Winning the Game and Other Stories (16 page)

It is ten in the morning and the sun casts luminous rays between the black, opaque monolith of the Cândido Mendes skyscraper and the turret of the church with the image of Our Lady of Carmona, she standing up as Our Ladies usually do, a circle of iron, or copper, over her head pretending to be a halo. Ana Paula is giving the naked girl a sunbath; she has already changed her diaper, washed the dirty one in a bucket of water she got from a chicken restaurant, hung it on a wire clothesline that she puts up only on weekends by attaching one end to an iron post with a metal sign that reads
TurisRio—9 parking places
and another to an iron post with an advertising sign. Besides the diapers, Augusto sees Bermudas, T-shirts, jeans, and pieces of clothing that he can't identify, out of consideration, so as not to appear nosey.

Kelly remains on the corner, unwilling to approach the small shack where Ana Paula is taking care of Marcela. Ana Paula has gentle eyes, has a narrow, calm face, delicate gestures, slim arms, a very pretty mouth, despite the cavities in her front teeth.

“Kelly, come see what a pretty baby Marcelinha is,” Augusto says.

At that instant, Benevides, the head of the clan, a black man who's always drunk, comes out from one of the cardboard boxes, followed by the two adolescents Zé Ricardo and Alexandre, the latter the most likable of them all, and also Dona Tina, the matriarch, accompanied by some eight children. There used to be twelve minors in the family, but four had left and no one knew of their whereabouts; they were known to be part of a juvenile gang that operated in the city's South Zone, acting in large bands to rob the elegant stores, well-dressed people, tourists, and on Sundays the patsies tanning on the beach.

One of the children asks Augusto for money and gets a cuff from Benevides.

“We're not beggars, you brat.”

“It wasn't charity,” says Augusto.

“The other day some guy came by saying he was organizing beggars in a group called Beggars United. I told him to shove it. We're no beggars.”

“Who is the guy? Where does he hang out?”

“On Jogo da Bola Street.”

“How do you get to that street?”

“From here? You go in a straight line to Candelária Church, once you're there you take Rio Branco, from there you go to Visconde de Inhaúma Street, picking it up on the left side, go to Santa Rita Square where it ends and Marechal Floriano starts, that's Larga Street, and you go down Larga until you come to Andradas, on the right-hand side, cross Leandro Martins, get onto Júlia Lopes de Almeida, go left to Conceição Street, follow it till Senador Pompeu, take a right onto Colonel something-or-other, and stay to the right till you get to Jogo da Bola Street. Ask for him, his name's Chicken Zé. A black guy with green eyes, all the time surrounded by suck-ups. He's gonna end up on the city council.”

“Thanks, Benevides. How's business?”

“We've hauled in twenty tons of paper this month,” says Alexandre.

“Shut up,” says Benevides.

A truck comes by periodically to pick up the paper that's been collected. Today it came early and took away everything.

Dona Tina says something that Augusto doesn't understand.

“Shit, ma, keep your mouth shut. Shit,” shouts Benevides, furious.

His mother moves away and goes to put some pans over a dismountable stove made of bricks, in the Banco Mercantil's doorway. Ricardo combs his thick hair using a comb with long steel teeth.

“Who's the babe?” Benevides points to Kelly, in the distance, at the street corner. Kelly looks like a princess of Monaco, in the midst of the Gonçalves family.

“A friend of mine.”

“Why doesn't she come any closer?”

“She must be afraid of you, of your shouts.”

“I have to shout. I'm the only one here with a head on his shoulders … Sometimes I'm even suspicious of you …”

“That's silly.”

“At first I thought you were from the police. Then from the Leo XIII, then somebody from the bank, but the manager's a good guy and knows we're workers and wouldn't send some spy to rat on us. We've been here for two years, and I plan to die here, which may not be that long, 'cause I've got this pain in the side of my belly … You know this bank's never been robbed? Only one in the whole area.”

“Your presence keeps robbers away.”

“I'm suspicious of you.”

“Don't waste your time on that.”

“What do you want here? Last Saturday you didn't want to have some soup with us.”

