Ch04: Footnotes
Corporate Bully
Business Barriers
Can work but won't
Threatened
Relapse
Stifled by Rules
DSS Benefit Rules
Employee Plus
Employment Barriers
Skill Polarisation
Freedom of Travel
Self-Destruction
Stifled by Rules
Resource-Starved
Mental Illness
Corporate Bully
Rules of Welfare
TECs
Fragmented Sources
Unwillingly Idle
Unfair Contracts
Workfare Scam
Brazil
Due to circumstances not of my making, I became a persona non grata to my wife's family, her church, the
DSS
and the
NHS;
and further, due to my unavoidable unemployed status, to the British public in general. But not to my neighbours in our 15-house close. They knew. Even so, to preserve my life and sanity I had to escape British jurisdiction. I went to Brazil.
[Portugues]
I discovered, shortly after my marriage in July 1967, that certain aspects of my wife's personality and behaviours were very strange. I hadn't noticed them before. As they say, love is blind. Over the following 37 years, it gradually dawned on me that her world-view was not what I would have thought of as being in any way normal. My detailed exposition of that 37 years is given in my article Mental Illness: A Carer's View.
During my final decade in the UK, my wife and I had no marital relationship. Our 'marriage' was nothing more than a master/slave relationship. My wife, to whom people referred variously as "the Princess", "a lady of leisure" and "one of life's passengers", did practically nothing. I ran the house and looked after her, including while in her highly disruptive unmedicated state for the two months or so before it dawned on the quacks that she was in relapse. During such time, they took absolutely no notice whatsoever of what I said. In fact, on some occasions they threatened me with prosecution for wasting medical time. Throughout this, I had to take care of our two sons. Our daughter had grown up and left home.
My wife has a Narcissistic Entitlement personality disorder, which precipitates sporadic schizophrenic relapses. The incessant lies she told about me over the years, caused me to become estranged from her family, her church, the DSS and the NHS. Her behaviour eventually made it impossible for me to hold down a job or even run a home-based business. The quacks continually asserted that there was nothing wrong with her. I felt debilitated and suicidal.
Regarding the lies: my mother once told me that my ex-wife had telephoned her and railed things about me, which my mother knew from direct experience were lies. My mother's response to her was: "Why don't you divorce him then? You'll certainly have my blessing!". The next time I saw my ex-wife she said she wanted to divorce me but later relented. I was never sure whether my wife lied about me deliberately or whether she was under some kind of permanent delusion that made her sincerely believe her lies were true.
Reviled by authority and with my wife's rich family able to hound me wherever I went, I was desperate for a way of escape. I needed relief. I needed peace.
On Thursday, 19 June 2003, I received an email 'out of the blue' from a lady in Brazil. She had seen my web site and read some of my essays there. From then on, we corresponded regularly by email. Eventually, being sentient of my predicament in the UK, she invited me to go and live with her in Brazil. I explained to her that I was effectively penniless and would not be able to support myself in Brazil. Furthermore, at my age, it would be very doubtful whether I would be able to find work in Brazil, especially since, at that time, I knew nothing of the Portuguese language. Her response was that she had a good salary as a Federal civil servant and would support me fully and that I should not worry about this.
She suggested that I should go on a preliminary visit to Brazil for two weeks at the beginning of 2004. I flew to Brazil to arrive on 31 December 2003 to see the new year celebrations in Belo Horizonte. She then took me on a trip to Porto Seguro in Bahia and also to various places in the hinterland of her home city. We got on well. I returned to the UK and planned my escape.
On the morning of 23 June 2004, I got dressed and packed other clothes and personal items in my 88 litre Bergen. With the Bergen on my back, I slung my laptop strap over my shoulder. I had also placed important personal documents such as my birth certificate in my laptop case. I had £500 in my wallet, which my mother had given to me. My son accompanied me to our local railway station from which I caught the train to Heathrow airport, London. From there I took the overnight flight to São Paulo, where I changed to a domestic flight to Belo Horizonte-MG. There I was met by my friend and her nephew, who took me to their home.
Our informal understanding was that she would support me completely in Brazil and that, for my part, would accept her informal commission to continue my writing to publish on my web site, for which she would be the philanthropic facilitator. From that time onwards, she has given me unfailing support and approval, which I hope I have adequately reciprocated to her.
The rigmarole of acquiring permission to reside in Brazil with my new friend was my first experience of the idiocy of Brazilian law and its requirement to prove the negative. Permission to reside in the country is granted [or refused] by the Polícia Federal [Federal Police]. So, my friend made an appointment with the Federal police for this purpose and off we went.
An amusing aside is that when we entered the taxi, my friend and I in perfect unison said "Polícia Federal". The taxi driver almost jumped out of his skin. He thought we were Federal Police officers. I can't imagine what he had been up to, but we calmed him down and told him that this was simply where we wanted to go.
We had several meetings with an officer simply known as Dr. João. Finally, my case was passed to a large affable Negro officer who said that I would have to provide a document called a "certidão de bons antecedentes". This is where the bureaucratic idiocy started. A "certidão de bons antecedentes" is supposed to be an official document, which states that I have never committed a crime in my country of origin.
I asked some British authority [I can't remember if it was the Foreign Office or the British Consulate] about how I could obtain such a document. I was told that the UK didn't issue such a document. They said then the only way was to write to all 120 constabularies in the UK and ask them to write a letter confirming that they each had no record of me having committed a crime within their jurisdictions. But they further advised that no constabulary had any obligation or even the means to make a reply. This was because in the UK no record is kept of people who have not committed crimes: only people who have.
In Brazil, on the other hand, everybody is fingerprinted and bioed, the results of which are stored on a national database. Each person's record has the equivalent of a tick-box indicating whether or not they have committed any crime. Issuing a "certidão de bons antecedentes" from this is simple. Consequently, this impossibility trap of having to prove a negative is something that generally only falls upon foreigners. For Brazilians, obtaining acceptable proof is easy.
Even if I could present documentary proof that I had not committed any crime in the UK, that would not prove that I had never committed a crime in any of the other 193 [excluding the UK and Brazil] sovereign countries in the world. So this proof of the negative could never be rigorous.
