“I’ve got a rotten memory,” Rezende says.
“That’s dangerous,” Augusto says.
Neither says anything further. Rezende takes a pack of Continentals from his pocket and offers Augusto a cigarette. Augusto says he doesn’t smoke. Rezende lights the cigarette, sees Augusto’s mutilated ear and quickly averts his gaze to the interior of the apartment.
Kelly returns with her suitcase.
“Do you have a sharpened razor?” Augusto asks.
“What do I need with a sharpened razor?” Rezende says, laughing like an idiot, avoiding looking at the remains of Augusto’s ear.
Augusto and Kelly wait for the elevator to arrive while Rezende smokes, leaning against the apartment door, looking at the floor.
They are in the street. Kelly, seeing the bookie sitting in his school desk, says she’s going to place a small bet. “Should I bet on the lamb or the stag?” she asks, laughing. “He didn’t do anything because you were with me. He pulled in his horns because he was afraid of you.”
“I thought you women were organized and there weren’t any more pimps,” Augusto says.
“My friend Cleuza invited me to join the Association, but—Five on the stag,” she tells the bookie.
“The Whores’ Association?”
“The Prostitutes’ Association. But then I found out there are three different prostitutes’ associations, and I don’t know which one to join. My friend Slackmouth told me that organizing criminals is the most complicated thing there is; even crooks who live together in jail have that problem.”
They take the same route back, passing under the Arches again, over which a trolley is crossing at that moment.
“Poor man, I was the only thing he had in the world,” Kelly says. She’s already feeling sorry for the pimp. “He’ll have to go back to selling coke and marijuana in the red light district.”
On Carioca Street, Kelly repeats that in Augusto’s place there’s no coffee and that she wants coffee.
“We’ll have some coffee in the street,” he says.
They stop at a juice bar. They don’t have coffee. Kelly wants a coffee with cream and bread and butter. “I know it’s hard to find a place that serves coffee with cream and bread and butter, especially toasted,” Kelly says.
“There used to be luncheonettes all over the city, where you’d sit down and order: ‘Waiter, please bring me right away a nice cup of coffee that hasn’t been reheated, some bread straight from the oven and butter by the ton’—do you know the song by Noel?”
“Noel? Before my time. Sorry,” says Kelly.
“I just meant that there were an endless number of luncheonettes all over downtown. And you used to sit down, not eat standing up like us here, and there was a marble-top table where you could doodle while you waited for someone, and when the person arrived you could look at her face while you talked.”
“Aren’t we talking? Aren’t you looking at me? Doodle on this napkin.”
“I’m looking at you. But I have to turn my head. We aren’t sitting in chairs. This paper napkin blots when you write on it. You don’t understand.”
They have a hamburger with orange juice.
“I’m going to take you to Avenida Rio Branco.”
“I’m already familiar with Avenida Rio Branco.”
“I’m going to show you three buildings that haven’t been demolished. Did I show you the photo of how the avenue used to be?”
“I’m not interested in old stuff. Cut it out.”
Kelly refuses to go see the old buildings, but since she likes children she agrees to visit little Marcela, eight months old, daughter of Marcelo and Ana Paula.
They’re on Sete de Setembro, and so they walk to the corner of Carmo, where, on the sidewalk under the marquee, in cardboard shacks, the Gonçalves family lives. Ana Paula is white, as Marcelo is white, and they are just satellites of the family of blacks who control that corner. Ana Paula is nursing little Marcela. As it is Saturday, Ana Paula was able to set up the small cardboard shack in which she lives with her husband and their daughter under the marquee of the Banco Mercantil do Brasil. The board that serves as wall, some five feet in height, the highest side of the shack, was taken from an abandoned subway construction site. On weekdays the shack is dismantled, the large sheets of cardboard and the board from the subway excavation are leaned against the wall during work hours, and only at night is Marcelo’s shack, and the Gonçalves family’s cardboard shacks, reassembled so that Marcelo, Ana Paula, and little Marcela and the twelve members of the family can go inside them to sleep. But today is Saturday; on Saturdays and Sundays the Banco Mercantil do Brasil doesn’t open, and Marcelo and Ana Paula’s shack, a cardboard box used to house a large refrigerator, has not been disassembled, and Ana Paula luxuriates in that comfort.
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.