by Frei Betto
Frei Betto, born 1944, is a Brazilian writer, political activist, liberation theologian and Dominican friar. He was imprisoned for four years in the 1970s by the military dictatorship for smuggling people out of Brazil. He is still involved in Brazilian politics, and worked for the government of President Lula da Silva as an advisor on prison policy and child hunger. His books have been translated into 23 languages. Hotel Brasil is his first crime novel.
BITTER LEMON PRESS
First published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW
www.bitterlemonpress.com
First published in Portuguese as Hotel Brasil by Atica (1999) and now by Rocco, Rio de Janeiro.
© Frei Betto, 2012
English translation © Jethro Soutar, 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher
The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s “PEN Translates!” programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas.
www.englishpen.org
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 978–1–908524–28-7
Typeset by Tetragon, London
Contents
I: The Residents
1.The Head
2.The Man with the Stones
3.The Cockroach
4.Sparkling
5.Under the Skin
6.Exiled
7.Jack of All Trades
8.Parallel Investigation
9.Shadows Offstage
10.The Cat and the Old lady
II: The Collection
1.The Proposal
2.Dinner
3.Ruses
4.Reveries
5.Trajectories
6.Confession
III: Crossed Wires
1.The Escape
2.Estrangements
3.The House
4.Settling Scores
5.Discovered
6.Spiritual Paths
7.Crossfires
8.Back to Square One
9.Taco
10.Revelation
11.Nuptials
12.The Ritual
To Hildebrando Pontes
The novelist is in all of us, and we narrate what we see, for seeing is as complex as anything else.
FERNANDO PESSOA
I
THE RESIDENTS
1The Head
He’d seen it out of the corner of his eye, without meaning to see it. Now he couldn’t believe he was seeing what he saw: a head lying dumped on the floor.
He bent over it, confused. He felt a sharp pang in his belly. The palms of his hands became damp with sweat. He forced himself to be strong, to face up to the horror. But he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t bear to look at the detail. The whole corridor filled with the red of the blood, and he retched.
CONTRASTS
Every day he passed the Arcos da Lapa, a shelter for beggars, dogs and cats, and crawling with rats and cockroaches. Seen from a distance, the miserable spectacle might make a good theme for a watercolour. But Cândido wasn’t one for painting, nor was he keen to get closer and linger, to have the repulsive smell impregnate his nostrils, to have his eyes take in the open wounds mottled with flies, the drool running from the limp mouths of drunks, the pregnant mothers scolding ravenous children playing in the rubbish.
The image of his ex-girlfriend popped into his head: her golden hair shining bright amid the congregation; the way she nibbled her little finger; the intonation of her voice. She didn’t draw leering looks from men, nor did she inspire secret envy in women, but she did have certain facets of extraordinary beauty. She listened quietly and attentively to others, had a joyful way of smiling and a shrewd knack for drawing deep significance from the most trivial of facts.
But Cândido had seen both sides of that particular coin and been left mistrustful of the fairer sex. Women could be exuberant on the surface, sensitive, alluring, irresistible. But in private, the petulant genie emerged from among the bed sheets and dishcloths, charm blown away by caprices. Then beauty became a burden, a sack of flesh and bone laid prone on the bed.
His mind was lost in a swirl of memories. What he saw was causing him to lose command of his faculties. He was paralysed by fear, his spirit torn by the stench of death, weighed down by the sense of foreboding. His skin had turned to goosebumps; sweat poured down his temples. He was glued to the spot, as if hemmed in among a crowd. If he could have found the strength, he would have moved, gone back to his room or out into the street, but something prevented him from taking a step. Fear froze him, even as he suffocated in the sweltering heat.
FEAR
As far as Cândido was concerned, fear wasn’t a feeling or an emotion. It wasn’t the nervous system breaking down and exposing our vulnerabilities and limitations, filling us with insecurity and shame. These were all fear’s effects. He believed that fear’s causes lay in social frictions and that these frictions were infused in people’s nervous systems. Rio’s violence made people prisoners in their own homes, hidden away under lock and key, in flats fitted with security alarms, their windows and balconies covered in grating.
And here was terrifying proof that nobody was spared. Here was the reason the city’s inhabitants moved around like soldiers going from trench to trench, hoping not to be struck down between one safe haven and the next. Luxury cars moved about the city like tanks of war: armoured doors, bulletproof glass, electrical security devices.
Cândido felt exposed when he travelled by motorbike, but he couldn’t afford a safer mode of transport. This gave him a fatalistic outlook: the belief that nobody dies before their time. Deus cria, Deus protege. Cândido wore faith like body armour. This faith helped him not to panic when faced with situations like this one. He hated the contrast between the houses left unlocked in the town he grew up in and the prison-like apartment blocks of Rio, where he now lived. Paying someone a visit in Rio became a ritual: identification, name announced on the intercom, lift unlocked at the appropriate floor, visit confirmed through the magic eye, locks opened one by one with thick, serrated keys.
