This sugar mill belonged to my family.
That sentence kept ringing inside my head the entire day. I couldn’t stop thinking of the little white girl with little pale lips, pointing her finger, thin like chicken bones, to the other side of the street, the abandoned mansion in the large plot of land overtaken by nature in front of the bus stop, claiming that the place belonged to her family. Inside the bus, staring at the window as the vehicle moved up the mountain, I couldn’t think of anything else. How? How could the sugar mill have belonged to that girl’s family? At school, I paid no attention to the teacher conjugating English verbs. At home, washing the dishes from dinner, sharing the sink with mainha, my leg folded like the handle of a cup, I didn’t listen as my mother told me gossip from the neighborhood, or when she fumed at me, the airhead, for thinking about God knows what.
“You better not be meddling with Mr. Whatshisname, did you hear me, Marina,” she said, but I paid her no mind.
And when I went to bed, I struggled to fall asleep because, young as I was at the time, I couldn’t understand how, while we had nothing, another family could have so much, so many plots of land, a big sugar mill like that and a house to boot, and be able to lose them all. How could someone who owned all of that could now look so starved, so lost, sharing secrets with a stranger waiting for the town hall bus to take her to the city?
I was thirteen when I started to see the matchstick girl—that’s how I used to call her, because she was skinny like a matchstick—at least once a week. Every day, when the sun dawdled to rise, I walked through the plantation and went to the bus stop by the road, where the vehicle collected the few students from rural areas to take us to the school in the city, in the upper part of the mountains. I always waited alone, except for when the matchstick girl was there, sitting on the edge of the cement bench, wearing a tattered dress, staring at the abandoned house on the other side of the road.
She would say: that sugar mill belonged to my family, without ever looking at me. I never answered out loud, I just nodded. I was afraid, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t know where she lived, or what she was doing there, since she never took the bus—and, when I returned, she was no longer there. One day, after a long period of rumination, I summoned up the courage to ask her name, but I introduced myself first.
“My name’s Marina,” I said.
Matchstick Girl looked at me for the first time. Her eyes were empty and sad. They made me think of a day when I was roaming the land around my house and I found a cow that fell in a bluff, with a broken back leg, her slick eyes full of flies, skeletal after many days without eating. She mooed for help, or mercy, and I rolled a stone above her head to kill her, but I was too small and weak, I couldn’t kill her, on the contrary, the cow began to struggle, mooing loudly like she was screaming, and I ran back home, crying. I could hear the cow screaming even locked in my room. The mooing was only interrupted when my father shot her. The eyes of the matchstick girl reminded me of that agonizing cow. Round, empty, but with no flies—but they might have had. When she told me her name, Rebeca, her voice reminded me of the cow. Luckily, the bus arrived just in time, and I ran inside.
By the end of my school year, more than half of the students that went up the mountain with me had already stopped studying for good. The work down here was heavy, and it was more important to bring food home than learn math formulas or stylistic devices. Life went on, but the matchstick girl kept appearing at the bus stop, pointing at that increasingly more decrepit house, plants growing wild on the front steps, walls taken by mold, roof covered by moss. One day, part of the old stone wall, patched with red bricks, fell. The iron gate, one hundred years old, shut closed by worm-eaten hoardings, was taken. Like that, the abandoned sugar mill, once the property of the matchstick girl’s family—I wonder if all of them looked like matchsticks?—had now an open door, a wide and forced smile, missing its front teeth. Another day, while we washed the dishes, mainha said:
“I heard there are junkies living inside the abandoned sugar mill.”
“I haven’t seen anyone, no,” I answered.
“Well, but you’re a girl and it’s dangerous to walk around here on your own. I can’t take you there, your father can’t take you there, and we have too much work to do in here, Marina, see. And we’re getting old. It’s best for you to stop going.”
I was barely fifteen and suspected that my mother wanted me to stop going to school to help her in the field. I swallowed the tears, and said:
“I’m not alone in there. A friend of mine waits for the bus with me.”
On the following week, Rebeca, the matchstick girl, stopped appearing. The sugar mill, too, was unusually busy. Men walked up and down, measuring it, writing things in their little notepads. One of them pruned the area with a machine. I also saw them repair the rooftop and the molded walls, polishing, plastering, painting. They installed a new gate.
Around that time, I understood we had nothing. We were allowed to live in a huge plot of land, owned by Barbosa, a man from the capital, and my parents worked his fields five times a week. In the remaining days, they took care of the small field given to us, sowing the vegetables that fed us. We discovered that the tiny piece of land I was born and grew up in was not ours when my mother told me the plot had been bought.
