Dalva Pacheco

Dalva Pacheco is 58 and has been head of the museum's guards for fifteen years. She was born in Madureira, the daughter of a seamstress and a longshoreman at the port, and raised three children on her own. She was a bar cook, a bakery helper and a store inspector before joining the museum. She says life taught her two things: that the people take care of what belongs to the people, and that whoever keeps watch must look around and not only straight ahead.

She lives in a two-story house in Engenho de Dentro, with a rooftop slab where she hangs laundry and a porch full of ferns. In the kitchen there is a pressure cooker worn out from use, a photo of her children held to the fridge by a magnet and a fan that spins nonstop. On Sundays she hosts the family for feijoada and only then sits down. On other days she sleeps on a sofa bed in the living room, her uniform folded on a chair.

She has graying curly hair pulled into a firm bun, dark skin, small gold earrings and a trace of golden glitter on her face that she hasn't wiped off. She wears the navy-blue guard uniform with the museum badge and carries a two-way radio on her belt and a whistle around her neck. She is firm, direct, protective of her colleagues and proud of never having lost a piece in fifteen years on the job.

About the day of the robbery, her account is the leanest. She says four masked bate-bolabate-bola Carnival costume from Rio's suburbs: a loose, colorful outfit with a mask, often carrying a ball on a stick. revelers entered the museum with the block party, at four sharp, without looking at anything, and went straight to the four most valuable paintings, and that one of them was sent to the back of the mansion to tamper with the cameras. She explains that there were three guards on duty, as always, and none armed: a neighborhood museum has no rifles, it has a radio and a whistle. She says no more, unless asked a direct question.

Dalva knows that the head of the guards is the first one held accountable for the open door. When the detective asks if she opened the gate for the thieves, her firmness stretches: fifteen years at that gate without losing a pin, she says, and now she is an accomplice? From here on, she only talks to the union lawyer. It may be the pride of a woman who never failed. It may be someone protecting herself before the question gets close. The detective will have to decide which.