Imagine how it might be, if you will, to be Santa Cruz Futebol Clube of Recife. Only three short years ago, you win a game in front of 60,000 fanatical supporters, and guarantee your return to the Brazilian First Division. A few months after that, following a rocky start to the year, you beat, in glorious, comedic, cartwheeling style, two of the giants of Brazilian football, Flamengo and Corinthians (to give some idea of perspective, for anyone who cares, Carlitos Tevez and Javier Maschereno play for Corinthians that day), again in front of vast throngs of fifty and sixty thousand people in the mundao Arruda. Your city rivals, if they can be called such things, cuddly Nautico and preening bantamweights Sport, are skulking in the anonimity of the Second Divison. Such adventures lie ahead for you, such glories are laid out for the taking!

And even though things do not go so well after that, and you do not win many more games, and you are relegated at the end of the year, no matter, you think, you'll soon be back. After all, you are the biggest football team in the nordeste, the oldest, most storied, most Brazilian part of this teeming, ramshackle, wonderful country. You are Santa Cruz Futebol Clube of Recife!

But this is not how it works out. Instead, although hope glimmers patchily throughout the year, towards the end of the season you begin to tumble, and your tumble becomes a plummet, and finally, shamefully, you are ignominiously relegated, for the first time in your history, to the muddy, uncharted waters of the Third Division. Worse still - Sport and Nautico are now prospering amongst Brazil's elite, and openly mock your agonies.

By now you are spinning dizzily, your freefall out of control. You have bequeathed your heritage to an arrogant oaf of a president, one who seems hell bent on destroying your very soul. You are led by a choo-choo train of managers with clowns' feet and rocking horse heads, and some of the worst football players ever to have someone help them tie up their bootlaces. You are R$50,000,000 in debt, and the upper deck of your stadium is categorised as unsafe and closed to the public.

And yet still they come, the people, the faithful, to watch you, although they probably do not know why they do, other than there is not much else to do in Recife on a Sunday afternoon. It will be alright, you think. It will take a long time to find your way back, but you surely have fallen as low as you can. People carry banners to your games that say and even if you fall, and I cannot stop you from falling, I will be there to help you back on your feet again. It will be alright, you know it will.

But, as it turns out, it will not be alright. As you begin your toils in the Third Division, rumour reaches you that the Brazilian football authorities are to create a new division for 2009 - a Serie D. You laugh, at first. Who on earth will play in the Brazilian Fourth Division, you wonder, imagining teams of mongrel dogs chasing a punctured football around scrubby dirt pitches. And even when you start off ropily in the Third Division, and you lose 3-0 to a team called Potiguar, from Rio Grande Do Norte, and for two weeks in a row to a team called Icasa, from Ceara, neither of whom you have ever really heard off, you do not worry overly.

In fact, it is almost as though you have no time to worry, and when it happens, when you fall again, maybe for the last time, for who will follow you now into such depths, you almost do not feel it. One moment you are dreaming, if not of the stars then at least of climbing back up and finding solid earth once more beneath your feet, and the next minute you are tumbling again, into this strange darkness called Serie D, and your year is over before it has begun, and your players are leaving, one or two to better places but most to simply look for work and a team wherever they may find it, and next year you do not know where you will be or where you will play or whether you will even be here at all.

Mr X tries not to take any of it personally, even though along his peregrinations he has also served cheering witness to Manchester City's hurtling crash from England's First Division to somewhere in the lower half of the Third, and, fresh off the boat in South America, Atletico Mineiro's tearful descent into the Brazilian Second Division for the first time in their storied history. Both of these disasters, like that of Santa Cruz, seem to have had their roots in Mr X’s arrival in Manchester/Belo Horizonte (and now Recife), and both City and Atletico have undergone impressive positive transformations following Mr X's departure from Manchester and Belo Horizonte respectively. He senses a pattern is developing here, but refuses to accept it may represent any kind of metaphor for mishappenstances in his life as a whole. In any case he has calculated that, assuming miracles still walk among us and Santa are promoted to a higher division in each of the next three years, he will be almost 40 years old by the time the team are back in the First Division, by which time (relying on the same assumption of the presence of miracles), he hopes he will have more substantial things to worry about (a wife, children, a career, for example) than the blinded alleys he may be led along by Santa Cruz Futebol Clube.

