Juliano Pavollini is in jail, telling to Clara, a psychologist, his story. He lived in a tiny town and he run away from home the day his father died, the same day he was 16 years old. Taking a bus to Curitiba, the capital of the State, he knows Isabella, for his child's eye a wonderful and very rich woman, but in fact a brothel's owner in the City. Realizing that he is alone and lost, she takes care of him, putting him in the attic of her hotel, and looking after him not only as an aunt (the official explanation for his presence there), but, in a moment, as a secret lover, initiating him in the sexual life. Terribly jealous of him, she tries to protect him against that "kind of life" she lives from, and dreams of seeing him a very important and educated man, to the point of sending him to regular school (a very good one) and sometimes paying private teacher for him.

In spite of her care, he becomes friend of a kind of bad boy, Odair, and goes with him, sometimes, to burgle residences at night. In one of them, a closed house, with nobody inside, he steals a photo of a girl (Doroti) from her room, and dreams of knowing her. He discovers her school, began to follow her and becomes her boy-friend, telling her a lot of fantasies about himself and his life. According his report to Clara, they loved each other. Juliano begins to nourish feverish plans of having a "normal life" - to get a respectable job, to get rid of Isabella and that dirty life and place, to marry Doroti. But Odair becomes a menace for him: he has a tape from their burglar in Doroti's house, when they kidded recording their voices in a primitive recorder gadget (the novel time is the 60s), and Juliano feels that Odair can destroy his dream. So, the idea of killing him as the only solution for his salvation grows day by day.

One night, he plans everything, pretending to go to a movie (Psicose), where he manages to be seen by the clerk who sells the tickets, and them find Odair - they were going for a new assault. But they are discovered in the dark and a guard shoots Odair, as Juliano manages to flee. Everything is perfect now: he gets a job, under Doroti interference and help, with her father, who is a lawyer, to be typist (thanks to Isabella, who insisted that he had to learn to type) and will begin soon his new work.
In the meantime, Isabella's brothel suffers a police assault, with all the women put in jail, as it used to happen when the "protection system" failed, but this time the major's policy is to reinstall the brothels out of the center of the city, to "clean" it.

In the day Juliano is 18, a solitary Isabella, now more and more a decadent and drunk woman, waits for him with a cake in the now completely empty hotel. Then, Juliano enthusiastically says to her that he would like to thank her for all she had done to him, and that now he would have a new life: he would marry Doroti and would work with a lawyer and would live in another and more respectable place. She gets furious and attacks him dangerously with a bottle, and in the struggle he also loses his temper and kill her, beating her head several times against the floor.

In that night, he looks for Doroti, to tell the truth, at least once in his life. He tells her that he killed his aunt and gives back to Doroti her old stolen photo; she realized what has happened all the time and run from him. He is soon put in jail and is condemned to 15 years of imprisonment.

Last paragraph:

É só isso, minha Clara. Eu gostaria que minha história fosse mais comprida, para te entreter por mais alguns meses. Tenho medo de que você não venha mais me ver. Você diz que não, que continuará me visitando, mas pode ser gentileza. Juliano Pavollini acaba aqui, em relativa paz, de certo modo melhor do que quando começou. Não tenho nada, não sou nada; mas ando com algumas idéias na cabeça.

(Alan Clarke)


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