The Invisibility Premise

It is not that he disliked people. Luís Augusto de Almeida was easy to get along with, though somewhat quiet. The middle child of nine, he had learned not to compete for attention, partly because of his soft voice and slight frame, and partly because he enjoyed being alone. Which was almost always impossible. In the Almeida house, not a single room was ever free—even a brief bathroom break alone was a feat. "Luís Augusto, hurry out of the shower!"; "Luís Augusto, it is your time to clean the dog messes” and “Luís Augusto, today you're washing the dishes!" (just like yesterday, the day before, and the day before that).

Hoping to hear his name less often, he would spend a lot of time away from home; the public library being his favorite refuge.

Even there, he felt free only to a certain extent. Soon one of his siblings would come looking for him, reminding him that the lunch dishes still needed washing. If no one came, he would linger for hours, partly absorbed in the books, partly in the glances of others, now and then settling on him: Dona Eulália, the librarian, pitying the skinny boy who always seemed hungry. Abelário, the security guard, assessing the threat of some mischief. Aninha, the new girl in town, with side braids and jaboticaba-dark eyes, staring at him for some reason he couldn’t grasp, but that already made him uneasy.

So young, and already he knew it with all his senses: simply to exist was to be seen.

Had this nightmare been confined to childhood, the fate of Luís Augusto might have turned out differently. Yet, as if stamped on the soles of his feet, destiny imposed its own paths upon him. That was how Alberto, Luís’s uncle, noticed his quiet, sharp-minded nephew and decided to take him on as an apprentice in his message-plane workshop. And so, some time later, the boy became the city’s official messenger pilot upon his uncle’s retirement.

With the fading of the years, the routine softened. He dealt little with people—had only to receive the great printed banner, fasten it to the plane, at times a bit of maintenance or repair; and the rest of the time he spent alone, flying low, noticing everyone, barely being noticed. Even when some looked up, they saw the message but never the messenger, who little by little was achieving the impossible dream of becoming invisible.

Until one day he found no reflection of himself in the mirror. He thought it must be a flaw in the plane’s reflective mirrors. He cleaned them, examined them—to no avail. He searched among his uncle’s old belongings for something that might show his image, looked again and again to be sure, but the fact proved inescapable: Luís Augusto was now invisible.

Ah! What lightness he felt! He went out into the city, feeling free for the first time. Strolling through the town without hearing his name, entering the church without kneeling, going to the library unnoticed, dancing in the streets unmocked. He returned to the workshop with no one to tell. He thought of writing his own banner to proclaim his invention, but without color or courage, he let the idea go.

And he did nothing with his days except polishing the aircraft, waiting for a reason to fly again. He pictured himself with arms outstretched, greeting everyone, laughing and saying, “This is Luís Augusto! I wish you all a good afternoon!”

But the truth is that simply to exist was to be seen, and he now understood that if he could no longer be seen, he no longer existed. And so, in a rush, in a sudden vertigo, he saw life passing around him in reverse: people walking backwards, everything so quick and strange: the plane flew backwards, and his uncle was the one piloting it. When he landed, he ignored the support his nephew used to give him and instead used a ladder that had never been needed before. Backwards into the house the uncle went, without so much as a word for Luís, and suddenly he was no longer in the workshop but in the library, and Aninha was gazing at the book he held, without noticing his presence. There were no more jaboticaba eyes toward him. Dona Eulália felt no pity, nor anything else, nor did the guard even suspect; and all who once saw him little now saw nothing at all.

And then he was in his family’s old house, the longing he had never known how to feel now flooding him as he shouted in vain, unable to make himself seen; tears running from invisible eyes, over invisible skin, across an invisible chest; siblings laughing and playing, the dog messes clean, dishes washed in the sink, the mother smiling, the family portrait in her hands: eight children, no longer nine. The one in the middle was missing, as if he had never been there, the son whose eye color is unknown, whose name we no longer remember.