In Capitaes Da Area, Jorge Amado writes, several thousand times, about Bahia being a place of magic and light and endless mystery, and Mr X knows very much what he means, because for Mr X Brazil was once a land of mystery too (and still is in some ways). But Salvador, or at least Pelourinho, no longer holds much that is mysterious or magical. Rather it is a place of terrible exploitation, as might be expected when brutal poverty rubs bony shoulders with foreign tourism. Mr X spends four days in Pelourinho and finds he can hardly bear the sight of the vulturish beggars preying on convoys of waddling American tourists, the joyless Nordic backpackers lolling gubernatorially in restaurants, the dead eyed prostitutes manhandling middle aged, balding German baggage.

Upon rejecting the advances of one beautiful garota da programa, who must be all of 19 and speaks fluent English, if fluent English means being able to say “you want massage now, yes?”, Mr X feels compelled to give the girl some career advice, while of course knowing absolutely nothing about her life or job requirements. Don’t be so aggressive, so obvious, he says. Gringos want to think you like them in a normal way (whatever that might be), that they are desirable, every Brazilian girl’s dream. And once they think that – then you charge them! Mr X sits back, pleased with himself. The girl looks at him, her face an ornate carving in stone, and walks away. Mr X feels like a fool, for it is the third time he has attempted to help a prostitute in Brazil after firmly rejecting the goods sold at her particular store. He does not know why he does this, only that he believes human interaction is the only possible justification for our existence on this often miserable planet.

And in some way he feels justified in believing this when, on his last night in Salvador, he gives an espetinho vendor R$10 to buy a barbecued chicken spit every day for a week for the street kid who perches sparrow like on the kerb next to where Mr X has taken to supping his refreshing nightly guarana, or cerveja based equivalent. The kid has legs so thin that Mr X suspects heavy rain might snap them into shrapnel, and when he waltzes past Mr X’s table, clutching a hunk of chicken bigger than his head, he gives Mr X an ear-splitting grin and a delighted thumbs up sign. Later, inspired by his largesse, and after perhaps one guarana too many, Mr X, when waylaid on his way home by another lost soul, gives the boy all the money he has, which is about R$2.75. The boy scampers off into the night, saying now he can buy some rice and beans, although both Mr X and the boy know that rice and beans is probably the last thing on tonight’s menu.

Mr X thinks most people would say he is being exploited, but he also thinks he does not care in the slightest, for he has money, not a lot but enough, and the people who ask him for help have nothing and are as thin as carpets. And in the end, he believes it is a very poor thing indeed to sit enjoying a fine meal in the type of restaurant that has cushions-and-music-and-waiters-and-everything and to turn away from the beggars in the street, to use the excuse that you are somehow being duped as an excuse to do nothing, to claim that your hand will remain in your plumply padded pocket because the mendigo will spend it on booze or drugs or special interest magazines rather than on low-fat low-carbs healthy snacks. As far as Mr X is concerned the mendigo can spend it on whatever the hell he or she wants, and all of this refusniking seems like a very black stain on the human heart of anyone who does such a thing.

Around four months ago I believed I had been struck down by Brazil’s typhoid for the 21st century, the infamous dengue virus. Of course it was not dengue, but was instead another, yet unidentified virus, that left me weak and light-headed and aching all over and covered from head to foot in a fetching polka-dot rash. Threading a tricky path through the SUS, Brazil’s creaky national health service, was no great pleasure, but on the other hand did not strike me as being a much sorrier tale than it might have been on the NHS. Public health care, Mr X tells me, is doomed the world over – not enough money, too many people, and the best doctors and administrators tempted away to the private sector. Anyway. My blood was tested, and whether it was my shoddy circulation or a myopic Brazilian nurse I do not know, but something went minorly awry, and a huge purple bruise bloomed the length of my forearm.

It was around this time that The Ex-Girlfriend’s troubles began, and she embarked on her not so little sojourn in Recife. It has been a rocky ride in parts, though not as rocky as I once feared. No spectres have travelled from **** ******* to gun her or I down in the street, no recifense thugs have been hired to do the same. Furthermore the smoke of sexual tension which I believed might burn our eyes and singe our throats has proved to be entirely without source or flame on either side, and for this thanks are due to God and the Baby Jesus, should either happen to exist (I am getting old and it is good to keep one’s bases well covered).

