by Thomas Murphy

Twenty Degrees of Latitude

(43’ 12’’ West; 22’ 5’’ South)

I knew Osvaldo Leopoldo.   

And I knew what he did.

He told me the night he died.

His sister Margarida called me that night at the newsroom on Rua Irineu Marinho in the Lapa section of Rio de Janeiro. She was desperate.  

“How bad?” I asked.  

 “Very bad.”

 I rushed to Catumbi.

I hate Catumbi; it’s a relic of when Rio was rich and Brazil important; I hate the little house where Osvaldo lived on Rua Van Eyck. Outside, the green stucco is peeling; when it rains, a patchwork of bricks and grout oozes watery white paste like snot from a runny nose. Osvaldo Leopoldo lived in the house with his sister and her husband, the Van Eyck Street drunk.

There is no doorbell. Visitors, street urchins and the meter man clap or shout from the street. I didn’t bother. I barged into the dreary house, the little house on the garbage-blighted street, the house I hate, the house where even the door is a hateful trap; the black iron grating is unhinged and clangs with the false tones of a broken church bell. Inside, the rooms stink of ammonia. 

Margarida was waiting. She was hollow-eyed and silent, but no tears. She pointed to Osvaldo’s room; the fat, white chicken-skin of her arm jiggled as she pointed and then covered her mouth like a horror show.    

The bedroom was a death chamber of dim light and the smell of camphor. I watched Margarida from the corner of my eye. She backed away from the door. She wanted nothing to do with that room anymore. She was glad to shift the burden of its brutish disquiet onto someone else’s shoulders, my shoulders.

Osvaldo Leopoldo stared at me from his death bed, a metal frame with an old tick mattress covered by blue acrylic blankets with faux satin borders. At first, I thought he was dead. But then I remembered, even on his best day, Osvaldo looked yellow-skinned and gaunt. Tonight, on his deathbed, he was clean shaven, except for the perfectly trimmed pencil mustache that made him look like a cartoon character from the 1940s. His hair was slicked back. It was like he had groomed himself for an important engagement that night–the occasion of his death. Osvaldo’s lips moved. He was forming words. I leaned in. I heard him say: “Jackie.” The name rang a bell. He said it again: “Jackie.”

That, I would later learn, was his “Rosebud.”           

I found Margarida’s soused husband in the living room. He was sitting in the dark. I hadn’t noticed him at first. He fondled a glass. He was picking at round, black jaboticaba like oversize olives.

He startled me. “How bad?” he said. It came as a pronunciamento from the depths.  

“Bad.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah, too bad.”

“Want a drink?”

“No thanks.”

He paused to pick more jaboticaba from the tin serving plate. He said, “Can you loan me, say, a one-thousand note?”

“No,” I said. I was always decisive with Margarida’s soused husband.

He paused again, the silent, patient pause of the eternally disappointed. Finally, he said, “Osvaldo was a coward.” The statement seemed to lend him a certain satisfaction, even a degree of comfort.  

I stared at him.         

“He should have gone to Mato Grosso,” he explained.

 “I don’t know anything about that.”

He leaned forward. Now, I could see his eyes, the pupils as black as the jaboticaba. He stared at me like a sick child. “He had a chance. But he was a coward. He stayed in this sinkhole.”

“Like you,” I said.

I fled from the house. I call it a house; it’s really an anti-house, like everything about them–Osvaldo, Margarida and the vagrant husband who collects one minimum salary from the state every month for some phantom disability, the only thing genuinely Carioca about him. As for the rest, they were the anti-Cariocas, pale, nervy, undersexed and ugly, like crawling night creatures in a City of Light—Rio de Janeiro, the oversexualized hustle of violence and sweaty, half naked bodies at the heart of old Brazil.

Osvaldo Leopoldo died an hour before dawn.

***

He was interred the same day – the day Brazil beat Argentina in Barcelona – at the São Francisco de Paula cemetery a few blocks from Rua Van Eyck. Everybody resented it.

Margarida, in a black-lace veil, greeted me at the chapel. It was heavy with the smell of candle wax.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “You were his best friend.”

I wanted to say, “I was his only friend” but I guarded my silence.    

A knot of fellow newspaper employees gazed at the figure in the coffin. I looked too. It was the Osvaldo Leopoldo I remembered, just a smaller version, a little darker in pallor — the black hair, without a trace of grey, slicked back, the pencil mustache in place — and in almost perfect health. Osvaldo Leopoldo seemed content. 

“He’s not smiling,” someone said. “He’s laughing at us.”

A few neighbors loitered in the hall. Margarida’s husband hovered. He wore a shiny black suit and a black tie.

I nodded to him; he nodded back — immediately, a cheer arose outside the gate as Brazil scored its first goal against Argentina — and he formed his lips into a circle like a tenor and seemed ready to issue a whoop but then visibly struggled to suppress himself and force the whoop into a whimper.

After a decent interval, Osvaldo Leopoldo was wheeled on an aluminum gurney from the dim chapel to his burial slab, a slot in the São Francisco de Paula Cemetery’s Great Wall of Death, like a post office box to the afterlife—no flowers, no priests, no words, not even from his ‘best friend’.  

I left as soon as was decently possible. It was hot. I let Margarida and her husband struggle on foot back to their anti-house on Rua Van Eyck. Now, they had a room to let.  

Back at Rua Irineu Marinho, I wrote the obit. In my mind, I dedicated it to Nelson Rodrigues, my late colleague. It was right down his alley–the dirty, despicable Rio de Janeiro suburbia of drink and violence and little lives. The only thing missing was sex. That would come later.  

I work two chairs down from where Nelson used to sit. By the time I knew him, he could hardly walk. His long, grey face was puffed up by cortisone. A cigarette would dangle from his lips, but he never smoked it. He grumbled. We used to lean in to listen in case he said something quotable (“Only prophets can foresee the obvious.”). His eyesight was poor. He squinted at bright lights and plastered the newspaper against his face. He used to tell us he only read the sports pages. I think he read the comics too. He would tap out his column one finger at a time. On the phone, he sounded like a sleepy drunk. He made no demands on anyone. He was Brazil’s greatest playwright.  

The obit was short. I omitted the crime. We only published it because Osvaldo was a deceased employee. Osvaldo Leopoldo Santos Neto–meaning he was probably at least third in a line of pock-marked night creatures–died on July 3, 1982, age 51 — it was an obit nobody would read the day after Brazil beat Argentina 3-1 in a World Soccer Cup qualifier in Barcelona, an obit Osvaldo, on any other day, would have proofread. I hope there were no spelling errors.

***

It bothered me — I’m a reporter — “Jackie,” “Mato Grosso,” the little life connected by the 410 bus line through leaky Frei Caneca Tunnel every night to and from Rua Van Eyck and Osvaldo Leopoldo’s various proofreading jobs on Rua Irineu Marinho and Rua Riachuelo in Rio de Janeiro’s old Lapa newspaper district, just a few blocks from Catumbi, which is just a few blocks from the city morgue, which is just a few blocks from the Mangue section of red-light bars, cheap sugar whisky and whores available in three or four different genders. 

Was I really Osvaldo Leopoldo’s best friend? He must not have had many friends.

I ran into him once at a corner bar near the newspaper office, the Bar da Amizade or the Bar do Neguinho, an open-air affair with tables that spill onto the street and beer drinkers with flabby bellies wearing shorts and rubber sandals who bicker and laugh and sometimes shout at passing cab drivers and pedestrians.

He motioned to me. I joined him. He was glad to see me. We stood with a knot of drinkers under the afternoon sun. He handed me a beer.

I hardly recognized him. At work, Osvaldo Leopoldo was grey, fastidious, and deferential. At an open-air bar on a steamy Sunday afternoon, he stood out. He wore pleated slacks, two-tone wingtips and a beige linen chemise. He was a different kind of man from the one I knew, or thought I knew–flushed, animated, sociable. The pencil mustache and the slicked back hair made him seem prosperous and worldly. Even his grammar, the elegant over correct grammar of a professional newspaper proofreader, made him stand out among the working class drinkers.

The subject was women. Osvaldo Leopoldo smiled but had little to say. Then, it was soccer. Osvaldo offered a comment but was shouted down. When politics came up, the bullies quieted; some of them leaned in; they were expectant…they wanted to hear what he had to say!

It was 1974. There was an election coming.

