When Teresa Silva was eight, she was sold to a well-off family.

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She had just brought in the smaller water pot — her older sister Joana had carried the biggest one balanced on her head — after their four-mile barefoot walk on barren soil dotted with carcasses and animal bones. In the family’s one-room hut, the mother was picking debris from dry beans over the table, under the light that came through the window. Joana poured water into a pot on the small tin stove and went to calm down the baby, who was fussing.

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Teresa went after her younger siblings, Lili, Dedé and Chico, pacing the hot ground opened in thirsty cracks, and found the children squatting behind the shanty, playing with tiny rocks and twigs. Lili was wearing a dress that had been Teresa’s, its shocking blue faded to a dirty off-white. Dedé wore shorts under his bare, swollen belly with that funny protruding navel, and Chico was bare bottom—he was the youngest, except for the baby.

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Teresa got two tiny rocks, one sharp and thin, the other small and round, and told her siblings, who watched in awe, a story of a little bride and a little groom dancing around a bonfire made with a small pile of thorns. By the time she moved the newlyweds to a tiny house by a river drawn on the soil with a fingertip, the sound of an engine cut the still air, and an automobile stopped by the family’s miserable hut, a cloud of dust spiraling up behind it. Lili coiled on Teresa’s lap, startled by the noise, but Dedé and Chico ran closer to see the car. Voices buzzed, and her mother called loudly, “Te-re-saaa!” Teresa put Lili on her feet and gently pulled her by the hand, wondering if her mother had guessed that she had drank a few sips from the pot on her way back.

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Her mother did not seem angry, though. Joana was fanning the fire on the tin stove and glancing sideways at the strange woman sitting in the hut’s only chair. The woman smiled at the girls, the sun reflecting on her golden earrings and turning her pale skin pink. Lili looked at her curiously from behind Teresa’s back, and the lady smiled at her too.

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The lady reached into her purse. “Hi, sweetie. Do you want a caramel?” she asked, handing Lili something sticky wrapped in paper.

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Lili got the gift and escaped swiftly to the straw mat on the corner where the baby was asleep, flies walking across his forehead. She examined the small package, then sniffed it and wrestled the wrapping, stuffing her mouth with the sticky brown piece. Her eyes shone.

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Teresa looked back at the lady, who was still smiling, surrounded by a halo of golden dust, when she heard her mother’s voice softly say, “Go with the good lady, Teresa. You will live in a big house and go to school.” Her mother’s rough hand timidly took away a lock of hair from Teresa’s forehead.

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The good lady held her clean, smooth hand out, and Teresa put her own small, wrinkled, dirty hand on the lady’s with a mixture of awe and fear. They walked to the car, where a man was waiting. Dedé and Chico, who were admiring the big, hot automobile, stepped back reverently when they passed by. A tall, beefy man with a full head of shiny black hair combed sideways and an abundant moustache got out of the car and opened the door for Teresa and the good lady. Teresa sat on the large leather seat obediently and looked back at her home through the window. Her mother was standing by the door frame, wiping tears while holding a couple of rumpled bills, and Joana was carrying Lili on her hip with an expression on her face that Teresa could not understand.

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The black-haired man sat behind the steering wheel and drove away from the house. Teresa tried to see her house again through the window on the back of the car, but all she could see was an imprecise shadow in a cloud of golden-red dust. The car smelled strangely, and her stomach churned.  

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“Funny how they look all the same colour from head to toe — blondish, honey-eyed, skin like rapadura [1],” said the black-haired man.

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“Well, the Dutch invaded Pernambuco centuries ago. You’ll find plenty of people like them in the backwoods.”

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“All lice and scabies and worms and dust, like this one. Why on Earth come this far instead of getting any girl from the village?”

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“Girls from the village have all sorts of bad habits and can leave you in a whim. Why not take a pauper from misery instead? The woman told me she has two other boys working on the land.”

“And the children’s father?”

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“Took off after they lost their animals to the drought,” answered the lady with the gold earrings.

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“These people always have more mouths to feed than they’re able to. Like animals.”

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Tears streamed down Teresa’s face, turning the landscape into a red blur.

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***

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Many years later, when Teresa thought about that period of her life, all she had were imprecise memories of her family disappearing in a cloud of dust, flashes of being stripped and bathed, the painful stroke of fine combs pulling her hair to remove lice, and the gayly coloured cotton dresses that the good lady brought from her husband’s store.

