Beneath the Trees of Eden: A Tragicomic Murderous Quest for Transcendence

Some time ago, a middle-aged man was found dead in his apartment in north London. His body showed multiple knife wounds. The following manuscript was found next to him. It was drenched in blood.

Beneath the Trees of Eden

A Tragicomic Murderous Quest for Transcendence

__________

A

Novel

Ed Cheminski

IndieOtter Publishing

Copyright © 2016

All rights reserved.

Beneath the Trees of Eden: A Tragicomic Murderous Quest for Transcendence

Copyright © 2016 Ed Cheminki

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.

To

the wandering people of this world, and their devils.

A note to the reader

This book is a work of fiction. All the characters are fictional, including those that are real. All events happened in one way or another, if only fictitiously.

‘To whom art thou thus like in glory and in greatness among the trees of É-den? yet shalt thou be brought down with the trees of É-den unto the nether parts of the earth: thou shalt lie in the midst of the uncircumcised with them that be slain by the sword.’

(Ezekiel 31:18)

‘...Upon four-legged forest clouds

The cowboy angel rides

With his candle lit into the sun

Though its glow is waxed in black

All except when 'neath the trees of Eden’

(Bob Dylan)

‘Aimless is my song, Yes, aimless,

As is love, as life is aimless

As Creator and creation.’

(Heinrich Heine)

‘Oneness is a prison.

To be myself is not to be.

I’ll live as a fugitive

But live really and truly.’

(Fernando Pessoa)

Part I – Genesis

1

The Big Bang

I was born a nobody at 3 AM. Years later, I was still a nobody – as my father before me and his father before him. Wasn’t for the anger, I would have died like they did: dreams calcified, like the bones that filled up their mediocre graves.

No. Not me. I had the rage burning in my chest, that fervent desire to free and to be free at all costs.

‘Why the long face?’ he asked me on the event of one of my birthdays (I don’t remember which).

‘I don’t know, I just don’t know. All I know is that I dream of more. I feel lost between all these worlds, and I want more, I dream of more. This cannot be it all. Can it? Is that it? Nothing else but this? All I have to live for? I just don’t know… it doesn’t make any sense.’

‘...oh yes? And what would you like to do then? Who would you like to be?

‘That’s a difficult question.’

‘No, it isn’t. I’ll tell you how it is…I’ll tell you just how it is…what you’re thinking…it’s a waste of time! You just put your head down and do it, little Niger – you just do it! That’s what you do. That’s all there is to it. That’s what my father did and that’s what I did and that’s what you will do. You’re not paid to t–h–i–n–k. Writing on your little shitty book, your little shitty stories that nobody reads…? I see you hiding in the corners of the house, locked inside your little shitty head. Look around you kid; look around you…there’s work to be done! Now drop that shitty little book and pick up that sack of scratchings, yes, that one! You’ve got to be who you you’ve got to be, little Niger. It’s been written...it’s there. God said so. Not me – God! You think you’re better than this? Well, you’re not! You’re just a little piece of shit. God said so.’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘About what?’

‘If that’s what God said.’

‘You shut your mouth you little prick! Shut your goddamn mouth before I burst through your teeth with my knuckle! Look here, boy, you’re wasting your time. More important – you are wasting mine!’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Well, I am sure! You just do it little Niger and then you keep doing it. The rest takes care of itself. What are you going to do, hugh? Wonder around like a gypsy, scribbling on your shitty little book?’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not, you ask? Why not? I tell you why not: because I’m your father and I said so. Now shut your pie-hole and pick up that sack. When you’re done we’ll start with the carcasses.’

That was the last time I spoke to him. I was glad. I hated every one of his bones. He chewed food with his mouth open, like a mentally disturbed gorilla. He had never read a book in his whole life. He cleaned his nose in the kitchen sink. He called me ‘little Niger’ even though I was pale yellow. Why did it have to be him? Why did he have to be my vessel? Why him? In his head, vegetarianism and homosexuality were the same things. Women were made of one of his ribs. His legs were bent like a pair of pliers. He touched his groin as if to check his cast-iron testicles were still there.