He said, “Listen to the official newscast every night. You listen, right? Just like everybody else…and remember one thing—everything they tell you is garbage…junk…shit! They wanna make you believe the government is going to win the election. But they’re not going to win. They’re full of crap. The opposition is going to win!”

“Naw,” said one of the drinkers. “You’re nuts. The Army keeps a firm grip. The Army controls everything.”

“Now look,” said Osvaldo – he addressed them with the seasoned patience of a college professor – “tell me this, how are you going to vote? For the ‘official’ party—in other words, the Army—or the opposition?”

They stared.

“You, for example…” Osvaldo Leopoldo pointed to one of the beer drinkers.

“Opposition.”

“And you…and you…”

A murmur of “opposition…opposition” spread through the little knot of red-faced drinkers.

“Of course; it’s only logical,” said Osvaldo Leopoldo, warming to his thesis. “Look at inflation…almost 30%, and that’s the official rate…you know what the real rate is…look at jobs…look at the profits made by the government corporations. Are you getting any of that? Are you getting a raise? You’re not even getting 30%, the phony inflation rate. You know how things are and so do the rest of the voters, especially your wives. They’re going to vote for the opposition, aren’t they, just like you.”

The men murmured; some nodded. I thought, in another context, they might have burst into applause.

Osvaldo Leopoldo issued a further, more specific but less easily interpreted, ukase: “Quércia, Itamar and Braga are going to win for the Senate.”

“Who the hell are Quércia and Itamar?” someone mumbled. Even I didn’t know.

In the actual election that year, little known opposition candidates Orestes Quércia, Itamar Franco and Saturnino Braga were elected to the Brazilian Senate from the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, respectively, Brazil’s three largest states. Osvaldo Leopoldo had hit the nail squarely on the head.

The subject turned to famous fashion models. Their faces and bronzed bodies in bikinis by the beach were pictured on every lush magazine cover in Rio that season. Osvaldo nodded politely and backed away. I followed him. We engineered a table on the sidewalk. There was a slight smell of sewage in the air. The sun poured down. We ordered cold beer.

I motioned approvingly toward the little knot of drinkers.

“I let them blather on about sports and politics,” Osvaldo said, “but they don’t know a thing.”

“I guessed.”

We talked about mutual acquaintances, office politics, money, crime in the streets. Osvaldo espoused an informed opinion on every subject. The reason was apparent–he was only a proofreader, but he read three newspapers every day with the extraordinary diligence of someone looking for every small error, deviance or contradiction.   

“Yeah, I read the papers,” he said. He seemed, for a moment, sheepish.

“You seem quite thorough.”

“It’s not only newspapers. I proofread magazines, reports, pamphlets, whatever comes over the transom.”

Various drinkers joined us as we talked. They would sit with expectant faces, puzzled by the tenor of the conversation, then drift away. Once or twice, Osvaldo would turn to one and say, “not now” or “I’ll tell you later.”

I asked him about “later.”  

“They come to me all the time with queries,” he said. “I give them tips on everything–income tax, bank loans, insurance. They don’t know a damn thing about anything.”      

“But not sports?”

“No,” he said. “I could, but I don’t. That’s the one arena where they don’t know anything but they think they do. Nobody can tell a Carioca male anything about sports that he doesn’t already know, or think he knows.”

 “Do you bet?”

 “On the animals? No, of course not.”

“I mean on sports.”

“I used to.” He shrugged. “I read every line of every sports page in every newspaper. I used to bet at the corner bar…but not anymore.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t miss it,” he said. “I don’t need the money.”

I noticed Osvaldo didn’t drink much.

He didn’t smoke.

I noticed there were no women around.

I didn’t say anything.

He smiled…every so often.  

I was seeing a new and puzzling Osvaldo Leopoldo. He wasn’t the hunched mole haunting the newsroom. I wondered if there were others. To what heights, or depths, might Osvaldo Leopoldo be capable? What about Osvaldo Leopoldo and family? Osvaldo and money? Osvaldo and sex?

I’m a reporter. I asked him.

“I don’t have a family,” he said. “Just my sister Margarida and her soused husband.”

“How bad is it?”

“Bad.”

“What does he live on?”

“Me…and Margarida…He’s trying to get a disability pension.”

“What’s his disability?”

“Does it matter?”

“No.”

“Incidentally, here he comes.”

I lost my chance to ask about sex.     

Margarida’s husband came weaving down the street, veering into the traffic lanes, vexing cab drivers. Children laughed. The boisterous beer drinkers offered him a drink with elaborate courtesy then erupted in laughter.

He didn’t recognize us. He didn’t seem to recognize anybody or anything.

I stood up. Osvaldo motioned me down: “Don’t bother. He’ll find his way home.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Who cares?”

It was the only time I ever saw Osvaldo Leopoldo in daylight.

Later, when I had access to his diaries, I would learn how the encounter had left him nervous at first, then gradually more at ease and, finally, pleased, even elated, at the attentions shown by a full-fledged newsroom reporter. I found the diary entry unnerving. Even when Osvaldo Leopoldo seemed most himself, he was not himself. Maybe that’s true of most people.  

***

     I worked in the same room with a man for 15 years and I hardly knew him.  

Who did?

I consulted my former editor.

Bernstajn – nobody knew his first name – occupied a top-floor suite—complete with wainscoting, a hooked brown-and-green Casa Caiada area rug from the Northeast on rustic wood floorboards, bookcases on two sides and a picture window with a splendid view of the garbage dump.

He was happy to see me. “Like old times,” he said. We sat under an oil portrait of Roberto Marinho.

“I hate to bother you,” I opened.

“I’m on the board of directors; I do next to nothing.”

I looked around. “You rate a nice office.”

“It’s not mine. It’s a studio. See all those books? Nobody reads them. They’re outdated legal tombs. They bought them at a used bookstore and buffed the spines with shoe polish. They use this room for television interviews. Looks impressive. I have to get out when they need it, three times a week. Then I have nowhere to go.”

“You don’t have your own office?”

“Nope. I just wander around for a couple of hours. People think I’m ‘inspecting.’ They act like they’re afraid of me.”

“And are they?”

“No.”

“Nice view anyway.”

“Yeah, I can see the bums rummaging in the garbage bins.”

“You get paid?”

“Lots.”

“Sounds like a good gig.”

“I hate it. Police reporter was better. Remember? Or do you still report?”

“I know some cops.”

“I envy you. All I know are senators.”

“The cops are still corrupt.”

“So are the senators!”

We had a good laugh at that.

I broached the subject of Osvaldo Leopoldo. To my surprise, Bernstajn remembered him: “Scrawny little fellow with a pencil mustache like he was trying out for a Dick Tracy comic…but he was a good worker.”      

“Proofreader.”

“He seemed to be there all the time,” said Bernstajn.

I told Bernstajn about “Jackie” but nothing registered. He had been out of police reporting for quite some time. When I told him about “Mato Grosso,” there was a connection, but it was puzzling.

“Osvaldo came to me one day,” Bernstajn said. “He wanted a promotion. He wanted to be a reporter. But he didn’t have a diploma, so we couldn’t keep him on as anything but an office boy or a proofreader. Of course, he was disappointed. But then I got an inspiration. We had just bought a paper in Corumbá, Mato Grosso. I told him out there diplomas don’t matter. It’s the end of the world, Brazilian border with Bolivia.”

“What did he say to that?”

“I can laugh at it now, but it startled me at the time. He got mad, really enraged. Then he caught himself. He even apologized. In any event, he turned down the offer.”

“Why?”

“All he said was, ‘I’m single, but I’m not an Indian.’”

***

I decided to talk to Margarida’s husband about Mato Grosso.

I hated talking to him. The only good thing is he’s always home.  

I found him in the same chair in the same darkened room with the same drink and the same plate of jaboticaba like fat black olives. The light was too dim to see what he was wearing but it might as well have been the same shiny black suit and skinny tie as the day of the funeral.

This time I accepted some jaboticaba and a drink. The drink was a shot of supermarket cachaça. He showed me the label.

“You know you’re killing yourself with this stuff, don’t you?” I put in.

“I do. What’s stopping me?”

“Your wife?”

“She has the silly notion she’d like to keep me alive.” He downed his shot.

I shrugged.

He pointed to the label again: “Bring me one of these the next time you come.”

“Sure, but a better label.”

“Don’t bother. This one is quicker.”

