THE UNIVERSE BANK AND THE PROGRESS OF SILENCE

 

All roads lead to Rome. Notwithstanding the length of that latitude. I cover my head with the blankets until I feel the warmth of my breath and need to breathe again. I need to throw up. And I run, tripping over my own legs, not even time to put on my slippers. And already in the bathroom, after the lid is lifted, all that comes out of the glottis is a liquid and white foam and an agony that comes from my stomach. Rome is not to blame for this indisposition. I understand that it is my body that is retaining and expelling what I keep and is not mine. After running cold water on my face and gargling the strong elixir in my mouth, I return to my room, still in the dark. I look for my slippers, open the door, slowly, so as not to wake anyone in the house, and I hear the men outside, with the backhoe, composing the wall. The sun wants to settle in the sky, even though, what I harvest of the day is, next to the tank, the wet ground, the leafy and wet cherry tree, the neighbor's nervous dogs that don't shut up and my painful eyes from sinusitis that always returns with weather fluctuations.

I keep all the yesterdays of you in me. Another empty pack of cigarettes, another ghastly ashtray and all I want to do is dump all these disagreements on the bed, but I don't give in to the body, I push myself into the kitchen. Hara Kirie needs to take the gabentina, today I'll try it with a slice of cake. Sterilization is scheduled for Thursday morning. If I make it to Thursday morning. If the world comes to Thursday. I turn on the radio quietly, while I help myself to yogurt, with half a lid of collagen and turn it on the coffee machine. At the kitchen window, three voyeurs, Che, Minie and Nicolau. I water the plants on the edge, while I try to dissolve that powder in the yogurt and I watch them make waves in the glass, getting my attention, I talk to them in cattês, first let me put something in my glottis. I swallow everything quickly and I seem to hear Tomás calling me a barbarian. Yes, I'm barbaric in everything. I want to dribble the world and caress all the creatures that are anything but barbaric, that deserve my attention and tenderness. Coffee with foam finally opens a smile for me and I like so much to have reasons to smile. God knows and so do I that I need motivation to successfully ward off the fatigue that tries to drag me to bed again and again in the day, after the obligations fulfilled. This karma that doesn't end. I go back to my room, only to pick up a new pack of cigarettes, open it, and mechanically dump the plastics in the trash. I light my cigarette and sip the last sip of that hot, bitter liquid I love so much. 

I open the front door, and I already have all the dogs, dogs and cats on my legs, greeting me, and running to the grill that is their home. I peek at Hara Kirie and Rocky's two buckets of water. I dump what's left of that drool residue and turn on the tap. Cats have the 4 jars almost empty. While I leave one of the buckets to fill, I go to the counter where I have the feed bags. Three. All different. I mix here and there, I serve the cats, I serve kirie and Rocky must still be sleeping. He never misses mealtime, unless he is asleep. My beautiful old man. I call him. I call Lucy and Mimi. They both come, Rocky continues to sleep at the foot of the stairs of the old house. I put the buckets back in, so the animals won't get thirsty. I fill the of the cats. And I'm finally going to take a look at the wall. Mr. Casimiro inside the backhoe loader, the other gentleman placing stones in the place where they were once clumsy. Yesterday I saw them demolish the end of the wall, but soon after it had started to rain heavily and it was six o'clock in the afternoon and they had already gone crazy, leaving the opening of the wall, without a net and without any protection. I greet them and return to the animals. I still have three mats of arraiolos to catch, but I keep them on the rope, because it protects my cats and dogs, either from the excess of sun, wind or rain. I look at the day, full of faces. The sky is full of clouds. My stomach churns and I open up from the garden and this time I vomit for real. Again liquid foam. The day is promising. The shutters in my mother's room are still closed. I quietly enter and return to the kitchen. I forgot to take something out of the freezer for lunch. I'll have to invent it. Lunch will be anything between the few possibilities, between tuna, sausages, eggs, omelette with sausages or something else. I don't worry about that. I don't even want to remember the food or it makes my stomach churn again. I take a benuron. The headache always threatens my day of dark and heavy clouds. I go back to the room. I read gmail. I realize that a black mask takes over the screen and it has happened a lot of times. And if I say to Tomás, he says: he's mommy, he's a great friend of rui pinto's who found out that you're very rich, only you don't know, and he must be trying to find out if you keep in icloud the number of offshore accounts you have, somewhere in the Maldives. Of course, no one cares about you, you are an illustrious unknown. And if you were rich, oh man, I wouldn't be surprised. 

I don't wake my mother, because she always goes to bed late, because she likes to see all the inventions that distract human beings, inside the little box that is now called a screen. Only if you don't wake up by noon. There, I am always obliged to take action. I agree to it. Miss Eve, it's been a long time coming. And she always grumbles that she went to bed late, and that she might as well let her sleep a little longer. There are now almost ten. I'm on the PC writing this pile of trifles that are part of my day. Tomás woke up, I hear him in the kitchen. 