I went home after the slaughterhouse. He went to the bar. Despite it all, I did not see it coming. There is no way of telling when a man is about to lose his life, or a young man about to lose his father. The days are all very much alike and nothing changes until it is too late. In the end, that's how time works; it simply happens. Then you’re either lucky or unlucky, and that depends on nothing, nothing at all.

The doors in the house were always open. Not because we were sociable, but because my mother was not to be trusted with a kitchen knife. Two days before the big bang, she locked herself in the bathroom. In her hand, two razor blades; one she swallowed, with the other she sliced her wrists open. My father brought the door down with his fists and feet, before my mother bled to death. He dragged her out of the shower cubicle where she sat with immobile arms outstretched on her legs, covered in a mixture of blood, sweat and dried–out despair.

I was a senseless teenager, and such exuberant scenes of butchering, and psychotic eroticism were constant. It would be true to say that the real personality of a man, the personality that emerges from the threshold phase we experience as adolescents, in my case simply failed to materialize then. Insecurity spread through my blood cells like moss in a damp field. I grew so aware of my inabilities that to control my own bodily impulses became a matter of serious concentration, especially those related to sex. A woman would just have to touch me for disgust and horror to fill up my stomach.

There had been times when I locked the door and like all teenagers engaged in long–lasting masturbation sessions in the company of my favourite sock. But that curiosity eventually gave way to despair, that was not only transmitted through genes, but also played out before me every day, like a low–budget Mexican soap opera. The masturbation sessions became considerably shorter and were replaced by wild and unfounded philosophical essays on the origins of sexual desire and the notion of life as an undifferentiated chaos. I began to disagree with what the teacher told me about Darwinian theory. I took particular issue with the survival of species. I could not see how humanity’s primary goal could be to survive for when I looked around me all I found was proof of the contrary.

Finding little sense in anything I was told, I began to read Camus after stumbling upon one of his books in the school library. With an old typewriter my father got in exchange for an unpaid–for bag of pork scratchings, I wrote wildly on how the world would be better off without parents and dogmas. Camus taught me how to see the absurdity of it all. But as I typed away what in my mind should have been the first volume of The World According to João de Deus, the truth is that I never wrote a single word. The machine had no ribbon.

I also knew, from reading yellowing books at my evening school classes that the practice of sex in different societies assumed very different functions and was performed in a great variety of forms. Sharing wives or husbands, for example, was a very common practice amongst African and South American native tribes – despite Christian influences. The Maasai in Tanzania, the Himba in Namibia and the Zo’es in the Amazon basin all practiced sex as a form of polyandry, where two or more brothers shared one wife or more. Yet I did not have to travel so far to see polyandry for myself.

My mother often accused my father of sharing his oeuvre between three, four, five women, maybe more. One of these women happened to be my mother’s sister, aunt Esmeralda. Aunt Esmeralda was not a beautiful woman, but her curvaceous figure ensured the attention of some neighbourhood men, who came by for afternoon coffee in the absence of her husband, a farmer, who spent much of his time with his beasts and plants, leaving aunt Esmeralda alone for most of the day, most days.

When in the city, aunt Esmeralda and the farmer lived in an apartment in the centre of our small town above a small convenience store. Whether out of loneliness or simple promiscuity, she began to court the men who paid her attention and of all the men she courted my father was the one who came on Wednesdays. On Wednesdays my mother, a carer, had her double shift where she bathed and fed and cleaned the bottom of a seventy–four year old wealthy widow, the mother of two men and three women who were waiting for her to die so they could fill up their pockets.