Margarida’s husband poured himself another shot. He glanced at me. I shook my head.

“You mentioned Mato Grosso the other day,” I began. “I learned that your brother-in-law was once offered a job in Mato Grosso but he turned it down and even the idea seemed to make him mad.”

“Osvaldo didn’t like Mato Grosso.” He downed the second shot and poured himself another.

“Why not? It was an opportunity.”

“An opportunity for what? Mental cruelty?”

“Why?”

There was a pause. His head was beginning to wobble.

“Well?”

“He had a bad experience there once.” He was already slurring his speech. His head bobbed.

“How so?”

“You have to ask her!” He jerked his thumb back as if some malign figure were hovering in the background. His anger was like a remote echo of Osvaldo Leopoldo’s from 15 years ago.    

I pointed toward the kitchen: “Your wife?”

“No,” he said with irritation. “Not her. You have to ask Suely…Suely’s the one.” He settled in his chair. His eyes began to fade. The interview was coming to a close.

“Who’s Suely?”

He rocked back and forth; he tapped his chest: “My sister.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“Neither did I!” He laughed. It was a coughing, uproarious laugh. The anger had vanished–now everything was a joke, even painful memories and old sins. It took him a while to wind down.

“What happened? Did something happen between Osvaldo and Suely?” I insisted.

“No, nothing happened; that’s just it…”

There was another silence.   

“How do I talk to Suely?”

“You don’t.”

“Is she dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s your sister!”

Silence. It was getting on time for another drink.   

“I don’t get it,” I said. “You don’t talk to her, is that it? You don’t know where she is. You don’t know whether she’s alive or dead.”

He shrugged.

***

Margarida told me Suely’s married name. That’s all she knew. The name meant nothing to me.

I circulated it in the newsroom. The society columnist found me the next day. He not only knew of Suely, he actually knew the lady herself. He handed me a couple of ten year old photos.

“Suely de Oliveira Kosminsky,” he said. He tapped one of the photos. “Her husband’s dead. Landowner in Mato Grosso. She fancied herself a socialite. She even tried to pass herself off as the Countess Kosminsky after he died, but I debunked that in my column. She hasn’t talked to me since and her name, and her image, have disappeared from the papers. Keep the pictures.”

“Do you know where I can find her?”

“Of course!” The society columnist, an imposing man with an open mobile face, exploded in laughter. “At the Copa! Every afternoon, sunning herself like one of those alligators in the ‘Great Swamp’ Mato Grosso is famous for!”

I went to the Copa, Brazil’s posh ice cream cake pile on the beach in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro’s answer to Cannes, Monte Carlo and James Bond, the next day. I know the press agent—a young man with a shaved head, a tiny hematite disk dangling from one ear, and skin the color of milk chocolate. I like him.

“Franco Zeffirelli is at the hotel,” he said. “Shall I ring him?”

“Later.”

“You want to see Madame Kosminsky?”

“Please.”

He ushered me to poolside.        

I had studied the ten year old photos. By my reckoning, Suely de Oliveira Kosminsky must have been about 35 in the photos, 45 now…she looked it…in a nice way…from a distance…but as I got closer, I could see the phony facelift smile, the lips chapped from cigarettes, belly flab half-hidden by a kimono. Suely was sitting at a white deck table under a big canvass canopy. She had a fizzy cocktail with a toothpick umbrella in front of her. She was feeding crumbs to her dog, a fluffy Pekinese with a pink bow around its neck. The dog smiled at me; Suely did not.

The press agent introduced me.

Suely looked up. “Who sent you?” she said.

“Ibrahim Sued.”

“Good to know,” she rejoined. “Tell him to shove it the next time you see him.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll tell him.” I decided to change the subject. I pointed to the south face of the hotel: “That’s the room where Orson Welles threw the furniture out the window and into the pool in 1942.”

“Who the hell is Orson Welles?”

“A television personality,” I said.

“He must have been mad.”

“Yeah. Cherchez la femme.”

“It wasn’t me…I was too young.”

“I guessed.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk about Osvaldo Leopoldo. Can I sit down?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about Osvaldinho…”

“I thought you might want to know…”

“I don’t!”

She was beginning to get up from her chair. Her expression had turned from indifferent to aggressive. The dog whimpered.

“He’s dead,” I ventured. “Osvaldo Leopoldo is dead.”

“I don’t care.”

Suely snapped her fingers. A waiter scurried to the table. She turned to me. “It was nice talking to you, sir.”

She smiled at me. Her little teeth were gleaming white; they were perfect cubes. Auburn hair framed her face in stiff, sweeping curls. Disdain dripped like perspiration.   

“Sorry,” I managed.

“Waiter, show this man out.”

The waiter stiffened.

I hesitated.

“I’m not going to say please. Get out! One more time and I’ll make a scene. Put that in your paper and publish it—’reporter ejected from Copa after propositioning guest.’ Sued will love that.”

“He will. I’ll tell him.”

***

Was there a connection between Suely de Oliveira Kosminsky and “Jackie?”

Maybe.

Margarida came to the newsroom the next day. She brought a carboard box. She said it might help answer my questions.

The box was full of memorabilia—letters, pictures, diaries, Osvaldo Leopoldo’s entire recorded life.  

I thanked Margarida. I bought her a cup of coffee. “Are you alright?” I asked.

“I am, but my husband’s worse.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

We parted as friends.

I began to rummage through the trove. The editors were curious. I humored them. “Wow!” I said. “I’m the custodian of the Osvaldo Leopoldo Santos Neto papers! I wonder how much they’re worth?”

“Two cents,” someone ventured.  

The boys in the newsroom got a good laugh out of that.

I took the box home. I spread its contents over the kitchen table. I separated everything into categories—photos, newspaper clippings, letters, diaries. Then I separated the piles into smaller piles—old photos, recent photos, vacation photos; letters received, a few letters written but never sent; old diaries, new diaries. It took me hours. It was fascinating.

I realized that, if I could correlate the photos, letters and diaries, a chronology  would emerge, complete with pictures and prose. I might learn about Suely and Mato Grosso. I might find the real meaning of “Jackie.”

I started with the diaries. They were flat, desktop calendar agendas with two pages for each day of the year. But how Osvaldo Leopoldo filled those pages! They were like De Vinci’s notebooks—line after line of descriptive prose in a tiny, barely legible scrawl interspersed with pencil drawings, odd symbols, numerals disciplined in columns like army regiments and, along the margins, crude sets of calculations.

It took me a week just to learn how to read them. Once I did, what emerged was the portrait of a man obsessed with detail, wedded to routine and rueful at the prospect of being forgotten by the world. The surprising thing, for me, was that I wasn’t surprised. An admittedly superficial reading from two or three years’ worth of diaries showed me the Osvaldo Leopoldo I had known for nearly two decades–detail-driven to the point of obsession, deferential but suppressed, a man ground down by Brazil’s tendency to present challenges without providing opportunities, but still highly reliable on the job and vaguely ambitious.      

The presentation and methodology of the diaries were evidence of all this. The diaries were meticulous. Reading one, you could take a year to relive every year of Osvaldo Leopoldo’s life like the priceless character of Funes the Memorious in the eponymous story by Jorge Luis Borges.

The diaries detailed every penny Osvaldo Leopoldo ever spent. He never balanced his checkbook—everything was in the diary. He sometimes calculated the weekly, monthly and annual inflation rates, in the page margins, for different consumer items. He almost never took a proper holiday. Instead, he would bank vacation money from one employer and hire himself out to another for the week. Except for Sunday afternoons, he was a night creature. He often had two jobs and took freelance assignments on the side, working through the night, drinking coffee, occasionally smoking a cigarette—he noted the number of cigarettes he smoked with little pencil drawings. He ate box lunches prepared by his sister. He never drank with Margarida’s husband. He knew every bus stop of every bus line on the north side of town. He knew the name of every cab driver plying the streets of the newspaper district. He was a night creature but not in the usual sense; he didn’t howl; he pecked and scrounged. I figured he worked about 12 hours out of every 24, five or six days a week. He slept through the day on his little cot in his little room in his little sister’s little house in ugly little Catumbi. He paid them rent. Margarida did his laundry. She never bothered him and neither did her soused husband, except to beg for an occasional handout.

