“What?!”
“I’m not going to dance with anybody, don’t worry.”
“You need any money?”
“I still haven’t spent what you gave me last month.”
“Behave, you hear?” said Luiz, hanging up the phone.
Salete took off her clothes, put a Carmelia Alves record on the turntable, and danced the baião in front of the mirror, her arms raised, the right arm a bit higher, as if embracing a partner. In mid-dance she started to cry; her face damp with tears, reflected in the mirror, seemed less vulgar to her, more romantic — but was still ugly. She sighed, pensive: all she did in life was cry.
She was interrupted by the maid knocking at the door. The pedicurist had arrived. She wrapped a towel around herself and opened the door.
“I’m going to do the pedicure in the bedroom, Cida. Come on in. Bring the ottoman, Maria de Lourdes.”
The maid brought a small cushioned stool and placed it in front of a large armchair near the window.
Cida did Salete’s feet every week. There wasn’t that much to do, and the pedicurist quickly finished her work. Cida hadn’t brought nail polish that matched that of Salete’s fingernails; that was that problem. The pedicurist had used one shade and the manicurist another, and the two professionals did not always have the same shades in their kits. Cida removed the polish from Salete’s hands and painted all the nails, both feet and hands, with a polish exactly the same color, bright red.
Afterward they drank coffee that Maria de Lourdes had made.
“And Malvino? How’s he doing?”
“Three days ago he showed up with a big bottle of wine, saying he’s not drinking hard liquor anymore. He said that from now on he’s drinking wine, which is the blood of Christ. But he hasn’t changed at all. I even think getting drunk on the blood of Christ is worse.”
“He’s a drunk but he’s yours, isn’t he? He lives at your house, he’s there when you need him. And me, with two men, one married and the other who doesn’t care about me? There’s a time at night when I look beside me in bed, and there’s no one there; I get up and the apartment is empty. My apartment, like you can see, has the best furniture there is, in the living room and the bedroom, it’s full of things, refrigerator, floor polisher, vacuum cleaner, blender, coffeemaker, a china set, I’ve even got pictures on the wall, sculptures, silver things, but a good man — zero.”
“I’d like to have the things you have. I love the old black man smoking a pipe, on the living room wall.”
“The one who did that is a famous painter, I forget his name. That porcelain ballerina is French, authentic. It was Luiz who gave it to me. But what good does it do?”
“Maybe someday he’ll leave his wife.”
“But I don’t want Luiz, I want the other one. He’s sick, has an ulcer in his stomach. If he came to live with me, I’d cure him.”
“Does he drink?”
“No. He’s just got an ulcer.”
“A sick man usually wants a woman to take care of him.”
“Not Alberto. When he gets sick, he hides and doesn’t want to see me.”
“Strange. .”
“He’s a policeman.”
“That explains it. But look, don’t get involved with a policeman. Stay with that rich guy who gives you everything.”
“I think Alberto likes another woman, a high-class hussy.”
“That’s better for you. Let her have him.”
“I’m going to tell you something. I’ve never told this to anybody. I was born and raised in the Tuiuti favela, there close to São Cristóvão. My mother worked, and I took care of my two younger brothers. We went hungry. Sometimes I would go with them, without my mother knowing, to walk in the Quinta da Boa Vista. We would swim in the lake, run on the lawns. It’s the only good memory I have of that time. I stayed in the favela till I was thirteen, when my mother died, and I went to be a nanny in the home of a family in Botafogo.”
“What did your mother die of?”
“Booze. She drank a lot.”
“And your brothers?”
“They went to live with an aunt. I never saw either of them again.”
In reality, she wasn’t sure whether her mother had died or not. At thirteen, Salete had run away from home. She didn’t have the slightest idea what had happened to her mother and her brothers. But she liked to think she was dead. Her mother was a dark-skinned mulatto, almost black, fat, ugly, and ignorant. She feared that one day she would turn out to be alive and show up, like a ghost.
“What about your father? Don’t you have a father?”
“I never knew my father. All I know is that he was a lowlife Portuguese.”
She had been working for two years as a nanny in a house in Copacabana when she met Dona Floripes. She was pushing the baby carriage down the street when a woman came up to her and, after a great deal of conversation, said that if Salete came to work in her house, she could earn much more. But Salete didn’t mention that to the pedicurist.
“The time in the favela was a horror. I suffered a lot before managing to get ahead in life and become what I am today, a fashion model.”
“It’s good to be well-off, isn’t it? After having it so rough, like you.”
“Magalhães is an important man, and he gives me everything. Still, I’d trade it all to live with Alberto. But like I said, he doesn’t love me.”
The pedicurist felt sorry for her client.
“You shouldn’t just give up like that. We have to fight for the man we love. Even if he is a policeman.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“They’ve got women all over the place and can get killed from one day to the next.”
Before the pedicurist left, Salete gave her, as she always did, the Cinelândia, Grande Hotel and Revista do Rádio magazines that she had already read.
Salete sat on the sofa, thinking, while leafing absentmindedly through the new Cigarra, without seeing even the fashion designs. She thought about what the pedicurist had told her. We have to fight for the man we love.
AT THAT MOMENT, Mattos was lying on his sofa bed listening to La Bohème. He had just seen a photo on the front page of the Tribuna da Imprensa that had greatly disturbed him. The amorous misfortunes of Rodolpho and Mimi, even though continuing to be expressed with emotion by Tebaldi and Di Stefano, had yielded to his cogitations about the Deauville Building murder.
Mattos, though recognizing that he was excessively emotional and impulsive, felt he possessed sufficient clearheadedness and perspicacity to escape the classic traps of the criminal investigator, especially the “snare of logic.” To him, logic was the policeman’s ally, a critical instrument that, in the analysis of disputed situations, allowed one to arrive at knowledge of the truth. Still, just as there was one logic adapted to mathematics and another to metaphysics, one adapted to speculative philosophy and another to empirical research, there was a logic adapted to criminology, which, however, had nothing to do with premises and syllogistic deductions à la Arthur Conan Doyle. In his logic, knowledge of the truth and the understanding of reality could only be achieved by doubting logic itself, and even reality. He admired Hume’s skepticism and regretted that the reading he had done at the university, not only of the Scottish philosopher but also of Berkeley and Hegel, had been so superficial.
He looked again at the large photo of Gregório Fortunato on the front page, with the caption underneath: “Gregório is the patent symbol of the thugs with whom Getúlio Vargas in his fear of the people attempts to surround himself. He represents the primacy of the methods of stilling the voices that disturb the sleep of the great oligarch, who wishes to sleep without nightmares despite his crimes.”