He concedes, despite this, that despite Cláudio’s sympathy, he highlighted some peculiarities: no one knew absolutely anything about his private life. “He was very reserved in that aspect. There we knew about each other, about the children who were being born, about the parents who were dying. We didn’t know anything about him, whether his parents were even alive, where they lived or where he lived, whether he lived with anyone… There were a lot of people there who loved him a lot and who he loved but didn’t go for drinks with us, didn’t go to our houses. Nobody there was friends with him outside of work.”
In fact, continues Olga, Cláudio it was “a little weird [esquisito]. But I always attributed it to the fact that he was so smart. It’s that strange feeling that a person who plays in a different league than yours gives you and has to make an effort to get down to your level.” Especially because, he adds, “we knew he came from Instituto Superior Técnico, he was a bit out of place there while developer.”
Cláudio — in the early hours of this Friday (Lisbon time) found dead, everything suggests that by suicide, by the American authorities — he was from the same class, at Técnico, as the physicist who is suspected of having murdered him with three shots at close range on the night of December 15th, in the building where the victim lived. And, according to the institute, he finished the course with the best grade — having even been invited to be a monitor (a student who “helps” teachers in classes).
This brilliance may have helped his colleagues understand that one day, out of the blue, Cláudio approached his boss and announced that he was leaving. “He said: I won’t come tomorrow and that’s it. And he did it both times, he came back and left the same way, abruptly”, says the former colleague. “The last person in the group to speak to him said they saw or contacted him in 2017 or 2018 and that he was leaving for the US.”
Then they never heard anything again — until this morning. Astonished, members of the Sapo groups shared videos with him. “There’s one where he’s throwing a spinning top, really, happily,” says Olga, with an echo of incredulity. “And we remembered the philosophical debates that sometimes took place at the end of the day. I remember one in which he and another computer scientist spent three hours disagreeing. Cláudio said that zero was even, and the other that it was odd, and they presented arguments.”
“All that remains is silence”
Perhaps zero is, by definition, both even and odd. How people can be many things—light and shadow, love and hate, life and death.
Cláudio who, everything leads us to believe, planned a massacre at a university and the murder of a former college classmate; Cláudio de Olga, reserved, almost secret, but “sweet”; Cláudio, of whom a Técnico teacher in his class (1995/2000) tells DN that she had to make “a big effort” to remember him, “because he was very passive”, in absolute contrast to Nuno Loureiro, “always very lively and who everyone remembers”; Cláudio who a colleague who is three years older and from the same IST Technological Physics Engineering course describes, in a Facebook post, as someone who “in classes I had a great need to stand out and show that I was better than others”“unpleasant, frequently getting involved in arguments with colleagues who he did not consider as brilliant as him (and who probably weren’t – but they were his colleagues and had every right to be there)”.
This physicist, who was a monitor in Cláudio’s class (and Nuno Loureiro) comments that “the Technological Physics Engineering course usually has very good students, but that year was particularly good. Cláudio was evidently one of the best.” But the arguments he mentions marked the idea he had: “They were completely unnecessary, they didn’t do anything to the class, meaning that the memory of teaching Cláudio isn’t even the best (unlike many other colleagues in the same class).”
Even so, they maintained contact until a certain point: “I followed the rest of his career at Técnico and the beginning of his PhD at Brown [a partir de 2000]. I exchanged many emails with him at that time and saw that he maintained the same attitude – as he told me – of having unnecessary conflicts with his PhD colleagues in classes, who once again he considered much less capable than him – and who probably even would be. I could tell he wasn’t enjoying being at Brown University.but I tried to convince him that it would be an initial phase, a cultural shock, but that this PhD was an excellent opportunity that he shouldn’t waste, and that when he started doing research and finished the curricular phase, he would certainly like it. It didn’t help. Cláudio thought that none of it was worth it, that it was a waste of time and the others were all incapable. And he gave up his PhD after a year. That was the last news I heard from him.”