May Twenty First

Today, above the Acaraú River, land of the UVA

This late morning I felt very tired. After climbing highs in the Jordão ridge, standing on the corner of a little house two meters wide, I could see that the floor was covered with straw for handcraft, where a skinny dog licked the scars that were wounding his tail, and I felt my breath quite sparing. Not much, after all.
The life here is simple like that, and it makes sense to be consumptive exactly like the old woman who was coughing on my left-hand corner. In front of her, there was an old bookcase from which was hanging an dusty DVD player and a satellite decoder. On the floor, close to the dog, a broken TV device. Few things to define an existence, we shall agree.
In front of me there was a thin woman, probably under 25, with part of her face deformed by a teeth abscess. Three or a little more kids, she couldn’t assure, boys or girls, eyes staring the vagueness. I was sat on the only seat of the house, but I had to refuse the coffee that was, so delicately, prepaired and offered to me. Labyrinthitis, I lied.
As Lars von Trier in Dogville, I know that it is extremely rude to refuse food in situations of a such scarcity. But I had to. It is extremely arrogant to write in English in places of ignorance. However, so I do. I’ve been over the last couple of days in Sobral, city named by a word that means something like “plenty of trees from which it extracts the cork for winery”. A standing fool on every corner, and in middle of nowhere it has rised the land of the eclipse which confirmed the curvature of the reason. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, on the outskirts of the Commonwealth, it makes sense every expression of contradiction and insanity. 
It is “no” the word that one can most easily to hear surrounding here. At that home, for example: no money, no food, no health, no public transportation, no government help. No hope, no praise, no social commitment.
There is – yes, that’s true –  the comprehensive public school, where they have food to attend teachers and students, and there is as well the soup of the Mother Teresa’s League, an catholic organization. In other words, it is necessary either reading a book or prays the rosary, in order to get a naïve piece of bread. Socialists and Christian conditionalities, who could understand them?

While social workers wear cheap suits and jewelry, and rest in white functional offices, proudly showing Stats of the government about the municipality to their visitors, I remember the swollen face, the stinking mouth, and the expression of hunger of the woman who was handling straws on the dog’s floor. Her mother’s tuberculosis. Their children, forgotten and ignored. A sword of compassion throughs my hurt chest for this unknown Brazil.

The coughing woman is enough to bother anyone ready to see that the difference, in Latin America, is the next of kin of the inequality. Radical differences mean, consequently, insurmountable inequalities.

I guess that streets with plates written in English just state that death and indifference are still coming, as always have done, to this part of the Northeast in a direct and Newtonian way, without any advances of the XXº century’s science. Poor are, as usual, preferencial victims. There are no progressive utopias stronger than reality. There are no national and visionary political projects more evident than the breathless desperation of an abandoned matriarch. And – very important to say – it makes no sense to build a bizarre copy of the Triumphal Arch where there is no triumphs to celebrate.
That agonic family, which had escaped from downtown Sobral – maybe too slowly to get released from the dust of cement factory, or the Grendene’s whistle, confirmates that the misery follows its march firmly and inexorably, and hopelessness is the universal language of the excluded.
Third largest GDP of Ceará? Oh, Ceará, land of jokermen, come on… For whom?
Please, ask the straws on the ground, the mangy dog, and the filters of cigarettes smoked by a ill and hopeless senior woman, and speak seriously.
Me, who have for a long time been skeptical of either grand speeches or sacred mobilizations, said I’m deeply sorry to the family, looked at the plain below me, breathed, and went down for the lunch.