MICHELE, Belo Horizonte, 2002
The first time I saw him in my life was on a Saturday afternoon. In fact, that was when he started showing up every Saturday afternoon at the bakery where I worked. He would arrive in uniform, wearing that TAM employee outfit, at the airport, still a boy, and would sit on a stool at the entrance to the bakery with a longneck in his hand, loosening the navy blue tie around his neck and saying:
--- Damn Tiago, you lead an easy life behind that cashier there. I feel like a slave in that airport. One suitcase heavier than the other. You can't even sit down, even with the counter empty ---
Tiago was his cousin, and he was the cashier at the bakery. I worked at the counter, serving customers and sometimes cleaning the premises. The first time I heard the two of them talking, I thought K was making up a bunch of lies, but later Tiago explained to me that he wasn't. It went something like this:
TIAGO: ‘’No way. The airport is a very lively place all day long, and sometimes this bakery is so boring that time seems to have stopped passing. Plus, there are all these hotties working around you and getting on and off the plane.’’
K: ‘’The thing is, your body gets sore afterwards, and I still have school early in the morning, remember? The fun part exists, it’s true. But it would be more fun if it were two or three days a week. I have to work until Saturday, look (and he pointed to his tie). Last night (Friday) after work, some friends of mine came by my house inviting me to a party, with some beers and stuff, and all it took was one drag of Letícia’s joint for me to stretch out on the couch and fall asleep, I was so tired. I didn’t even see people leaving. They locked it from the outside and threw the key under the door.’’
TIAGO: ‘’Hey, isn’t Letícia that girl from your class at school who works with you at TAM?’’
K: ‘’That’s right. It turns out she doesn’t work carrying heavy loads all the time, like me. She works on the speaker in the VIP lounge. Yesterday, for example, I had two minutes left to leave work. I was already dead, counting the seconds. Almost eleven at night. The chaos of boarding on Friday was over. And when the clock threatened to strike eleven, for me to leave, guess what: a van stopped in front of the door in front of the counter where I work and the entire Soweto band got off with a mountain of sound equipment and I had to label, weigh and carry all of that stuff to the conveyor belt almost by myself. It was the final blow to my spine.’’
TIAGO: ‘’He he he. Did any other famous people stop by there this week? That day I went there to buy my ticket to São Paulo, I was stunned by that surreal apparition right next to me. I never imagined seeing someone like Enéas Carneiro up close. What a harassed guy he is. So many requests for autographs. A bizarre pop star! LOL!’’
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ResponderExcluirK: ‘’He’s the most voted federal deputy in history. What did he want? By the way, there were some famous people this week. Romário, I barely had time to look at him because of the baggage claim line. But one in particular really stuck with me. You know, last Tuesday was my seventeenth birthday, and I had to work anyway. Around seven o’clock at night, Regina Duarte’s daughter showed up. I saw her up close, because I had to pick up her luggage. Can you believe that while I was tagging it and asking her if it was fragile, she kept looking at me, smiling intently, and suddenly asked: “How old are you?” and I said: “Sixteen. I mean, seventeen. Today is my birthday.” Then she smiled even wider and congratulated me. Everyone stared. I blushed and was confused. I thought she was going to harass me.”
ResponderExcluirTIAGO: “’But she’s a hottie! Is that bad?”
K: ‘’No. It turns out I’m dating that girl from Varig, remember? She noticed, but she didn’t seem to find it very funny’’
ResponderExcluirTIAGO: ‘’Lidiane?’’
K: ‘’No, Lidiane works with me at TAM. That blonde with green eyes, Jaqueline, who came to talk to me that day, at that party at the Jaraguá club’’
TIAGO: ‘’Wow! In fact, you can’t even compare one thing to the other. Is it that easy to pick up women there? I confess that I’m currently experiencing a worrying drought. It would be good if you introduced me to some friends, huh’’
K: ‘’It got a little better after Mody committed suicide and I stopped going to Rua da Bahia and Carangola. This avant-garde art thing isn’t very popular with the really pretty and hot girls. If it does, it’s not avant-garde art’’
TIAGO: ‘’Hahahahahahahaha! And the book?’’
K: ‘’Stop. I’ve shown it to a few people. Some older people. I want to know what a person who doesn’t use drugs understands of everything I’ve written so far. My problem is that I read much more than I write, and the writings end up being hyper-intellectualized. To this day, only you and Mody have read something I’ve written carefully. Congratulations, you can consider yourself a survivor now. I don’t mean to be darkly humorous.’’
ResponderExcluirAnyway, that was the tone of those Saturday afternoons at the bakery. Other than that, I would say that what caught my attention about K, sitting on that stool at the door, was the way he looked at all the women who came in and out. It wasn’t just any look. He looked as if he was going to eat them later, somewhere. It was really weird.
