Ilmar Penna Marinho Junior - The beast of a thousand years

“How’s everything, sonny boy?” echoed the voice of tragedy.

In that damn year of 1986, Leonardo’s family world crumbled. Until his last breath, his father had concealed from everyone the buildup of unpayable debts with banks and loan sharks, leaving a lot of bitterness within the disunited family. After bitter meetings with his uncles and with his father’s oldest sister, with whom they barely had any relationship, they went to live in São Paulo, ashamed by their relative’s bankruptcy, once so cheerful and unconcerned, whose picture stayed like this for a while on the grand piano in the living room. Leonardo was the only one who remained in Rio and witnessed the declaration of bankruptcy. He saw his father’s pictures vanish from the piano as well as from the memory of his family and friends. He watched, by himself, the bush take over the gardens, the dust collecting on the furniture, the silverware disappear from the manor, sold in an auction. He was sure that the most important reference in his life, his father, was gone forever.

“You’re the only one who believes in this corrupt government!” warned his father’s friend.

“We have to invest in the democratization,” replied his father, full of civic enthusiasm.

Leonardo recalled that, during the time his father was working on the stock exchange, he was interning at the law firm. His father’s friends were getting rich, benefited by the good times of millionaire public constructions and the boom of the stock market. And his father insisted with the hesitant, greedy investor:

“Don’t tell me you want to limit your profits. You don’t understand that if you don’t by the stocks now you won’t be able to double your capital!”

It was with the sale of the beautiful properties he had inherited that his father bought the brokerage firm. The first year was wonderful and he made great friends. But it was all a big roller-coaster ride! When the times of euphoria were over, he woke up in the middle of the night with no friends, struggling with the nightmare of debts as a consequence of the bank’s crippling interests. Boom! A shot right on the temple, in an unbelievable cold act. He lost his head along with the family’s fortune.

The honk of a car on the street made Leonardo’s thoughts return to Lisa’s house. He recalled that, on one of his trips to the kitchen, during the first consultation, she had turned off the stove, but a delicious smell of white beans came through the door and entered his nostrils. Oddly enough, he was taken by the nice memory of his father’s culinary refinement: the sophisticated French feijoada, with a well-known name, cassoulet.

Then he recalled the first time he had made love, when he was sixteen. His father had planned the whole spree without the knowledge of his mother. He had financed his son’s date with an experienced older woman from another country. He became an habitué, as he would spell, pursing his lips to the madam. He got to know the best working girls and the most modern motels in Barra, all sponsored by his proud father. He became picky and, with the experience he had gained, he began to prefer older, more enigmatic women, who knew how to give everything they had and were grateful for having sex with an insatiable beast.

“How’s everything, sonny boy?” always echoed the distant voice.

After his father’s death, the more he read the papers, the more he felt indignant about the cases of corruption. The more he remembered his great dad, who believed until the end in the vitality of the stock market as an essential leverage for the growth of national companies. He believed in the purity of the good intentions of the government of civilists, who had come from the dungeons and the revoking of political tenures during the dictatorship. This filled him with anger, or worse, with vengeful hatred.

Poor guy, he thought. His father had always been a nationalist moron. He had never even thought of opening a bank account in a tax haven. If he had done like his clever friends, who got rich, he would be safe and sound, him and his respectable family. He spoke with the ghosts of the past: it’s crazy how we miss those we really love. He liked the old man since he was a little child, on the lazy Sunday mornings when he would go to his father’s bed before having breakfast on the terrace. It was good to feel protected, loved, under his mother’s jealous stare, who would rather have the company of his well-behaved sister than that of the rebellious brat. Fuck! Money, always money! — Leonardo exploded angrily. His father lost everything. He died saying that in the old days being poor was an unfortunate situation, and today being poor is a social injustice. His biggest dream was to buy his father’s manor back one day, to live in it.

It was Lisa, the astrologer, as in a whispered prayer, who revived the pain of those wounds by evoking Uranus in exact conjunction with his Sun. To go through what he did at the age of 25 was too much suffering. Because he couldn’t count on a past of poverty to succeed, but he soon realized that he didn’t need a bachelor’s degree in law to be rich. He just had to have trust in himself — as he thought astrologically — convinced that the stars go around the sky many times and play tricks on people, like him falling in love with Lisa, who made him have faith in the future and love. He had never forgotten what he’d hear before scheduling the consultation, like a hand break he would use not to lose everything in his life.

“Be patient, Mr. Leonardo. All in good time.”

Ana, Leonardo’s wife, had already decided to satisfy her curiosity and find out what her husband was up to when he was not home. She recalled what her friend Amelinha had read to her when they were leaving the gym, in an introductory text of the weekly Kabbalistic conscience: “Nothing is set in stone, you can always change your destiny”. Then Amelinha had forced her to run her finger over the page, going from left to right, until she stopped at a number. It was the seventh of the seventy-two names of God, the DNA of the Soul. This was the message: “I receive the full impact of the forces of Creation. I return meaning to lives that seem meaningless and without purpose to a world that often seems to have no resolution. The order returns. The structure emerges. Everything will be fixed.”

As soon as her husband went to the bathroom, Ana didn’t hesitate and went to his den to check the three cell phones on the table. She went to see if her husband was still in the shower. He was. She then made the automatic calls to the last numbers in the log, without fearing that the times of the calls would be identified. She was shaking with fear from Leo’s unknown world.

“What’s up, boss?” answered a hoarse, vulgar voice.

“Who’s this? Ana said shyly.

“Who do you want to talk to, bitch?”

She called other numbers. Everyone hung up abruptly, without identifying themselves. All of the voices were from rude people, who abused her with curse words before turning their phones off.

Since it was impossible to identify the calls, they didn’t mince their words. Not a single civilized voice answered her calls.

On the sixth or seventh call she heard something curious.

“The toys arrived yesterday, man. Top of the line,” said the anxious voice. “Everything is in the warehouse. The bosses haven’t seen it yet.” And then, without receiving an answer, the voice shouted: “Who the fuck is this?”

Before putting Leonardo’s three phones back in their places, the woman deleted all the calls so as not to leave a trace, erasing the records. She went back to the kitchen thinking about her husband’s life when he was not at home. If being an accountant meant dealing with this kind of lowlifes, she had to feel more sympathy for her husband now than she did shortly after his parents died, she reasoned. However, at the same time, everything seemed very suspicious and weird. Starting with the repetition of a certain dialed number, apparently residential, which felt a bit familiar. She didn’t want to take any chances. She wrote down the number and decided to call it later from a payphone.