David Arioch – Jornalismo Cultural

He made unusual noises, contorting his mouth, frowning and craning his neck

He ran two kilometers on foot without knowing that they’d never let him go (Photo: Cultural Foundation of Paranavaí)

In 1949, on a cold and especially dark morning, Nicanor woke up scared and struggling to move. He felt the rust smell of his own dried blood that covered part of his cheekbones and chin. The nauseating odor numbed him, and made him weep to the point of the thick parched blood turned into balls that crashed against the dirt floor. In sandy soil, they were joining and forming a larger and opaque sphere as a ground ball, like children shape to throw in friends and neighbors.

Hoarse, feverish and with only one feebly eye open, the boy had no strength to articulate a word without stammering and feeling a tremor that began on his heels and ended at his neck. When he shook his legs in vain, he felt his blackened fingers, thick-skinned, sprung out of the white sandals tatters. Unintentionally, he touched a fetid paste that was formed from his feces, urine and blood. He suffered so much in recent days that he unlearned to cry.

He made unusual noises, contorting his mouth, frowning and craning his neck. With the strength that remained, he strove, trying to see something by an elongated spacious crack. Nicanor lusted after a little sunshine, but the only occasional visitor was a random blast of glacial and searing wind that touched his skin with the delicacy of the blade knife.

Sometimes, he shook his head and gazed at the ceiling, watching the holes where rainwater invaded the old ranch which was previously used for coffee storage. After all, he saw some beauty in chance and he was grateful because of it. If it were not for the invasion of nature, he would complete 23 days without feeling the water anointing his lips. Each drop was sucked with the satisfaction of who drank water from a robust and overflowing mug.

However, his mood oscillated with the hours. In early night without rain, only the song of the cicadas and the treble shrieks of owls soothed him. The silence scared Nicanor because it brought the indescribable void of absence and the mourning of that was not died. Yes, it was less frightening, much less than the synchronous sound of boots approaching the old dark cottage. With his ears made anomalous by despair, Nicanor recognized by far the rinkle of a machete in friction with the parabellum shaking on a loose holster.

At such times, his eyes moistened sharply, focusing on oxytone pain on the edges, making boiling tears. The palate was so inflamed that the boy could not keep his mouth shut, like the door where four men of abyssal eyes entered once a day smiling. Sardonic, they always came by surprise. They clapped their hands and said the same words: “Hello! Is there anyone there? We are coming and we are entering, my fella.” They closed the door with an ax handle and witnessed the Nicanor agony as if they were watching a festive show.

Making a startling effort to prevent urinary incontinence, the boy invariably recognized the defeat. He was embarrassed and feeling worse than a maggot. Nicanor defecated, dirtying his legs and feet even more from rubbing on the ground and touching the soil with yellowed nails. The mockery from torturers followed interleaved quince rod blows on the inner portion of purplish thighs. When Nicanor closed his eyes and leaned his chin on his chest, one of the executioners swung the chain that bound his crossed and bloodied wrists. He woke up scared, with some faltered and narrowed muscles, especially the sphincter.

He forgot even the shabby clothes he wore for more than a month, enough time to stick onto his body as a second skin. He wished death upon hearing the crackling sound of a piece of wood on ember. He only calmed down when he saw the ominous stocky bald man, with dark teeth, get away from him carrying an orange bat. While Nicanor perished a little more, the four executioners ate corn bread with butter, and also drank a mate so hot that steam wet the flagellated hands of the boy. After the break, the four stood up, withdrew their horsewhips attached to the belt of their trousers. Then, they started the scourge that lasted more than an hour.

In a reflection of effort so dedicated that he felt something was pressing inside his skull, Nicanor remembered that a month before he explained to the boss, someone for whom he worked since 1944 on a farm, that he would change service. The boy would open his own business in the city. The man then agreed and suggested that the boy go to a ranch in the woods in the late afternoon to do the reckoning. Easygoing, he ran two kilometers on foot without knowing that they’d never let him go. Overcome by uncontrollable grief, he stammered and begged God to take him away. Then beseeched which allowed him to smell the perfume of wet grass.

At the end of the night, Nicanor had a seizure and fainted. Prostrate, with a weak pulse and beginning his end, he was dragged, like a piece of carrion, by two gunmen outside the ranch. They threw his body in the vicinity of a stream and ran, fearing for their lives, reminiscing about the old folk legend of Tabarel From Candlesticks, a mystic figure known to charge double the deaths on a fog day.

