Swedish pizza

by Sergio Schargel (Brazil)

I didn't expect to find Brazil

Late June 2016. Accompanied by me were Daniel, the Spaniard (or Basque, as he preferred to say with hatred when anyone called him Spanish) and Anukrati, the Indian. We had arrived in Stockholm on a flight from Bremen, Germany, the night before. It turns out that Sweden, like all of Scandinavia, is an expensive country for a group coming from developing countries. Especially for miserable students coming from developing countries. Okay, perhaps miserable is a bit exaggerated, but Sweden was outside our financial standards nonetheless. Well, you know what they say: improve, adapt, overcome. Therefore we spent a whole week only eating on fastfoods, after all it was the only thing we could finance without going broke. As we already had McDonald’s on the night prior, at lunch we insisted on something at least a little more elaborated. The choice fell on Pizza Hut. The price of the pizza, divided by three, was affordable. The restaurant was empty. There were only us and some other dude, and, while we were waiting for our food, this dude decided to leave and left his pizza completely alone. Why would someone leave a pizza alone, is beyond my reach. Especially in a dangerous country such as Sweden, full of evil seagulls. Poor pizza, so tasty, so delicious, so abandoned. I was willing to advance on it, but unfortunately we are not on a state of nature, therefore I limited myself to my human restrictions and stood still, hungry and hoping for my lunch to arrive soon. Seagulls, however, do not give a damn about our human restrictions. Seagulls are nihilists and I can prove. I suppose it is a consequence of the liberty that only the inexistence of conscience can bring. I confess that I feel nothing but envy. They don’t care about anything, because there is nothing to care. It’s fantastic. And of all the nihilistic animals in the world, I believe that few care less about anything than seagulls. If I have enough social ties that prevent me from going to the guy’s table and eat his pizza, seagulls do not have the same. A seagull landed on the table, and, I swear, it took a sly look at both sides, picked up a huge chunk equivalent to at least half the pizza, and flew out to eat it in peace. I swear, I am not delusional, I am not anthropomorphizing the bird. I'm sure if it could snort, it would. It was the incarnate void, now and forever, she was god. In a hurry I managed to take two photos, which was our luck, because when the Swede returned he thought that we were the ones who had stolen his pizza. Perhaps he was not even Swedish. Who knows? Perhaps he was, I do not know, from Guam. Nevertheless, in my mind, he was Swedish. He looked Swedish, he was in Sweden, he spoke a language I didn’t understand, and he looked like someone who went to IKEA every Saturday for no reason. Therefore, Swedish. I suppose he came to question us because, among the few presents, we were the only ones who were laughing. Which inevitably raised suspicions. Anukrati had never been very good at self-control, and it got even worse in delicate moments, she couldn't stop laughing. Daniel, however, went further and managed to make matters worse: he started laughing at Anukrati laugh. As I am an extremely rational guy, I punched our interlocutor and ran away. The police followed me and captured me, at this very moment I am writing this in my memoir in the few spare time I have of the forced labor in the newly opened Swedish gulags, which are inside an IKEA. They found out that I had been training seagulls for illegal activities. Yes, every seagull that ever stole some fish or ice cream was trained by me. This whole last paragraph is true, even if it is not. Unfortunately, as the reality is much more tedious, I simply showed the pictures to the Swede, he calmed down, and we continued our attempt to travel and spend as little money as possible.