by Clara Bazzo
Serra Pelada, 1980
As she walked through the dirt roads of a village even more impoverished than her, Iara reminisced about the cows on the property where she lived. Whenever the farmhands went to collect the cows destined for slaughter, Iara could swear that the animals sensed their impending fate. Her father used to say that the cows were just like her, foolish creatures. At that moment, she truly felt like a cow, with a sense of being led toward an unwanted destiny.
The treatment she received from her father during this journey was not much different from how he treated the cows. He hardly spoke to her during the two-day trip from their property to this wretched place. And when words did come, they were just short orders like ‘walk,’ ‘stand up,’ ‘eat without complaining.’
Iara never thought she would miss the wretched place she lived, but now all she wanted was to be able to go back home. Or the shack they called home. But when this thought arose, she realized there was no home left. Her mother was gone, buried in an unmarked grave. Her sister was left with the neighbors.
A month after her mother’s passing, her father heard the story of this gold mine. The owner of the nearest grocery store closed the shop and searched for the mountain of gold. According to him, you didn’t even need to dig to find gold in that place. It was on the surface. If you just bent down and looked a little, you could walk away from the mountain a rich person. Filled with the hope of easy wealth, her father left everything and headed to the gold mountain.
The place they finally arrived at, after a two-day journey in makeshift trucks on a bumpy road, looked anything but a place that would have a mountain of gold. The small village resembled their shack—improvised and poorly constructed. On both sides of the dusty path, rows of shoddy wooden shacks made up the landscape. Her father would stop from time to time at some of these shacks, talking to strangers. Some of them would stop, and look at her as if appraising her. Her father would nod, return, and say, ‘Keep walking.’
After a few stops like that, he finally returned and said something different: ‘You stay here.’ Her brain, accustomed to the same repetitive order to walk, took a few seconds to process the new information. As she tried to understand what was happening, a short, partially dressed woman emerged from inside the shack and handed some money to her father. The woman looked at her with the same assessing gaze she had seen in some places where her father stopped. Looking suspiciously at her father, she said, ‘How can you be sure she’s still a maiden? She already looks kind of old to me.’ Maintaining his usual expressionless tone, he replied, ‘She’s fierce, just like her mother. And where we come from, no one has tamed her yet. Good luck with her.’ Without looking at her, he set off again on the dusty path. It took a few moments, but Iara finally realized what was happening. Her father had sold her for the best price, just as he used to do with the cows.
© Clara Bazzo 2023-08-25