The next morning, the young man woke rubbing his hands on his body. It was hard to believe that he was still alive and that some of the injuries disappeared, as well as his severe pain. Perplexed, Nicanor looked around and put his hands on his face, free of dried up blood. He rolled over and cried like a child rediscovering the world, after intensely aspiring the scent of mellowy dewy grass that wrapped his body in a romanesque morning.

Photo: Copy

Cherubim heard gunshots followed by meowing. Outside, on the sandy dirt road, Ranulph did not move, and was sprawled over a portion of sibipiruna’s fine sheets. His mouth was still hanging open, exposing the pain of death not even spared the most innocent beings.

The boy tried to stop crying because he was afraid to look too sentimental. Cherubim made so much effort that the hot tears, that threatened to drain the corners of the eyes, disappeared without gaining the principle of freedom.

Angry, Cherubim noted Matias on the mango tree, smiling and aiming the shotgun in his direction. “Do you want too? I give you, muggle!”, warned the boy. Cherubim said nothing. Only scratched his head, regardless of the dusty cloud that was forming around his head like orange mist.

Keeping his back in front of the killer, the boy crouched and made caresses on the cat’s belly. The kitten no longer felt Cherubim’s hands on his clear fur. Where there was a pair of blue eyes, it remained a small shapeless mass. Two bashful tears fell, moistening the cat’s dry mouth. It was too late.

The hours passed away, and the nature buried Ranulph, covering his body with sandy soil, gradually transported from the forest by south wind. “Cherubim! Take this animal here. It will start to stink”, they said. He just nodded his head in agreement, without even moving his legs that rested on the curb.

When the earth, dragged by gale, invaded the cat’s mouth, the boy approached and cleaned it using a washcloth moistened with water. In the late afternoon, he tried to bury Ranulph in his mother’s garden. He was reprimanded as he was digging the earth with his grandfather’s trowel. “Are you mad, boy?! This is no place to bury an animal!”, complained his grandfather.

The old man picked up the dead cat by the back skin and put him into a thick dark bag. It looked like a cadaver pouch in PVC. He hung the bag on the handlebars of the bike, and rode to a vacant lot used as a garbage dump in the nearest neighborhood. He returned without a word, walked into the kitchen, took a bitter sip of coffee and laid down on the hammock.

Cherubim was watching the old man, wondering what he did to Ranulph. Without the courage to ask, he recalled a law imposed in Paraná village in the 1970s, when three large dogs killed two babies. “No one can come here with animals. If someone kills an animal, nobody can cry or bury him, or they will have to deal with me”, said Mandino Counselor, whom the population resorted to whenever there was a problem in the neighborhood.

Under a papaya tree, Cherubim watched his grandfather sleep on the hammock. He cried and shouted with his hands in his mouth. The boy also lashed his own legs and back with the papaya branches. No one listened. The welts multiplied. He did not care. He lay on the ground and felt a bitter taste in his mouth, a mixture of dirt and blood.

He woke up at down, lying on his old mattress, wrapped in a dirty white sheet and full of holes. Through the orifice in the roof, the sun illuminated a dog food packet flanked by a water bowl. Cherubim got up and ran to the shack entrance, where he lived with his mother and his grandfather. The hovel threatened to fall for years, but resisted.

He sat on the floor and used a piece of stick to draw Ranulph. After he was finished, he dozed a little, with his back propped up on a wooden fence with barbed wire. In his dream, he heard a purr that prickled him. He opened his eyes and under his left hand, Ranulph was marking his territory again, rubbing his dirt and soft fur on him.

The smell of garbage went unnoticed, not the hunger meowing. Crying, Cherubim held the blind and overwrought cat in his arms. He took him into the house, and there they stayed the rest of the day. The Ranulph and Cherubim story changed Paraná Village in the late 1990s: “Who does not see love in an animal, does not see love itself,” said Mandino’s son.

The more I walked inside the shop, the more I felt like walking through Nell Trent’s grandfather’s antique shop

I walked to the back of the shop and showed her an old small brown wooden chest (Photo: David Arioch)

It happened in my town when I was 14 years old. As I walked down the street on Christmas Eve, the rain was thin on the busy downtown. I looked at the turbid sky and didn’t understand how the water that touched my body could be warm while it dampened my head in a solemn short cold interval.

I was intrigued and I saw a purpose. The drops that crashed against my scalp and my forehead, dripping between my eyes, sliding down my nose, and making the contours of my mouth before jumping from my chin to my chest, reduced my drowsiness and sent me warning signs, it demanded my attention where I walked.