We returned to the Federal Police. I explained about the incompatibility between the systems of the two countries. To prove that I haven't committed any crimes in the UK demands the proof of a negative [probatio diabolica] from evidence that does not and cannot exist. A foreboding look of inevitability propagated across the officer's face. There was a long silence. Then suddenly, "bam bam!". His carimbo [official stamp] came down hard on his ink pad and crash landed on my residency approval form. He said "Tudo bem! Bem-vindo ao Brasil!" [OK! Welcome to Brazil!]
The great take-away from what happened here is the truism that bureaucratic procedure and syntactic law can only take you so far on the journey to justice. But finally, in order to arrive at a correct and just decision, a sentient human being has to mindfully consider the whole situation within its appropriate context and then make a reasoned judgement.
From our presential [face-to-face] encounter, the guy knew I was OK. So, although Brazilian law required me to prove a negative, the officer decided in this case to override the idiocy of the plain letter of the law.
This is way above and beyond the normal workings of bureaucracy
[burrocracy]
as perpetrated by the species I have elsewhere disparagingly referred to as the British Standard Jobsworth Plank, of which there are copious counterparts here in Brazil. I should have heeded this warning because the impossible burden of having to prove the negative was going to raise its ugly head again, to be devastatingly applied in the letter alone, without the intervention of mindful judgement.
Having arrived in Brazil, I now had a de facto separation from my wife in the UK. My Brazilian friend and I wanted to make our new relationship official. She asked a lawyer friend, to petition the Judge of the Family Court to give official recognition to our new relationship. She applied to the Judge for us to be recognised as having what was called a União Estável. She explained our situation to the Judge, including about my de facto separation. The União Estável so I was given to understand at the time, was an instrument of law devised to enable same-sex couples to form effectual relationships. The Judge decreed that if it applied to same-sex couples then it must also be applicable to opposite-sex couples.
We were from then on officially recognised as being in a União Estável and the court issued the appropriate official document to this effect. With this, my Brazilian friend [now effectual partner] was able to register me as her dependant with her employer: the Federal Court. I had no income, so it enabled me to become her kept spouse: an obvious role reversal from the norm, but nonetheless equally valid. It also meant that if she were to die before me, I would have right to the determined continued proportion of her pension until I also died. This made her feel comfortable about having invited me to Brazil. It also made me feel comfortable.
I left the UK with the clothes I stood up in, the contents of my 88-litre Bergen, my laptop and personal documents, plus £500 that my mother had given to me. My ex-wife's lawyer effected the transfer of all previous joint matrimonial property; namely money, goods, rights and effects, including our car and our detached house valued at £510,000 exclusively to her. This action clearly signalled a definitive separation. I arrived in Brazil destitute, saved only by the promise of my Brazilian friend.
My father died a year before I left the UK. He and my mother had a family Trust fund. The probate process was still on-going when I left the UK. However, in 2005, I inherited some money left to me by my father in the Trust fund, which was in the process of being dissolved. This money is therefore factually not legally part of any matrimonial property I had previously shared with my ex-wife in the UK.
Trying to transfer my money to Brazil was exceedingly problematic. In fact, I thought it was not going to be possible at all. I tried several banks which all refused to accept the transfer of my money. Then I tried the Safra bank. They said that I would have to prove the origin of my money in order for them to accept it. They said all I had to do was show them my latest Income Tax return. I could not understand this. How could they possibly know the origin of my capital from an Income Tax return? It showed only my 'earnings' for the year and the Income Tax paid on it.
I then learned from my Brazilian partner that the Brazilian Income Tax return [Declaração de Imposta de Renda] also lists all a person's current property, capital and assets. And the banks accept this as proof that the capital stated therein is officially recognised as being correct [or, as they call it regular]. Consequently, with only a UK Income Tax return I would not be able to prove the origin of my money.
Besides, I didn't even have a recent UK Income Tax return because my family and I had been living on Social Security 'benefit' for the past 13 years. With my wife's disruptive behaviour, it had long ago become impossible for me to hold down a job or even run a home-based business.
The only way I could prove the origin of my money was from the documentation resulting from the dissolution of the Trust Fund. Safra said that I would have to have all this documentation officially translated into Portuguese by a sworn [legally registered] translator. The documentation was extensive. So the cost of translating it would be astronomical. Even then, there was no guarantee that what it revealed would be adequate or acceptable. I declined and closed the account that Safra had opened for me.
Then I tried the bank Sudameris. The person I dealt with there saw that the money was coming from a UK bank account in the joint names of my mother and me. She accepted that as proof that I personally was the source of the money, which she deemed to be an acceptable origin. My money was transferred to my new personal account with Sudameris. It is with this money, inherited from my parents after my separation from my wife in the UK that I bought my apartment. My Brazilian partner had said that she would support me completely but I thought it appropriate that I should contribute to our new life by supplying the capital to buy our new home.
I therefore bought an apartment in a condominium building close to where my new partner had lived with her mother. Having been bought with money inherited by me after our definitive separation, the apartment is my exclusive property. My ex-wife cannot possibly have any legal claim on it.
Our daily routine was that my partner and I would spend the morning at the gym [she was very keen on exercise and keeping fit]. We would then have lunch, after which she would go to work at her job as a Judicial Analyst at the Federal Court that dealt with disputes between employees and their employers. She worked a permanent shift from 13h00 to 21h00.
During this time, I worked the full 8 hours on my writing. Initially, I used the laptop computer I had brought from the UK on which all my data files were already arranged, with the facility to upload finished essays to my web site, which was hosted on a server in the United States. Later, my partner bought me a good desk computer, which was much easier and less fatiguing to work on.
At weekends, we would often go into the city to do shopping, eat out, go to see an unlisted film at her favourite 'art-house' cinema and sometimes meet up with her friends and colleagues. Our conversations were rich and stimulating.
