Lorenzo Monfardini was 22 years old when he took the stage with a gas cylinder in his arms.
It was not a prop or a graduation joke. It was the exact summary of his father’s life, Jefferson Gomes Monfardini, 49, who sold gas for more than twenty years so that his son could complete a degree in production engineering at the Federal University of Ouro Preto. The idea came from his mother, but Lorenzo was the one who decided to carry it literally, in front of everyone, on November 29, 2024.
He has a phrase tattooed on his skin that his father repeated nonstop: “I have to be, not have”. Father and son had gone almost a year without seeing each other —he lives in Pernambuco, Lorenzo in Ouro Preto— and that reunion, with a gas cylinder between them, became the image that millions of people needed to see that week.
