His Own Man Read online

  Although his in-laws’ clan was traditionally conservative, they never backed the military, from whom they distanced themselves to the greatest extent possible. And if their social class had benefited from the repression imposed on the country, particularly in regard to control of unions and the undermining of workers’ expectations, it’s also true that not all who belonged to this segment of our society stood by, or cooperated with, the regime. There were those who sought to remain discreetly neutral. A dignified stance, compared to the position of those who openly approved of the dictatorship — or financed it.

  The Magalhães de Castros’ fortune, moreover, was solid enough that family members weren’t afraid of retaliations and could therefore act independently. For a few years, Marina’s father continued to fund plays and films produced by progressive intellectuals and refused to stop advertising in leftist newspapers that had initially managed to survive thanks to attitudes like his. The Correio da Manhã, to cite just one example (and there were many political and literary magazines among them), wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did were it not for the clan’s support.

  Their Santa Teresa mansion served as an oasis in Rio de Janeiro for many years. Despite the atmosphere in the city and the country, people could speak their minds freely within its walls. Every time we entered the gateway to the property’s sprawling grounds and drove past the pool from which friends and acquaintances would wave, drinks in hand, we felt we were entering paradise.

  It was in this same privileged environment, at one of the Sunday luncheons Marina’s parents would periodically organize in order to see their now-married daughter, that I met a colonel friend of Max’s from the Brazilian Coffee Institute.

  I was somewhat taken aback by the way he greeted me. He clicked his heels and bowed his head rather formally. Then he shook my hand firmly and whispered, “Colonel Cordeiro,” in a low voice as if “Colonel” were his first name, the equivalent of João, Marcelo, or Pedro. This was of course customary among the armed forces, giving rank and surname in a single breath. But the fact that I heard it in such a protected space, and that it sounded so irritatingly natural besides, made me feel the stench of oppression right under my nose.

  Of average height and muscular build, the colonel was about fifty years old. He smiled a lot, but somewhat gratuitously, a trait that gave him an air of perpetual politeness, vague and undefined, which did little to ingratiate him with those present. Ironically, his surname, Cordeiro, the Portuguese word for lamb, also called to mind the fables of Aesop and La Fontaine, suggesting there was a wolf in sheep’s clothing in our midst — and not even the banality of the cliché comforted me. The colonel’s pointy white teeth contrasted sharply with his friendly appearance, as if at any sign of discord something unexpected might happen. Aside from his teeth, however, I didn’t detect more overt suggestions of contained violence. On the contrary, his body language remained relaxed. Yet in five minutes of conversation with me, discussing various topics, he twice declared, “But this, you have to admit, is a matter of principle.” And with that, one of his many masks came off.

  I don’t recall exactly what we were talking about, but hearing “you have to admit” followed by “a matter of principle” conjured for me a sinister world of innuendos in which compromise would prove impossible should differences of opinion arise.

  If linguists one day undertake a more refined study of speech from this authoritarian period, they’ll find that numerous phrases during those dark times went from being innocuous to intimidating. We were to hear “But this, you have to admit, is a matter of principle” at Itamaraty countless times over the next few years. The interjection “my good man” would often be thrown in for emphasis, as if the term of endearment held an additional veiled threat.

  But to return to Max’s friend, at one point, as we were speaking of the Coffee Institute, the colonel raised his eyes skyward and sighed. “The revolution hasn’t gotten there yet.” Right after that, in a theatrical gesture, he lowered his head and devoted himself to a moment of almost melancholic reflection. As if, in his view, the “revolution” hadn’t reached a number of places. Which would thus explain the corruption prevalent in them.

  The idea of a Greater Brazil wasn’t yet being broached. It would take a few years before that entity bared its fangs in the economic and commercial sectors. And we hadn’t yet won the 1970 World Cup, which would boost our national pride considerably. Even so, the colonel turned out to be a harbinger of those times.

  What intrigued me most that day, further illustrating my naïveté with respect to Max and his labyrinths, was the fascination this character held for my friend. Evidently Max hadn’t reached this stage through an admiration based on moral or intellectual values. Or through more trivial motives, which sometimes lead a man to value in others talents he himself lacks. No. To my surprise, his fascination had darker origins, as he himself would hint to me one day, in a conversation about the colonel.

  “It’s that he’s different from us,” he explained at the time, averting his eyes.

  “Different how?” I asked innocently.

  And Max murmured, “He’s killed a man.”

  Certain revelations leave an indelible impression on those who hear them. Clearly that anonymous death had deeply affected Max. It was as if by taking a life, the colonel had made his own less insipid.

  9

  The armed forces never really worried about Itamaraty as a focal point of subversive activities. The ministry was held to be an elite group, given the rigorous admission process that had been in place for generations. The generals tended to regard leftist leanings that might exist within it as more intellectual than radical in nature. Besides, they were dealing with far more serious challenges on other fronts.

