Shadow Play (14 page)

Apparently, in the old days, this great name alone had sufficed as his stock reply to most questions: ‘Viceinte, who would you most like to fight?' ‘Joe Louis.' ‘Where did you learn that uppercut, Viceinte?' ‘Joe Louis.' ‘Who do you think can beat you?' ‘Only Joe Louis.' Our restaurant had a special place in his heart for many reasons, one of which was Nelson's presence: they had been friends and sparring partners throughout his career, all the way to the championship.

Actually Auguste began the restaurant as little more than a boulangerie, with quiches, tartes, feuilletés and sandwiches, perched on the absolute edge of town because that was the only spot he could afford. Sr. da Lima was driving by in his famous, immaculately restored red-and-cream Duesenberg one morning when he recognized Nelson smoking outside with Auguste. He stopped immediately, stayed for a sandwich, returned twice in the next three days, listened to Auguste's dream of something bigger, and wrote him a cheque that allowed him to begin renovations within a week.

That was the kind of man he was: he jump-started his own post-boxing career on the back of a similar impulse. Sick with himself for having surrendered his title under threat from the
boss (Sr. Saldanha) who controlled boxing bets in São Paulo, and who had placed a large amount at very profitable odds on Sr. da Lima's unfavoured challenger, he jumped off the table during his rubdown, spoke to someone on the phone, and went inside for a shower. By the time he'd towelled himself, six men belonging to a rival gang had sidled in through the back door and were waiting for him in the locker-room. He dressed, and they left together for the ringside where Sr. Saldanha was finishing his cigar and an accountant was totalling up his winnings.

Until this point Nelson claimed to have been an eyewitness, but the legend continues that young Viceinte da Silva (his birth-name) stepped up to Sr. Saldanha, who was now in an affable mood and even promised him a favourable rematch within three months, and shot him in the middle of the forehead. Before his three bodyguards could pull out their weapons, the other six men emerged holding Tommy guns, from the shadows behind the seats.

There was a rematch, and Nelson insisted it had been fair because Sr. da Lima would never accept a tainted title. But his opponent went down inside the first minute with a chop to the back of the head and ironically, that victory ended Sr. da Lima's boxing career in its prime. His dream had been to fight his way up the continent until he got a shot at Marciano whom he'd never forgiven for battering a Joe Louis long past his best, but now no one dared challenge him in Brazil, not even in an encounter he publicly guaranteed would be fair.

And it was this strange twist of fortune, more than any active desire, which had forced him to retire as champion and begin a new life in the underworld. In fact, insisted Nelson, in their frequent heart-to hearts between two old fighters Sr. da Lima
still complained that he regretted the way his career had been curtailed by fate, when he should have been remembered with the same honour and matchless dignity that people associated with his hero. These melancholy sessions usually ended with a shameful invocation of Louis's holy name: ‘You know what I always ask myself, Nelson? If He ever heard my story, would He want to have anything to do with me? I met him once, I went up to say hello at the ringside the first time Ali defeated Frazier. He was sitting in a wheelchair and gazing straight ahead, and I told him I was once champion of Brazil. Speaking very softly, he asked me my name, and I said people sometimes called me Joe Louis. A small smile broke out on his face and he made an effort to wink at me, then he held out his famous right hand and said, “I should charge you money for using my name”.

‘Whenever I picture that slow smile I think I should have remained a fighter. No matter what the provocations, no matter what the challenges, if I really wanted to live up to his name, I should have got on a boat and left for New York and started again from the bottom. That was the turning point, Nelson, my crucial mistake. But I'd been fighting for five years already; the thought of arriving in New York as an unknown and battling my way up to Madison Square Garden, I couldn't face it.

‘Also, I had begun to have my own doubts. Did Zé go down because I hit him, or did he go down out of fear? No, I lost everything the day I lost my undefeated record, even though it was fixed and I was miles ahead on points when I dove in the eighth. Do you know Saldanha wanted the odds to climb even further, so he actually placed his money during the fight? He told me to fight my natural style until the eighth and hit Zé as often as I could without dropping him.'

