Pen Pals

Convict Jose Simao, serving a 15-year sentence for murder and robbery, sized up his new cell mate as an ideal companion. Like Jose, white-haired Abdias Scares da Silva was a habitual criminal with a long police record and a vast fund of anecdotes about his scrapes with the law. Besides, both men came from the same Pernambuco home town. In no time at all murderer and thief were swapping yarns, telling jokes, helping each other pass the dreary days in the Pernambuco state pen.

One day Abdias told Jose about a night in 1949. Abdias had robbed a drunken sugar planter of 700 cruzeiros and was wisely trying to get out of the vicinity. On a muddy path through a sugar field, a stealthy figure had crept up behind Abdias, struck him over the head and robbed him. When he awoke the next day, caked with blood and mud, Abdias had crept away, not daring to report the assault because of his own crime.

Something about his cell mate's tale clicked in Jose's memory, and he brooded over it. He asked Abdias to repeat the dates and places. A fortnight ago, as the two men basked in the prison courtyard sun, Jose blurted out: "Abdias, do you still hate the man who clubbed you?" Abdias replied philosophically: "No, those are the risks of our trade." With a sigh Jose unburdened himself: "Abdias, my friend, forgive me. I was on the other end of that club. You are supposed to be dead, and I am serving time for your murder."

When Abdias' shock wore off, "murderer" and victim embraced, swore everlasting friendship, went arm in arm to see the warden. Jose told the astounded official what had happened, explained that a band of sugar workers had found him rifling the pockets of his unconscious victim and presumed Abdias dead. Turned over to local police and shunted from one backwoods station house to another, Jose, too, had thought the man dead, and had finally been convicted on the testimony of the sugar workers and his own confession despite the absence of a corpse. "This is highly irregular," murmured the warden, but he sent off the records to Recife for a judicial review of Jose's trial.

Last week the happy thieves, presuming that the wheels of justice will free Jose and Abdias will be able to rejoin him when his sentence runs out, confidently made plans for future adventures in the wondrous backlands of Pernambuco, where even dead men tell tales.

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