This mayhem tonight

Sanctuary. Mithraeum, full of people all around. From the distance here in this caged utility vehicle the movement of townspeople can be seen very easily. It's twenty to midnight now. I ask the boys what those people are doing around the Mithraeum. Andrés explains it is townspeople coming to salute us and wish us good luck down in the Obscure Catacomb of Death, Annihilation and Infinite Mayhem. It's twenty to midnight now. On the seat facing me there is Anderson sitting like he'd rather not touch the dusty old seat.

"Still afraid to soil your pristine garments, Anderson?", Renan wound up his friend, his sweet revenge for having his leg pulled while drooling blood in yesterday's session at the Mithraeum.

"Good blood is the one that comes from the tongue, Renan", one tiny Mineiro winked at the other tiny Mineiro.

I and six tiny inhabitants of this lost city in Minas Gerais on the caged back of an utility vehicle, transported like cattle. Making jokes to soothe the mix of sadness and tension that is obvious in the air. I don't feel tension coming from Renan, only if it's the anticipation of knowing he'll be down in the arena in less than an hour, hugging a bull some fifteen times as big as himself, studying the best position to initiate the kill.

"Renan's tongue has healed, I can see", Andrés eagerly tried to relax.

"White suits you fine, Ms. Grisam", said Bruno that was talking to Adriano in soft voice all the while while we shook like hell on the back of the vehicle.

"You too are cute in white, brother Taurino", and I laughed a half-laugh.

Anderson now talked to Guilherme and Bruno. Adriano, Andrés, Renan and I were in total silence as the utility vehicle approached the Mithraeum. When we parked, people started gathering at the back of the car to see us get off. It was hard to though with so many people at us wanting to witness the seven loonies together, maybe for the last time. Good-luck charms and wishes washed all over us, hugs, handshakes and a torrent of taps on our shoulders and backs. Andrés asked me for my glasses, he put mine together with his and gave the two pairs to his father, while I tried to sign the tee of one of the young natives of Taurinos that has come in white too, "to bring on the good light of Mithra and his good vibes", even not being doomed to take part in the ceremony as we are.

And one of those who come to wish us good luck is master Danilo. Always smiling, the kind of Mineiro that knows the value of a smile and a good mood. He drags me out of reach and says, "I told you, once you have the name in the book, there's no holding. The book is alive, it can remember what you and me cannot anymore. Good luck tonight, "sá" Stella. I'm sure the King Star will guide your steps in that darkness", and he held my hand in his. I don't know why I felt nicer like an oasis amid the chaos that has begun to take its toll from me. And the ceremony hasn't started yet.

We started descending the stairway of the Mithraeum one more time. Andrés had trouble closing the trap-door this time from so many people still around the sanctuary. The lights in the staircase lighted the way until a certain flight down there. The rest was darkness. And we knew what lurked down there. As we went down each step, the noises of people still outside the Mithraeum mingled with the sounds of metal of the bull shed down there. If I had no idea what a descent to hell was, now it was plain for me to see.

When we got to the end of the stairway to hell, Andrés turned off its lighting. Absolute darkness, you wouldn't see your hands even if you put it in front of your eyes, moos as loud as ship whistles, the hellish noise of the metal bars for the bull shed. The noises of people around the Mithraeum had been long left in the past. The present was darkness and all that hellish noise, before Andrés turned on the lights in the sanctuary.

When he did, the sanctuary came alive out of the blue. The mid-light everywhere you looked at, the ghastly focus right on the center of the arena. We sat down on the grandstands and no eyes could make it past the circle down there. The noise of the bulls and grids was loud, almost unbearably loud din. Andrés turned on a small digital clock that projected the hours on the back wall of the sanctuary, making the ambient even more phantasmal. In this moment, there were only ten minutes to go to midnight. Renan talked in very soft voice to his brother and Andrés. What he asked for I couldn't hear, but he was quick to get a negative answer from Andrés.

"No, Renan; your brother is not going to tape you in the arena to upload to no fucking You Tube and period. What happens here is to stay in your memory only."

Andrés swapped places with Anderson so he could be closer to me, "I apologize for the way I treated you down in the arena yesterday. I was nervous, sad, angry, all at once. What I said I'd do I will really do in case you fail, but there are better ways to say that to someone. Am I forgiven?"

I didn't say a word. I heard his words far away, as if coming from another dimension onto a psychophonic magnetic tape. He repeated the question three more times and gave in, I wouldn't say a word. He then changed the subject.

"You're the last in line. Careful with the floor, the arena is going to be just a pool of blood, hide, horns and viscera as you finally make it there. The burden of finishing the ceremony (and finishing it well) is all yours… Are you paying attention?"