The bruise has faded now, though it stayed with me for months, much longer than I had first expected, and The Ex-Girlfriend has gone too, to a small house she has rented (the first in her short-ish life) near the Santa Cruz football stadium. She has furnished this house with a mattress and table I have given her, and a few other odds and ends (pencils, books, a radio), and absolutely nothing else. But she will be fine, I think, because she is resourceful, and her expectations in terms of material goods are low, and because I will probably continue to help her when I can, and besides there is now The Ex-Girlfriend’s New Boyfriend to help (and though I can hardly at this late stage become mean-spirited about such things, helping seems to me more the job of The New Boyfriend than The Ex-Boyfriend, no?)

All talk of rockiness aside, her time here has been A Good Thing All Round. My mother, a seer in such matters, tells me I have done something good and pure, and in a world that is not always full of such things, it feels good to contribute at least a crumb of worthiness (perhaps my first). And I have gained a lot myself – my daily debating sessions with the living room wall have ceased, for one, and I now have someone else in Recife I can call a friend.

And so there is not much else to say on the subject, other than as is often the case things prayed for, when they come, are not always as wonderful as had been hoped. I say this because towards the end I had spent not an insubstantial amount of time sacrificing chickens and goats and lizards at heathen altars and invoking the gods of afro-Brasileiro religions in order that The Ex-Girlfriend might pack her bag(s) and leave (amongst other things my already comatose love life had been taking a considerable turn for the worse – it is remarkable how effective the words “I live with The Ex-Girlfriend” can be as an antidote against the stirring passions of Brazilian women). Needless to say, my beseechings to all things holy and unholy had gone answered.

But last night I went to the bakery and although she is gone I bought bread for both of us, and when I looked this morning I wondered would there be enough for two breakfasts, before I remembered, and felt a minor tug at my heart, and standing in the kitchen small loneliness and time and silence stretched out quietly before me – not greatly, but like a subtle noise in the night loud enough to hear but not to remember.

No such worries for Mr X, however, who has announced that, tired of a lack of adventures in his life, he will make as many foolish and unsensible decisions as possible in order to create a worthy narrative of which he can then write. He seems to have taken Hemingway as his model, and is drinking and smoking heavily, and this Thursday will travel 14 hours by bus to Salvador to meet a girl of truly dazzling beauty he has met on the internet. Whether this girl remotely resembles the photos Mr X has seen, or whether she is even a girl at all (she of course may be a he – a hairy knuckled Bahian sexual predator, or worse, or better, a gang of passport thieves, knives between their teeth, lurking in wait for Mr X at the bus station) remains to be seen. Mr X doesn’t care, he tells me, for he is a writer, and writers should live life to the stupidest full, shouldn’t they?

And in any case even if the journey turns out to be full of white-knuckled peril, it may be safer than what Mr X would otherwise do if he stayed in Recife, which would be to go to the Santa Cruz game. For after a run of truly miserable results Santa are one defeat away from elimination from Serie C, the Brazilian third division, and elimination would mean that next year Santa would play in the fourth division, which doesn’t even exist at the moment but seems to have been created solely to allow for yet greater suffering for tricolores across Recife. In such event it is unlikely a stone of Arruda, Santa’s stadium, will be left unleavened by the team's enraged supporters and it will be even greater shame to the Inferno Coral if so much as one city bus is left untorched. Hemingway or not, all of these are things Mr X would prefer to watch on the news on Monday, rather than witness in person.

There are many people that believe Stephen King is not a good writer, but Mr X is not of them. One of the best things Stephen King has written comes in Pet Sematary, when the main character, Louis Creed, goes kite flying with his two year old son Gage (or three year old, or four year old, or whatever – it has been a long time since Mr X has read Pet Sematary). Louis Creed reflects, or perhaps it is the narrator, that this day is the last truly happy day he will remember in his life, and some lines later we are told that Gage will in a few weeks be knocked down and killed by a truck on the road in front of the family home. What strikes Mr X as being good about Stephen King’s writing (and Mr X does not quite know if it is intentional or not) is that his description of a truly happy day does not seem particularly blissful or idyllic. Gage cries a lot at one point, and Louis Creed has a fight with his daughter, who is a few years older than Gage. Maybe too (Mr X is imagining now) some milk is spilt in the kitchen, or Louis Creed’s car won’t start.

