by Ted Simon
My escort knew most of the women. He shouted 'ta boa' at them and they exchanged familiar insults. Each time he would turn to shout 'ta boa' at me too, to distribute his good nature evenly. He led me first, on his invisible lead, to a small brightly lit shop where bets were taken for a national football pool called Loto, and he pondered heavily over his card, licking his faulty ball pen until he had finally decided between the rival merits of Santos and Sao Paulo. Then we went up some stairs to the back of a cheap eating house and he watched affably as I ate my favourite dish, a rich dark pork and bean stew called feijuada.
When we came down the moon was shining full on to the black facade of the cathedral. Beside me on the doorstep of a bar a man lay back with his legs apart and his eyes closed in blissful drunkenness. The grey material of his trousers was so threadbare that a fountain of crystal urine passed straight through it and rose up sparkling in the light of the street lamps. On the pavements the refugee peasants from the flooded interior were already stretched in sleep, as motionless as the stone beneath them. Some had pieces of cardboard to lie on, others not. Some lay in couples, back to back. Some had a few belongings, others none. All seemed utterly at peace, faces tranquil, bodies classically composed as though they had paid special attention to the placing of their shining brown limbs before letting the world fade from sight.
I looked out on this scene, and, for once, felt part of it, not just an idle spectator. As a prisoner of the Policia Federal I felt I had business there, though God alone knew what that business would be. At least I had come to terms with the uncertainty, and there was some satisfaction in that. My senses and my curiosity were both sharpened. Nobody was feeling sorry
for me, and I was not obliged to feel sorry for anyone else. I felt I was within reach of experiencing a genuine emotion born, for once, out of the moment itself.
We walked across the cobblestones and the policeman drew me to the right so that we would have to walk behind the cathedral. After chatting with another group of women he beckoned me towards some stone steps. There was a mass in progress in a chapel in the crypt of the cathedral. My first view inside was like a hallucination, as though the rough black masonry itself had split to reveal a glimpse of paradise. A roseate glow washed over the pure white walls and low vaulted roof, and bathed the priest and his small congregation. The chapel, in its gleaming simplicity, was the opposite of everything that Fortaleza had seemed to me to be. A cool clean and infinitely desirable vision. Anyone who could enter there, I thought, would lead a charmed life.
Perhaps that was why we stayed outside. The policeman stopped at the threshold and knelt on the steps, laying his forehead on a low stone buttress. He was a young, strong man and I was moved by the way his body folded naturally into a sculptural form of complete humility.
I stood beside him, a cigarette still smouldering in my fingers, unable to take part but hoping vaguely that there might be a small surplus of grace to take care of me too and whatever might be waiting for me at the station.
Walking back the last hundred yards he told me that he was a married man with children and came from Bahia, and that this day was his thirtieth birthday. The station was quiet. The night passed peacefully. Occasionally I woke up to imagine an agent with a lumpy face and dark glasses furiously ransacking Sao Raimundo. Then I dismissed him and slept again.
The unnatural calm lasted until midday on Friday, and then it was broken by another triumph of melodrama and corny characterization. I was already on my way to lunch with another policeman, when a big and battered black car making terrible noises from its exhaust screeched to a halt beside us. The driver had obviously escaped from a gangster movie of the thirties. He was what they used to call a runt. He was weedy and wore an over-padded suit, and on his face were two huge pieces of sticking plaster, in a cross. Al Capone must have sent him personally, for he was full of urgency and self-importance. I was bundled into the back, and the wheels started spinning before the door was closed.
We shot off in the direction of Sao Raimundo, and my adrenalin made valiant attempts to rise to the occasion. Surely this must be IT, I thought, but then the car made a surprise left turn and in a moment we were back outside the police station. I was rushed inside and along the corridors into the Superintendent's reception area, where Xavier himself was standing and talking on the telephone. Then Franziska came in and told me there was a call from the Foreign Ministry. They wanted to talk to me.