A Brazilian boy with no appetite for sex is an odd and rare occurrence. This is because it is sexuality alone that, when mixed with the ever–present Catholic guilt, reveals itself as the most powerful force acting in the South American personality. True, the very idea of sex repulsed me, yet other things kept me occupied. I became a recluse and read anything I could put my hands on. I had failed a year at school and my parents enrolled me in adult education evening classes to make me catch up with my cousins who, like a litter of cats, were all born at the same time.

‘You will never be an Einstein, but you need to keep up with the others, I don’t want to be accused of having given birth to the only dumb one,’ my mother once told me while slapping me on the back of the head as I spread my arms over a physics book.

But this all happened before my real life had begun.

When did it all begin? It began with a ‘BANG!’

I was asleep when the fight started. They screamed at one another. My mother cried for help, my father shouted obscenities at her. My body shook side to side with rage and fear. I leaped off my bed and tiptoed to the door. I walked along the corridor and saw my sister standing in front of my parents’ bedroom. She had heard it too. I whispered her name, but she stood paralysed pressing her back against the wall. I walked on and the screams got louder. The old wooden house creaked under my feet. I approached the spot where she stood, pale as a sheet of paper. I told her to turn and face the wall. Seconds later came the big bang.

It was the sound of a .38 bullet leaving the barrel of an old Colt .38 revolver with furious and unforgiving speed. It was the sound of the gun my father kept on top of the wardrobe, under a pile of cheap porn magazines. It was the sound of the .38 gun I reached out for, the gun whose trigger I pulled, producing that explosive sound as the bullet was fired. The bullet sliced the air leaving a perfect supersonic line of sound and smoke that cut the night and pierced through my father’s bowels like an iron spear thrown with the mighty strength of a savage and enraged warrior. The bullet ruptured his skin, his muscles and all the tissues and arteries it found on its way. It perforated his intestines and tore through his spine, crushing the discs that held his body erect leaving only a dent in the cold cement wall behind the bed, against which the man sat naked and immobile, bleeding and dying, with a glazed, mummified, lifeless smile plastered on his incredulous face.

‘Give me the gun!’ ordered my mother as she snatched it from my hand. She pointed it at my father’s head and then fired another round.

* * *

People came and went that night. Amongst them were the only few policemen in town; one took my mother away and the other hung around feeling pity on our behalf. He also kept people away from the body. Meanwhile, an old man with a ridiculous shirt and a small camera around his neck took photographs between one fag and the next. No one was dusting surfaces with small brushes, spreading white powder over objects or sticking tape on furniture. Nobody wore latex gloves or masks or goggles – the town was called Uberapitanga, not New York City.

My mother was taken away and locked in a room with bare concrete walls and a door made of tin. Three weeks later she was condemned by a jury formed of the cream of society amongst whom were the uneducated wife of a drug dealer, the baker who was part of a paedophile ring, the wife of the mayor who stole from a charity fund, the ex–policemen who worked for farmers as a hit man, the manager of a bank who lost money that wasn’t his, and an excommunicated priest who was caught being banged by one of his catechist boys.

The trial resulted in a unanimous verdict: twenty–five years locked away in a female penitentiary near the capital. My father was taken to the local cemetery. While my mother wrestled with her new cellmates, who tried to make their way into her vagina with a piece of lead pipe, my father lay six feet under a cheap patch of cemetery ground.

A month in prison and my mother was dead. ‘She swallowed blades,’ they said. Then they dumped her in the cemetery, next to the hole where my father laid. She thought death would give her freedom. She was wrong. There they were, for the whole of eternity, rotting together, six feet deep under the red earth.

2

Bone Marrow Soup

Let me tell you about Uberapitanga. At the time of my parents’ deaths, there were twenty thousand people living there and many of them were mad. Some said it was the high–speed wind that blew from the east. Others thought it was the high concentration of drugs that were trafficked every day through the town. Uberapitanga had its own community of drug dealers, all of whom found it an attractive place to set up business: it was close to Paraguay and Argentina, it offered cheap and unregulated labour, uncontrolled borders, clandestine airports, cheap guns, outlets for money laundry and all that comes with the business. A puppet mayor, a corrupt judge and a mediocre police force (the police car often ran out of petrol!) ensured the traffic was never jammed. So, although small, the town was not peripheral to the traffic – quite the contrary.

