Caught by surprise

Flavio de Souza

CauGHT BY SuRPRISe illustrations by

Rafael Sica

CauGHT BY SuRPRISe

Copyright © Flavio de Souza, 2018 Back cover text © by Luis Fernando Verissimo All rights reserved to EDITORA FTD S.A. Rua Rui Barbosa, 156 – Bela Vista – São Paulo – SP CEP 01326-010 – Tel. (0-55-11) 3598-6000 Caixa Postal 65149 – CEP da Caixa Postal 01390-970 www.ftd.com.br CONTACTS director Ceciliany Alves publisher Isabel Lopes Coelho foreign rights Tassia Oliveira foreignrights@ftd.com.br

Flavio de Souza is a theater director, scriptwriter, illustrator, actor and author of several children’s books. He was the creator and screenwriter of the TV Series Mundo da Lua (Moon’s World) and Castelo Ra-Tim-Bum (Ra-Tim-Bum Castle).

Rafael Sica is an illustrator and comic book artist and has already had his comic strip published in various Brazilian newspapers.

He won the HQ Mix Trophy, in the New TalentDraughtsman category, and in 2009 in the Web Comics category.

Flavio de Souza

CauGHT BY SuRPRISe

illustrations by

Rafael Sica

W

hen I was little, I used to spend a lot of time at my grandparents’ house. It was my dad’s parents’ house, I mean. My dad and my mom worked at night, so my grandma Helen and my grandpa Joe would pick me up at school, and I would have dinner and take a bath at their house.

A lot of times my parents were late, or very tired, or the traffic was awful, or all three things at the same time, and I ended up sleeping over there, in the room that used to be my dad’s and my uncle’s.

In these grandparents’ house, I did things that I could only do there. My grandma let me eat dessert before the meal because she believed me when I said I would eat all the food afterwards.

In the bathroom there was a bathtub, and my grandpa played games like battleship and snowstorms, and then I could stay in the bath until my fingers got all wrinkled up. In that house I could play with a paint and brush every day. There were so many things I could do!

In that house, time seemed to go by slower.

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G

randma Helen was always coming and going, coming back and leaving again. Cooking or washing or ironing.

Stitching or reading or talking to a friend on the phone while standing or walking around the house, picking things up, putting them down or moving them to another place. She seemed to be like one of those wind-up toys that only stop when the spring stops unwinding, and her spring just kept going all day long.

By the time the soap opera started, she was already somewhere between this world and the world of dreams, and she would sleepwalk to her room. She would say good-night while brushing her teeth, with her eyes closed. Her last kisses always tasted minty.

B

ecause of all this, I spent more time with my grandpa. He worked at home, so he could do things that my father couldn’t. He liked to have breakfast at the corner bakery. To eat snacks at the bakery. And to have coffee at any time of the day at the bakery. He preferred to buy a different newspaper every day, because he liked variety. He thought that reading the same newspaper was like always having a conversation with the same person.

Grandpa Joe taught me how to play a bunch of card games. I taught him how to play video games. I installed most programs on his computer and all the apps on his cell phone, because his son, my dad, would lose patience after just two minutes. I don’t know why, but it seemed that the grandson was more patient with the grandpa, and the grandpa was more patient with the grandson.

He had already read to me a thousand and one stories. And told many other ones. He even made up a story where I was the hero. One day I’m going to draw cartoons and my grandpa will be the hero.

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I

n this story, I am the hero because I discover a mysterious secret which I will later reveal, I go on a treasure hunt, and I even make an ogre laugh. But it isn’t a fairy tale at all. I am the hero, but the ogre is not a fierce, hairy and stinky monster. The ogre is my great-grandpa Alexander.

People are usually born with eight great-grandparents, right?

It’s two parents, four grandparents, four great-grandmas and four great-grandpas, right? So, just to be clear about which greatgrandpa I’m talking about: the ogre in this story is the father of the father of my dad.