“We’ll have to leave, Marina,” she told me, “Mr. Barbosa sold his lands, and we can’t stay here anymore. He gave us a month. They bought everything, from Riacho do Cavalo to Mr. Bastos’ farm. And Arimatéia’s cistern, too. They even kicked out the settlement from the abandoned power plant.”
I was devastated. I had my own life plans. I was going to celebrate my next birthday in the city at the top of the mountain, in Areia, with my friends from school who lived there. We would eat ice cream in the square, listen to music, talk about boys even though I wasn’t very interested in that, I just pretended to be, and we would lunch with Juliana, one of my best friends, whose father was an architect who worked for the town tall and had promised to pay for our lunch in a steakhouse facing the valley, Coca-Cola and all. I wanted to finish my studies, move to the capital, where I could go to the beach, and then to college, I wanted to be an English teacher. Whenever the bus went up the mountain, I liked to imagine I was somewhere else, in another city, in another country, and I had made-up dialogues going on inside my head, as if I was inside a double decker bus in the middle of London, like I saw once in a British movie that our English teacher made us watch in the tiny television of her room.
At the end of the year, I saw, from the bus stop, a family move to the sugar mill. A white woman, blonde as can be, like I had never seen outside of telenovelas, walked out of a fancy car and looked around, wearing sunglasses, holding a lavish hat. She rubbed her belly, like she was pregnant, but nothing could be seen in that flat stomach. A man came right after, from the driver’s seat, he was tall and wide, wearing a suit that was too hot for the weather, with dark hair and eyebrows thick like caterpillars, his skin as white as the recently painted wall of the old sugar mill.
“That sugar mill . . . ”
I jumped, frightened. Matchstick Girl was back. I hadn’t seen her coming. She spoke with that detestable and agonizing dying cow voice.
“Belonged to your family, I know,” I answered with no patience, brandishing a finger and pointing to the sugar mill. I realized my own arm was thin like chicken bones, like a matchstick, same as hers. After the land was bought, my parents had lost their jobs, and our money was getting scarcer, just like our food.
“Now everything belongs to them,” said Rebeca, “for no . . . ”
The bus arrived and I ran inside without looking at the matchstick girl. The vehicle was almost empty as it went up the mountain, with only me and the driver, the same one since I could remember, both the driver and the bus, and by then I didn’t even fantasize with the red double decker anymore.
In the city, everyone talked about the English family that bought and moved into the old sugar mill, Areia Vermelha. They were extremely chic people, with white skin and golden hair, they only spoke in a way that was foreign, they had brought extremely old china from their united kingdoms, two enormous Dobermans, and the man, the head of the family, would reactivate the abandoned power plant, would buy lands to raise cattle and plant sugarcane, and they would only bring benefits to the poor region of Areia. Maybe the old sugar mill would even go back to producing cachaça . . .
It was the last day of school, and also my birthday. Me and my friends ate ice cream in the square after class, to say goodbye before summer vacation. They hugged me affectionately, they paid for my ice cream, and Juliana told me, with sadness in her voice, that she wouldn’t be able to take us for lunch, since her father was fired a month prior to that. She said her father blamed the English, but we didn’t really understand why, something about listed buildings and heritage sites, words that we were not interested in. The girls started to tell stories of that old sugar mill, where the gringos were living now.
“The sugar mill was called Areia Vermelha, red sand, because of the blood spilled there. There’s a stream behind the house where water runs red every full moon.”
“The enslaved people burned down the house, killing the white folks. But they were not able to run away and died inside it too. I heard you can smell the ashes at night.”
“The house was built over an indigenous graveyard, and I heard that, at night, you can still hear the rattles and the screams of dead warriors.”
“In the fifties, a pervert locked children inside the old senzala, the shed where enslaved people used to live . One day, no one knows why, he hanged himself in a tree, the children were only found when it was too late, and they starved to death. I heard you can still hear the children laughing and playing under the tree where he killed himself.”
“There’s also the firestarter lesbian girl,” one of the girls said, and two of them giggled.
“What did she do?” I asked.
“She killed her parents because they didn’t accept her sin. She beheaded them and buried them in the backyard. Then she bathed in kerosene, and set fire to herself and the house. No one else lived there after that.”
“That’s horrible,” said Juliana with a serious tone. She hadn’t liked that story, despite having laughed at all the others.
“I heard she’s a ghost nowadays, and she waits around the road, asking men for a ride. She kills them when they hit on her.”
