ZUBY77:
Episode 28: No Bangs for Jennifer

On the night of December 30th, Braga started throwing bangs in the air. Noises could be heard everywhere. The lower sky was filled with flashy lights of different colours as the people continued to jubilate and wait for the incoming 2006.
“Can we go out and buy our own bangs? I want to throw some out of this window,” I had said while we were kissing in bed.
“Is that why you initiated the kisses?” Solomon said.
“No. Stop being insensitive to everything, I just want to throw bangs like everyone else,” I said.
“Well, we are not everyone else at the moment. In case you have forgotten, there are a bunch of thugs and a wounded woman looking for us out there. I know you will tell me that they don’t know where we are but trust me; the world is too small to take chances sometimes. If I was Jose or Madam Grace, it won’t take me long to figure out where we are. So I am not taking chances for now. We will go out tomorrow, let’s just hope that even if they came here today, they would be tired of searching for us by tomorrow.”
I knew he was right and that I was selfish but I also felt that the chances of Grace and Jose finding out where we were was very small. The only link we had with Porto was the Taxi driver who brought us to Braga. There was also a very slim chance that Jose or Grace could find who the driver was. All in all, I felt safe in Braga, safer than I was in Lisbon and Porto. I even wished that we could just find a small apartment of our own, find small jobs to be doing in Braga and settle down there permanently. We would get married and have children and live happily ever after. Unfortunately, things didn’t work that way. My ambitious boyfriend was never going to buy that idea. The idea of an ex prostitute holding him down in Braga forever was never going to be bought by him no matter how I tried to paint the beautiful picture of us together in the future. I didn’t know of where Solomon lived in the past but from the things he said and how he seemed to know everywhere, I believed he had lived somewhere bigger and better than Portugal.
As had become our tradition, we had unprotected zex that night and slept around 11pm.
The following day while I cleaned the house, Solomon went down to the reception. When he came back up, he said we were going out. I was all smiles and he saw it. I didn’t know why I was obsessed with going out there in the city but I surely knew that I wasn’t animal and wasn’t going to be caged in one room for fears that Madam Grace or Jose could run into me somewhere in the City.
“Where are we going?” I had asked.
Solomon said the reception gave him the address to the Church on the mountain. He said it was the best place to look around in the city.
An hour and half later, I wore one of my new clothes and we left for the mountain.
The Bom Jesus Cathedral Church was perched on top of the mountain. There were newly carved stairs all the way from the foot of the mountain to the top. There were also some kind of transport systems that took people up to the mountain but we decided to do the trekking. It too over 30 minutes for us to get to the Church itself on top of the mountain, although we stopped occasionally to look at the statues of Jesus Christ which were mounted at intervals based on the Catholic Church’s Station of the Cross procession.
Since I wasn’t Catholic and has never been, I didn’t know half of the things I was supposed to do up there at the Church.
“I want to go for confessions like these people are doing,” Solomon said as he pointed to a few people standing in a line.
“What are you going to confess?” I asked and we both laughed.
“Just stay here in the hall or walk around the museum, I will be out before you know it,” he said as he walked up and stood behind the last woman in the line.
I left him and walked down to the big hall where the Museum was located. I didn’t know much about museums and the purposes they served: therefore I just started form one statue of Peter to that of Paul and James and Jesus and whoever else in there in the Bible.
There was one statue that particularly captured my attention. It was that of Mary Magdalene washing the feet of Jesus Christ. From the story I heard when I was in school; Mary Magdalene was supposed to be a prostitute. Based on the accompanying story, Jesus allowed Mary to wash his feet because Jesus came to the World for sinners and not the righteous. The story was a great hope for me in particular because somehow, I felt that I could still be saved from the things I did in the past. If Jesus could forgive Mary to the extent of allowing her to wash his feet, then I had chances of being forgiven and making it to Heaven too. Right there in front of the Statue of Mary Magdalene, I vowed to return fully to Church as soon as I settle down permanently somewhere.
I waited in the hall for over 40 minutes before Solomon tapped me on the shoulder. “Let’s go.”
“Wait baby, there is something I want to ask you. Can we join one Church when we settle down in a safe place?” I asked.
“No,” he said as he started walking away.
I chased after him. “But you just went for confessions; you can’t just throw all that away by not attending Churches after.”
“I will go for another confession in ten years time and then after that, I will wait for another ten years before making another one. Maybe by then, I will be old enough to dedicate my time to the Church.”
“But why is that?” I asked.
He stopped and turned at me. “I don’t see the logic in going for confessions every week only to turn around and do the same things.”
I stood in one place and refused to follow him. He walked for a few meters and stopped, and then he turned around and walked back k to me.
“What is the sudden obsession about Church all about?” He asked.
“It’s just that I felt ashamed of myself for not going to Church for long,” I said.
“So what stopped you from doing that?” He asked.
“You know what stopped me. I was forced to go to the streets even on Sundays.”
He grabbed my hand and started pulling me away slowly, “You could have said no to Madam Grace and embraced the Church instead.”