Captains of the Sands (33 page)

Then he plays for them, laughs with them in great guffaws, as if he were still one of them. Good-Life slowly moves away as he grows. When he’s nineteen, he won’t be coming back anymore. He’ll be a thoroughgoing drifter, one of those mulattoes who love Bahia above all, who live a perfect life on the streets of the city. The enemy of wealth and work, the friend of parties, music, the bodies of halfbreed girls. A drifter. A rowdy. A
capoeira
fighter, switchblade artist, thief when necessary. Good-hearted, the way Good-Life sings in an ABC ballad that he put together about another drifter. Promising the girls to reform and go to work, always staying a drifter. One of the rowdies of the city. A figure that future Captains of the Sands will love and admire, just as Good-Life loved and admired God’s-Love.

One day, after a long time had passed, Pedro Bala was going along the streets with Legless. They went into a church in Piedade, they liked to look at gold objects, it was even easy to snatch the purse of a lady at prayer. But there was no lady in the church at that time. Only a group of poor boys and a Capuchin who was teaching them catechism.

“It’s Lollipop…” Legless said.

Pedro Bala stood looking. Shrugged his shoulders:

“What’s it got him?”

Legless looked:

“Barely enough to eat…”

“Someday he’ll be a priest too. He has to go all the way.”

Legless said:

“Goodness isn’t enough.”

He finished the thought:

“Only hate…”

Lollipop didn’t see them. With extreme patience and goodness, he was teaching the unruly children their catechism lessons. The two Captains of the Sands went out shaking their heads. Pedro Bala put his hand on Legless’s shoulder:

“Not hate, not goodness. Only the struggle.”

Lollipop’s kind voice crossed through the church. Legless’s voice of hate was next to Pedro Bala. But he didn’t hear either one. What he heard was the voice of João de Adão, the dockworker, the voice of his father, dying in the struggle.

Cat said that the old maid was loaded with money. She was the last of a rich family, going on forty-five, ugly and nervous. The word went around that she had a parlor full of gold objects, diamonds and jewels accumulated by the family over generations. Pedro Bala thought it might render up a little taste of money. González, the pawnbroker at the “14,” would pay for those items. He asked Legless:

“Think you can get in?”

“I can…”

“Then we’ll raid.”

They laughed in the warehouse. Cat left to see Dalva. Legless told him:

“I’ll go over tomorrow.”

The old maid opened the door. She had only one servant, an old black woman who seemed to be part of the inheritance, for she’d been with the family for fifty years. The old maid looked very haughtily at Legless:

“Do you want something?”

“I’m a poor crippled orphan.” He showed her his game leg. “I don’t want to live by stealing or begging. Have you got any work for me to do? I could do your shopping.”

The old maid didn’t take her eyes off him. A boy…It wasn’t
kindness speaking inside her. It was the voice of a sex that was giving its last beats. In a short time her sex would become useless, the doctors had said that her nervousness would stop then. Much earlier, when she was still a young lady, there’d been a boy in the house to do the shopping. It had been good…But her brother had found out, sent the boy away. Now the brother was dead, another boy had come to ask if he could do her shopping:

“All right.”

She told him to take a bath. In the afternoon she gave him money for the shopping and also for some clothes for himself. Legless managed to add a thousand two hundred to the bills. He thought:

“I’m going to make some money while I’m here…”

In the kitchen the black woman told ancient stories in her mixed-up language. Legless listened, showing excessive interest in order to win the woman’s confidence. But when he asked her about the gold objects, the woman didn’t answer. Legless didn’t insist. He knew how to be patient, he was used to that kind of work. In the parlor the old maid was embroidering a shawl, watching Legless through the door with interest. She had an ugly face, but her oldish body still had something attractive about it. She called Legless over to look at the work she was doing. When Legless took a look, she bent over, he saw her large breasts. But he didn’t think she was showing them to him. He found the work very nice, he said:

“You’re a very smart lady…”

He even seemed to be a well-brought-up boy. In spite of his game leg and ugly face, the old maid found him handsome. It would have been better if he hadn’t been quite so grown. But even so…She bent over again, showed her breasts to Legless. Legless averted his eyes, didn’t think that she did it on purpose. When he praised the work again, she passed her hand over his face:

“Thank you, son.” Her voice was languid.

The black woman laid out a mattress in the dining room for Legless to sleep on. She covered it with a sheet, got a pillow.
The old maid was visiting the house of a friend on the same street, and when she returned, Legless was already lying down. He heard her taking leave of someone:

“Forgive me for making you take a spinster home.”

