Josiah Marquez Part 2

I pressed my lips together, sniffling as I remembered that it was Bernardo who had planned our expulsion from the army, realizing that we could no longer cope after being discharged. He knew I had a USB drive where I had copied all the data from Lucah's computer, which contained a detailed dossier on the overbilling of public works carried out by Cristian and a series of construction companies. In other words, we would be as insubordinate as possible to get expelled, and then I would blackmail my father to finally leave me alone. Simply asking to leave the corporation wouldn't be enough because it wouldn't tarnish me enough for my father to stop harassing me. I wanted to dirty my dear old daddy’s plans. So, we stopped saluting, walked around without the required uniform, and when we got beaten up by our superiors and were sent to the military prison for it, Bill punched one of them in the eye and was immediately expelled. We became viewed with suspicion. They planned to expel us too, but Cristian decided to grease a few palms, so Harry, Bernardo, and I were discharged on grounds of “insanity.” My father literally turned blue when he saw everything I had against him; I even had the contacts of journalists dedicated to exposing corrupt politicians. And it worked; Cristian behaved himself for a while. Bernardo was a genius...
But the way I handled things after our discharge upset my friend. The alleged betrayal messed with my head, triggering memories of the infidelity my mother experienced from Cristian. I hated unfaithful people, and believing for so long that Ana had been with my brother drove me mad.
I found out from Luana that Lucah was living at Ana’s house. Enraged and jealous, I bought the land next to her house to build my tattoo studio, but I ended up sleeping with Ana while we were both completely drunk, and Docinho ended up pregnant. All my plans changed when I saw her with that little belly... And I decided to build my own house too. I wanted scraps of her, scraps of the daughter who would be born, and the mother had made it clear she didn’t want me near. Bernardo was furious with my actions. He wanted me to move on from Ana and fight in court to be with my daughter... But he didn’t understand. How could I do that with the woman I loved? Fighting with her over the child could drive her mad. She had no one already... I couldn’t.
I didn’t intend to terrorize Ana; I was going to live my life and just stay in the shadows. I even once stopped Lucah at the condominium. I talked to him calmly after learning about Ana’s pregnancy, asking him what he had with her, whether they were a couple or not. Lucah called me a fool. How did he put it? “I’m not to blame if you weren’t enough, if your woman preferred to run to me.” Then Ana didn’t understand why I was so hurt by that... by my brother. Why did he say that if he had nothing to do with her? If he was Jonas’s boyfriend? Lucah took pleasure in hurting me; that was a fact.
I approached the coffin, letting out a long sob that made my entire chest tremble and my body shake. I raised my right arm, trembling and unsure, guiding it to hold his cold hand beneath the layer of white flowers that covered him entirely, leaving only his face visible, feeling my face hot, my breathing heavy, and how difficult it was to hold the weight of my body. This would be the last time I touched him, the last time I felt his hand. This would be the last memory of his image in my mind.
Why?
Why did this have to happen to him?
My blood was hot in my body as the agonizing suffering of stakes driven into my chest nearly left me breathless, coming out in uncontrolled sobs of desperate crying. It was such a profound sense of helplessness in the face of life, so much... pain.
The way I blamed myself was very heavy. Voices whispered in my head about how I had been a shitty friend, about how I was an idiot and let my pain take precedence over the people around me. Bernardo had broken into my house because he wanted to talk about something. I had been drinking since I got home... Ber wanted me to stop and go with him to resolve something, but I couldn’t understand what my friend was saying because he was shouting about some photo, something he had seen about someone.
I was upset that day, with a shattered heart because my brother had died, and I set aside my grievances to say goodbye, but I couldn’t give the last farewell. I only wanted to be with the noise of melodies because Ana was supposedly at Marta’s, and I could keep the volume high. The loud music reduced the noise of the guilty thoughts attacking my head, clawing the agony into my body. If I had gone to him, I would have prevented whoever it was from hurting him.
I became truly unstable after Bernardo’s accident. I felt I had lost everything, and what Luana told me about Ana being over Ber’s lifeless body made the noise in my head worse.
For a while, I thought it was Luana, after all, Harry had seen her running around after Bernardo’s accident. I almost slapped her, almost, when I pinned her against the wall to explain everything. Luana said she hadn’t even encountered Bernardo before seeing him on the ground. She was just going to check if Ana was okay because she had just discovered that Marta was traveling and my ex-girlfriend had lied to her to be alone. Luana said that when she reached the corner of my house, she saw Bernardo on the ground and Ana standing over him, holding a crowbar, and then she climbed onto the truck bed to destroy the sound system. Luana said she had run to get Marta’s car to take him to the hospital when she bumped into Harry. She asked for my word as a man that I wouldn’t tell Ana about those things, so I kept silent. But I would have to tell my wife about all our misunderstandings, and at the right time, when we decided to confront our pains to truly forgive each other, exposed to one another, I would tell her everything, including the accusation from my cousin. I always thought that if I told Ana about Luana’s certainty that she had seen her with Ber, my Docinho would break completely. And even in moments of rage, when I wanted to yell at her about that testimony, I still refrained out of fear of what it would do to her. Sometimes, during my bursts of anger, accusations slipped from my mouth, but the way her face would break in pain always stopped me from talking about Luana’s certainty about what she saw. I wouldn’t have suspected Ana if Luana hadn’t said those things... It was my cousin who turned that key in my mind, reminding me that Ana was holding a crowbar... But that didn’t explain the shards of glass on Bernardo’s head wound.