The new roommate

I recently moved in with my sister, she has a roommate that intrigued me and so I asked her to find out a bit more about him. Mica, his first roommate, told her the story.

“Zé Manel was found in December of 2008 on the Fanqueiros Street in Lisbon and was in the company of a friend that, like him, was naked. I looked at him, he still had hair (yes, he was not always bald) and I thought that I couldn’t let him freeze. So, I took him home, Vigário Street nº1, 1st left in Alfama. In the first day I gave him a bath because he was full of cement (apparently he was a bricklayer) and offered him some old clothes. I remember taping a toothpick in the corner of his mouth.

We got along well, we were two single guys with mustaches sharing a room in Alfama. There were no problems until I started to take girls there, if we got home too crazy without noticing him it was often to wake up with a scream capable of killing someone because there was a guy looking at us in the room.

After that I remember making a movie, it was unfortunately lost (you will now lose the game), where he spoke, gained that weird paint on his face and went bald. The video was of him presenting me as an artist (Mica is a clown). Then I started dating Telma and so she was the only one sleeping there but as the others she also thought Zé Manel was a voyeur and suggested he needed another place to live. As Zé Manel is very quiet I spoke to a colleague, Catarina, and she came to dinner to meet him. She is a bit strange and quiet and I felt the chemistry right away. At the end of the dinner and with my heart aching I said goodbye to the only roommate that never gave me advices without me asking.

Catarina moved so many times that not even she knows where he’s been. I didn’t see him for a while. From time to time I heard of him, but him, hurt, never asked about me. A long time passed and one day Telma and I moved. As fate, our new roommate was Catarina that obviously brought with her, her roommate. I was happy to see him and gave him new clothes, a pretend gold necklace and a straw hat. He was in the living room for a bit but then one day he went to the terrace and stood there for several months.

That’s all I remember. Kisses and a hug Zé Manel.”

But that wasn’t it, my sister told me the rest of the story.

Eventualy Catarina had to leave the house and left a bunch of stuff behind. After that, Telma and Mica moved out and Zé Manel was again welcomed inside by Inês. For a while he joined the bandwagon of Zé, Tony and Vasco who amused themselves giving frights to everyone including Miss Alzira, who so sweetly brought yogurt cake sometimes. Zé Manel slept in the “cafufo”, the little bedroom of the missing roommate.

He also spent some time on the back seat of Rita’s Range Rover, looking through the window searching, for what, we will never know (maybe his friend from Fanqueiros Street). Scaring little children and being the mockery of some.
Now he lives here, he’s a perfect doorman, greets the pizza guy, the gas man and also the curious next door neighbor that I think, still didn’t realize what he is.

Recently my sister gave him 3D glasses and... Chinese green horns.