Gilded Lily Page 7

  “Fernando didn’t even think of charging them a commission, but it was Lily who insisted that Alfredo treat him fairly,” said Vera, Fernando’s wife, and a good friend of the Monteverdes at the time. “Lily was extremely well brought up, and she was always thinking of others.”

  Even Alfredo’s mother, the domineering matriarch Regina, was extremely fond of her new daughter-in-law at first. “Regina always said that Fred needed a good woman, and that Lily seemed to care about him and could help him when he was sick,” recalled Masha Monterosa, Regina’s friend and bridge partner in Rio.

  Many of the couple’s friends at the time agreed. “We finally thought that Fred had found the best woman for him when he married Lily,” said Maria Luisa. “She was very sweet. She had her feet firmly planted on the ground, and she had Fred’s total trust.”

  But she didn’t have it for long. Barely three years into their marriage, Alfredo started to have serious doubts about Lily, according to friends and business associates. Maybe it was those elaborate French dinners, prepared by someone else.

  Despite what appeared to be a happy married life, there were tensions. Lily could never quite understand the close relationship that Alfredo enjoyed with his sister, even though Rosy spent most of her time abroad in New York and Italy after she divorced her first husband.

  Whenever brother and sister were together, Lily felt like a complete outsider, recalled Rosy. Sometimes they used the secret language they had invented as children in Romania, confounding whoever happened to be in their presence.

  Their preferred mode of entry into the Ritz hotel in Paris or the Dorchester in London was by pretending to lean on a flower. Alfredo and his sister would drive up to the entrance in a Rolls-Royce, wait for a doorman to open the car door and, feigning great fatigue, they would lean on a lily or a rose and enter the building, laughing later at the incredulous expressions on the faces of the hotel staff.

  During one such surreal exchange between Rosy and Alfredo in Paris, Lily had been so exasperated by their antics and role-playing that Alfredo took pity on her and ducked into Boucheron to buy her an exquisite diamond ring to make amends.

  But while he indulged Lily with expensive surprises, he also loved to indulge his sister. He once wrapped a square-cut blue white diamond ring in crumpled toilet paper and tossed it carelessly on Rosy’s coffee table at her apartment in New York.

  Throughout Alfredo’s life, Rosy remained his most important confidante. “Rosy dear, as usual I am filling a whole letter about me,” Alfredo wrote to his sister in one of the frequent letters he sent to her in New York and Italy, alternating between English, Portuguese, and sometimes Romanian. “Forgive my selfishness but somehow I feel like telling you how I feel.”

  The relationship between brother and sister was troublesome to Lily, said one family friend, who did not want to be identified. “Lily was clearly jealous of Rosy,” she said. “She tried to outdo Rosy when it came to everything. If Rosy had redecorated her apartment in New York, then Lily would come up with the same color scheme to redecorate the family home in Rio.”

  It’s not clear whether Lily took her cue from her sister-in-law when she insisted that she needed to hire an architect and interior designer to redo their new home in Rio de Janeiro. Shortly after marrying Lily, Alfredo gave up his stunning penthouse in Copacabana and bought a sprawling modern house on a leafy residential street, with a garden in the back for the children and their dogs. The Monteverdes moved into the house at 96 Rua Icatu, in an exclusive hilltop neighborhood in Rio, in 1968, after the home had undergone extensive renovations overseen by Lily and their architect Fernando. The house was deceptively small at its rather demure front entrance, which was partially hidden by tropical foliage. A visitor had to drive farther up Rua Icatu, a winding road that snaked up a mountain, to appreciate the home’s full size. The bottom floor featured floor-to-ceiling windows in the sunken living room and a tremendous view onto the tropical garden in the back. Guests enjoying an afternoon glass of champagne in the living room had a view of lush foliage, lilac and white orchids, and flaming pink hyacinth. The tranquillity and quiet were so complete that guests might be forgiven for thinking that they were lounging at a country retreat far from the urban chaos of Rio de Janeiro. On the second floor, where the bedrooms were located, Alfredo helped design a large office that led into the master bedroom suite, where a large picture window overlooked the garden.