Until then, I walked like a peculiar kind of incorrigible sleepwalker. I had slept less than five hours and I felt my eyes warm, tired and flushed. My reflection in the shop window revealed a tangled and abstract aspect. I heard acute, mild, severe and oscillating voices on all sides, but I couldn’t identify words. “Are they really speaking English?” This question protruded from my consciousness.

Mixed with rain, sometimes violent, sometimes calm, falling from the branches of trees that shaded the narrow sidewalk, the unexpected smell of wet earth in Mine Street inebriated me. The fairy lights colored the drops that returned to natural transparency when it released from its plastic and glass hosts. The truth is that I noticed just what glittered or amplified my senses.

People talked to me. I didn’t know who they were or what they said. Confused, I limited myself to smile as much as possible, without showing too many teeth. I felt very tired and my bleary eyes didn’t help me deal properly with human interaction that morning.

After a long walk, I scratched my eyes and stopped in front of a mirror of an antique shop. “Hmm, now I’m getting better. Soon I’ll feel 100%”, I concluded. A nice lady invited me to visit the place. The entrance was narrow, but the interior space was big and seemed so inviting and mysterious, that I had a sudden urge to spend hours there.

Fragrances of cloves, vanilla, amber, sandalwood and musk, distributed in various antiquarian points, leading the visitor to feel like part of a divided reality into fragments, with perfumes that enriched objects, the shop owner asked if I would like to see something special. I said no, and she left me at ease. Previously, she told me that she devoted many years of her life buying and collecting objects from 1910 to 1970.

“My father passed away over 30 years ago. He was a collector of things that people considered obsolete or of little value. ‘How something that marked a period and demanded days and even months of effort, may someday be seen as insignificant? There is nothing in the world that deserves such depreciation”, he told this to Martha, the owner of the antique shop before leaving to meet a client who was looking for a music box.

The more I walked inside the shop, the more I felt like walking through Nell Trent’s grandfather’s antique shop, immortalized by Charles Dickens. For a moment, it also reminded me of the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” by Frank Capra. Well, in my case and at that time, happiness could be purchased.  However, the reality was a destroyers desire. I opened my grizzly and battered wallet, counted the notes and coins which bobbed into my pocket, and I quickly made sure that nothing there fit in my budget.

The sadness hit me hard. It made me perspire, moistening my hands and the few notes of low value that I looked crestfallen. The coins have lost their luster, as if they were powerless, destroyed by circumstance. By far, Martha noticed the moment I quickly cringed to put money in my pocket and left the antiquarian.

She interrupted me and asked if I appreciated anything. I said yes. “Ok, then why won’t you take anything?” I hesitated for a few seconds. I felt trapped, like a helpless animal. Seeing in her face a comforting expression of benevolence, I just told her that I didn’t have money to buy anything in her shop.

“Why not? How much do you have?” Reluctantly, my hands were shaking when I took the notes and coins from my pocket. Marta smiled and asked me to show her which object pleased me most.

I walked to the back of the shop and showed her an old small brown wooden chest that cost more than double of my savings. “Who will you give it to? It’s a nice Christmas present! You have good taste!”, commented Martha, making me blush. I explained that it would be for my mother. Then she asked if there was something in my pocket. I took a piece of white paper that carried a little poem of mine called “Faience Child”.

Martha read it carefully, smiled and, to my surprise, declared that “my work” covered the rest of the amount. Before leaving, she asked me to autograph the poem and to help her put it in a golden frame of baroque inspiration . “Now we have a valuable framework,” she emphasized.

We said goodbye and she accompanied me to the shop’s entrance, where I saw her smiling graciously until the time that I disappeared from her sight. Excited, I walked through Vargas Street and I returned home watching the sun clearing the cloudy morning, drying the asphalt and illuminating the scene, vehicles, people and animals which were covered by the same warm and lilting mantle.

The following month, I took my mother to the antiquarian. When we got there, there was nothing, only a rent board. “A glimpse of passing faces caught by the light of a street-lamp or a shop window is often better for my purpose than their full revelation in the daylight”, wrote Charles Dickens in “The Old Curiosity Shop”.

She was an artist and a work of art, a platter author who has learned to be guided by the wind

Dark and tiny, she seemed free to do whatever she wanted in her current world

On a mild climate day I got home late in the afternoon. I saw the garage and the clothes on the clothesline covered with soot from the burning of sugarcane. The way she moved through the air gave me the impression that I was in front of the remains of a tortuous and dirty storm.

