A portuguese playing god

THE FIRST CHAPTER

PONTEVEDRA, JUNE 2013

Dear Mr. Jenkins,

First of all I apologize for the simplicity of my English. Certainly, you not hired me for my language skills, but I think that for a Portuguese man, my English is not bad at all.

I am able to confirm that I accept the terms of your contract however, I have a requirement to do and, to justify it, I should tell you a few words about me, about my life and explain how I escaped from Lisbon and how i find myself, now, ready to serve you…

"I am a filthy pig, a large and noisy pig rolling around in filth. I only think about sex, revenge and other shit that I bring in the head. My aunt used to say that I was a little bit nuts, since childhood, which brought inside, a button out of order. And she said it with a disgusting air, while distracted her look in the store windows of Joframa in Fanqueiros[1] street, littered with dull and yellow mannequins skinned with dents in the paint. It was the time when the universe was made of Lego, books and good stuff and everyone wanted to be something: police, fireman or astronaut. I did not want to be anything. I just Imagined myself a kind of Vasco da Gama[2] or Sandokan[3] and discover the remedy to treat mother’s illness, the absurdity of sterile ailments and maladies that she suffering from weakness and vomiting between the bathroom and bedroom, in the dark, windows closed, debiting requests and moaning. A headache, kidneys, back, belly… It is the nerves, said the neighbourhood. It is laziness said his companion. And I just felt like to blow his head on the wall and watch, unmoved, brains and cartilage flowing by the stucco, slowly, making the curve of the socket, surrounding the footer and taken pausing on the ledge of a bent nail in the floor… I just stand it because it was too much work bring mop and bleach and wash walls and floor, scrape the dirt from baseboards and clean splashes from paintings and bargains fair... "

“I hate people and small talk. Trying to speak or trying to find a reason to speak to whom I will not see again in my life… No, Thanks!” Since the time I could think and formulate remembrances, I have always been lonely. As I have already said, when mum was very sick, my aunt came to Lisbon to give her a hand and the bastard of my stepfather flirted her by the back door. He was a taxi driver and drove a Mercedes-Benz 200 D, very similar to a combat car, clean, lustrous, with a Belenenses[4] flagship and the fluorescent picture of Holy Mary on the dashboard. Those were the moments when I rushed to grab the little box behind one of the Chinese Ming jars mum used to buy to conman Mr Mota, when she had the disposition and could smile. He ran the thrift shop and assured, as an authority in antique that every item of furniture he was selling was quality and genuine. I took a few coins out of the little box in order to go the grocer’s and buy some chewing gum and remember my Summer holidays with Christina in Santo André, when my grandfather made strawberry wine, illegally, because it was forbidden during the dictatorship and spread butter on both sides of Maria cookies because he liked sweets and licked them because he had no teeth. Love at intervals, playing, messing around in Pessoa’s way. Pessoa. [5] This Pessoa becoming immense pebble, melancholic stigma crossing with punctuality, teasing Lusitanian soul. The races to the cellar, smelling diesel from the engine, to draw water from the well, because she was afraid of wild boars, snakes and field mice. Exchanged caresses in the middle of sacks of potatoes and grandmother, with rough hands, to hold us needing help to catch the quinces beginning to mature and fall, making noise, squashed on the hard lumps of dry land, the grandmother screaming because they were without usefulness. The same sound I hear later, when that lieutenant militiaman who did the troops in Angola and who worked out of Loomis and then gone to a bank, married with a very beautiful woman, by the way, and took off from a peeled balcony of a seventh floor in Lisbon and I heard the grandmother screaming they ran out and be usefulness. I realize that smelled death and at the end, the smell of the death was an absolute silence, narrow path between thought and faith, a kind of exile where body rescuing the memory and love that grew stronger not by the space occupied by the heart, but the void that was when he left…

So when I discovered that my stepfather was fucking her I did not have any qualms or rashes in... But on… I lost Christina… Destinations… I was not considered a good catch, as saying the families, she even liked me and, apart from my mother, who loved, she was the person who most enjoyed, but I did not study. I read a lot, loved to read, devouring the Five, and the Seven and the classics, but did not like school. Then the reformatory, the friends, anyway... I also was not a man to nine to five jobs you see? Being holed up there, taking orders from bosses with less body and head that I, with time for lunch, time for the bathroom, bowtie tight. Absolutely, not! Then the intrigues of the colleagues, envy and anger, the stupid comments about clothing or over Benfica[6] or something like that. It was enough to catch me in a bad mood and took just one punch. Destinations… I had a friend in the neighbourhood who was filed and polite, studious, that guy that all mothers like to have? And they still came to dating. She did not like him. It was something like a kind of convenience, that did not last long and I know a few years later that they left to speak up...

