New dawn

Woke up amid the darkness of my bedroom to the soft sound of Andrés' voice. He told me had closed the windows of my bedroom so I could get up. I found it rather strange and asked why he'd do it. He told me it was going to be the first time I was going to use my eyes since I had died.

"But I used them yesterday, all the time, Andrés", I said, distrustful and finding the lad bigger even in the darkness of the room.

"Yesterday it was night when you left your body, remember? All was still very confused, plus the confusion that happened to Bruno…"

I said it was true, but even at night I could have a singular vision of everything around me. He told me it was nothing compared to what I was going to experience, since I had had some good rest. So, what he really meant was that I'd have to train my eyes to see this new dawn Taurinos and I were experiencing.

He asked me to sit on the bed and look around. My sight was still a bit obscured by the darkness of the room. I noticed some strangely familiar details around, but I was too distracted by Andrés' voice to give them much more thought. He walked up to the windows and said he was going to open the windows little by little. I'd have to simply keep looking around and tell him in case I felt dazzled by the light.

"Are you ready?"

"Yes."

He slowly opened the curtains (that were strangely familiar to me too), leaving just a finger of space between them. A formidable beam of light came into the room, making my eyes ache in a way I never supposed could be true. When he saw my reaction and the face I had made, he asked me to stay calm and not to close my eyes.

"Open your eyes again, slowly, but keep them open, Miss Grisam. Otherwise you'll never get used to the light of the day. Come on, let's try."

The light blinded me. Maybe the same light I had seen at the moment of my death. I made a huge effort to keep them open. Andrés opened them some more. The light was now a huge blur in front of me, making my eyes water intensely, "come on, Miss Grisam, you've done so many more difficult things…" and I tried hard to keep my eyes open. The blur started to disappear very slowly. He asked me to tell him when my sight became clearer. And so doing, he was little by little opening the curtains until nothing else was left to open, revealing all the interior of the bedroom.

That was my bedroom. Not my bedroom on the farm Taurinos, but my bedroom in my house in Santos! I'm stunned, it's really hard to believe. I look around, all of the details, objects, my psychology and psychoanalysis books, Man And His Symbols, one of my favorite works by Jung, my Zener cards on the nightstand, my laptop, everything! Was it all a dream in the long run, my good Lord?!

But if it was all a dream, what was Andrés doing in my bedroom?

"Did you like it? It was my father and my brother who built it during the night, along with you. All of the material here, even the bricks were taken from the dreams you were having. Your books, your personal belongings, your clothes…"

"But I heard no noises during the night!", I was simply amazed at all of that.

"Mineiros are known to work in silence, isn't it how the saying goes?" and he winked at me and gave me a little mischievous smile.

I didn't even stop to question how I had been taken from my bedroom on the farm Taurinos. I had to have retired from that phase of not believing things. Who am I right now not to believe? After all I had lived (and died) through here in Taurinos, who am I not to believe? Someone would have to be in my shoes to believe it. I can even blame it on those who call me Euclidian. But I just can't blame it on those who call me a liar.

The pain and dazzle in my sight had fully subsided, replaced by the clearest sight in the world. Living now in the world of Mithra, the god of light, my sight went beyond all reach in such a fashion I could never suppose true. So, I started to stare amazed at Andrés. His face, his glasses, his hair, his clothes, sneakers, all came to my sight with a sharpness that was absurd, aggressive, even violent, as though seeing him with this new sight could even bite me. It was awesome and frightening all at once. I had noticed how handsome he was, but it was nothing close to what I saw at that moment. He smiled at first, but started feeling embarrassed with the eyes that couldn't stop following him. I was in a state of hypnosis, diving into the vision I had of him. I had seen him so many times, but it was nothing like what I had now in front of me. There are no people like this. No, there are no people like this.

"What are you, an angel?", I asked hesitant, stunned by the sight I was having of him.

"I'd appreciate it if you could take your eyes off me. I hate it when people look at me as if I were an animal in a zoo cage."

"You've got no right to ask me that, brat. Were it your brother, Anderson or any other of the lads, it'd be different."

He felt suddenly intimidated by my way of talking. He felt my sudden anger, he was there halfway between silence, embarrassment and disappointment, since he seemed to intend the house, not himself to be the target of my attention. But I'd still take long looking at him, without being able to believe.

