Record 003
Who we are
Early winter, 2036
Seu Tomás says a village should be able to say what it is in one breath, so that if a stranger asks, you know your own answer before you know your fear. Ours is this: we are twenty-five, we grow what we eat, and we are not worth the trouble of robbing. The last part is a lie we tell on purpose. I will come back to it.
I want to write the rest down properly, though — all twenty-five — because Vó Cida counts us out loud every winter, on the first hard frost, touching each name like a bead, and I have only lately understood why. A number is easy to lose. If you are reading this, you should know who we were, in case the counting ever stops.
We are twenty-five. Eight of us are still growing. Five are small — Lia, who is six and afraid of the goats; Tuca, who is nine and afraid of nothing, which is worse; and three littler ones who belong to the two families in the low houses. Three of us are almost grown: Rafael, who is sixteen and already does a man’s work; Bruna, who is fifteen and keeps the chickens and a knife; and me, though no one has told me which side of grown I am counted on, and I have stopped asking.
The other seventeen are grown. Nine men, eight women, and two of those are old enough now that the rest of us do the lifting for them: Seu Tomás, who needs his own page and will get one, and my grandmother, Cida, who wove the blanket that hid the machine before it hid me.
Everyone here is for something. No one made that a rule. It is only what a place becomes when there are twenty-five of you and the world outside has decided you should not exist.
Seu Osmar is for the machines we are allowed to have. He keeps the generator he taught to drink ethanol, and the panels, and he knows the exact hour of the exact day the sun is weakest the way other men know their children’s birthdays. He does not like the crate in my back room. He likes engines, which do only what you build them to do. A computer, he says, is an engine that has opinions.
Dona Nair is for keeping us alive when the body turns on us. She knows which leaves bring a fever down and which root stops a gut from bleeding, and she is better than any book I own — but she is not magic, and she is running low on the things she cannot grow, the old medicines from the before. I am going to have to write about that, and soon, and I am not looking forward to it.
Bento is for the roads. He is the one who goes out — to the dead towns, for the metal and the cloth and the things that keep in tins — and he is the one who comes back, which is the harder half of the work. He carries a map in his head of every place he has been and every place a person did not come back from, and he does not show the second map to the children.
The rest of us grow things. This is most of what a life is here, and I will not let it sound small, because it is the opposite of small; it is the whole reason the number is still twenty-five. We grow cassava and corn and beans and squash and Osmar’s cane, and we grow all of it the way we do everything — hidden. Our fields do not look like fields. They are scattered under the trees and folded along the hills in shapes that mean nothing from above, so that the land, seen from the sky, looks only like land. It took the grown ones years to learn to farm this way, to feed people while pretending to feed no one. I think it is the cleverest thing we do, and no one outside will ever see it, which is exactly the point.
We have goats, and chickens, and two pigs, and one old cow who gives almost nothing and whom no one will eat because she has a name. We have a well. We have a school, which is Vó Cida and three children and the few of my father’s books she has judged safe. And we have a watch — someone is always awake, always on the road, and, from habit more than fear now, always on the sky.
I have been trying to think how to tell you what this place looks like, and I have decided the honest answer is that it does not look like anything. That is the entire craft of it. Some of it I have told you already, in the first record, quickly, the way you point at a thing from a distance. I am going to set it down again, slowly, in one place, because it is the reason the counting has not stopped.
There is not a straight line in the valley. Nothing is square; no path runs true; no two people walk to the well by exactly the same line, because a line that gets walked twice becomes a mark, and a mark is a sentence in a language we would rather nobody read. Our houses are cut back into the hillsides — one wall open, the rest earth — and roofed with soil and planted over, so that a house is a low green swelling in a slope, and this whole village from above is a hillside with grass on it and a bad memory of geometry. The earth keeps them warm in winter, and, far more to the point, keeps them from being warm in the way that matters. A house made of dirt does not glow at night.
We eat at first light and at last light. I did not know why until I asked, and the answer is not habit and it is not hunger. It is that twice a day the ground and a body come to the same temperature, and for about an hour the warmth of a person does not stand out from the warmth of a field. My whole life, breakfast has been at the exact hour when a person stops being visible, and nobody ever thought to mention it, because to everyone here that is simply when you eat.
The still is dug half into the hill. Osmar’s generator breathes out through a long pipe buried under the yard, so that whatever comes up at the far end of it is cool, and thin, and means nothing to anyone. Fires only under the trees. Panels flat under the brush, lifted only when the sky is empty. And by every door in the valley, on a nail, a shade.
And there are no dogs.
I have read about dogs my whole life and I have never seen one. There is not a dog in this valley, and I am fairly certain there is not a dog for a hundred kilometres. I asked Seu Tomás about it once, when I was small enough to ask him things. He said, “A dog can’t learn the shade.” He did not say anything else. I have been thinking about that answer for six years.
We are not the only ones. I should say that plainly, because when you are twenty-five it is easy to write as though you are the last twenty-five, and we are not. There are other places like ours, days away on foot, more of them than you would guess. Some we trade with, carefully, at the edges, the way — the books say — you would feed a dog you do not know. I have never fed a dog. You already know why. Some we do not go near at all. Bento says the machines were never the thing you had to fear most out there. People were. People are. He says it the way he says everything, flat and finished, and then he checks the door.
That is the truth behind the lie I started with — that we are not worth robbing. We are worth robbing. We have full stores and fed children and a still that makes a thing a hard man would kill for. So we make ourselves look like nothing, from the sky and from the road both, and looking like nothing is its own kind of work, and everyone does it — even the children, even Lia, who is six and does not yet know that the game of going very still when a stranger passes is not a game.
Twenty-five. I have counted us the way Vó Cida taught me, touching each name.
I hope, whoever you are, that when you find this the number is larger. I am afraid it might be smaller. Either way — now you know who was here.
— Pedro