  The military commanders nonetheless needed to find people to monitor us, people who would blend in, since the idea of having SNI agents infiltrate our environment was unthinkable. At first, as had been done in other government offices, a Division of Security and Information (DSI) was created at Itamaraty. This proved to be merely a smokescreen, a seemingly innocuous oversight agency. Behind it, however, lay the real agents, selected from among our own diplomats. Thanks to them, the regime had access to everything we wrote. Though few in number, these intermediaries wove an invisible, intimidating web around the rest of us. Their names would remain largely unknown, even after the regime was over.

  Since none of this was common knowledge, we lived in a nebulous world, dealing with international issues that seemed strangely removed from our government’s stance. This often led to some bizarre situations: in a right-wing country, we were increasingly allowed to formulate a left-leaning foreign policy. As a result, we would be the first government to recognize the independence of Socialist Angola and, to the astonishment of our own military, one of the first to reestablish diplomatic ties with Communist China.

  It was a way for us to retaliate, thought the more naïve among us. Or to delude ourselves, concluded the more realistic. Because even if we could achieve an independent foreign policy, we would be dismissed and jailed, just as one of our colleagues had been, were we to go public regarding the torture and missing persons on the rise in Brazil.

  Amid these contradictions, as young apprentices, we also kept a close watch on one another, not knowing if we were sharing an office with some enemy or were “lunchable” for dubious reasons.

  Since Max was my friend and, at the time, I knew nothing of his covert dealings, I felt comfortable opening up to him about the widespread mediocrity overtaking the government, particularly in our more restricted environment. He would laugh heartily, agreeing with some of my venting but never failing to tactfully add a few favorable words about the military. Nothing that made me suspect he had an incestuous relationship with them, but his comments always seemed somehow to endorse the regime.

  Although I continued to find conversation with him amusing, it pained me, as the intellectual I took myself to be, to imagine that a person I tru
sted and admired could have become so closely identified with such a system. When I called him to account, he claimed to have reached the conclusion that the populist republic needed to be dismantled so that other realities might now be examined. When I pressed further, condemning the increasing intensity of the military repression, he reminded me of the alternatives proposed by our small, now disbanded group from Urca: take up arms — or work within the system.

  “Within the system?” I asked. “But for or against?”

  “As if there were a difference …” He laughed in response.

  One day, concerned about the activities of a colleague who was deeply entrenched with the right, I asked Max if he thought that lives might be at stake as a consequence of the man’s actions. He launched into one of his tirades: “But, my friend, if it were only lives we were dealing with …”

  From then on, I felt Max’s integrity was being corrupted by indifference or cynicism. Paradoxically, these attitudes didn’t seem to prevent him from showing a certain aptitude for criticizing the regime. His detractors would later say that he was serving, in this capacity, as an agent provocateur, ferreting out colleagues he could inform on.

  Today, I prefer to think that such displays were simply escape valves in which he indulged, so as to keep face among us. These forays in the Legions of Good, as Max called them, allowed him to revisit ideals that had been part of his upbringing, and in which, I want to believe, he still had faith. I’ve come to think that at some level he never stopped seeing himself as a Socialist at heart, although he had given in to the right (as he used to joke) while it needed him. This hidden conviction may even have been what enabled him to move toward the left when such shifts became expedient. Undoubtedly, others in our midst had behaved the same way.

  What bothered me most about Max at that stage wasn’t so much his defense of the right, no matter how cynical it sounded to me at times. Nor was it his tendency to downplay the abuses committed by the military. (Despite the censorship, we received word of these regularly.) After all, we had met when he was at the secretary-general’s office, working quite closely with those in power. No, what bothered me then, perhaps from what little I knew of him in other contexts, was a more troubling flaw, because it was rooted in one of the most vulnerable aspects of human frailty — flattery. He was a master in the refined art of pleasing those in power by appealing to intellectual qualities they rarely possessed.

  Influenced by his readings, he upheld a theory of vanity that he continued to perfect throughout his career. For him, the only true antidote to vanity was pride. When someone was said to be “a man without vanity,” he was most likely an individual with a strong sense of pride. According to Max, because the proud were so confident, they “didn’t need others’ stamp of approval.” It was as if they were immune to some lesser evil.

  Despite the unsavoriness associated with the sin of pride, for Max it implied greatness. And since this trait was becoming scarce at the ministry, he was left with the more prosaic alternative of dealing with the vain.

  He moved well on this fertile ground, however, whatever shape it took — and there were many, which in turn required good judgment and a certain selectivity. In order to set himself apart from other colleagues also competing for favors, Max had chosen a single course: literature.

  In this particular field he had no rivals. He worked with the precision of a surgeon, able to wend his way with a scalpel through the most twisted and delicate passages. “One doesn’t praise a poem the way one does a necktie,” he would declare.

  He earned the trust of his superiors, who submitted their manuscripts to him. He would eloquently extol the virtues of texts that deserved eternal damnation. Or he would comment on poems with tears welling in his eyes — and then later reread these to me while howling with laughter. As such, he encouraged mediocre authors, within and outside Itamaraty, to publish their works in books or offprints, assuring them that they didn’t deserve the obscurity to which they’d been relegated.