But it wasn’t only the wind or the drugs. Uberapitanga was also known for being the coldest place in the whole of the state, and one of the coldest in the country, and it was to the cold alone that some attributed the madness. Some said the thin air of the high altitude limits rational thinking, inducing a state of chronic thoughtlessness that from time to time gripped people by their brains until they did something stupid. Some went beyond stupid and lost it completely. The geographic isolation of the town furthered the process.

Some caboclos even thought that madness was caused by the spirits that haunted the town. I was once told that the murdered native people of that land still visited the ancestors of those who had killed them; first for the gold, then for the land and then for the wood and finally for the water.

Barnabé, a caboclo who slept all day and drank all night, once told me when visiting my father that ‘if Brazil is a melting pot, it is stirred by the devil’.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Sure kid, I’ll tell you, but don’t tell your father I told you–’

‘Ok.’

‘Right, so one sunny Tuesday, a very unimportant Tuesday...,’ he had to stop to cough and spit and take a sip ‘...one of them construction men was digging the soil where they intended to build a block of apartments for the perfumed people that go about in them shiny cars, you know – them. Now, as the diggers rolled in and began to remove the earth, bodies, dozens of them, were discovered. They were just lying there like rubbish – no caskets, no headstones, not even an old rag over their faces – nothing. They were buried in their clothes, thrown in the mud like diseased beasts in every position you can think of, as if they landed there like when a kid like you throws a broken toy away...’

‘So they were...’

‘Shhh, I think I heard something,’ said Barnabé covering my mouth with his dirty hand.

‘Oh come on...don’t be such a chicken,’ I begged of him as I tried to escape his grip.

‘All right, you’re right, it’s nothing.’ He coughed and spat a little more then grabbed the litre of cachaça and gobbled down a tenth of it. ‘Ahhh, that’s better,’ he said, wiping his mouth.

‘Come on, tell me more…and quick, before he comes...’

‘All right, all right, so...there were bones of all sizes and shapes, male and female, children and their parents and their grandparents – they were natives, caboclos like me. Now, anywhere in the world people would have stopped the building and opened an investigation, but no, not in Uberapitanga. The same man who owned the construction company was one of the farmers you should know well... ’

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘Colonel Ercílio Paz,’ said Barnabé.

‘The mayor?’

‘Yes kid, Mr Mayor himself,’ said the sun–scorched man.

‘That’s a crazy story!’

‘That’s no story, kid.’

‘So what happened next?’ I urged the half–toothless man to tell me.

‘The colonel knew very well what that meant and he fled to the capital. In the meantime, the police were contacted and so they went to the hole and there…’

‘What? What did they find?’

‘What do you think? Asked the man as he grabbed the bottle.

‘I don’t know! Just say it, damn it!’

‘They found nothing, kid – nothing. The bodies had vanished as if they’d never been found in the first place. All they saw was the foundation for the new building – still fresh. Some say they’re still there somewhere lying under tons of concrete. Some believe they were dug up again and thrown downstream. Whatever you choose to believe, I know that their spirits now haunt the town and those who killed them – I see them everywhere.’

My father, who had been listening to it all from the other room, rushed in and grabbed old Barnabé by the scruff.

‘GET OUT! OUT OF HERE! YOU FILTHY PIECE OF SHIT… YOU SAVAGE… GET THE FUCK OUT… DRUNKEN LIAR – WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? FILTHY LITTLE SAVAGE!

Barnabé recoiled into a ball as he sat on the floor. He protected himself by covering his head with his hands and knees as my father towered over him like an enraged Gorilla, frothing in the mouth and spitting his saliva, as he kicked the man on the floor.

