Sapphire Moonlight

Chapter 45

Chapter 45

Joao Caio went to the window and had a look down at the street. It was eleven pm.  

He was in his house upstairs in the room he used as an office.  

Towards the place where the French Consul's house stood everything was quiet. Everything was quiet too towards the banker's house across the street from him. In the whole street it was the same situation. And at the same time it was all merrily in tune to the light, upbeat, pre-holiday mood that he was in.  

At the garden in front of his house the leaves swayed gently in the light breeze of the hour. Up in the sky the full moon, its shine dazzlingly intense, made you seek for an understanding of how it was that it worked, and how its brightness could be so bright, so unaccounted for, though we all know the explanation about the sun. But the quiet cool nocturne shine made the idea of the sun incompatible. Its luminosity might be due to some other source.  

A little to the left was Orion and he watched the Três Marias - Three Maries - as they called the three stars that formed the belt of the warrior or huntsman that fought the bull in the sky in that hemisphere. More to the right was the Cruzeiro do Sul, the Southern Cross, four stars that formed a cross plus a fifth one. The longer part of the cross, with the star that was more distant pointed to the South Pole. 

Joao Caio came back to the sofa where he had been lying thinking before he went to the window. He stood up again and decided to go to the hammock a few steps away from the sofa. He turned off the lights and lay quietly. 

It had been a hectic day. Some papers had started to plummet in the morning, a morning of panic. He had to act fast. He sold all his positions from two blue chip companies and bought another stock from an electricity company in place. It later proved a lucky move. Besides cutting his losses he ended up making a considerable profit at the end of the day. No one understood how he could act so quickly and unerringly. 

He saw what he already knew or had known. That he had to be there ahead of his business all the time. It was true he would be going on holidays in two day's time. But holidays or no holidays he had to be focused on his business only, and nothing else. This was why he had phoned the senator in the afternoon to say that he wanted to see him. He was going to tell the senator he would decline the offer to become a minister in the new administration if the governor of Sao Joao D'Acre was elected. And it looked certain that the governor would be elected.  

His company was like a country for him, besides his country. Country in the sense that it was his safe place, a safe port to anchor his ship in good or bad times. 

He saw how much he loved the company he himself had created, after a period of despair when he thought he would have no more chances again.  

During that wild period after he was ditched by a girlfriend he was in love with, he thought he would go crazy with despair and sadness.  

But as soon as he got involved with the idea of launching his company he started to feel enthusiasm again and started to feel sensations he thought he had lost forever or that he had forgotten all about. 

Out of despair, and thinking that nobody would hire him ever, flat broke, he launched his company out of nothing. He did not even have a car.  

The company steadied him. It was also a sort of a floating plank that a man hangs on to desperately in order not to drown after a shipwreck. He himself had created the plank to hold on to. 

This was why he would decline the offer. He would accept to be a member of the board of councilors, though.  

His maid Maria Dirce had left coffee for him on the table nearby. He stood up and in the light from the corridor had some coffee. 

At the time of the girlfriend that had turned him down, he had an inferiority complex. This was why the whole thing had ended badly. It looked as though he would never achieve anything in his career. 

The real trouble was that, without knowing it, he simply did things, and took no time for serious thinking, with the purpose of really, really achieving.  

At the time he had that girlfriend, he had wanted to become very rich. He had to prove he that was capable. To counterbalance all the bad feeling. He started to act with that sole target in mind, and forgot everything about the rest, the rest meaning sensitive thinking, perception, perspective, fine tuning, love, tenderness. He wound up making a mess of it. A complete mess. All this he understood perfectly later, after the event, with the wisdom of hindsight. But not then. Then it had been hellish.  

Later, after the girl had ditched him, and after a subsequent black period when he found himself in real deep water, Joao Caio's struggle for life took a turn for the better. He saw the only way out would come only through thinking. And then he remembered something his father had taught him when he was in the first year in primary school. He had had bad marks and the teacher had complained against him to his mother. His father told him that he wanted him to get A level in all the subjects the following month or he wouldn't watch TV anymore. And his father made it clear that he was to deal with it alone, nobody would help him, he would have to find a way by himself. A month later Joao Caio got A levels, mark 100, for all the subjects, except for discipline, where he got mark 90. His father congratulated him for the brilliant victory and told him he was not to worry about the mark 90 in discipline. Later when Joao Caio was in the secondary school in the first year he got bad marks in French. His father employed the same resources: 

'I want a high mark in French.' 

'The spelling is terribly complicated. I can't manage.' 

'This is your problem. You will have to find a way.' 

'But -' 

'You do something, it's your problem and that's final.' 

And a month later Joao Caio got a mark 90 in French. The method he used was to have a look at the pages of the coursebook and then close it and then to try to write ten words or so without looking at the pages in the book. Then he would check it and find that he had misspelt most of them. He would have another look at the pages and subsequently repeat the process. He would get a higher number of words right this time and so on, until he was able to write all the ten or so words perfectly. Afterwards he would do the same with ten words more. He did not do it of course with all the book, but, say, with a hundred or more words. Then something happened with his process or way of looking at words, that made him able to retain the spelling of words by simply looking at them once or twice. 

Later in High School the same happened in Chemistry. He went to exam needing a pass mark 80, something almost impossible in chemistry in a final exam. 

'I will not accept a bungle,' his father said. 

And for the third time Joao Caio succeeded. He studied hard, got his 80 and passed the Chemistry exam.  

So when years later his world had crushed, not his father, but Joao Caio himself gave him the order: you do something.  

He gave the best of himself trying to see with all his might the important things that were not visible at first sight - what, after all, was really happening, was really going on (it was a question of awareness, of great awareness) - and this enabled him to see beyond. This is the secret how you see things nobody else sees. This marked for him the very path to success.  

All the things Joao Caio accomplished, the huge problems he solved, all the progress he made, transformed him, turned him into a self-confident man. Something inside him had changed. The inferiority complex, though, was always there at the bottom, he never really got rid of it. But he didn't mind it so much anymore, he found a balance, a way of living with it, and it didn't bother him any longer, thank God for him. When it started to cause turmoil again, he stopped and put himself together. 

From a small fridge nearby, Joao Caio got a bottle of wine. He went back to the window and started drinking it as he felt the breeze against his forehead.  

Up in the sky, Orion had moved well to the left, the moon had taken to its highest point, and the Cruzeiro do Sul, the Southern Cross, was close to the point where the moon was now. Joao Caio had another look through the window at his neighbourhood. It all looked friendly. He felt they were all in the same boat, he, the consul, the banker and many others in the neighbourhood.