I found fullness in an avocado grove
At 25, I finally feel like a woman! The owner of my own nose, free and confident. The master's scholarship I receive is enough to pay for all my expenses, and I finally live alone. The little apartment I've rented under the garage of a building, near the Rosário Church, in Ouro Preto, isn't much. To get from the living room to the kitchen, I have to leave the apartment, cross the entrance hall and enter the kitchen through another external door. My bedroom window overlooks the river that flows down the hill from the municipal hospital at the top, and is turbulent on stormy nights. One day this river will overflow my window.
Tonight we took the pub route. To dissipate the tension of a week of exams, I ended up overdoing it on the pinga with honey. At two in the morning, before it was too late to find my way home, I finally plucked up the courage to interrupt the long monologue of a stranger who, sitting next to me, described to me the sufferings of his past life, when he was a slave and lived in the cellars of one of those houses next to the stone bridge near Rua do Pilar. My friends had moved away, everyone already knew this story.
Now I'm walking home alone along the slopes of Ouro Preto. I feel confident, the master of my destiny. I make my way along a steep staircase made of hewn stone that crosses a grove of avocado, guava and pitangue trees. It's like a dense forest! The staircase leads me to a stream that cascades over some large stone slabs and passes further on under an arched bridge. Finally I reach a clearing in the woods, where the river bends and spreads out, depositing a bar of very white sand on its banks. The moon, finally freed from its cocoon of clouds, falls back onto the sandbank, filling this little backwater with magic. Such beauty gives me a chill, and the last alcoholic vapors finally disperse into the air.
Last week I met a prospector in this same corner who was looking for gold nuggets with a paddle in his hand, dreaming of a better life. I don't need a pan, because right now I can't imagine anything better than my current life. What does the future hold for me?
Voltar