 

Teresa now lived in a big house covered in hardwood floors, leather rugs, a washroom with ceramic tiles, and a faulty, uncertain supply of running water. She was designated a room in the backyard aedicule, where she had a wooden bed with a grass-filled mattress, a trunk for her nonexistent possessions, and nails on the walls to hang clothes. The good lady taught her how to use the toilet bowl, how to clean it with a small brush, how to wash and iron and dust and wax the floors, and how to use a fork and a knife. Teresa spent days in the house and nights in her room in the backyard, watching the moon sail on the sky outside the window. She missed the warmth and regular breath of her siblings. The cook, Luzia, a taciturn woman in her sixties, gave Teresa a St. Expedite stamp to keep her company and a tiny kerosene lamp to rarefy the dense darkness.  

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Teresa never received any money because she was ‘family.’ She was beaten, too, because all children in any family were beaten as a means of being educated. The black-haired man with the moustache did not pay attention to Teresa, but the good lady enjoyed her company. She combed Teresa’s golden-brown hair with Vaseline and tied it in neat plaits. She supervised Teresa during her many chores. The afternoon would find them with the window shutters closed against the sun, and Teresa would fan the good lady, who napped in a lace-trimmed hammock. On Christmas, Teresa received the first gift of her life, a rag doll, that she named Laura.

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One summer morning, the good lady gave Teresa a new pair of leather sandals and walked her to the school. A new world opened to Teresa, and in her scant spare time, she would braid Laura’s hair, take her to the motherly shadow of a cashew tree, and prop her against its trunk. She taught Laura the ABC and how to count to ten, tracing the letters and numbers on the ground with a twig, wishing she could become a teacher. Teresa slowly started deciphering the news in the Sunday newspaper after the black-haired man discarded it and the words in the old bible under the Our Lady figurine’s niche. From that first year of school, Teresa got the abilities of sitting quietly for hours, of reading, of writing, a small bit of arithmetic, the idea that Brazil was a funny drawing on a big paper, and an insatiable curiosity about the world.

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In December, though, the good lady said that school was interfering with the girl’s tasks at home and did not enroll her for the next year; not even a word from the teacher changed the good lady’s mind.

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The good lady’s interest faded. She stopped braiding Teresa’s hair, did not want to have the girl fanning her with the big palm-leaf fan, or hear her read aloud from a magazine on the rare occasions the good lady’s family mailed one from the capital city.

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When the good lady’s belly started to show, Teresa understood what had happened, and knew that she would become indispensable to the household, as much as her sister Joana was to her own family. Joana would never be sent away. She would also never step into a classroom or have three good meals a day. The idea that Teresa had been given away hurt. The idea that she had been spared the life Joana would be tied to until she was old enough to be married hurt, too, but in a different way. Unable to reconcile these feelings, Teresa felt guilty when she missed her family and when she was happy as well.

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When the good lady’s baby was born that winter, Teresa was to carry him around, change his diapers, feed him his bottles, and rock him to sleep, like a living doll. Her own rag doll, Laura, was hidden in the small trunk, as she had promised; the good lady had wanted to take Laura away to prevent Teresa from neglecting the baby. Teresa loved that baby, though. Antonio, whom everyone called Toninho, was funny and cute, and he smiled at her with bare gums. She was there to prevent him from eating poisonous plants or bugs when he started crawling. She sang him lullabies and taught him prayers, and many times she fell asleep on a chair next to his crib.

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When the boy was two, Teresa would sit him in the backyard and trace the letters she had learned in the sandy soil, like she used to with her doll, and tell him stories like she had done to her younger siblings. Toninho toddled his way behind his beloved Tetê, constantly asking questions she didn’t know how to answer. Teresa would always find something to tell him, though.

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“Why does the soap make bubbles?” asked Toninho.

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“Have you ever heard about the Soap Fairy?” answered Teresa. “She lives on the big cauldron Luzia uses to make soap and fills everything with her breath.”

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“Why mom and dad are white, you are brown, and Luzia is black?”

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“God left Luzia and I in His oven for a longer time, Toninho.”

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“How did the Three Marys[2] went to the sky?”

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“The Three Marys? Hmmm… Well, in a kingdom far away from here, three beautiful sisters…”

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When the good lady noticed that her toddler was counting his own fingers and pointing to the letters in the newspaper, she got a couple children’s books that Teresa laboriously read aloud from. Teresa was confused with the new words but ecstatic about the adventures of Pedrinho, Narizinho, and Emília the doll. Toninho used to fall asleep long before she finished a chapter, but she kept reading anyway. She would wake up earlier and stay up late to complete her work so she would have time to escape to that world of adventures, of fairies and sacis, of talking pigs and jaguars and fables and folklore tales.