During her annual leave, she took me to many places both within Brazil and abroad. For instance in January 2009 we stayed at a guest house at the small resort town of Cabo Frio on the Brazilian east coast. Years later in 2015, we visited Rio de Janeiro. We stayed in Ipanema and visited the cafe in which Vinicius de Moraes reputedly sat when he saw the girl walk past that inspired him to pen the words of the famous Bossa Nova: Girl From Ipanema.
One of my sons and my daughter have visited us in Brazil. My son came in January 2007. We took him to visit Porto Seguro in the State of Bahia and to visit my partner's original home town of Brasília de Minas about 500 km north-west of Belo Horizonte. My daughter came in May 2012. I took her to Serra do Cipó at the invitation of an English teacher for whom I worked informally, assisting in her class on English pronunciation. Also, a friend and colleague of my partner took us to visit the beautiful farm belonging to her extended family in the mountains near the city of Ouro Preto-MG. I would never wish any of my children to visit Brazil now. As obvious foreigners, they would be guaranteed targets for armed street robbers.
My partner and I visited Lisbon, Portugal twice. In May 2011 we met all three of my children there: my daughter and both my sons. In August 2014, we met up with a former business colleague and his wife. We have also been twice to Buenos Aires, Argentina in August 2012 and April 2016 just before my partner retired. I remember being nervous showing my British passport because of the Falklands war in 1982.
In March 2013 we visited Zurich, Switzerland at the invitation of a Hungarian friend who had married and moved there. My Hungarian friend was living with her husband at his apartment but still had her old apartment, which she made available free of charge to us for our stay. My three children travelled from the United Kingdom and stayed with us there.
My younger son got married to a Canadian woman, moved to Ottawa, became a Canadian citizen and acquired a good job working for the Canadian government. We visited him in Ottawa in July 2013 and March 2018. He then moved to Quebec City, continuing his same work for the Canadian government. In April 2024, I visited my son in Quebec City. I had to go alone. My partner could no longer travel. We also visited my daughter and son in Edinburgh, Scotland during August 2016, June 2017 and October 2018. I had planned to go alone from 22 May to 12 June 2025. Notwithstanding, difficult circumstances prevented me from doing so.
2019 was the last time my partner travelled. From 25 June to 10 July that year, we made a long trip via Lisbon and Berlin to Gdansk. We went to my daughter's Polish wedding reception where we met her husband's mother. On the way back to Brazil, it became blindingly apparent that my partner was not well. It transpired over the following years that my partner had fallen victim to Alzheimer's disease, which was medically diagnosed on 11 July 2021. The ensuing trauma for both of us of this illness and my observation of, and involvement with, its apparent effects, inspired me to write what became my essay on Memory and The Nature of Time.
Nevertheless, we had lived a wonderful life together until her retirement in October 2016 and beyond, our diversions and travels certainly being of great inspiration for my writing, each time recharging us to continue.
We continued together in my apartment but with my relentlessly advancing age I found it increasingly difficult to care for her. We first had the weekly assistance of house cleaners [faxineiras] and later a professional carer who had done a course in home care for Alzheimer patients. She comes from 09h15 to 15h15 Monday to Friday. Eventually, even this was not sufficient and I was beginning to collapse under the strain. My partner's brother suggested that we could both live together as a couple in a care home with full care and medical support for the aged, including those with dementia and Alzheimer.
We visited 5 care homes in the region of Lake Pampulha in Belo Horizonte-MG Brazil. We decided on one and started to arrange the contract. However, to be able to afford the cost of the care home, I would have to sell my apartment. Our lawyer therefore proceeded to negotiate the contract with our chosen care home. This seemed to be progressing rapidly and well.
In the meantime, the prospective buyer of my apartment took the property deed to the Registry to arrange the transfer of ownership. The Registrar noticed that when I had bought the apartment in 2005 that I had declared my civil status as "separated". Our lawyer told us that the Registrar said that I would need to provide a certificate of divorce [or a nullified marriage certificate] duly apostillised and judicially translated into Portuguese before I would be allowed to sell the apartment. [See: Cartório web site.]
From all this, I really cannot understand why I was permitted to buy the apartment in the first place. Ironically, if my partner had bought the apartment and I had paid the on-going day-to-day expenses of our living, I wouldn't be in this probatio diabolica.
Thus, I would have to proceed as follows:
And I am pretty sure that all this would be well beyond my financial means!
The Property Registrar is, of course, requiring me to prove that I am now divorced. Thus it would at first appear that I am being asked to prove a positive.
Notwithstanding, the objective of this is to prove that I am not married any more, which is to prove a negative. But even this is to inductively prove that my wife, from whom I separated 20 years ago, does not have a partial claim on the apartment I bought after separating from her, with money I had inherited from my parents after the separation.
The final objective of the Property Registrar's requirement therefore seems to be to indirectly prove the negative that my long ago separated wife has no claim on my apartment. I presume that this is to protect her possible interests, even if to do so robs me of my rightful property. So the whole thing is a probatio diabolica covertly metamorphosed into a positive request for a document that I cannot obtain.
My daughter doesn't know where the marriage certificate is. She can't find it. I remember one time, during one of my ex-wife's approaches to relapse, she had hidden it along with other important documents, between the pages of old newspapers that had been stacked and tied ready for recycling. She said that there it was safe from burglars. Perhaps so. But safe, per se, certainly not. In reality it has probably become lost in such a situation. I have no idea how I would go about obtaining another one and what impossible requirements I would be presented with.
This flagrant injustice has been caused by a local Brazilian bureaucracy blindly assuming and asserting an erroneous worse-case context pertaining to a foreign country that it cannot possibly know about and which is strictly none if its business.
The Brazilian Cartório's method of ascertaining that I am the exclusive owner of my apartment is highly indirect, convoluted and places the onus on the weaker party to prove a negative.
Ownership is a separate issue from marriage. The onus should be on any person who has an interest in a property to claim that interest at the time of separation or division. If it is jointly owned then both names should be on the Deed.
My ex-wife in the UK has never lived in my apartment in Brazil. She has never even been to Brazil. She has absolutely no wish ever to come to Brazil. She knows I bought an apartment in Brazil with money I inherited from my parents. But she hasn't claimed part ownership or even the right to reside in the apartment. It is none of her business. She already has what was our house.