The girls laughed. Juliana was still serious, and she said:
“That’s a lie. It wasn’t the last time someone used that house. Painho told me that when he was a child, they took his father there. It’s where soldiers tortured people during the dictatorship. They found my grandfather’s body many months later, floating in the stream, his body all swollen and his hands tied behind his back.”
We were all silent.
It didn’t take long for us to part after the heaviness that fell between us. The ice creams were finished, and the afternoon began to bleed into the sky, giving birth to the night.
Slowly, one by one, we said our goodbyes, until the only ones remaining were Juliana and I, and she went with me to the street where I waited for the bus.
“Don’t believe in them,” said Juliana, “they just wanted to scare you. Everything will work out. My father’s tale is true, but that’s past. Ghosts don’t exist. Painho says ghosts are for people who are afraid of the past, just like God is for people who are afraid of the future.”
If my mother heard her, she would not allow me to ever speak to Juliana again.
Her father worked with the preservation of the city’s historical heritage. He was a respected architect. It was a pity to hear he had been fired; I couldn’t understand how someone so important lost his job.
“I have something to tell you,” she said, “I’m moving to João Pessoa. Painho had to sell the house. He’s going to work as a driver while he doesn’t find anything better.” Juliana saw my eyes tear up, and she squeezed my hands. “If you only were able to see, Marina, the place where we’re going to live. It’s horrible, horrible, far from everything and everyone. I don’t know how I’ll be able to stand it.”
The bus arrived and I got in. The last time we saw each other was the day Juliana left, in the following week.
At home, my mother was delighted. She had even killed our last chicken and prepared my favorite meal, chicken cabidela with cowpeas and xerém soup. I waited for the good news, and, while we washed the dishes and painho laid on the hammock, she told me:
“Your father found a job. The English couple will reactivate the power plant, he’s gonna cut sugar canes.”
“What about you? What about the house?”
“The gringos are looking for a maid. But only one who speaks English. And I told them about you, Marina, if you work for them, we’ll be able to keep the house.”
I started to work for the English family at the age of seventeen, in the old sugar mill of Areia Vermelha, the rusty plaque with its name replaced by one with the family’s name. In the first day I walked into the plot of land, I glanced at the other side of the road. During the last storm, the wind had torn part of the bus stop’s fibrolite roof, exposing the concrete bench to the sun. The matchstick girl wasn’t there. I felt like an idiot for thinking of her, still referring to her with that childish nickname I gave her. I wondered if her name was really Rebeca. I couldn’t remember. The storm had also caused a mudslide that destroyed a handful of houses in the mountain, and ruined my mother’s garden, the one she took care of all on her own, now that my father spent the entire day cutting sugar canes. She started to work as a maid in the recently reactivated power plant, abandoning our vegetables, since there was no one with time and strength to work on them.
At first, the English family looked great. The woman was nice and smiled a lot, she almost never talked, and always looked very busy, despite having nothing to do the entire day. The man was very serious, and was always in meetings, either on the phone or in the power plant. The dogs ran free, exploring the fields, without ever entering the house. They scared me because they barked whenever I came near them.
The house was huge, full of rooms and extensions, and I had to cook in addition to cleaning. I was very busy the entire day and, at night, I had no time or energy to go back home and return as soon as the sun rose. So I slept there, in the old house. Despite speaking their language, I spent most of my days in silence. Wiping the kitchen table, sweeping the floor, washing the bathrooms, dusting the rooms—and there were many.
When I finished the last one, it was already time to start again. I only spoke when I had to enter the office of my boss, excuse me, I’d say in English, or in the couple’s bedroom, where the woman spent a lot of time in front of the mirror, observing her growing belly, brushing her hair, or lying on the bed, staring at the window, excuse me. Around the house were very old plants with extremely thick trunks. Most of them didn’t have any fruit in spite of casting very pleasant shadows, and the mango tree, the largest of all, only produced rotten mangoes. I liked to eat in the backyard, under a cashew tree, listening to the sound of the leaves, accompanied by the singing birds, while my employers ate silently in the kitchen. One day, I heard a child laughing by my side, even though I was alone. I never got near that tree again.
I had a bedroom, a small place in the back of the big house. It took me around five minutes to walk there from the main house, the room was small and the window was smaller, but it was mine only, bathroom and all. I woke up early, before the sun rose, and I prepared breakfast for the family.