The soot moved by air in a mocking way. When I tried to touch her, she dodged nimbly and fixed on something that I naively struggled to protect. There was dirt everywhere. Without constriction, the soot smeared all along the way.

She was an artist and a work of art, a platter author who has learned to be guided by the wind. It could be touched in its thoroughness, but never possessed, because after that it was born to nobody else. Dark and tiny, she seemed free to do whatever she wanted in her current world.

My white and clean car was blackened when he met her. Unable to move, he witnessed the specious wind carrying so much soot that made the sun disappear behind the massed shadows of filth. The brightness of the bodywork was gone, misted by sovereignty of false plumbago.

I rubbed my finger on the hood and I noticed a mishmash of ash and low-quality graphite faded under my right forefinger. To my surprise, she still preserved the smell of burnt sugarcane.

Resting in a dry place, and when she was clinging to damp or wet, the soot dissolved, creating designs not always incomprehensible or empty in meaning. In the center of a white shirt that brandished on the clothesline, I saw the hooked shape of a tiny, striated hand. She had bitten nails, and some were more grimy than others.

Maybe it was the most derogatory Phoenix, since she was reborn from the ashes and almost like ashes without the right to turn into something beautiful, good and fruitful that people could enjoy watching or aspirate. Bud of sugarcane straw,  she was born ugly and without existential motivation.

Gestated in ember, soot went through dozens of miles to reach their destination – urban area homes, including people who do not know she existed. That was her fate, the short life of those who emerged stubborn by fire. I don’t blame her for indiscipline. It must be horrible to wake up feeling something hot forcing you to leave.

I dove into my mind and watched her first flight, shy and languorous. Sent away, obeying without question the order of things. After all, she felt the remaining freshness of green that was extinguished ten meters from the ground. The soot struggled to cry, seeing herself as blurred, uniform and insignificant. She writhed in the air, but it had no effect. Relegated to a sterile existence, she was drier than the most tenacious droughts.

Angered by not having any rights, and aware that she would have no more than hours, and with lucky a few days, she rebelled against her fate. She made a deal with the wind, promising to revere him as a god if he would help her go as far as possible in your rumpus. He agreed.

After turning into storm, the wind carried her. With his nimia and ruling force, he condensed all the soot of the cane fields, creating a small and blurred replica of the moon. In dozens of kilometers of route, the ball fell apart and fragments followed by the most different directions – through pastures, fields, villages, districts and cities around my hometown.

On that day, the soot invaded John Kennedy Street, crossed the sky of my house and left hundreds of unwanted traces, accompanied by a gurgling sound that mimicked the clink of knives. The sugarcane smell still lingered. While I decided what to do, soot got into my nose and I inhaled. Later I felt a burning in the chest. I had the impression that something unusual was alive inside me and moving.

I went to the doctor the next day and in the same week I made some tests. He showed me that there was a strange stain that distended on one of my lungs. I don’t deny I felt a mixture of worry, anger and sadness. “I’m pretty sure are traces of nitrogen monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon dioxide and ammonia. We need to take care of it, because otherwise it can quickly turn into asthma, lung cancer or even penile cancer”, warned the pulmonologist.

“I felt death smash up against my head, as if a meteor had fallen from space and just chose my skull as a airfield,” wrote Campos de Carvalho in “The Moon comes from Asia.” In the second and third battery of tests, carried out in the next month, showed me there was nothing left in my lungs. Then I remembered that 15 days before a prolonged sneezing gave me an odd sense of relief. What came out of my nose was not clear as water, but cloudy as the void of nonexistence.

Arriving home, I lay in bed and, looking through the window, I realized that on the other side of the wall there was a new soot stain. It looked like a burning bush. I fell asleep, thinking only of another passage of Campos de Carvalho. “At night the moon comes from Asia, but can not come, which shows that not everything in this world is perfect.”

I was surprised to see in the yard a small hawk perched on the branch of a brazilian grape tree

The little one loved living at home, going through every space he pleased or instigated his curiosity

I was eight or nine years old. I got home and I was surprised to see in the yard a small hawk perched on the branch of a brazilian grape tree. He was so young and my mother found him injured near a vacant lot. She took care of him and soon he recovered, but he didn’t want to leave.

