Circus artists also believes in saints (Spider-Man, chapter 2)
Soon after Claudinha installed the alarm on the doors and windows of her apartment, the neighbor's children discovered the novelty and, every time they came home from school, punched her door until the alarm went off. Soon her neighbors were disgusted by the daily racket and threatened to call the police if something wasn't done. Between complaints from the neighbors and conversations with the children's mother, time passed with no news.
One day, however, when she came home from work in the evening, Claudinha saw a group of neighbors gathered downstairs at the playground. They were carefully examining the façade of the building and talking quietly, with frightened looks on their faces. Over the intercom, the doorman told Claudinha that an apartment had already been broken into the night before and the thief was starting to break into the apartment below through the balcony door, when the owner's dog realized there were strange people inside and started barking. The neighbors were now trying to figure out the route the thief had taken before breaking into the first apartment. Claudinha was now sure she wasn't crazy, as some people had claimed. Someone had tried to break into her apartment. And it wouldn't have happened again in the building if the landlord had paid proper attention to her story, instead of making sexist jokes. At least now he would have taken action and had the building's playground alarmed.
Some time later, walking through the center of Rio at lunchtime, Claudinha saw the landlord of her building in Rua Gonçalves Dias chatting with a street prostitute. "Son of a bitch, a moralist..." she said quietly, as she passed the scene on the sidewalk, looking him in the eye.
Many months later, her friend Zazel was hired as a teacher at a circus school that worked with children from underprivileged communities to get them off the streets. One day, Zazel invited Claudinha to attend one of her classes after working hours. Her friend was proud of the social nature of the work she was doing. Her only regret was the newspaper reports that had started to appear about the police's suspicions that teenagers from the favela who were taking the circus artist course might be involved in residential burglaries. In several of these robberies that were taking place in Rio's south zone, the thieves apparently had circus skills.
While Zazel was teaching juggling, Claudinha noticed another group of students, who were following their teacher's every move with a look of genuine veneration. A young, muscular man with sun-streaked golden hair, a real poster boy for Rio's South Zone, was showing them how to walk on a trapeze and throw themselves over the safety net without hurting themselves. He then showed the students his ability to climb a vertical surface with almost no footholds. "Impressive," she thought, although it gave her a slight chill.
After the lesson, Claudinha and Zazel went to a nearby bar to have a beer and catch up. "What a cutie," Claudinha commented about the teacher. "He was my classmate at Colégio Santo Inácio. A strange guy, he always seemed a bit angry. I never really liked him," said Zazel, "It's a coincidence that we became teachers here, isn't it?" Claudinha was about to ask more about the professor when they were both surprised by his arrival at the bar. Soon, he was sitting having a beer with them. As they chatted eye to eye, Claudinha noticed his clothes. All designer clothes. The guy looked like a mannequin. Then she remembered that he had studied at St. Ignatius, so he must have come from a wealthy family.
Her eyes had been lovingly examining every exposed inch of his body when he pulled up the sleeves of his sweatshirt and Claudinha noticed his bracelet. A colorful braid with a little saint hanging from it! "What saint is that?" she asked. "It's Saint Catherine, the saint who protects construction workers from accidents and falls." "Ah," she replied dejectedly. Shortly afterwards, barely recovered from her disappointment, she asked Zazel if they could leave, as she had woken up early and was very tired. The young man seemed slightly annoyed by the lack of results from all that charm he had thrown at her.
On the street, hugging her friend, Claudinha told him a summary of her story, from the early morning phone call about the attempted robbery to the description of the bandit's bracelet. "Oh my friend, what a disappointment. I dread these middle-class kids who fight boredom with adrenaline. If I hadn't seen your colleague's bracelet, I wouldn't have suspected a thing. With a little more talk, he'd have been able to walk right through the front door of my apartment. There was no need to jump in through my bedroom window!".
Shortly afterwards, he was discovered in a tragic way. During one of the robberies, he was startled when the owner of the house woke up, and ended up falling from the seventh floor. It seems that Santa Catarina wasn't paying attention that day, and he ended up appearing in two different sections of the same edition of the newspaper: the deaths section and the police chronicles section.
End of story
Voltar