  After the final renovations were complete, Alfredo did not want to stop. He set out to create an annex to the property so that he could house his household staff. Unlike most of his peers, Alfredo was extremely dedicated to his staff. Shortly after moving in, he confessed to his housekeeper Laurinda that he had bought a vacant plot of land near the Icatu house. He wanted to expand the house, he said, and construct separate quarters to accommodate more live-in servants.

  “I want to be able to walk a short distance when I need to talk to you,” he told Laurinda, with a wink, ducking into the kitchen, as he did on most days, to sample the meals the servants cooked for themselves.

  “Seu Alfredo ate filet mignon, but he loved the poor people’s food,” said Laurinda, recalling how Alfredo would savor the smell of a steaming pot of bean stew in the kitchen.

  On weekends, Alfredo took the children, along with Laurinda’s two boys, Adilson and Ademir, to the Rio Yacht Club or the exclusive Caiçaras Club in the city’s upscale Lagoa neighborhood.

  “Seu Alfredo treated everyone like part of the family,” recalled Laurinda. “Everyone loved him.”

  But as it turned out, not everyone was enamored of Alfredo Monteverde.

  For one thing, the rich man who was so kind to his household servants could also act with swift brutality when confronted with their disloyalty. About a year after moving into the Icatu house, Alfredo fired one of his longtime servants. Anita was a single mother from the impoverished northeastern state of Bahia. While Alfredo and Lily were away on vacation in Europe in June 1969 Anita had been put in charge of the house. She was to allow Laurinda and the other servants in to maintain the property. But Anita, who was not well-liked by the others who worked in the house, refused. When the Monteverdes returned and the house was dirty, Anita blamed it on the others, saying that they had not appeared while the family was away on vacation.

  Laurinda had nothing but contempt for Anita, who often lit candles and made strange offerings to the Afro-Brazilian gods (known as orixas) in the black-magic (known as macumba) ceremonies that she had brought from her home in Bahia. “I told her, Anita stop smoking up the house with your spells, but she just kept on doing it,” said Laurinda.

  Anita’s lies to her employers about the other servants were the last straw for Laurinda, who also accused Anita of trying to turn the children against her. Feeling cornered, Laurinda left the house on Icatu without a word to her employer, who was at his offices downtown. When Alfredo heard of the resignation of his favorite housekeeper, he drove to the Parque da Cidade favela to find out what had happened. Laurinda was livid. When he tried to convince her to return to work, Laurinda told him that she refused to work alongside Anita. She related the black magic and the duplicity, but Alfredo wasn’t listening. He opened the door of his convertible and sped to his house to get rid of Anita, whom he fired on the spot. He gave her five months’ wages, and five minutes to collect her things and leave the house.

  Anita, who moved slowly at the best of times, took her time, and before she left the house, she may have taken her revenge on her boss. After Anita left, the servants discovered Alfredo’s favorite shirt—white with pink stripes—which had been hanging to dry in the small outside area near the servants’ quarters. The shirt was tied over and over again with twine and hidden under the wash basin.

  “If I’m not staying, no one else is going to stay in this house,” said Anita in a menacing tone to the other servants as she walked through the kitchen and climbed the garden stairs to the servants’ entrance through the garage.

  Coincid
entally, Anita’s ouster occurred simultaneously with Alfredo’s decision to get rid of Lily.

  “Tell me,” he said to Maria Consuelo Ayres, his closest confidante at Ponto Frio. “How do you go about separating from your wife or husband?”

  Maria Consuelo was used to such hypothetical, third-person questions from her unpredictable boss whenever he was having difficulties in his personal life, and knew it signaled the end of a romantic relationship. However, she does recall being a little bit surprised that Alfredo, whose ability to marry and divorce seemed to come so easily, was seeking marital advice from her. She knew right away that he was having trouble at home. Calmly, she told him that if one is indeed having marital problems, one must discuss them calmly with one’s spouse. Maria Consuelo put the conversation out of her mind and assumed that all was well when Alfredo, Lily, and Alfredo’s mother, Regina, took off on their European holiday in the summer of 1969. But when he returned, Alfredo matter-of-factly informed Maria Consuelo that her advice had not worked.

  “By the way, what you said about calm, rational discussion,” said Alfredo during the course of a business day. “It didn’t work.”

