MODY, Belo Horizonte, 2000

It's true, I committed suicide in 2000. But that's not what I'm going to talk about. First of all, I want to make it clear that I was never a close friend of this guy K, and I think the way he introduced me to the public is absurd. Maybe he tried to forge a friendship with a suicidal painter to make a certain impression on the reader and, thus, increase the aura of avant-garde mystery surrounding his artistic background. The fact is that I have always been, and continue to be, one of the best friends of a cousin of his, whom I met as a child, in BH. When I met K, he was like a brat (recently arrived from Bahia), who was being granted the privilege of "joining the older crazies", who really understood music and drugs. There was a glaring discrepancy between him and us, especially in appearance: he was healthy, athletic, and drank and smoked very little compared to us --- at most, he would take a few puffs of the odd joint. And what's more, he was superficial, only interested in talking about football or about girls he had hooked up with, was hooking up with, or wanted to hook up with. It was difficult to get him to talk about philosophy and poetry, since everyone in his family said he was a "poet." And it was irritating, he seemed to have read all of Nietzsche's books, as he was always saying, and when he started to talk about it, it only took five minutes for him to assume not the air of someone who understood the subject, but rather that of Nietzsche himself, he spoke as if he were Nietzsche, as the author of everything he had read, often getting up to look at himself in a nearby mirror. I have never seen anyone look at themselves in the mirror so much in my life!

The first time he snorted cocaine was at a party in the backyard of an apartment on Carangola Street, and I was the one who gave him some packets. The boy didn't show any signs of excitement at the time, but the next day we learned that he had fallen ill while waiting for the bus to return to Pampulha. According to his own account, he got off at Mineirão (because he had taken the wrong bus) and walked almost breathless all the way home, about five kilometers away. Later, an aunt of his took him to the emergency room and they found that he was in respiratory arrest. This probably made him rethink his relationship with us, as we were preparing to dive into adulthood with the flame of drug addiction burning brightly above our heads. From the beginning, I felt that he wasn't one of us. The thing about being a poet, at that time, was just a social veneer that he used to give his own image a mythical depth that, if it existed, had nothing to do with art. It had to do with meditation, physical exercise and a certain vocation for getting involved in dangerous situations. Something that became very “clear” the night he surprised us with the story of how he had “supervised” an expedition of UFBA students to the Canudos region, in the backlands of Bahia, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of that war. He was only 15 at the time:

K: “(...) so my father spoke to the director of the Social Sciences department and I went to work there as an office boy. I was working with a fifth-year student, Tati, who a week before the expedition said that she and I would have to supervise the two buses (one for her and the other for me) by ourselves, since the course professors, including the department director, would take advantage of the occasion to travel on vacation.