I took some steps back to look at the whole of him. The more I looked at him, the more I wanted to look. I myself started feeling bothered, though I couldn't help but staring at him. Andrés started stomping slightly as he always did to show his unholy impatience.

At last, much to Andrés' relief, I somehow managed to look away from him into my bedroom. Colors, textures and details jumped to my eyes as in the best experiments of Aldous Huxley with mescaline and Albert Hofmann with LSD. I walked the whole of the house. Andrés could see how much I had missed my little place, how hauting the details and colors of everything I saw were. He was smiling and shaking his head all the time.

"You'll have plenty of time to enjoy your house. Come with me, let's have breakfast on Taurinos, mom's waiting for us", he picked up my laptop and took it with him, not without my amazed look following all of his steps.

Duílio and Adriano didn't have breakfast with us. According to Aparecida, "they spent the night up, are going to sleep until later today". I didn't believe what had happened to me since I woke up. My house within the limits of the farm Taurinos, far from the main house on a lot of its own, as if my house had been relocated, brick by brick. The same details and even the same little flaws. The view of the mountains and the blue, the hauting blue of the sky were so beautiful they were frightening. The landscape of the cerrado with its microflowers creating myriads of colorful dots everywhere. I looked at Aparecida and the precision of the details haunted me again, as it had happened to me with Andrés. He told his mother I'd be acting weird for some days because it would take me some time until I got used to looking at the townspeople again. He spoke of the richness of details, colors and sharpness I experienced and said it would be a difficult phase, though it would be rich in discoveries and findings for me. Aparecida seemed to understand well what he said, though she herself did not know what dying was. If she had gone through death in some remote point of the past, she certainly could not remember what it had been like. She was quick to make me feel comfortable to escape the situation of strangeness she felt at seeing me look at herself and her son that way.

"But, Miss Grisam, get yourself some coffee, please do help yourself, there's milk, farm butter, corn bread, cheese bread, you know, make yourself at home, please do."

"It's hard to believe", I had told Aparecida, "each detail, each flaw, everything as it was" and she was all, "yes, it seems we'll have to believe the power of imagination whether or not we want to acknowledge that" and she laughed, bright and nice.

Aparecida was a wise person. Whether she was sure of what to do with this wisdom in some situations of life was completely another story. But the science of things was in her, as it was in the others. As it was in me, without my knowledge, hidden inside of me all the time.

The table was the kind of table you'll find in well-off Mineiro families' houses. The food was tridimensionally beautiful; even the unattractive labels of products made in the countryside of Minas Gerais were astoundingly sharp and colorful as a feast to my eyes. I filled my mug of coffee and milk and the foods seemed alive on the table as though they were ready to jump over me. Andrés completed his mug with coffee, grabbed a cheesebread from a nearby bowl — living legends of this town running on cheesebread — opened the laptop and Firefox — my favorite browser, coincidence or not — and another program I could not see what it was. I didn't interfere, but Aparecida asked her son to turn it off, "it's no time for gaming right now, let's just eat and have some small talk"; Andrés only smiled and said what he did had to do with our first trip coming to Taurinos, a trip Aparecida took with me and Duílio. Andrés' mother was intrigued and wanted to learn more now.

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm telling you Google Earth hasn't forgotten about us, mom", and he looked at Aparecida and me beaming.

And he turned the LCD screen so it faced us two. The other program I hadn't seen was the one he had just mentioned. It showed the city of Taurinos, its houses, its streets, all in a resolution I hadn't seen even in aerial photography of a big city as São Paulo. Aparecida was astounded, "but how come you've found it, I've been looking for the town like hell in this program and could never seem to find it?"

"It was before Miss Grisam… Well, you already know, mom", he explained, a bit embarrassed. I had to laugh, almost a nervous laughter, at all those weird things going on in front of me. I myself had tried everything I could on the Internet, name, co-ordinates, had never found the town.

"Right now", said the young Mineiro country boy, "Bruno is opening Google Earth too. He can now see Taurinos from above as we can. Now he's off to where the telephone is. He's dialing and it seems he's calling us here."

And the telephone started ringing in the dining room where we were. Astonished, Andrés' mother went to get the call. I saw by the talk it could not be anyone else but Bruno himself. Aparecida called me, eyes as big as saucers, still not used to her son's visions and passed me the phone, telling me Bruno wanted to talk to me.

"You won't believe me. I can see the town on…", said the lad on the other side of the wire, on Pinho farm.

"…Google Earth, isn't it?", I completed.

