Man and boy

It's five in the morning. Everything is still a bit dark, but the sight soon gets used to the light at this time of the morning. I go out to the dirt road that passes in front of the farm's gate. The gate with the name of the farm above on a sign, the legend for those who are lost in the obscurity of times and nights in town.

A strange shape on the road. A man, as far as I can tell. A staggering walk of one who has walked these roads man and boy. Now close to me, under the weight of the years, the age manifests in features that suggest kindness yet heavy of the age he's dragged to this day. He stops close to me and greets me. We start to talk. His mountaineer accent is heavy and the words are not always the ones I'd use (and the other way round too), but with a bit of good will we got to understand each other.

"You lost over here?"

"No, as a matter of fact I'm hosted by the Conselheiros way up the road…"

He looked at me with a slightly altered expression, maybe one of surprise. Would it be surprising for someone to be wandering near the place where they're staying?

"So you know the brothers that live there", he asked apparently interested.

"Yes, Adriano and Andrés, I know them", I replied.

He cast a knowing look at me. He was staring at me for long with the same look in his eyes. As though he were engaging in an inner struggle between carrying on with the talk or leaving me alone and moving on.

"Those boys… They're mean. They're so mean. Beware of them two."

"Adriano too?"

"He is too. But the plump one…"

He made another huge pause. As those in the films that seem to have frozen the moment in an unique eternity.

"What about him?"

"He's meaner. Much, much meaner than the other."

I needed to meet someone from the outside, some that had no connections — at least no direct connections — to the farm. All I have seen since I arrived is people who have bonds with the farm Taurinos on account of this or that. I try to make the man talk as much as I can.

"Do you know the two brothers well?"

"Yes, and I was their grandfather's friend."

"Then I think I need to talk to you."

He swung his head sideways.

"Not here. In my home, if you want to, at six p.m., today or any other day you can. Ask about master Danilo. You are…?"

"Stella. My name is Stella."

I told him to wait for me at six today. Said I had a lot of questions to ask. He gave me directions on how to get to his house (5 km away from the farm) e went down the road out of the blue. Spent the rest of the day thinking about how Adriano (as I saw him) could be what Danilo called "mean".

It's about five-thirty p.m. when I put myself on my way to Danilo's. Enjoying the cerrado landscapes around, learning more and more about Taurinos' rural landscapes every time I step out of the farm. I think of when I'll get to visit Taurinos' downtown. But it won't be today yet.

A little house, lost in a valley that is near now. Alone, lost in the middle of nowhere. How can one live in such isolation? Knowing the next neighbor is just so far away. Apart from not having neighbors making noise, there is the side effect of the infinite loneliness one can experience in a place like this. No electricity, no communication with anyone or anything.

The house is modest. A house made of pau-a-pique. From the inside a frail light reaches out, probably from a "kreosene" lamp.

Master Danilo receives me with a strangely mixed expression of surprise, satisfaction and caution. He points at a chair and tells me he is preparing rice, beans and a wild chicken for dinner. He invites me to have dinner with him. I accept the invitation, thinking of prolonging the visit and extracting as much as I can from his knowledge. I watch master Danilo as he deals with cooking at his firewood stove, all around lit by the lamp.The evening is now plain to see in the outside fields within the valley; the Evening Star can be seen from the window. The ambient inside the house is cozy and intimate, maybe because of the frail lighting here.

"You live here alone, master Danilo?"

"For some forty years, since I bought this plot of land, "sá" Stella."

He lays two white enamelled iron dishes on the table. Says the house is poor, but he makes a point of keeping everything tidy and clean. I look around and see he's not lying. This is unusually clean for a single man's house. Master Danilo lays the silverware and bowls with the food and, sampling the beans, I notice they'd provide us with a great meal without anything else to go with them. The man cooked wonders, there's no doubt about it. He ate distracted by the light of the lamp. All of a sudden he excused himself and left the table. He went to the lamp, trimmed its wick because it was flickering too much for his taste. He graded the light conveniently and got back at the table, breaking the spell of silence.

"What are you doing on the Taurinos farm? You're a relative of theirs?"

