Luna: New Moon

Lyoto. I can’t see him clearly any more, but I remember his voice. He had a southern accent – he was from Curitiba. I think he was my first love. Oh, you smile. I didn’t flirt with him, tease him, seduce him, play sexy games with him so it must have been love. I met him on the jiu jitsu team. Sports teams, they’re all sex sex sex; everyone is doing it all the time. We were at a competition – I was on the women’s team, Light class, Purple belt. He was Heavy, Black Fifth. I remember his weight and his belt, but not his face.

Papai would borrow the flashiest Mercedes from the showroom and drive to home competitions. It was a long drive but he enjoyed it. Afterwards he would drive me through Jardins and take me out to dinner somewhere expensive. I would step out of that big car and feel like a millionaire.

Then one time he drove up and I didn’t get in the car and go with him. I wanted to go drinking beer with Lyoto and then on to a party. I remember the sad look on Papai’s face that we wouldn’t be driving down Rua Barão de Capanema again checking off the menus on the car screen. I think I made him feel like a millionaire too. He still came to the tournaments, right up until I went to Ouro Preto for post-grad. It was too far for him to drive and I was losing interest in the fighting by then. Year after year, tumbling about on a mat, to advance by a Dan here, a belt there.

Lyoto had been dead two years by then. We had been lovers for over a year. I wasn’t there when he was shot down in the Praça da Sé. I was working on a term paper when the word came. I never was the political one. I was an engineer, he was a literature student. An activist. I was just a natural capitalist who had never taken a position because I had never really thought about politics, he told me. I had pragmatism. He had theory. I could never debate with him because he had everything thought out; argument after argument like a colonial army. When one line fell, the next would advance, firing. The world order was rotten. Diseased with social injustice, racism, sexism, inequality and bad gender politics. I thought that was just the natural state of Brazil. But even I could see the number of helicopters that flew over USP campus increasing every day: the limousines of the hyper-rich, the people who lived up there among the tower-tops and never touched the ground. The changes fell like micro-meteors, like hundreds of tiny impacts. The bus and metro fares going up again. My friends tagging their bicycles, because theft was going up, because fares were going up. Shops buying full shutters because more people were sleeping in shop porches. More cameras on the streets, because of the street sleepers. Surveillance drones. In São Paulo! Maybe in some European state, or the Gulf, but it is not the Brazilian way. Where there are drones, there will always be police. Where there are police, there will always be violence. And every day the price of bread went up, up, up. If there is one thing that will bring people on to the streets, it’s the price of bread.

Lyoto was committed. He went down to Praça da Sé and painted placards and occupied spaces. He thought I was uncaring. I was caring, but not about people I didn’t know. Not about Chinese companies buying up whole provinces and driving people off the land. Not about refugees from the country, who even favelados looked down on. I could only care about what I knew. My family, my friends, the family I would have some day. Family first, family always.

I was scared for him. I watched Youtube. I could see how the protests were escalating. Shouting to stones to petrol bombs. Each step the police responded: riot shields to tear gas to guns. I told him I didn’t like him going down there. I told him he could get arrested, or go to jail and get his CPF pulled and he could never get credit or a proper job. I told him that he cared more about strangers than he did about people who cared for him. About me. We split up for a while. We still had sex. No one ever really splits up.