"Can you believe it? Open your laptop, connect…", his voice sounded sharp and enthusiastic, as though he himself were at my side.

"We've got it open already, Bruno. It's hard to believe, but I believe you just the same."

His voice's sharpness astounded me, even diluted by the telephone wire. Andrés asked me to call him to the farm Taurinos at four so we could have some conversation. After breakfast, he called Guilherme and Renan, Anderson and Arthur and arranged for them to come at three in the afternoon. He emphasized a request for them not to be late. I asked him why schedule different times for Bruno and for the other lads and he told me he wanted to talk about Bruno without him being present. I understood he wanted to clarify some points about yesterday's incident and particularly about my urgency of being with the lad at that moment and I asked no more questions. Aparecida only shook her head, understanding nothing of it all.

The lads started coming by car and, like what had happened to Andrés, were puzzled at seeing me stare at them hypnotized as a sailor that falls prey to the beauty of a mermaid. Adriano had already woken up while Duílio still slept the sleep of the just. I lost myself in gazing at Adriano, the implacable richness of details on his face and figure hauting the most secrets corners of me until he was frightened and walked away from me.

"I want to thank you for the house you and your father built for me. I don't think I'd feel more at home in my original house, if you ask me."

"That one within our farm is your original house, Miss Grisam. It's not as heavy and thick as the one that came from Santos, but it's still your original house. How nice you liked it and felt at home. It was worth the sleepless night in the long run", and Adriano smiled, embarrassed and bewildered when he saw my eyes couldn't find a way out of himself, "are you feeling fine?"

Andrés explained my current situation to his brother and, as the other lads arrived, the same bewilderment took over of them all as they saw me in that situation, with eyes that seemed more like microscopes examining them all around me. Guilherme frowned at me, "what the heck, Miss Grisam, it seems you've never seen us" and Renan was twice as curious as his brother. I had turned my eyes to Guilherme and seemed to eat him with them. My look landed on Renan, even with the extreme difficult I had to pull them out from his elder brother and I stopped in front of him. I absorbed each detail of his face, each line of the little Mineiro's vexed expression.

"Ah, c'mon Miss Grisam, I don't like it…", Renan started until Andrés said, "let her get used to you again, Renan; it won't help asking her not to look, she'll do it just the same."

"Why?" Renan was perplexed.

"Because she's never seen you before." said Andrés with a calm and plain voice.

Renan frowned, cast his eyes on Adriano — whose reaction I could not see for having my eyes pasted on Renan — and on his brother, eventually bringing them back to Andrés, "what do you mean, she's never seen us before? And all that has happened so far…"

"She knew us before she left her physical body. She was in a coma. What she saw of us was just a shadow all blurred and crooked."

"Is what he's saying true, Miss Grisam?", asked the tiny Mineiro looking serious at me, "and please do stop looking at me like this", asked he, going red as a tomato.

"True. I never imagined you'd have this appearance."

"What… What's changed in us?" Guilherme found it strange.

"Everything. You're bigger than I imagined, not much bigger, but you are. The colors, the details, it is just like changing a vintage black and white television for a high definition set", I spoke with Guilherme without getting my eyes off Renan, until the latter was irritated and got out to the porch stomping like hell (probably because he still thought I was making fun of them). I followed Renan with the eyes until he disappeared away from my sight. I went to the porch after him and looking at the sky, said "Renan, I'm not joking, all is very different for me now, please don't be angry at me." He started laughing between the funny and the angry when he saw me looking at the sky and his laughter drew my eyes instinctively back on him again. The others came out to the porch to see what was going on and I was gazing at them in the natural light. Gorgeous, I thought. I had never seen anything like that in my whole life. It seemed something you'd have to wait for your life to end to see, it seemed.

We sat down at the porch in the wonderful Taurinos' afternoon light and waited. It was hardly three in the afternoon when we heard a distant rumor of a car engine coming by the dirt road. Andrés said it was Mr. Feletti bringing Arthur and Anderson. It was them indeed. Mr. Feletti smiled, waved from the car window and went out back on the road as it always happened when we had a meeting. My gaze fell on the two newcomers, keen, carnivorous, getting to know them for the very first time in unimaginable resolution, as all of the others, "what's going on with her, has she never seen us?" asked Anderson, perplexed.