‘I TELL YOU WHAT YOU ARE…YOU ARE A LITTLE PIECE OF SHIT – THAT’S WHAT YOU ARE! A LITLE SAVAGE PIECE OF SHIT! Here, take your bottle and vanish, out of my sight, you ungrateful son–of–a–bitch!’

My father was a drunk who hated other drunkards and nobody likes to talk about stuff that happened in their backyard I suppose, especially if the man being accused was also the man who paid you.

The same way no one ever talked about the poverty they lived in, the same poverty that drove them insane with hunger, boredom and a taste for miracles. It was the farmers, the lawyers and doctors who held on to the money. The rest were poor caboclos who ate sopa de tutano (bone marrow soup): the destitute, uneducated descendants of the ethnic stew that constitutes the Brazilian people; indigenous blood, black blood, white blood, all intertwined in one gene soup seasoned by Satan himself, as Barnabé would have had it. That was before he got drunk and fell head first into a ditch, drowning in thirty inches of water.

* * *

In the aftermath of the big bang, people came and people went. Some offered help others took what was left. One of my mother’s five sisters belonged to the first group. She took me in for a while and found me a job, while my sister, a teenager like me only a little older, fled without saying a word. She couldn’t look at me anymore, after what I had done. I disgusted her. I let my mother go to jail and to die there. I killed my father. I let my mother perish for a crime I had committed. Nobody seemed to know where my sister headed. The police went after her but after a couple of days they gave up. Some time later, there were rumours she was working as an escort in the capital. Some believed she was in fact living in a brothel somewhere in São Paulo – but nobody really knew for sure. I didn’t really care. In fact I was relived. I was more worried about what I was going to do next. And since I didn’t know what to do or where to go, I stayed where I was.

After some time, I found a job in the town’s only accountancy office and there I worked for three years as a delivery boy, cleaner, typist and eventually ‘computer expert.’ The office, owned by Senhor Eliseu Farias, a man who looked like a penguin with glasses on the tip of his beak (I mean, nose), was the first place in town to purchase a computer – a Macintosh – after Senhor Eliseu read in Accountancy Quarterly that ‘…the information revolution is coming to stay and accountants of all nations must unite!’

Nobody knew what to do with the thing, so anyone could claim to be an expert. A Máquina – ‘The Machine’ – as they called it, was permanently wrapped in a plastic cover and it occupied the whole second floor of the three–storey building. The accountancy office took most of the ground floor and Senhor Farias, the chief accountant and proprietor of the firm, occupied the top floor. There he lived with his wife and daughter, a spoiled little witch who at the age of six already knew the conversion rate for every important currency in the world.

The computer sat on an especially designed wooden desk. It remained unplugged, in case ‘the electric grid contaminates it with something,’ as Senhor Farias asserted one day in such an authoritative manner that would have made Bill Gates look like an amateur. As a result, I was the only person who turned it on – secretly – on Friday afternoons after Senhor Farias had gone up two floors. A colleague, João Schmidt, o ‘Pimpa’, (a tall Germanic type with blue eyes, crooked teeth, yellow hair combed on the side, long fingers and skin white as chalk) and I discovered we could play Pac–Man using the machine’s keyboard. From then on we spent most Friday afternoons beating record after record, o Pimpa trying to forget why he had chosen to work for Senhor Eliseu for the past decade and me trying to avoid the despair and disgust stamped on all those faces.

The same aunt who found me that job also put a roof over my head. I shared a bedroom in her house with her son Tiago, or ‘Ti’ (because in Brazil everyone has a diminutive nickname) a young boy whose onion farts kept me nauseated throughout the night. My aunt loved to cook onion soup, not that they had much else. The money I earned from my forty–hour Monday–to–Friday job was divided into three parts. One third went to my aunt for half–room and board. Another third went to the police, or the pigs, as we called them. I bought them beer and cheap whisky so they would continue to search for my sister. I did that to keep them thinking I was the good guy in this whole story and not for any real interest in my sister’s whereabouts. The final third I used to buy second hand books, shoes and the things I needed for my evening classes.

