not only did Aniceto guide the widow to kiss her on the mouth, and to explore her entire body, but he produced in her an orgasm through penetration that she had never before experienced with a man at that intensity. Lying on her back, the prostitute felt Aniceto's full weight focused on his pubis, and, by vigorously pressing against her vulva, he could swivel his hips, introducing the penis at the same time and with the same force that he massaged the clitoris.

“I was so shaken, I could barely move,” concluded the girl, at a loss for words to describe the sensation.

Because she was a prostitute with vast experience, Zmuda gave much value to that technique. And a few months later he was able to watch it live, for it was exactly the technique Aniceto used on the tall woman at the party where Baeta took notice of the capoeira for the first time.

That, however, was not what most impressed Dr. Zmuda about Aniceto. It was in the field of sexual attraction that he was truly working wonders.

To seduce a nurse was perhaps not so difficult; but by then, Dr. Zmuda already knew that Aniceto was not exactly Madame Montfort's employee, that he had been the cause of the crime committed by the industrialist's wife, and that he had a certain facility in seducing very fine ladies, like the widow Palhares and her neighbor in Laranjeiras, not to mention the women he met at the House of Swaps.

Although there were exceptions—and Madame Brigitte had already arranged some fantasies to that effect—females in general (so the doctor believed), preferred males of a superior social rank to their own, which in Rio de Janeiro was often confused with the notion of race.

Palhares and many of the other women who had been seduced by the capoeira had already shown a tendency toward brutish, poor, or ignorant men, which for Zmuda belonged to the realm of individual fantasy, so there was no real surprise there. The surprise lay in Aniceto's being accepted by so many superior partners, which gave his achievement the air of a real feat.

This was one reason why Aniceto's presence at the House of Swaps was so essential. Miroslav Zmuda wanted first to understand his method and then to discover the scientific foundations that made it possible.

The second reason was more pressing: the capoeira, besides being an irresistible seducer, had an unimaginable capacity for entering the minds of women and discovering their most intimate sexual desires, which he would then turn around and expose and exploit.

A good example was how he had managed Palhares and the tall woman: Aniceto seemed to know things beforehand—that both liked being with women, too, that the widow enjoyed being treated with a certain contempt, and playing a more submissive role, that the other preferred the more dominant role, and that being passive, in that kind of situation, was her way of humiliating her partner.

Even supposing Palhares had revealed such desires to the capoeira (which Zmuda considered very unlikely), there was no way to explain the tall woman, other than amazing coincidence or deep intuition. The doctor leaned toward the second hypothesis, while revising his notes and confirming that neither of the two had exhibited those tendencies, those symbolizations, before.

This was the third major theme of Dr. Zmuda's research: the constancy of the phenomenon he called “sexual symbolization,” the discovery of which he owed to the city, Madame Brigitte, and the House of Swaps.

It was in Rio de Janeiro that Miroslav Zmuda discovered—or, rather, became fully convinced—that female orgasms were extremely affected by the symbolic components of attraction and sex. These symbols could operate merely in the realm of fantasy, for example in individuals who secretly imagined certain scenes during intercourse. Or these scenes could be fully carried out, and then they became real-life experiments and tremendously influenced pleasure levels.

Since then, the Polish doctor had been cataloging and classifying a large number of these symbolizations. Both the specialized literature and public opinion in general tainted these as aberrations, perversions, fetishes, addictions, vices, abominable practices, and deviations. Nobody inhabited these dark areas so familiarly as did Aniceto.

 

In 1916, when the composer Donga filed for a copyright at the National Library for a score to a song entitled
Pelo Telefone
(the first composition to earn the name “samba,” although it was, in fact, a
maxixe
), he may have committed a series of omissions, or even told lies regarding the genre, the authorship, and the dates of its composition.