The diaries were rich, compelling, a witness to daily life in Rio de Janeiro from the 1960s to the 1980s but there was no “Mato Grosso” and no “Jackie,” at least not at first glance. They were in there, but where?

I spent a weekend correlating the earliest diaries with the letters and the pictures. Mato Grosso gradually took shape like a photograph emerging from the soak after adding stop bath and fixer.        

Mato Grosso was the only time Osvaldo Leopoldo ever went on vacation.

It started off beautifully.    

***

Osvaldo Leopoldo traveled to Mato Grosso in 1964 with his sister Margarida and her husband at the invitation of Margarida’s sister-in-law Suely, who worked as a bookkeeper for a rancher near Corumbá.

They journeyed from Rio de Janeiro by bus in a series of punishing drives on two-lane paved highways and dirt tracks. It was the dry season. Dust covered the windows, the seats, the brown bags with sandwiches and drinks; it infiltrated the water bottles, stuck to the teeth and blew through the windpipe and nostrils like an army of ants. Sometimes the travelers slept at cheap roadhouses, sometimes on the bus.  

Osvaldo suffered, along with the others, but would guard little memory of the trip to and from Corumbá, the border town near Bolivia at the extreme western limits of the vast Brazilian landmass. The only episode he recounted in his diary was a shabby wood-and-tin rest stop where a blind child sat in front of the bus playing a single-string musical instrument. The boy was skinny; his hair was patchy and scant like a cancer patient’s; he rolled his eyes, which were white with sightless steel-blue pupils, as he picked and banged on the instrument. The bus travelers gathered around him; when he paused, they applauded, tossing green one-cruzeiro notes like strips of lettuce into a tin plate on the ground.

At Corumbá, they were met by a pea green pickup truck with a painted sign on the cab–Águas da Polônia, Arnon Kosminsky, prop. The driver piled them into the loading bed where they sat on the floor panels or the wheel cutout for the long journey to the ranch. The floor panels were covered by cardboard mats advertising Ralston Purina. The truck barreled down a dirt track, kicking up red dust at the edge of town that turned to yellow in the country and then a mush of weeds, brown mud and stiff dried clay near the ranch.

The driver delivered them to the servants’ entrance of the Águas da Polônia ranch house. Suely greeted them. She smiled at her brother, who nodded and looked away. They didn’t speak. They didn’t embrace in the mode of most Brazilian families.

Over the next few days, Osvaldo fell in love with the Pantanal, Mato Grosso’s sprawling wetlands.

A pair of ranch hands took an interest in the big city visitors. One was named José João; the other was a deaf mute never properly introduced who acted as helper. The men were young with red leathery skin, black hair plastered in bangs over their foreheads and round Indian faces.  

The next day, José João announced a boat trip into the wetlands. Osvaldo Leopoldo, Margarida and her husband loaded into the narrow vessel, known as a Vaticano. The boat was painted in gay colors; it had an outboard motor, manned by the deaf mute servant, a sharp prow, and a canvass canopy stretched on poles anchored to the gunwales. It was supplied by bottled water, a hunting rifle and a couple of oars held in place by locks that looked like old-fashioned manacles.   

The sun poured down. Margarida wore a floppy sombrero, Osvaldo Leopoldo a crushed fisherman’s cap; Margarida’s husband was bareheaded.

Once on the bayous, they chugged bottled water; they sweated; Margarida’s husband swore.

There were no proper rivers; instead, they glided along channels that cut through fields of still water dotted by groves of white and green shoots that clicked like bamboo. Occasionally, the channel would open into a broad pond or a bending bayou.

Osvaldo Leopoldo marveled at the motorman’s skill in navigating the bland, uncertain marshes. José João provided commentary. He would point to a distant herd of marsh deer, a lounging jaguar, ant eaters with black stripes and bear-like fur scrounging on rare patches of dry earth, ocelots with fat rodent faces. There was a constant background sound of wild birds and foraging animals.

“There!” he would point and they would spy a flock of macaws sporting a rainbow of colored feathers; or he would turn and say: “Over there!” and they would see a red and white jabiru stork with a fat neck like it had swallowed a golf ball.  

Osvaldo Leopoldo was enthralled, Margarida’s husband prostrated. He cowered under the canopy; he grumbled about the heat, crawling bugs, the danger of disease from mosquito bites. Margarida tried to placate him with calming whispers; all they did was thrust him into a sulking silence. Finally, he said: “The bottled water’s running out.” 

José João produced an aluminum canteen. Margarida’s husband drank from it. “It’s warm,” he complained. “There are bugs in it.”

At noon, they docked at a shed built half on land and half on stilts with uneven wooden planks jutting over the bayou.
The occupants of the shed were clearly ready for them. A table on the deck was already set. The members of the boating party took their places. A dour couple with Indian faces served them pacu, a white fish roasted whole, with its gills folded back and its eyes staring, accompanied by brown rice and fried banana.

José João tried to appease Margarida’s husband with beer but it was warm.

“Tastes like piss,” Margarida’s husband muttered. “Looks like it too.” 

José João took a collection and they paid the Indian couple. Margarida’s husband complained about being tricked.

The boating party returned to the channel. Margarida’s husband dozed; Margarida whispered in his ear and stroked his hair.

José João pointed to islands of floating vegetation, to the bursting pink raiment of the trumpet tree, to fig trees with pleated, bell-shaped trunks like bamboo skirts, trees on the banks that dripped long green vines into the still waters. A pond was blanketed by masses of wide victoria regia lilies. Then, a section of river came into view with hundreds of alligators lounging at the margins; Osvaldo Leopoldo was fascinated, Margarida terrified; her husband swore he would never take another river cruise in his life.  

The landscape was a mix of rainforest and water in equal measures but as the party returned to the ranch Osvaldo noted broad uplands of fenced-in pasture dotted by cattle, the heart of Arnon Kosminsky’s lucrative trade.  

That night, Osvaldo Leopoldo dreamed of cows, the night after, alligators.    

Osvaldo’s diary entries for those first days in Mato Grosso were effusive. This was yet another version of the little, hunched over figure fussing over newspaper copy but, in this incarnation, instead of inhabiting a corner of the night city, here was a man in love with light, color, and the interplay of flora and fauna like Claude Monet let loose on one of nature’s biggest canvases, the Brazilian perennial flood plain. Osvaldo Leopoldo himself cited Monet in his diary (Osvaldo was proofreader on a series of Sunday supplements entitled Great Painters of Universal Art collected by newspaper subscribers and then bound in faux leather by the paper’s publishing house. A set of Great Painters of Universal Art could be found in Bernstajn’s “office.”) 

Osvaldo’s diary entries remark on the fresh air, the dry heat, the big sky, the fishy smells on the marshes, the odor of moist earth and decayed animal flesh on land, mold in the servants’ quarters.

But there were also oddities. At the ranch, they were not treated as guests but as servants or as the remote, vaguely suspicious relatives of servants. They were staying in servants’ quarters and, in the first few days, had never been invited into the main house. They rarely saw the owner who, at first, didn’t seem to know who they were. Apart from José João and his silent partner, house servants and ranch hands practiced a studied indifference. The visitors from Rio were Suely’s invitees, yet during the first days of their stay, even Suely was mostly absent.

***

On the third day, José João invited the party to go alligator hunting…that night.

“It’s the only way,” he said. “At night, you can charm them.” He offered a knowing smile.

Margarida’s husband frowned. “He was ready to spit in José’s face,” Osvaldo Leopoldo wrote in his diary. Margarida was appalled. They demurred.

José João, the deaf-mute motorman and Osvaldo embarked on the Vaticano just after dusk. They glided past Arnon Kosminsky’s pastures, picked their way through reeds and marshes, and emerged into broad shallows. The night sky opened. Osvaldo would tell his diary he had never seen the Southern Cross properly until he gazed at it under the stark canopy of night in the Mato Grosso wetlands.  

The deaf mute servant switched off the motor. They drifted. A white half moon hung over the waters. Osvaldo spied alligators rocking and shifting on the surface; the moonlight picked out their ridged features; they maneuvered in near silence. For Osvaldo, the allure of the wetlands was gradually replaced by an eerie disquiet.         

The moon, riding just above the horizon, was partially obscured by trees and brush as they drifted toward the shore. Osvaldo Leopoldo felt a chill.

José João approached the gunwale; he sat next to Osvaldo. Osvaldo could smell his sweat and his fish breath. He was repulsed.