With whatever I was left with I would go to the Sunday movies at the only cinema in town: a twenty–five seat room with a screen so small you’d think you walked into someone’s living room. There were two choices: Bruce Lee or Jerry Lewis. To escape boredom, after Bruce Lee, I’d go home and beat the shit out of my cousin. If he cried, I’d give him half a chocolate bar and he would stop. In Brazil, corruption starts early.

Living in a small southern Brazilian town in the 1980s was not much different to living in East Germany when the communists were there. There was a total and complete lack of novelty, the town was monochrome and either farmers or army soldiers were the most common categories of people one would find. Besides the large farmland, the town had also an enormous military army base that served no offensive, defensive or any other purpose whatsoever. Half of the town was in the army, because in the army young men get fed. The rest were farmers or poor peasants who worked in the fields doing low–paid seasonal work in the cattle ranches; playing cowboy. There was also a third category of people, who begged in the streets and were invisible to the rest, and I don’t need to talk about them.

Despite the vast farmland surrounding the town, my mother used to queue for hours at the shops for milk and bread. The economy was so stagnated that farmers preferred to throw their produce to the pigs rather than sell it. The president of the republic – an oligarch who came to power after the sudden death of the elected man – was no Nobel Prize–winning economist, and in his claim to reduce inflation he decided misery was good enough for the rest of us. So the usual thing happened: he grew richer and the people grew poorer.

In those days I wore clothes handed down by my older and wealthier cousins. If I needed new shoes my mother would take my old ones to the shoemaker and he’d give her a discount on a new pair of soles in exchange for some home–made bread. My mother was a good baker when she had ingredients to bake with. The new soles would keep my feet dry for another month or so before they would need new soles again, and so the shoemaker would get his fresh loaf of bread in a seemingly perpetual monthly cycle.

Barefooted kids played football out in the streets and that’s the sole reason as to why Brazil is so good at it: it’s cheap. Kids play with rotten lemons, oranges and old socks, and just about anything that can be made into a ball. While my mother sold bread and crocheted pillowcases for the better–off neighbours, my father drove an old Volkswagen van that had no breaks. It had so many holes we nicknamed it ‘the sieve’. When it rained the water came in and rust ate the car alive. He drove it to and from abattoirs, collecting carcasses and picking up bones to sell to the hopeless, the drunkards and the indigent, single mothers and injured toothless men, who bought them cheaply to make soup.

* * *

Not long after my parents died, I began to meet new people as I joined the weekly pilgrimage to one of the two clubs in town: the Workmen’s Club. The other place, the Union Club, was for the exclusive use of the moneyed class: the wealthy farmers, the politicians, the lawyers, the drug dealers, and the petit–bourgeois businessman. The owner ostracised everyone else by charging high membership rates that only such people could afford. For the rest of us there was the Workmen’s Club, a cheap disco with a bar the size of the Titanic and a large dance floor where people line–danced and showed off their polished imitation leather boots and jean trousers bought cheaply at the Lebanese brothers who owned the only discount clothes shop in town. In the Workmen’s Club, I became acquainted with some small drug dealers, the small fish, some guys belonging to the armed gangs, and all sorts of other rejects: the scum of little society.

The Workmen’s Club was the only place that offered some form of entertainment for no entrance fee. With its imitation of American country music and Paraguayan whisky, it turned out to be a pretty democratic place where the police and criminals, chicken thieves and other equally untalented professionals – rogue plumbers, drunken fingerless wood–cutters, butchers and bin men – would mix and match, often not so harmoniously. Now, despite the numerous professionals who attended the club, we were also graced with the presence of the only pimp in town who sometimes would bring along his prostitutes. They’d turn up in the pimp’s old brown Ford Belina, crammed in, screaming, drinking and kicking: a nightmarish, denigrated South American version of the handsome Italian–American gangster with his big Lincoln Town Car and beautiful American girls, who poured him expensive whisky while he rolled into the party.

