Page 10 of The Secret Dinner

“Why did you do this to us, man?”

Piglet stared at the frozen image on the TV, where Mario was jumping on a giant mushroom. His breathing sounded like a truck engine. When I got closer, I smelled the brutal stench coming from his armpits.

“Explain yourself!”

“There’s no explanation,” he said, his hands crossed over his belly. “Cora is the one joy in my life. I can’t stand you guys anymore, or this apartment, or this city. I’m sorry I spent all the money, but I don’t regret what I did. I want to go home to Pingo, I want to go back to be with my mom. I’m homesick. She gets me.”

My dreams were getting flushed down the toilet and all that bastard could do was stare at us like he couldn’t care less. I was overcome with hatred, and I acted without thinking. I brought up the one thing I knew would hurt him.

“Your mom’s dead, Piglet!” I shouted. “Dead!”

I immediately regretted it. Piglet opened his eyes wide and started to cry. He put his hands over his ears and rocked back and forth, wailing “No, no, no” over and over. Hugo and Miguel tried to hold him back, but it was like trying to stop a raging bull. Piglet screamed and banged his head against the wall. I stood there motionless, watching his forehead tear open, staining the beige paint with blood.

4

Maybe it’s time for you to learn a little more about the place we’re from. Pingo d’Água is a ridiculously small town, nestled in the middle of Paraná, right off the BR-277 highway, which cuts across the entire state from the Port of Paranaguá to the Friendship Bridge in Paraguay. In the 1980s, our town became known as home to the region’s largest brothel, run by Madam Adélia. There, girls of all colors and shapes and sizes brought joy to their clients, mostly truck drivers. Many even crossed the border from Paraguay or Argentina just to meet Adélia’s girls.

In 2003, a young woman named Lygia arrived from São Paulo. She had fair skin, long hair, and was a member of the Assemblies of God Church. She got a small room in town, where she began to hold worship services for a tiny audience. She was a firm woman with a pleasant voice who made a strong impression on those who listened to her sermons about the “designs of Satan” being perpetrated at the brothel. According to Lygia, God had sent her to Pingo d’Água with the mission of purifying its inhabitants, who were consumed by temptations of the flesh.

Little by little, she gained followers, increasing the reach of her sermons, especially among former prostitutes and scorned women. Within a year, she managed to get enough money to buy a property where a beauty salon used to be. There, just a few blocks from the brothel, she became Pastor Lygia and established her church, the Universal Church of the Crucified Lord, an arm of the Assemblies of God.

At first her church had only seventy folding chairs, an improvised pulpit, and an eye-catching sign on the door. Passersby could easily hear the pastor’s sermon—the speakers were powerful and projected her voice all the way to the main square. It wasn’t long before those seventy folding chairs weren’t enough; soon it was standing room only, especially on Thursdays and Sundays.

As far as we know, Madam Adélia couldn’t have cared less about the church’s expansion. She knew that lust and faith could coexist in peaceful communion—many of those who asked God for forgiveness at worship services turned right around and sinned in the halls of the brothel, and vice versa. Besides, she had bigger things to worry about, like taking care of her son—the result of a careless night—and expanding the brothel’s business, which generated a lot of money.

Seized with greed, the madam hired a team of engineers to design plans for a water park, with dark rooms and massage saunas, to be built on the land next to the brothel’s main villa. It was her dream to own the largest adult leisure complex in all of western Paraná, and judging by her determination, that was exactly what she was going to achieve in just a few short years.

It turns out that precisely during this same period, in 2006, Pastor Lygia began a robust political and social campaign to try to block Madam Adélia’s expansionist desires. She expressed her criticisms in fiery sermons on the square, in controversial interviews with local newspapers and at protests in front of the brothel, throwing stones at the windows and using a megaphone to announce the names of the clients who were coming and going. She spread rumors that all manner of terrible things—bestiality, pedophilia, and necrophilia—were happening at the brothel.

City hall and the police were forced to intervene. Since sex tourism was the town’s main source of revenue and a lot of influential people had something to hide, the madam managed to get a restraining order against the pastor and construction went ahead as planned. They celebrated the victory with an orgy on the night of August 30, 2007, one for the history books, where the girls charged half price and there was free beer until midnight.