“Dona Joana, don’t say that…”

She came in, locked the street door, removed the key. The black woman had already gone to bed in her room off the kitchen. The old maid came into the dining room, took a peek at Legless, who pretended to be asleep. She sighed. Went into her room.

The lights were all out in the house. In spite of its being very early in comparison with the time they went to bed in the warehouse, Legless fell asleep.

That’s why he didn’t know what time it was when the spinster came. What he felt was a hand running through his hair. He thought it was a nice dream. The hand slid down, passed over his chest, onto his stomach, now it was softly gripping his sex. Legless woke up completely, but he kept his eyes shut. The old maid was squeezing his sex, lying next to him. She had a nightgown on. She put Legless’s hand on her body. Legless got close to her. He tried to speak, she put her hand on his mouth, pointed to the kitchen:

“She might hear…”

Then she said in a softer voice:

“You’re going to be nice to me, aren’t you?”

She squeezed against him. She pulled Legless’s pants down. Then she covered them both with the sheet. But when Legless wanted to go all the way, she said:

“No. Only on the outside.”

It was an incomplete affair that enraged Legless.

The old maid was softly moaning with love. She was squeezing Legless’s head against her enormous breasts, his sex against her thighs, the boy’s hand on her sex.

Legless gets up bewildered. A great weariness in his limbs. Those nights are like a battle. It’s never a complete pleasure, a full satisfaction. The old maid wants a crumb of love. She’s
afraid of complete love, the scandal of a child. But she’s hungry and thirsty for love, she doesn’t care if it’s only the crumbs. But Legless wants full love, it bothers him, makes his hate grow. At the same time, he feels drawn to the body of the old maid, the half-caresses, exchanged in the night. One thing keeps him in that house. Even though he feels hatred for Joana when he wakes up, an impotent rage, an urge to strangle her since he can’t possess her fully, even though he finds her ugly and old, when night approaches he gets eager for the spinster’s caresses, for the hand that manipulates his boyish sex, for her breasts, where he rests his head, for her thick thighs. He thinks up plans to possess her, but the old maid frustrates them, fleeing at the last moment and scolding him in a low voice. A dull rage comes over Legless. But her hand goes back to his sex and he can’t fight against desire. And there’s a return to that tremendous struggle from which he emerges nervous and exhausted.

During the day he scarcely answers the old maid, says brutal things, the old maid weeps. He calls her spinster, says he’s going away. She gives him money, asks him to stay. But he doesn’t stay because of the money. He stays because desire holds him back. He already knows which key opens the room where Joana keeps her gold objects. He knows how to lift the key to bring to the Captains of the Sands. But desire holds him there, along with the spinster’s breasts and thighs. Along with the spinster’s hand.

He’d always been unfortunate on the woman side. When he managed to get a little black girl on the sand, it was with the help of the others, by force. No one looked at him, inviting him with her eyes. Others were ugly, but he was repulsive, with his game leg, walking like a crab. Besides, he’d ended up being nasty and was in the habit of possessing the black girls by force. Now along comes a white woman, with money, too, old and ugly, it’s true, but quite screwable still, and she was going to bed with him. He stroked her sex with his hand, lay thigh to thigh, rested his head on her big breasts. Legless couldn’t leave there, even if he was getting more brutish and more restless every day. His desire demanded a complete possession. But the spinster was content to gather up the crumbs of love.

During the day Legless hates her, hates himself, hates the whole world.

Pedro Bala complained about the delay. It was time enough already for Legless to know the secrets of the house. Legless says yes, he won’t take any longer. And that night the battle of love is even stronger. The old maid moans with love, picking up the crumbs of love. But she won’t cede “her honor.” That gives Legless the courage to take off with the key the next day.

The spinster is waiting for him for love. She’s like a wife who’s been abandoned by her husband. She weeps and pities herself. Her love isn’t coming, she needs love too, just like all those girls who pass on the street in their pretty dresses.

But the robbery infuriates her. Because she thinks that Legless only loved her on the long nights of sin in order to rob her. Her thirst for love is humiliated. It’s as if he’d spat in her face, saying it was because of her ugliness. She weeps, she doesn’t moan a song of love anymore. She feels enough anger to strangle Legless if she were to find him. Because he’d mocked her love, the thirst for love that’s in her blood. Her misfortune is even more thorough because for a whole week she was completely happy with the crumbs of love. She rolls on the floor with an attack.