The point is that a good day does not need to be a chocolate box of treats and delights from beginning to end; maybe all it needs to be is a day in which nothing very bad happens and some positive thoughts occur.

Mr X thought about this yesterday, as he walked home on a warm Friday afternoon. Earlier that day he had enjoyed a good if not remarkable lunch, and had taken the bus to the Federal Police Headquarters, where the administrative noose around his neck had been loosened, if not removed entirely. Mr X thought about catching the bus home too, as it was a hot day, but instead decided to walk (a rule of life, according to Mr X – walk everywhere you possibly can, use the bus when longer journeys are required, and never, ever drive, for driving is elitist and isolationist and bullying and in short is the dirtiest work the devil ever did).

Nothing much happened on Mr X’s walk, just as nothing much ever happens, but that is not the point. Blue skies had appeared after several days of rain, and Recife sprawled like a gluttonous cat in the sunshine. Mr X went to the book shop, where he bought Guimaraes Rosa’s Primeiras Contas and a copy of Herzog. He walked over the bridge into Santo Antonio – the river glittered sleepily underneath. On Avenida Guararapes he stopped for a moment at the book stalls and bought a second hand copy of Jorge Amado’s Capitaes Da Areia, and came across a real copper-bottomed find – a stack of 1970’s Brazilian vinyl, each with a booklet containing photos and biographies of the artists. Ancient samba stars smoking gloomily in Rio botecos, fantastically bearded nordestinos perched on arid rocks – that kind of thing. Mr X bought a Milton Nascimento and an Ismael Silva record and chugged happily on his way. He stopped off on Rua Das Palmas and shared a coke with The Ex-Girlfriend, who was working selling lottery tickets. At home, he ate some fruit and performed a few half-hearted stretches, which is for Mr X what passes for exercise these days.

Later, his Portuguese Teacher arrived. Mr X was struck by inspiration. It’s a nice day, let’s go the pub!, he cried. His Portuguese Teacher agreed. They walked around for a while. Mr X thought how it might be the last day he would spend doing this, since in a week he would move to Olinda. In the Praça, hundreds of teenagers stood waving flags and handing out flyers for the political candidatos. Sound systems blared out comedic musical tributes to the honourable members, all of whom looked the same to Mr X (though they had given themselves numbers to help with identification). Mr X and his Portuguese Teacher went to the Patio Santa Cruz and sat in front of the Bar and Restaurant Santa Cruz and his Portuguese Teacher had a guarana and Mr X had a beer and then a second beer. Then they moved to Cadu’s and his Portuguese Teacher had another guarana and Mr X had another beer and then a fourth beer. A woman came around selling stuffed toys and Mr X thought about buying one to give to the son of a woman he knows, which is for Mr X what passes for family these days. Later The Ex-Girlfriend came past on her way home from work and sat and talked to Mr X and his Portuguese Teacher for a while.

After a while it was time to go and his Portuguese Teacher went home and Mr X walked up past the back of the shopping centre where alternative lifestyle adolescents congregate on weekend evenings. Mr X picked his way through the sweaty multi-sexo hormonal soup and went past the hospital where toxic looking waste barrels were being loaded onto a truck. Mr X became aware that he was if not happy at least a good distance from unhappy.

At home he stopped off for a moment at the Internet Palace of Delights and saw he had received an email from A Woman On The Internet – ooooooiiiiii lindo gostei de vc viu bjuuuus, (trans: "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temporate”) which is for Mr X what passes for romance these days.

And after that, well, Mr X went to bed.

Tired of the murkiness of downtown Recife, Mr X resolves to move address. There is some heaviness about the heart in taking such a decision, for there have been some good times here in Boa Vista, and nights of much revelry and bleary eyed philosophising in Cadu’s and the Praça, and many friends, both permanent and temporary, have been made. But it is also a tiring place to live, and the gruesome pagode played at the gay sauna in front of his apartment three nights a week has become the final drop of water.

Luck has smiled upon Mr X, something that he must admit, when he puts aside his mask of world weary cynicism, happens rather often than he probably deserves. Via the wonders of the internet he makes a friend from a small Caribbean island, and the friend invites Mr X to a barbecue at his home in Olinda. The barbecue is washed out by one of the torrential rainstorms that every so often batter the north east coast of Brazil during winter, but more importantly the friend and his wife tell Mr X that they are moving, and that their house, which has a garden, a sea view and is five minutes walk from the colonial wonders of Olinda’s cidade alta, will soon be available.

