He was a person living on the margins of society, whose existence in public places, like that of all homeless people, is driven away and seen as useless for the community, being able to notice what no one noticed.
Without this man who lives on the street, and of whom we know nothing except what he did — the name released was just “John” — it is possible that the American police would never be able to identify the perpetrator of the shooting at Brown University, on December 13, and the murder, two days later, of the Portuguese physicist Nuno Loureiro, in Boston.
Let us remember that the American authorities were, until the moment they learned of a comment by John on the social network Reddit in which he drew attention to the car driven by a man he suspected and found near Brown University, completely in the dark regarding the identity of the person responsible for the attack. It was the registration number of the car, rented with the killer’s real name, that allowed the case to be “unraveled” – and discover that the death in Boston was attributable to the same person (because the same vehicle, although with a different registration number – because the driver had changed the plates – was captured in Brookline, the area where Nuno Loureiro lived and was shot).
In the hyper-vigilance society that is the United States, with most of the public space covered by cameras, the only thing that the authorities, who began by denying the connection between Loureiro’s death and the shooting of Brown (and for good reason: they occurred in different states and the same weapon was not used), managed to identify “a person of interest” in the images captured near Brown on the day of the attack – a pot-bellied man, with a Covid-type mask that covered his face and a characteristic gait, and of whom they could not even conclude what generally authorities, especially American ones, start by identifying: ethnicity.
John later said that he noticed, next to Brown, on the day of the attack, a man who unlocked a car and appeared to be heading towards it, but suddenly changed direction and started walking around the block. Intrigued, he followed him and approached him. The man, in an interaction captured by video surveillance, reacted badly, accusing him of harassing him. John would end up going to the police and telling them what he had seen – leading, as stated by people linked to the investigation, to solving both cases relatively quickly.
This is the first lesson that, in this quatrain so appropriate to fables, we must learn: Salvation, or in this case protection and solution, can come from those we cast into invisibility, contempt and suspicion. It was because he wanted to act as a protector of the community that John followed that man whose behavior seemed strange to him – he who, as a homeless person, most people see by definition as suspicious.
The second lesson is addressed to us as a country. A country where a significant percentage of citizens show enthusiasm for demagogues whose main characteristic is discriminatory speech based on ethnicity and national origin; demagogues who put up posters in which they aim to identify immigrants or ethnic groups as “outlaws”, undesirable, to be expelled, to “remigrate”.
Until now – as far as we know, as we only learned of his identity by chance, so carefully were the crimes planned – had a Portuguese person become famous abroad for committing spectacular murders. Never before has a Portuguese immigrant taken a leading role in such an American tradition as school shootings and mass murders. (Only two people died in the attack on the university, but, as more than 40 shots were fired, there could have been many more).
Never before has a Portuguese immigrant community been frightened, as is happening to the Portuguese immigrant community in the USA, by the possibility of a racist and xenophobic government, such as the current North American government, taking it as the target of its discriminatory speech.
It had certainly never happened to the Portuguese immigrant community in the USA, the same one whose voters demonstrated, in the most recent elections, such great enthusiasm for the Portuguese substitute for Donald Trump’s racist and anti-immigrant speech, to see social media discussing whether the Portuguese are white – with a non-negligible part of those involved in the discussion concluding that they are not.
There is always a place for us, someone for whom we are the Other, the alien, the “one who does not belong”, the undesirable, the one who must be expelled, the “non-white”, that is, the “non-norm”, the “bad”.
There is always a place or someone or an event that can lead a Portuguese ruler, as happened with the Secretary of State for Portuguese Communities, to say “this serious incident has nothing to do with our community, this does not represent us in any way, the Portuguese are not this”.
As if the actions of an individual, regardless of nationality or ethnicity, could represent any group or community; as if someone could say what the totality of individuals of a given nationality are. As if there was a uniform nature determined by place of birth, color, culture. As if, after all, racism and xenophobia made sense, in this case due to the determination that we, the Portuguese, do not go around shooting up schools, nor carefully planning murders – we, the Portuguese, follow the law (so unlike Americans, right?).
Not by chance, there were those who, given the identification of the author of the attack on Brown and the murder of Nuno Loureiro as a Portuguese immigrant legally in the USA since 2017, created a substitute for André Ventura’s poster against the gypsies, but with the Portuguese as the target and Trump in the place of Chega’s presidential candidate: “Portuguese must obey the law/The Portuguese must comply with the law”.
Cláudio Valente committed his crimes a few days before Christmas. It is assumed that this had no bearing on the meticulous planning that almost made them perfect – in the sense of unsolvable. Whatever his motivation, it certainly would not have been to make us reflect on racism and xenophobia, much less on the need to see and judge each person for what they are and do – on what it means to be human, to be a person. But we can, at this time when we are supposed to take a deep breath and think with good will, learn something useful from this dread.