A wire clothesline ran horizontally, flush with the poorly hewn cement wall that formed the boundary between two narrow avenues of houses. There lived some families that we knew a lot. Seu Miguel and Dona Olga occupied the only townhouse in the neighborhood, facing the main street, where cars traveled at high speed, in contrast to the slow pace of the nameless villages.
Everyone told sad stories of animals run over, because pets lived as bewildered as we do, in the hiatus between peace and uproar. When they went beyond the bucolic limits of the doors, they fell into the maelstrom of traffic. The same happened with humans, when they left the collective affection of the villages. At the end of each working day, they returned exhausted from being run over.
If we got sick, Dona Olga applied the dreaded Benzetacil, a kind of Drauzio Varella of injectable drugs. It hurt, but it healed completely or almost. Next door to the house lived the sweet Tia Miná, who supported the family thanks to a sewing machine that seemed to work day and night. I felt a great affection for her and considered her daughters to be the most elegant girls in the world.
I was saved from dying in childhood, for the second time, by one of them, who injured her forearms, supporting the bricks of the wall that collapsed on my eight-year-old head. Oblivious, I didn’t even notice as the structure magically collapsed and the entire weight of its cement uprightness came crashing down. The first time I was saved from dying in infancy? Well, I’ve already told this before in a chronicle.
It was when the “collected” measles made me a child who was given up by the doctors and a home treatment with camphor, due to my mother’s stubbornness and courage, allowed me to recover completely and without sequelae. Miracles? It is true that not everything is known about the mysteries between heaven and earth and that nothing beats having a strong saint. Anyway, I think I owe Senhor do Bonfim a candle or two.
It’s Easter Sunday and I think of the simple everyday life in the villages that now have names. The one where I lived received the one from my paternal grandfather. I don’t know if he would like this tribute or who these stories are interested in. My mother, Seu Miguel, Tia Miná or Dona Olga. Life is as fast as the cars that picked up the animals near the house and drove on, as if it were nothing, the headlights still dirty with blood.
Kátia Borges is a writer and journalist.