THE PALE LIGHT OF THE AFTERNOON
Cândido had experienced the same paralysis once before. A schoolmate with a freckly face, fiery hair and a flamboyant way of waving his arms around when telling a story, as if life were a special-effects production that only he could see, had been run over and killed.
One Friday, the boy had left school anxious to get home as quickly as possible. He and his parents were going to spend the weekend in the country at their fazenda. Cândido sat with him on the bus. They lived in the same neighbourhood, though the boy’s stop was one before Cândido’s. Sitting on the left-hand side of the bus, behind the driver’s seat, the two boys stared out at the open road. The friend got off and crossed in front of the bus. He disappeared from sight, dragged under the wheels of a van that had been turning the corner. The driver of the van wasn’t to know that a child would come rushing out from behind the bus.
It was a cold day, the sky covered in grey clouds. Neighbours and relatives tried to console the boy’s parents, who were in a state of total shock. The police took the driver of the van away, as devastated as if he’d killed his own son. The victim lay on the road under a black pl
astic cover. Onlookers formed a stunned, silent ring around him. Cândido shook, stricken with an angry sorrow, a mixture of hatred and powerlessness. He stood, surrounded by people who had gathered in the pale light of the afternoon in something like a vigil, the particular bleakness of the death having given them all a great sense of reverence.
That day, Cândido wondered about the meaning of life for the first time. Belief in God eluded him.
WITNESS
This was neither the time nor the place for unleashing his demons. Yet Cândido found it impossible to hold back his imagination, to stem the flow of memories brought on by a wave of mixed emotions. Reason withdrew. Tension became overbearing. His heart raced along, pumping out fear. The silence, though interrupted from time to time by the forensics team – who went about their business so carefully that it was as if they feared waking the dead – filled him with uncertainty.
Nervously, he brought the segment of orange he held in his hand to his mouth. The juice flooded his gums, impregnated his taste buds, revived his palate and dribbled down his chin. A pip landed on his tongue. He spat it out with his breath.
He lifted his right hand up to the height of his eyes, the fruit resting between thumb and fingers, and wiped his mouth clean with the back of his left hand. He realized his jaw was trembling with nerves, though he was not the focus of anyone’s attention. He knew the size of his own cowardice. And that his shame was no less great. What would the other guests say if they saw him like this, weak at the knees, heart doing somersaults? Yet why this obligation to act tough when everyone knew life consisted of fears? Fear of death, fear of loss, fear of abandonment, fear of ending up forgotten. The same thing had occurred to him once before in the dining room, listening to Pacheco, the political aide, reeling off a string of boasts. Pacheco’s thirst for power struck Cândido as being a paroxysm of fear. In Pacheco’s case, a pathological fear: being afraid of one’s true self and seeking adornments – fame and fortune – to hide that fear from others.
THE WARDROBE
Cândido had hated playing hide-and-seek as a child, ever since he spent a full Sunday afternoon trapped in a wardrobe.
It was a neighbour’s birthday. The boy’s mother iced a cake in the shape of a football while the children played in the yard. “Um… dois… três… coming, ready or not!” When the birthday boy opened his eyes and popped his head out from behind the jabuticabeira tree, everyone was gone. Cândido had run inside the house and tucked himself in among skirts and blouses, dresses and nightgowns, breathing in the pungent smell of mothballs. He sat there in the dark, waiting for someone to find him.
“Parabéns pra Você…” He awoke to the excited singing of Happy Birthday. He tried to get out. The wardrobe door was stuck. He pounded on it and screamed, but nobody came. He felt humiliated that no one had noticed his absence.
Later on, he realized someone had entered the room. He banged on the door and cried for help. The neighbour ran away in her underskirt and bra, panic-stricken, convinced there was a ghost in her bedroom. She called her family for backup, and only then was Cândido set free.
SARCOPHAGUS
The forensics photographed the room in evanescent tones. Cracks in the walls made maps of unknown lands. The open window couldn’t hide the smell of damp and mildew, but it did let in some light, a slanted beam that drew whirlpools of dust. From where he was standing by the door, Cândido could see outside to the palm trees on Largo da Lapa and could even make out one of the four snakes on the obelisk, a remnant of Rio’s days as the capital, the Prefeitura do Districto Federal.
The room’s furniture, mismatched and dilapidated, took up almost the entire space. Yellowed notebooks spilled out over pornographic magazines on the shelves above the desk. Mineralogy books lay open with holes in their jackets, pages torn in illiterate lines by greedy bookworms. Everywhere dust turned nooks and crannies into cotton fields. Cases lined with cardboard and topped with clear plastic lids showed off emeralds, agates, amethysts, aquamarines, topaz and tourmalines. The gemstones and the open window provided the only sources of light in a dark and dingy shelter.
Sunk into the mahogany bed as if in a sarcophagus, the bloodied corpse looked as if it had been doused in a mixture of red wine and tomato sauce. A hand dangled over the edge of the mattress, seeking help, a ring visible on the wedding finger. The other hand was bent double against the body’s lacerated chest, as if trying to fasten a button. Its legs were stretched out rigid and its feet wore shoes with holes in the soles that revealed soiled white socks.
