JANA, Santos Dummont, 1998

When he arrived to study at our school in Santos Dummont, despite his young age, 16, he was already a kind of living legend. No one understood why, with a recent past of so much madness, adventures, beaches, travel, culture, jobs, girlfriends, etc., he had ended up there, in our classroom; apparently, not even he himself. When we asked him what he had come to do here, in our city, he would simply answer:

--- Read ---

The girls liked him, including me, and in general, he got along well with everyone, he was just a little distant and abstract. According to him, he was living alone with his grandfather Kaesar, who was almost ninety years old, in that sinister, crumbling mansion, across from the abandoned cheese factory where the Forum was later built, next to the Rio das Poças. No one had the courage to go and visit him, because the place seemed to be inhabited only by ghosts. Hardly any relatives showed up there after his grandmother died --- when they did, they left quickly.

Right after the first month of school, there was Carnival in SD. It was in the middle of the street carnival that I met him for the first time, and I began to understand him (a little) better. He told me that he wasn't really studying, and that he had only enrolled in our school to fool his parents, who stayed in Bahia, and to "meet people." He explained that it was okay, because he had always been a year ahead in school and had decided to "waste a year" with that scheme. And then what?, I asked him. I don't know, I think I'm going to Belo Horizonte. Do you want to go? He asked me. I didn't answer right away, but he knew that I couldn't do that. It was only two months after our first kiss that I plucked up the courage to visit him in that haunted mansion. He took me there himself, one afternoon. It was sunny, and the mansion's gardens were very beautiful, despite not having been looked after in ages. The plants spread crazily everywhere, vines twined around other trees, which in turn competed for tiny spaces with gigantic bushes that continued to grow out of control. And so many flowers! It gave the impression of an orchid garden that, a decade ago, had exploded and reproduced and proliferated in all directions uncontrollably. K took me through a side passage of the mansion, where there must have been a garage in the past, and suddenly asked us to stop in silence. He pointed to a garden bench in the middle of a tall, almost closed weed, where I noticed, completely still, barely breathing, the living image of an old man in an Italian beret with an open book on his lap.

--- That's my grandfather Kaesar. Sssssssssshhhhhhhh. He's rereading a book by Teilhard du Jardin about the noosphere ---- he said, stifling a laugh, and we headed for the back entrance.

The house was old and huge inside, and there was an old piano in the living room next to a rocking chair. Laundry room, pantry, kitchen, dining room, TV room, a bunch of rooms filled with rotten furniture and, finally, a staircase that led to the second floor, where K “lived”.