In the days when he worked for the water and sewerage department, he thought of giving up everything to live off writing. But João, a friend who had published a book of poetry and another of short stories and was writing a six-hundred-page novel, told him that a true writer shouldn’t live off what he wrote, it was obscene, you couldn’t serve art and Mammon at the same time, therefore it was better for Epifânio to earn his daily bread at the water and sewerage department and write at night. His friend was married to a woman who suffered from bad kidneys, was the father of an asthmatic child, his mentally defective mother-in-law lived with them, and even so he met his obligations to literature. Augusto would go home and find he was unable to rid himself of the problems of the water and sewerage department; a large city uses a lot of water and produces a lot of excrement. João said there was a price to pay for the artistic ideal—poverty, drunkenness, insanity, the scorn of fools, affronts from the envious, lack of understanding from friends, loneliness, failure. And he proved he was right by dying from a sickness caused by fatigue and sadness, before completing his six-hundred-page novel. Which his widow threw in the trash along with other old papers. João’s failure did not dishearten Epifânio. When he won a prize in one of the city’s many lotteries, he resigned from the water and sewerage department to dedicate himself to the task of writing, and adopted the name Augusto.
Now he is a writer and a walker. Thus, when he isn’t writing—or teaching whores to read—he walks the streets. Day and night he walks the streets of Rio de Janeiro.
At exactly three a.m., when Haydn’s Mit dem Paukenschlag sounds on his Casio Melody, Augusto returns from his walks to the empty upstairs apartment where he lives, and sits down, after feeding the rats, in front of the small table occupied almost entirely by the enormous notebook with lined pages where he writes his book, under the large skylight through which a ray of light enters from the street, mixed with moonlight on nights when there is a full moon.
In his walks through the city’s downtown, since he began writing the book, Augusto looks attentively at all there is to be seen—facades, roofs, doors, windows, posters stuck on walls, commercial signs, whether luminous or not, holes in the sidewalk, garbage cans, sewer drains, the ground he steps on, birds drinking water from puddles, vehicles, and especially people.
Another day he went into the theater-temple of Pastor Raimundo. He found the theater-temple by chance; the doctor at the Institute had told him that a problem in the macula of his retina demanded treatment with vitamin E in combination with selenium and had sent him imprecisely to a pharmacy that prepared the substance, on Senador Dantas Street, somewhere near the intersection with Alcindo Guanabara. Upon leaving the pharmacy, and after walking a little, he passed the door of the movie theater, read the small poster that said CHURCH OF JESUS SAVIOR OF SOULS FROM 8 TO 11 DAILY and went in without knowing why.
Every morning, from eight to eleven, every day of the week, the theater is occupied by the Church of Jesus Savior of Souls. Starting at two in the afternoon it shows pornographic films. At night, after the last show, the manager puts the posters with naked women and indecorous publicity slogans away in a storage area next to the bathroom. To the church’s pastor, Raimundo, as well as the faithful—some forty people, most of them elderly women and young people with health problems—the theater’s usual program is unimportant; all films are in some way sinful, and none of the church’s believers ever go to the movies, because of an express prohibition from the bishop, not even to see the life of Christ at Eastertide.
From the moment that Pastor Raimundo places a candle, actually an electric light bulb, on a pedestal that imitates a lily, in front of the screen, the locale becomes a temple consecrated to Jesus. The pastor hopes the bishop will buy the theater, as he has done in certain districts in the city, and install a permanent church there, twenty-four hours a day, but he knows that the bishop’s decision depends on the results of his, Raimundo’s, work with the faithful.
Augusto is going to the theater-temple that morning, for the third time in a week, with the idea of learning the songs the women sing, Flee from me, flee from me, O Satan, my body is not thine, my soul is not thine, Jesus has defeated thee, a mixture of rock and samba. Satan is a word that attracts him. It has been a long time since he went into a place where people pray or do anything like it. He remembers as a child having gone for years on end to a large church full of images and sad people, on Good Friday, taken by his mother, who forced him to kiss the feet of Our Lord Jesus Christ lying with a crown of thorns on his head. His mother died. A diffuse memory of the color purple has never left him. Jesus is purple, religion is linked to purple, his mother is purple, or was it the purple satin lining her coffin? But there is nothing purple in that theater-temple with bouncers who watch him from a distance, two young men, one white and one mulatto, thin, small, short-sleeved dress shirt and dark tie, circulating among the faithful and never coming near the chair in the rear where he is sitting, motionless, wearing dark glasses.
When they sing Flee from me, O Satan, Jesus has defeated thee, the women raise their arms, throwing their hands backwards above their heads, as if they were rebuffing the demon; the bouncers in short sleeves do the same; Pastor Raimundo, however, holding the microphone, directs the chorus by raising only one arm.
Today, the pastor focuses his attention on the man in dark glasses, missing an ear, in the back of the theater as he says, “Brethren, everyone who is with Jesus raise your hands.” All the faithful raise their hands, except Augusto. The pastor, very disturbed, sees that Augusto remains immobile, like a statue, his eyes hidden by the dark lenses. “Raise your hands,” he repeats with emotion, and some of the faithful respond by standing on tiptoe and extending their arms even higher. But the man without an ear does not move.
Pastor Raimundo came from the state of Ceará to Rio de Janeiro when he was seven years old, along with his family, who were fleeing drought and hunger. At twenty he was a street vendor on Geremário Dantas Street, in the Madureira district; at twenty-six, pastor of the Church of Jesus Savior of Souls. Every night, he gave thanks to Jesus for this immense gift. He had been a good vendor, he didn’t cheat his customers, and one day a pastor, hearing him selling his merchandise in a persuasive way, as he knew how to speak one word after another at the correct speed, invited him to enter the Church. In a short time Raimundo became a pastor; he was now thirty, had almost lost his Northeastern accent and acquired the neutral speech of certain Rio natives, for it was like that, impartial and universal, that the word of Jesus must be. He is a good pastor, just as he was a good vendor and a good son, since he took care of his mother when she became paralyzed and dirtied her bed, until the day of her death. He cannot forget the senile, failing, and moribund body of his mother, especially the genital and excretory areas that he was obliged to clean every day; sometimes he has disgusting dreams about his mother and regrets that she didn’t die of a heart attack at fifty, not that he remembers what she was like at fifty; he only remembers his mother as old and repellent. Because he knew how to say words rapidly one after the other, and with correct meanings, he was transferred from the outlying Baixada district to downtown, as the Church of Jesus Savior of Souls wanted to bring the word of God to the most impenetrable districts, like the center of the city. The center of the city is a mystery. The South Zone is also difficult; the wealthy disdain the evangelical churches, the religion of the poor, and in the South Zone the church is frequented during weekdays by old women and sickly young people, who are the most faithful of the faithful, and on Sundays by maids, doormen, cleaning workers, dark-skinned and poorly dressed folk. But the rich are worse sinners and need salvation even more than the poor. One of Raimundo’s dreams is to be transferred from downtown to the South Zone and find a way into the heart of the rich.