Black Lies, Red Blood

Twenty-nine

He recognized him right away. They faced each other silently, for an eternity it seemed to Anders Brant. How did the man get in? The gate by the street and the downstairs door were both locked. Now he was standing, evidently perplexed, outside the door to Brant’s apartment.

Brant noticed that he had prepared for the visit carefully, there was an odor of cheap soap and he had put on the best set of clothes he could get hold of, perhaps even borrowed the dazzlingly white shirt and blue shorts. He had flip-flops on.

“Good afternoon,” said the man.

“Good afternoon. Can I help you?”

The man nodded. Brant hesitated whether he should invite him in. The landlady was in Ribeiro visiting her sister and would probably not be home before evening. The Dutchman who rented the minimal studio that shared a wall with Brant had been gone for several days, probably on a visit to the woman he spent time with.

If he let him in, what might happen? It was the man’s obvious efforts to look proper that decided it.

“Come in,” said Brant, stepping to one side.

He went toward the kitchen. Sitting in the combination living room-bedroom felt wrong, too private, and besides the windows faced out toward the alley.

They sat down at the table. The man took a quick look around the kitchen. His eyes settled for a moment on the camera and the little tape recorder on the table, before he cleared his throat.

“Thanks,” he said.

Brant suddenly felt thirsty, perhaps it was the man’s throat clearing that triggered it, but he refrained from taking a beer out of the refrigerator. He did not want the man to be the least bit affected.

“I know you saw what happened,” said the man.

Brant said nothing, but instead waited for what would follow with an expressionless face. This was a technique he used in interviews. Saying too much yourself, filling in, making comments, explaining, giving background and intentions, that could lead astray. The interlocutor, or interview victim, adapted so easily, made a parallel course to try to please or get off easily.

From the inner courtyard was heard the stubborn sound of the bird calling its incessant nitschevo-nitschevo, the Russian word for “nothing.”

The man sighed, looked down at the table, certainly bothered by his errand, but probably also by the unfamiliar environment, apparently indecisive about how to present his case.

At last Brant felt obliged to break the silence. The bird’s stubbornness and the man’s timidity were making him nervous.

“What’s your name?”

“Ivaldo Assis,” he said, extending his hand.

Brant introduced himself and took the man’s hand across the table.

“I know that you saw,” Ivaldo repeated.

Brant nodded, and that was what was needed for Ivaldo to continue.

“What you see is one thing, but what really happens is another. My son died. I am grieving my son, not the man who died before your eyes. That wasn’t my Arlindo. He died a long time ago. Do you understand?”

For the first time their eyes met. The man’s left eye was full of blood, red streaks marbled the white of his eye.

“He was not, he did not turn out to be a good man. Not a good son, not a good husband and father. He created a lot of sorrow around him. Arlindo was only twenty-seven years old, but he had three lives on his conscience, and many others I don’t know about, because he was not only a murderer, he dealt drugs too. I did all I could to get him to change his ways, but he was so disturbed in his soul. May God forgive him!”

Brant stretched out his arm, opened the refrigerator, and took out a Brahma. There were glasses on a tray on the table. He filled two and set one in front of Ivaldo.

The man waited patiently until the foam had settled and then emptied the glass in one gulp, thanked him with a nod and continued his story.

“Our family comes from the inland, sertão, in the vicinity of Jacobina, do you know it?”

Anders Brant nodded. Not because he had visited Jacobina, a city perhaps three hundred kilometers northwest of Salvador, but he guessed that the landscape looked much like around Itaberaba: caatinga, bushy vegetation worn by wind and sun, river channels dried out for long periods of time, cactus, merciless heat in the summer, stony, meager soil, which could be made fertile if irrigation could be arranged.

“Then you know. It was poor. We had no land. When my wife died my three sons and I moved here. I thought they might get some education. I had a brother here in Salvador, in Massaranduba, and we moved in with him. It was crowded but we managed. I took odd jobs. My brother was a bus driver. Then he died too, shot during a robbery, and we were evicted. My oldest son had moved to Ilhéus and was doing fine, but two were left, and then my nephew Vincente, who I was taking care of. We were without a roof over our heads, three young men and I. We stole some lumber, put together a few carts, and started collecting rags and boxes. That worked out too. There were four of us and we were strong.”

Anders Brant had heard this kind of story many times, in Brazil and in other countries. The details might differ, but the tragedy was the same.

People from near and far made their way to Salvador, hoping that the city would live up to its name, and save them from poverty and misery. The city grew beyond its limits, new favelas shot up like mushrooms from the ground, the misery was the same, but also the new arrivals’ hope for a better life.

“One day we found this place in the alley, an abandoned building, and we moved in. It was good, we had a roof over our heads. I even planted a tree on the slope outside. Maybe you’ve seen it, it’s five meters tall now. The only sad thing was that Arlindo started living a bad life. He brought a woman here, Luiza. She got pregnant and had a son, but he was born premature and died. He hit his woman. Maybe that was why the child left us. I was a grandfather for thirteen days.”

Brant refilled the beer glasses. The same procedure was repeated, when the foam had settled Ivaldo gulped down the beer, nodded, and continued his story.

“He did drugs and for a while he got his little brother and his cousin involved, but at last they got strength from God to say no.”

The old man fell silent. Anders Brant studied his facial features, marked by poverty and hard work, a person in this multimillion anthill, dark skinned, the descendant of slaves, born poor, without great demands on life. A man who had lost a son.

Anders Brant had an impulse to put his pale hand over Ivaldo’s dark one, but resisted it.

“Now my hope is with you,” said Ivaldo.

“How is that?”

“Vincente was reported. We thought you were the one who called the police, but it was a woman in the building on the other side. I recognize her, she always sits in the window and glares, and that’s what she was doing that evening too. She saw Vincente push his cousin, my son Arlindo, over the wall.”

“What should I do?” asked Anders Brant.

He sensed what the answer would be.

“You have to give false testimony,” said Ivaldo.

“And let Vincente go free?”

Ivaldo nodded.

“I won’t do it. I can’t lie about a thing like that. For a while I thought I was seeing things, but I saw what I saw. I chose not to tell, but don’t ask me to lie.”

“Were you afraid?”

Brant nodded.

“You don’t need to be. Arlindo cannot take revenge. And God understands.”

“This is not about God,” said Brant.

“It’s not?”

Anders Brant did not know how to get himself out of this dilemma. Discussing a conceivable God’s possible understanding was totally foreign to him, and starting to talk about laws and justice was almost tragicomic to a man who had never experienced any justice.

“Don’t you believe in God?”

Brant shook his head.

“Not in God, and not in paradise,” he said. “I am struggling for paradise here on earth.”

“The day after tomorrow you’re going to believe in hell anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re going to make an excursão, you and I,” said Ivaldo.

Brant was uncertain what the man meant by that word. He would translate it as “outing,” but did not understand the context, and it was so clearly marked on his face that Ivaldo thought it best to immediately tell him what this excursão would involve.