“It’s not like the big city,” José João whispered. “In the big city, predators come out at night; here, in daylight; at night, they are harmless.”

Osvaldo Leopoldo was not convinced. “Any piranhas?” he asked.

“Not in these waters; only alligators.”

“In the big city, the piranhas come out at night.”

José João pointed; they were edging away from the channel; a vague thrashing sound enveloped the Vaticano as it drifted.

José João put his arm around Osvaldo Leopoldo’s waist. His grip – only momentary – was firm, stronger than Osvaldo would have thought from the ranch hand’s slim build and stringy arms. José João turned to him. “Trust me,” he said. Then he picked up his rifle.

“Close,” said José João. “They’re getting close.”

His voice was hoarse. His breath left a film of mist and spittle in the chill air.

For the first time, Osvaldo Leopoldo was scared. He was scared by the lapping water on the shore, the sparkling movements on the surface, the forced intimacy with the Indian faced ranch hands.

“Alligators are like women,” said José João. “You shine a light in their faces and they are transfixed; then you shoot them.” His tone dripped contempt, the concealed anger of the hired man, deferential by day, brutish by night.    

José João motioned to his deaf mute helper. The motorman clicked on a flashlight. He scanned the waters like a prison guard. Osvaldo Leopoldo didn’t look at the water; he looked at the deaf mute helper, at how intent he was, at how a thin vapor seemed to steal from his lips as he hissed under his breath, at how expectant he was in searching for any break in the surface. Osvaldo admired the deaf mute and was repelled by him.

Osvaldo’s attention was jolted back to the water by a sudden thrashing; moonlight picked out a ruffle of white swells on the water’s surface; an alligator glided toward them; its fat body swayed; it seemed huge, monstrous, out of proportion to any idea Osvaldo had ever had of what an alligator should look like up close; it had rummy, indifferent eyes.

José João raised the hunting rifle. He laughed under his breath, a subtle contented laugh that said he was just doing his job and, incidentally, showing the city boy a thing or two about life in the wild. The deaf mute helper wheezed with excitement. When the alligator was two meters from the gunwale, the deaf mute shined the flashlight square in the brute’s rummy eyes. The alligator halted; it seemed to stand at attention, transfixed by the bead of light. José João took aim. The rifle discharged with a pop, ejecting a ribbon of blue smoke into the humid night; the shell casing landed at Osvaldo’s feet with a ping. The alligator thrashed violently, then sank into the water and drifted downstream.

Osvaldo’s heart pounded. He couldn’t control his breathing. He looked down. He forced his muscles to relax. He knew if he spoke his voice would waver.

José João stowed the rifle in the oar lock. He looked at Osvaldo. The ranch hand suddenly seemed hulking, malign, predatory. Osvaldo’s hands were shaking. He managed to say: “Are we going to bring it back?”

“The carcass? No, of course not.” José João’s tone was caustic like a grade schoolteacher chastising a pupil for willful ignorance.

“You don’t use it for anything?”

“My friend, do you know how many alligators there are in the Mato Grosso Pantanal?”

“No.”

“Millions! We are doing them a favor.”

“I didn’t know,” Osvaldo managed.

“Now you do,” said the ranch hand. “Now you know the ways of the wild.” The angry disdain in his voice was now explicit.

José João turned to Osvaldo Leopoldo like a cunning, ravenous animal facing down prey. He clutched Osvaldo by the hips. The deaf mute motorman wheezed with delight. He played the flashlight over Osvaldo’s face like a movie spotlight.

“Now, you pay me back,” said the ranch hand.

“I didn’t know I owed you.”

The ranch hand tightened his grip. “You will pleasure me,” he said. “With your mouth.”  

Osvaldo Leopoldo closed his eyes. He had expected this. He pretended to look resigned. He opened his eyes, dreamy, world-weary slits, then pounded the ranch hand in the solar plexus with both fists, lunged on top of him with his full weight, withdrew swiftly, grabbed the predator by the heals and flipped him on his back. José João crashed against the gunwale. He cursed. The motorman laughed with guttural excitement. Osvaldo Leopoldo unfastened the oar lock, grasped the hunting rifle and brandished it butt stock first like a club.

The ranch hand tried to scramble to his feet.  

“Don’t get up!” Osvaldo ordered. “Or I’ll smash your kneecaps.”

José João tried to speak.

“Shut up!” Osvaldo said.

The ranch hand raised his palms. The deaf mute laughed uncontrollably. He clapped his hands in delight. That, Osvaldo Leopoldo wrote in his diary, he had not expected.

“Let’s get out of here,” Osvaldo said.

The motorman giggled. Spittle dripped from his lower lip. He saluted. Osvaldo Leopoldo had never seen anyone so happy.

***

Osvaldo Leopoldo related the incident in miniscule script over four calendar pages of his diary. The next day’s entry was blank except for a pencil drawing of teardrops.

Osvaldo also told Suely. He did not tell Margarida or her husband and I doubt he ever told anyone else. A day later, he notes that José João and his helper had been sent on a long fishing trip to the upper Paraná.

This was yet another side of Osvaldo Leopoldo, one I found, at first reading, a surprise, even a shock. But further reflection caused me to modify my view. Osvaldo Leopoldo seemed to surmount the incident easily. Why? The episode occurred at night; it involved violence and the threat of violence. These were things familiar to Osvaldo Leopoldo, the night worker treading a landscape of criminality, refuse and decay. Maybe the rural swamp of the Mato Grosso is not so different from its urban counterpart in Rio de Janeiro. They both crawl with predators. Osvaldo Leopoldo knew how to defend himself. He was a mole but he was also a night creature in a city sewar. Maybe he wasn’t so innocent.    

***

Three days later, the Countess arrived.

It was an occasion.

Arnon Kosminsky, proprietor of the Águas da Polônia ranch and mineral water springs, invited Suely and her guests into the main house for the first time. It was late afternoon. The packed clay tracks, slate walkways and scraggly brush skirting the house on three sides baked in the dry heat. The walls, made of wattle and daub taipa were dazzling white.     

Inside, Kosminsky, and his foreign guest, greeted them in the lodge. There were four or five others in the room Osvaldo recognized as senior ranch employees or local suppliers of goods and services. The room extended across the entire width of the house, with doors and windows left open on both sides for circulation. Sunlight dappled comfortable furniture on the west end; a cooling breeze, with a faint scent of desert flowers and choking dust, swept through the room from east to west.

Kosminsky stood before an incongruous fireplace. Above it, a deer’s head presided. The proprietor wore his usual khaki. He smiled broadly. The new guest stood next to him. She was gaily dressed. She had milky white eyes, enlarged by mascara and false eyelashes, with pupils like black holes. If Kosminsky was 50, she was 40. The Countess was polite but nervous.

Suely, dressed in a linen peasant skirt and blouse, boldly approached Kosminsky. She stood flanking him, a picture of familiarity and competence in contrast to the constrained newcomer.

Suely turned to Kosminsky: “You first.”     

“To start, I want to apologize for my absence these past few days,” Kosminsky said. “Labor problems, vet problems, tax problems; you know how bad this inflation is, but the new Army government is going to sort all that out. In any case, we’re making up for it today.”

Kosminsky signaled to a pair of servants at the back of the room. One brought around a platter of canapés, the other a bottle of whisky and a tray full of shot glasses. Margarida picked out a canapé with dainty fingers; her husband instructed the servant to fill a shot glass to the brim.

Kosminsky said, “Drink up, friends! Best whisky in Mato Grosso!”

Margarida’s husband sipped from the shot glass, turned to Osvaldo Leopoldo, lifted the glass in a mock toast, and said, “Old Stroessner…aged 14 days.”

Kosminsky resumed: “We’re proud to welcome you to Águas da Polônia and Mato Grosso. You know, it’s not just alligators and dust!” He glanced at Osvaldo Leopoldo. “I hear you’ve already met the alligators!” Kosminsky chuckled. “My friends, Mato Grosso is the future. The inauguration of Brasília four years ago opened the interior.” He pointed to the rustic furniture at the west end of the lodge. “I’m proud to say Bernardo Sayão sat in that chair…the man who built the roads in this part of the country; all roads lead to Brasília and the man responsible for that is Bernardo Sayão…I’m proud to say I was his friend.” Kosminsky turned to his new companion. “Now, let me introduce another friend, this one from Poland. Her name is Marie, but we’ll call her Maria.”

