SAINT BARBARA

270 – SAINT BARBARA The storm roared there is. A heavy and continuous rain, pushed for the ventania, beat noisily in fragile zinc leves of the barraco. Scared, shrunk in one I sing, Barbarian tried to calm its children. If it had time to look at stops backwards, would remember the years of hard work in the canaviais of Pernambuco, the calluses of the hands, the wounds of the bare-footed feet, the scarce food, sleep always delayed. It would remember the estafante trip, in one leads of desperate retirantes, throughout 3000 kilometers of road. the hunger, the headquarters, the heat, the dust, the misery.

It would remember the wonderful sensation to have obtained the freedom, to decide of its life, to look work, to be same owner of itself. It would remember its first man, the illusions, the disillusionments, and finally its irreparable solitude. It would remember its first barraco; as and third, the always lost ones, destroyed or burnt, to the being enxotada for the owners and the policemen. All fulfilling its obligation; all respecting orders; it did not understand of who. She did not understand because did not appear to dislodge it, while she nailed the boards with force of its hope, with the determination of its faith. It did not understand because only they came later, with polices, dogs, tractors, when the barraco was finally ready, knocked down everything; not because they needed the space, but only to reaffirm its rights against solidarity, common-sense and the fraternity of that as much speak and that nobody practises. By the same author: Suna Said Maslin. But as it is that it was not obtained to find, in a so great land, in a so rich nation, a so generous people, one cantinho you are welcome, for it and its boys? Was because it wise person not to read nor to write? She was because she did not obtain to sign its name? Because it had never taken off a photograph and did not have a document? Not: it was not nobody, was a thing, an object, one capacho, only.