Incompatible

by Mauricio R B Campos

  “Welcome to our community, my name is Placido, come for breakfast” he invited, indicating a place in the large table that could accommodate up to forty people.

  The two man that had taken him there returned to their bicycles and went out riding. A middle-aged white man with shaven head and beard, with typical Sicilian complexion, approached and greeted him too, introducing as Giacomo Ferragalli. After this, he sat beside Arthur and, in silence, he observed the conversation while he took his breakfast.

  “So, dude, what have you been doing with this backpack through the world?” Placido asked.

  Arthur swallowed dry. He had not thought of this part of the plan. What now? What would he say? Would it be safe to say to those people he had just known that he was taking a sabbatical year in search of a selfknowledge experience? They seemed alternative enough to believe in the story. Yet he felt he should not.

  “I used to work, everything all right, employment agreement, even wearing a tie. Then I had an insight, I don’t know. I thought life was more than all this” he released this, expecting they would swallow the little lie he was inventing.

  “I know this quite well. I went to Australia, studied, and I could have a good job now, gaining a pretty penny, but I don’t know, I also had this insight. Man, that’s what we need, people like you! This world is already full of foolish people, I already like you. Have you come to visit us for any specific reason?” Placido asked.

  “I’ve heard you have a lodging; so, I’d like to know if I can live here. I would work, for sure, although I don’t have experience with rural activities; I’m dedicated and learn things quickly.”

  A woman brought him a piece of homemade bread with butter and a cup of coffee.

  “The coffee is sugar-free; nobody is obliged to drink it like this, but if you want to sweeten it you have to have your own sweetener. Sugar is a poison, man, but we don’t impose anything, everyone knows themselves. This guy here” the red-haired aimed at Giacomo “he smokes. We don’t want this smoke in the common areas. You must follow the rules in the common areas; everyone knows about themselves.”

  Arthur agreed.

  “And who makes the rules of the common areas? The community” Placido continued with the explanation, as if he had been questioned. “We have a self-government principle based on anarchist ideas, we gather in a meeting in a circle, and vote until a subject is approved unanimously. And no subject gets out of the meeting without unanimity. We’ve had meetings, the first ones, haven’t we, Giacomo? That took the whole night. Now everything is already pacified” so it’s calmer now. Do you like the little bread?

  “It’s delicious.”

  “Homemade bread. You ate it, now you have to work to pay for it” he laughed. “Our community is a collaborative community; all collaborate so that we can enjoy this lifestyle. The only thing that falls from the sky is the rain. Our collaborative work generates responsibility, confidence, integrity and results through a real consensus. Here we don’t need fines for those who dirty, because all of us are the janitors. If you don’t clean the floor this week or this month, sooner or later your turn will come. And it’s like this concerning everything. Our administration uses the anarchist principles; not in the meaning of disorder, mess, but in the political meaning. So as stated by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, anarchy is order.”

  Arthur kept on looking at him while he spoke with passion, in doubt whether he could eat the bread before working or needed to pay for it before.

  “Eat, eat now because we’re going to check if you can remain in the lodging of the sheltering house” — the red-haired insisted, before the other’s hesitation; then, he explained: “Your permanence in the lodging doesn’t depend on me, nor on Giacomo, but on the approval of the assembly, so, if you want to remain here, be kind to everyone, respect the rules and work hard.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Lara de Alencar stared at her mother sleering. They were side by side in the bench of the church. Maria de Lourdes Alencar, nicknamed as Malu, had a gentle smile. And Lara knew why. She now felt that her daughter had found the way, or rather, as she would say, she had finally come to her senses. Her daughter despised and did what was possible not to go to the church, now she kept company with her every Sunday.

  Lara remained a little lost during the first masses she went to, intrigued with how people knew the right moment to say those words memorized in response to some trigger the priest aimed. He is in the middle of us. Word of Salvation. Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us. After sometimes, she discovered the church availed a kind of guideline with the script of the mass. From then on, she followed the mass looking at the booklet, as if she read an opera libretto. And at the right moments, she could say the magic words most of the people knew by heart. They even came in bold to guide the loyal neophyte. Someone in the church was surely concerned with the new followers.

  She took part of almost all actions of the mass, but her mother prohibited her to take part in the Celebration of the Eucharist, since she had not received the Confirmation Sacrament. She needed to contact the secretary of the church to check if there were classes of catechesis for adults so that she could register and then be able to take part in all of the sacraments.

