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288 pages, ebook
First published August 1, 2019
On this land, it's the strongest who survive.
My voice was a crooked plow, deformed, penetrating the soil only to leave it infertile, ravaged, destroyed.
My father was holding the tongue, wrapped in one of the few shirts he owned. Even then, what I feared was that the tongue would cry out on its own to tell on us. That it would turn us in for our meddling, our stubbornness, our transgression, our lack of concern and respect for Grandma and her things. And, worse, our irresponsibility in putting a knife in our mouths, knowing very well that knives bleed the beasts we hunt and the animals in the pen, and they kill men.
Zeca Chapéu Grande was a respected healer, his name renowned throughout the region. But here, within the confines of the plantation, under the rule of the Peixoto family — who barely set foot on those fields except to give orders or pay the manager or remind us that we were forbidden from building brick houses — under their rule and that of Sutério, my father was just another loyal tenant farmer, grateful for the opportunity he’d been given after searching so long for work and a place to settle down.
In moments of heightened emotion, I lose myself, I overflow, unable to hold myself together. If I could still mount a horse . . . but no one remembers Santa Rita the Fisherwoman. No healer calls to me, no house of Jarê. Slowly the people unlearn what they once understood; so much has changed.
The blood of history flows like a river. First, it flows through dreams. Then it comes galloping as if on a horse.