Late motherhood
That October night there was a very strong storm in the region where Nair lived, in the Serra da Bodoquena. After a sequence of thunderclaps that shook the ground as if a prehistoric beast was struggling to free itself from the womb of the Earth, a tornado came, followed by hail and torrential rain. It was time to go to bed and, as the storm wouldn't let up, Nair appealed to all the saints: to one of them, she asked that the roof would withstand the wind and hail, to another, that the house wouldn't flood, and to God-the-father-all-powerful she begged him to protect 'this old daughter of yours who lives alone in the confines of her square of land'.
The next morning, when she looked out of the kitchen window, she discovered to her dismay that her little farm was ruined. “What a tragedy! All the work of plowing the land and sowing the soybeans has been wasted...", she commented to herself and went off to investigate the damage with her gourd in hand. It was on this occasion that she saw it for the first time: in a depression of the land, where the topsoil had been washed away by the torrent, the limestone rock was exposed, showing a couple of open fractures. From the edges of these fractures, a stream of murky water flowed down from the higher ground. “What a beautiful thing,” she exclaimed aloud, “a baby doline!”.
The agronomist came after lunch to assess the damage done by the rain. When he saw the doline that was beginning to form in the lowland, said without blinking, “You have to have that hole cemented, otherwise all the soil around it will run off and form a big gully.” Of course not, Reginaldo,” she replied, ”I never imagined that I would see a doline in the flesh, especially here, on my land. It belongs to me, it will grow and develop as it sees fit.”
Nair was an amateur geologist who, on her Instagram account, collected photos of famous dolines in China, the United States and the Bahamas, which had once collapsed into the open, swallowing up houses, cars and everything else in their vicinity. From that summer onwards, amazed at the new discovery on her land, she developed the habit of going out for a walk along her dolina early every morning. She was accompanied by her caramel mongrel, who, with a fearful look on her face, kept a respectful distance. Every week, some distant relative would show up, attracted by the comments that groups of Petrobras geologists were regularly visiting the dolines in the region: “Could it be that Petrobras has found oil on these lands? Nair will receive a fortune if it's true. We're all going to be rich!”
As the water table in the region dropped due to the use of groundwater to irrigate soybean crops, the hole got bigger. Over time, she had to have a fence erected around it to prevent her goats from falling in by accident. Shortly afterwards, she gave up growing soybeans: “There's no way I'm going to give this water full of pesticides to Dodo, poor thing”. Years passed and the geologists from Petrobras and universities who used to carry out investigations on her land were prevented from continuing to visit the site. She began to protect the doline from the curiosity of outsiders: visits were now restricted to the living room.
On the rare occasions when her sister came to see her, she would wander around the fence, not understanding Nair's fascination with the doline. “On Leopoldo's land there's a hole like that where people throw all their garbage. The other day they found out that someone had invaded his land at night and thrown a stolen car in there,” and as she did so, she threw the wrapper of the cereal bar she was eating into the hole. Seeing this act of mischief, Nair lost her temper and attacked her sister tooth and nail. “Imagine treating Dodozinha like a garbage dump! Get out of here and don't come back any time soon,” she shouted in a squeaky voice and with her hair in an uproar.
At 70, Nair and the dolina were inseparable. “Late motherhood generally does this to women: it makes them unbeatable warriors in the fight to protect their offspring. If anything happened to my little Dodo, nature wouldn't give me another chance,” she would tell anyone who would listen. Over time, no one else came to visit her, apart from the mailman and the accountant, who came every year to congratulate her on her birthday and remind her that tax time was coming up.
Every day, after finishing her household chores, Nair would spend her free time next to her dolina, “It's essential that I keep a close eye on its growth,” she would say as she cultivated flower beds nearby. On warm summer evenings, she would set up a sun lounger by the edge of the doline and, with a glass of chilled white wine in her hands, the two of them would spend countless hours in silent companionship. On the rare occasions when loneliness distressed her, Nair would recount her past adventures in a low, monotone voice, “I know I can trust you, Dolly. After all, you pulled me in, your mouth is a tomb.”
The doline grew exceptionally quickly and, inside, lush vegetation grew, interspersed with birds' nests and flocks of bats. Every evening, Nair admired in a trance the moment when the flocks of scarlet macaws that lived inside took flight to hunt for insects. It was a unique spectacle that had become famous in the neighborhood.
On a clear summer's night, when Nair was troubled by her memories of the past, she decided to lie outside in her lounge chair, wrapped in her white piqué quilt, and watch the full moon move across the sky. The earth tremor, when it started, was so subtle that she didn't even bother to get up, just asked quietly, with her hand flat on the ground, “Calm down, Dodo. Do you, like me, feel disturbed on the nights of the full moon?”. The answer was resounding: a wide strip of rock around the doline collapsed in one fell swoop, taking huge blocks of limestone and Nair, wrapped in her shroud, inside.
The neighbors, dismayed by the disaster that could have befallen any one of them, gathered on the banks of the doline to hold a funeral ceremony for “dear Nair, who, like no one else, knew how to live and die in close contact with nature”.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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