The legend continued that the now retired fighter da Silva returned to his home city and went to pay his respects to his departed mother before embarking on his new profession. Whilst at the cemetery, he noticed a name on a gravestone that for some reason he liked and soon, as if to mark his shedding of one skin for another, he re-emerged in São Paulo as Viceinte Faria Moreira da Lima, soon to attain renown as Senhor Dom Viceinte da Lima. But people here had their own way of exonerating him of criminal associations. Though (even) they had to admit there was a long list of killings that could probably be traced to his orders, they insisted he had never killed an ‘innocent' man. Nelson once summed up this fine distinction for me.

‘Understand, Charlie, if Sr. da Lima needed to kill you, it means you were involved in the game in the first place. Your hands were already dirty. You had made a choice, you understood the rules, and you knew there was always the chance you would end in this way. You would obviously have done the same thing to many others in your time, and you would do the same to him if you could get to him first. The point is that no one uninvolved in such matters has ever been one of Sr. da Lima's victims, not even in any kind of accident or crossfire. Even his enemies haven't been able to accuse him of this. He belongs to a world whose rules are different, and people say all sorts of things about him because he is always the winner, just like they did when he won his fights. But the truth is that he fights his wars behind closed doors, within the walls of that world. He never brings it out into the open or harms anyone who has no dealings with him. When you know Brazil better, you'll realize what a rare thing that is.'

Of course he was a hero to Nelson, whom he treated with a unique respect that ignored all differences in their positions, and Auguste still wouldn't charge him a centavo even though he'd paid him back in full two years ago. But Noel never contributed to such discussions, except once when the restaurant was closed and the others had taken their beers to the table in between Sr. da Lima and his bodyguards.

‘Brazil is a very big country, Charlie. So the north has no idea what the south is doing. You can kill a hundred people in one place and build a hospital with some of the money elsewhere, and they both tell different stories about you. There are many favelas in Rio and São Paulo where they would say something very different. Perhaps innocent people can't help dying there, it's much more crowded and desperate than here and it's not always possible to do things so cleanly. Also, not so many people love you, so you have to keep many more of them afraid.'

Anyway, following Nelson's plan it didn't prove so difficult to resolve the problem of Grace Duvalier. All it required was a tiny, almost indiscernible fingerprint I left upon the edge of her plate, another even fainter smudge visible only against the light upon the cutting end of her special knife, and a bit of strategic placement. It was a busy Saturday lunchtime, and I'd made sure to leave just one table unoccupied, specially for Madame, right in between the ones usually reserved for Sr. da Lima and his bodyguards. By the time I brought the gentleman his Ricard, he had already noticed her minutely examine and send back her cutlery. Then she refused to touch the St. Jacques I placed before her, because of the little saffron finger mark by the plate's
edge. I pointed out that the sauce itself was saffron and it must have tilted slightly to the edges, to which she replied frostily that it didn't matter how busy the restaurant was, since we charged the same prices at all times, everyone had a right to expect impeccable standards. And she made it plain that I wasn't to palm her off with the same serving moved onto another dish: she expected a fresh, untouched portion.

Normally, no matter how full the restaurant was, I kept an eye on Sr. da Lima's plate so that I would be ready the second it was empty, but this time we took a few moments deliberately rearranging Madame's dish in the kitchen. In fact, if memory serves me right, we poured ourselves a kir each and clinked glasses to her imminent annihilation. I pointed out that we had to applaud her courage or at least her degree of obliviousness: no one could have failed to recognize Sr. da Lima at the next table and yet it made not the slightest difference to her behaviour. Far from being intimidated, she kept tittering little asides to him in between reprimanding me for my lapses.

We had calculated each phase of the sting to a nicety. Ten minutes later, when I walked out with her immaculately restored starter, Auguste marched behind me carrying Sr. da Lima's rack of lamb himself, and stood with his back to us profusely apologizing for having kept him waiting. Striving to satisfy ‘unforeseeably particular customer demands' on what was already an extremely busy afternoon had tied him up for the last ten minutes.