The little one loved living at home, going through every space he pleased or instigated his curiosity. His plumbeous feathers contrasted with the clear sky on hot days. I said he was the lord of the rain because his plumes were gray as the misty sky. Whenever someone asked me why Diodon had orange feathers next to the right foot, I repeated the same story I made up:

“In a day of little clarity, he flew so high that the sun got angry and suddenly appeared just burning a small portion of his plumes. The shock was so big that even his blue eyes changed color – an endless memory of his stubbornness.”

Dio was quiet and silent, but he didn’t like to interact with other animals. He only watched them from a distance, as if from the branch where he rested, he observed the vassals of his kingdom. He had an inquiring look and at the same time simple and pure. He couldn’t hunt, so the responsibility fell on us to feed him with ground meat plus calcium carbonate powder.

The first time he went up on my finger, I felt a tickle. When I started to laugh, Dio opened his beak and screeched. I had the impression that he wanted to answer my laughter in his own way. As Diodon grew, my fingers became insufficient to safeguard him, and he decided to nest in my arm and shoulder, especially around the neck, where he learned to poke me subtly with his claws. Over my shoulder, Dio always called the attention of onlookers in the center of the town.

From time to time, he opened his wings like a fan, reaffirming its grandiosity. His popped eyes gave me the impression that his painstaking vision contemplated all around him, like his hearing. Nothing went unnoticed, not even a solitary leaf swept by the breeze into a manhole.

Occasionally, he cowered in the presence of strangers, hiding part of his body behind me. I was tickled and laughed when his grizzly beak poked my head. Then he moved his feet to the left, to touch my deltoid, and watched me carefully, since ignoring the visits that he regarded as intrusion. Despite the estrangement that lasted months, he no longer saw the poodles Happy and Chemmy as threats. By analyzing them, his behavior has changed considerably. I remember when I caught the fond Chemmy licking Diodon’s feathers. Silently, the little hawk was aiming the nozzle towards the indigo sky in contemplation.

At late afternoon, after the restless Happy came to lick his beak, Dio wasn’t positioned to peck the dog’s nose as usual. The truth is that he didn’t care. The little hawk may not have noticed what happened and continued admiring the celestial vastness, abstracted from the earth and released to the heavens where he floated under soft dreams as his feathers.

Happy thought that Diodon’s passivity was strange, and examined with exultant and ensnared expression. The poodles retreated when the little hawk flapped his wings and walked toward the brazilian grape tree in the backyard. Climbing from branch to branch, he reached the top and hesitated for nearly a minute before he jumped with open wings.

During the flight, Dio squealed with excitement that caught the attention of neighbors and strangers who passed through Arthur Bernard Street. He was happy and even the most inattentive person realized it. It was as if the cloudless sky gained a new owner, a young animal which discovered that the breath of life also exists in the concession.

Every day in the afternoon he flew at the same time. I was finding it curious and I started to time the duration of his flights. One, two, three, four hours. Each week that passed I noticed that Diodon spent less time at home. That’s when I realized that his home was no longer a place, but a space where his wings bobbed with the purity of a winged horse.

The last time I met him at home, he gently pecked my head. His feathers were more vibrant as well as their glittering eyes of citrine that conveyed me cunning and conviction. Diodon was no longer the small hawk who came home wounded, malnourished and with few feathers. Although he didn’t like hugs, he allowed me to involve him quickly between my arms, without even pointing his long, sharp claws. I let him, and he played the same way he winched the first time that he came up on my finger. Within minutes, Dio left and never returned.We didn’t try to seek him because there is nothing to find when the departure is motivated by the untimely desire to fly.

I never understood how love, so colorful symbolically, could have baleful constitution

I continued visiting mister Ofer until 1993, when we lived in Progress Garden

Throughout life, many times I’ve heard someone saying that love, mistaken for passion, is overwhelming, as if made of sparks of foolishness. When it comes, makes you blind and averse to sense and reason of serene things. It consumes you unexpectedly, leaving your lips parched as dashed ground by severe drought. I’ve heard many stories in my town about suicide for love; people jumping from buildings, throwing their cars against trees, hanging themself, consuming strychnine and shooting themselves in the head. I never understood how love, so colorful symbolically, could have baleful constitution.

Love should not be like mourning, a sorrow manifest. Neither deserves to be related to death if it embraces in essence the fearlessness of light. The heart that loves in abnegation only darkens when it stops beating, irremediable fact of our epilogue. But while living is colorful and robust as a mango harvested in march. It is beyond good and evil. Love is beautiful in literalness, in the purity of its semantics. Not so unilaterally or less distorted and depreciated by clumsiness, confabulations and deconstructions of sense.