In any case, a certificate of divorce or nullified marriage certificate, does not prove that an ex-spouse does not have joint ownership of a property. There are obvious situations in which even divorcees can still share ownership of a property.
As the person with Power of Attorney for her mother, my daughter doesn't have the authority to grant me permission to divorce her mother. She is disqualified on the grounds of her obvious conflict of interest between her mother and father. Divorce is considered to be a highly personal matter, which is beyond the jurisdiction of a Power of Attorney. Because her mother is non compos mentis, my daughter would, in any case, be required to refer the matter to the UK Court of Protection.
The Court of Protection is specifically tasked with protecting the interests of the Respondent [my ex-wife] and does not concern itself with the negative consequences precipitated upon the Petitioner [me] should the divorce be refused. Consequently, the Court of Protection will only grant permission for me to divorce my wife "if it is satisfied that the divorce is in [my wife's] best interests, considering [her] past and present feelings, beliefs, and values". My wife has, for practically all her adult life, been a staunch member of the Calvinist sect: the Strict and Particular Baptists. Her enduring and unshakable belief has been that marriage is for life — unconditionally.
In order for me to be granted a divorce, even after over 20 years of separation, a bailiff will first have to serve her with the required 'papers'. This is bound to precipitate within her a violent emotional furore, which could possibly result in her death. Besides the extra traumatic burden such an action would precipitate upon my already overloaded daughter [whose promising career in sustainable transport has already been totally destroyed by it all] I would never wish my ex-wife herself to suffer the sudden highly unnerving experience of being set-upon by court bailiffs serving her with 'papers'.
Granted, I left my ex-wife to protect my life and sanity, spurred on by the comments of an erstwhile medic whose conscience got the better of his medical ethics. He warned me straitly that in his judgement, from similar cases in his experience, I would not last much longer if I didn't find myself a new life. I knew he was right.
General medical opinion notwithstanding, the years with months of sleep deprivation suffered by me and my children was, definitively, a real and present danger to our lives. After months of sleep deprivation, one lives in a semi-dream state of not being fully certain of what's real and what's not. For example, when I was crossing the road for my fortnightly mandatory 'sign-on' at the Jobcentre, I always had to ask myself "Is the road really clear? Is that merely a dream car coming towards me or is it a real one?".
This is just one of many extremely dangerous situations precipitated solely by my wife's behaviour. To any thinking person, this is an obvious "danger to others", although, of course, the quacks can't see it. Consequently, the Social Service authorities won't recognise it, asserting that there is nothing wrong with my wife and that I am "a lazy good-for-nothing layabout who doesn't think he ought to contribute to society and thinks he can just free-load on the 'hard-working' tax-payer".
My son, like me, having been deprived of sleep for the two-months run up to one of my wife's relapses, fell asleep in the street on his way home. I was worried because it was late at night. Eventually, a friend found him and brought him home. After that he was simply too tired and exhausted to go to work. The authorities declared that he left his job voluntarily and therefore would not receive any sickness or unemployment benefit and would have his pension contributions suspended, which would propagate forward to eventually jeopardise his retirement money.
I do not blame or condemn my ex-wife for her condition or behaviour. She did not, by taking thought, decide how her brain was going to be 'wired', any more than I did mine.
In any case, reality notwithstanding, what can and cannot happen in this matter will depend entirely on what the quacks think. One way or the other, my ex-wife is not going to sign the papers or even look at them. So the process of my obtaining a divorce could take forever, assuming it be at all possible.
Consequently, it is almost certain that, despite having lived on separate continents for over 20 years, conventional wisdom is that the Court of Protection is extremely unlikely to grant me leave to divorce my wife, whatever the consequences are for me. So the cost of proceeding would be an all but futile waste of money that I do not have. Any expectation of my being able to obtain, apostillise and have officially translated, a certificate of divorce to present to the Property Registrar here in Brazil is therefore futile. In any case, there is no guarantee that the Brazilian authorities will accept the divorce certificate, particularly because it is not the same kind of document they expect in Brazil, which, as I am given to understand, is a marriage certificate with an official annulment stamp. Brazilian bureaucrats [burrocrats] can be exceedingly obstinate.
There is, of course, another vital implication here. If the Brazilian authorities regard me as still being 'married' to my ex-wife, this automatically implies that they will no longer recognize the official União Estável under which my Brazilian friend and I have been living for the past 20 years, as granted by the Brazilian Family Court Judge under the full and truly declared circumstances at the time. This implies that the legal validity of my Power of Attorney for my partner is highly questionable. If it becomes revoked, I will be unable to pay our day-to-day expenses.
If I die first, my apartment will, as far as I am given to understand, fall into the possession of the State authority to be auctioned, with the proceeds distributed 'to who knows whom?' — perhaps certain 'officials' will be having some rather nice holidays out of it. I imagine that my children, to whom my estate will then rightly belong, won't be considered or even known about by the Brazilian authorities.
If my partner dies first of her Alzheimer, then I will not be eligible to receive an on-going proportion of her pension, contrary to what she, our lawyer and friends have always assured and asserted I would receive. Consequently, I will become instantly destitute and therefore unable to pay the on-going costs of my apartment.
My only option will be to abandon my apartment which, remember, I paid for with money I inherited from my parents after my de facto separation from my ex-wife and over which she therefore can have no claim. But, of course, I have no way, that would be remotely affordable for me, to prove this to the satisfaction of Brazilian authorities. So, when the time comes, I will have to prevail upon my children to buy me an air ticket with which to rapidly skip the country.
The Brazilian Property Registrar [Cartório] is presumptively meddling in an event, which took place in a foreign country within which it has no jurisdiction and of which it does not have the necessary and sufficient knowledge to qualify it to make a judgement. The process of de facto separation of matrimonial property, pertaining to my ex-wife and me, occurred entirely in the United Kingdom, where it was legally and properly conducted and documented. So inevitably, the Brazilian Property Registrar [Cartório] has not and cannot furnish positive proof that my ex-wife or anybody else has a whole or partial claim to ownership of the apartment that I bought with money I inherited from my parents after my separation from my ex-wife.