I could hear Xavier saying that I had been there four days and I became quite angry suddenly. I raised eight fingers, and said 'ocho' loudly, but Xavier took no notice. After a while he passed the receiver to me with a smile.
'You can talk to Counsellor Brandao in Brasilia,' he said, and walked into his office.
Brandao spoke good English and sounded concerned.
T telephoned the customs about your motorcycle - a technical problem of ownership - and they told me you are in custody. What is your position? What are you doing? Are you a journalist, or not? Why didn't you tell them?'
I tried to explain to Brandao who I thought I was, but with little success. It began to occur to me that the subtle distinctions I had thought so important might be invisible to the naked eye. If I was to be connected with the Sunday Times at all, I would be considered a journalist, and it would be useless to deny it. Normally there was no need to reveal the connection, but in Brazil because of the guarantee on the motorcycle it was inevitable.
T don't understand,' Brandao was saying. 'You say you have been there for four days . . .'
'No, that was Xavier. I have been locked up here for eight days.'
'EIGHT! I still don't understand. Haven't you got a document from the Sunday Times?'
I took a deep breath and said 'Yes'. For better or worse I could stand the complications no longer, and with the Brasilian Foreign Office involved I felt safer. The conversation lingered on. With each passing moment I felt more certain that at last the knots would be untied and I would be free. I put the phone down with Brandao's civilized assurance like music in my ears.
Xavier had returned and was sitting near me.
T have a Sunday Times correspondent's card,' I told him. 'It is at Sao Raimundo, and I should explain it is with another passport . . .' but Xavier had already got to his feet.
'We will get the card in the afternoon,' he said. He was in a remarkably jovial mood. We might have been making a date for tennis. He put his arm round my shoulder and swept me towards the door.
'Now it is time for our lunch,' he said.
I tried one more time to talk about the passport but he would have none of it.
'See you later, I think you say,' he grinned, and disappeared. I still did
not like him very much, but I was glad to see him happy. Neither the card nor the passport were ever mentioned again.
In the afternoon my optimism appeared to be justified. Not only did Matthews arrive unexpectedly - T was worried, so I came a day earlier' -but with him came Alan Davidson from the bank and Father Walsh from Sao Raimundo. It seemed impossible that I would not be walking out with them when they left.
Davidson had received the guarantee for the bike and had arranged for an agent to get the bike out of customs.
I told them about my talk with Brandao. Like me they seemed to think that must be the end of it, and Matthews went to see the DOPS Inspector who was technically in charge of my case to ask for my release. Meanwhile I told Walsh about the strange scene of the day before and the references to Sao Raimundo. Once again he insisted that nobody had been there, with or without lumps, pockmarks or plasters. What surprised me more was that he seemed to attach no significance to it, and I wondered fleetingly whether they all thought me a bit peculiar.
Matthews returned and said they refused to let me go, until they had a reply from the Policia Maritimi. I was terribly shocked and I cursed loudly and angrily while they waited for my symptoms to subside. When I was rational again, Matthews lowered his voice and went on.
> 'They say they have grounds. They say they have been looking for an Englishman, a lawyer, with the same names as yours. He is called John Simon Edwards and they say he has been involved in subversive activities.'
At first it sounded like an outrageous fiction - another damnable pretext for hanging on to me. I was convinced that they hated to let people go. Just the fact that you were in there at all meant that there had to be something wrong with you. Eventually they would find some way to justify keeping you. Ignacio the clerk seemed to know it. He did not behave like a man who had been deprived of his liberty, more like a patient in an institution waiting to hear whether he was cured.
Yet the story was almost perfect in its way. It explained nearly everything, the messages, the snatches of conversation about 'ingles' and deportation. Even the odd feeling I had of being two people must have come from my frenzied effort to make sense of the mystery. The cancelled visa must have been in his passport, but if they had his passport, where was he? Had they thought he was hiding at Sao Raimundo? Why hadn't they been there? But then Sao Raimundo was a district, not just a church. Was it only coincidence? Too much coincidence, I thought. And if the story was true, I could see how my arrival would have confused the police as much as it confused me. Was Mr. Edwards a keen underwater fisherman, I wondered. I should have liked to meet him.