This great-grandpa was a huffagrumpus. It was grandma Helen who came up with this nickname, because she thought that her fatherin-law grumbled, huffed and moaned too much. There are people who think that grumbling and moaning are the same thing. But I don’t think so, because I have an aunt who moans a lot all day about almost everything and every time she moans, her husband, my uncle, grumbles about it like this: “why does this woman moan so much?” or “What have I done to deserve this?” and “Will this never end?”

This nickname started out much bigger:

“supermoaninghuffagrumpus”. After a while it became simply huffagrumpus, which was a secret nickname, all right? And it’s the only one he had. Nobody ever had the guts to call greatgrandpa Alexander just Alex, or Xander. Not even his parents thought about doing this, he was already uptight from when he was little.

They told me that “uptight” is when people don’t go to the bathroom often enough, they end up feeling kind of… uptight, when you have a lot of feces stuck inside (which what doctors call poop), and that’s what makes people get irritated. But I don’t know if my great-grandpa’s intestines work well or not…

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M

ost people called this great-grandpa of mine Mr. Gonzalez. He always looked like he was in a bad mood and always did what he did, the way he always did it, at the time he always did it, in the same place and with the same people, or if not, just by himself. If it couldn’t be his way, then Mr. Gonzalez crossed his arms, stuck his chin out and stared at a particular spot where there was no one. That is, if he didn’t turn his back to people or actually walk away.

No, he actually did have another nickname, also a secret one, that was only mine. Remember? I’ve already called my greatgrandpa an ogre. Afterwards, he got the other nickname, but this one I will only tell you about closer to the end of the story, ok?

I was told that he was so grumpy because his blood pressure was high and because of that he always had a headache and never took any medicine for it, and so everyone just had to accept him just the way he was, and that was that. They even explained to me what high blood pressure is, but I can’t remember if it means someone feels pressured to do things they don’t want to do, or if it makes people see things they don’t like and then end up full of impressions… Although then that would be called high impressions, but I better leave things at that and continue telling my story.

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G

reat-grandpa Alexander retired, great-grandma Florence died, and then he became even quieter than he already was, as well as more serious, and more stuck inside his house.

The VW beetle stayed inside the garage for years and years, until his oldest daughter, my great-aunt Celeste, started to drive it.

Then he started to forget almost everything, or actually, really everything: words, names, activities. He forgot his dog’s name. He forgot to feed his dog. He forgot to close the tap in the kitchen. He even forgot to sleep.

After, he started to forget his own name and one day he left the house to buy something, and then he didn’t know what it was anymore, in some store which he couldn’t remember either, and when he tried to go home he had no idea where he lived.

Then my great-grandpa couldn’t live alone anymore. Like when people are really little. Because every place in the world started becoming a dangerous place.

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O

ne day I went to sleep in grandma Helen and grandpa Joe’s house and when I woke up I went to the storage room to get one of my dad’s old toys. He’s not that big a part of this story, but I can tell you that when he was a boy he didn’t leave everything a mess or break his toys. Everything is still there, to this day, in the storage room.

I wish I was like that. One day, who knows, I’ll be a bit more like my dad.

12

W

here was I? In the storage room, where I found a big heavy notebook with a strong smell, that kind of looked like a photo album. And it was!

What a weird album. To start, on the cover it was written “photographs”.

What a strange way of writing! The photos weren’t color pictures. I thought: “maybe they just faded away?” Stuck in a page inside, there was an envelope full of strips with weird, transparent photos, and photo strips that were so small I couldn’t even see them properly. I thought: “I wonder what these strips are?”

My grandma had gone out to go to church, to Chinese exercise class, to the market and to some more places. My grandpa likes to read and write at night, and in the morning, he sleeps. There was no one who could answer my questions. I called my mom and then my dad, but no one picked up.

I started to look at the photos in the album and I thought it was strange because I couldn’t recognize any of those people. Then I turned the page and my jaw just dropped, trying to understand what I was seeing. But I couldn’t!

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