The Brazilian Property Registrar [Cartório], has thereby gridlocked me into a situation in which I am forcibly prohibited from selling my apartment, of which I'm the legitimate and exclusive owner, unless or until I can provide a piece of paper, issued by a foreign country, that does not exist and which I have no means to obtain. So the situation is permanent.
Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property. — Article 17, The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 1948.
Consequently, the Brazilian Property Registrar [Cartório] has, in flagrant violation of the human right granted to me under Article 17 above, arbitrarily confiscated my property through indirect expropriation facilitated by a probatio diabolica.
Although, to be fair, it should be noted that Brazil is not a signatory to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948.
The Cartório is, hereby, proactively preventing an 83 year old man with diminishing vision [me] and a 75 year old woman with advanced Alzheimer [my companheira for over 20 years] from moving into a care home that is able to provide us with the supported accommodation and presential medical services that we so desperately need. So, we are inexorably destined to have to soldier on together in this horrible apartment until at least one of us dies.
Lives ruined: all because of Brazilian bureaucrats and their silly bits of paper!
In order to be free of the burden of this apartment and the taxes levied on it, I could renounce ownership, which as I understand the situation, I am free to do under Brazilian law. This would enable us to move into the Care Home without the problem of the on-going costs of the apartment, which we cannot manage in addition to the monthly cost of the care home.
Notwithstanding, even while forfeiting the capital value of the apartment [currently about R$500,000.00, which my children would not be able to receive as inheritance] I have learned that I can never quite trust that some quirk in Brazilian law won't suddenly raise its ugly head to prevent me from even renouncing ownership.
For instance, I think it highly likely that, if I am barred from selling my apartment, I will also be barred from renouncing ownership of it, in that I would again have to prove a negative: namely that there was 'nobody else' in the world who could possibly have a claim on the property; otherwise my renunciation of ownership would have to include the transfer of full ownership to that 'nobody else'. Yet another case of Brazil's probatio diabolica.
Another option is to prove that the money I used to buy my apartment was inherited from my parents via a family Trust fund. This would prove that my apartment, having been bought with inherited money, cannot be considered part of any matrimonial property and that, consequently, my former wife in the UK cannot have any possible claim to it.
However, the official documents pertaining to the Trust fund and the correspondence pertaining to the transfer of my inheritance money from it to me here in Brasil comprises 29 pages of legalistic English. All this would firstly have to be apostillised to make it recognisable and acceptable in Brazil. Secondly, the legalistic English of this entire documentation would then have to be translated into Portuguese by sworn translators. Thirdly, since...
"Brazil does not have a direct legal equivalent to the common law family trust fund due to fundamental differences in its legal system, which does not recognize the concept of a trust as a separate legal entity holding title to assets." — Google AI
...then the whole validation process of my inheritance would have to be conducted by specialist lawyers who are competent in international law with knowledge of Trust funds. The sheer cost of this would obviously be far beyond a former benefit-dependent carer [me] who had just spent 37 years caring for a wife with Narcissist Entitlement personality disorder that precipitates sporadic highly disruptive schizophrenic relapses.
Any convoluted judicial solution is futile if it requires legal and ancillary services that the victim does not have sufficient means to purchase.
The universal principles of justice, which are self-evidently embedded within the human conscience, demand that all should have a free, equal and inalienable right to be treated fairly. But sadly, in most of this rancid dog-pile world in which we live, justice has an excruciating monetary price, which is only affordable by the rich and corporate.
So proving the origin of the money in order to prove that I am the exclusive owner of my apartment is a clear non-starter: just as it was when trying to have the Safra bank allow me to transfer my money from the Trust fund to an account with them.
In any case, the Cartório did not ask for such a document: it asked specifically for a nullified marriage certificate. So I would not be at all surprised if, despite the fact that the document clearly proves the origin of the purchase money, the 'jobsworth' clerk at the Cartório would, nonetheless, simply state that since it is not a nullified marriage certificate as requested, it is unacceptable.
People have suggested to me that my Brazilian partner and I move together into a care home and retain the apartment by renting it out to cover the on-going expenses like local Authority taxes plus condominium and utility charges. This might be workable, although it will still leave me with a lot of responsibility, which at my age I would well prefer to do without. I am also not sure that with the current "irregularity" of its registration that, under Brazilian law, I would even be allowed to rent it out. I will therefore try by all means to avoid this option if at all possible.
My ex-wife in the UK, had no problem whatsoever in selling our £510,000 ex-marital home in England on Tuesday 31st August 2021 in order to move to Scotland. I was not even consulted and my name appeared nowhere in the documentation of the sale. Although de facto separated, she regards herself as still 'married' to me and under UK law, she still technically is. Thus, in the UK, a married woman, who owns a house, is free to sell it unilaterally without her 'legal husband' being involved or even notified. My daughter merely mentioned the sale to me in passing.
This is a further reason why conventional wisdom would suggest the unlikelihood of the Court of Protection permitting a divorce in this case. As illustrated by this case, a divorce is unnecessary in the UK in order to divide matrimonial property. Division can be effected through either mutual agreement or legal arbitration. In this particular case, I freely and unilaterally left all my matrimonial property with my ex-wife. We have legal documents verifying the transfer of full ownership of our house and car to her. I physically abandoned all other goods with her and left all my money in a joint bank account that I could no longer access.
I transferred ownership of — or otherwise left — all matrimonial property to my ex-wife in the UK because I wanted to make sure that, as a vulnerable person, her life would not be severely disrupted as a result of the house having to be sold in order for the matrimonial property to be divided between us.
I also, though technically still married, have been in de facto separation from my ex-wife for over 20 years. I bought my apartment, after our de facto separation, with money I inherited from my parents. Inherited money is not considered to be matrimonial property. So, Brazilian law didn't present any objection or barrier to my buying it! Yet, under Brazilian law I am not allowed to sell my apartment, presumably because it supposes that my ex-wife may have a right to half of its value. It appears that I am further unable to sell my apartment unless my ex-wife co-signs the deed here in Brazil.