Huddled together in the corridor, the hotel guests whispered laments in whimpering tones. They spoke through gritted teeth, as if not wanting to disturb the deceased, and looked through slit eyes, so as not to meet the gaze of the forensics. They stood shyly before the gaping nakedness of the corpse. They saw without discerning, looked without observing.
The head was still on the floor, its face turned towards the door. Its thin hair was gloopy with blood. Its eyes had been gouged out. Its mouth bore the mocking smile of a man enjoying his own pain. A mask of Mephistopheles.
The contrast between the headless body on the blood-soaked sheets and the head on the wooden floorboards of the corridor struck Cândido as being especially horrid, as if the former were somehow more dead than the latter. He couldn’t help thinking of John the Baptist, head on a platter, redeemed by the glory of martyrdom.
LA GIOCONDA’S SMILE
The killer left no trace, no evidence of the murder weapon, not a single clue that might explain the cold-blooded decapitation. Though conclusively dead, the corpse was alive with mysteries.
According to the forensics, the victim died from a stab wound to the heart before having his head chopped off. There was no sign of panic on the severed head’s face, nothing to indicate a struggle. Indeed its Gioconda smile suggested the killer had been received like a friend.
The blow to the heart had doubtless been so fast and precise that the victim hadn’t even had time to be surprised. On the other hand, there were signs that the beheading had been a slow and laborious process, one performed using a blade considerably larger than a penknife but not as big as a machete. The cut was uneven, as is found on animals skinned and quartered with a blunt knife.
Cândido stood in the doorway, distraught, his mouth plugged by a slice of orange, unable to take his eyes off the scene that so drained his spirit. His mind was a mess, his breathing erratic, his whole chest wheezed when he exhaled. His stomach churned, his legs faltered. He wondered whether he was paralysed by affection for the victim or compassion for penitent souls.
He realized he was incapable of feeling reverential about death without the deceased being in a coffin. He needed to see the body’s cold face powdered in purple tones, flowers snug around the body, candlesticks on sentry duty. A profane corpse was different. It returned his stare and had a terrible hold over him. He continued to peer curiously down at the head on the floor as he sucked the sweet liquor out of the orange.
2The Man with the Stones
“Can I interest you in any topaz or amethyst?” whispered Seu Marçal, rummaging in his jacket pocket. He pulled out a fistful of gemstones and arranged them on the palm of his hand.
Cândido was in the TV lounge, a few days after he’d moved into the hotel. Apart from the dining room, which joined on to the kitchen, the TV lounge was the only place where the guests occasionally shared the same space, drawn there by the pull of the television, framed in its varnished wooden box. The room’s walls were adorned with an engraving of the Egyptian pyramids, a print of a Rio landscape painting by Debret and a dusty indigenous headdress with withered feathers. Sofas and armchairs were upholstered in a pale yellow cotton that was splattered with shoe polish and grease stains. In the middle of the room a frosted-glass console table held metal ashtrays. Light came in through two chest-high windows by day, while at night a ceiling light with a round lampshade was operated by pulling a golden chain cord.
Cândido had noticed
the way Seu Marçal had subtly honed in on him. The old hunter was big and clumsy, but lithe when it came to identifying potential prey. He’d bent over backwards to be courteous to the new arrival, offering to serve him at dinner, his fat fingers clasped around the ladle as he slowly slopped feijão over Cândido’s steaming rice.
Seu Marçal was all ears whenever Cândido talked about the street children, always sat next to him in the communal areas of the hotel. Now he’d finally made his approach, uttered in the honey-tongued tone of a man whose business it was to make money while letting customers think they were getting a bargain.
Cândido didn’t fend Seu Marçal off as Pacheco, Rosaura and some of the other guests did. He admired him at a distance, treating him courteously, but avoiding any familiarity that might establish bonds of friendship. Cândido was guarded not out of distrust but because he felt himself to be past the age when two people form an affinity based on mutual respect and acceptance.
His gaze fell upon the jewel the old pedlar had on his finger: a ring with a chrysolite gemstone like a cat’s eye; round and multifaceted, it sparkled lime green encrusted in gold.
Without waiting for an answer to his offer, Seu Marçal delved back into his old black jacket, dusty with dandruff, a jacket he never took off, not even on the hottest of days; they’d doubtless have to bury him in it. He produced a small cardboard box and removed the lid to reveal a handful of coloured gemstones on a bed of bright white cotton. Cândido’s eyes trembled before a kaleidoscope of temptations.
“They make great presents,” said Seu Marçal with a salesman’s smile, ever amused by the compulsive craving of the punter.
Cândido kept his eyes fixed on the gemstones.
“I can offer you a very special price,” added the old man, trying to keep his voice casual, “between amigos.”
Playing the seducer put a twinkle in his eye, like a crystal encased in the deep hollows of a gnarled face, a face framed by the rusty stubble of a beard.