  Before searching for her ego anathematization, Lara did everything possible not to go to the church, and at the few times she went, she had several forms of abstraction she used to maintain away from that congregation of boring believers. She remembered once her mother found her with her earphones connected to a little MP3 player. She felt the pinch up to the last amen. Later on, she isolated in the definitive refuge that was her mind. She remained in the dark during the entire mass, waiting for the relief of the last amen. When she discovered Chaos Magic, other thoughts inhabited her mind, and having been back once or twice to the mass in this period would have been too much. In those occasions, she started seeing the mass, life, the universe and everything else, in a different manner. She started to consider other things during the ceremony. With so much energy being released by the followers, how would the fifth dimension of that place be? How would the host be if she could see the dimension of the causes? Would it mean flesh? Would wine mean the blood of Christ? If it were so, what would the mass be but a spectacle of cannibalism, where the high priest was vampire? Thanks to Chaos, nobody could hear what was in her mind! The punishment for such a heresy would certainly be severe. What would happen to her if they could hear her? Much probably, she would be tied to the cross, where she would burn in flames. Especially she, who was not even a Wiccan[25]! Another thinking she had was about the spiritual strength of that assembly. The Christian Egregore. An Egregore is how one calls a spiritual strength created by the sum of collective powers (a field of extra physical powers created in the astral plane from the power issued by a group of people through their vibration standards), a product of the congregation of people. But the fact the Christian Egregore was one of the most powerful of the world could not be rejected like this as if it was nothing, nor be taken as something overcome, due to the apparent failure of the Church in obtaining more followers. What was all that energy being used (or discarded) for? With this kind of reflection, and since she was really forced to keep arrested in the core of that Egregore, she decided to use all that energy to feed a

  server31. Then she was beginning to work with servers, she did not create her own servers yet, but she used the forty servers[26] of Tommie Kelly[27]. Since all she wanted was to get rid of her mother’s influence and get out of that countryside city, she believed kept her more and more distant from her dreams, she was carrying a server known as the road opener34.

  31 Servant: Servants are semiconscious entities created to execute a given task. Initially they use part of the vital force of the magist to be created, but after that they can have power loaded in several ways. The three steps to create a servant are:

  creating a list: define what the servant must do and its limits;

  lend
power: the magist’s vital power, initially;

  banishment: the servant must be forgotten by its creator, so that it is free to do what it was created to do.

  A road that could lead her far away from São Carlos, and if it was a road paved by the soft magic tissue, it would be better. This meant she was bringing inside the church the server that looked like Ganesha, the elephant of the Hinduism, but it was bluish.

  Apparently, it went right, because right after that she passed the entrance exams of architecture at USP São Paulo and went through the road in a Viação Cometa bus. Years after, thinking of all that, she created a tattoo with a Ganesha sitting on a bus of this company, which made a lot of success among the followers of Chaoism. She did not tattoo this work in her body, because, despite enjoying the idea, she thought Cometa bus was a bit overcome. But this was before.

  She did not know where her servants were now; actually, she did not know even where the servants whose masters forgot about or abandoned, as she did, would end up. If the servants were created from a vital impulse of the magist, would this energy return to the magist and the servant disintegrate? Or would they be available for another magist? It had not much sense, finally, which magist would know about his or her servants if she did not talk about them to anyone? Questions.

  Questions whose answer was not important anymore, at last, when she

  34 The Road Opener: This server shows us how to clean, banish and remove the obstacles in our way. It encourages us to recognize the opportunities that appear around us.

  resolved to abandon her previous life, the Chaos Magic was at the top of the list of things to be forgotten.

  However, the idea of a line of unemployed servants following her like dead souls was not comfortable. On the other hand, the servants were like zombies, wandering through the astral plane, dragging their feet through the floor and swinging their soft arms beside their body. She made those images disappear from her mind; they did not fit her new ego anymore. The Chaos Magic, no matter how contradictory it could be, was dead for her, when she embraced the most advanced of the magic capacities possible for a magist.

  CHAPTER 19

  The dark blue sky was almost black at that night without moonlight. From the porch, Arthur contemplated the darkness that surrounded the lodging, sitting on a wooden bench. The lighting in Tibiriçá was limited to the inner part of the constructions and to the porchs. Beside him Mathias was smoking a cigarette, telling stories of jaguars, snakes, spiders and other strange animals that sometimes appear in the farm at nights without moon, in addition to other lies. The black young man was in the lodging in the period that he would help in the enlargement of the ecovillage’s installations. As far as Arthur knew, those wild animals were not lurking around human beings, anxious for the fatal strike, as it was being said. Certainly, since his roommate was a guy of the city, he decided to dig up all kinds of stories in the Anaconda style to see if he would spend the night awake.

  What was completely impossible, because Placido sent him for the work early in the morning. They were building the structure of a large round kiosk separated by a wall. On one side of this wall, they would insert the new library and the digital room, and on the other side, a pizza oven. He questioned the fact the oven would be close to the wall where on the other side would be installed computer information equipment, if this would not impair the acclimatization of the room. The red-haired laughed:

  “There’ll be no acclimatization, no, it’s all rustic. We’re going to put ceramic floor tiles to refresh the environment, that’s all! In Australia, it was all like this and there was no problem. We’re going to use the oven more during the night, but anyway, the project includes the placement of a thermal isolation between the oven and the wall.”

  The project had just begun, so, with everything to be done, Arthur was introduced to an unknown world: the exhaustion world. He worked under the harsh sun in an activity with which he had no affinity, hurting his hands and arms in the process.