My ex-wife is almost 85, has a serious personality disorder, is mentally ill and physically immobile. There is no possibility of her making — or even condescending to make — the arduous journey from Scotland to Brazil just to sign a deed for me.
I would have thought that after 20 years of nobody presenting any claim or joint-claim on the property, it should be obvious that nobody had any legitimate claim on it or interest in it. But no. They let me buy it but won't let me sell it.
This is not reciprocal. It is not fair. It is wholly unjust. It's fundamentally impractical.
Another possibility is to submit our União Estável certificate to the Cartório. However, I do not know how to do this and clearly they will not recognise this if they are asserting that, having been separated for 20 years, I am still 'married'. Besides, I'm under the impression that my lawyer has already sent a copy of our União Estável certificate to the Cartório.
The condition requiring a probatio diabolica to be placed upon me by the Property Register to 'regularise' the deed of ownership for my apartment [without which I am prohibited from selling it] is for me fundamentally unrealisable. In most countries probatio diabolica is illegal. Notwithstanding, legal or not, in Brazil, it happens.
It seems to me that, in Brazil, it is not at all unusual for authorities and corporations to act illegally with impunity because of their power.
As Lord Thurlow put it: "Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned; they therefore do as they like." — John Poynder's Literary Extracts (1844). I think that this applies equally to any kind of large organisation, including government departments and authorities.
For example, in Brazil the venda casada [married sale] is also illegal. This is where the purchase of a vital supply such as a telephone or Internet connection is made conditional upon also buying a whole host of other goods & services such as video streaming, on-line news stand & e-book subscriptions and discount cards for superstores. From what I can see, practically all telecom service providers inextricably entangle a venda casada upon customers as a matter of course. I am victim of such vendas casadas with the Brazilian Internet Service Providers: Claro and TIM.
In Brazil, the probatio diabolica is also deliberately built into contracts of sale and purchase such as the land scam to which my Brazilian companheira fell victim in 2002 in which the contract of sale and purchase had been skilfully crafted by the vendor to be fundamentally unfulfillable in a multiplex of ways.
So, in reality, there is only one functional law: 'Might is Right'.
The whole matter of my selling my apartment is factually nothing to do with my so-called civil status: it is simply to do with me legitimately buying an apartment with my own personal money, then being robbed of it with impunity by meddling State bureaucrats who know nothing of me, the context or my circumstances but just blindly expediting stupid over-simplistic rules which precipitate a probatio diabolica.
It seems that the Property Registrar wishes to ensure that a spouse receives his [or — invariably — her] fair share of the proceeds from the sale of of matrimonial property. If this be the case, then the onus should be on the Property Registrar himself to actively seek a positive proof to:
Notwithstanding, all law is predicated upon the law of 'Might is Right'. Consequently, the Property Registrar, as the overwhelmingly stronger party, forcibly transfers the onus of proof onto the individual property owner, which then becomes the probatio diabolica to prove that there is not any other party anywhere in the world that has a partial claim on the proceeds of the sale of the property.
From what I have explained in this essay, clearly there isn't anybody else. My ex-wife, from whom I have been separated for 20 years, received far more matrimonial property than she was ever entitled to: namely, all of it! But to prove that to the Property Registrar in Brazil is way beyond my means, even though it would be well within the Property Registrar's means to prove the positive. So, whether just or not, 'might' always has its way.
Society is a collective comprising a vary large diversity of individuals. But society is not a machine. It does not naturally have the fixed rigid structure of a machine. It does not naturally exhibit the programmed behaviour of a machine; irrespective of what various artificial forms and functions its human powers-that-be may try to impose upon it.
It has instead much more the nature of a fluid in motion — like a weather system, oceans of currents, a shape-shifting shoal of fish or a murmuration of starlings. It has no central control. Its behaviour is governed by natural laws that determine the way in which its elemental components interact with each other when they meet by chance. The swirling beauty of its global behaviour is a consequence of its natural fractal laws operating at the scale of interacting individuals.
Mathematically, such a phenomenon is known as a complex-dynamical system. And human society — of whatever scale from modern nations with populations of hundreds of millions down to the size of an anthropological community — is a complex-dynamical system. As such, it is governed by nature according to fractal laws, which orchestrate the interactions between each encountering pair of individuals, as and whenever such an interaction occurs.
One defining behaviour of a complex-dynamical system is that its individual elements [in this case people] can be — and are — subject to vastly different circumstances within their respective locations or hinterlands. Consequently, individuals, as they travel their separate paths through time, space and the social order, can be — and are — arbitrarily subjected to vastly different sets of events and circumstances over which each has little or no control. Consequently, the diversity and complexity of circumstances in which an individual can find himself is way beyond astronomical.
The notion that any hierarchical system of control working according to a limited set of narrow over-simplistic rules dreamed up by a small group of legislators with negligible knowledge and experience of the vast diversity of circumstances that occur to individuals in society is stupid and futile. This is well evinced by the churning cauldron of socio-economic uncertainty in which most members of society live their stress-ridden lives.
The complexity of the detail in this essay necessary to convey my true circumstances compared with the over-simplistic decision mechanism of the Property Registrar that precipitated the probatio diabolica well illustrates that bureaucracy is incapable of governing with justice and equity. It's too simple to work. I would wager that I could encapsulate the functionality of most bureaucrats in just 400 lines of C-code.
What happens appears, from my experience, to be as follows. A bureaucrat arrives at a decision by blindly following the syntax of the law [or rules]. A judge, on the other hand, uses the law as a guide to help him mindfully consider each case [or situation] and from this reach a decision by reasoned judgement.
The bureaucrat is merely a processor of syntax. He could easily be replaced by so-called 'artificial intelligence'. The judge is a sentient processor of semantics [meaning]. He fundamentally could never be replaced by 'artificial intelligence'. Notwithstanding, as my father frequently used to lament, too many judges simply work as over-paid processors of legal syntax.
The power and diversity of expression available to me, through the English language, has enabled me to convey accurately and completely my exact circumstances in the matter of selling my apartment. There is no doubt from what I have explained herein that my wife, from whom I became separated over 20 years ago, has absolutely no claim on my apartment in Brazil, which I bought with money I inherited from my parents after separation. Notwithstanding, Brazilian bureaucracy is forcibly prohibiting me from selling what is exclusively my own property. Why is this?
