February 11, 2024

Lisbon, Portugal. Age 25

I'm spending my Tuesday night smoking pot on a balcony with a Portuguese grad student named Artur.

It's half past nine, and he's telling me an objectively untrue story about how he nearly murdered someone in the hills of Beira Alta. The man was old, the age of a grandfather, suffering legal action from Artur's mother (who is intelligent and beautiful and a woman, which is a rare enough combination that he makes sure to mention it twice). She was owed some sum of money, and the man decided to rid himself of the debt by mentioning her place of work, her route home, and how easy it would be to follow her with a hammer.

I'm told he's a nasty person. Everyone from Artur's town knows his face, his frown, the ugly brown Saab he drives. After the initial threat two weeks passed without a sighting, but on the third Monday the man followed Artur's mother into a bank and lunged for her with his hand deep in his pocket. Artur was with her and interfered — caught his arms and pinned the man against a wall with such force that the cement bled.

I would pry him for proof, but he argues his way out of everything. Anything. I've only known him for two hours and that was the very first thing I learned; he's studying to be a lawyer and has lots of practice with defenses and explanations and rebuttals. No matter what I ask, he has an answer that he’s absolutely sure of. Most of our conversation is me letting him talk.

He started street fighting when he was eight. It took him places, introduced him to bad things and worse people. Then at age sixteen he was “brought” to Sicily to compete against a member of some unnamed mob for a reason that, to me, sounded like sport, but was described as a sort of honorable achievement for a young man. He won the fight and left the country ingrained with an awareness of mortality that's only available to those who have been within an inch of death. His mother was threatened the next year, when he was seventeen. He's twenty-seven now.

It’s strange; the violence of his life story is gruesome but justified through his teeth — it comes out logical, sane, argued like I'm a juror sitting in a dining room court of law. I nod along and side with him like murder is a thought experiment — as if the possibility of him nearly killing a man the same year I had my first kiss is a sweet, ironic hypothetical.

I don't believe his stories, which is maybe why I’m not worried about the things he says. The world is filled with cellphones and laws and protective services and a hundred things that make me think he's probably just a compulsive liar practicing his English. It’s all fascinating to listen to, but he's too sure of his words for them to sound like less than a script. Except in one case:

I ask Artur if he would've killed the man, given the chance. He smiles at me. Says he hadn’t given it any thought.