The Angel of Florianópolis

His name was Rafael, the same name as my brother. We met occasionally in the middle of the night while I was waiting for the sunrise to take the first bus back to the camp. I was living in a tent in the far South of Florianopolis Island, among nomad-hippies. He was a restaurant worker in Lagoa da Conceicao, an area with bars, night clubs, restaurants and an amazing lagoon next to the sea.

Florianopolis is the paradise on Earth, and Rafael was wandering there with sad eyes. He was not the only one. A month before, I had left my parents’ house without telling no one. We had spent the night talking without exchanging numbers. it was 2007 and mobile phones were a luxury in Brazil, it was not just about having a cell phone but also the culture of using it all the time. He gave me his online address on Orkut – a social media which used to be very common in the first decade of the century.

A little bit older than me, Rafael seemed to be living in another dimension, a different city, but we almost shared the same story. His family was very wealthy and held an important position in Uruguaiana, in the south of Brazil. This place is one of the most populated borders in South America, with a strong and very typical Gaucho culture. Rafael was not like me, he was my hero, my inspiration. He had left much more than I had just to live with his convictions in a magical and stunning place by himself, without needing more than the basic things one needs to survive - a modern Thoreau.

All the talk we had about power and rent concentration was so empowering, the idea that we can just exist by enjoying life as it is was a revelation for me. Life doesn’t need to be a burden, we can exist without being worried to achieve fame and having nobility titles or buy things that we even don’t really care about. What I did not know was that this ship was already sinking. The nightlife and loneliness did not have a good effect on him. He told me about his family for so long that I realized how far he was from them, but far just in terms of kilometres, not in mind.

When the sun rose, I took the first bus to get back to my ‘home tent’. I could not fall asleep, tents are so hot during the day, but I was not tired. My days next to the sea were all about walking around the beach, hiking in the mountains and meeting people from everywhere. Different from my hometown, Florianopolis is quite international. A famous place for surfers and those who like nature. The South of the island was all about fishermen and hippies from all around the world.

I could not see my friend again and I get back to my hometown some weeks after. A year passed, I started to study law and went to live with my aunt, and everything was way much better than one year before. I saw an opportunity to present a paper in Florianopolis, everything funded by the university, I was happy as never before. I checked Rafael’s page on Orkut to ask him if we could meet for a drink and walk along the lagoon.

His personal page, the ‘scrap book’ was full of post-mortem texts. The first time I couldn’t believe it, so I checked his name on Google. There was a penny press journal reporting a murder, Rafael had been stabbed. They didn’t manage to find the murderer; his body was founded in a dodgy area of Florianopolis – a smuggling place.

My hero was dead. It looked like the loneliness had beaten him. I may be wrong, but we have this saying in Brazil that ‘people just changed the address’, which means that the nightlife and drug consumption rarely leads to another reality. The area where he had been found was too far from the place where he used to live. He was probably going to buy something. If this were fiction, I would probably have led an investigation with a lot of adventures and action, unfortunately, what happened was real – in life, there is no guaranteed happy ending.