'But now’ I said, 'Now they know there are two of us, so why do they have to hang on to me? It's crazy . . .'and I went into another fit of fury as futile as the first.
My friends tried to comfort me, but there was little they could do. Apart from freedom I had everything I needed. I had clothes, books, the use of a shower, cigarettes, money, access to restaurants, a fairly comfortable bed and a companion to play chess with and talk to. Yet the time dragged by as heavily as ever, and now there was not even fear to spice the hours. Another full weekend at least, alone with Ignacio, with not even the antics of my captors to amuse me. It seemed intolerable.
However, entertainment was unexpectedly provided by the management, in the shape of a lawyer called Andrade. He made his first appearance briefly that evening when Xavier brought him to the office. I saw a tall man, thin and grey-haired, who looked as though he had just seen his life fall into ruins.
'You can stay here if you like, but you must not talk to these,' said Xavier, indicating us. Miserably the man shook his head and mumbled something, and they left together. He was all the more pathetic because he was so well-dressed and groomed, and obviously accustomed to comfort and respect.
Next day he was back, but in much better spirits. His coming was a revelation to me, an example to us all. He brought with him a leather bag and a small pigskin case, and his first move was to unpack a brightly coloured string hammock and hang it across a corner of the room. To my astonishment the hooks were already provided in the walls, and in my eight days there I had failed to take notice of them. There were silver-backed brushes, toilet water, an elegant robe and slippers and hints of other unidentified luxuries.
The silence lasted only half an hour, if that. Within the hour he had told the clerk his life story, but it had gone too fast for me to catch more than a tantalizing detail here and there. We played two games of chess, he won the second, and I persuaded him to tell his story again slowly. As best I could tell it went like this:
He was from Sao Paulo, Brazil's biggest, busiest, smoggiest city, where he had been employed as a lawyer in the state government. Then in 1964, after the military coup, the brother of the Governor of Sao Paulo betrayed him or slandered him in some way and he came to the Governor's palace to protest and demand satisfaction. He accused the brother to his face of his reptilian behaviour, and the brother replied in terms which he, Andrade, could not tolerate. He therefore delivered to his persecutor a punch on the nose, at which the cowardly fellow drew a gun and sent Andrade sprawling on the marble floor with a bullet through his calf. However, as he lay on his back, propped up on his left elbow, he was able
to draw his own gun, and he shot the Governor's brother once through each shoulder and once through the leg.
Andrade's account of this event was marvellously vivid, as he moved and spun with the progress of the story, and he concluded by hoisting his right trouser leg to reveal a penny-sized scar on one side of his calf and another on the other side. The scars gave him great satisfaction.
As a result of this incident, he said, he was unable to earn a livelihood in Sao Paulo. He lost his job, all doors to private practice were closed, and he was labelled politically undesirable. In 1970 he exiled himself from Sao Paulo and came to Ceara, a sufficient distance away to outrun the slanders. In Fortaleza he built up a new reputation and took part in the creation of several important enterprises, including a water treatment plant and a cemetery. He associated himself with the Ceara branch of the company that sold Larousse encyclopaedias in Brazil, and it became the most profitable branch in the country. His boss in Ceara became his closest friend.
Then in 1973, just before Christmas, he was suddenly dismissed. The principals in Sao Paulo refused to see him or communicate with him, but he decided to take no action. Then some months later his former boss in Ceara was also dismissed and accused of fraud. This man invited Andrade to help him prepare a case against Larousse, but in the meanwhile Andrade had discovered that it was his supposed friend who had originally denounced him to Sao Paulo as a swindler. Andrade therefore gave evidence against his former friend instead.