“I told you. I want to talk. And you only have to tell me what you want to. And I only like green-colored soups, and your soups are yellow.”

“It's the squash,” says Dona Tina, who is listening to the conversation.

“Shut up, ma. Look here, man, the city's not the same anymore. There's too many people, too many beggars in the city, picking up paper, fighting with us over territory, a whole lot of people living under overhangs; we're all the time throwing out bums from outside, and there's even fake beggars fighting us for our paper. All the paper thrown away on this part of Cândido Mendes is mine, but there's guys trying to grab it.”

Benevides says that the man on the truck pays more for white paper than for newsprint or scrap paper, dirty paper, colored paper, torn paper. The paper he collects on Cândido Mendes is white. “There's a lot of continuous computer forms, reports, things like that.”

“What about glass? It can also be recycled. Have you thought about selling bottles?”

“Bottle men have to be Portuguese. We're black. And bottles are giving out, everything's plastic. The only bottle man who works these parts is Mané da Boina, and he came by the other day to have some soup with us. He eats yellow soup. He's in deep shit.”

Kelly spreads her arms, displays an impatient expression, at the corner across the street. Augusto says good-bye, embracing everyone. Benevides pulls Augusto to his naked torso, bringing his alcoholic mouth close to the other man's, and looks at him closely, curiously, shrewdly. “They're saying there's going to be a big convention of foreigners and that they're going to try to hide us from the gringos. I don't want to leave here,” he murmurs menacingly. “I live beside a bank, there's safety, no crazy man's going try to set us on fire like they did with Maílson, behind the museum. And I've been here for two years, which means nobody's going to try and mess with our home; it's part of the atmosphere, you understand?” Augusto, who was born and raised in the downtown area, although in a more lustrous era when the stores' facades sported their names in glowing twisted glass tubes filled with red, blue, and green gases, understands completely what Benevides is telling him with his endless embrace; he too wouldn't leave downtown for anything, and he nods, involuntarily brushing his face against the face of the black man. When they finally separate, Augusto manages to slip the clever little black boy a bill, without Benevides seeing it. He goes to Ana Paula and says good-bye to her, to Marcelo and to little Marcela, who is now wearing a pair of floral-patterned overalls.

“Let's go,” says Augusto, taking Kelly by the arm. Kelly pulls her arm away. “Don't touch me; those beggars probably have the mange. You'll have to take a bath before going to bed with me.”

They walk to the used-book store behind the Carmo church, while Kelly spins her theory that beggars, in hot places like Rio, where they walk around half-naked, are even poorer; a shirtless beggar, wearing old, dirty, torn pants that show a piece of his butt is more of a beggar than a beggar in a cold place dressed in rags. She saw beggars when she went to São Paulo one winter, and they were wearing wool overcoats and caps; they had a decent look to them.

“In cold places beggars freeze to death on the streets,” Augusto says.

“Too bad that heat doesn't kill them too,” Kelly says.

Whores don't like beggars, Augusto knows.

“The difference between a beggar and others,” Kelly continues, “is that when he's naked a beggar doesn't stop looking like a beggar, and when others are naked they stop looking like what they are.”

They arrive at the used-book shop. Kelly looks at it from the street, suspicious. The shelves inside are crammed with books. “Are there enough people in the world to read so many books?”

Augusto wants to buy a book for Kelly, but she refuses to go into the bookstore. They go to São José Street, from there to Graça Aranha Street, Avenida Beira Mar, the Obelisk, the Public Promenade.

“I used to work the streets here, and I've never been inside this place,” Kelly says.

Augusto points out the trees to Kelly, says that they're over two hundred years old, speaks of Master Valentim, but she's not interested and only comes out of her boredom when Augusto, from the small bridge over the pond, at the opposite side from the entrance on Passeio Street, at the other end where the terrace with the statue of the boy, now made of bronze, when Augusto, from the small bridge spits in the water for the small fishes to eat his spittle. Kelly finds it funny and spits too, but she quickly gets bored because the fish seem to prefer Augusto's spit.

