Rodrigo Leao - All Dogs are Blue

My mum brought me a tuna sandwich and I devoured it like it was fillet steak. I was homesick.

Mum, when will I get out of here? Will I leave here worse off than when I came?

If you go about threatening people, we’ll be here much longer. Why are you always in that gloomy corner?

One day my mum would come and the next my dad would come. It seemed like their consciences were weighing on them for having me committed.

I broke the china cabinet.

I broke all the glasses.

But I got all the bad spirits out of the house.

Here comes the gang to give me my injections. They stretch my lard and give me Benzetacil.

Benzeta.

Benzeta.

I want a Benzetacil injection. Penicillin on account of a wound I have on my leg. I need to lose 100 pounds. A nurse said I was actually kind of cute, but that I needed to lose a few pounds. I could be the Casas da Banha mascot — a lard-arse for the lard supermarket — and sing their jingle. I’ll dance ‌the cha-cha-cha. Casas da Banha 4.I was a pig. A swine. Filthy. I had no idea what was or wasn’t degrading. But one day, for sure, I was going to create something biodegradable; I’d get rid of my impurities and be clean. Clean on the outside. Inside I’d always have those marks that animals leave, bite marks. With bruises on my soul. I’d always be looking for myself and finding pieces here and there. The Fearsome Madman passed by in the background. He was already out of his cubicle.

When are they going to get me out of here, nurse?

The first taste of freedom is leaving the cubicle. The second is walking around the asylum. Freedom itself only happens outside the asylum. But real freedom doesn’t exist. Heading for freedom, I always run smack into someone. If there were freedom, the world would be one big madhouse with everyone in it. I could walk out and about with Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Go on holiday to Angra dos Reis.

Rimbaud killed a jaguar that was circling around my body the other day, at night. Another day, during the day, we ate the asylum slop together. Me and Rimbaud. He was admitted for drugs. He limps a little. Must be in his forties. I asked why he wrote so little. He told me he hated writing. What I like is to feel the wind in my hair. There are breezes that are dangerous for a frail guy like Rimbaud, but he’s a clever guy, knows how to sidestep misfortunes. Soon he’ll be released.

Back to the cubicle and the injections. They don’t trust me any more. They only give me medicines by injection. They think I’m going to spit the medicine out or hide it somewhere. Why do these doctors hate me so much? Five come to hold me down. I struggle like a whale. But then I calm down. Then I’m calm. And I almost don’t feel it, them stretching my lard so much. I almost don’t feel the pain of the injections.

A beautiful rainbow opened up that only I could see, through a far-off window, really far off. That day I cried because I was alone. I cried because I didn’t have a job. I cried because I didn’t have a wife. I cried because I didn’t have kids. I cried because I didn’t have a family. I cried because I was thirty-seven years old and living like a teenager.

Why are you crying, fatso? I cry for the fatsos of the world, for those who want to eat an apple pie, a chocolate truffle. But who don’t have the money to buy all the treats in the world. Me, I cry because I want to eat you. Oh, you bastard! Eat you roasted. I’d do like the cannibals and eat people. But I’d rather be less crazy and stick to sugar. Chocolate éclairs, napoleons, chocolate-chip ice cream, coconut sweets, peanut brittle. I’d get so fat, I’d blow up like Mr Creosote.

The only time I left the cubicle was at mealtimes. But there was a nurse who didn’t take his eyes off us for a second. What if I worked at the asylum? It must be really hard dealing with that clientele, with all kinds of people. With posh guys from Rio’s Zona Sul and with street sweepers. With old halfwits and senile Attorney Generals. The insane must be the easiest ones to care for. Every time, I stopped believing in God. A place like the asylum was a sign that God didn’t exist. Or that he existed, and didn’t care about who was inside that little hell.

I was still a kid and was at the club having fun in the pool when I saw a small child, smaller than me, almost a newborn, drowning. The scene got to me, and it took me a while to think of rescuing the child. I just stood there. Like an idiot. Another kid came along. He was faster, he grabbed the child who was drowning and pulled him out of the pool. They threw a party for the hero. A party that should have been for me. I stayed in the corner. I realised that day that some people are born to be heroes, others are born to be average. I was condemned to be average. I’d never be a superman.

I’d go back to the cubicle. The only good things were the guava jelly and the nurse’s pert little bum. Sometimes I go to bed and can’t stop thinking about the night nurse. I’d come just putting my body on hers. Just being able to feel her flesh on mine. The first time I had sex was with a boar. They held the animal by its hooves and said stick it in . I stuck it fifteen centimetres inside the animal and then they let him go. I came just because the boar jumped up and down. Its arsehole was prickly. It hurt my penis. My penis hurt so much! After a long time the animal tired out. I came six times in a row. I lit a joint, he retreated to the other corner, and I stood there, high as a kite. I did a lot of drugs in my teens. Once, when I drank some mushroom tea, I ended up by our water tanks, having a philosophical chat with myself. The worst of it was that I found answers. I didn’t even know there was a higher me. I ventured a few questions about the future and my I told me everything. Except that after the mushroom tea wore off I forgot everything I’d said.

An armed cop came in.

I heard the shots. I paced back and forth. I was flooded with adrenaline at daybreak. The day broke with those shots. Could someone be hurt?

Yesterday, there were shots fired in here, Mum. Tell me what happened. Tell me. You know I’m curious.

If that ever happened, I’d have you taken out of here straight away, son. You’re here to get better. To stop destroying Mum’s house. That’s all.

Actually, they had killed a guy in there. A police officer knifed him. The Fearsome Madman was involved.

Every day before bed I prayed the Hail Mary. Every day I asked God to get me out of there as fast as possible — and that as fast as possible would be the next day. Later, I didn’t believe in God or the Hail Mary, but I prayed. Doesn’t hurt to pray. Doesn’t cost anything to ask. Some Christian, one Sunday, appeared right near my cell and left a little leaflet. I looked at it and read it when the doses weren’t high and they let me read, then I ripped up the paper. My God! Fundamentalists are taking over the world. They’re even coming here to recruit the utterly fucked. Religion nowadays just fucks with people. I think they knew there were a lot of alcoholics in here. Religion isn’t just the opium of the people. But it’s what keeps the people happy. It’s a sad thing when a nation needs religion to lean on. It’s worse than a lunatic who’s been cured, but who will always need the support of another person to be happy. Better to be an incurable lunatic.

Fearsome Madman ate his food with his hands. They say that he killed people and everything. I know that on visiting days no one ever came to see Fearsome.

The pigeons flew up into the sky, ready to crap on someone’s head or a car windscreen. I remember one time when a mental patient took some ant poison to give to the pigeons. The result was a trail of pigeons on the ground. Dead. All of them.

There was a lunatic there who was a man but who dressed like a woman. He liked banging his head against the wall and was always shaking. There was another who reminded me of my grandmother on my mum’s side, always really elegant. Another who had a really strange habit of filling one cup full of coffee and another with milk, and drinking each one without mixing them. That wasn’t something a crazy person does. Once I got close to her and she was talking about Heraclitus and Parmenides with a Spanish accent. She was Chilean. I made up a backstory for her in my mind: that she had fought for Allende and lost, like all Chileans. She was politically persecuted. Abused by the government. She was tortured and wound up in a mental asylum in Brazil. She was a sociology professor. Surely she had children who didn’t know her whereabouts and who moved around from place to place looking for their mother. Governments do so many things to destroy the lives of those who are a nuisance to them. Being a nuisance seems to be a condition of being a good civil servant. To see the dirty tricks and not do anything, see people losing strength, people with no money losing money, paying high wages to bureaucrats …