Later, after calming down—I think Pontecorvo escaped by the stairs—Peçanha, seated behind his desk again, told me, “That’s the kind of people Brazil’s fallen into the hands of—manipulators of statistics, falsifiers of information, con men with computers, all of them creating the Big Lie. But they won’t pull it off with me. I really put that wretch in his place, didn’t I?”
I said something or other in agreement. Peçanha took the box of El Ropos from the drawer and offered me one. We smoked and talked about the Big Lie. Afterwards he gave me Pedro Redgrave’s letter and my reply, with his okay, for me to take to the composing room.
On the way I saw that Pedro Redgrave’s letter wasn’t the one I had sent him. The text was different:
“Dear Nathanael, your letter was a balm for my afflicted heart. It has given me the strength to resist. I will not make any deranged gesture. I promise to—”
The letter ended there. It had been interrupted in the middle. Strange. I didn’t understand. Something was wrong.
I went to my desk, sat down, and began writing the answer to Odontos Silva:
He who has no teeth also has no toothache. And as the hero of the well-known play put it, “There’s never been a philosopher who could bear a toothache with patience.” Besides, teeth are also instruments of revenge, as Deuteronomy says: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for afoot. Dictators despise teeth. Remember what Hitler told Mussolini about another meeting with Franco?—I prefer having four teeth pulled. You’re in the situation of the hero of that play All’s Well If Nobody Gets Shafted—no teeth, no taste, nothing. ADVICE: put your teeth back in and bite. If biting doesn’t do the trick, try punching and kicking.
I was in the middle of Odontos Silva’s letter when I suddenly understood everything. Peçanha was Pedro Redgrave. Instead of returning the letter in which Pedro asked me to have a mass said for him and which I had given him together with my answer about Oscar Wilde, Peçanha had handed me a new letter, unfinished, surely by accident, and which was supposed to come into my hands by mail.
I got Pedro Redgrave’s letter and went to Peçanha’s office.
“May I come in?” I asked.
“What is it? Come in,” Peçanha said.
I handed him Pedro Redgrave’s letter. Peçanha read the letter and, seeing the mistake he had committed, turned pale, as was his wont. Nervously, he shuffled the papers on his desk.
“It was all a joke,” he said, trying to light a cigar. “Are you angry?”
“For real or a joke, it’s all the same to me,” I said.
“My life would make a novel …” Peçanha said. “Let’s keep this between the two of us, okay?”
I wasn’t sure what he wanted to keep between the two of us, his life making a novel or his being Pedro Redgrave. But I replied: “Of course, just between the two of us.”
“Thanks,” said Peçanha. And he breathed a sigh that would have broken the heart of anyone who wasn’t an ex-police reporter.
mandrake
I WAS WHITE AND HAD FIANCHETTOED MY BISHOP. Berta was mounting a strong center pawn position.
“This is the office of Paulo Mendes,” my voice said on the answering machine, giving whoever had called thirty seconds to leave a message. The guy said his name was Cavalcante-Meier, as if there were a hyphen between the two names, and that they were trying to frame him for a crime but—click—his time ran out before he could say what he planned to do.
“Every time we’re in a close game some client calls,” Berta said. We were drinking Faísca wine.
The guy called back and asked me to call him at home. A number in the South Zone. An aged voice answered, its vocal cords reverential. It was the butler. He went to get the master.
“There’s a butler in the story. I already know whodunit.” Berta didn’t think it was funny. Besides being hooked on chess, she took everything seriously.
I recognized the voice from the answering machine: “What I have to say has to be in person. Can I come by your office?”
“I’m at home,” I explained, and gave the address.
“So much for the game, B.B. (Berta Bronstein),” I said, dialing.
“Hello, Dr. Medeiros, what’s the situation?”
Medeiros said the situation wasn’t serious but was no laughing matter either. Medeiros thought about nothing but politics. He’d held some position or other at the start of the revolution and, despite having the biggest office in town, had never shaken off the nostalgia of power. I asked if he knew a Cavalcante Meier.
“Everybody knows him.”
“I don’t. I even thought the name might be a phony.”
Medeiros said the man owned plantations in São Paulo and the North, exported coffee, sugar, and soybeans, and was an alternate senator for the state of Alagoas. A rich man.
“What else? Does he have any weaknesses, is he involved in any shady financial transactions, is he a sexual pervert as well as a landowner?”
“You think the whole world’s no good, don’t you? The senator is a very highly respected public figure, a business leader, a model citizen, unimpeachable.”
I reminded him that J. J. Santos, the banker, had also been unimpeachable and that I’d had to rescue him from the clutches of a crazed transvestite in a motel in the Barra.
“You got a Mercedes out of it. Is this how you show your gratitude?”
I hadn’t “got” the Mercedes, I had extorted it, the way bankers do with their interest rates and management fees.
Medeiros in a mellifluous voice: “What’s the problem with Cavalcante Meier?”
I said I didn’t know.
“Let’s finish the game,” Berta said.
“I can’t meet the guy naked, can I?” I said.
I was getting dressed when the bell rang, three times in ten seconds. An impatient man, accustomed to doors that opened quickly.
Cavalcante Meier was thin, elegant, fiftyish. His nose was slightly crooked. His eyes were deep-set, brownish green, and intense.
“I’m Rodolfo Cavalcante Meier. I don’t know if you know me.”
“I know you. I have your file.”
“My file?”
“Yes.” I saw him looking at the glass in my hand. “Care for some Faísca?”
“No thanks,” he said, evasively. “Wine gives me a headache. May I sit down?”
“Planter, exporter, alternate senator for Alagoas, services rendered to the revolution,” I said.
“Irrelevant,” he cut me off, sharply.
“Member of the Rotary Club,” I said, to rattle his cage.
“Just the Country Club.”
“A leader, a man of integrity, a patriot.”
He looked at me and said firmly, “Don’t joke with me.”
“I’m not joking. I’m a patriot too. In a different way. For example, I don’t want to declare war on Argentina.”
“I have your file too,” he said, imitating me. “Cynical, unscrupulous, competent. A specialist in extortion and fraud cases.”
He spoke like a recording; he reminded me of a laugh-box that you wind up and it makes a sound that’s neither animal nor human. Cavalcante Meier had wound himself up, his voice that of a plantation owner talking to a sharecropper.
“Competent yes, unscrupulous and cynical no. Just a man who lost his innocence,” I said.
He rewound the laugh-box. “Have you seen the papers?”