No! Donizetti was the only pimp in Uberapitanga and an old brown Ford Belina was what he drove, cheap cachaça was all his whores could afford and old, re–mended, fishnet tights under tattered, over–stretched, mini–skirts was all they could afford to wear. Fights would often break out and someone would die of a knife through the lung or a bullet in the eye. Good alcohol was expensive. Those who could afford it made damn sure everyone else saw them drinking it. They stood proudly at the bar, talking loudly about how bad what they were drinking was, and how much better whiskey was waiting for them at home. Right there economic capital was transformed into social capital and that might get you laid, promoted or perhaps even wealthier. But the blatant display of the slightest sign of wealth could also get you into trouble; extortion and a good beating could be waiting just around the corner. Those looking for a reason to give a toss made sure nobody noticed the bottle of cheap liquor hidden in the inner coat pocket or down the trousers.

One night, in a dark corner of the club, while discretely having a sip of Paraguayan scotch (which was once found to contain chemicals used in the manufacturing of rat poison diluted with tea) that I had smuggled into the room, a bottle Schmidt had given me as a reward for having beaten him on Pac–Man, I was approached by the son of the owner of the only pizza place in town. His name was Rico Picanha, son of Senhor Nelson Baptista Picanha. The latter was a Jesus worshipper who liked to think of himself as related to the Europeans ‘…who crossed the Atlantic and discovered this blessed land, this Eden, when navigating in their mighty ships, those who came and educated the Indians and ended their ignorance – for the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ and bless the Jesuits, bless the saints, bless, bless… God bless…’

‘Ok mate, here is the deal,’ announced Rico. ‘I know you have some shit with you. Now it just so happens that I have some shit with me – wanna swap? It’s in the boot of my car, outside. How about you come with me, we invite some girls, and we drink your shit and sniff my shit and have a little fun, huh, huh, what do you say, huh?’ he proposed euphorically.

‘Why do you do that? I replied. ‘Aren’t you the son of the pizza man? You must have enough money to buy yourself a beer or two?’

‘Yeah, yeah, sure, but that’s beside the point, totally beside the point! My dad doesn’t approve of me drinking, let alone playing in the snow,’ he said winking.

‘You see, we are Baptists, and by rule we shouldn’t drink. And he would know if I drank in here, you see he’s friends with the owner. Besides, it would be a lot more fun that way. So what do you say, donkey boy?’

‘All right,’ I said suspiciously.

‘But no funny business, and don’t you ever call me ‘donkey boy’ again.’

‘All right, all right, you said it man you said it. We’ve got a deal. I’m Rico Picanha by the way, but people call me just Rico. What’s your name?’

‘Hi, Just Rico, I’m João, João de Deus,’ I said.

‘No, no, my name is just Rico, not ‘Just Rico.’’

(Yes, I know, you idiot, I thought to myself)

‘Are you related to the de Deus family? The family whose wife killed her husband and then killed herself?’ he asked.

‘Yes, the husband was my father and the wife was my mother.’

As often happened when people learned who I was, the blood left his face and after a moment of silence, what sounded like a sincere and embarrassed apology took the shape of a long philosophical monologue that made no sense at all, but somehow made him look and sound concerned and, at the same time, confused. After I cut his ramblings on the nature of life and the phenomenon of death short of their triumphant end, we made our way through the moving, drunk and aroused crowd. Rico, a tall and handsome type with strong black hair, dark brown eyes and side–burns running down his square, masculine, tough–guy face, pulled a couple of girls aside and told them of his plan.

They followed us out of the club and into the parking lot. Between us, we drank the whole bottle of whisky I had, along with a bottle of cheap batida de côco (coconut liquor) that the girls had with them. I had developed an antipathy for most girls, whom I found utterly pointless, and my general disgust for sex didn’t make this any better. But the Paraguayan scotch, at fifty percent volume, loosened my tongue and settled my stomach, and I was no longer in control of my mouth, hands or legs.