Sr. da Lima was short with Auguste but his ire was clearly directed elsewhere. We kept peering through the porthole in the kitchen door to catch the frequent glares he sent in her direction, which she didn't even notice, obsessed as she was
with wiping her fingers and mouth every time she set down her cutlery. Then Madame made her own displeasure evident when she refused to hear of dessert and asked instead for a Grand Marnier straightaway with her bill. I almost felt pity for her as I played our last card, leaving a single but visible thumb impression upon the glass I would normally handle so nimbly by its stem. I hadn't even returned to the bar when she shouted out my name; I turned around to find her marching towards me with her liqueur held high in front of her.

Sr. da Lima had delicacy enough to have his message delivered once she was outside the restaurant. One of his men followed her out, and that night a very shaken Madame called and asked for Auguste to inform him that she'd been banned from the restaurant whenever Sr. da Lima was dining, and so there would be no more of her daily walk-in visits; she would phone ahead in future so that we could warn her before she reserved a table. Auguste sounded mortified, and spoke with passion and sincerity for a long time about how she was one of our most treasured patrons, reiterating his regret that we had only ourselves to blame for this depreciation of her custom. But it was a well-known fact that Sr. da Lima visited the city at least twice a month, and so from that day onwards I could always reply that of course we had more than one table available, as long as she didn't mind the risk of running into Sr. da Lima, who never gave us any advance notice before arriving.

Those first months were full of happiness. We would often end up drunk at Auguste's, either straggling down the main street until we reached his door, or else we'd enter his block through one of its side doors and continue through the endless corridor. He lived at one end and this disordered but
merry trudge through his building was almost half a kilometre long, moving from patch to patch of light thrown by the high, naked hanging light bulbs. Even at one o'clock there would be many doors open to either side of us; we could see families eating behind the curtains or sitting on their beds in front of the television. Some men would have gathered to play cards in the room of a bachelor, while outside a few children ran from room to room down the corridor and old women sat darning in the poor light on some of the benches. Auguste pointed out one boy who diligently practised his keepy-uppy skills alone every night until three. We happily greeted everyone we saw.

Or there was the time we decided it would be an adventure to explore in the other direction, down the riverside, along the city's edge. In that mixture of early dawn and the last of the moonlight it was just the two of us, but we were so drunk I had to hold on to Auguste to stay upright while he never let go of the railings. Then, a little distance away we noticed a stripped-down double-decker bus standing forlornly in a lane. Despite its rusty condition with no seats, or glass in any of its windows, it reminded me with a sharp twinge of London and I vaguely (with some embarrassment) recall a lot of sobbing. Not quite knowing how to calm me, Auguste must have suggested we climb aboard. Like a true friend he pushed me up each of the steps and all the way to the front of the upper deck where we remained for a long time, while he revealed a side of himself I'd never have imagined before. He was a sculptor once, he told me, and he carried around numerous ideas in his head, all to be hewn out of stone.

‘I must leave something, Charlie, somewhere, just as a mark that I too inhabited this earth. Once I believed it would be
a book of recipes, and that people would remember my dishes. But I lost that opportunity, and perhaps it's for the best. Memory is fickle, anyway. It's better if it's something made of stone.'

I didn't know how to respond to this, so I encouraged him and praised his cooking, and he tightly held my arm as I descended ahead of him one step at a time.

All I wanted after that was to lie down in my bed and grieve, perhaps read some treasured pages from my diary, but we reached a large field beside which were parked a lot of taxis waiting for the crowds inside the bars and nightclubs. Somehow Auguste got into an argument with one of the taxi drivers. My next memory is of being chased, or believing that we were being chased, by a host of vindictive cabbies, who frightened us so much by their numbers that we fled right over the railing and knee-deep into the river. We would never have drowned if we were sober but the fast-flowing muddy currents kept pushing us over. Thankfully some of the more humane cabbies took mercy on us, and three of them waded in and helped us out. Before we left we promised them all a free lunch at the restaurant that Sunday; ten of them took us at our word, and it was a marvellous success.