Читать книгу The beast of a thousand years - Ilmar Penna Marinho Junior - Страница 13

Chapter 7­­­­

AMELINHA, A DEAR FRIEND OF ANA’S, Leonardo’s wife, used to encourage her to consult with an astrologer she knew to discover the omens of her destiny.

“You have to go there, Ana. She’s wonderful! She knows how to restore hope in the midst of disillusions!”

But Ana kept postponing it and postponing it, and in the end quit the idea of going to see the astrologer, Lisa. Without telling his wife, it was Leonardo who ended up going to see the astrologer, because he felt haunted by the doubts about his involvement with the drug traffic.

After his father’s death, feeling less controlled in his life, Leo allowed himself to quit the law firm, which was imposed on him by his father, and commit exclusively to his occupation as an accountant and negotiator of the bribery connected to the drug traffic. He continued to expand his professional services to the organized crime, with no one ever finding out that, behind that cordial, low profile man who complained about urban violence, at the bottom of his heart there was a calculating Leo, thirsty for revenge. He’d never gone to a single favela to relay messages nor had he ever handled weapons or dealt drugs. He was happy to stay concealed in the background, in a minor role as an accessory, bestowed with the privilege of being the man of trust and the protégé of the thug Skull. But he expected a lot more from destiny and the mysterious “occult powers”.

Everyone recognized his competence and mathematical mind. Thus the nickname Big Head — as he was known in the criminal underworld. He became friends and performed small services for all the members of the gang. And, as if to prove that opposites attract, his closest friend was the boss’ “muscle”, the feared exterminator Runner, nicknamed with this nice sporting alias for his habit of entering the slums running and shooting to kill.

He was happy to be welcomed and called Mr. Leonardo. He thought the astrologer would refuse to open the door if she knew she had “Big Head” in front of her, although he had never been directly involved with drugs, larceny, robberies, and serial murders, typical of large urban concentrations. He would hate not to be allowed in the party of the stars or have his natal chart read like this: “Do you understand, Mr. Thug Helper, that you’re going down if you keep this double life as a criminal?” He laughed at the difficulty people have understanding that not every offender is a criminal. For the astrologer, the important thing was — whoever he might be — to not allow him to hinder the complicated reading of his solar progression.

“Do not interrupt me, please, or I won’t be able to read. Everything is in your favor. You’ll be rational and unemotional in order to achieve your goals, but first you’ll have to break connections with the past. There’s a vengeance here. It’s a double-edged sword. Be careful not to let everything go down the drain and ruin your life”

It was worth to be forewarned and not lose his mind with everything good that was yet to come — he told himself after the consultation, in which the woman of the stars picked from the past the deaths of his parents and warned him not to spoil his son too much. And she also told him, during the extra time of the consultation, several truths about his marriage of over fifteen years with Ana. However, what left him most sad and shaken was to remember his father’s death.

His head throbbed when he returned to the scene of the past. It was as if, all of a sudden, he’d heard the bang of that fatal shot in the den. He’d never forgotten that damned year. The shot was fired in the mahogany library. The upholstered couches, the valuable paintings, the lavish collection of secret books from the Inquisition, the beautiful china, the luxuriant ferns, everything was shaken by the deafening blast. There, death was inescapable — in the company of books and so many memories — disturbing the cozy place in which his father’s friends used to come to talk or sip a twelve-year-old whiskey, with the traditional five ice cubes.

When his mother opened the door, she was desperate with what she saw, unable to believe the classic suicide scene before her: his father’s head fallen on the blotter, blood still spilling on the table and dripping over the edges. A dark stain spreading through the silky Persian rug. His mother had burst into a convulsive cry, leaning on the back of the leather armchair, and soon began to yell hysterically. She just got silent when she was dragged from the library. Leonardo never forgot his mother’s petrified eyes and her last look of infinite affection toward his father’s lacerated head. His mother had named him Leonardo because she was very devoted to Saint Leonardo Murialdo, a saint nobody knew, but that she had heard Pope Paul VI pontificate as “excellent in the ordinary”. She never got over the suicide. She also suffered with the absence of her friends and the bad company of the white walls of the hospital, where she died months later, victim of an incurable cancer.

“How’s everything, sonny boy?” was the way his father always greeted him when he arrived at the landscaped manor on São Clemente Street.

He’d told the astrologer, when he scheduled the interview over the phone, that he was born on August 25, 1961, at 11 AM. Right on the day President Jânio Quadros renounced. It was a turbulent day for the country.

“How’s everything, sonny boy?” echoed the voice of nostalgia.

The dictatorship period was over and everything promised to go politically well, while economically everything was going bad. The first civil government elected after twenty years of repression had inherited the problems of the economic development model practiced by the military regime and worsened by successive international crises. On February 28, 1986, the government decreed Plano Cruzado, whose failed general price freeze and adoption of a “wage trigger” only contributed to an environment of economic recession, uncontrolled financial speculation and the threat of hyperinflation. Foreign exchange reserves were quickly exhausted and the confidence in the democratic country failed. Brazil went bankrupt.

