Robb - A Death in Brazil

Praise for A Death in Brazil:

An astonishing feat of storytelling Peter Carey, Booker Prize winner

Glorious ... fascinating and revealing New York Times

Robb paints a picture of Brazil quite unlike any other Publishing News

Electrifying ... enthralling Literary Review

Fabulous ... Robb writes beautifully Irish Examiner

Reads like a thriller Daily Express

Eclectic and inventive ... a wonderful book Guardian

A brilliant portrait of Brazil Sunday Tribune

Fabulous ... an utter marvel Waterstones Books Quarterly

An intoxicating cocktail of a book Time Out

Masterful Sunday Business Post

A brilliantly atmospheric study of twenty-first-century Brazil Sunday Times

Excellent... mesmeric ... I eagerly anticipate Robbs next work Irish Times

Midnight in Sicily
M
Pigs Blood

First published in Great Britain in 2004

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright 2003 by Peter Robb

Maps copyright by Alex Snellgrove

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

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eISBN: 978-1-4088-4627-8

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IM
Florisvaldo Azevedo de Carvalho

You can put anything into a book of omissions. Reading one of these never worries me at all. What I do when I get to the end is close my eyes and think of all the things I didnt find in it. So many great ideas come to me then, really deep thoughts.

MACHADO DE ASSIS

The tram goes by full of legs:
White legs, black legs, yellow legs.
My God, what are all the legs for, asks my heart.
But my eyes
ask nothing at all.

CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE

Brazil made me intelligent.

FERNAND BRAUDEL

The maps of Brazil, which have been drawn by Alex Snellgrove, show only places mentioned in the previous pages. Likewise, the notes on reading and the chronology at the end refer only to matters discussed in the book.

The tilde over a Portuguese vowel, as in So Paulo or sertes, stands for a missing n at the end and means the sound comes out through the nose. The sound of an nh pairing in a Portuguese word is that of an in Spanish or gn in Italianso the surname of Euclides da Cunha rhymes with vicua in Spanish and prugna in Italian.

The currency values that appear here, many of which are necessarily approximate, are expressed in United States dollars valued at the time of the transactions they refer to. So after ten or more years, PCs billion would be a lot more today.

Like everyone, I went to Brazil to get away. At the start it was easy. At the beginning of the eighties Brazil still had a consulate in Naples. It occupied a vast and gloomy suite with high ceilings and the finest veil of dust in a distinguished Umbertine palazzo two blocks in from the Bay of Naples. On a clear day you saw Capri from its window. The consulate was marked by an oval plaque in burnished brass and you reached the office in a clanking iron cage lift with glowing mahogany seats.

Reception was manned by a tall lady with parchment skin and horn-rimmed glasses on looping chains. Another nearly identical lady lurked within. They wore silk blouses in the heat and cashmere twinsets in the cool. Their dark straight hair was pulled severely back, their feet shod in costly lace-up shoes and they moved softly in long skirts of handwoven tweed. Behind frosted glass yet farther in I once saw a fuzzy silhouette of the consul himself. There was a huge old Underwood typewriter with a cast-iron frame on the reception desk, several wilting aspidistras in pots in the corners and a fly spotted schoolroom map of the Americas on the wall.

I wondered what the old ladies had to do in Naples, and they seemed to be wondering too. There was a Brazilian I knew studying navigation at the Naval Institute, but that was all. A hundred years earlier, hundreds of thousands of southern Italian peasants had sailed steerage for Brazil from Naples. Now a third of Brazilians were of Italian descent, and some of the richest among them. The rich came to Italy to spend and poor Brazilians, if they could, would come to Italy to make their fortune. Most of these were transsexuals who plied their trade at the richer freeway junctions farther north. The Naples consulate was dying of inanition. The fan flicked around noiselessly. Though they made it clear that the consul couldnt be hurried, the two ladies were always very good about my visa. Of course I went to Rio first, via Casablanca with Royal Air Maroc, which had a special offer at the time.

Murders happen anywhere and mine most nearly happened in Rio. Twenty years later only the scar of a small knife wound on my arm reminds me that this is a memory and not a dream. The night went on and on like a dream, with a dreams ungraspable logic, or a Brazilian soaps. Details become wonderfully vivid, like the old carving knife with a long curved and darkened blade carelessly left earlier on the kitchen bench of the Copacabana flat, in the moment it was being held at my throat. My Portuguese lost its rudimentary awkwardness and became unreally fluent very fast. Words Id never known I knew came pouring from my throat. Things flowed with a dreams weightless speed. The danger lay in the speed. A flailing knife blade moves faster than thought. Movement had to be slowed, the heat lowered. It was the one thing I understood. Let nothing happen. Respond to violence, speed and noise not with violence, speed and noise but with ponderous torpidity, envelop each new threat in slowness. The beautiful Portuguese periods began to roll, slowly, slowly, but with what baroque grace, from my amazing tongue. Obtuse fearlessness stayed the hand with the knife, impassive calm put a little wobble in the spin of violence.

Chance put the knife in Adelmos way. Chance, or Brazilian entropy, had saved me a moment before we worked our way to the kitchen. The hideously old-fashioned Brazilian furniture, in the sitting room where it started, was a wasteful mass of dark stained solid tropical woods and dark brown cowhide upholstery and rows and rows of little brass studs. Adelmo grabbed a lamp and then a chair to smash my head. The lamps base was cast iron and the chair too heavy to wield. When we got to the kitchen and he grabbed the knife, a tiny part of the first fatal impetus had been lost.