Money-Making Machine

By Patricia Crain and Victor Rebelo

Ever wondered how successful people managed to get where they are? Are they super-beings, with powers different to your own? 

Victor Rebelo says not, because his story is of a poor boy from Portugal making his way in a new country. It is about facing death, of facing up to life's circumstances, never giving up in the pursuit of his goals. It also about how Victor developed his formula for success, and how to live a full life. 

Here, you might find encouragement, guidance or even inspiration. See how Victor built his Money-Making Machine, and perhaps you can design your own.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victor Rebelo
• Release date: Apr 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9780639800110

Book preview

Foreword

THE POPULARITY OF O’Vicente was evident in the phalanx of waitrons, all in black, waiting patiently for the patrons to arrive. I had trouble finding the place when my antiquated navigation device insisted that there was no such address in Bedfordview, as advertised, but did accept the information for bordering Kensington. In spite of this, I was early, but the waitress who assisted me knew who Victor Rebelo was and showed me to a table. Not any table, by all accounts, but his table. As I waited the place filled up, and I wondered if this would be a meeting of import. At the very least, I was assured of a good lunch. Etienne, a publishing acquaintance who had arranged the meeting, had said, This guy wants to write a book and needs help, and I thought of you. I could not miss Etienne, resplendently bright in lime green shirt and matching hat, as he wound his way to the table accompanied by a large, dark-haired man who jovially returned the greetings of other patrons. This is Victor Rebelo. Vic, this is the lady I was telling you about, Patricia Crain.

Over delicious plates of traditionally prepared Portuguese food, the conversation jumped from topic to topic. I found Victor engaging and open. I wondered, though, if he could be considered over-confident, arrogant even. Then he told me how he grew a moustache, as many young men do. I thought the women at work might respect me more, he said, and we both laughed. The meeting stretched way past the few hours that we had allowed for it. I used to think that success and a certain age went hand-in-hand, and that by one’s sixties people had achieved many of their goals in life. Of course, that is not necessarily true, but Victor is one of those who have made it so. As he talks, it becomes apparent that he has a clarity of purpose that guided him to the success that he enjoys today.

His overt reasons for wanting a book about his life are clear: he would like to run motivational workshops and his research showed that one’s own publication is useful, even necessary, for success. He also wants to leave a legacy for his family, tell them about certain events in his life while he can still talk about them. In the months it took to research and write this book, other motivations appeared, swirling through the stories that are remembered and those that are not. Once he turned sixty, Victor’s thoughts turned to the past and there was a need to create a picture, albeit a shifting one, that links different events and assigns meaning to them. With hindsight our understanding of the myth of our own lives is coloured by lived experience, and from our present vantage point we may see that which we completely missed before.

There is all of this, but perhaps the most important reason for Victor is the hope that one or more readers will find something of value in this story, some insight that will inspire them to keep on when their spirits flag and encourage them to make the best of their lives. He wants to show that he struggled, that his life circumstances were far from advantaged, but that he made it through. Not only that, but he developed a formula for success. And he wants this for everyone.

This is a man who lives in the moment, relishing what the world offers; a man who walks in awareness of his faults, knows that he has behaved badly in the past, acknowledges that he is not always right. He owns his crimes. He also owns his capacity for good and spends his waking life trying to be the best man he can.

It was a rewarding experience helping Victor write as much of his story as one can in one small book. He is not famous, nor has he made it onto a list of the country’s top earners. In many ways his story is an ordinary one. Yet it is in the ordinary life that the extraordinary is born.

Patricia Crain

Johannesburg, 2018

Introduction

I HATE FUNERALS WHERE they talk about the dead person as if he were a saint. I want this book to be my eulogy. When I am dead, you can read a page or two, and tell it like it was.

I always had money, even when I was a kid, but read on to find out how I got it. It never made me happy, and I pissed it away anyway. That is why I don’t like money. It’s easy, come, easy go. I found out that it is more important to have a vision, a plan, a goal. I wanted to make a money-making machine, something that could create what I need to live comfortably. I have no money right now and I am a happy man. I take what I need to live comfortably, but push the rest back into the business.

Before you ask, let me tell you what a money-making machine is. It is a well-established business that creates for you every day until you die, and continues functioning for the next generation without you. It is an evolving entity created and sustained by the people that make it work, and in turn it sustains all who are employed there. If you get it right, it also enriches families and communities.

I was a horrible boy, but as I grew older, I learnt from my experiences and became what I am. So it’s not what I was that is important, but who I am now. It is the same for everyone. I take people as they are now, deal with situations in the present. It is what you are today that counts. Whatever happens in your life, you always win, because even the bad and the ugly experiences have valuable lessons.

I want to show people, through this book, that they can change their lives and themselves. I did. You can.

Victor Rebelo

Johannesburg 2018

CHAPTER

1

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In the Blood

Lina’s mother tried to stop me, whispering, Don’t go in there! He is out of his mind…

I pushed past her anyway: I need to put a stop to this, once and for all! A step away from the front door was their bedroom and I slammed the door open. He was waiting for me. Bastard, he said, as he pulled the trigger from a little over two metres away.

