Book of brilliant things

Laptop marking six-fifteen in the morning. I am at the porch, gazing at the beauty of a cerrado that gets stranger and stranger, sadder and sadder every day, despite Taurinos' beautiful dawn.

I got the book on the corner table where the laptop is too. My curiosity falls over the most recent notes on the book, about the class of 2009's ritual. And there it is. All I saw and what I didn't see is there too. I skip the others' passages and go directly to mine. Maybe it's possible for me to remember what really happened by reading the passage as dryly told by the book.

From the beginning I realize that Renan's narration (agreed by all of the present, Andrés included) is slightly wrong. What I saw is correct. The bull didn't leave the bay at the moment the gate opened. The book even makes reference to the steps I took aside to look inside the bay. It describes how I walked closer and how he jumped over me, the fall of the sword amid the animal viscera on the floor (where it matches Renan's description), exactly what I told them I remembered. I read more and more, absorbed by such disgusting matter that the dry description of the book made three times as disgusting.

The reading of it all did me harm. Not for the bull. I felt no remorse for the destiny he met. He didn't hesitate to go through our good friend's body with his horns, why should I feel any remorse for killing him? What really did me harm was the detailed encounter with my own dark side. Things I didn't know about myself, lurking in the darkness of my personality. Many of these things matched Renan's description, but all in all, they saw a very different thing from what really happened in the arena. Our self-image so many times censors everything, trying to keep the good looks. It cleans the obnoxious image out, gives us the impression we're nothing but decent law-abiding citizens. Erases all the dirt so it won't damage our delicate mind. Here is where I stand.

I heard the noisy coils of the screen door at the porch. Andrés walks up to me, sleepy eyes, wrinkled face and the weariness of someone who tried unsuccessfully to sleep. He is sheer dismay head to toes. I can't blame him for feeling like this, but I do need to give him a jolt.

"If they think I'll swallow this story of a summary judgment without the presence of the defendant, they've got another thing coming" I said to Andrés as soon as he hit the chair.

"This morning I didn't want to wake up to this shame… What happened to us all yesterday? All was right… And soon later all was wrong. How could we come to this?"

I told him I had been reading the book. Showed him the description it made of my battle, the beginning (the point of all discord in my short narration). He glared at me. The young Mineiro was stunned at learning I had been the only one true to the facts in the last meeting. He wondered what they had really seen in the act.

"Much of what you all saw appears in the pages of the book. It's twenty and some pages. Considering that the book summarizes the passages, we have here the four hours you mentioned last night."

Andrés started reading further. A smile appeared occasionally on his face as he read. I asked him what he was smiling at. He said he had come to the part where I barked the animal alive. Said that, like the others, he worshiped me as the most atrocious of all the handlers that ever lived through the ceremony. Said that, like Renan, he wouldn't mind being a woman so that he could be me. I replied that they reminded me a lot of the tiny little sloths in the feature cartoon The Ice Age 2, a film by Brazilian director Carlos Saldanha, worshiping the sloth that was one of the protagonists of the film. He got it and laughed a whole lot remembering that particular passage of the movie.

"Ms. Grisam, only you can make me laugh in a time like this" he lowered his head and started sneaker-gazing.

"Look at me. Keep your head up. Don't let them see you like this. You did the best. We all did, you yourselves said it to me. Now they are trying to frame you for inducting a woman."

"That's how the judgment goes, Ms. Grisam."

"No, that's not. They are trying to take advantage of me being a woman. Bruno made it very clear. He openly said it should have gone wrong because there was a woman."

"Ms. Grisam, do you really think we can void the judgment because of what Bruno said in the meeting? It's so much more than this. I took a big chance, bigger than I could afford when I inducted you. There have never been women in the Society, only in the last two times. Course Bruno and my brother would maintain it happened because it was a woman. You were the only one not to remember a thing of what you did in the arena. But don't worry you won't be touched, they want to punish me instead."

"This doesn't worry me at all, Andrés. You all and the situation of the city worry me. It's been days since the ceremony took place and nothing seems to have changed in the town regarding the chaos of cattle everywhere. The landscape in town and here is getting stranger all the time, the one around this farm is worrisome too. I'm less than sure whether remembering or not what happened in the bloody arena will send the cattle back to the pens, pacify the town and bring it back to life as if by magic."

He asked me something I couldn't get because he was looking out to the mountains.

"Look at me when you speak. I can't hear you."

"What else will solve this all then?" he asked looking at me this time.

I was staring at him for long. Long, even longer than the Brazilian standard. He asked why I was doing it. For a moment, I didn't know how to elaborate what I wanted to say. I took some time to answer.