Kosminsky and Maria exchanged a few words in what Osvaldo assumed was Polish. Maria faced the guests and smiled sweetly. She didn’t try to speak.

“Maria’s shy,” said Kosminsky. “But we’ll change that, won’t we, folks?” There was little reaction. Kosminsky seemed disappointed. “You know, back home, Maria is a Countess,” he continued. “I aim to make her Countess of Corumbá!” He may have been expecting applause but there were none.

The speech-making was over. Kosminsky took Maria by the hand. They mingled with the guests, sampled the canapés, and sipped whisky.

Margarida approached the Countess. She offered a word of greeting. The Countess replied in what Osvaldo took to be French. No one in the party spoke French. The Countess looked disheartened. From then on, she clung to Kosminsky.

Osvaldo Leopoldo never learned whether Maria was a real Countess, but he doubted it. Suely took to calling her that but with an edge of sarcasm— “The Countess wants this…the Countess says that.” Suely managed to infect the servants and ranch hands until “the Countess Maria” became a standing joke. Osvaldo was sure “The Countess” sensed the universal disdain. 

***

The arrival of the Countess marked the beginning of Suely’s attentions to Osvaldo Leopoldo.

She surprised him one morning with an invitation to go riding.

“I don’t know how,” he said.

“I’ll teach you.”

He was embarrassed. He feared humiliation, even a trap by the experienced country girl to show up the gawky street kid.

She seemed to sense everything he was feeling. “Remember,” she said. “I used to be a city girl myself.”

Osvaldo Leopoldo looked down; he smiled with embarrassment. He was angry with himself for doubting Suely’s intentions. Maybe she liked him; maybe she thought he was somebody, not just Margarida’s night owl brother.

Suely had already picked out the horses. A stable boy brought them around. To Osvaldo, they seemed monstrous, walls of twitching brown muscle; they snorted vapor and dripped saliva; their teeth ground and floated like bad dentures. They smelled like manure.   

Suely mounted in a swift, graceful pirouette. Her horse grunted and shook its head with apparent satisfaction. Osvaldo looked up at her. Admiration glowed in his eyes. In beige riding breeches and cowhide boots, a touch of rouge, a gliding scent of musk, her auburn hair framing her face in stiff waves, Suely looked regal. How could such a creature spring from the same cinder block and stucco row house as Margarida and her soused husband? Why was she a bookkeeper and not a Countess?

Suely looked down at her companion. “You don’t have to worry about the saddle,” she said. “It’s already secured.”

Osvaldo tried to reproduce the motions executed with such simplicity by Suely. He put one foot in the stirrup, grabbed the saddle horn with his left hand and cantilevered himself up and over the fender and seat jockey. But he moved too fast; his body slid clear across the slick leather seat and he tumbled into the dust.

Suely and the Indian faced stable boy laughed.

Osvaldo looked up. “I told you,” he said.

Suely’s laughter, he thought, was genuine, not mocking.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I was worse the first time. I went sprawling. Now, try again. The boy will help you.”

Osvaldo repeated the motions; the boy steadied him until he was almost comfortable with his back against the cantle.

Suely nodded approval. “Come. I’ll take you down the bridal path,” she said.

Osvaldo Leopoldo and Suely went riding every morning for a week. At first, they followed the beaten clay path. Later, they ventured to tableland covered by meadows and craigs and dotted by towering termite mounds. In the uplands, they found a stream that opened into a cascade of rapids and a pond covered by water lilies.

Suely shared gossip.

“Doctor Kosminsky loves riding, but the Countess hates it,” she said. “I used to ride with him every day but he doesn’t come out anymore…because of her. He takes a jeep everywhere now.”

Suely always attached the honorific of “doctor” when she talked about Kosminsky.

“He’s not a real doctor, is he?” Osvaldo said.

“No, he’s a refugee,” she said, as if “refugee” represented an even higher station than “doctor.”

“Nor is ‘Maria’ a real Countess,” he added.

“Countess? What a joke. She won’t even get on a boat with him or anybody else; so that’s another thing he can’t do anymore. She tries her French with everybody but who speaks French out here? It’s the end of the world. She doesn’t even try to learn Portuguese. She scowls all the time. What does she do all day? She harasses Doctor Kosminsky, stays by his side every minute. They chatter away in Polish…chazzz wazz chazz chow wow…what an irritating language! I don’t know how a whole country can stand it. I can’t wait for him to get rid of her.”

The gossip sometimes turned to Margarida and her husband.

“What a pair,” Suely said. “You know, my brother hates it here. He wants me to steal whisky from the liquor cabinet. Imagine! I told him to go to hell. They won’t be here much longer.”

Osvaldo Leopoldo nodded.

“But you’ll stay, won’t you?” she said. Her voice was almost plaintive.

Osvaldo was touched. “Of course,” he said.

There was an awkward pause.         

“I look forward to our daily ride,” she said.

“So do I,” said Osvaldo. “How do you find the time?  Doesn’t Kosminsky need you?”

“I do things my way,” she said.

“Do you tell him where you are?”

“I tell him everything,” she said. “And he listens.”

Osvaldo didn’t doubt it.

***

A few nights later, the arguments started.

They could hear it from the servants’ quarters.

Kosminisky and Maria would go at each other in what Osvaldo Leopoldo supposed must be Polish. Kosminsky’s rages were like the rumble of far off thunderstorms in the big sky. Suely was right. Swear words and threats in Polish were irritating. One night, there was the sound of broken crockery, pots and pans hitting the kitchen tiles; a coo-coo clock crashed to the floor with a clang of scattered metal parts and a  booming cry from the dying coo-coo bird.

The next day, Suely sought out Osvaldo Leopoldo at breakfast. She was giggly. “Two nights ago, I put spiders in her bedroom,” she whispered. “Last night, it was lizards.”

The day after that, the Polish Countess Marie left Mato Grosso for good.

Margarida and her dyspeptic husband, suffering alcohol withdrawal, followed the day after that.  

His last words to Osvaldo were: “You just want to screw Suely, don’t you?  That’s all you’re interested in, isn’t it? Well, now’s your chance. Good luck.”

Osvaldo Leopoldo protested.

“Well, as far as I’m concerned, you can have her. What do I care?”

In fact, Osvaldo’s hopes were high—the daily rides, the shared gossip, the whispering confidence. It was all reflected in letters he sent his sister, letters she saved and eventually incorporated into the boxed Osvaldo Leopoldo dos Santos Neto ‘papers.’

But it didn’t take long for the tone of the letters to change. The daily rides dwindled and then ceased. Suely was too busy; she was at ‘Doctor’ Kosminsky’s side from dawn to dusk. The bridal path, to Osvaldo Leopoldo, became a beaten track to deception.

One day, he confronted Suely in the stable. She was startled.

“I miss our daily rides,” he said.

“Sorry, I’ve been busy.” “I haven’t been…very busy,” he answered, with an edge he hoped would convey more disappointment than anger. “So, I guess I’ll be leaving.”

“I hope you had a good stay.” Suely smiled, a forced, condescending smile.

“I’ll miss you,” he said. He looked down. He knew, by then, any entreaties would be futile but he expected, at least, some acknowledgment, some courtesy, a sign of respect or even friendship.

 Suely said nothing. He looked up. He couldn’t hide his despair.

“I’ll be going now,” she said. “I told you I’m busy.”

“Busy with ‘the doctor?’”

“Yes, he needs me.”

Osvaldo Leopoldo was near tears. “I need you too,” he said. His voice wavered.

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“You’re getting rid of me, aren’t you? Why?”

 She looked at him with the impatience of a straw boss who doesn’t want to waste time with stragglers.

“Don’t ask.”

“I’m asking.”

She started to walk away.

“Why?” he insisted.

“Why? Look at you! You’re not exactly a ‘catch,’ are you? You’re a skinny, pale nobody. A proofreader! You make a living reading what other people write. What kind of a job is that? What can you offer a girl like me? Live in an attic? Work in a sweatshop? No thanks. I want something better. Doesn’t it show? Doesn’t it? Tell me, honestly, Osvaldinho.”

Osvaldo broke down in tears–a wave of hot, scummy sobs mixed with sweat and mucus. He tried to articulate his feelings but he was convulsed by a fit of coughing.  

“Osvaldinho, you’re not making sense,” she said.

