New energy

Varlei was in a much better mood today. He managed to work on the house three days in a row, and today Luciana took him shopping for clothes for his children – it’s already time to put together the package to ship to Brazil for Christmas morning. She told me later that he stared so hard at the girls in the mall she was worried someone would ask for police to intervene. But in the evening our lonely friend was expansive and boiled two fat cow livers in an inch of spitting corn oil and ate them at the table with us (me: beans and rice; Luciana: macaroni and cheese). Chatting at table, Varlei told us how energetic and alive he had felt when his wife was pregnant the first time. He felt he could do anything. The story he told to put the nail in it involved a large open truck with a load of sand in the back. A storm was coming, a tropical storm that would wash away all the sand and result in loss of money, time, opportunity. So he stayed up all night, unloading the truck with a small bucket, all he had available, carrying by hand in bucketfuls the entire load of sand up into his house to keep it safe from the storm. In the morning, the storm broke full force on their town, and he walked down the streets ankle deep in storm-floods, exhausted to his core and feeling full of a magical power because he had striven all night against circumstances to protect his unborn child.