AGNELO (2010)

I was locked in my office with a delegation from the Astolfo Dutra sports department, negotiating a partnership agreement between the NGO and the city government to establish a Second Time project there. I remember asking Lucinha, the kitchen girl, to serve us a tray of coffee within half an hour, as we were expecting some members of the delegation who hadn't arrived yet. While they waited, I chatted and checked my emails, which were becoming (let's be honest) increasingly chaotic and difficult to respond to in real time. Despite this, some of those emails left me quite intrigued, and one, in particular, completely confusing. The first few were responses to proposals I didn't remember making to anyone, so I sifted through them one by one, to see how far my memory was letting me down; were responses from companies, proposing that we schedule meetings, on the one hand, and on the other, to my astonishment, there were a series of continuations of conversations that I had no recollection of having taken part in; in one of them (I will not mention the name of the company, out of prudence), I was "congratulated" on the optimistic tone I had adopted in presenting a partnership project that promised to enhance environmental compensation work at a pulp mill in Governador Valadares, which would rapidly improve its image. Note: I hadn't visited Governador Valadares in ten years. Furthermore, our NGO didn't do that kind of work. I didn't know what it was! In another, my "precociousness" was praised by a group of young environmentalists from Paraná, and in yet another, a councilman from Divino, in the Zona da Mata region of Minas Gerais, thanked me for the gift he had received "in person," a manual from the Perseu Abramo Foundation on Political Reform—and I was certain I knew neither the councilman, nor the city of Divino, much less the Perseu Abramo Foundation book. But the last email I read, before getting up from the table feeling slightly dizzy, was the last straw: a love interest of mine (I'm openly gay) was criticizing the harsh tone in which I'd refused to meet him three days earlier; I read and reread the response I'd 'supposedly' given him to an invitation to come over that night, and I thought I was going crazy: it was exactly what I would have written that day, if I'd really wanted to say it in that tone. It turns out that wasn't true; I was even waiting for that contact, as lax as I am (and I am!) with relationships. The text, which I won't reproduce here, was so identical to my written diction that it copied with exquisite perfection even the tiniest nuances of the sentimental twists that shape the construction of my sentences in my private correspondence. Something was very wrong! I reacted haphazardly, immediately replying that "I DIDN'T WRITE THAT!", and while Lucinha was serving the coffee (the other members of the delegation were already seated across from me), I received my affair's instant reply (which made me even more desperate): "I DON'T BELIEVE YOU, YOU CYNIC!" I had to excuse myself from the delegation to go to the bathroom. Now the initial dizziness had really gotten much worse. I felt as if a form of macabre irony had taken over reality, turning toward me a face definitively angry with my "manners." In the main hallway of the building, I felt my eyes surrounded by other eyes, nameless eyes, in a ghostly exercise of questions and answers, whose details seemed to be at the service of some arrow center attentive to my every step. The friendly and productive scene of that day, so promising until about an hour ago, suddenly expanded around me until it took on the dimension of a dark and utterly adverse destiny. I felt incapable of a convincing reaction to it, at that moment, due to the sheer magnitude of the indiscernible flow I saw threateningly coloring the invisible, with exquisite shades of uncertainty and impermanence. It was against the silence of others that it squeezed my nerves, as if to extract from my face a Machiavellianly calculated shade of vinegary pallor. Within my mind, an equation of dangers suddenly took hold that, until recently, I had deemed so improbable that the impossibility of expressing it in words or asking for help against it plunged my entire being into a subconscious, subliminal state, in which the only certainty was that the course of events had reached its peak of danger. What I witnessed immediately afterwards did nothing more than horribly confirm my most morbid intuitions of that moment. It was opening the bathroom door and feeling my entire body freeze with terror, in a stillness that, though brief, seemed fixed eternally in that second that was enough for my eyes to see K pressing the tip of a knife to the throat of a young man I only vaguely remembered who or what he was: an intern of who knows what, someone in the Party had asked me to pay him for a while while they looked for something better for him at the Legislative Assembly in Belo Horizonte. If I hadn't forgotten, he was overseeing the acquisition of a van for our Social Technology Center in a district of JF. I instinctively recoiled after that crucial second of pure terror and staggered down the hallway toward the kitchen. I needed to drink water, quickly, as I felt my blood pressure suddenly dropping. Unfortunately, upon reaching the kitchen door, I felt struck by another very bad omen: at the table where the coffee pot stood, I saw a man sitting with such a menacing appearance—he was old, with deep wrinkles on his face, but incredibly strong, sanguine, with arms and especially hands that immediately made me think of death by strangulation and sacks with dismembered bodies being dragged in the dark; and he had a black sailor's cap on his head, which he took off as soon as his eyes met mine: an empty, hard, brutal look, of someone looking at something about to be run over in front of him—that nothing else occurred to me other than to retreat into the void of that corridor where my soul now seemed definitively captive to some insistent nausea, which ulcerated the reality around me with increasingly absurd degrees of nonsense.