VIDAL, Juiz de Fora, June 2009

Let's just say that from our first collective encounter, on the first day of class, in the first year of law school, in the room where we all met, this friend of ours, whom I'll call here by the nickname we gave him, Sponge Bob (because he drank horribly and physically resembled the character) had become a sort of mascot for us, a being riddled with serious intellectual limitations and psychological problems, whom we carried with us wherever we went, day or night. Bob came (it was unbelievable) from Acre, where his father owned a huge cattle ranch, and he lived with his family on Santo Antônio Avenue, parallel to Rio Branco, in a very chic and equally huge apartment. We were block neighbors, and we saw each other a lot, a relationship that continued unchanged throughout our time at law school until today. He was our richest friend, besides Demétrios, the son of a contractor, whom we befriended later, after K was no longer studying at our college. The fact that we were all three—me, K, and Bob—die-hard Vasco fans, united us irrevocably in our suffering and psychotic madness over the years.

One day, after we'd already graduated from law school, Bob stopped by my house around lunchtime and convinced me to go with him to the new shopping mall in town, on Avenida Independência, which had recently opened and neither of us had been there before. It was a Friday, and we decided to have lunch there over a few beers. His car, at that time, was already a social distinction that K (who still knows nothing about cars) and I considered "exaggerated"—we were his best "poor friends." Over time, Bob began attending parties and clubs for the city's wealthy (as his social status seemed to demand), to which neither K nor I agreed to go, even when he insisted. I even went to a few, but bitterly regretted it. K, no, never went to any. From time to time, something natural would happen: Bob would reappear, bored, complaining about everything in life and begging K and I to go out together, because he “couldn’t stand those people anymore” and “those parties”, after which he felt (according to him) “his life fading away in a hangover of meaningless echoes”, and in this he knew that the only lively place in the city where the three of us could meet was the Cultural Bar, the maximum nightlife that K and I could stand in JF (apart from the Wednesday samba at Musik).

Well, that day, at the newly opened Independência shopping mall, Bob and I were drinking in the food court, chatting animatedly at first about soccer and the occasional girl who'd gotten him hooked on some party at Privillege or someone's mansion. Bob never lost the air of stuttering dementia with which he tried to brag, albeit amicably, promising future invitations to parties where he'd introduce me to some twentysomething beauty. It didn't take a psychoanalytic wizard to see Bob's progressive decline; his hair, already thinning in his freshman year of college, had almost completely fallen out in two or three years of living in those restricted social circles, leaving him with a meager spectacle on the back of his neck to adorn the glaring squint framed by his thick glasses. So the vacuum in which our questions and answers floated at that moment was the absence of meaning necessary for the rescue of objectivity in the terrain of the shifting action that that Friday promised: that of a tedious vital anguish of the middle class that in the hustle and bustle of the Juiz de Fora night would attempt the most difficult, in a noisy succession of beers, drinks, headlights, music and young people, until, in the lunarity of its artificial mobility, the dawn dissolved into its status quo ante without any epiphany.

"Have you seen K?" Bob asked after a while.

"I ran into him six months ago. I couldn't believe it: he said he was learning to dance forró at a studio on Pasteur Street, right next to our house, and that the instructors and students (practically all girls in the class) met every Friday night at a bar near Praça da Estação. He said he'd signed up for the forró class because he'd gone to the bar and couldn't get any girls to dance. He said the night at that bar was a lot of fun and that the number of single girls throughout the night had triggered in him the dark mental device that had designated forró class for his 'transfiguration' (laughs)," I said, partially repeating K's own words. Bob started laughing uncontrollably.