The Dreamseller_ The Calling - Augusto Cury [65]
The dreamseller remained silent. But Dimas couldn’t take it.
“Jurema, sweetie . . . li . . . lighten up,” he stuttered, attempting a familiarity that only Bartholomew could get away with.
She didn’t let it slide. She came close to him, took several whiffs of his body and scowled, “Lighten up? You smell like rotten eggs.”
Bartholomew roared with laughter.
“Didn’t I tell you? I’m a saint for putting up with that guy’s smell!” Bartholomew said. And he laughed so hard he couldn’t hold back and ripped a sonorous thunderclap of his own.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she told him. “If you can’t hold it, you should at least do it so no one can hear you.”
We were starting to get worried. We looked at the dreamseller and began to realize that this new member of the family wanted to pour cold water on us—literally. For the first time we saw him scratch his head, without taking action. Jurema was a revolutionary, but she was unbalanced. She turned to the dreamseller and did what we never thought anyone would be bold enough to do: She confronted him.
“And don’t give me that story about how Jesus called those who cleansed the outside of their body but forgot to cleanse the inside hypocrites. Yes, we must emphasize the inside, but without ignoring the outside. His disciples bathed in the Jordan and in the houses where they were guests. But look at you. Look at your followers! How long has it been since they’ve had a real bath?”
We had bathed in public bathrooms, but not as often or as well as we probably should have. The master didn’t argue. He simply nodded his head in agreement. He had taught us many lessons, and the greatest one was to have the humility to learn from others.
And if that weren’t enough, Jurema turned to Edson and boldly asked him to open his mouth. He did so cautiously. We felt that the dreamseller had to have regretted his choice at this point. But maybe not. “Wasn’t a female disciple with just these characteristics what he was looking for?” I thought.
“Good lord, what a stench! You need to brush your teeth,” she told the Miracle Worker, pinched her nose and told him to close his mouth.
I laughed—but between clenched lips. She noticed it and said, “What are you laughing at?”
She didn’t spare anyone, except Monica, who hadn’t had this much fun in years. She felt that we were a traveling circus.
The dreamseller said Jurema wouldn’t sleep under the bridge with us, because of her age. She and Monica would return home and reunite with us the following day.
At the end of the day, Jurema invited us to bathe and eat supper together at her house. The prejudice virus, which was dormant, reawakened. We looked at one another and thought that, given her age, a professor’s meager pension and what she had to pay for medicines and doctors, her financial situation couldn’t be much better than ours. We probably couldn’t even all stand in her house, much less have dinner there. And with the old woman plodding away at the stove, it would be midnight before the meal was ready.
Jurema turned her head up the street and whistled.
When we asked what she was doing, she said she was calling her driver. We thought she must have been suffering some kind of dementia and Dimas said under his breath, “It must be the bus driver.”
There was no sign of any driver. She whistled again, this time more loudly. Nothing.
“I think ‘Driver’ is the name of her dog,” Bartholomew said. Jurema shot him a dirty look and wagged her cane, but instead of smacking him, she seemed amused by the joke.
“Just imagine everybody cramming into some old Ford straight out of a museum,” Edson said.
Our group always had some kind of retort. In the few months we had been together, I had enjoyed myself more than I had in my entire life, even when we were making fun of each other. The dreamseller fostered that environment. Monica felt as if she were always at a street fair. In her former life, she had been wealthy, but what she hadn