He stepped in front of her. He tried to compose himself. He ran his hands over his face and straightened his shoulders. 

“I said I’m sorry,” she insisted. “I have to go now. Get out of my way.” Her voice was authoritative, like a mother giving orders to a room full of disruptive children. She displayed no fear, only a roiling distemper that, at first, irritated, then enraged Osvaldo Leopoldo. How dare she treat him like a child. How dare she insult and deceive him. He loved her; he wanted to walk with her as a man walks with a woman; he wanted her to be as she should be; he wanted things to be as they should be. He grabbed her by the waist. She screamed and tried to wrench herself free. He dug his fingers into her belly and pressed his face against hers. She pounded his side with her fists.

He heard the jeep. He understood what it meant but the understanding carried no force with it, no means to halt or retard his grasping hands and his righteous rage. He heard the stable doors creek. He heard Kosminsky’s high-pitched voice, his grating curses in three languages; he wanted to spit at ‘the Doctor,’ knock him off his feet and kick him in the sides until he squealed like a pig.

Then he heard the shotgun blast.

***

No one was hurt in the stable incident. The blast was a warning shot. Kosminsky ordered Osvaldo Leopoldo off his property; Suely fled into the house; and a pair of ranch hands escorted Osvaldo to the servants’ quarters to pick up his things.

Someone drove him in the pea-green pickup truck to the bus station in Corumbá. He sat in the loading bed; his tears splattered the flattened down cardboard boxes used to deliver Ralston Purina to the Águas da Polônia ranch and mineral water springs. There was no bus until the next day. He would have to sleep on the dusty station platform. The pickup truck driver let him take some of the Ralston Purina boxes to spread on the floor.   

For weeks, Osvaldo Leopoldo’s only diary entries are penciled-in teardrops.

To me, as a ‘student’ of the Osvaldo Leopoldo ‘papers’, this represented something of a relief. Here, at last, was a man in love, an unrequited love, albeit, but who hasn’t suffered that? Could this be the fourth, and final, Osvaldo Leopoldo? There’s the obsessive night worker in the grammar and prose industry; the nature lover, awakened to the bright light of day by streams and meadows; the toughened urban dweller unafraid of violence; and now, a romantic embracing the delights and poetic pangs of adult sexual love. Were there any other Osvaldo Leopoldos? Were they still lurking in the letters and diaries? Were they the connection to the illusive Jackie?

There were gaps in the diaries, as there were gaps in the Suely Kosminsky story.

I decided to consult the would-be Countess of Corumbá again, this time armed with a 17-year-old letter written by Osvaldo Leopoldo but never sent.  

It was a cloudy day. I found Suely at the Pérgula restaurant in the Copa. She was preening her Pekinese and sipping tea. She saw me but didn’t look up.

“I thought I told you to beat it.”

 “You did.”

 “So beat it…again.”

“I know what you did to Osvaldo Leopoldo.” That got her attention. She stopped preening the dog.

“What I did?”

“What you did.”

“It’s what Osvaldinho did to me…you know what he did to me?”

“I do.”

“And?”

“Inexcusable.”

“So?”

“I’m more interested in what you did to him.”

“And what exactly do you think I did to him?…before he came at me with a kitchen knife.”

“The same thing you’re doing to that dog of yours…and, incidentally, he doesn’t mention any knives in his diaries or in the letter he wrote you.”

“Alright, I’m exaggerating…and what exactly do you think I’m doing to ‘this dog of mine.’?” She made a coochey coo face and pinched the dog’s cheeks.

“The same thing you did to Osvaldinho…pretending to love him. You’d drown that dog in the pool if you thought it would bring you something.”

I had misplayed my hand; I knew it immediately. Suely turned on me with a vicious stare; it was not the surly, almost comic, anger of our first encounter, but a bitter, deep-seated glare of revenge betraying the nausea of defeated pride and the spleen of misplaced passion.

“Get out!” she blurted. “Get out or I swear I’ll make a scene and they’ll never let you in here again.”

“I’d miss the dancing girls.”

“You make a joke out of everything.”

“Not this.” I slapped Osvaldo Leopoldo’s unsent letter on the table. “It’s addressed to you, after all. You can keep it.”

Suely looked at the sheets. She went to touch them, then drew back. “Is this your latest joke?”

“You tell me.”

“Well, what the hell is it?”

“It’s a letter Osvaldo wrote to you in 1964 and never sent.”

“So, it’s hate mail.”

“No. It’s a love letter.”

 “He must have hated me.”

 “There’s a fine line etc. etc.”   

Suely picked up the letter. She started to read. I sat down. The dog looked me over. I smiled. The dog was ambivalent. That, at least, was progress.

It took her a long time. There was no change in her facial expression. She put the letter down.

“Did you read it?” she asked.

“I did.”

“And?”

“Is it accurate?”

“I wouldn’t change a word.”

“So you led him down the bridal path, so to speak–just like he says in the letter–then got rid of him when you saw your chance with the jealous ‘doctor.’”

Suely looked flustered and then—momentarily–angry. I feared I was over-playing my hand again. I had my own momentary spasm—I wanted to swear at her, chuck the table and chairs into the pool like Orson Welles and get the hell out of there before someone called the police.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman.”

“And you don’t know what it’s like to be a man.”

“You call Osvaldo Leopoldo a man?”

“I do.”

Suely looked me over with the same skepticism as the Pekinese. “Alright, I’ll tell you something, but nothing I say should ever see print.”

“I’ll try.”

“Can I trust you?”

“No.”

“I believe you.”

“So?”

“I come from a family of clerks, like the Hitlers,” she said. “You’ve met my brother?”

I nodded.

“’Doctor’ Kosminsky was a prize,” she continued. “Yes, I ‘won‘ him. All’s fair etc. etc. And what a prize! Womanizer, drinker, gambler! You think I don’t know about men? I’ll tell you about men. A man comes from frigid, gloomy Poland to the tropics and he thinks every half-clad native girl is fruit for the taking. So he takes and takes and takes but he’s never satisfied. There are never enough girls. There’s never enough whisky, especially when it’s fake. There’s never enough money, so he gambles…Kosminsky gambled in Paraguay, but in Paraguay nobody wins, not even the house.”

“Where is he now?”

“Dead.”

I glanced around the Pérgula, Rio de Janeiro’s most opulent restaurant. Yves Montand or Franco Zeffirelli might wander in at any moment. “But he left you a fortune.”

“Nothing but debts.”

“Then how…”

“They don’t know that…yet.”

“Really?”

“You promised!”

“I did.”

“I moved here when Kosminsky died. I know people. He was somebody…once…and they got me into the social columns, until that rat Sued came along. But Osvaldinho, of course, reads all the social columns. He sent me letters. I returned them unopened. He came here…like you. I shooed him away. He kept coming. Finally, I got a court order. That’s news. Put that in your newspaper– peeping tom proofreader served cease and desist order.”

Suely went back to preening her dog. She fed him crumbs off the tablecloth. The dog was not quite satisfied. Neither was I, but I knew the interview was over.

“That’s all,” she said. “Now, get out.”

***

The whores started around 1967, Osvaldo Leopoldo’s fascination with blood a year or two later.

The gap in Osvaldo’s diaries extends from late 1964 through 1966. There are references to prostitutes starting in 1967. They become obsessive a year later. By late 1968, he is listing every single whore and every whorehouse, often using elaborate symbols in the manner of William Gladstone, the 19^th Century British Prime Minister, and meticulous diarist, who frequented London brothels in a putative campaign to ‘save’ their occupants from perdition. Gladstone, frequently, failed to save himself.  

I knew ‘Jackie’ must be in there somewhere.

Osvaldo Leopoldo, as one would expect, was explicit about the logic behind his actions. There are no afternoon papers on Sunday so Saturday was the one night he could knock off early from work. So, Saturday became Osvaldo’s night out in O Mangue, the traditional red light district just a few blocks from Rua Van Eyck. When he didn’t go to O Mangue on a Saturday night, he’d go to Bar da Amizade or Bar do Neguinho on Sunday afternoon.

He was also explicit about money. Every encounter in the Mangue district comes with a price tag. He even calculated, and accounted for, inflation! Osvaldo Leopoldo spent money only on essentials…except for one thing…but maybe that was essential too.

Here, at last, was Osvaldo Leopoldo and sex, the fifth and last version of the man I never knew, and yet another study in the light and the dark–midnight at O Mangue and noon in the broad sunlit uplands of the Mato Grosso.