One of the girls and I occupied the back seat of the car while Rico and the other girl took the front. In a matter of minutes Rico had snorted two lines and invaded the chick, making her scream and contort herself in the front seat. He kept putting his finger in her mouth while turning her bouncing arse up and towards me.

‘See that? Do you see that? Meat! Meat! Oh come here you little bitch; papa will show you his little toy...’ By then I had only managed to tentatively put my left hand onto the girl’s right breast while clumsily chewing on her left ear. That was before I vomited on her lap. By the time Rico and the girl were done, I was still apologizing to the girl who sat next to me apoplectically. Rico, however, was insatiable and he tried to have it again, this time with my stunned lady–friend. But she had had enough of the whole thing and snapped:

‘YOU IDIOTS, YOU STUPID MORONIC IDIOTS! GO SHAG YOUR MOTHERS!’

But Rico let the girl know just how frustrated he was with the situation:

‘Yeah, yeah, look here you cunt, why don’t you get this precious fanny of yours and stick it up your arse?’

While this exchange was going on, I was still vomiting Paraguayan scotch and coconut liquor, now behind Rico’s car.

After this first encounter, Rico and I spent most of our free weekends working on his various projects. One of these involved climbing up a tree next to the mayor’s house armed with a pair of binoculars, to spy on the mayor’s hot–shot seventeen year–old daughter getting undressed. Or we would steal fire extinguishers from new apartment blocks and sell them to buy marijuana, or fake ID cards so we could get in at Donizetti’s. Sometimes we would steal the only police car in town and take it for a ride while the officers were in the club. Then Rico would call the police officer in command to report the crime. Being bored and young is always a dangerous mixture, and although we didn’t let things get out of control that often, they kind of did.

The best example of that took place when Rico decided it was a good idea to set some fireworks around his uncle Jonas’ chicken barn, to scare his chicken and wake him up. The fuse got out of control and sparked wildly all over the barn. The dry straw that covered the wooden floorboards caught fire and consumed the whole barn in minutes, killing one hundred and forty hens and seven prizewinning cocks in the largest chargrilled chicken barbecue the town had ever seen.

People came from all over town to the rescue, but it was too late. Not a single chicken survived. They couldn’t even be eaten. The carcases had to be thrown away because the burned feathers were stuck on the remaining flesh. Rico and I fled the scene unseen, while Jonas, an avid member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, stood in his Winnie-the-Pooh pyjamas screaming to the four corners of the night:

‘THE LAST DAYS ARE COMING…I TOLD YOU SO, YOU SINNERS; HERE IS THE SIGN THAT THE DEVIL IS FIGHTING BACK…BUT YOU LISTEN TO ME, PEOPLE, YOU LISTEN TO ME!!! THIS DEVIL, HE MAY HAVE WON THIS BATTLE, BUT NOT THE WAR. ‘TIS ONLY BUT A SMALL VICTORY! YES, YES, LISTEN UP ALL OF YOU: JESUS, YES, GOD’S SON IS COMING DOWN FROM HIS CELESTIAL HOME AND THE DEVIL WILL LOSE THE FINAL WAR…JESUS CHRIST IS COMING, DO YOU HEAR ME, THE SON OF MAN IS COMING…’

Rico and I heard Jonas screaming his prophecy from the fields as we ran to escape the crowd. But even with the fires of hell burning high up into the night, even with the brightness of the winter days and the crisp mountain air that froze upon the wild frost–bitten fields of that God–forsaken land, and the days and nights I spent with Rico, drinking and gorging in insanity, my life was one bone marrow soup: tasteless, poor, unsatisfying; the leftovers from somebody else’s feast.

3

A Vision

Life moved on, but to nowhere in particular. Every piece of destiny seemed in direct contrast to every possible virtue I might have possessed and two options presented themselves to me: follow my parents down their