My head felt strange, a quick flash of hot and cold, and I stared at him in disbelief, Jesus! That was his name, or one of them, but I don’t think that’s why he dropped to the floor in a dead faint.

The Cleveland cop shop was nearby and I drove myself there. The cops knew me because I gave them free tickets for the drive-in, but they also knew Lina’s father.

Howzit, Vic… The policeman began his greeting, his face taking on a worried expression.

He shot me! Must have been a rubber bullet…

THE POLICE MANNING the Cleveland police station did not think it was a rubber bullet. They knew what it looked like when someone had been shot and, in spite of a lack of blood, the large young man before them looked like he was in serious trouble. Victor was not aware of his surroundings, barely noticing the sudden activity as policemen left to arrest Lino de Jesus Vidal, the man who had shot him. By the time he realised that he was feeling strange and asked someone to throw some water over him to cool him down, an ambulance was already outside.

This was not Victor Rebelo’s first brush with death, nor would it be the last, but it was the one that made the newspapers. While the shooting took place in August of 1976, the trial of Vidal for attempted murder was held in January the following year and the headlines read Karate Man Shot by Future Father-in-law. It was true that Victor had, indeed, once practised the martial art, but at one hundred and thirty kilograms his body was evidence of the headline’s misnomer. Paradoxically it was being grossly overweight that saved him, the fat in his belly slowing the bullet down and closing up the wound.

Today, forty years later, it is a much older and leaner Victor who speaks of his experiences. There is no such thing as a waste of time, but there is a waste of life. You understand what I’m saying? Victor’s eyes are a deep chocolate brown, his gaze intense. He smiles easily, a broad grin that invites everyone to join in, and gives the impression that he is an easy-going fellow. It is not likely, though, that it was only by being Mr Nice Guy that this man went from a poor childhood to become a successful businessman. He also did not make it through sixty-three years without his share of hardship – or more than his share, if you count getting shot at close range by your future father-in-law as out of the ordinary.

I have a three-pronged goal, he says. To build a home – not just a house; to create a money-making machine; and to help people, with one term and condition. The intense gaze again. One T&C: you must want to help yourself. That’s really important. I will always help people who try to help themselves.

In a way, Victor had his first experience of death in a childhood nightmare which might have been sparked after he sneaked into the neighbour’s lounge, temporarily in use as a camera ardent. The body in the coffin was that of a woman who had lived in this apartment above Victor’s paternal grandparents. There she was, the woman who would never again give Victor a stem of parsley for Avó’s pot, lying in the coffin and unable to move.

Later, Victor had a strange and frightening experience: I tried to move, but there was no space. The hole was just big enough for my body, and I was covered in soil. The wooden cart and ox – my only toy – had been buried with me, but I could not move my arms to play with it. Lying there, I knew that I was dead. Was this a dream or a vision? He is not sure, now, but remembers that when he thought of it he rushed to his bed, crying uncontrollably. Avó Maria tried to console him, wanting to know what had happened, but he could not tell her. At ten he had no words to explain that he had felt death.

Appropriately, a fierce storm raged as Victor spoke about his dream of death, bringing much-needed rain to the drought-stricken greater Johannesburg metropole. It brought so much water, all at once, that the nearby Jukskei river burst its banks and flooded the highway, creating chaos in the homeward-bound traffic. People lost their lives that day, and property was damaged by flash floods. Scary as it was, it was nothing compared to a particular November day in Lisbon, two-and-a-half centuries ago, a day that sets an illuminating framework to this story of a life.

How many have had such a clear realisation of their mortality, and at such a young age? Knowing that we are all going to die, we seldom think that particular day is imminent. This was true in Lisbon – one of the oldest cities in Europe – centuries ago as people crowded into churches, lighting thousands of candles to celebrate All Saints Day. A faint trembling of the earth quickly became a shaking that set the bells of the city ringing. The first quake was followed by a more powerful shock that toppled saints and candles in the churches, making buildings sway and crash down in the streets. Churches and cathedrals were among the first to fall, roofs caving in and crushing the throngs of people who had congregated there. Large cracks, some over four metres wide, opened up the streets of the city and people and carriages, statues and markets disappeared forever into the deep fissures. The third shock was not as powerful as the second, but in a mere ten minutes many of the landmark buildings of Lisbon had come tumbling down.

Folk rushed down to the open spaces near the marble docks as fires broke out all over the city, some from cooking fires, many from the candles lit in worship. Fires were left burning as people fled their homes, trying to find their way through the narrow, rubble-strewn streets to safety. Those who made it down to the harbour stared in shock at the seabed left exposed by the retreating water, revealing the debris of lost cargo and long-forgotten shipwrecks. Some opportunists rushed down to the lost ships to search for treasure, but they were never to profit from their find. The first tsunami wave, nine metres high, caught them unawares and sucked them back out to sea. It was followed by another and then another, each revealing large stretches of the river bed as it retreated, dragging people and debris with it.

