#thoughtcatalogue
An excerpt from ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium.

“I still don’t really understand this whole *boiadeiro* thing.”

“Of course not. To truly understand the boiadeiro, you need to listen to ‘On the Western Plain’.”

A *boiadeiro* (*boia* for short) is a cow herder from upstream Magritte, the great steppes of Northern Mesque. He is a rugged individualist and explorer.

“It’s an old ballad about a young girl who falls in love with a daring boiadeiro. He promises to marry her as soon as he returns from the Western Plain.”

“I’m guessing that doesn’t happen.”

“Of course not. The boiadeiro returns from the Western Plain a *changed* man. One night, as he and his beloved are out walking along the River Magritte, she pleads with him to give up his riding and settle down…”

In the background you can hear the orchestra swell as the screen fills with the maiden’s imploring eyes…

“So he gives up his riding and settles down, right?”

“No, the boiadeiro strangles his beloved and throws her body in the Magritte. Then he rides off, because the Western Plain is calling to him.”

“That’s… not where I thought that was going.”

“You have to understand — a true boiadeiro needs a whole horizon to himself. He can’t be tied down by man or woman. His beloved was selfish. She didn’t know what it meant to love a *boiadeiro*.”

What if… to truly love a boiadeiro is to float lifeless downstream?

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As so he is me, then so I must be him—a boiadeiro, a lone wanderer from the Pale, a rugged cowboy with his fate resting on solitude and abandonment.

The Pale is a long and frigid horizon that spans an azure blooming against the nihilistic sun, teeming with endless hectares of dust. Dust that collects and tattoos itself underneath the skin. Across the Pale is a journey both brutal and harsh, as is the boiadeiro himself.

As he sits smoking his lungs in the smoothness of his pipe, he lets out a warm bellow, and yanks the reigns into the paths ahead. The road is tumultuous, piercing the sweat into his brow. In the near distance, whispering winds foretell a cold and cruel future, but in no way must the spirit of the boiadeiro be diminished. His temperament is a religion in of itself, as he is its most frail disciple.

In the vastness of the azure, from the Western Plane creeping into the Twin Valleys, a brightening light strikes past the eyes and places a vision that resembles the clarity of a mirror…

I look closer and see myself; the past and the future coalescing into one reflection: a scarred face, a ghoulish demeanor swirling with a bleached undertone, and a beautiful life. All the colors of my veins have been snuffed out into the grey center. Within it, lies a worship into an eternity that is indeed true. Wherein the concept of suffering is etched into the marrow, and the screams underneath are masked and united into my own little voice-box. An unholy anatomy of belligerence, rebelliousness, and oxymoronic empathy to strangers and nay-sayers.

I ride the world with heel of my boot, striking its throat with spurs and feathers. My heart bears heavy the collected fears of my ancestors, and my own. No longer do I serve them, as only I myself should brave the weight of this burden—carrying it towards the sky only for it to fall beneath my feet, in needless and purposeless fashion.

I have become him, a boia, alone in this world yet again. With only the light between my ears as my sole companion. And still—with all this emptiness, I’ve never been happier since.