Spiderman strikes in Rio again (Spiderman, Chapter 1)
It was a hellish summer, the kind that only happens in an El Niño year. And to make matters worse, the air conditioning was broken. It wasn't just the fresh air that was missing these days. Claudinha also needed the noise of the unit to sleep well. In fact, the noise was more like a rattle. The only way she could sleep now was to open more than one window in the apartment, to create a draft and thus cool down a bit inside the house.
In the early hours of the morning, Claudinha woke up to a slight noise, nothing at all, it sounded like the window sliding slowly on its track. With the last images of her dreams still imprinted on her retina, she opened her eyes and saw an arm. An arm resting on the window! Startled, she sat up in bed, rubbed her eyes and looked at the window again. She wasn't dreaming, there really was an arm resting on the window on the balcony side. In a single movement, she switched on the bedside lamp and flew into the bathroom, where she locked herself in until dawn. She ended up sleeping there, lying on the rug on the cold floor.
Early in the morning, she unlocked the bathroom door and peeked carefully through the crack to see if she could see or hear anything. Nothing. Total silence. She then left the bathroom and searched the whole house to see if anything was missing. Nothing. Everything in its place. "He must have been frightened when I turned on the light in the bedroom and run away," she said to herself. She decided to go to the bakery next to her building. While she was checking her wallet to see if there was enough money to pay for everything she wanted to buy, the elevator door opened and Claudinha bumped into the landlord, Antônio, a very nice Portuguese man. After the usual greetings, she asked if he had heard of any recent robberies in the building, any strange stories. "Why?" he asked. So she decided to tell him everything that had happened the night before.
Although Antônio listened attentively to the whole story, he gradually began to chuckle wryly. "Wouldn't that be one of your friends?" he asked at the end, as if every single woman who lives alone collected men on her balcony for consumption in case of need. Not knowing what to say, nor wanting to pick a fight with someone so narrow-minded, she mumbled a quick goodbye and hurried off to the bakery. During breakfast, the more she thought about it, the angrier she became with the landlord and with herself for not giving him the answer he deserved. She decided to take action and called the police.
Having already been properly vaccinated by Antônio's macho attitude, Claudinha began the conversation with the policeman by asking if there had been any recent cases of Spider-Man robberies in Rio de Janeiro. "No, my child, the last story happened a long time ago". Well, as she didn't want to be known as the first of a new wave, she gave up talking to the police.
Over the next few weeks, every time Claudinha went out with her friends, she would tell them what had happened and analyze their reaction. Little by little, she collected a series of similar stories that she heard from them in return. One of these stories struck her because of its similarity to her own.
Her friend Carol, who lived very close to Cobal de Botafogo, was awoken one morning by a very strange phone call. In it, a young and very agitated man said he saw someone climbing the façade of his building. In the background there was a loud noise of music and young people. In a bad mood, she hung up, thinking it was a hoax. The phone rang twice more, but she didn't answer and ended up unplugging it from the wall so she could go back to sleep.
The next day Carol woke up very early. A light breeze was blowing through the apartment. "I still remember how delicious the temperature was that morning, after a few days of unbearable heat and a lightning storm," she said. The apartment had spent the whole night with its windows and balcony doors open, as usual during the summer. At dawn, a violent storm had hit. But what Carol found strange were those little pools of water arranged symmetrically, like a person's footprints, so far from the balcony door. They ran from the balcony door to the bookcase in the living room, and from there to the sofa. Carol stood in the middle of the room for a while, trying to understand what had happened. It was then that she remembered the phone call she had received earlier in the morning.
She went back to her apartment and, from the balcony, examined her surroundings to see which buildings gave her an unobstructed view of her apartment, after all, her building was surrounded by several tall trees. "That brown building over there is a good candidate. I wonder if there was a party there last night?". That's how, by knocking on doors and talking to the doormen, she found out where they had called her from. "The hardest part was finding a phone number in your building," her neighbor told her. "We used one of those old phone books that gave the phone number according to the address. As my mother keeps everything old, we had one of these catalogs here at home. As luck would have it, the first number we dialed was yours".
Claudinha heard this whole story from her friend Carol and decided to trust her own instincts. That same day, she called a blacksmith's and asked them to fence off her balcony. She also had alarms installed on her windows and external doors. She didn't want to live through Spider-Man's adventures anymore. Now she could finally sleep soundly!