Now he himself had been arrested. He was told that criminal proceedings, brought against him years ago in Sao Paulo, had gone to trial and he had been convicted in his absence and sentenced to five years. He was now waiting to be sent to prison. He seemed to be quite without hope.
That evening he received a visit from his son, a young man in casual but most expensive clothes.
'Papa!' he cried, and they fell into an emotional embrace. They were given a private room somewhere to talk, and Andrade came back beaming. He carried a plate of roast chicken joints wrapped in a clean red and white napkin, and a bag of other assorted foods and fruits, which he shared with us.
His son and his friends, he said, had been researching in the records of Sao Paulo. The whole story of a prison sentence was a wicked lie disseminated by his enemies. There had never been a judgement against him, he said. Soon the truth would emerge and he would be free again.
I found it as difficult to believe in the new rosy dawn as I had in the black picture of despair he had painted a few hours ago, but he was so exhilarated by his prospects that I pretended to share in the wonder of it all and congratulated him heartily on his imminent release.
'At least’ I said, 'you won't have to escape.' He laughed. Earlier he had spent some time discussing ways of breaking out of the station. Compared with the prison at Sao Paulo, he said, it would be very easy. I did not ask him how he knew.
His euphoria carried him through until Monday morning. When I returned from the bathroom, I noticed Andrade and Ignacio both standing by the wall in a rather curious position, and could not at first make out what it was that was so odd. Then I saw that they were standing in such a way that the morning sun, passing between the wall and the roof, shone on their faces. They were both very serious about it, and it struck me as the sort of thing one might do if one had spent long periods in prison.
Shortly afterwards Andrade was taken away. He returned briefly later to collect his hammock and other things, and his face had fallen once more into the bitterest dejection. He said nothing and neither did I.
Monday was a poor day for me too. There was no sign of my release. Ignacio was taken away too during the day, heaven knows where ... At lunchtime I was refused permission to go out, and put back on the prison diet of rice and beans. Franziska was nowhere to be seen, and nobody else would explain. In the evening there was a strange agente on duty and again I was not allowed out. Even worse, I was given nothing to eat either, and the effect was very depressing. In the mornings, I had established a routine whereby a
policeman fetched me a sandwich, coffee and cigarettes, but on Tuesday morning even that system failed. I was dumbfounded. It was as though the whole bloody business was starting from the beginning again. All my carefully cultivated special relationships had withered. At lunchtime all my usual companions vanished. Nor was anything brought to me. The anxiety I felt then was unusually corrupting, for it undermined all my expectations. I could not attribute this new regime to anything. I could not even be sure it was deliberate. It simply left me with a sense of total revulsion against every one of the bastards, from Xavier down to the cook; I no longer cared whether they were cunning, incompetent, corrupt or naive, it made no difference. The result was a rotten, soul-destroying mess and from that moment I buried the benefit of any doubt I might have had about any of them.
In the afternoon Matthews and Davidson came to tell me that I was free. I was to be delivered officially into the arms of the British Consul with Davidson as witness. It should have been a moment of joy and celebration, but by then I was so deep in resentment and misery that all I could think was 'about bloody time too.'
In gratitude to the others I tried to look happy but it was hard going. I wanted only to get away, and the formalities dragged heavily. At the last moment, when Davidson had already left, Matthews and I were standing
with Xavier by the entrance. Xavier looked at me with an indulgent smile and said: 'Now you can write the story.'
'Ask him', I said to Matthews, 'whether he is finally convinced that I am innocent’
Of course Xavier had to say yes, but I was watching his face and I shall be indebted to him always for a superlative specimen, in its finest flower, of the variety of human expression known as The Sickly Grin.
But it was I who was sick.
During those last days something inside me twisted and strangled the source of my vitality. Up till then I had imagined, without realizing it of course, that the entire Brazilian police apparatus was devoted to my case. My very existence depended on whether they found me 'innocent' or 'guilty'. It must have been some time on Monday that they found that they had no further use for me. From that moment I was not even worth my rice and beans.
