Sapphire Moonlight

Chapter 32

Chapter 32

The front door of the Dantas's house in Providencia was ajar. In the porch, Juliana, Otavio Sergio and Luiza waited for their mother as she was getting ready to go out with them. They were about to go shopping.  

The house stood on a corner. The street that ran along its left-hand side was on a slight hill that went upwards to the back of the house and beyond, towards where Convent Square was, some five hundred metres away. It had a number of trees on the sides - magnolias, trees-of-heaven, shademaster honeylocusts, skyline honeylocusts, jacarandas and sycamores -, so that the whole street was always in the shade. The street in front of the house was level and it also had trees, but only a few, some of them leafless, some of them small, which didn't interfere with the light, so that this street was open and clear. Two palm trees, their tops almost level with the roof of the double-storey house, stood in the lawn in front of the verandah, on the left side.  

Sitting in a garden chair made of green transparent plastic thread wound around a framework of iron painted dull black, Juliana listened to Otavio Sergio and Luiza's talk. There were four other similar chairs nearby. The elasticity of the plastic threads made them really comfortable. Their framework consisted of welded cylindrical iron sticks, either straight or bent, and each chair was in a different colour of transparent thread - green, red, blue, yellow, glass-like and white. Otavio Sergio was sitting in one of them and Luiza was sitting in another.  

These two talked merrily about the funny incidents that had happened in the club that morning as they had gone there for a swim. Their comments were punctuated by laughter. Juliana laughed quietly as she listened to their chatter. Her reaction was due more to the happy and humorous mood her brother and her sister were in while narrating the events, and their contageous laughter, rather than by the facts themselves, which would otherwise have been quite insignificant and absolutely commonplace. The point was that anything they chose to relate on that sunny, inspiring, and most propitious holiday afternoon would certainly prove to be highly amusing. 

On the pavement across the street from them, the owner of a building material warehouse went by, at a measured, steady pace. The upper part of his body, slightly hunched - the shoulders and the head - swung a fraction of an inch or an inch to the right diagonally, clockwise and back again, rhythmically, each step he took. It looked as if he was dancing some kind of Caribbean dance as he went, and he was elegant. He looked forward calmly, as he headed right, towards the town centre. 

'There goes Alfredo Bartolomeo,' Juliana said quietly, to herself and to her brother and sister, as if it was the name of a character in a well-known serial. That was the man's name. The warehouse was three blocks away and he was returning to work as he did every weekday at exactly the same time with merchant pacience and merchant regularity after having had lunch in his home. 

'But what,' asked Luiza, 'what did the owner of the bar do?'  

'He was unfriendly,' Otavio Sergio said.  

The club had agreed they didn't want to run the bar with their own personel and had decided to lease the concession to a third party. It was this third party Luiza and Otavio Sergio were discussing, as they talked about the man - a short and stout man who sometimes happened to be in a bad temper - who, for the past three months, had leased the bar at the club.  

'He emerged from inside the bar, and stood there, his elbows on the counter, his head leaning on his hands, scowling.' 

'Was there any reason for him to be angry?' asked Luiza. She was wearing a red T-shirt, untucked, blue jeans and trainers. Otavio Sergio was wearing a blue and white check shirt, blue jeans and a pair of trainers.