Crimes of August: A Novel

Twenty-two

[249] twenty-two Alzira Vargas do Amaral Peixoto discovered her father,asshe herself said,the day she lost him for the first time.It was the year 1923,and her father had left for a revolution that never seemed to end,the first among many others in his life. He seemed very tall, and powerful, in his blue colonel’s uniform of the ProvisionalAuxiliary of the Military Brigade with black boots and baldric, a black revolver in a holster attached to his belt,his head of thick dark-brown wavy hair covered by a wide-brimmed hat.Alzira would never forget the light caress of her father’s mustache brushing against her cheek in a goodbye kiss. Since that time,she had come to see him,always,as the central figure in great deeds. The moments of simple happiness, as when he had taught her how to play billiards in the game room of the governor’s palace in Porto Alegre, were less significant, though still pleasant to remember. The memories that dominated her mind and filled her dreams were of the moments of tension and heroism they had experienced together. Such as in May of 1938 when Integralists invaded the Catete to arrest the president, with the collusion of the commander of the guard, the Marine Lieutenant Júlio Nascimento. The invaders were beardless and inexperienced youths; attackers and defenders were matched in their grotesque and fatal ineptitude, she could see today, coolly. But Alzira remembered, without that memory having been deformed by time,the epic figure of her father remaining calm amid the general commotion . Earlier, in 1930, on that railroad platform, she had listened emotionally to her father, no longer a colonel but just a soldier dressed in khaki leading the revolution that would place in his hands, for many years, the destiny of a [250] people and a country, utter his unforgettable command:“Rio Grande! Arise, for Brazil!” In 1932, on July 9, she was at a dinner dance at the country club in Rio de Janeiro, the first truly elegant party she had ever attended, when they came to take her back to the palace because an insurrection had broken out in São Paulo. Her heart pounded with excitement as her father said that the constitutional allegations of the Paulistas were a simple pretext for an uprising, for over a month earlier he had named a commission to draw up the proposal for the new Brazilian constitution. These reminiscences came, sometimes,mixed with the sweet aroma of the cigars her father smoked.Oh, how she had suffered that twenty-fifth of November in 1935,away from Brazil and unable to be at her father’s side as he commanded the resistance to the rebels at Campo dos Afonsos or in the Third Infantry Regiment when the communists with their revolt engendered a senseless and bloody comedy of errors identical to what the Integralists would repeat three years later. She had sworn she would never again leave her father. In the treason of ’45, she was at his side; defeated, he had maintained his courage; an exile in his own country, he had comported himself with exemplary dignity. Alzira had thought that history had redeemed her father in 1950 when he became president in a democratic election. Now, in that painful August of 1954, when for the first time she saw her father as a disenchanted old man, a small man, a man without hope, without desire, without the will to fight, victim of the sordid betrayals of his enemies, the ambiguous judgments of his friends—now she became aware of history as a stupid succession of random events, an inept and incomprehensible confusion of falsity, fictitious inferences, illusions populated by ghosts. Now she wondered, has that other man whose memory she had kept in her heart for so many years ceased to exist? Was he another ghost, had he never existed? That idea was so painful and unbearable that she thought she would not resist and would die of pain, there in the Ingá Palace, in Niterói. After returning from his time off, Mattos was at the precinct that Sunday when Cosme,the son of the PortugueseAdelino,asked to speak to him. “Did you know my father died?” [251] “I did. I’m very sorry.” “Since I was a little boy, I’ve always been afraid of the police. When I...