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When Toninho was seven, he started school. Teresa soaked and scrubbed clothes against the washboard as fast as possible so she could ‘help’ him with his homework. She was eager to learn something new. Toninho was an adorable boy — he brought her flowers he had stolen from dry, battered gardens on his way home and gave her candy whenever he could. When he got schoolbooks, Teresa covertly read them by candlelight as she watched over the boy’s sleep. The next year, his father brought home a stunning encyclopedia bound in red leather with golden lettering on the spine. Teresa wasn’t allowed to remove it from the shelves except for dusting.

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By this time, Teresa was free from the greenish skin, swollen belly, and visible ribs with which she had arrived at that house. She had grown a solid palm, tall enough to inherit some of the good lady’s old dresses, although they were still too big for her. The girl’s growth did not go unnoticed by the good lady’s husband, so Teresa had to be faster than his hands and stick around Toninho and the good lady. She succeeded most times.

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Teresa felt things she could not put a name to, and after days of work she often could not fall asleep. She was both ashamed and proud of the changes in her body, and her mind was changing in ways she could not understand. She would walk to the hot, dense shadows in the darkness of the backyard and watch the sky, thinking, thinking, longing for the unknown without any idea of what was going on within her. It was harder to pay attention to things during the day, too.

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“Pay attention, girl! Are you on the moon?” Luzia scolded her when she forgot to keep an eye on the boiling pan of milk on the stove. “You’re not paying attention to me, Tetê!” whined Toninho when he was telling her a story and noticed her eyes lost in the distance. “I’m sorry!” was Teresa’s answer to everything, even when she didn’t know what she was sorry about.

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The good lady’s husband had been coming home earlier and leaving later in the morning and had already suggested a couple of times that Teresa could bring lunch to him at the store in the village. Then, he would not need to walk home and back at lunchtime. The good lady had not allowed it. She had grown bitter, making Teresa scrub tiles and the toilets over and over again, and she would send Teresa to bed without dinner for any small mistake.

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When Teresa noticed that the man had gotten into the habit of walking in the shadows of the backyard late in the night, she started to stay with Toninho in his room until she heard the man snoring. It was only then that she could safely go to her own bed.

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One night, Toninho forgot to put the encyclopedia back on the office’s bookshelf after finishing his homework, and Teresa could not resist. A big book like that might contain some of the answers she needed. She read and read — it was the “M” volume — and when she was reading about monkeys, she leaned sideways and dozed off, accidentally holding the book to the open flame of the tiny lamp. It didn’t really catch fire — Teresa dropped the book and was startled awake — but the edge of the pages got a tiny burn mark. She smoothed the burn with her fingers while panic clouded her vision, turning the elegant leather cover on a red blur.

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Teresa did not sleep that night.

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In the morning, when Toninho saw her wiping tears, he offered to take the blame. They both knew he would be severely beaten, so Teresa refused his offer. It had been a while since she had been beaten herself, because the good lady had put an end to it when her husband showed interest in applying the punishment himself, but burning an expensive book would likely get her much worse than going to bed without dinner. Teresa and Toninho quietly put the book back on the shelf, hoping that the good lady and her husband never noticed the burn.

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They noticed it weeks later. Toninho and Teresa did not say a word when interrogated, so Toninho was grounded and Teresa was sent to the good lady’s cousin who lived in São Paulo, a five-day journey from the village.

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The burn mark on the book was an excuse fallen from the skies to get rid of the girl instead of having her around until Toninho had his own children and inherited Teresa.

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The good lady’s cousin had no husband, and Teresa was a skilled worker, so the good lady put the girl in the old, battered jardineira, a loud mixture of truck and bus that travelled between the center of the village and the train station thirty kilometres away, with her cousin’s phone number written on a paper, and no regrets.

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Holding her small bundle of belongings against her chest, Teresa looked at the window. Her last vision of the village was dear Toninho, puffy-eyed and red-faced from his desperate cry, restrained by the good lady in the blue dress with a pink flower pattern and golden earrings, getting smaller and smaller, then disappearing in a golden blur.

 

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FOOTNOTES

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[1] Rapadura is a solid block of unrefined cane sugar, greenish-brown in colour, hard and tasting like molasses.

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[2] The Three Marys is the Brazilian popular name for the stars in the belt of Orion’s constellation.