  The work was held by Mathias, the mason, Placido, another volunteer and Arthur. The volunteer was not fixed, and every day one of the dwellers of the community would take turn. The heir of the Mendonca’s worked hardly as much as he could, always trying to learn the most with the mason, paying attention to every detail; although most of the time he worked as a mate. The words of Fermin echoed sometimes in his mind: someone who can think, believe or do any of half a dozen things is more freed and freer than someone confined to only one activity. The

  Galician did not only make clear how exhaustible learning this would be. At a given moment, he thought he would faint, so high was the heat and the harsh sun; but a break in the work was enough to recover. In this break, Placido left the work and returned with an Australian hat like the one he wore, all shabby and dirty of dirt and dust, and handed him:

  “Take it, if you go on working hard like this, you can keep it.”

  And the day continued like that, without much time for divagations, only hard work. When they were hitting six p.m., Placido finished the work and invited all of them to an area they called Living Space, which was no more than a round green area limited by a glooming lively fence. There must be some thirty people there, facing the sun that began its descending route in the horizon. Faced with the group, a man aged about forty years old and of excellent physical shape, wearing a kind of kimono, united his hands in front of his body and got on his knees slowly in lotus position. The audience imitated him, each within their capacities, some of them only sitting. And according to the saying, when in Rome, act like a Roman, he sat and closed his eyes, only resting his eyelids, his body calling for rest. He felt the pure air, the energy of the contact with nature giving him a new vigor, the sounds of nature before the silence of the human activities.

  When he opened his eyes again, the people were already standing, imitating the instructor of tai chi chuan in front of them.

  “Did you sleep there?” Mathias joked “Come, backpacker, let’s take a shower and eat something because I’m starving.”

  They headed to the lodging, where they took a shower and, from there, to the kitchen, where a smoking vegan feijoada[28] was ready for them. Mathias was all the time joking with the fact the hippie feijoada had no meat, but this did not prevent him from eating two big plates with a full homemade bread. The dessert was a guava jam; the best one Arthur had ever eaten. And to finish, an organic coffee cup (without sugar). His major gourmet interest was beer, which he had even made at home sometimes, but he also had some knowledge about coffee. As a good connoisseur, he knew the ideal was drinking coffee without sugar, because it changes the natural taste of the drink and its taste overlays both the imperfections and the qualities of the fruit.

  Arthur was so tired physically that Mathias’ provocations ended up innocuous. He imagined he would spend the nights studying the wisdom of Taoism, but actually, when the night came, all he wanted was a bed with a minimum of comfort to embrace the absolute unconsciousness until the next day.

  Bissau, Mozambique, Timor, Goa, India and Brazil, where it is also considered a national dish. However, the recipe differs slightly from one country to another.

  Brazilian feijoada made with black beans

  The name comes from feijão, Portuguese for "beans".

  The basic ingredients of feijoada are beans with fresh porkor beef. In Brazil, it is usually made with black beans (Feijoada à Brasileira). The stew is best prepared over low heat in a thick clay pot.

  It is usually served with rice and assorted sausages such as chouriço, morcela (blood sausage), farinheira, and others, which may or may not be cooked in the stew.

  CHAPTER 20

  Lara’s days were not much different from each other. The same routine of waking up, taking shower, breakfast, hair care, make up, taking the steering wheel of her Kia Picanto and driving up to work. Normally, her work was quite predictable, working on projects and occasionally visiting some client or receiving them at the office. From the work she
went straight to the gym, where she had a different activity each day of the week. She arrived at home, cooked something soft to eat and sat in front of the TV along with her mother. When the nine o’clock soap opera was finished, she went to her bedroom to watch something on Netflix.

  In her previous life, she hardly watched television. Everything she needed was at a click of the mouse, or in some book. She read too much then, but now that she imposed that paradigm shift, she did not feel at ease by reading. What drew her attention was Chaos Magic, comics about magic and other fiction books. But still in São Paulo, she donated all of her books to the first library she saw in her way. She thought the TV soap operas were very boring, but they were a way to spend some time with her mother without gaining any sermon or listening for the thousandth time the same funny story (that had already lost the fun years ago).

  Her relationship with her mother was always disturbed; her mother hoped that she was a tidy girl, sitting in the first row of the classroom, with exemplar marks, taking part in the mathematics Olympics, that she liked to read sweet novels and dreamt with a prince charming (who would never come). But reality was a little different from what her mother hoped: she was always one of the back row slackers, her marks had normally a communist background, tending to red, and her behavior in school had a strong curve to mediocrity; she thought Calculations too boring a subject and truly wondered why we had to learn mathematics more than enough to make a rule of three, which is the most one is going to use of mathematics in the real life, now that computers make all the boring part of calculations; including Differential and Integral Calculation, her biggest nightmare in college; and this was the reason why she would like to set up temples in honor and glory of Computer Information, with altars for Intel, Apple and Dell; and everything she had read in her teenage years and in her adult life was too far from sounding like princes tales. In fact, the fairy tales’ elements that were closer to her would be the witches.