And in this collection of my trifles, I decided to leave a note to the Universe: I'm going to catch you and it's going to be around the bend. Last year, on August 10, 2023, my brother came upstairs, visited his mother and decided to take her to spend a few days with him. She didn't want to. I had already told him this, but he is stubborn enough to come and decided to turn a deaf ear. I remember that the three of us went to Milho Rei for lunch and a week before, I had told her that I was very tired, stressed, that I needed to have two or three days, without thinking about anything and without the weight of responsibilities, that I never had a day off or a weekend, or a holiday and not a day to get sick. He had to arrange two or three days to come and be with his mother, who is also his, because I really needed to go to the beach or just go out to the river, with a book in my hand and zigzag, to breathe again. He didn't see it that way. And he wanted to take her with him. Because my brother can't stand the village. Me neither. Specifically, this one. We had a boiled potato lunch with grilled sardines. It was hot. We returned home and he decided to insist with her, if she had already made the bag to spend two or three days in Porto. She, very upset, stuffed a nightgown, some underwear, her medication, her cell phone chargers in a weekend bag, and told me that she was going this time, but she wouldn't go again. She didn't like to leave her comfort zone to be with him and the woman she can't stand, which is my brother's companion. 

The day after he left, I tried to call him, but he wouldn't answer his cell phone and I called the landline in my brother's apartment. Finally, she answered my cell phone, crying heartlessly, to pick her up, that she was in a very bad way, that she was going to die. I called my brother and he didn't answer me. I called my brother's daughter, who was still my niece at the time, and she answered and asked her: Bea, please, you work near your father's house, go see me the grandmother who is ill, in ten minutes I'll be in Porto, try to understand what's going on, but call me Inem. So it was. In 13 minutes I was in Porto, in front of the Inem, which was empty, at the entrance of the building. I went upstairs and found personas non gratas upstairs, in addition to my niece, who handed me my mother's purse and Eva sitting on the kitchen counter, trying to answer the questions that the Inem technicians asked her. As soon as she saw me, she was relieved and told me that she had spent the night unwell, between vomiting and diarrhea, that she didn't want to bother Antero and that he had gone to work. It hit me. So, he came to pick up his mother, taking her upset, and finally left her alone in the apartment, sick. I accompanied her to St. John's Hospital and only left there at five in the morning, which was when she was discharged, after many CT scans and many other tests. Antero had come home from work and went straight to me and I scolded him. Bring the upset mother, and then leave her alone. I should have done it on my day off or taken two days off. So I wasn't even with her. I understood that at the time, it hadn't even occurred to him that his mother couldn't continue to be his maid, cook for him or make his bed and take care of the boy's laundry. He replied that he just wanted to give me some rest. At no time did it seem to him that she was no longer the same. In fact, sensitivity only exists for those who put themselves in the shoes of others. 

When she left the hospital in S. João, we went to Doce Alto, so she could have some hot tea or milk and eat something. As soon as we left Doce Alto, my brother, as if he were autistic, continued to insist that his mother would stay there, that he was resting and would stay with her and that he and his girlfriend had already arranged for someone to take care of her, that Rosa would arrive that afternoon and they would talk about it. My mother, with tears in her eyes, said to her: I already told you that I won't stay here for another second, I want to go home to Penafiel. Not only will I not stay, but I will not come back to Porto. I've already told you, Antero Henrique.

My brother wanted to try to amend it and tell him to stay then, to at least hear what he and his girlfriend had to tell him and that then, if she still wanted to come, they would bring her. My mother was aggressive with him, screamed twice and told me to open the car door for him. I had already gone to the pharmacy while they were having breakfast at Doce Alto and I started. On that date, my mother, who no longer did anything at home except set the table for me, sometimes stopped doing anything and said to me: Cristina, you have to take over the portfolio. My retirement blah blah blah, I have this account, this one and this one, the payments I make them this way and I would like you to continue to do it this way. Therefore, from that date on, I also started to deal with the monetary part, payments, transfers, etc. 

That's when I found out that my mother, who has a Universo card, because of the purchases she made at Worten and allowed her to buy appliances and the like, that she had canceled the direct debit and had put the payments by ATM. Of course, no bank likes to have direct debit taken away from it because it loses autonomy. And since that date, because I don't know where there is a branch of Banco Universo, because I've already looked for it and they can only tell me that they are contactable only by email and a phone that they don't answer, I went with my mother to the store, where she used this card and she asked to change the data of her cell phone and her email to my data. They, Universe, continue repeatedly, sending to my cell phone only and every month the entity and reference for payment of a bill that never ends. My mother says that it's paid and more than paid, that they can't keep sending bills because she doesn't owe them anything. In addition to the Worten store itself having called them in our presence, my mother having made a written complaint in Worten's complaints book and that I sent them more than one email demanding that I send me a letter or an email with the total amount of the debt so that we could end this situation and so that I could finish the Worten card, not only did they refuse to respond to the emails,  as they continue to send me threatening messages, if I don't pay 15.30 more, 15 more, 20 more, 30 more, depending on what they need to receive, they will report to the bank of Portugal. My mother told me not to pay any more money until they send us a clarification, until they send us our clarification. Yesterday I paid again. And as soon as I paid, I received another message from them, saying that because I didn't pay on the date they sent me the message, instead of the 15 I had already paid, I owed them 30, 80 euros. Well, having said that, and after all the approaches we had with them, after the written complaint at the Worten store, after the many attempts made via email and telephone, so that these gentlemen who own the world could justify why they want to continue to steal and threaten my mother, if they could retract, I decided that the best way to get their attention was to make this available. I'm sure there will be many other people who are victims of this type of approach from banks who refuse to answer, hiding in an unavailable phone and at an unknown address, and then I make it available here on my blogs and also on facebook, which will be of some use in giving me a voice. Litigation and bad faith must be scrutinized. Silence is not an answer, and threats cause psychological damage. End of payments. Date: June 18, 2024.