/lit/ - Literature

I wish to drop this here if nowhere else, written around this same time, last year, originally in Brazilian Portuguese

Looking at the street, he remembered the carnavals he spent there as a child. The trampolines that were placed in the middle of the street, the music at the maximum volume exploding the eardrums of those who passed by, the street light of its typical orange color of Rio de Janeiro's light poles, the smell of carnaval spray foam, the smell of old paper from paper strings and confetti thrown all over the floor and all over the place, smells of beer and soda. It was always hot, it was always night, always a lot of noise and lots of lights, white that came from inside the establishments, yellow that came from the headlights of cars. He remembered that he stood at the height of his sitting mother's shoulders, who would tell him to enjoy the party as long as he could, because soon they would have to go, as the dreaded block of the bate-bolas was about to arrive. And in fact it would arrive, being more than a simple maternal threat like so many bogeymen, since the bogeyman himself would be humiliated if compared to the accumulated trauma that the bate-bolas left on the children.

After midnight the bate-bolas passed like a multitude of stampeding animals that beat down on everything in front of them with hollow hard plastic balls on the end of a thick cellophane tape. In his childhood, the balls of the bate-bolas were already made of plastic, and not an ox bladder tied to a stick as in the past. His elders called them “Clovis”, which seemed to be a most appropriate name for such an extravagant and colorful figure. With their masks that most resembled something that a Mexican luchador would wear with the theme of the face of a pictorial clown of a nature typical of the European carnaval, sometimes with his cartoonish features drawn to the appearance of an animated monster that could be seen as a cartoon villain. The puffy clothes, super-colorful and gaudy, with sleeves and collars and huge fabrics that wavered in the wind as they ran. Many sported frevo dance steps, suddenly falling on their ass to the ground and hovering their entire weight on the ankle of one bent leg at the last second, with the other leg stretched forward in a show of muscle capacity, immediately repeating the movement with the other leg. They screamed and ran and hit the ball, which made of a hard, hollow plastic made a frightening sound, and threw a plastic chair or table away, simply for the pleasure of causing a little chaos.