I had a normal childhood. I mean… for that time. I was born in sixty-one. In Lisbon, the empire capital... With more than two fingers of forehead and as many expansion, my mother was admitted into the maternity ward, at nine o'clock, afflicted with pain and busted water, blessed by God in a Christmas dinner and sponsored by the Hospital’s Christmas program TV. The night, passed it with warm cloths, suppositories and keeping the suffering to herself not to wake the others. At nine, in the morning of December twenty-six was born a male rickety, crush, purple and yell overstay uterine assisted by a couple of snappy doctors, drunk sleeping and burping king cake, spiced of Port wine. I got the name in honor of the Mexican who warmed the hearts of housewives in constant seventy-eight circular rotation of Luis Alberto del Paraná, [8] in the National Radio microphones even before the broadsheet daily of a little woman who was lame and blind, and was not therefore surprising, the approval and submission of my grandparents surrendered the stage name stamped on my birth certificate: Luis Alberto ...

When my father, Jose do Patrocínio, committed suicide, had left my pregnant mother, a lot of debt, unsolved problems and threats from money lenders. No great options, desperate to have a new beginning, came to Lisbon, like many others on demand breadwinners. Came to know a taxi driver, accepted his support to escape a fate of misery in a small land within the country, but soon discovered that it was a crude, rude, just settle in Lisbon, with a terrible temper, no patience, due to the crisis in business. The assaults were constant and I started to watch these scenes very early.

It was a quarter of people aged with the fourth grade poorly stitched, completed in adulthood, causing delays commuter train to join three or four letters in an urban space delineated the good way of the New State, an architectural typology that structured those with major and minor features. In the northern part, at the dividing line between the Marquis and Border Street Campolide to the Conde das Antas, lived the wealthy, emerging middle class to the account of trade and services, on the south by Tarujo zone, next door to the Praça de Espanha,[9] the lower middle class for whom work in construction, cleaning and related was absolute company. The neighbourhood was not bad. I remember perfectly Mrs. Antonia with her figurine to squat and round, lowercase letter mode round capsule, to exult in the fact that it is the sole owner of a television set in the building. The device, a "Pilips"[10] triumphantly pronounced with the mouth marked by the absence of teeth, was one of those huge, heavy, with a doily linen on top to protect from dust and a small candlestick to grace. Was placed in the bedroom on the dresser where every Wednesday nights takes place the session movie. Small kitchen stools, all in a row appropriately close to the wardrobe, blue filter suspended by fishing sinkers on the screen not to hurt the "view", small dish with toothpicks de la Reine [11] and there we all went in procession, as converted to the sacred images of faith, eat the toothpicks and watch movies of Danny kaye while the old Crude, husband of Mrs. Antonia, nicknamed the crude because of the way as he usually digested meals, curled in position of fetus in the bed, give gross farts without appeal, ifs or buts. I laughed out loud flags, the roar of relief of flatulent Crude in the ranking of "Ars comica" was at the level of the best scenes of Danny Keye, but was immediately shaken by a mighty shove of my mother. My diminished presence in the gassed battlefield served only to read the subtitles and summarize the history of film. It was the only one who knew how to read…

If on Wednesdays had film session, on Monday afternoon was written session, at home of Mrs. Judith, a beautiful widow, sized thin and elegant, but illiterate. She was descended from a wealthy family from the north who had lost in the game and lost all fortune. She had come to Lisbon, married a gracious gentleman widowed shortly after a lightning stroke that had a lot of talk on the street. On the table of the room rested cookies, coins, the block, the pen, the left hand between her thighs and the right griping in endless caresses on my sex. Dictated the letters to the sisters with a breathless enthusiasm with various levels of intensity, between grope and sighs rubbing the howling, whining there would debiting, enumerating wishes much health and other banalities that I was in charge of paraphrasing. In the end, she insisted on “reading” them before inserting the envelopes, through their eyes in amazement beef about those lines of calligraphy irregularly orgasmic and full paragraphs to increase the number of pages...

We were in seventy-three or seventy-four. I had A few friends at the time. Children and grandchildren of two or three adjacent buildings, since, the northern part people did not mix rich and poor. Who attended the Marist and Dorothean catholic school, avoided contacts with the frumpy frequency of the public school in Tarujo. Sometimes we found ourselves sporadically at Sunday Mass, chanting psalms orderly and honed. In the few conversations of salvation and circumstance, drew up destinations and predicted future: the daughters of Matthew of the construction company went to teachers and medical and we had possibilities to the usefulness locksmiths and carpenters in the workshop of General Taborda, and we would be lucky to learn to read and write ... The group was composed of the grandchildren of Mrs. Antonia, cousins and nephews of the owner, of Mrs. Judith and two or three street kids. Among them, Madalena and Filipe the store owner of the ready-to-wear. Of the two daughters of Mrs. Antonia one had gone to live in the Reboleira. Jota Pimenta was built there a very good houses... The other had gone to St. Anthony Knights where monthly rents were already in the three thousand and five hundred escudos, sharp and loaded with a childlike expression of pride.

We took a quiet life among the outrages of age and little freedom space given by the family. Between climb trees and going to the pool in the other side of the city, the tram number twenty-four to the square of Chile, after wandering through, in return, a path sacred, painful and long walk, to our neighbourhood, the group was about to end fourth grade and enter a world unattainable by our fathers: that of the preparatory school.

