Chapter 1
The series of bureaucratic steps you’re faced with after the death of a loved one—identifying the body, registering the death, obtaining the death certificate, making phone calls and final arrangements—often leaves you so numb that you have no time to cry or grieve.
When everything around you starts to crumble, you have to be unshakable, like a lighthouse leading the way forward through the darkness.
First thing Saturday morning, I went alone to the morgue to identify Miguel’s body.
Afterward, I stopped by the police station to give a statement, filled out paperwork, and arranged payment for the body’s transport back to Pingo d’água.
Around noon, I called my mom to tell her what’d happened.
To me, telling friends and family was such a no-brainer that I assumed somebody had already done that while I was dealing with the bureaucratic shit.
But no. My mom listened to the news in distraught silence, which morphed into a series of heaving sobs, broken by logistical questions.
“Let me tell his mother … My God, how did something like this even happen?”
I tried to remember everything the detective had told me at the police station, with as much detail as possible: Miguel was walking alone along Rua Tonelero at around five PM when two men on a motorcycle pulled up beside him.
According to witnesses, they took his phone and a briefcase he’d been carrying.
Miguel didn’t resist, but the muggers shot him three times, and he died instantly, just a few blocks from home.
The detective justified their initial difficulty in identifying the body by citing the fact that the muggers had also taken his wallet containing his ID.
When they were removing the body from the crime scene, they found his hospital badge tucked into his shirt pocket.
It was a straightforward case of armed robbery, one of many daily muggings in Rio de Janeiro.
“We’ll do everything we can to catch the culprits,” the detective had told me, with the weariness of someone who’d made that same promise too many times before.
I was able to get the body released from the morgue that same day, to be transported to Pingo d’água the following morning.
Back at the apartment, everyone was still in shock.
Piglet had become a different person: I’d never heard him go that long without letting out one of his boisterous belly laughs, which always lightened the mood.
We were somber, empty, sapped. Cora stayed close by, ever faithful, careful to respect our space.
She hadn’t been that close to Miguel and didn’t try to force things in that regard.
She wept quietly, hugging her boyfriend with a lost look in her eyes.
After the initial shock, Hugo had wiped his tears and tried to help.
He offered to accompany the hearse and organize our trip home to Pingo d’água.
I couldn’t sleep at all that night. What was Miguel doing on Rua Tonelero?
He never went past that corner on his way to the subway or the gym.
Before the sun was up, we were in a cab to Gale?o airport.
It was a two-hour flight to Curitiba followed by a six-hour drive in a rental car amid rural fields and abandoned farmhouses, following the hearse carrying Miguel’s body, until we finally arrived in Pingo.
We exited off br-277 highway, taking the dirt road to the right that leads into town, while the hearse went straight to the cemetery.
Though there wasn’t much time before the wake, I wanted to go home.
Before driving under the large arch at town entrance—WELCOME TO PINGO D’áGUA—we passed the large abandoned structure that had once been Madam Adélia’s famous brothel.
Now all that remained was a rusted skeleton, charred rooms where local teens went to do drugs and lose their virginity.
Piglet glanced at the burned-down building, its dusty beams rising out of the rubble like horns, but he kept his face blank, as if none of it had anything to do with him.
It had been six years since I’d last set foot in my hometown.
My parents came to visit me about twice a year in Rio, and whenever we said our goodbyes, I’d promise to come to Pingo, even set a date, but I’d always come up with an excuse at the last minute and put it off indefinitely.
It might seem silly, but I was terrified of returning to my roots only to realize that this was the place where I belonged all along. That I never should have left.
It didn’t take me more than ten minutes of driving around the few streets downtown to confirm that nothing had changed—like so many others, it was a town stuck in time.
Around the main square sat the town hall, the clerk’s office where my father was a notary, the same old clothing stores, same bars, Mr. Italo’s video store that had fueled my childhood imagination, and the tiny, washed-out Catholic church, now completely overshadowed by the excessive grandeur of the Universal Church of the Crucified Lord just a few feet away.
The only sign of change was the handful of hotels and motels for the faithful who came from far away to attend Bishop Lygia’s concert-like worship services.
A service had just let out, so the center of town was bustling.
When I got to the house, my mother was waiting for us at the gate in a black dress, her face puffy.
It took me only a few seconds to reach a bittersweet conclusion: This was no longer home.
The unpaved streets, the houses with their small fences and big yards, that obsession with knowing everybody’s business, the stalls selling Bibles in various sizes—none of that belonged to me anymore.
I was an outsider. I didn’t have the patience anymore for all this peace and quiet.
As I hugged my weary mother and she cried on my shoulder, I felt a complete and utter detachment, and with it came a depressing realization: If I didn’t belong in this world anymore, where did I belong?
I’d turned into an entitled little bitch, fawning over the filthy rich in exchange for money in the bank and fuel for my ego.