Then, much later, the news happened. Tiago moved to Rio de Janeiro and, since K had resigned from TAM, he suggested K replace him at the cashier. It was out of the blue that K started working at the bakery and, as the establishment was having financial difficulties, the owner asked him if he would like to help him make the bread, in exchange for a small salary increase, since he could no longer afford four bakers per month. He accepted immediately, and would even come and make bread at dawn, before going to school.
Working with K was pleasant and funny. We laughed a lot together at the things he said about certain customers and the imitations he made of them. Many of the girls who came to buy bread studied at the same school as him, and the ones from the condominium next to the bakery, in particular, quickly identified him because of the time he had worked at the airport and the parties they always had in Jaraguá. Pampulha seemed like another city, different from Belo Horizonte – a small town that the inhabitants of the capital had to come to if they wanted to watch Atlético or Cruzeiro games at Mineirão.
ResponderExcluirI, personally, lived even further away, in Venda Nova, a poor neighborhood, and I think that's why K started calling me "Rosa do Povo", because I was also very popular among the bakery's customers. The men, in particular, loved my smiling, clumsy and funny ways, and they always complimented my beauty, they thought I was very hot, something that K also made a point of reminding me almost every day. One day, even after he was already dating that girl who we later discovered to our surprise was pregnant with someone else's child, he took me to the bus stop and, after answering some of my questions about his relationship with that girl, he took my hand and gave me a big kiss on the mouth.
I responded right away, and my bus arrived shortly after. The next day, at the bakery, I said that I didn't want to go through with it because I thought the mess he was living in was too dark. He understood perfectly and we remained friends as before.
ResponderExcluirEverything was fine, until the day the accident that led to the bakery going bankrupt happened. I would arrive at work at six in the morning, when K and one of the two bakers were finishing making the first batch of bread of the day. Then he would have breakfast there and go to school, nearby, by bike. That day, when I arrived at the bakery, I got a fright. There was an ambulance parked in front of the door, and inside the paramedics were putting the baker who worked with K on a stretcher, a huge amount of blood on the floor. In the back, near the machinery, I found K silent, staring at the floor, in a state of shock. The machine that thinned the bread dough was covered in blood, with pieces of his hand between the rollers.
---What happened, K?--- I asked.
He looked at me for a long time, in silence, and then started talking like a madman:
ResponderExcluir--- You know, Michele, that Márcio is a really nice guy, a talker, he and I always talk a lot about things here, making bread in the middle of the night, he talks all the time, what's up?, I practically only interrupted to ask a question, since he's much older, he's done practically all the technical courses at Sistema S, including the electrician's course, today, for example, he started talking about electricity with me, and I asked a lot of questions about how electricity works, and he kept talking, explaining, he said he already had a clientele in the area, and there was a time when, I don't know what got into him, he started talking about a girl, you know, from his neighborhood, and he started getting agitated and inattentive, there was a time when he practically screamed, cursing the girl, saying that all women were sluts, and that it's all about money, that's when the machine almost swallowed his hand The first time, I asked him to let me put the dough in the cylinders, because he seemed tired, hungover, you know?, and increasingly furious and excited, remembering last night, then he started talking about things he could do with electricity, I couldn't resist, I made the mistake of asking questions, he was getting crazier and crazier, listing those hypotheses of attack,
, he said he knew a lot of traps inside a house to hurt others, I said what for example Márcio?, then he started to explain that you could --- THAT MOTHERFUCKER PAY ME!, he shouted first --- that you could for example enter someone's house, climb a ladder, unscrew the light bulb in the living room, for example, the first one that a person turns on when they enter the house, which is within range of the person who presses the switch, and then fill the lamp with kerosene until the fuse is submerged or something like that, and seal everything again and screw it back into the ceiling, and then when the person entered the house and turned on the light it would explode like a grenade, it could kill, blind, I don't know, I asked if he had ever done it, he was completely possessed, it was at that moment that, he said "hey BOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMM", and then the bread machine swallowed his right hand and he screamed again ‘’AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!’’, and then I saw those pieces of hand that you see there, and he was stuck for a long time, until I helped him pull it out and he pulled that bloody stump of hand out of the machine,
ResponderExcluirIt seemed like a nightmare, you know? When we called to tell the owner, he almost had a fit. And after all, when he saw that he would have to keep paying Márcio without him being able to work, he really had a nervous breakdown and almost didn’t come to the bakery anymore. K and I spent two months working double time, trying to save our jobs. But after the first month without Márcio, our salaries were late, and we realized that the bakery was over. In the last month, K and I started to pocket part of the cash every day, you know, to try to make up for the late salary. Until one day K told me that he was leaving, that he wouldn’t come back to the bakery the next day, and that I should do the same. That day, he took me to the bus stop again, “to say goodbye,” he said. When we got there, he tried to kiss me on the mouth again, you know, but I didn’t want to this time. The whole thing had left me very impressed. He stared at me in silence, sometimes it seemed like he was laughing. It was ridiculous, the bus wouldn't pass by at all.
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