In the early years of the twentieth century, the small town of Brodowski, in the heart of Sao Paulo State’s coffeegrowing district, was populated almost exclusively by Italian immigrants. They labored on the plantations, maintained their language and customs, married one another, and largely kept to themselves. In the winter months, Ribeirao Preto, the closest city of any size, could be reached by a single-lane dirt road. But in the springtime, when the rainy season began, the dirt turned to mud, and the mud isolated Brodowski from the world.
A hundred years later, the coffee was gone, replaced by the new century’s more lucrative cash crop: sugarcane. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original residents had been assimilated, the road had long since been paved, and Ribeirao had swollen to more than a million residents.
But one thing hadn’t changed: Brodowski was still a sleepy little town. And yet Brodowski was famous. Famous because it was here, in 1903, that Candido Portinari had been born. Portinari grew up to be Brazil’s most famous painter. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, his work was selling for hundreds of thousands of reais and gracing the walls of some of the most prestigious art museums in the world.
Then, in late 2005, something else happened to put Brodowski on the map: the famous social psychologist Paulo Cruz bought a house there.
Doctor Cruz’s first book, Trabalhando nos Campos do Senhor ( Toiling in the Fields of the Lord), was a weighty tome on Evangelical sects in Brazil. It earned high praise in the world of academe, but the first-and only-printing numbered a mere thousand copies. And more than half of them were pulped.
His second work, released in 1998, under the title Namoro e Noivado (Courtship and Engagement), was a different case altogether. Cruz’s colleagues lamented the lack of scholarship. The critics turned up their noses. The scientific journals panned it. And it went through seven printings in four months, each one bigger than the last. His publishers, attempting to explain the phenomenon to the astonished author, compared Cruz’s work to that of the American Alfred Kinsey in the 1950s.
They were right.
The author’s detractors, almost exclusively professors of sociology and social psychology, ascribed his success to prurient interest. They accused Cruz of titillating his readers under the guise of educating them.
And they, too, were right.
But, after seven printings in four months, there was no stopping Doctor Paulo Cruz. He wrote two more books in quick succession.
O Casamento (Marriage) appeared in 1999, and was re-released in 2000 with a lurid new cover and a new title: Sexualidade no Casamento (Sex within Marriage). Cruz followed it up in 2003 with Sexo e a Familia (Sex and the Family). And that became the biggest hit of all, ultimately translated into thirty-two languages. Cruz’s reputation was made, and he was offered a lucrative sinecure in the psychology department at the University of Ribeirao Preto, which he accepted.
By 2005, he was traveling the world, delivering-over and over again-variations of the same speech. It was a talk he constantly updated by introducing new and different slides. The slides were of attractive and well-endowed men and women photographed in “scientific” poses.
The professor, required to show his face in a classroom no more than once a week, and not even that if he was away on a speaking engagement, could permit himself to live quite far from the campus. He hit upon Brodowski, selected the house and grounds of a former coffee planter, and settled in as the town’s newest resident. Living in the great house, and playing the lord of the manor, suited Cruz well. So, too, did his domestic arrangements.
He met a young psychology student named Florinda Gomes, who soon became his mistress. Florinda assumed Cruz was going to marry her. In that hope, as with many other things in their life together, she was disappointed. Cruz’s research on male/female relationships in general had convinced him that a fixed union was not for him. He liked feminine companionship, he even liked children, but he didn’t want to have a wife or offspring living with him in the same house, and he certainly didn’t intend to entangle himself in a marriage.
He forbade Florinda to move in. If she had, within a few short years the law would have considered her his commonlaw wife. But by setting her up in an apartment of her own in downtown Ribeirao Preto, all she could hope for, should he tire of her, was child support. Officially, and before the law, Professor Paulo Cruz remained a bachelor.
Florinda’s mother, a widow named Eustacia Gomes, lived almost fourteen hundred kilometers to the north, on the island of Itaparica. She visited her daughter infrequently, offering as an excuse that the arthritis in her knees made it difficult to travel. All of them knew this to be a lie. The truth of the matter was that Eustacia Gomes didn’t like Paulo Cruz.
The island’s sandy beaches and lukewarm seas made it an ideal place for a family vacation. During the summer months, January through March, it seldom rained on Itaparica, and Paulo and Florinda’s three kids, released from the imprisonment of their school back home, were in their element.
That year, taking advantage of the drop in airfares after the Christmas season, Florinda scheduled a visit that was to last a month. Cruz remained behind. He always did. In the absence of his mistress and their brood, he coveted his solitude. The lack of distraction also had a concrete advantage: it would enable him to make significant progress with his next book, a work he’d provisionally titled Sexualidade Entre Doze e Vinte (Sexuality between Twelve and Twenty ).
Cruz’s insistence on being left alone while in the throes of creation was well known. Friends and family were aware that they’d meet with a cold reception if they attempted to visit, or even to telephone, at such times.
So his murder remained undiscovered for quite some time. The medical examiner’s estimate was that Professor Paulo Cruz had already been dead eight to ten days before Florinda returned and found him. The local police had no clue as to the motive for the crime, and had no suspects. The rarity of murder in the vicinity of Ribeirao made undertaking a murder investigation difficult for them. It was already being chalked up as the work of a random killer, an unsolvable crime.