Three carcasses with butter, sometimes two more Berlin balls just to fill the hole in your stomach at snack time. I have a wide stomach, it’s not my fault I was born this way with this vocation for packing. I was born weighing seven kilos. My mother says that it looked like a cute calf, one of those animals that you want to hold against your chest, and that a bottle every two hours was literally for boys. I was always a baby who ate like a man. At three months I was already eating soup and, as soon as my first teeth came in, I threw down a bitoque with egg and everything, which you don’t play with a child’s hunger.
At the age of five he weighed sixty kilos and at ten, just one meter and fifty tall, he was already ninety-five. Of course, apart from my mother, everyone said I was fat. My mother liked me like that, she fed me like a beautiful little piglet, she said that chicha was beauty, that I wasn’t like the wretched children of the neighbor upstairs, those ones, you could clearly see that they were malnourished.
At the age of twelve it began to become difficult to go to school. A measly fifty steps took me away, I was sweating, panting, with my heart pounding and, of course, full of shame. I always had good friends at school, despite being the “elephant”, everyone liked me, or at least seemed to.
At fourteen I stopped being able to leave the house. I spent my days in bed and took classes online, since walking had become impossible, each step was an ordeal, a pain that shot through my body as if someone was charging me for food every year. I no longer got up for practically anything.
One day, after eating three roast chickens, a kilo of French fries and a large box of chocolate ice cream, I accidentally vomited. Something had gone wrong with me.
When I looked at the vomit spread over my chest, yes, at that time I was already eating lying down, only getting up very rarely to go to the toilet and, therefore, avoiding liquids, I realized that I didn’t even have the strength to clean myself. I vomited just like that in the position I was in, lying down, I just lowered my chin and let everything come out all over me.
And I couldn’t move right away. Despite the humiliation, the disgust at myself, I stood there, looking at my dirty chest. Only later did I notice that my mother was standing at the entrance to the room. He had an expression I had never seen on him before, a face of undisguised disgust. “It’s the ugly chicha’s fault, darling.”
These chronicles are part of a fiction project by writer Cláudia Lucas Chéu with P3. A marathon of daily chronicles with no goal in sight.