Mrs. Antonia, apart from claiming ownership of the only TV in the building, was a gracious little lady, with an annoying twitch a blink of eyes, sometimes the left, sometimes on the right, won by the mathematical precision of the slap of her husband. The Crude incidentally José Bandeiras, was tall and stocky, the face with strong traces of beast, that it’s conjugated with the form noisy, intense and continuous sipping directly from the food bowl. Prison guard and snort of the PIDE, [12] no major qualms or ambitions, ready to obey and execute, inherited one charcoal and grocery store where an employee had stick-in-the-mud, also from the north, greasy-looking, chubby, who shook his head and grunted some orders to his wife to sell, serve, arrange, unload, clean and other verb conjugations ending in the same sound.

The grocery store was a small space with stench from the mixed odours of edible hygiene products with toiletries; biases the packets of peanuts, rice, potatoes, tea packs yellowed by time since "the Ming Dynasty", shelves full of powder blue and white bar of soap and wax Buffalo. The store had an arch that gave way to a small tavern with three small tables and a stone bench. On the wall behind the bench, stood two huge pipes vertically with two small plates of wood to trim the leftovers. Throughout the day, removed the flies floated on the small plates and reuse the wine. Egg sandwiches exposed in the window, yellow by the morning light, greening with the unfolding of the day, accompanied by a ceremonial and widely advertised discount making the green five pennies cheaper than yellow...

The eternal toothpick is digging between craters, roots of teeth and gums, cleaning the floor with the same piece of cloth that he cleaned the bench. Selling coal and petroleum bulk tugging one brave spit when rhinitis was pressed or not someone to eat close by. There was the place where the neighbourhood was going to buy what they needed, because it was the store of the Crude, because it was cheaper, because from time to time led to scrounge something, but, above all, because it was spun…

I also remember the brigade of PIDE that gathered information from the Crude. They were two. The thin, sucked of meat and sensitivity, with the intelligence and the robustness of a tree trunk and Boots… The boots was in his twenty-five years of intelligence as evil and evil as well dispensed. Tall, strong, stupid and gross proudly displayed their attributes in a curriculum of torture and outrages gallantly announced. On the street, everyone feared him. Hear the creaking of his boots treading the steps of the stairs was synonymous with certain detention and timeless. In the building could be heard often in his footsteps that held on the first floor where he lived the crude. The ears glued to the door, the neighbours suspended the breath until relief from the noise of latch left first swallow that sinister figure. With the nerves on edge and the tight heart, my mom, due to the cadastre registration of my grandfather and the invective of the chauffeur against Marcelo Caetano feared that someday was the day of Santa Maria and Boots come get it. For me it would be a relief, but only spent a scare. One day, the steps of the boots did not stop on the first floor in front of the Crude’s door. Slowly and heavily pursued their march to our level... Then I began to see life going backwards in a flashback beardless and afraid. My mother, with her hands coiled and nerve under the apron, was about the middle of the third Hail Mary when we knocked on the door...

- Knock! Knock! Knock! - Three knobbly and firm strokes accompanied by a lapidary phrase:

- International Police of State Defence! Please open!!

My mother lost the thread of the Marian litany, not glimpsed find neither miracle nor Ariadne to help her articulate direct complement with half a sentence, merely a long babble around the prayers, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, in search of the miracle through the damp patches and the bare wire of the lamp.

I opened the door – Yes, please. My stepfather is not! Rocked early... only comes at night. Want to leave a message?

Apart from the taxi, my stepfather had three men in charge. He did all building works, plastering, painting, plumbing and downspouts. At the Weekends did some odd jobs to round calendar days in the grip.

- I'll leave a message yes, my boy. - And immediately handed a business card. - Your stepfather must call me. I have a work to do in my yard and I need his services. I heard it's an "artist" and I need him to do me a masterpiece...

The door closed behind the ranger boots coming down the stairs. The face of my mother bathed in sweat started new ballad, this time in gratitude and preparing the sermon to his arrival. Stop speaking bad about Caetano, stop giving with Portela which was red, stop to listen to Radio Moscow, anything ... the list was endless...

That time ran inexorable as tired cliché. My sex life was developing at the pace of the letters of Mrs. Judith and Sundays, catechesis, where I jacking off while the priest with his back, enumerated with boredom episodes of the life of Christ for children. Aware of the blatant sin, Bless me before hitting the wank and my companions laughed when I put my dick hurriedly into the pants, scratching me to the tears, in the zip closure. Sundays were stray numbers in the boxes of the calendar break with homework and supreme opportunity to kiss girls in the Mass when the priest said to greet us we in the peace of Christ…

( First chapter )

[1] Stores in a street of the downtown Lisbon.

[2] Portuguese navigator

[3] Character of the novels by Emilio Salgari.

[4] Portuguese soccer team.

[5] Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet.

[6] Big team of portuguese soccer

[7] “Carbonária” was a secret revolutionary society who played in Italy, France, Portugal and Spain in the nineteenth and twentieth century’s. It started in Italy around 1810. Their ideology was grounded in libertarian principles marked by a strong anticlericalism.

[8] Mexican singer of the sisxties

[9] Streets and zones of neighbourhood of Lisbon

[10] Philips Tv

[11] A sort of cookies

[12] P.I.D.E International police of state defense. The secret and political police during the dictatorship.