"Actually I was contacted in Santos, where I live, to work with Andrés, that is having some behavior problems."

"What behavior problems?"

"Too much aggressiveness, you know?"

Master Danilo had a good laugh. He said the only way to solve Andrés' aggressiveness problem was to drown the boy in a river. I looked in a serious manner at him and he went on, "if you take his aggressiveness away, what is going to be left of him?"

"What do you mean by that, master Danilo?"

"I mean the only thing you'll find in him is aggressiveness."

I told him I saw Andrés hit his brother, described the beating and he said this didn't count as it was Andrés' idea of caress and brotherly love. Said he was capable of more, much more, but it was rare that he directed this against people.

"Does he direct that to the bulls? I've seen him branding the bulls and he looked very aggressive at doing it."

"Oh, branding bulls is such a normal everyday thing."

"What is abnormal in his actions then?"

A pause fell upon us. Master Danilo took a bit more of food for his plate. Outside the night was an accomplished one, the first curiangos started going to the side of the roads with their curious calls. I looked through the window while I ate. The magnificent skies of southern Minas Gerais, the Milky Way lost in the distance dressing the night from one side to the other in the sky. I turned my eyes back to master Danilo and had him measuring to himself how much information he should pass on to me.

"It is a long story. One that compromises a lot. Are you sure you want to hear?"

"This is what I came for. Your food is delicious, but I only came here for the story."

He grinned and thanked me for the compliment on his food.

"Andrés — the boy's grandfather — and I used to hang out and wander across the whole of this region together. Since we were just kids, we hung out together all the time. We swam in rivers, stole horses for a ride that we later left near the farms we stole them from, mischievous kids' business as you know. He once found a book that spoke of this region thousands and thousands of years ago."

"Andrés told me about this book. Where is it?"

"I dunno. It's been years since I last heard of it… He liked to read so much and ended up wearing glasses from so much reading. I remember he told me the whole contents of the book. It spoke of an entity that visited the town from time to time, also known as The Big One. This entity was like an energy that existed around, but not in the town itself. The Big One inspired the bulls that lived around to found a village. You might find it funny and absurd but they did found a village, as if they were actual people."

He said that since remote times people had waited for the Advent; I asked him what the Advent was and he told me the ancient inhabitants of Taurinos waited for the arrival of the Creator that would come to bring eternal life to town. He'd come in physical body, but to give the townspeople eternal life he'd have to give his own life away. If he did it, he'd do it completely of his own volition. And nobody else would die or get sick in town, except in special cases. He didn't know how to tell me what these special cases might be.

"The Conselheiros told me about the foundation of the town. Do you believe this story?"

"Yes I do, but it's no matter for believing. It's more like going outside and seeing and feeling it in the air. Andrés and I felt in the air what the book spoke about. All the time. The Big One wanted to come to town, but something prevented him from doing it. It was us, the kids in town."

"What did you do to stop him?"

"Can I skip the part in which the bulls attacked and killed people? Did the plump one tell you that?"

I asked him why he called the boy plump so frequently (besides the obvious motivation of the child actually being overweight). He said he called his grandfather like this too for the hell of it. I told him I knew the beginning of the story, when the bulls attacked everyone and everything around in the fiercest fashion possible.

"None of the bulls in town is really tame. The Big One can't enter the town, but he manoeuvers from the outside. He doesn't let any bull come out of town alive, you know?"

I told him the experience on Sunday, and he was awed at Andrés sacrificing three robust bulls pulling them out of the city limits just to make me believe it. He kept shaking his head in disbelief.

"I told you the boy was mean… So you saw it happen. You know well how the story goes. That's The Big One not letting his seed spread out of town."

He crossed fork and knife on the plate and glanced at me, undecided whether to go on with the story or not. He eventually said that, around the same time grandpa Andrés found the book, the issues of people getting attacked and killed by the bulls started happening again. This would always happen when the entity was around, about to lay siege to Taurinos, what he did from time to time.

"People only live peacefully here in the intervals between one Law of the Bulls and another. According to the book, he appears every fifty-two years. We calculated the time and saw it was time for another Law of the Bulls."