It was a truth too painful to accept, at least not without a healthy dose of angst.
“You look different,” my mother said. I hadn’t looked at myself in the mirror all day. Was she saying that because of Miguel? Or the drugs? Mothers have a freakish sixth sense about those things. “Come here, you need to eat something.”
The house was full but silent. I greeted some of my mother’s friends and introduced Cora to everyone, since clearly Piglet wasn’t going to—he’d always been terrible at social etiquette and seemed even worse now.
Mrs. Marina, Hugo’s mother, was a very short woman, but she looked even smaller.
She got up from the table to give me a hug before saying a word to her own son.
She looked over at him scared, unsure of how to approach him after all those years apart.
Their greeting was detached, heavy with heartache.
Maybe her husband was still beating her.
Hugo hated that she’d never stood up to him.
This, combined with their intellectual gap and his unbridled vanity, prevented him from feeling true affection for his mother.
What he really felt was shame. And anger.
We ate corn cake and talked very little—any word sounded wrong in that situation.
I didn’t see Miguel’s mom until the wake.
When we arrived at the small chapel next to the cemetery, she was standing beside the coffin, her dry eyes fixed on Miguel’s face.
What mothers feel for their children isn’t just love, it’s something much stronger.
As I hugged her, I understood that the reason she wasn’t crying is because the dead don’t cry, and that’s how she was.
She was still breathing, but she was dead.
The pain I felt was more than emotional; it was also physical.
My chest and eyes burned, and my legs felt like they had been crushed in a vise.
Shaking off my stupor, I walked up to the coffin and started to bawl, everything I’d been keeping bottled up finally released: I cried for the people in cages at a slaughterhouse somewhere in Rio de Janeiro, I cried for that poor man desperately searching for his missing fiancée, I cried for my best friend.
Miguel was the most trustworthy, kind, and companionable guy I knew.
Once, during my sophomore year of college, an ex told me he’d contracted HIV.
We’d had sex a couple of times without a condom, and desperate, full of shame, guilt, and regret, I asked Miguel for help.
He had important classes he couldn’t skip that day, but he insisted on coming to the clinic with me for a test. Before I even got the results back, he told me I should have been more careful but explained that being HIV-positive wasn’t the end of the world.
The test came back negative, but if it hadn’t, I knew I had the best possible person by my side.
Miguel was my confidant, the brother I never had.
In losing him, I had also lost a part of myself.
The thought of hitting rock bottom can be comforting. You think when you’ve finally gotten there, the only way to go is up. Turns out, rock bottom doesn’t exist. Things can always get worse.
I was talking quietly with Piglet in a corner when Rachel walked into the room and approached the coffin, wearing sunglasses and holding a bouquet of white roses.
She touched her ex-boyfriend’s cold forehead, placed the flowers on his pale hands clasped together over his belly, and seemed to be mouthing a prayer.
Then she turned to us, taking off her sunglasses.
Her eyes were red and sad but also filled with hatred.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?” she shouted. “It’s your fault he’s dead!”
I couldn’t even believe it. I feigned offense, looking to my mother for backup. Cora took cover behind Piglet and Hugo grabbed Rachel violently by the arm.
“Stop spewing nonsense. Get out of here.”
“You killed Miguel! You’re all traitorous pieces of shit! You killed Miguel!”
She pointed at us like we were lepers. Wracked with sobs, she tried to break her thin body free from Hugo and attract more attention.
People began to murmur, watching the show and shooting us accusatory looks.
I wanted to kill Rachel. All I had to do was call Umberto and tell him that bitch was a threat, and that would be the end of her.
I knew I had that kind of power, and for the first time, listening to her shrill screams, I thought about using it.
After some hassle, Hugo and two other guys finally managed to drag Rachel outside.
I sat there quietly like nothing had happened, eager for time to hurry up and pass.
Around half past four, the funeral procession began.
I made a point of volunteering to be a pallbearer.
As the gravedigger shoveled the dirt, my mother closed her eyes and squeezed my hands, feeling my cold skin.
It was only after most people had already left that I finally went over to Miguel’s mom.
I’d briefly spoken to her during the wake, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something still pending, an unanswered question occupying an invisible space between us.
I gave her another hug and kissed her wrinkled forehead, and told her again how she was like a second mother to me.
“I’m going to get you the money for your treatment,” I promised, but she was barely listening.
I’d decided that I was going to take on that responsibility to try to make up for the whole shitty mess.
Miguel’s final calls before he died had been to me.
Thirteen missed calls. What had he wanted to tell me?
Why hadn’t he texted me instead? It must have been something important, something he’d rather have said face-to-face.
I went home and tried to sleep without taking anything, embraced by the nostalgia of my teenage bedroom.
But no matter how hard I closed my eyes and tried to clear my head, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my friend’s death had nothing to do with the violence of Rio de Janeiro, that it wasn’t just a coincidence.
That Miguel’s death had been planned.