“How’s everything, sonny boy?” echoed the voice of tragedy.

In that damn year of 1986, Leonardo’s family world crumbled. Until his last breath, his father had concealed from everyone the buildup of unpayable debts with banks and loan sharks, leaving a lot of bitterness within the disunited family. After bitter meetings with his uncles and with his father’s oldest sister, with whom they barely had any relationship, they went to live in São Paulo, ashamed by their relative’s bankruptcy, once so cheerful and unconcerned, whose picture stayed like this for a while on the grand piano in the living room. Leonardo was the only one who remained in Rio and witnessed the declaration of bankruptcy. He saw his father’s pictures vanish from the piano as well as from the memory of his family and friends. He watched, by himself, the bush take over the gardens, the dust collecting on the furniture, the silverware disappear from the manor, sold in an auction. He was sure that the most important reference in his life, his father, was gone forever.

“You’re the only one who believes in this corrupt government!” warned his father’s friend.

“We have to invest in the democratization,” replied his father, full of civic enthusiasm.

Leonardo recalled that, during the time his father was working on the stock exchange, he was interning at the law firm. His father’s friends were getting rich, benefited by the good times of millionaire public constructions and the boom of the stock market. And his father insisted with the hesitant, greedy investor:

“Don’t tell me you want to limit your profits. You don’t understand that if you don’t by the stocks now you won’t be able to double your capital!”

It was with the sale of the beautiful properties he had inherited that his father bought the brokerage firm. The first year was wonderful and he made great friends. But it was all a big roller-coaster ride! When the times of euphoria were over, he woke up in the middle of the night with no friends, struggling with the nightmare of debts as a consequence of the bank’s crippling interests. Boom! A shot right on the temple, in an unbelievable cold act. He lost his head along with the family’s fortune.

The honk of a car on the street made Leonardo’s thoughts return to Lisa’s house. He recalled that, on one of his trips to the kitchen, during the first consultation, she had turned off the stove, but a delicious smell of white beans came through the door and entered his nostrils. Oddly enough, he was taken by the nice memory of his father’s culinary refinement: the sophisticated French feijoada, with a well-known name, cassoulet.

Then he recalled the first time he had made love, when he was sixteen. His father had planned the whole spree without the knowledge of his mother. He had financed his son’s date with an experienced older woman from another country. He became an habitué, as he would spell, pursing his lips to the madam. He got to know the best working girls and the most modern motels in Barra, all sponsored by his proud father. He became picky and, with the experience he had gained, he began to prefer older, more enigmatic women, who knew how to give everything they had and were grateful for having sex with an insatiable beast.

“How’s everything, sonny boy?” always echoed the distant voice.

After his father’s death, the more he read the papers, the more he felt indignant about the cases of corruption. The more he remembered his great dad, who believed until the end in the vitality of the stock market as an essential leverage for the growth of national companies. He believed in the purity of the good intentions of the government of civilists, who had come from the dungeons and the revoking of political tenures during the dictatorship. This filled him with anger, or worse, with vengeful hatred.

Poor guy, he thought. His father had always been a nationalist moron. He had never even thought of opening a bank account in a tax haven. If he had done like his clever friends, who got rich, he would be safe and sound, him and his respectable family. He spoke with the ghosts of the past: it’s crazy how we miss those we really love. He liked the old man since he was a little child, on the lazy Sunday mornings when he would go to his father’s bed before having breakfast on the terrace. It was good to feel protected, loved, under his mother’s jealous stare, who would rather have the company of his well-behaved sister than that of the rebellious brat. Fuck! Money, always money! — Leonardo exploded angrily. His father lost everything. He died saying that in the old days being poor was an unfortunate situation, and today being poor is a social injustice. His biggest dream was to buy his father’s manor back one day, to live in it.

It was Lisa, the astrologer, as in a whispered prayer, who revived the pain of those wounds by evoking Uranus in exact conjunction with his Sun. To go through what he did at the age of 25 was too much suffering. Because he couldn’t count on a past of poverty to succeed, but he soon realized that he didn’t need a bachelor’s degree in law to be rich. He just had to have trust in himself — as he thought astrologically — convinced that the stars go around the sky many times and play tricks on people, like him falling in love with Lisa, who made him have faith in the future and love. He had never forgotten what he’d hear before scheduling the consultation, like a hand break he would use not to lose everything in his life.

“Be patient, Mr. Leonardo. All in good time.”

Ana, Leonardo’s wife, had already decided to satisfy her curiosity and find out what her husband was up to when he was not home. She recalled what her friend Amelinha had read to her when they were leaving the gym, in an introductory text of the weekly Kabbalistic conscience: “Nothing is set in stone, you can always change your destiny”. Then Amelinha had forced her to run her finger over the page, going from left to right, until she stopped at a number. It was the seventh of the seventy-two names of God, the DNA of the Soul. This was the message: “I receive the full impact of the forces of Creation. I return meaning to lives that seem meaningless and without purpose to a world that often seems to have no resolution. The order returns. The structure emerges. Everything will be fixed.”

