The Messiah of 15 Meticais and the Prophecy of the "Terão"

Edmilson Panguana"

Today's bus stop feels like a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse, with much more noise and fewer costumes. There's an almost cacophonous harmony: the taxi driver shouts as if he's selling his soul, the passenger complains as if the driver owns the refinery, and the sun… well, the sun is frying heads with an enthusiasm worthy of a barbecue. The bad joke is that we're all here practicing the national sport, "Glazing into the distance," while the minibus, that ungrateful thing, is parked at the gas station, eyeing a hose that's dripping diesel. It's a platonic love: in which the people want the minibus, the minibus wants the fuel, and the fuel… well, that's on vacation in the Strait of Hormuz.

The arrival of a minibus at the Albasine bus terminal, on days when the gas stations are dry, is not a transport event; it's a biblical epiphany. When that van, with its peeling paint and suspension begging for mercy, approaches the roundabout, the noise at the bus stop changes. The murmur of complaints turns into a chorus of hallelujahs. It's the messiah on wheels who appears, enveloped in a cloud of black smoke, promising to take the faithful to "paradise" (in this case, it's just the Museum or the city center, but for someone who's been there for three hours, it's the same thing). The irony begins with the tithe: this Messiah doesn't want your soul, he only wants 15 meticais. The problem is that paradise is full, and salvation depends on the agility of each person's ribs to fit on the running board.

That queue has taken on absurd geographical dimensions. It's so long that those at the end of the line don't even know which neighborhood they're in anymore. They say the tail of the Albasine queue has already crossed the jurisdictional border, and now there are residents who will have to pay property tax in the municipality of Marracuene, such is the distance they traveled... on foot, while waiting to ride in a car.

And, of course, as with any good crisis, theories emerge. Amidst the noise, there's always the "standby analyst" who has found the culprit. For some, the fuel delay is the government's fault; for others, it's the international situation. But in Albasine, there are those who swear that the blame lies with Terão. Yes, Terão! Iran is far away, but "Terão," that mystical place where they say "they'll have fuel tomorrow," "they'll have a solution soon," is the biggest culprit of all.

While the fuel is still at the "Terrão" (a reference to a gas station) and the taxi is still at the pump, the people of Albasine stay there, with that unwavering faith of those who know that, at the end of the day, paradise costs 15 meticais, but patience... that's priceless (and diesel-free too). When the taxi finally pulls up, the terminal transforms into a rhythmic gymnasium, but without the rhythm part and with many more elbows. It's the moment of the ornamental leap onto the stirrup: people who seem to have rubber bones, bending at angles that defy human anatomy just to ensure that a third of a buttock rests on an iron bench.

In the midst of this chaos, our hero emerges: a student with a bag bearing a picture of a beautiful woman under his arm, battling gravity and the crowd. He doesn't just want to get in; he needs divine intervention. He clings to the remaining rags of the bus conductor's sweaty shirt—who at that moment wields more power than the prime minister—and begins his litany:

"Dude, please! Help me get in, even if it means sitting on the driver's lap! My teacher said that if I miss today, there's no tomorrow for me. It's the Symposium about Language Day, man! It's the Portuguese language, it's our heritage!"

The collector, preoccupied with the 15 meticais he's about to collect and not giving a damn about proper grammar, looks at him with one eye on the deposit and the other on the mess, and replies:

- “A Xilungu? A Xilungu xanga mina yi apontador dza gasolina Se o teu professor quer Simpósio, diz ele vir txovar o carro!”

But our hero doesn't give up; he keeps performing the gymnastics of pleading. He tries to convince the orange vendor to give him her seat in the name of grammar. He argues that language is what unites us, while desperately trying to connect his body to the inside of the minibus. It's a delightful linguistic irony: he wants to discuss sentence structure at a symposium, but the only sentence he can articulate at the moment is a desperate vocative: "Dude, help me!"

In the end, he succeeds. He enters sideways, with his neck bent at a 45-degree angle, a true "living metaphor for syntactic flexibility." He goes to the symposium to talk about Camões and Mia Couto, but his greatest literary work of the day was written right there, at Albasine, in the sweat of someone who lined the queue to save the day for the language, while the taxi driver, ironically, could barely "talk" to the engine because the diesel fuel was still stuck in that mystical Terão queue.

2025/12/3