The huge waves, leaving further destruction in their wake, did not put out the fires on higher ground, though. What the earthquake and the water did not destroy, the firestorm did, raging for five days. Tens of thousands of people died in Lisbon on 1 November, 1755, and more perished along the coast. Portugal was not the only country affected, but a mere one hundred and fifty miles from the epicentre of the quake, the capital felt its full force.

As the survivors set about the business of recovery, priests attributed the destruction to punishment for the sins of the people. This was questioned by those who pointed out that the devout were killed in the churches, while the prostitutes survived in the brothels, which seemed to weather earthquake, tsunami and fire. Led by people such as Voltaire, enlightenment thinkers began to believe that the earthquake had natural causes and little, if anything, to do with divine intervention.

The Marquis of Pombal rose ably to the task of rebuilding, with his first priority to bury the dead and heal the living. He meant this figuratively, as he had the dead loaded onto damaged ships and burnt at sea to prevent disease. Of course he incurred the wrath of the church by doing this, but under his watch Lisbon was rebuilt to a grid system, with straighter and wider roads, which became the way of building cities all over the world. New buildings were also designed to withstand quakes, another ground-breaking initiative.

Everything changed. Pombal, as minister, assumed the powers of a dictator. The influence of the Church was reduced by the placement of new churches and cathedrals as well as by the way that educated people began to think. It was the beginning of a decline in Portugal’s role in world politics. Such events have a profound effect, not only on the psyche of individuals, but also on that of the nation that survives them.

Although it would not completely regain its wealth or superpower status, this little country was still to exert its influence on the world, and Lisbon would remain a major city and port. By the time that Victor Manuel de Amorim Barreira Rebelo was born, on 5 December 1954, two centuries of reconstruction had elapsed. During this period Lisbon witnessed ongoing struggles for control by church and government, survived the first world war and, although it did not participate in the second, was affected by, for instance, a lack of goods and food. Once again, Lisbon was being expanded to accommodate an influx of people from rural to urban areas. There were other great historical moments which, some would say, contributed more to the development of Portugal as we know it, but this story does not purport to be a history of the country. Rather it centres on one man, Victor Rebelo, and we begin in the city where he was born.

The big earthquake, the tsunamis and the firestorm had not completely eradicated the Moorish influence from some of the buildings in Lisbon. Particularly in the south of Portugal, a hint of the Moor can be seen in the features of people, and in the arches and terraces of some traditional houses. In the blood of the Portuguese that of Iberians, Celts, Romans, Germanic tribes, Moors and Jews mingles, developing over centuries a people with predominantly brown eyes, dark hair and a height of less than one hundred and eighty-two centimetres (or six feet). Of course, it is dangerous to generalise in this way, both in terms of the events that contributed to the development of the character of the peoples of Portugal, and of their general appearance. Yet, in many ways, like his parents, Augusto and Libânia, and their parents, Victor Rebelo was to conform pretty much to the dark-haired, brown-eyed prototype. His personality, too, fitted with the general notion of the Portuguese character: open, easy-going, welcoming and friendly. There was something else, though, that came through the centuries, his ancestors and the place where he was born, and it manifested in Victor in a way that made him a pioneer of sorts. Something, perhaps, of the restless spirit that sent the Portuguese sailing all over the world, intrepid and daring adventurers. Something, too, of the instinctive merchant, and the warrior drive of the entrepreneur.

There was something else, as well. Along with an inescapable urge to carve his own way in the world, there was a feeling of having roots in the country that he was to adopt as his own. When Victor traced his ancestry through DNA testing, however, he could find nothing to explain the way his soul sang when he travelled into the African bush, and the ties that he felt bound him to the sun setting over the sea in northern Mozambique.

CHAPTER

2

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Grandparents and Alvalade

I was one of those kids who took everything in. I would listen, and was witness to many things that did not make sense to me. I began to notice how unfair the world was for some individuals, and how glorious for others. I tried to understand what the difference was between the two types of people, the haves and have nots. In my own life there was something missing – was it affection, care, communication, spiritual guidance? In those days children were meant to be seen and not heard, so I was petrified to speak my mind. When I did, I was humiliated and silenced. My acts of rebellion were small, at first, but grew with my frustration and inability to discuss my fears.

My grandparents lived in the same neighbourhood, in parallel streets. I lived with my maternal grandparents, Avó Maria and Avô Amorim, in the apartment where I was born. In those days it was traditional for couples to live with their parents after they got married. Not many newlyweds could afford to sustain themselves flying solo. My dad ill-treated my mother and eventually Avó Maria put her foot down. She told my mom that was no way to live and it was taking its toll on the family; that either she did something about it or they had to find alternative accommodation.

YEARS BEFORE VICTOR had his dream of death, he had an all too real encounter with mortality, and he has vivid images of this traumatic experience. I must have been about six,