He stared at me for some time as though he were trying to read what was going on in my mind. Didn't seem successful in doing so and went back to his original place on the grandstands. I glanced at the wall. Two minutes to midnight and, looking at the wall clock too, Anderson starts singing softly like he was Bruce Dickinson just to relax a bit:

"The killers breed or the demons seed, the glamor, the fortune, the pain. Go to war again, blood is freedom's stain, but don't you pray for my soul anymore. 2 minutes to midnight. The hands that threaten doom. 2 minutes to midnight. To kill the unborn in the womb."

Two Minutes To Midnight, written and performed by Iron Maiden.

"Anderson, focus on the ceremony and nothing else now. It's time for war", reproached Andrés.

At midnight sharp, Andrés had everyone hold hands. He begged the King Star for the energy required for all of us to perform well in the battle and all those beautiful things one says in a prayer. He asked his brethren to let all of their maximum ferocity flow for enforcing the law of men in this hell dominated by bulls and uncertainty.

Renan had his body agitated, in feverish yearning for finally stepping into the arena. Andrés asked him to wait and turned on another thing: a small oscilloscope that started producing a humming sound that changed in tone and modulation randomly, that mixed to the sounds of metal from the bull shed creating din well beyond the strongest imagination. When din was the only thing to be heard in the whole of the sanctuary, maddening the bulls that started kicking the metal bars all around them in hellish chaos, he finally allowed Renan to begin the killing.

The others started screaming and shouting to encourage him (as if it was required for Renan). He walked resolute to the entrance of the circle holding his sword, stepped on a slab in front of the gate, pressing it down and unlocking the gate. The kid looked up to the ceiling of the sanctuary, crossed himself and stepped on another slab, this one right inside the arena. It closed the gate behind Renan and opened the first bay so the bull could break free. He did and the all the energy held back in the darkness for days and days in that tiny bay exploded inside the circle as a bomb would.

Renan was the target. The only moving thing in the circle besides the Sacred One himself. The animal charged into the kid only to find the iron protective bars of the circle with his horns. Renan amused himself making him collide against the bars and dent his forehead more and more as he did it. At last, tired of the game, Renan came on to the Sacred One with an angry expression and attitude and harpooned the animal on the top of his back, as he himself had taught us. The force I saw him deploy in the very act was physically impossible.

The Sacred One twisted his body in pain, while Renan already mounted him right after the sword and spun the blade inside the wound as a devoted and efficient torturer. As if he were stirring a cauldron of soup. The hole was now visible from the grandstands where we were and managed to drive the kid insane as the blood started flowing free from the more than open wound. I saw Renan withdraw his sword from the wound with only one movement, stick his own face into it and start drinking the animal's blood that overflew. And I saw him burying the sword in another random spot of the Sacred One and widen the first wound with the help of his hands alone.

"Watch him and learn from a true master", shouted Guilherme to me, voice fainted amid the hellish din all around us. I was too overwhelmed to give him an answer but I knew Renan had barely started the show.

It was the end for that Sacred One. The body all taken by atrocious shaking, the sad, painful and angry mooing that would never stop while the little devil opened more and more the wound until he literally disappeared into it. This can't be happening. The deeper he went into the Sacred One's body the more viscera were chucked out of his body as if they were unimportant pieces of rubbish, landing on top of one another on what was already a pool of blood. The others screamed and shouted excited, until all came to a halt. Only the animal still shaking, alone in the center of the circle.

All of a sudden, the very rib cage of the Sacred One was pulled off his body and thrown to the center of the arena. The animal opened like a shell and Renan jumped to the outside, covered in blood and fluids, grabbing the almost dead animal by one of the legs proceeded to tear it into thin slices under the eyes of all the Taurinos alike with nothing but his bare hands.

"Good, yes, you've done it well. Here is a small prize. The history of the world."

History Of The World, written and performed by Gang Of Four.

"Did you guys like my performance of birth?", was the first thing the little monster clad in layers of blood and viscera and other disgusting things asked as he made it back to the grandstands.

"I feel like barfing", I told him, half joking, half seriously, it was hard to hear myself amid all the din.

"You might as well do it to my face. What is a barf for one that is already shit all over?", and the little disgusting thing laughed his ass out and started urinating himself from so much laughter.

"Renan, enough; don't be so fucking disgusting", pondered Andrés, but actually holding his own laughter back.

I had to laugh too at the bizarre of the situation as a whole. Down there in the circle, the pieces and splinters of what had once been a bull. Not one more spasm of life. Andrés looked at Bruno and liberated him to go down to the circle. Like Renan, he stepped on the small slab, forcing the gate to open. The bull shed's bays all came alive at once, more and more noise until it seemed to pierce our eyes. Once inside the circle he too raised his eyes to a point above the sanctuary and crossed himself.