"No, Andrés said this is the first time she's seen us", clarified Guilherme, "what?", asked the two at once and Guilherme explained all that again to Arthur and Anderson. And, tired of unimaginable hypnosis they caused to me, I knew we'd still have Bruno coming at four.

"I need to talk to you, Miss Grisam", said Arthur, all of a sudden.

"Before you do it, we need to clarify one or two points about Bruno, Arthur. Then, you'll have plenty of time to speak your heart, mister." Andrés seemed anxious to learn what he wanted to learn and looked serious at me as he opened the informal meeting with a direct question.

"You knew pretty well Bruno wasn't going to kill himself, didn't you?"

"Yes, and he knew it as well as I did."

"Well did he?"

"If you know the present events of the town, you knew he was aware of it. Why are asking me this question then?"

"You told his parents there was nothing else to do for him, remember? Why did you say that?"

"Because there are things that the person only can decide. I had just killed myself…"

He was all alarmed, "c'mon Miss Grisam, you just…", and I cut him right away, "cut that crap of come on, come on, what do you call abandoning your body voluntarily and letting it rot?", and I went on, "I had just killed myself and had very little, if anything to say to him. Still I felt I had to be with him at that time. It was me, even involuntarily, even not knowing how, who dug the abyss he had fallen into. I told him there were people here who needed him and left him with the best company one can desire: music."

"But if he was not going to manage to kill himself…"

"Didn't the thought occur to you that what he was living through at that moment could be worse than death? I was not afraid of the scene he made with the shotgun and the shells and he knew that. He acted everything as a symbol, because at that moment it was important for him. The suicide bid was farcical, but his situation of loneliness was not. I saw loneliness in his eyes. It was infinite loneliness, as if he were the last man on Earth or something like that. I was lost in his loneliness for a while, in that woeful terror in which his eyes seemed to scream in silence. You wouldn't know what to do if you just looked into his eyes at that moment. Well I didn't. If I stayed there longer I could get lost in that lifeless loneliness and he would fatally slid into that heinous abyss forever and drag me along with him. Neither he nor I would be able to find a way out of it. We'd be like two undead souls, the same I experienced on that hospital bed, only forever this time. And you knew it (at least technically), didn't you, Andrés?"

"Why wouldn't Andrés let us know?", inquired Anderson instinctively, casting a look on Arthur.

"I didn't think it was so serious…", started Andrés, frightened at the perspective of becoming the center of all attentions once again.

"It was not Andrés' fault; he didn't mind because he knew Bruno couldn't kill himself. Still he can't feel what people are really feeling inside. He knows the present, knows each and every movement, but not what goes on inside people's feelings, maybe not even his own feelings. So, he had no idea the situation was so serious."

Andrés stared at me in silence. He seemed not to be able to think of something reasonable to say, though he looked grateful for me having advocated his cause.

"Maybe you don't know how aware he was of all my physical death represented for the town and how he seemed to be the only one to be aware of what exactly it was to live with it in this town. Of how alone he was within this awareness. I can speak about it freely because I know you won't experience it like he did. You can understand fine what I say, but feeling — really feeling it inside — this you can't."

There was a huge silence, dense as those which tortured me before I died. Arthur looked at me and I fixed my eyes on him; said he felt much the same as me, long before he arrived at the farm Pinho. I imagined that by the urgency that took him right into the barn. He confirmed that too. Said what he had felt inside the barn was an atmosphere that was worse than the death he had experienced during the Law of the Bulls. And what made things worse, according to Arthur, was the fact he knew he could not fix things not even by pulling the trigger. An infinte frustration added to an infinite loneliness. Who'd resist it at all?

"When I walked in, he was distracted listening to music. He had already leaned the shotgun on a box and was just listening to music. The music distracted him enough time for me to arrive and distract him definitively. The surprise at seeing me back and alive was so great that desperation couldn't fit inside him any more. He only needed some minutes of distraction from all of that. And, thanks to Mithra, we managed to get these precious minutes for him."

The Pinhos' car stopped next to the porch and Bruno got off. Mr. Pinho waved at us, said something to his son and went away by the same dirt road that had brought them to the farm Taurinos. My eyes gazed at him, the only one of the boys I still hadn't seen after Andrés woke me up and trained me to see with my new eyes. I had me eyes set on him and he, as a good Mineiro country boy, didn't take long to feel shy as a clam and ask why I gazed at him like that. Renan was the one who explained it now, more trained than minutes before for these small peculiarities of our new life. Bruno sat on the last available chair on the porch and waited for what was going to follow.