Lygia felt she had lost the battle against filth and smut but continued to hold morning, afternoon, and evening services, calling on her followers to cry out to Our Lord Jesus Christ to remember their fallen town, and to punish the sinners who were defiling the traditional family. Only punishment from Heaven could stop Satan’s sinful ways, personified by Madam Adélia.

A week before the opening of the new leisure complex, Pingo d’Água fell victim to the biggest storm in its history. Lightning bolts flashed across the sky, and one of them struck the electrical box in one of the brothel’s outbuildings. The short circuit started a fire, which quickly spread through the rooms without anyone noticing—business had been slow because of the rain and most of the girls were already asleep.

The flames engulfed the brothel in just a few minutes. Some girls tried to escape, but Madam Adélia was so obsessed with security that she had made sure to lock everything by key before heading to bed. Townspeople living nearby heard them screaming, burned alive as they punched and kicked the windows and front door.

By the time firefighters arrived, it was too late. The fire had consumed a large part of the building and the brothel’s structure collapsed before they could even enter. Later, the charred bodies of sixty-three women were found among the debris. Madam Adélia’s remains were found in her bedroom, lying peacefully on the bed. She took sleeping pills and hadn’t heard the screams.

The only survivor of the tragedy was her son, who was sleeping over at a school friend’s house that night. That boy was Piglet, and his school friend was me. We were eight years old at the time. My mother told me all this when I was older, when I was able to better understand what had happened that strange morning. All I remember are the sirens going by and my worried parents making phone calls. You could feel the tension in the air.

My mother was the one who had to explain to Piglet that he wouldn’t be going back home. I’m not sure exactly what approach she took to tell that young boy his house had burned down and his mother and all her “friends” were dead, but it couldn’t have been easy. There’s really no way to say something like that gently, is there?

The news was in all the papers. Pingo d’Água teemed with reporters, worshipers, and nosy people. For the religious fanatics, a divine punishment had cleansed the city. The power of prayer had prevailed, just days before the town had established itself as the devil’s lustful playground. It seemed that the Old Testament scriptures were right—God really did like taking drastic measures.

After multiple TV appearances and getting signed to a gospel record label, Pastor Lygia became Bishop Lygia and soon became a religious pop star, selling half a million CDs. Her meteoric rise could be explained by the will of God, who’d selected her as His Chosen One. In just a few years, Pingo d’Água became the largest religious center in the south and the second largest in all of Brazil, second only to the Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida. Bishop Lygia recorded CDs and DVDs, and her services, filled with music and miraculous healings, began to attract hundreds of thousands of followers.

Piglet had had a lax upbringing, running wild and with no rules. Even though my mother harbored an entirely reasonable distaste for Madam Adélia, she and my father understood that none of it was Piglet’s fault and, in an act of charity, tried to raise him at home. But Piglet was a problem child. Before the age of twelve, he was already displaying antisocial behavior, disordered eating, and signs of a personality disorder. He lived with us for four years and then moved into Hugo’s house. Everybody felt a little responsible for him and adopted a kind of rotating system for housing him.

As a teenager, Piglet clung to religion as a means of escape. To sustain his fragile memories, he needed to re-create the past, establishing complex psychological connections. In his imaginary world, his mother was still alive, waiting for him in Pingo d’Água. He made his mother a religious woman, a good friend of Bishop Lygia. I was never sure if he knew the real story, and I never had the courage to ask.

In any case, there’s no denying that religion helped him get back on track a little and kept him out of the psych ward. When he took the college entrance exam, nobody believed he would actually get in, but he snagged a full ride to PUC and moved to Rio de Janeiro with us. Fortunately, medication had minimized most of his symptoms. Miguel kept an eye on him, and sometimes we even managed to forget the whole story and treat him like a normal person. Nobody knew just how much the past still weighed on his soul. I only found out later, in the worst possible way.

5

Miguel ran to his room to get a dose of lorazepam. The sedative was powerful: We had to restrain Piglet, who would have kept smashing his head against the wall if it had been up to him, but all it took was one injection and he fell into a deep slumber. While I was bandaging his head, Miguel ripped into me. I just stood there and took it, not saying a word. I can admit it when I fuck up.

I got a rag and a bucket and cleaned the blood from the wall. I managed to get most of it, but a pinkish, translucent stain remained to remind me of what I’d done. A feeling of defeat hung in the air. After all that, we still had a big problem on our hands: pay what we owe or move out and face a lawsuit. Hugo suggested we talk in the living room over a nice bottle of wine.