  The crisis in his personal life became so overwhelming that he mentioned it to several friends, family members, and business associates. “Fred commented to my husband that he wanted to separate from Lily,” said Lourdes Mattos, referring to a conversation that Alfredo had had with her husband, Geraldo, Ponto Frio’s chief director.

  For his part, Geraldo was also used to such pronouncements from his boss, and when he heard nothing further, he assumed that Alfredo and Lily had ironed out whatever differences they had, said Lourdes. Besides, at the time, Alfredo was on so much medication to treat his depression that Geraldo assumed that he wasn’t thinking straight.

  Alfredo also must have confided his marital difficulties to his mother, who told her bridge partner that all was not well with Lily. “Shortly before Fred died Regina told me that she was completely wrong about Lily,” said Masha. “She said, ‘That’s not a marriage for Fred.’”

  Alfredo had also spoken to his accountant about an imminent divorce. “I didn’t really deal with Fred’s personal tax matters,” said Trotte. “But as the divorce would involve issues directly affecting Ponto Frio, he told me that he and Lily would need to make some financial arrangements, pending their divorce.”

  But other than his family and closest business associates, few others knew anything about their imminent divorce. They didn’t fight or raise their voices, at least not in front of the servants.

  Perhaps Lily was hoping that Alfredo would change his mind. After all, most of her family now depended upon Ponto Frio for their income. Her brother Artigas Watkins worked as a security guard at a Ponto Frio warehouse when the Watkins family’s business fell apart after Wolf’s death in 1962. Her mother, Annita, and the other Watkins siblings also had their expenses paid for by Ponto Frio, said Trotte, who included the Watkins family’s expenses in Ponto Frio’s accounts. “It was a bit of creative accounting when it came to the Watkins family’s expenses,” said Trotte. “We received their bills, and we charged them to the company as expenses.”

  But below stairs, the hired help only found out that things were not well with their boss when they found Alfredo’s cursed shirt. It was Nelly, the maid who worked with Laurinda at Icatu, who found the striped dress shirt.

  When Nelly showed Laurinda the shirt, she knew immediately that some kind of macumba curse had been put on her boss. Laurinda doused the shirt in hot water and cut the twine.

  “But it was the wrong thing to do,” recalled Laurinda with great regret many years later. “Hot water only makes the curse stronger. I should have put cold water and salt on it to kill whatever macumba curse had been put on Seu Alfredo. But I did the wrong thing. I made the curse stronger.”

  THREE

  “She Behaved Beautifully”

  THE NIGHT BEFORE Alfredo Monteverde died, Laurinda dreamed that she had fallen down the main staircase at the redbrick house on Rua Icatu. It was Alfredo himself—tall and handsome, in his pinstripe suit and his favorite pink and white striped shirt, smelling of sandalwood—who rushed to her rescue in the dream. “Did you hurt yourself?” he asked her, staring intently into her eyes. But before she could answer him, she woke up crying.

  “When you wake up crying from a dream, it always means death,” said Laurinda. “The dream told me that Seu Alfredo was going to die. It couldn’t have been clearer what was about to happen.”

  On the morning of Monday, August 25, 1969, Laurinda woke at dawn, prepared her children for school, and set off from her modest home in the hillside shantytown where she lived. By the time she hopped on the series of crowded buses that would take her to Alfredo’s home, Laurinda had forgotten about the terrible dream that presaged the death of her beloved boss.

  Icatu, a sleepy residential stretch of road that curls up a mountain, is surrounded by lush tropical forest in Rio’s Humaita neighborhood. There are brightly painted colonial-style homes at the foot of the street, but the farther you climb into the forest, the grander the homes and gardens.

  In the early mornings when the street is quiet, tiny tamarind monkeys, their long tails dangling beneath them, dart out of trees, balancing themselves like skilled tightrope walkers on overhead electrical wires. For a split second at a time, they seem to stare in rapt attention, their small bulging eyes scanning any passersbys who have stopped to catch their breath in midclimb before attempting the last steep incline to number 96.

  On that fateful Monday morning, the monkeys didn’t stray from their routine. In the silence of the early morning, they startled Laurinda with their chatter as she climbed the last, steepest part of the hill. Catching her breath, the diminutive, roly-poly housekeeper stood to watch them gathering bits of rotted papaya and banana. Then she rounded a corner and headed into the cul de sac high above the street where the servants’ entrance was located through the garage at the back of the Monteverde house.