"Certain things go better seen than explained", Andrés was now beside me on the grandstands as Bruno stepped on the inner slab, forcing the gate to close and opening the second bay. The same blast of energy as before, the huge and dark thing springing right on him, but nothing that would intimidate the young matador. Somewhere in the beginning of his fight he grabbed the Sacred One by one of his rear legs and pulled him back to himself with inexplicable violence.

I can't help but thinking the movements of both Sacred One and handler belong to no laws of physics we know of. Something happens in that arena and I don't know what it is. I guess I'll find out in time. The tension in me only increases amid all the racket, the insane and never ending shouting of the boys, the maddening frequencies of the oscilloscope humming, the sound of the grids' metal clanging like hell and the worst, the perspective of being down there too handling one of those huge and frightening creatures, and weren't this all enough, it had to be the one who claimed Arthur's life.

"Wanton violence! Blood! Sufferance! Death! Yep, show the fucker who's boss, Bruno!", the voices of the others were at once loud and muffled by the overall racket.

Bruno now submitted the Sacred One to a series of sophisticated humiliation techniques, after he had buried the sword down to its handle in the bull's fleshy back. He grabbed the Sacred One by the horns and rubbed his face on the floor until there was nothing left of that side of the face. The boy was really ferocious. It was easy to see the bull wouldn't stand him much longer. Before the eyes could accompany his movement, he was already opening the bull and lying inside the living carcass like it was a bathtub of viscera and warm blood. A love like blood, a love distorted by hate, a love-hate that didn't fit itself out of so much contradiction.

"We must play our lives like soldiers in the field. But life is short I'm running faster all the time. Strength and beauty destined to decay. So cut the rose in full bloom till the fearless come and the act is done. A love like blood, a love like blood. Every day through all frustration and despair. Love and hate fight with burning hearts till legends live and man is god again and self-preservation rules the day no more. We must dream of promised lands and fields. That never fade in season. As we move towards no end we learn to die; red tears are shed on gray. A love like blood."

A Love Like Blood, written and performed by Killing Joke.

From his relaxing bath, a fiercer Bruno emerged to give the bull his final punishment. He went on to tear the bull alive into blankets of meat, while the animal's body shook in the final moments of despair and agony even chucking pieces of meat and viscera on the grandstands, out of the limits of the circle. Andrés commented with me that he didn't even know where he was throwing the meat at, since he had lost all of his reference inside the circle and no grandstands could be seen form the arena owing to the lighting that was used in the Mithraeum.

It was the end of the second bull. Radical end and complete annihilation. Its pieces and organs were scattered all around within and without the circle, pieces that were still warm and nervous of the lost battle. Some shaking still agitated strange and mildly some of the members that had been ripped off, like in Mesmer's animal magnetism. Bruno left the circle as disgusting as Renan had, as Guilherme drew his sword from its sheath and prepared for battle.

He complied with the same rituals as his forerunners. The sign of the cross' syncretism in a moment of sacrifice, in a fight that had to be complicated down in the circle despite not looking hard from way up here and having movements that were performed too easily (whatever happens on that arena I'm each minute closer to find out). The din all around, eternally unbearable and the sensation of something growing inside of me that I cannot define. It must be the oscilloscope, the goddamned oscilloscope.

"No reason for panic, it is not so hard as it seems", said Bruno to me, sorry for my expression and still dripping blood and pieces of viscera all over.

"It's no panic", I explained, "I'm actually nauseated."

"Ever heard of Dramamine®? It's good for nausea."

"Ah, it won't work", I retorted as I saw Guilherme clutching to the great big beast down in the circle.

"Well that was just an idea…" he concluded before Andrés asked him to sit down on account of the action down there. Only by his gestures could I understand the reason, because the din was getting louder and louder all the time and threatening to deafen me.

The killing performed by Guilherme had a pattern akin to his brother's, maybe something that runs in the family. The difference was that Guilherme knew how to extract the animal's brain without it falling apart; he seemed more methodic than his younger brother. He threw the pieces far above his head and made blood and viscera fall like rain on himself and the poor huge thing. Maximum ferocity for the sake of our lives and our town.

I was at the end of the grandstands, so everyone entering or leaving the circle would have to pass me by. Great place to collect impressions, but I felt they would come and talk to me because they knew I was feeling insecure, so all of them has been quick to talk to me after they were finished with their atrocity.

What am I talking about anyway? I'll have to be as aggressive as they were and will be until my time comes. I'll have to do what they are doing, killing all of the bulls one by one in unparalleled feast of atrocity and gore. Why my very own hypocrisy? Where do I go to hide from myself? There is no way out of here that is not the one we used to enter. There is no way out of a commitment like ours.