Fundamentally, it is a matter of language. However, it is not an incompatibility or conflict between the natural spoken and written languages of English and Portuguese. It is instead a result of the catastrophically abysmal limitations of the miniscule sub-languages of bureaucracy, irrespective of whether they are written using English words or Portuguese words or the words of any other natural language.
The language of bureaucracy is almost invariably an official 'form', which comprises in-fill fields and tick-boxes. Each field offers an extremely restricted set of word choices that the victim may enter. The tick-box similarly offers the victim the option to tick or not tick little boxes pertaining to a very limited number of prescribed short statements. A tick indicates that in the particular victim's case, a statement is true and the absence of a tick indicates that it is not true or is irrelevant.
Thus, on a bureaucratic form containing 8 tick-boxes, the entire language in which the victim is able to express his situation is restricted to a sub-language through which it is impossible to convey anything other than the truth or falsity of 8 statements, which were all pre-composed by some remote aloof bureaucrats, with the victim having no say whatsoever regarding the actual content of the statements.
When I bought my apartment in 2005, on the bureaucratic form presented by the Property Registrar [Cartório], I had to enter my "civil status". I was given a choice of "single", "married", "separated", "divorced". I correctly entered "separated", which was the truth. But this nanoscopic sub-language did not, and could not, convey any of the vast real context of my particular situation. It simply didn't have the necessary and sufficient 'informational bandwidth' to be able to do so.
Consequently, the bureaucrats, in their ignorance, automatically embedded it within their presumed standard context of a separated Brazilian couple, who inhabited the same city, in which both parties to the 'separated' civil status could physically attend the Registrar's office to update and sign the deed and thereby declare who did and who did not have a real or implied claim to the apartment.
However, the 2-bit information content of the "civil status" field on the Registrar's standard form was wholly incapable of conveying the very different context pertaining to my specific case as described in this essay. Thus, by stating the truth of my "civil status" as "separated" on the Registrar's form, what was conveyed to the Registrar was the notion that the wife from whom I have been separated for 20 years, may possibly have a part claim on my apartment, which is wholly untrue.
Consequently, in order to convey the truth, I should have put my "civil status" on the Registrar's form as "single". Then, the truth that there was nobody that had any partial claim on my apartment would have been correctly conveyed. There are many instances where it is necessary to tell a lie in order to convey the truth. A very illustrative case of this is given in my very short essay on Tick Box Forms.
The dysfunctionality of bureaucracy leaves many people trapped in an unresolvable probatio diabolica with no legal way out. Their only option to resolve their predicament is forced to be an illegal one. So, I have to ask, why should the enormous and accelerating crime rate be any surprise?
There is no love lost from me for the ethos of repugnant individualism that now permeates the United Kingdom, indelibly etched into the British zeitgeist during the Thatcher era, with its universal attitude of: "I'm all right Jack because I work hard; so if you're poor, it must be your own bloody fault". I don't see this as dominant within the Brazilian zeitgeist. It is there, but I think it is more generally realised that wealth does not result entirely, or even predominantly, from work, effort, merit or virtue. And neither does poverty result from sloth, laziness, undeservedness or vice. The specific lot of each individual — as he travels his unique life-path through time, space and the socio-economic order — is influenced predominantly by events within his effectual locality, which are, for the most part, beyond his control.
Notwithstanding, the social ethos and attitudes carried within a society's zeitgeist are definitely not the same thing as — are distinct and separate from — its form of government and system of law — and the bureaucracies through which these impact that society at the practical level.
Having lived the first 61 years of my life in the United Kingdom and the subsequent 22 years in Brazil, I have sensed and experienced a subtle but strong difference in the attitude towards the individual in the two countries. And this difference has been intimated to me via their respective bureaucracies. Although frequently authoritarian and disciplinarian, I found the focus of bureaucracies in the United Kingdom to be towards the individual, his rights and entitlements. In Brazil, on the other hand, I found the focus of bureaucracies to be predominantly towards the rights and entitlements of the collective. The notion of who is there to serve whom is reversed. At least, that's what observation, experience and incommodation have shown me.
An example of this is that of late payment. In Brazil, in my experience, in any situation where the individual has to pay a tax or charge to a collective, and payment is received after the payment deadline declared or specified by the payee, it is nevertheless always the individual who is penalised with a fine + interest. Collectives have a favoured trick of sending demands as close as possible to their declared payment deadline so as to swallow up the maximum of 5 days allowed for payment to be made. Some claim not to have received payments that have been debited from the individual's bank account and hence add a fine + a whole month's interest to the next bill. Absolutely always: Might is Right. The Individual has to pay unjustly. What strikes me as contrary to what should be is that individuals here in Brazil seem to accept this as being "just the way things are".
Another example is democracy. Whatever the majority desires is always accepted, no matter what kind of catastrophic consequences the implementation of that desire may have on any individual. The pain, inconvenience and suffering of the individual is irrelevant; all that matters is the convenience and pleasure of the collective. This happens even down to the size of a condominium. If the majority has the income to be able to support the addition of a luxury that an individual on hard times cannot afford, the luxury is enforce and the pauper has to pay or be force to move out [always assuming he is permitted by the authorities to sell his apartment!]. The individual doesn't matter.
They see the collective as king — or even God. They do not seem to see that the human individual, each of whom has the same 86-billion neuron brain that accommodates a 'self' with feelings, values and aspirations as having intrinsic worth. On the other hand, they see the collective, which has neither consciousness nor conscience, as having ultimate significance, even though it is merely a precipitative consequence of the relationships between sentient individuals.
So I can, in part, see why Brazil isn't a signatory to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948. The ethos of individual preciousness and rights isn't really present within the public mind.
Since its bureaucracies — intentionally or inadvertently — obviously follow this same ethos, it is little wonder why in Brazil, unlike in the United Kingdom for instance, the individual can find himself suddenly subjected to a probatio diabolica.
