Page 3 of The Secret Dinner

I’m also enclosing a classic Rio postcard in this letter, Christ with open arms.

God bless you.

With love,

Leitão

CORA

1

Five years went by in the blink of an eye. Next thing I knew, we were approaching the end of 2022, Brazil had the craziest presidential election ever, Covid had terrorized the entire world, and I donned a cap and gown to give my graduation speech to all the teary-eyed parents in the audience, thanking “our professors for their kindness and the immeasurable knowledge we received throughout our time there.” The truth is that college wasn’t all that wonderful. The campus was far away (almost an hour each way by subway); it had poor infrastructure, frequent faculty and staff strikes, and professors who were often absent. Eventually, I started to skip class, too.

My life had changed much less than I would have liked. Most of my romantic relationships were still short-lived, and I was still renting the same apartment, splitting expenses with my three friends. Bukowski was on his last legs, and my mother still insisted on meddling in my life, even from afar. She sent daily text messages (colorful Good morning GIFs, Care Bears, and motivational phrases), called twice a week, and visited me every quarter. If you’ve never experienced this, you don’t know the true meaning of the word nuisance.

No doubt, living in Rio de Janeiro was better than living in Pingo d’Água. But I couldn’t say I was happy. Disappointed was maybe more accurate. I had a degree and had dropped my country accent. Now that I’d graduated, I hoped to find a job at a good company, save up enough money to start my own business, and maybe feel somewhat accomplished before the age of thirty. Flashy success really only makes sense when you’re young.

Once, on the wall of a public restroom, I saw a poem:

SOMETHING YOU WON’T FIND IN BOOKS

IS THAT VAGINAS FART

There’s a lot of stuff you won’t find in books. Besides my textbooks, I’ve always liked to read self-help—true stories about people who made it in life. I read Wise and Powerful Men, Learn to Succeed in Any Situation, For a Successful Man, and Secrets of the Richest Men in the World. They said nothing about being young and having a business degree with no opportunities. Nothing about looking for a job in your field and not getting one. Nothing about being ignored.

If you’re not rich, you have nothing. Books don’t tell you that. If your dad doesn’t own his own business, you have nothing. Another thing books don’t tell you. If you don’t have someone to put in a good word for you, you have nothing. Books won’t even tell you that.

I read The Five Characteristics of a Successful Entrepreneur, which are: perseverance, strategic vision, focus, persuasion, and self-knowledge. I was already persistent, strategic, focused, and persuasive. I kept a planner for years, made some investments just to get some experience, studied theory and start-up case studies, talked to experts in digital marketing. What I mean is, I was no rookie—I was prepared for the job market. But when I graduated, there were no opportunities. “It’s the financial crisis,” my roommates would say, trying to console me. They were just as screwed as I was.

Hugo had finished culinary school in 2021 and fancied himself a real chef, but he was also a nobody, always jumping from restaurant to restaurant, making peanuts as an assistant cook. I must admit he had talent, he was a born artist: In 2019, he’d spent six months in Paris on a scholarship at the Centre de Formation d’Alain Ducasse, but his ego alienated him from others. Hugo still had a lot of floors to mop, a lot of days sweating his ass off and biting his tongue ahead of him, which he had trouble doing. Focused, persuasive, and persevering, but not at all strategic.

Miguel was doing his residency at a hospital in a far-flung corner of Rio. He was always taking Bukowski and driving across the city. He hardly showed his face at the apartment anymore, hardly bathed, hardly ate, hardly saw Rachel, his insufferable girlfriend whom he’d met at the start of med school. On the rare occasions I did see him, Miguel always looked both exhausted and fulfilled. Strategic, focused, and persevering, but not at all persuasive.

Finally, there was Piglet. Living up to his nickname, Piglet never graduated and spent all day lying in his reinforced bed, surfing the web and eating potato chips. He’d always been content and easygoing but was neither persuasive nor strategic, nor focused, much less persevering.

I saw then that my friends were doomed to failure, and I was stumbling down the same path. I had a job at a bookstore in town, and I should have been happy with that. I liked books and being around them, but the truth was that the customers mostly annoyed me. They were uninformed or distracted, and would come in asking for “that book with a pink suitcase on the cover” or “that really gory one,” but they never knew the title, the publisher, or even the author. They wanted me to be a psychic, not a bookseller. They’d show up with their never-ending lists for school, buy coloring books, and ask for birthday suggestions for their aunt whose tastes they knew nothing about.

Working in a bookstore was a detour from my plans, and I’ve always hated detours. I didn’t even make a decent living. I hadn’t moved all the way to this city and studied my ass off just to barely make ends meet. I should have had my nose buried in prep books and practice tests until I passed the civil service exam and got a stable government job. I’d sent my résumé everywhere, pulled all-nighters studying for specific openings, and, as patiently as I could, waited for something good to happen.

It’ll get better, a voice inside me said. Keep going, work hard, study hard, and things will get better!

I kept going, I worked hard, and I studied hard.

That voice was a fucking liar.

2

When you move in with your best friends and have to see their faces every day for years, it ends up not being all fun and games after a while. It’s hard to live in harmony when somebody steals your food out of the fridge, leaves their dishes piled up in the sink, floods the bathroom floor, pees on the toilet seat and doesn’t clean up afterward. Piglet was the main culprit for our fights in the apartment. We had a lot of arguments over the years, and we even went a while without speaking. But I would always give in. He was incorrigible, an unabashed slacker, but what can you do? He was my best friend.

Piglet had dropped out of school after the first year because he couldn’t stand the strict schedule, all those tests and demands. Having obligations didn’t suit him. He wanted to be a free man. While we studied and worked, he played video games, watched Star Wars marathons, and binged Netflix. And he had a fetish: He would spend the whole day wearing headphones, listening to (but not watching) porn. He liked the sound of women moaning, their high-pitched shrieks during sex.

But Piglet was also religious. Whenever he met somebody new, he’d immediately tell them he grew up in an evangelical family. He liked to sing worship songs and even listened to them from time to time, when he wasn’t listening to porn. His religion didn’t stop him from earning a living creatively, running little scams on the internet: He sold nonexistent products and counterfeit pharmaceuticals to old ladies with cancer; he hacked into computers and made online transfers from unprotected accounts. He earned some Bitcoin, which paid the bills for a time. When we found out about his illicit activities, we were pissed. The last thing we needed was trouble with the law. But he was also a lot of fun. He knew how to turn on the charm, and he assured us he wasn’t doing anything wrong and that his scams were safe and discreet.

In that little world inside his bedroom, he didn’t hold back. Holding back was for the thin, the healthy, the ambitious, the ones with a future ahead of them. Piglet went all out. He embraced the cliché of a junk-food-guzzling glutton who loved pigging out on McDonald’s, Burger King, and KFC, always with extra cheese and bacon. He loved every cuisine—Thai, German, Chinese, Japanese, Peruvian, Italian, and Brazilian. He was the type of person for whom eating was not a necessity but a pleasure, a reason for living. For him, food delivery was the greatest invention of the twentieth century. And ordering online was the greatest invention of the twenty-first.

Piglet insisted on paying me a few bucks just to drop off his letters at the post office every week. He also paid a kid to deliver weed to our door. He went out very little, only to bars, where he ate and drank like a horse. Apart from that, he spent his life online.

My feelings about him were complicated—a mix of pity and indignation, with a sprinkling of affection and concern. It was on a Monday in September that Hugo and Miguel came into my room together, saying they had an “important matter to discuss.” I was sitting at my desk, watching a TED Talk on YouTube about how to build a financially healthy business, chowing down on an old slice of pizza I’d found in the fridge.