It took a long time to get to Jackie.

And a lot of blood was spilled along the way.

Starting around 1970, the diary entries show an interest in sexual coupling during menstruation. He likes the blood, the way it flows and eddies, its color and texture when it mixes with vaginal fluids and semen, even its smell; he likes the way it looks and feels on his penis as he penetrates and then withdraws from the menstruating vagina. By 1971, menses becomes virtually the exclusive arena for Osvaldo Leopoldo’s sexual appetite.  

A couple of diary entries offer an elaborate argument for it. For one thing, it’s a way to avoid getting a girl pregnant. He also apparently believed in the more doubtful proposition that sex during menstruation served as protection against venereal disease (“infected matter is expelled along with the blood,” he writes).

But other entries are more pathological. In a 1972 entry, he writes, “I make her bleed. I am the man who makes her bleed. The blood of life seeps and sometimes floods from her body because I make it so; I am the instrument that makes her body bleed; I give life and I deny it.”

Some of the entries are quite lurid, describing a sudden “cloudburst” of blood or a “red sea” emerging from his partner’s vagina. He revels in “rivers of blood veining my manhood.” There is a reverse machismo at work—he trumpets his power not to procreate through sex; he dominates, like a toothless lion, the most vulnerable—and available—of the female inhabitants of the jungle.  

He’s also interested in posterity. Some entries feature a faint bloody fingerprint; one or two include an arrow pointing to the print as if Osvaldo Leopoldo wanted future generations to know of his bold foray into forbidden sexual practice. He’s telling us sex is dirty, literally dirty, and that he revels in the dirt and that, maybe, we should too.     

Jackie finally appears in 1978; her reign is brief.

Maria de Fátima Rodrigues was murdered on the night of Saturday, November 22, 1980. Her body was found the next day in an area of wetlands surrounding a remote Rio de Janeiro suburb. She was clad in a white minidress with white plastic go-go boots extending to just below the knees. It was a four paragraph story in the Monday papers. Very likely, Osvaldo Leopoldo proofread the article about his own crime; maybe he made changes for accuracy. The papers called it “The Swampland Killing.” There was some follow-up for a few days. Anonymous brothel employees confirmed her profession, saying her trade name was Jackie. That’s what rang a bell in my mind when Osvaldo whispered her name that dreary night in Catumbi. There was no lack of suspects. Jackie was popular. But, for the cops, there were too many suspects; when they lost interest, so did the papers.

The diaries show a long build up to the murder.

At first, it wasn’t difficult for Osvaldo Leopoldo to procure a menstrual prostitute. The Mangue whorehouses learned to make an appropriate girl available to him virtually on demand. The problem arose when he found Jackie in 1978 and began to demand her services exclusively. Timing was a problem. Osvaldo only showed up at the Mangue district two or three times a month and always on Saturday. The timing of Jackie’s menstrual cycle with his visits had to be exquisite. Gradually, his frustration grew. Sometimes, it would take months for him to encounter Jackie in the appropriate ‘state.’ The diary entries become increasingly edgy. One night, he starts yelling at the Madam; another, he yells at Jackie because she isn’t menstruating. He issues threats. In one incident, he overturns a table and chairs and brandishes a straight razor. His mantra was: “Where the hell is that bloody little cunt?” He didn’t mean it figuratively.   

Osvaldo Leopoldo describes the murder in meticulous detail.

On the night of Saturday, November 22, 1980, he found her, in the usual brothel, with another man. She was not menstruating. This time, instead of exploding, he waited patiently. He invited her to attend a “party” in a remote western suburb, with the promise of meeting well-healed clients. They took a long bus ride. Jackie became nervous as the populated neighborhoods grew thin. They got off at a wooded area near the end of the line. Osvaldo Leopoldo walked with her up a muddy path into the wetlands, embraced her, promised “a new adventure,” and slit her throat with a straight razor. He was careful to direct the jets of blood away from his clothes. He counted out the exact change for the bus fare home to Catumbi.

I was now the only person who had the answer to “The Swampland Killing.”

But why? Why her? She is the only one he murders, at least according to his meticulously kept diary. He doesn’t hurt or even manhandle any other of the dozens of prostitutes he lists over more than a decade.

Naturally, I was obliged to tell the cops. I even thought they might help solve this last mystery. I know plenty of cops. I wouldn’t call them friends. Cops don’t have friends; neither do police reporters.

I called a police source of mine. I offered details. He invited me over. I met him at the imposing police headquarters on Rua da Relação–until recently used as a dungeon for the torture of political prisoners–just a few blocks from Rua Irineu Marinho. A plainclothesman, my source was as imposing as the building, including an impressive beer belly, dark hair with white streaks and the grey chicken skin and wattle of the Carioca night worker, a sleeker, better dressed version of Osvaldo Leopoldo.

I brought copies of selected pages from Osvaldo Leopoldo’s impressive diaries. The plainclothesman read them. He moved his lips while he scanned the lines. Finally, he put the papers down.

“Where is he now?”

“At São Francisco de Paula Cemetery,” I said. “He’s resting comfortably.”

“What did he die of?”

“Stomach cancer.”

“Oh My God; that’s a bad one.”

“It is, aggravated by heartbreak and self-abuse.”

“Maybe it was syphilis.”

“Maybe.”

“You may have stumbled onto something bigger,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Like a serial killer…a Brazilian Jack the Ripper.” He tapped the sheets with his finger. “That’s a good story for you.”

Cops think they’re good reporters just like reporters think they’d make great cops.

“I can see how it would make a good story,” I put in. “But there’s no MO; there were no other murders.”

“And now he’s dead; how convenient,” the detective responded. “But there may be a reason for that and you should know it. The city started to take the Mangue district apart right after this incident. He kills his first victim—it’s some kind of blood lust—but then the whorehouses start to disappear. Here’s an even better angle for you—he sees his playground, and his whole sex life, go to the wrecker. That’s when he gets cancer. He has no more stomach for living.”

It was a nice idea, but it was overruled by the facts.  

“Incidentally,” I said. “Do you have a photo?”

“Do you want before, during, or after?”

“All three.”

“I was ready for you,” he said. He slapped a folder in front of me. It was full of photos from ‘the Swampland Killing’. He delt one out. “’Before,’” he said, then folded his hands and rested them on his belly.   

My jaw dropped. “The ‘before’ photo, marked ‘Jackie-swampland murder’, showed a young woman in a striped minidress and go-go boots. She had auburn hair that framed her face in stiff curls; she wore glistening pink lipstick. She was slim and light skinned. It seemed to be a publicity still. In my mind’s eye, I compared the young woman to photos of Suely on horseback from Osvaldo Leopoldo’s 1964 trip to the Mato Grosso Pantanal. It was not the same face but it was a similar face, the face of a late 1970s exotic dancer trying to mimic the glamorous 1960s. The young Jackie of 1979 resembled the young Suely of 1964. Even the name was suggestive–Jackie, for the former American First Lady. Suely was trying to look like Jackie Kennedy in 1964 and Maria de Fatima Rodrigues was taking a whack at it in 1979. They ended up looking like each other; only the eyes were different, one vacant, the other cunning.  

 The cop delt out another photo: “’During.’” A photo showed Jackie, in white minidress and boots, sitting in a cheap lounge. “And ‘after’.” The last photo showed Jackie in the same dress and boots lying in the woods on the afternoon of Sunday, November 23, 1980. It was not graphic. She seemed—almost—at peace, as much at peace as Osvaldo Leopoldo in his casket.

The cop, of course, knew nothing of the counterfeit Countess. I decided not to fill him in. He probably wouldn’t care anyway. He would get credit for solving a cold case; I would get a good story, with or without the Ripper angle.

“It wasn’t blood lust,” I said. “Osvaldo Leopoldo wasn’t a serial killer. There was only one person he wanted to kill.”

“Cancer got him before we did.”

“Yeah,” I said.. “The cancer was eating at him for 18 years.”

Thomas Murphy is a journalist and writer. A U.S. citizen, he has lived in Brazil for 40 years, working for international news agencies. His freelance articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Americas, Contemporary Review, and many other publications. He has contributed to fiction and journalism anthologies, and to travel books under the Insight banner. A graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., he is married with two grown children. See www.thomasmurphybooks.com