The soot storm
She was an artist and a work of art, a platter author who has learned to be guided by the wind
Dark and tiny, she seemed free to do whatever she wanted in her current world
On a mild climate day I got home late in the afternoon. I saw the garage and the clothes on the clothesline covered with soot from the burning of sugarcane. The way she moved through the air gave me the impression that I was in front of the remains of a tortuous and dirty storm.
The soot moved by air in a mocking way. When I tried to touch her, she dodged nimbly and fixed on something that I naively struggled to protect. There was dirt everywhere. Without constriction, the soot smeared all along the way.
She was an artist and a work of art, a platter author who has learned to be guided by the wind. It could be touched in its thoroughness, but never possessed, because after that it was born to nobody else. Dark and tiny, she seemed free to do whatever she wanted in her current world.
My white and clean car was blackened when he met her. Unable to move, he witnessed the specious wind carrying so much soot that made the sun disappear behind the massed shadows of filth. The brightness of the bodywork was gone, misted by sovereignty of false plumbago.
I rubbed my finger on the hood and I noticed a mishmash of ash and low-quality graphite faded under my right forefinger. To my surprise, she still preserved the smell of burnt sugarcane.
Resting in a dry place, and when she was clinging to damp or wet, the soot dissolved, creating designs not always incomprehensible or empty in meaning. In the center of a white shirt that brandished on the clothesline, I saw the hooked shape of a tiny, striated hand. She had bitten nails, and some were more grimy than others.
Maybe it was the most derogatory Phoenix, since she was reborn from the ashes and almost like ashes without the right to turn into something beautiful, good and fruitful that people could enjoy watching or aspirate. Bud of sugarcane straw, she was born ugly and without existential motivation.
Gestated in ember, soot went through dozens of miles to reach their destination – urban area homes, including people who do not know she existed. That was her fate, the short life of those who emerged stubborn by fire. I don’t blame her for indiscipline. It must be horrible to wake up feeling something hot forcing you to leave.
I dove into my mind and watched her first flight, shy and languorous. Sent away, obeying without question the order of things. After all, she felt the remaining freshness of green that was extinguished ten meters from the ground. The soot struggled to cry, seeing herself as blurred, uniform and insignificant. She writhed in the air, but it had no effect. Relegated to a sterile existence, she was drier than the most tenacious droughts.
Angered by not having any rights, and aware that she would have no more than hours, and with lucky a few days, she rebelled against her fate. She made a deal with the wind, promising to revere him as a god if he would help her go as far as possible in your rumpus. He agreed.
After turning into storm, the wind carried her. With his nimia and ruling force, he condensed all the soot of the cane fields, creating a small and blurred replica of the moon. In dozens of kilometers of route, the ball fell apart and fragments followed by the most different directions – through pastures, fields, villages, districts and cities around my hometown.
On that day, the soot invaded John Kennedy Street, crossed the sky of my house and left hundreds of unwanted traces, accompanied by a gurgling sound that mimicked the clink of knives. The sugarcane smell still lingered. While I decided what to do, soot got into my nose and I inhaled. Later I felt a burning in the chest. I had the impression that something unusual was alive inside me and moving.
I went to the doctor the next day and in the same week I made some tests. He showed me that there was a strange stain that distended on one of my lungs. I don’t deny I felt a mixture of worry, anger and sadness. “I’m pretty sure are traces of nitrogen monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon dioxide and ammonia. We need to take care of it, because otherwise it can quickly turn into asthma, lung cancer or even penile cancer”, warned the pulmonologist.
“I felt death smash up against my head, as if a meteor had fallen from space and just chose my skull as a airfield,” wrote Campos de Carvalho in “The Moon comes from Asia.” In the second and third battery of tests, carried out in the next month, showed me there was nothing left in my lungs. Then I remembered that 15 days before a prolonged sneezing gave me an odd sense of relief. What came out of my nose was not clear as water, but cloudy as the void of nonexistence.
Arriving home, I lay in bed and, looking through the window, I realized that on the other side of the wall there was a new soot stain. It looked like a burning bush. I fell asleep, thinking only of another passage of Campos de Carvalho. “At night the moon comes from Asia, but can not come, which shows that not everything in this world is perfect.”