“I'm hungry,” Kelly says.

“I promised to have lunch with the old man,” Augusto says.

“Then let's go get him.”

They go up Senador Dantas, where Kelly also worked the streets, and come to Carioca Square. There the portable tables of the street vendors are in greater number. The main commercial streets are clogged with tables filled with merchandise, some of it contraband and some of it pseudo-contraband, famous brands crudely counterfeited in small clandestine factories. Kelly stops before one of the tables, examines everything, asks the price of the transistor radios, the battery-driven toys, the pocket calculators, the cosmetics, a set of plastic dominoes that imitate ivory, the colored pencils, the pens, the blank videotapes and cassettes, the coffee strainer, the penknives, the decks of cards, the watches and other trinkets.

“Let's go, the old man is waiting,” Augusto says.

“Cheap crap,” Kelly says.

At his walk-up, Augusto convinces the old man to comb his hair and to replace his slippers with one-piece high-lace boots with elastic on the sides and straps at the back for pulling them on, an old model but still in good condition. The old man is going out with them because Augusto promised they'd have lunch at the Timpanas, on São José, and the old man once courted an unforgettable girl who lived in a building next to the restaurant, built in the early nineteen hundreds, and which still has, intact, wrought-iron balconies, tympanums, and cymas decorated with stucco.

The old man takes the lead with a firm step.

“I don't want to walk too fast. They say it causes varicose veins,” protests Kelly, who in reality wants to walk slowly to examine the street vendors' tables.

When they arrive in front of the Timpanas, the old man contemplates the ancient buildings lined up to the corner of Rodrigo Silva Street. “It's all going to be torn down,” he says. “You two go on in, I'll be along shortly; order rice and peas for me.”

Kelly and Augusto sit at a table covered with a white tablecloth. They order a fish stew for two and rice with peas for the old man. The Timpanas is a restaurant that prepares dishes to the customer's specifications.

“Why don't you hug me the way you did that dirty black guy?” Kelly asks.

Augusto doesn't want to argue. He gets up to look for the old man.

The old man is looking at the buildings, quite absorbed, leaning against an iron fence that surrounds the old Buraco do Lume, which after it was closed off became a patch of grass with a few trees, where a few beggars live.

“Your rice is ready,” Augusto says.

“You see that balcony there, in that blue two-story building? The three windows on the second floor? It was in that window to our right that I saw her for the first time, leaning on the balcony, her elbows resting on a pillow with red embroidery.”

“Your rice is on the table. It has to be eaten as soon as it comes from the stove.”

Augusto takes the old man by the arm, and they go into the restaurant.

“She was very pretty. I never again saw such a pretty girl.”

“Eat your rice, it's getting cold,” Augusto says.

“She limped on one leg. That wasn't important to me. But it was important to her.”

“It's always like that,” Kelly says.

“You're right,” the old man says.

“Eat your rice, it's getting cold.”

“The women of the oldest profession possess a sinuous wisdom. You gave me momentary comfort by mentioning the inexorability of things,” the old man says.

“Thanks,” Kelly says.

“Eat your rice, it's getting cold.”

“It's all going to be torn down,” the old man says.

“Did it used to be better?” Augusto asks.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“In the old days there were fewer people and almost no automobiles.”

“The horses, filling the streets with manure, must have been considered a curse equal to today's cars,” Augusto says.

“And people in the old days were less stupid,” the old man continues with a melancholy gaze, “and not in such a hurry.”

“People in those days were more innocent,” Kelly says.

“And more hopeful. Hope is a kind of liberation,” the old man says.

Meanwhile, Raimundo, the pastor, called by his bishop to the world headquarters of the Church of Jesus Savior of Souls, on Avenida Suburbana, listens contritely to the words of the supreme head of his Church.

“Each pastor is responsible for the temple in which he works. Your collection has been very small. Do you know how much Pastor Marcos, in Nova Iguaçu, collected last month? Over ten thousand dollars. Our Church needs money. Jesus needs money; he always has. Did you know that Jesus had a treasurer, Judas Iscariot?”