As soon as her husband went to the bathroom, Ana didn’t hesitate and went to his den to check the three cell phones on the table. She went to see if her husband was still in the shower. He was. She then made the automatic calls to the last numbers in the log, without fearing that the times of the calls would be identified. She was shaking with fear from Leo’s unknown world.

“What’s up, boss?” answered a hoarse, vulgar voice.

“Who’s this? Ana said shyly.

“Who do you want to talk to, bitch?”

She called other numbers. Everyone hung up abruptly, without identifying themselves. All of the voices were from rude people, who abused her with curse words before turning their phones off.

Since it was impossible to identify the calls, they didn’t mince their words. Not a single civilized voice answered her calls.

On the sixth or seventh call she heard something curious.

“The toys arrived yesterday, man. Top of the line,” said the anxious voice. “Everything is in the warehouse. The bosses haven’t seen it yet.” And then, without receiving an answer, the voice shouted: “Who the fuck is this?”

Before putting Leonardo’s three phones back in their places, the woman deleted all the calls so as not to leave a trace, erasing the records. She went back to the kitchen thinking about her husband’s life when he was not at home. If being an accountant meant dealing with this kind of lowlifes, she had to feel more sympathy for her husband now than she did shortly after his parents died, she reasoned. However, at the same time, everything seemed very suspicious and weird. Starting with the repetition of a certain dialed number, apparently residential, which felt a bit familiar. She didn’t want to take any chances. She wrote down the number and decided to call it later from a payphone.

That night, at the dinner table, she tried to learn more to put things in order and focus on what she had to find out to give, Kabbalistically, “mean and purpose”.

“Hand me the bread knife, please,” asked Leonardo to cut the fresh bread from the bakery, now delivered at their door.

“How was your day, darling?” Ana asked sweetly, trying the shaky ground of unknown calls and numbers.

“As always,” Leonardo replied curtly.

“Anything new?” the woman provoked, staring.

“All normal. The usual problems.”

The cell phones started ringing with urgency. Leonardo would stand up and answer immediately, after checking the origin of the call. A police informant had warned him that they were setting up an operation to arrest Skull. From the distance Ana and his son were seated, they couldn’t hear his words. Once in a while, and only when he raised his voice, they could hear curse words, the only thing distinct.

“I don’t know why men swear so much,” said Ana provocatively, waiting for her husband’s reaction.

Leonardo kept silent, focused only on cutting a smaller piece of baloney to fit in the small piece of bread. She hated baloney, but Leonardo and their son stuffed themselves.

“This one came directly from Bologna, son. It was an Italian friend of mine who brought it. It’s very spicy, you’ll like it.”

His son nodded, giving it an approving look. Leonardo then smiled affectionately, generously, offering the piece of bread stuffed with baloney that he had prepared.

“Try it!” ordered Leonard, as if he was a general.

His wife watched closely the loving scene, like so many others that always happened in the playful relationship between father and son.

“Do you like it, son?” asked Leonardo, watching his son avidly chew the bread with his mouth full.

“All your clients curse. Is this normal?”

Leonardo laughed, a cynical, provocative laugh.

“What do you want, darling? That, in the computer age, men say bonjour?” answered Leonardo pouting with his lips pursed, making his son, who soon began to mimic him, laugh. They laughed a lot and Ana had no alternative except to join them and dissipate the bad mood with which she had come to the table, caused by the suspicions she had about her husband’s phones.

“Have you decided if your son will join the Army?” asked the woman, changing the subject after the half-hearted smiles.

“Yes, he will. When time comes, he’ll join.”

“I think it’s good. He’ll learn some discipline and to obey his mother.”

“What, doesn’t he obey you?” Leonardo asked, surprised.

He didn’t have the chance to hear his wife’s answer, because his cell phone rang and he left the table to answer the insistent call.

“Boss, Rainstorm tracked the private call he received and identified it as being this number. There’s no mistake.”

“What the fuck? I haven’t called him!”

“Oops! This phone is tapped, boss!”

Leonardo was thoughtful, stroking his belly, which had gotten more evident during this frantic last year, full of worries outside his home. The other phone rang. He checked the number and answered it.

“Is everything OK, man? The battery was dead, so I couldn’t answer.”

“I didn’t call you. Well, it doesn’t matter. Can you tell me at what time was the call?” asked Big Head in a low voice.

After hastily closing the lid of the last cell phone, the smile on Leonardo’s face was completely gone. His face was now one of pure tension, something that made the furrows of his forehead protrude. Leonardo didn’t return to the table. He went straight to his bedroom to look for an aspirin on the nightstand, before the pangs in his head killed him with the pain. He had to be patient, as Lisa had said.

“What’s up, Major?’

The phone had rung very late after dinner. It was the last call Leonardo answered. It was the Major, with news.