The boy with the thorn in his side

Found a note on my house's door today. Andrés said in the message that he and his father were off to Varginha to pick up Aparecida and Adriano, that would be discharged from hospital today.

These days, I have remembered Meire. I hadn't met her on MSN for some time. Not that it worries me, but I have missed the chats with her on the messenger. I would like to follow her progression within the practices I had suggested her, if she's still dedicating to it. Maybe it is her own walk of life interfering. Not that it is an accomplished rush, but nobody places chatting on the MSN above their everyday priorities. It would be so nice to meet her here in Taurinos. But it's her life and if she already gave up the practices there would be nothing left for me to do but getting over it.

Aparecida didn't have enough words to thank me for the help I gave the men of the farm Taurinos during her absence. I did miss the talks with her in the kitchen while I helped her with some domestic affairs. I was happy to see her and her son back to town.

In his bed, Adriano was much better than what master Danilo described yesterday during the meeting at the Mithraeum. It was plain that master Danilo had exaggerated in the colors of his description to make a deeper impression on everyone (especially the policeman) during our meeting. But it was true that the night under torture of the Obscure Police had devastated him physical and emotionally. I told them that the policeman would come to apologize to Adriano as soon as the hardware store was closed tonight. Adriano told me he thought it was time he recognized he was wrong. Aparecida scowled at the very idea and said she wouldn't want to be present lest she ended up hitting "the tiny little monster". Adriano laughed, amused. Considering how well-pondered and conciliatory she was that gave me a true-to-life idea of what these days were when she was taking care of her son in hospital.

"I don't know, I'm afraid I'll lose my self-control and hit him in the face", she concluded, upset.

Andrés came to the porch to talk to me. Said Renan had taken advantage of lunchtime to visit Dica's son, Célio, in his house. That he took a bottle with him, just like the one he had once chucked at the boy's face. Upon arriving at his room, he gave Célio the bottle, sat down not very far from him, shut his eyes with a grimace and waited. Célio put the bottle on the floor. Renan stood up from the chair, picked up the bottle and gave it back to him, sitting again and waiting. He repeated the action until Célio dismissed him, telling him he had been forgiven and asking him to go in peace. I understood it was a very peculiar way of apologizing, running the risk of ending up in hospital himself. Were there a shadow of rancor in his victim, Renan would've lost some of his teeth.

"Renan cuts an odd figure most of the times, this I can tell for sure", laughed Andrés.

"You're watching the boy?"

"Course I am, need to check that he is obeying the resolutions we came to in the Council's yesterday's meeting. And he sure is. You saw everything right yesterday before the meeting. Knew he was going to use this strategy, of being the obedient lamb to show Anderson as insubmissive before the Council's eyes for not joining the Obscure Police like he should. He turned the table, when Anderson thought the punishment would only go to Renan. He's only ten years old, but is so very intelligent, we cannot underestimate the little fella."

"He must be coming here tonight."

"Yep, he must come here to see the damage done to my brother. And if you ask me, Adriano can even spit on his face, Renan will still beg Adriano to forgive him until he does."

"Do you think he's being sincere in his apologies? Or is it all a part of his strategy?"

"Renan is not a pretender. He is a guy of a million faults, is a hothead, but not a pretender at all. What he does is because he feels like doing. I think he has understood and accepted Anderson's explanation for real. Saw he was wrong to have taken it all with fire and sword. I believe Anderson too. Never thought he had created that moniker to pull Renan's legs. But he has already felt that the circle is coming to squeeze him like an orange. When he felt this himself yesterday, Renan submitted to the Council's decisions. He saw that the Council was going to condemn his attitudes and that by rebelling he would only add to his sufferance and isolation. He was intelligent, recognizing he was wrong, but it doesn't mean he was being insincere. Even Renan can look at himself from the outside sometimes. Not Anderson; he only adds to his sufferance by keeping on evading his function in the Police. He is being humilliated by himself doing it. The community knows this and it won't take long until they starting putting pressure on him until he cannot resist anymore. Then, he was going to submit to Renan, like a little puppy with nowhere to run."

"Good heavens, what a situation…", and I shook my head.

"Yup, nobody said it would be a bed of roses. Renan is suffering too, Miss Grisam; don't think everything is victory to him. To be rejected is not high on his priority list as it is not on anyone's. Anderson is his best friend; you can imagine how much it hurts him inside that Anderson has been escaping the function he was supposed to be performing together with Renan."

He looked sideways as though he wanted to share something others could not hear.

"On that night at the clearing, and you must've felt that too, he was calm, as though he wanted to understand what we did there at night. He was jealous of us because we could just sit down in the fields and contemplate the Milky Way while he had to hunt for invaders and other heinous things on the limits of the town. It was not only the energy of our fear he wanted. He wanted to feed on our friendship energy, enjoying the starry sky together, he wanted to be sitting there with us."

"So why didn't he appear in his normal aspect? I'd love to have him sitting there with us looking at the sky!"

"Because in that moment, more than the energy of our friendship, he needed the energy of our fear. This is why he was there behind us for so long. Because we wouldn't dare to look back and could never know what he was doing behind us, what only added to our panic. Uncertainty is the mother of fear. Darkness is its father. This is why he stepped forth so slowly with the horse. Each step the horse took increased our fear more and more. Though he doesn't like to be feared in his normal aspect (he gets angry to death when it happens), in that aspect he needed this to fill the last gap of energy. Now he is Da Monster. Now he is Da Bomb. And the energy people have given him won't dissipate anymore. He is ready to initiate Anderson when the time comes. The power is going to stay with them and they'll never have to feed on that again, because it is going to stay within them for ever and ever. Anderson is exactly the last piece to complete the puzzle. You can imagine how his refusal to participate frustrates Renan's plans and work. The two are desperate, each one for his particular reason. But it all amounts to just the same in the long run."

As the lads used to do, I whistled in sheer admiration of everything I had heard, though it was something imaginable joining the pieces of all I had seen.

Night and day | Forgiveness day

Radio Universal: Obscure Police