"Andrés, I want to help you. I want to help your people, your friends. But you will tell me if there's still something I should know."

"Again that story of the cattle thieves?"

"That was one of many things that were kept as a mystery."

"Were there others?"

"For instance, who came up with this idea yesterday that everyone should remember what happened in the arena so that the ceremony could be accomplished?"

He was confused. Turned his eyes to the mountains, eyed me again and seemed to come no conclusion at all.

"So…? Who came up with the idea? I don't remember seeing anything about this in the book."

In the end, Andrés didn't know how to explain where the idea came from. We started musing over its origin. Quite a while doing it. We looked up in the book, but no clue. None of the reports of meetings after ceremonies accounted for such storytelling. Andrés and I exchanged looks. He seemed ashamed for never stopping to reason about it.

"But Andrés, think it over, the guys were to sacrifice you for something that is not even in the book and therefore is not a rite in the Society?"

He gasped. Didn't manage to say anything, like his throat had been locked.

"Thank you for the voice, the eyes and the memories shine. Thank you for the pictures of living in the beautiful black and the white. Some say we'll be together for a very long time. Some say that our first impressions never will lie. I open up to take a look into the bright and shiny book Into the open scheme of things. Book of brilliant things. Book of brilliant things. I thank you for the shadows. It takes two or three to make company. I thank you for the lightning that shoots up and sparkles in the rain. Some say this could be the great divide. Some day some of them say that our hearts will beat like the wheels of the fast train, all around the world."

Book Of Brilliant Things, written and performed by Simple Minds.

Six in the evening. There is a threat of rain in the sky. Only a threat, despite all the rain that has come down on poor Minas Gerais these days. Here the intention is not to rain. There is something that blocks the humidity from coming to town. The air in Taurinos is getting drier and drier.

Duílio stopped the car in front of master Danilo's and left me, Andrés and the book. Adriano wanted to come, but he was made to stay by Duílio, Andrés and me. I took advantage of the moment to dare Adriano to find in the book the so-called rule of memorial meetings after ceremonies when we made it back to the farm. In the car, I got something of a tinnitus in my ears. Something ringing, as though my hearing was being shaken to life. I got off the car full of hope.

"Hey, the plump one is here too, good evening "sô" Andrés, "sá" Stella, come on inside. And Mr. Conselheiro, does he never stay? The hut is humble and poor but it's all yours."

Andrés explained that his father had gone downtown. Master Danilo was making some coffee. He gave us each a mug, put the sugar bowl on the table, three teaspoons and we started talking. He was eager to learn everything about the meeting and was, since we hadn't seen him since our entrance in the Mithraeum.

"Hey, I'm a lucky man. Not only one Taurino came to tell me the story, but two at once!"

Andrés smiled and said I could hear his account, not mine. Said besides getting deaf I couldn't remember what had happened to me in the arena. Master Danilo when he learned the news. He dismissed the storytelling after the ceremony, said it had never happened before. Said he understood the color thing as it was innocuous. But he thought that having an arrangement like that rule the outcome of the ceremony was a little too much. Andrés grinned at him, satisfied at learning he could defy the power of the others in the Society.

"The book is what we must follow. It's what records and remembers everything we all have long forgotten. This is where all the security for all the practices comes from", he explained, "but "sá" Stella, I can't believe what happened to you. I think such a male attitude and mentality has been created within the Society that now everything runs against women. It seems that even the invisible forces are against them, but it is the ill-will that acts as a remaining force, spoiling everything, even the person's health. Likewise, the town's children created such a barrier of ill-will against the adults in the Society that now everything seems to act against them. Saw Duílio going away? Going downtown is not so important, but he acts as if he had nothing to do with this Inner Chamber business."

"So you think this is the problem?" Andrés was interested.

"Well, that's something I know myself. From my observation. Course I could be totally wrong."

Andrés summarized the fights of them all in the arena. Then I told him what I remembered from my stand. He listened in, eyes shining with fascination. He showed especial interest in what Bruno did in the arena.

"I did exactly what he did in the arena. But it's no expression, I mean it was the same movements, pulling him by the leg, rubbing his face on the floor, same blows with the sword, opening the bull in the belly to lie inside it, everything you said Bruno did. Like him, I was second to enter the arena."

Andrés and I exchanged looks. He was fascinated with the coincidence, but according to master Danilo there was no coincidence at all: it was the same ceremony as in 1957. He suggested that we saw the records for 1957. I told him we had looked for it unsuccessfully but he said we were too involved in the story to be able to find the passages. He clearly pointed at where the records were: where they should be, prior to ours of 2009.

Down memory lane | Into the vaults of madness

Radio Universal: A Love Like Blood