“That’s exactly what I don’t want. Here they feel like their own bosses, they trust us, as if we were all friends. I’ve been in this business twenty-five years. Don’t come to me with untested theories. Woman is revolutionizing the Brazilian press; it’s a different kind of newspaper that doesn’t run yesterday’s warmed-over television news.”
He was so irritated that I didn’t ask exactly what Woman was out to accomplish. He’d tell me sooner or later. I just wanted the job.
“My cousin, Machado Figueiredo, who also has twenty-five years’ experience, at the Bank of Brazil, likes to say that he’s always open to untested theories.” I knew that Woman owed money to the bank. And a letter of recommendation from my cousin was on Peçanha’s desk.
When he heard my cousin’s name, Peçanha paled. He bit his cigar to control himself, then closed his mouth, as if he were about to whistle, and his fat lips trembled as if he had a grain of pepper on his tongue. He opened his mouth wide and tapped his nicotine-stained teeth with his thumbnail while he looked at me in a way that he must have considered fraught with significance.
“I could add ‘Dr.’ to my name. Dr. Nathanael Lessa.”
“Damn! All right, all right,” Peçanha snarled between his teeth, “you start today.”
That was how I came to be part of the team at Woman.
My desk was near Sandra Marina’s, who wrote the horoscope. Sandra was also known as Marlene Katia, for interviews. A pale fellow with a long, sparse mustache, he was also known as João Albergaria Duval. He wasn’t long out of communications school and constantly complained, “Why didn’t I study dentistry, why?”
I asked him if someone brought the readers’ letters to my desk. He told me to talk to Jacqueline in the office. Jacqueline was a large black man with very white teeth.
“It won’t go over well being the only one here who doesn’t have a woman’s name; they’re going to think you’re a fairy. Letters? There aren’t any. You think Class C women write letters? Elisa made them all up.”
DEAR DR. NATHANAEL LESSA. I got a scholarship for my ten-year-old daughter in a fancy school in a good neighborhood. All her classmates go to the hairdresser at least once a week. We don’t have the money for that, my husband drives a bus on the Jacaré-Caju line, but he says he’s going to work overtime to send Tania Sandra, our little girl, to the hairdresser. Don’t you think that our children deserve every sacrifice? DEDICATED MOTHER. VILLA KENNEDY.
ANSWER: Wash your little girl’s head with coconut soap and wrap it in curling paper. It’s the same as the hairdresser. In any case, your daughter wasn’t born to be a doll-baby. Nor anyone else’s daughter, for that matter. Take the overtime pay and buy something more useful. Food, for example.
DEAR DR. NATHANAEL LESSA. I am short, plump, and shy. Whenever I go to the outdoor market, the store, the vegetable market, they trick me. They cheat me on the weight, the change, the beans have bugs in them, the cornmeal is stale, that kind of thing. It used to bother me a lot, but now I’m resigned to it. God is watching them and at the day of judgment they will pay. RESIGNED DOMESTIC. PENHA.
ANSWER: God doesn’t have his eye on anybody. You have to look out for yourself. I suggest you scream, holler, raise a scandal. Don’t you have a relative who works for the police? A crook will do also. Get moving, chubby.
DEAR DR. NATHANAEL LESSA. I am twenty-five, a typist, and a virgin. I met this boy who says he really loves me. He works in the Ministry of Transportation and says he wants to marry me, but first he wants to try it out. What do you think? FRENZIED VIRGIN. PARADA DE LUCAS.
ANSWER: Look, Frenzied Virgin, ask the guy what he plans to do if he doesn’t like the experience. If he says he’ll dump you, give him what he wants, because he’s a sincere man. You’re not some Kool-Aid or stew to be sampled. But there aren’t many sincere men around, so it’s worth a try. Keep the faith and full speed ahead.
I went to lunch.
When I got back Peçanha called me in. He had my copy in his hand.
“There’s something or other here I don’t like,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“Ah, good God, the idea people have of Class C,” Peçanha exclaimed, shaking his head pensively while he looked at the ceiling and puckered his lips. “It’s Class A women who like being treated with curses and kicks. Remember that English lord who said his success with women came from treating ladies like whores and whores like ladies.”
“All right. So how should I handle our readers?”
“Don’t come to me with dialectics. I don’t want you to treat them like whores. Forget the English lord. Put some happiness, some hope, tranquility, and reassurance in the letters, that’s what I want.”
DEAR DR. NATHANAEL LESSA. My husband died and left me a very small pension, but what worries me is being alone and fifty years old. Poor, ugly, old, and living a long way out, I’m afraid of what’s in store for me. LONELY IN SANTA CRUZ.
ANSWER: Engrave this in your heart, Lonely in Santa Cruz: neither money, nor beauty, nor youth, nor a good address brings happiness. How many rich and beautiful people kill themselves or lose themselves in the horrors of vice? Happiness is inside us, in our hearts. If we are just and good, we will find happiness. Be good, be just, love your neighbor as yourself, smile at the clerk when you go to pick up your pension.
The next day Peçanha called me in and asked if I could also write the illustrated love story. “We turn out our own stories, not some translated Italian fumetti. Pick a name.”
I chose Clarice Simone, two more homages, though I didn’t tell Peçanha that.
The photographer of the love stories came to talk to me.
“My name is Monica Tutsi,” he said, “but you can call me Agnaldo. You got the pap ready?”
Pap was the love story. I explained that I had just gotten the assignment from Peçanha and would need at least two days to write it.
“Days, ha ha,” he guffawed, making the sound of a large, hoarse domesticated dog barking for its master.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Norma Virginia used to write the story in fifteen minutes. He had a formula.”
“I have a formula too. Take a walk and come back in fifteen minutes; your story’ll be ready.”
What did that idiot of a photographer think I was? Just because I’d been a police reporter didn’t mean I was stupid. If Norma Virginia, or whatever his name was, wrote a story in fifteen minutes, so could I. After all, I read all the Greek tragedies, the Ibsens, the O’Neills, the Becketts, the Chekhovs, the Shakespeares, the Four Hundred Best Television Plays. All I had to do was appropriate an idea here, another one there, and that’s it.
A rich young lad is stolen by gypsies and given up for dead. The boy grows up thinking he’s a real gypsy. One day he meets a very rich young girl, and they fall in love. She lives in a fine mansion and has many automobiles. The gypsy boy lives in a wagon. The two families don’t want them to marry. Conflicts arise. The millionaires order the police to arrest the gypsies. One of the gypsies is killed by the police. A rich cousin of the girl is assassinated by the gypsies. But the love of the two young people is greater than all these vicissitudes. They decide to run away, to break with their families. On their flight they encounter a pious and wise monk who seals their union in an ancient, picturesque and romantic convent amidst a flowering wood. The two young people retire to the nuptial chamber. They are beautiful, slim, blond with blue eyes. They remove their clothes. “Oh,” says the girl, “what is that gold chain with a diamond-studded medallion you wear on your neck?” She has one just like it! They are brother and sister! “You are my brother who disappeared!” the girl cries. The two embrace. (Attention Monica Tutsi: how about an ambiguous ending? Making a non-fraternal ecstasy appear on their faces, huh? I can also change the ending and make it more Sophoclean: they discover they’re brother and sister after the consummated fact; the desperate girl leaps from the convent window and creams herself down below.)