  Looking back, Laurinda couldn’t remember anything amiss. When she reached the back of the house, Waldomiro Alves, the gardener, already had the garage door open and was cleaning the interior of Alfredo’s car—a white 1966 Oldsmobile convertible with red leather seats. Laurinda waved to Waldomiro as she headed down the steep set of stairs that took her through the lush garden with its caged macaws. She patted Barbarella and Sarama, the two Irish wolfhounds, as she walked towards the servants’ part of the house, off the kitchen.

  Laurinda nearly collided with her boss. In his charcoal gray pinstripe suit, neatly pressed white striped shirt, and striped black and brown tie, he was heading up the garden stairs, taking them two at a time, and humming the melody of his favorite samba: “Everything is in its place / Thank God, thank God / We shouldn’t forget to say / Thank God, thank God.”

  Rushing up the stairs after her husband was Dona Lily, blonde and elegant even in her bathrobe, which opened slightly as she ran to reveal a silky nightgown. As she did most mornings, Lily accompanied Alfredo to his car to kiss him goodbye. Laurinda didn’t actually see them kiss that morning, and for about a split second she wondered why Dona Lily was running after her boss, rather than walking by his side, as she usually did. But then she heard the car speed away and saw Lily walk back down the stairs and head back to the bedroom. She didn’t give it another thought.

  It was 7:30 a.m., and time for Laurinda to change into her maid’s uniform and begin her work.

  However, Laurinda did recall that there were a few things amiss on that fateful Monday morning. For one thing, the children didn’t go to school. Lily informed her that she was taking her children to the Copacabana Palace hotel for the day to see their father, who had recently arrived from Buenos Aires. Alfredo’s son, Carlinhos, as he was known to Laurinda, would stay behind at the house.

  After Lily and the children left for the hotel with the chauffeur, Lily’s brother Artigas dropped by in the late morning, lounging in the garden.

 
“Seu Artigas was at the house for a very long time,” said Laurinda, adding that it was not unusual for members of Lily’s family to drop by unannounced. “I brought him juice, coffee, and water.”

  Despite this unexpected visitor and the enforced school holiday, everything else appeared to be in its place at 96 Rua Icatu on the day Alfredo Monteverde died.

  ALFREDO WAS IN good spirits when he arrived at his offices in downtown Rio, recalled Maria Consuelo. “He wasn’t in one of his depressions,” she said. After twenty-three years of working alongside Alfredo, Maria Consuelo was familiar with the silence and irritability that always seemed to accompany one of those rapid downward spirals.

  Shortly after arriving, Alfredo disappeared into a lengthy business meeting with his chief executive Geraldo, but before he did, he asked Maria Consuelo to make reservations at the Copacabana Palace hotel for lunch. He would be dining with Lily, and her first husband, Mario, he told her. He wanted to discuss what would happen to Lily’s three children after they divorced. In the four years that he had been married to Lily, he and Carlinhos had grown very attached to Claudio, Eduardo, and Adriana. He wanted to maintain a relationship with the children, and needed to make arrangements with Lily and their father.

  “He told my husband that he was having lunch with Lily that day to discuss the fate of her children,” said Lourdes Mattos, Geraldo’s widow. “In fact, this was the whole purpose of the lunch.” At the meeting with Geraldo, Alfredo discussed plans for opening several more stores, recalled Lourdes.

  Most of Alfredo’s executive team at Ponto Frio knew that he was planning to divorce Lily. He had also confided his intention to Rosy, and on the weekend before he died he had made plans to join her at her home in Italy for a short holiday.

  But if he was at all worried about the lunch with Lily and Mario, he wasn’t showing it. Shortly after arriving at the Copacabana Palace hotel at midday, Alfredo bumped into his friend Michael von Lichnowsky, the personal assistant to Octavio Guinle, then the owner of the hotel. Von Lichnowsky later told Rosy that Alfredo emerged from the newspaper stand at the hotel, joking and brandishing a copy of the latest Time magazine. He wasn’t the least bit anxious or depressed, Von Lichnowsky told Rosy.