Guilherme emerged from the hellish circle all covered in blood, gore, his own blood, even a bull's ear hanging from the sticky layer of blood on his shirt, and lots of glory. A true warrior, slightly gored and all. Though I was brooding I could see what was left of his Sacred One. The arena is now the fully-blown pool of blood and viscera promised by Andrés. Now it is Anderson preparing to descend.

We had Anderson pulling off one of the legs of the huge thing he handled while he mooed consumed by pain and by the insane violence he was an accomplished victim of. Without any conditions to follow on for want of a leg to sustain his enormous body, it was easy for Anderson to pull off the rest of them, including his tail and finally his head in a slow and gloomy process that seemed to take hours and hours to come to a conclusion. The ease of action in him was the same that surprised me in his forerunners. I even forget the fear of everything, the crescent tension as my moment approaches, for the curiosity of finding out what there is on the arena tonight, that makes such powerful men out of these young handlers. The strange sensation grows inside of me much than before, the sensation it will never stop, expanding endlessly with no limits at all for its expansion. Andrés wants to drive us all insane with the bloody oscilloscope humming and modulating non-stop.

We had Adriano mounting the bull and not being less ruthless than Renan had been. On the contrary, sometimes he seemed to surpass his grim little friend. I gasped, astonished at his cruelty and extreme ferocity, what was not a small thing considering all the atrocity I had witnessed so far.

Andrés finally descended for his handling. The shouting was intense as he complied with the many rituals before entering the ring and locked the gate behind himself. His was one of the most interesting and tense handlings of the night, but he knew well where he was stepping amid the chaos of viscera, members, heads, horns and blood the arena was becoming more and more at each Sacred One annihilated. It would be beautiful weren't it that gross activity I have described here. And yes, you know what became of the huge bull after Andrés was finished.

Andrés came up from the circle with the bull's head in his hands and put it at my side. The modulation of the oscilloscope even interfered with my field of vision. Little spots, all colors started forming while Andrés talked to me. I saw his lips moving as he pointed at the bull's head but the sound was the din and nothing else. I tried to articulate some sounds to beg him to lower the sound a bit. Not only did he give me the sword and order me to descend but he turned up both volume and frequency of his hellish sound system. I prepare to die as I look at the boys who are curious, from the top of their cover of excrements and glory in the arena, to see I would fare. Some look a bit scared and that's the last I see of them before I descend to such Dantesque circle.

I stop at the legendary gate all my forerunners have crossed, no exception (and how many more before them?). I look at the last bay and the monster kicking furiously inside. Turn my eyes to the pool of blood in the arena where I am going to be bogging down in a few moments. Step on the slab outside and the gate opens with a noise that gets to scare me. Then I step in. I am crossing the Rubicon.

Now just what I need to put an end to my life: step on the other slab. I approach it as the bull that killed Arthur starts kicking and now even deforming the bars behind him. It seems to me if I don't free the animal into the arena it will eventually do it himself. It's me who has to step on the slab, when I feel prepared. What the fuck? How the hell have I been prepared for this? I start crying and the violence of the bull inside the bay fills me with the infinite horror of knowing it will escape and will have to face it anyhow. The gate is still open behind me. The chance of escaping it symbolizes doesn't seduce or move me. Without further ado, here's me, looking at the ceiling of the sanctuary, crossing myself and stepping on the second slab. This time will be forever.

With a thunder among the noise around me the gate closed and locked behind me. At the same time the last bay's gate crashed open in front of me. The sound I heard from the grandstands and the shouts of the kids is long gone now. I am isolated within this trap. At last, my death. And the worst: I can't even close my eyes since I have to pay attention.

Nothing happens.

Cautiously I take two steps to the left to look in the bay. The monster is there. I have to act of my own initiative now. I approach the bay slowly and he looks at me while I come closer. Suddenly, it springs over me and it's so soft when he gently and slowly pushes me over the whole circle of the arena and crushes me against the wall. I seem to feel nothing with all the impact that half a ton might have on a body. I don't know what side of the arena the boys are at now, I have lost all my reference. This is the mystery, is this why it seemed to be so easy for the kids to do what they did? I can't forget there is a huge face of a bull breathing on me, I'm pinned, the sword is out of my reach among the viscera, the racket is wearing me out, the stress under the weight of the animal is intense and in spite of this all, I manage to stand up. From that moment on it was the unknown. The last I can remember is that I stood up despite all that hell tormenting me.

Promised you a miracle | Down memory lane

Radio Universal: A Love Like Blood