He was quick to dribble words and if they were bitter, the task was easier. And it made me so confused to see how easily he knocked people down. Preferably the ones he loved the most. Syllables erect, there were no stutters and no hesitations. It would seem that he was born with all evil creations. To injure, he thought, would be to raise an arm of his own, a man of 1.92 m, and push a bland bowl of soup. Or slap a friend on the back, as if to say: hello good morning, by the way? Or taking action against a driver who made a mistake against him or someone else near him. The car would turn inside out, preventing the man from escaping and then it would be a see-you-see until the police arrived and convinced him that violence did not provide answers to the injustices of everyday life.
Sensibility was a word outside his scope. If I were to say to him, he would finish: Let's put an end to the verbiage, after all I'm smart, but a foreigner or a faggot is not a thing! And he would get up, defeated, and flee out the wilderness or out the doors. I inquired about his life. He was a man of good looks, good manners, and a better heart. That's how I remembered him in my childhood. Something had happened to create so much bitterness. And it will happen. He had been fired from the chamber unfairly and without much he could do. A father of two and a domestic wife, the family depended on his right salary.
As he was very isolated and powerful, everyone was afraid to touch the forbidden subject. If it weren't for Joaquina being verbally abused because of this. No one ever saw him at a professional appointment again. He did odd jobs, he was good with hands and ideas. An excellent craftsman, an artist. And he didn't know how to obey. Not even command. His wife began to work by the day to make ends meet after the children got married. Today I was going to clean Mrs. Fernanda's house, tomorrow I was going to iron a neighbor's house. The next day, for Lousada to help sew curtains in an atelier and that's how she led her life. With his odd jobs he earned enough for himself, for the gasoline he spent, sometimes on the tractor and sometimes on the van, to buy a new machine or to buy another animal. He cherished the animals. It was said that he treated the animals better than his family after this incident. He spoke little, except to strangers if the situation demanded it. With his wife at home, he grunted something, but not much, enough for her to know that he was unhappy and would remain so. And that created the snowball effect. One day she came home to find him face down, lying in the hallway, still wearing the anorak from having come from the street. Mr. John, who had come out of his side in a good mood. But Mr. John did not know that he had come once again from the chamber, to have expected a solution to his problem. There were no solutions and he swore it was a plot against him because he was not from the PSD. Politics aside, the beetle medicine had trickled down the walls of the house until it reached the kitchen. Joaquina knew that this smell was strange and horrible. And it almost prevented her from speaking, drying her throat.
"Manuel," she had shouted, but Manuel was not there, only his brutish body that was difficult to drag. Joaquina screamed as hard as she could for her mother-in-law who lived across the street to call the fire department. And this had been the first of many other times. The last one had led Manuel to be admitted to the Magalhães Lemos Hospital. And to be transferred to the area hospital, in the psychiatry ward. In a recent time, where people accepted psychiatry better, it was the same as other human specialties and not a place where madmen who were never recovered hid. For Joaquina, his attempts to die were already the fado she knew was hers, but she had never gotten used to. When I left for work, I thought that would be the last time I saw him alive or normal, without being on medication. Would his bitterness come from months of wandering the hospital corridors where others like him wandered? No, the bitterness had come from injustice, from forced and unjust unemployment. From not knowing how to govern a family that had always been his responsibility. The fact was that Manuel knew how to do everything, he had the ability to work with wood and even make sculptures and paint. He also knew how to play musical instruments, repair automobiles, whatever the breakdowns, plough the fields, build houses, and pretend that life wasn't hard. But to caress, to pamper, or to speak sweetly were things of such difficulty that he preferred to die. People didn't understand, because he didn't lack education, he was cultured enough, he read the newspaper often and watched the news, the debates, the cultural programs every day. Love was his arduous and impossible task. Because it came from trust, and this he had lost long ago, trust in humanity. The day before yesterday, I wrung out half a dozen less aggressive, sweeter words and a tear. Then he fled, hidden between his fears of reading his soul and the anger of not knowing how to face love and reciprocate.
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