"Miss Grisam, I wonder if you could possibly be so kind as to look away from me" he said, slightly bothered and angry. I had never had a good relationship with him and the fixed stare in the tridimensional details of his face and body wouldn't help anyhow, even if he had understood why I did so. Then Arthur started talking, forcing my look his way and helping to unwind Bruno a bit.

"I want to apologize to all of you for what happened on the ceremony night, mainly to Miss Grisam", he said with a grave look in his eyes, "but I chose her to be on the arena and felt I couldn't leave her there alone. I chose Miss Grisam because she was the only one who could go; Andrés had placed her in Taurinos' Ancient Society, in the Inner Chamber and she had a gift of seeing things that the others could not see. I knew Andrés and Adriano could too, but none of us could go down on the arena twice…"

"I'd go", cut Renan, looking at Andrés and Arthur, "I fell on my knees before this prick, begged that he let me handle that bull but no deal… I wanted to avenge you, brother."

"This war [with this bull] was not yours, Renan", explained Arthur, smiling, "it was mine and Miss Grisam's. It was not even hers, but turned out to be hers in the end. I think she's the bravest woman I've ever seen."

"Your father really asked me to be you on the arena during the handling. He seemed to have an intuition you'd be there. He gave me your sword and said clearly to me, 'now it's yours. Do your best with it. Remember my son when you use it. Be my son when you use it.' He knew, maybe much more than all of us, despite the distance separating him from everything that was going on with us in the Society."

"Yes, my father at times feels things from far away", the lad smiled, "he didn't speak for knowing that, he felt you had to remember me during your handling time. Because it was to connect us somehow and I would be able to guide your every move. And it was what happened. It's too bad nothing worked out in the end."

"Yes, because there were eight people at the Mithraeum instead of seven, right?", inquired Anderson, anxious to have a confirmation of what really had gone wrong.

"No", said Arthur circling his eyes among the present.

The answer surprised everyone, Andrés included. He himself seemed not to be feigning surprise at all.

"Why'd it fail then???" asked Bruno, reflecting everyone's surprise in his voice.

"Nothing good is ever done with the hate I was feeling at that time. I was frustrated for being taken away from town the moment it most needed me. On the arena, I could not stop. Miss Grisam was like a glove puppet in my hands. I could not stop and this is the reason why she could never stop. With that, I left her deaf, with no memory of what had happened — because it was not her really on the arena that night — and all broken down inside because I used so much of her energy that her body here ended up ill. I apologize, Miss Grisam. I never meant you no harm. Still I was confused and ended up voiding the whole of the ceremony."

"There is nothing to be forgiven, especially now that we know how all of this confusion came about, Arthur. You tried to do what you thought was best for the town at that moment and I think it excuses all that has passed and what is yet to come. When it comes."

Bruno rose from his chair, even though Andrés insisted on him staying on his seat. I remembered Renan at our very first meeting right at this porch and felt like laughing, but refrained from doing so.

"We're eight now, from now on. The Society has changed in number but it is still the same Society. Despite all, it is good to be here. Yesterday, when Miss Grisam and Arthur came into the barn to talk to me I saw how good it really was to be here. When you started throwing me in the air, like you did to Arthur at the Mithraeum that day, I realized it was among you I really had to be."

That said, he took his seat again to avoid Andrés throwing a tantrum. And smiled at him and Renan, a smile full of meaning. I couldn't refrain from laughing any longer, but this time Bruno knew why I was laughing.

"I think we can close the meeting, at least for today, if no one can think of anything else to add to what was already said. Bruno said exactly what I was going to say about Taurinos' Ancient Society. I think there are no better words to express the feeling. So we're eight. Let's do what is best for Taurinos within everything that was left for us here. Our town is beautiful. Even in hell, it's beautiful. And I guess what was left for every one of us is to struggle so it can be that beautiful for the eternity to come."

It was almost six o'clock. Time flew us by without any of us noticing it. Duílio came out to the porch to call us for an afternoon meal. It was the first time I saw the huge man even bigger in the new resolution of my eyes. Warned by his wife about what was going on with me he only laughed and laughed and welcomed me to a new era. His laughter was contagious, even more when I stumbled at the threshold of the porch door. Duílio prepared to tell the lads off when I told him this was the way things usually happened in a new era.

Resolution | Death on four legs

Radio Universal: The Day Of Creation