Not that there is no pain in love, after all it is inherent to life and sends us iterated signals that suffering also dignifies the existence; teaches that we are defectives, fragile and ephemeral as all beings that inhabit the Earth. However, a feeling becomes harmful only if we allow it to. At least that’s what my life shows me since I started to recognize its entanglement and depth.

When I was seven years old, I lived with my parents in an old house on Pernambuco Street. At the time, a part of the population of my town still had the custom to hold funerals in the own residence hall. One day, across the street, just over 50 meters from home, walking and moving the fingers of the right hand by the wall painted with lime, I stopped in front of a gate where I saw and heard people in a shy crying, talking and scratching their eyes.

They were around a glossy black coffin that looked like a newly unmeasured greased shoe. The room was small and the people, depending on the height, almost rubbed the navel and chest at the deceased’s head to get to the bathroom.  Because of the distance, I could not see her face covered by a snowy cloth that more resembled a bridal veil. I knew she was a woman because I remember when someone said that the deceased was mistress Stela. “Hey, they will bury her with that party cloth?”, I asked myself in a burst of spontaneity and simplicity.

The next morning, when I went out to buy bread, I found mister Ofer, the husband of mistress Stela, walking slowly, laughing alone, and without pointing eyes to anything that surrounded him near a bakery at the Federal Avenue. It seemed like a solemn trance and perhaps meaningless in the strangers conception. I approached, greeted him, and in a typically thoughtless act of a child, I asked: “Mister Ofer, your wife died yesterday, so why are you laughing?”

So he kept quiet for three or four seconds as he watched me and straightened the last button of his flowered shirt, such that retirees use when they go on vacation to a tropical paradise. His complexion and his eyes sparkled so much that I could see my little reflection distorted in his almond-shaped velvety pupils.

“Look, David, you’re still too young, I don’t know if you will understand, but I will reveal to you a secret. I’m not happy, but I committed to rediscover a new direction in my life. Before Stela died, she knew how much I was dependent on her. She was my first and only companion for more than 40 years, since we were teenagers. So you know what she did when she became ill and they told her she wouldn’t live long? She was not lamented. She took a notebook from inside the nightstand, picked up a pen and planned my life, day by day for the next five years. She always knew that I am a mess. She said it was for me to follow straight, so I wouldn’t feel lost. If I started a new life, I could leave the notebook. Otherwise, I just needed to restart the tasks. The first day is today. Take a look!”

I took the notebook with both hands and there were the first suggestions. “Dear Ofer, my great love, get up tomorrow, take a good bath, wear the flowered shirt that is on the first hanger, put on the beige shorts in the second drawer and the almond sandals that are in the first row of the shoe rack. Walk slowly to the bakery and smile. Remember the first time we met, when we got married and when Laura was born. Be sure to smile, even if the people judge you. Ignore all the negativity. Sooner or later this exercise will brighten your heart, turning pain into a new form of love. ”

I returned the notebook and walked to the bakery. There, he bought me a snack and a soda. He preserved the smile most of the time, even when he reported the difficulties in the 1950s. “Our house was practically a shack. We had no fridge, so I only could buy food that did not spoil quickly. We were young, very young, but we were happy in a little place in the woods, “he said, already teary eyed.

On the way back, I noticed that while he was walking, mister Ofer fondly massaged his wedding ring on his left hand. There was a warm and stuffy silence like a diving suit that blended the sounds of motorcycles, cars and trucks crossing the Federal Avenue. Suddenly the uncomfortable smell was overshadowed by a uniform and subtle scent of a blue lily bouquet transported on foot by a young employee of a flower shop. “It is her favorite. Stella called it a Blue Darling”, commented mister Ofer in a laconic laughter.

In front of his house we said goodbye. When I was leaving, he yelled my name and asked me to await. Soon he returned with pomegranates in his hands, picked from his backyard. “That never miss love in your home as never lacked in mine,” he said with a candid smile. I continued visiting mister Ofer until 1993, when we lived in Progress Garden. Over time, my routine changed and his too, then we lost contact.

One day in 2002, I received a letter signed by his daughter Laura, who lived in Curitiba for more than 15 years. I thought the correspondence was sent by mistake because I no longer remembered her. When I opened the envelope, I found pomegranate seeds, brought from Palestine, and a small letter. “My dear and good friend David, all that dies today reborns tomorrow, if the heart accepts it. Never forget that even the Dead Sea couldn’t overshadow the scent of pomegranates that radiated to Jericho”, wrote mister Ofer.