Master Danilo told me Andrés, himself and five other boys in town started a society to drive The Big One away from town. They had created a closed arena where seven bulls of Taurinos were butchered and cut into pieces while still alive.

"The number seven repeats a lot throughout the story, no? Is it a sacred number or what?"

Master Danilo explained that seven was the sum of the two figures that formed the number 52, which happened to be the interval between one Law of the Bulls and another. I smiled and said it made a lot of sense.

"And so the seven did one bull at a time?"

"No, no, no. Each kid handled his own."

"Alone??? A full-grown bull? Did you really take part of it?"

"Well, who else but the seven of us?"

"How did you conceal this from your parents?"

"There was nothing to conceal, they knew right from the start. No adult in the tradition of the city managed to perform the ceremony without dying in the same fashion the bulls did at the city limits on Sunday, you've just told me about it. It was the children that had to deal with it."

"Has it been the children all the while? Since the beginning?"

"Yes, it has."

"Andrés told me about the ceremony in the beginning, but never told me it was children performing."

"Perhaps he didn't want to scare you."

"This would never scare me, believe me, I've seen worse things come from children his age. Weren't the parents afraid something terrible happened to their children?"

"Course they were, but what could they do? It was the only way to drive The Big One away from town. What choice did they have other than letting us kids deal with it?"

"Did the ceremony work out?"

"Oh, it did. We saw we had come to the conclusion on how things really worked for the ancient ones. We found out how it had always been done and put it into practice. This happened over some fifty years ago."

"What was the name of the society?"

"It was Taurinos' Ancient Society. The boys must be on a revival of it right now, no?"

I told him Andrés had started looking for The Big One on the farms. He was interested and I said he would come this time in one of the calves born on one of the town's farms. He looked astonished at me, as though he didn't know this part of the story.

"I would never imagine he would try to enter the city like this, "sá" Stella. But if it's this way, he might be in town right now. As the bull grows it's going to be hell. If it happens like this, this is going to be the first time he will have entered town since the beginning… Help yourself, get more food, "sá" Stella."

I thanked him, but turned it down. Asked him whether he still kept any record of the Society. He said he still had a snapshot of the seven kids together. Took ages to find it in aged weathered dog-eared notebooks he kept in a corner of the room.

I picked up the shot and was looking at it in disbelief. The weathered aspect of the paper, the scratches on its surface and the date with pretty calligraphy on the verse left no room for doubts: the shot and today were separated by a gap of at least fifty years. In the photograph, the seven battle-ready young butchers, a serious expression. With a reasonable degree of difficulty, I could tell master Danilo from the group. On the other hand, it was easy for me to find Andrés, right beside master Danilo. Looking so much like his grandson. Looking so much like…

A sensation of alarm covered the whole of my body. Andrés looked too much like his grandfather. Absurdly like him. To tell the truth, there wasn't any difference between the boy in the shot and my young client.

"He's the living image of his grandfather, eh? One would never tell them apart." He noticed my astonishment.

"How old was he when he had this shot taken?"

"He was the same age as me, twelve years old."

"Did Andrés get to meet his grandson?"

"No, he died seven years before the plump one was born. Don't ask me what he died from. No one knows what it was. They say the man was found at home, wide-open eyes, the body was already stiff. He was sound as stone as far as everyone knew."

The sensation of strangeness grows inside of me. It grows at each new word, each new fact. I gave the shot back to master Danilo, thanked him for the dinner and hospitality, said goodbye and went out to the rural night of Taurinos. Breathe in some open air, reflect a bit more about it all, something that five kilometers would allow me to do satisfactorily. The curiangos in their night calls distracted me and involved my thinking in a curious haze of comfort.

The feeling of strangeness at the sight of the shot with the kids. Yes, of course, the fact that a boy was a dead ringer for his grandfather was no matter for astonishment after all. He wouldn't have been the first. Why such strong feeling of strangeness about it, then? But why didn't I see any detail, feature in the kid that I couldn't find in his grandfather?

Mountain ranges | Seven

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