Read Crimes of August: A Novel: 5 (Brazilian Literature in Translation Series) for Free Online

and clerk were waiting for the inspector.
    “So then, sir, is everything resolved?” said the lawyer.
    “Everything. We’re going ahead with the booking.”
    “Sir, my client acted motivated by defense of his honor, immediately after being unjustly provoked by the victim.”
    “Tell it to the judge.”
    “Sir, even you, an educated individual, unlike my client who’s a stevedore at the docks, a coarse illiterate man, even you would lose patience if your wife told you what the wife of my client told him.”
    “I already apologized,” murmured the woman humbly, from the back of the room.
    “She’s sorry, she knows she made a mistake, she’s apologized. Didn’t you hear her?” said the lawyer.
    “This is a crime calling for public action. I’m not interested in the victim’s opinion. We’re continuing with the booking.”
    “Sir, she called my client a limp-dick. Is there a husband alive who can hear his own wife call him a limp-dick without losing his head? Well? Give me a break!”
    “There’s no one with more authority to call a guy a limp-dick than his own wife,” said the inspector.
    The accusation was written up and signed, and the woman sent for the corpus delicti examination. The husband paid a small bail as stipulated by law and was then released.
    Mattos took an antacid from his pocket, stuck it in his mouth, chewed, mixed it with saliva, and swallowed. He had complied with the law. Had he made the world any better?
    MEANWHILE, DOWNTOWN , Salete Rodrigues, wearing a wool two-piece jersey outfit that the magazine A Cigarra said had been launched by existentialists, took the elevator in a building on Avenida Treze de Maio and got out on the twelfth floor, the location of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation.
    “May I help you?” asked a receptionist behind a counter.
    Salete said she wanted to enroll in the secretarial training program. She was informed that the courses were Portuguese, mathematics, and typing. There were night classes and day classes. To enroll, the candidate had to have a middle-school diploma.
    Salete’s face turned red when she heard this. She thanked the woman and left hurriedly.
    She was nervous as she waited in the hall for the elevator. She felt sure the receptionist, seeing her flushed cheeks, had guessed everything, that she had only gone through elementary school and had no middle-school diploma to show. In July, she could have gotten a job in the Senate. She was with Magalhães at the Beguine nightclub, watching a show by the existentialist Serge Singer, when Magalhães had told her, “I’m going to get you a job in the Senate.” Magalhães had lots of buddies among the senators, and it would be easy to arrange a job. “You don’t even have to go there, just pick up your check at the end of the month.” She had told Magalhães that she “had little education,” and he had replied that the Senate was full of people who had “come in through the window” and boarded the happiness train, as it was called. She had become frightened and asked Magalhães not to do anything. Now, whenever she heard her favorite program on the radio, which was called The Happiness Train, she repented of not having accepted the offer. After all, she could have learned how to type; she had even gone to a typing school in a house on Rua da Carioca and seen a bunch of scrubby mulatto women banging away at keyboards. If those wretched women could learn to type, so could she.
    When she got to the street, she felt great consolation in noting that men turned their heads to watch her go by. She killed some time in the downtown area in order to catch the two o’clock showing of The Robe , with Victor Mature, at the Palácio theater. She cried during the film.
    It was still early to go to Mother Ingrácia’s spiritualist center, in the Rocha favela. In a pharmacy she bought a bottle of Vanadiol, which the radio claimed was good for the nerves. She walked down Gonçalves Dias, Ouvidor, and