Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen, Page 221

Two years after I arrived in Rio Verde to live, the time had long passed when my presence was looked upon as exotic or extraordinary. I was a fixture in the town, and the population no longer gathered on the dock to cheer and wave when I left or returned, and at night the house was no longer filled with people sitting around on stools and boxes watching me opening a can of tuna fish or sending billowing thirty-foot flames into the darkness as I tried to light that mad Portuguese stove.

I was pretty much accepted by the town; I even had enemies. But I was still something quite special, unique, and apart from the town's life, and perhaps only Ramon knew that I had more than my share of faults and that under certain conditions of duress I could be a quite ordinary old son of a bitch.