Having said all this, I think that, in the right hands, with less changes than one might imagine, Brazil could become one of the world's prime examples of human development.
There is a solution to all this, which is simple, equitable, just and fair. It is based on neither the proactive belligerence called capitalism nor the desperate reaction to it called socialism. But it would be wholly unacceptable to established power.
An anthropological community operates as a complex-dynamical system. As such, it inherently self-governs according to the self-evident protocol of human conscience, which defines the envelope of behaviour within which benign binary human interactions may take place.
This is captured well in the following quotations from the Judaeo-Christian Bible: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" — Matt 7:12 and "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." — Matt 22:39
If this protocol were enforced by each upon himself, centralised hierarchical bureaucratic government would be unnecessary and irrelevant. The ancients knew this:
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest. — Proverbs 6:6-8
So ants can do it. Termites can do it. Birds can do it. Fish can do it. Animals can do it. Even machines can do it! So why not humans? They could. But to be able to do so, each would have to have returned to him a necessary and self-evident birthright that has been stolen from him by a power he cannot fight.
That self-evident birthright is the free and unencumbered use of sufficient terrestrial resources to enable him to turn his labour into his needs of life. The thieves are a greedy elite who have commandeered all the resources of the planet into their own possession and around which have erected an impervious wall of exclusion, thereby depriving humanity of what the planet, on which all were born, freely provides. So he can only gain his minimum necessary needs of life from those thieves if, and only if, they perceive that they have need of his labour from time to time.
But these elite thieves are small in number. The exploited majority does contain the physical power to take back its stolen inheritance. It does not have to obey aloof faceless bureaucrats who cower behind their 'democratically' elected face men. So how did a small elite manage to establish and then contain such a situation?
In the beginning: by superior strength and skill in combat or by the occasional good fortune arbitrarily thrown up by the complex-dynamics of socio-economics. This was then eternally sustained through deception. The majority were schooled to believe that this status quo was right and good. Consequently, if any individual were to unilaterally desist, the deceived majority would flock to the aid of the elite minority to reinforce the status quo. Unilaterally, any member of the majority can change nothing.
Thus is maintained a status quo which bestows health, wealth and happiness upon the exigent, relegating the meek to misery and starvation, with a middle majority in a churning cauldron of economic uncertainty.
But how can the elite maintain the notion, within the public mind, of this being just? By employing deception to shift blame. The majority is persuaded that it is not the blindingly obvious greed of the thieves that is keeping them on the stress-ridden edge of survival. It is, instead, the burden of over-taxation required to support the lazy good-for-nothing poor, unemployed, elderly, infirm, deficient and inept.
If society lived as a conglomeration of anthropological communities in which each had, by right of birth, free and unencumbered use of his fair share of the resources of the planet on which he was born, he could never suffer the deprivation of poverty and unemployment. If or when he were elderly, infirm, deficient or inept; he would be cared for by friends who well know his circumstances, personality and character. He would be a loved member of his community: not a naked number in the file of an aloof bureaucrat coldly enforcing his infantile over-simplistic one-size-fits-all rules.
But to bring this about will require that the protocol of good manners, which is at the seat of natural human conscience, be made the fundament of a new universal system of education. Then all will know and uphold the protocol of good manners.
Brazilian law has placed me in an impossible situation. At the age of 83, I am imprisoned in an apartment I have never liked, cannot afford but am legally prohibited from selling. This prohibition is illegal, even under Brazilian law, because I bought my apartment after separation with money that I inherited from my parents after separation, which is not considered to be matrimonial property. But I cannot afford the astronomical cost of proving this to the satisfaction of the Brazilian authorities.
Consequently, I am left with the following choices:
Live permanently in the apartment. When I die, the State will auction the apartment, pay off the debts and confiscate the remainder. My children, one of whom is homeless, will receive nothing.
Simply abandon the apartment and flee the country. This means that I forfeit the approximately R$500,000.00 [2025 value] of the apartment and live on the street in the UK until I am able to acquire a place in a homeless hostel. All this while the Brazilian authorities will be hounding me for unpaid taxes and tributes for three years until they take possession of and auction the apartment — and confiscate the remainder.
The probatio diabolica is thus a weapon of war, used by "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" to relieve me of what little I have. Notwithstanding, since I know what will happen and am powerless to stop it, I have a kind of 'closure' on the matter and can get on with the short remainder of my life. So, although I will lose my one and only home valued at R$500,000 [£71,095.07 or $93,564.60] with an extremely unlikely prospect of ever getting it back, at least I've had my say!
So I have resigned myself to having to take Option 2.
I comfort myself with the knowledge that, after all, money: or more specifically, monetary value is nothing more than an arbitrary yardstick, of capricious elasticity, used by those with sovereign and economic power to compare an immense diversity of like against unlike, in terms of one single dysfunctional universal measure that has no basis in physical reality. And as such, it is a factual nonsense. Indeed, if money be a measure of anything, it is simply a measure of hegemony, which, to my mind, has neither social morality nor economic virtue.
Brazilian bureaucracy is so excellently depicted in the film "Brazil (1985)" directed by Terry Gilliam. The Dictatorship has gone but the Bureaucracy hasn't. It's still there alive and well and gridlocking people — especially foreigners — into unresolvable probationes diabolicae.
Notwithstanding, in retrospect, I would change nothing. Despite all the obstacles, challenges, Draconian regulations and unjust penalties of Brazil, I have been given the supreme privilege of living and enjoying a sublime union with my Brazilian soul mate to explore life, the universe and everything together.
† "Burrocracy" is a popular term of ridicule in Brazil of the word "Bureaucracy" in which "Bureau" means desk or office and "cracy" is a generalised substantive derived from the Greek word "kratos" meaning "power" or "rule". The word "bureau" in this case is replaced by the Portuguese word "burro" which, as an adjective, means "stupid" and as a noun means "donkey". It conjures the vision of stupid donkeys sat at desks issuing an incessant torrent of papers upon which are written infantile commands, regulations, edicts and instructions, which are blindly but ruthlessly enforced upon the hapless people. It conveys much more than a grain of truth, I think.