  Even though his victims didn’t rank among people I particularly respected, I felt sorry for them without exception. In the more modest pantheon of lesser evils, it seems to me, there is no greater sin than taking advantage of others’ weaknesses to further one’s own cause. And Max proved to be a pro at this, great pretender that he was. When the targets of these maneuvers happened to be the bosses’ wives, when the poems (or canvases, or embroidery, or pottery, or whatever else they may have created in a moment of inspiration) were theirs, the cruelty was even worse — for it often affected the innocent and the naïve. “Secretary Xavier said that my poems are intriguing,” a major’s wife once shared with me, twisting the white scarf she held in her hands.

  “Who?” I asked in surprise.

  “Your colleague. The secretary …”

  “Oh, Max. And what was it he said?”

  “He said” — and here she lowered her voice, sensing that certain things aren’t to be repeated with impunity — “that my poems are intriguing.”

  The major was traveling on business to Montevideo, accompanied by his wife. Max and I were also a part of the mission. The proximity of our airplane seats had provided for a certain intimacy among our foursome during the flight. We had chatted about beaches, barbecues, sports, and TV shows. After lunch, the major and Max had fallen asleep, each in his aisle seat, leaving us trapped in the middle of the row.

  “You don’t say,” I replied cautiously. “Intriguing …”

  She took a deep breath and, slightly embarrassed, glanced at her husband as if making sure he was still asleep. Quietly, she recited the poem for me. It was long and mostly unintelligible, as it competed with the noise of the engines and her companion’s snoring. But the last stanza was perfectly audible. In it the hero returns home at dawn, his olive green uniform stained with blood: “From where would he be coming, my holy warrior, at the break of dawn?”

  Her reverent tone made me realize she was totally unaware of her husband’s activities, and yet it seemed eerily prescient. Where indeed were they coming from, these holy warriors? Where were they headed? And what deeds were they performing on their nightly raids that might give rise to a romantic poem in one home — and such grief in others?

  10

  That trip to Uruguay, although only three days long, ended up having an important impact on Max’s career, since it was there that he met one of the most sinister Brazilian career diplomats of the time: the head of our embassy in Montevideo. The man displayed a singular efficiency in that universe laced with secrets and conspiracies. A dramatic starkness was evidenced in his speech and gestures — even in his attire. On formal occasions, he had a habit of donning a black waist-length cape over his dark suit, a throwback to another century. He was, in this sense, a courtly figure, but of frosty demeanor. For many at Itamaraty, who spoke of him only in hushed voices yet didn’t think twice about embellishing the myth, he was the kind of man who would carry a dagger at his waist. With a diamond-encrusted handle, the more inspired would add.

  Arriving at a reception — with no shortage of witnesses on hand — the ambassador would casually loosen his black cape and allow it to drop, following his grand entrance, certain that the servants or, in their absence, some younger diplomat in charge of protocol, would rush to retrieve the illustrious cloth before it touched the ground.

  Positioned to the right of the right ever since his youth, this high official focused his energies on the all-out battle against communism, in whatever form it might take throughout the international political scene. He admired Karl Marx’s work, but only on the conceptual level — since the spirit of those theories tended to confirm the inherent danger of dreams and utopias. But what really riled him was Marxism’s growing appeal in Brazil, especially following the Cuban revolution. He considered it a curse that this admiration had created roots (which he judged to be romantic and, therefore, dangerous) among the formulators of Brazilian foreign policy prior to his esteemed “Revolution.” To his way of t
hinking, the association between Marxism-Leninism and the populist traditions of Latin American politicians (politicians with the smallest p available in good Western typefaces, he liked to emphasize) would destabilize the region. Being an intelligent man, he knew that social changes were necessary, and that delaying them for another hundred years might prove unwise. But like many of his generation, he thought it would be better to let them evolve through predictable patterns and processes, whose repercussions would be under constant scrutiny, than to import foreign ideas formulated for other cultures.

  On the night of March 31, 1964 — as he would later disclose to Max — the ambassador opened the small refrigerator in his lodgings, where he had kept a half bottle of the finest French champagne stored for months. Wrapped in a silk scarf and dressing gown, he toasted the new times from the balcony of his residence. In contrast to several of his colleagues, who had quickly aligned themselves with the military, he had opted to remain behind the scenes — recognizing that his ideas were too well known.

  What he sought and, as was discovered later, had already accomplished at the time I refer to was to form an elite network, within and outside the ministry, which would help the military consolidate its power until it became inviolable. (In less formal circles, or when he had a second drink, he used to introduce a more conciliatory variant into this equation of his: “Or until the people learn to vote.”) Should there prove to be interest, we would not shy away from sharing experiences with other countries. As a simple exchange of ideas, naturally. And there was no lack of interest around us, as History would soon reveal.

  By one of those coincidences that well-organized social events sometimes afford, Max happened to have a private conversation with the ambassador during a reception the embassy held for the Brazilian delegation visiting Uruguay. This occurred with utmost discretion, as did almost everything else taking place at the residence that night — the guests tiptoeing, doing their best to occupy the least amount of space possible, and soundlessly taking care of their personal agendas.