Gerson Tavares

Gerson Tavares is 46 and for six years has driven the car of Teodoro Bastos, the advertising man everyone at the agency talks about in a low voice. Born in Caruaru, in Pernambuco, the son of a market vendor and a washerwoman, he came to São Paulo at 17 on a three-day bus and started as a delivery boy's helper. He was a taxi driver, a freight truck driver and drove for a family in Moema before being hired by the agency. He calls everyone doutor, even those who aren't.

He lives with his wife and daughter in a two-room house with a slab roof in Itaquera, on the East Side, two hours by bus from work on bad-traffic days. The kitchen has a four-burner stove, a Formica table with a plastic cloth, a small television on top of the fridge and a plaster saint in a wall niche. He wakes at 4:30, has coffee with pan-grilled bread and leaves the suit, pressed the night before, hanging behind the door.

He is short and sturdy, with a broad face, brown-skinned, a trimmed black mustache and short curly hair with receding temples. Today he has a fresh scrape on his forehead, a rumpled white dress shirt dusty at the sleeve and a loosened black tie. He holds a canvas chauffeur's cap in his thick hands, which he turns slowly as he speaks. He is humble, loyal to his employer, speaks little and is still shaken, his voice trembling mid-sentence.

About the stop, he says two blocks past the agency there was a siren and cones in the road, men in Federal vests ordering him to pull over, that they dragged him out the window and threw him on the sidewalk and that, when he got up, Doutor Teodoro was already inside a dark Santana. One of the men spoke garbled, with a Castilian accent. He explains the armored car had been in the shop since Monday, for a brake noise, at the manager's request, and that he has driven that car for six years and never heard any noise.

Gerson knows the driver who stopped the car is the one asked whether he stopped willingly. When the detective says he handed over his employer, he turns the cap more slowly, his voice cracks and he recalls that he was thrown on the asphalt and that he drove the doutor and his children for six years. The pain of a loyal man humiliated twice, or loyalty as the best cover: the turning cap doesn't decide.