Mr X moves quicker than a chicken in a bar full of foxes and the next week he meets with Getulio Vargas, the owner of the house. Getulio Vargas tells Mr X a few minutes into their meeting that he is a homosexual who dislikes other homosexuals and instead prefers to conduct his affairs of the heart with heterosexual men who have (a) a female partner and (b) the required amount of spare time. Mr X remains unaffronted by this revelation and the only comment he has to make on this state of affairs is that it seems a rather impractical use of Senhor Vargas’ time, given that the apparatus involved in both situations would, one presumes, be much the same. In any case good feeling abounds and Mr X and Getulio Vargas agree a very reasonable rent and arrange to meet a few days later to sign contracts, pay deposits and so on.

But, like a music industry lawyer whose titanic ego has been pricked, fate turns and snaps angrily at Mr X. On Monday Getulio Vargas informs him that bad news is afoot. A Mystery Woman has emerged, one who has fallen in love with the house and is willing to pay Getulio Vargas a chunk of change that is considerably greater than the chunk of change Mr X was willing to pay, in exchange for the privilege of seeing the sun sparking on the balmy Atlantic with her morning coffee. Getulio Vargas sighs as he recounts this tale of woe to Mr X (seeming remarkably affected by the saga given that it will result in him receiving more money than before), and tells Mr X that really he would prefer to rent the house to him, and that the whole thing is just a terrible gosh darn’ shame. As he listens Mr X has a feeling he knows where the whole shebang is heading, particularly when Getulio Vargas calls The Mystery Woman during their conversation. Getulio Vargas and The Mystery Women exchange information that Mr X thinks surely must already have been exchanged. After the phone call Getulio asks Mr X if there isn’t anything he can do to make things easier for them both? Couldn’t Mr X find a way to increase the agreed rent, so that it more closely resembles the rent offered by The Mystery Woman?

Mr X has a feeling that The Mystery Woman is no more real than a down and dirty street fight involving a unicorn and a mermaid, but also, really that there is not an awful lot he can do about the situation. So after a little meaningless bantering Mr X agrees to the increased rent and amidst much falsity and squeaky grinning and damp handshakes things are settled.

Most people, of course, would suggest that Mr X has, as a gringo, been the victim of a dusting of Brazilian financial chicanery. Many Brazilians will tell you that gringo means foreigner, no more and no less. This is true of course, but the word also carries an inkling that being a gringo, the bearer of the title is also (a) rich and (b) if not entirely stupid then at least clankingly naïve. It is in the intonation and the roll of the eyes that usually accompanies the utterance, and the tutting noise that precedes or succeeds it. But the idea that gringoes are there to be fleeced and that most of them are rich enough not to notice doesn’t tell the whole story. After all those involved in transactions involving property throughout the world are as famous for their financial honesty as big city taxi drivers, and I was often almost the victim of much seedier scams than Getulio Vargas’s whilst living in a city of such exemplary honesty as London (hur hur). Rather, it is a lazy little stereotype propagated by both Brazilians (who like Liverpudlians often take a strange type of pride in their trickiness) and gringoes. For example, at the beginning of the great funfair ride with The Ex-Girlfriend all those years ago, I was told by both gringoes and well-heeled Brazilians to “hold onto my wallet”, the idea being that The Ex-Girlfriend and/or her family were out to get their hands on my fairly insubstantial hoard of dough and that when it happened I would be too naïve to protect myself. Of course no such thing happened, or at least not often, and in fact The Ex-Girlfriend would have probably have starved herself to an aesthetically pleasing death before she would ever have asked me for money.

The point being, if there is ever a point to anything here, is that Brazil is never as unique as it would like to be (whilst remaining very unique indeed) – it is never as good, it is never as bad. People cheat people all over the world, and (he says with stunning obviousness) there are gringoes who make the lowest of Brazilian picaroons look like unworldly Pollyannas. So in the end, as the lights go out and the streets grow quiet here in Boa Vista, from where Mr X will soon take his leave, it can only be said that Brazilians are not probably as dishonest as Brazilians would like to think they are. And that feels like The End, for now, because I'm deadly tired.