Twice a week, a gardener came to tend for the plants. He couldn’t be much older than twenty, and I always saw him talking to my boss, planning the landscaping of the house. In a few months, they took down many trees, planted a grass lawn and many rose bushes, installed a fountain and a charming stone walkway in front of the house. The gardener was very handsome, cheerful, and he always wore tank tops that showed his muscled white arms that turned red by the end of the day, burned by the sun.
“Did you know that the mango tree only ever bears rotten fruit?” I mentioned one day. Maybe thinking that he, as a gardener, could understand what was wrong with it. I was tired of sweeping the dirt under the tree, gathering disgusting fruits filled with worms.
He looked at the tree, his eyes half-closed because of the light, and wiped away the sweat dripping down his forehead with the back of his hand.
“Have you noticed the dogs don’t come anywhere near it?” he said. He reeked of alcohol.
Bothered by the smell, one that reminded me of the times when my father returned from the fields with a stomach empty of food and full of booze, I turned my face away and looked at the dogs. They slept on one of the sides of the house, under a narrow shadow, squeezed against the wall. The mango tree was just around the corner, casting an immense shadow. I tried to remember any memory I might have had of the dogs under the tree, but I couldn’t find any.
“Dogs can feel bad stuff,” he said, “you haven’t heard any of the stories about this sugar mill, have you? The land never forgets the bad things that happen on it. And animals can feel that.”
He noticed I wasn’t bothered by ghost stories, and smiled. He went back to work, probably had another meeting with the boss to discuss details regarding the garden, since he used the front door of the house, an entrance not even I could access.
My father died a few months later. He lost his hand while cutting a sugar cane, the infection spread, his body was too old to resist, and he died in a few days, giving me no time to visit him, since I was too busy taking care of someone else’s house. My mother didn’t last long in those lands either. A fire took over her house and body. I was told it happened while she was cooking, as she tried to heat up the stove using a bottle of alcohol. Her funeral was the last time I left the sugar mill, and while they finished covering her coffin with dirt, I wondered if a tree that bore rotten fruit would grow there. If the land kept misfortunes within it, I kept them in my memory. And, like the land, I remained silent, since I had no choice but to swallow my pain in order to keep standing, dropping my rotten fruits like the mango tree.
On the day of her burial, I woke up in the middle of the night with the sound of a matchstick being ignited inside my room, the phosphorus scraping at the box, tearing apart the silence of the night, one I was so used living with. I opened my eyes in the darkness and saw a small flame lightening the center of the room. I jumped out of bed, my heart hammering with the fear that someone could have entered, even if the door had been locked with a deadbolt, and I turned on the light. There was no one inside, no phosphorus, no fire, not even the scent of combustion. I cried the whole night until I convinced myself it had been just a dream.
On the next day, my boss criticized me. She said I looked tired. That I had dark circles under my eyes. That I was hunching my shoulders. Yawning too much. She said I had to cheer up, lift my chin, after all, if you want to work, you don’t grimace. I had to smile while washing her toilet.
At some point, I wondered if she was pregnant. She decorated an entire room with baby-related things. She was quite busy refurbishing the house, had some of the walls taken down, changed the exterior color, installed several air conditioners and new windows. She was talking a lot, I had never seen her talk so much, she was very lonely, never had friends over or called anyone on the phone.
“No, but I will be. That’s why we moved to this place, to this fertile land. Philip and I were not able to conceive. But I know we will, here. With such pure air, and such rich land, we will have to.” She pulled up her blouse, touched her flat white belly with her two hands and, with her eyes full of tears, she finished: “Finally, I’ll have something that’s mine.”
Sometime later, I saw men working on the road. They took down the bus stop, removed all the plants, and poured tar and crushed stone on the ground, to make the road wider. I found my boss at the kitchen table, talking to herself.
“It’s mine, no, it’s mine. Mine!” she repeated until she noticed me. She turned aggressive and yelled at me, asking where I had been and telling me I was lazy, remiss, that I dawdled too much when I worked inside the house. She shattered a glass against the wall, and a shard struck me in the eyebrow. While I bled, I stepped on another shard. My sandal was too worn-out, and the glass cut my heel. She kept watching me in silence as I tried to stop the blood, and then I cleaned her mess.
I attended one of the man’s meetings. Two employees from the town hall appeared unexpectedly, and since they didn’t speak English, I had to mediate the conversation. I didn’t know most of the words they said or how to translate them, but I understood they were there to fine him for the structural changes in the house and entrance, as the construction was a listed building, and could not be refurbished without a permit. My boss just laughed. The house is mine, he said, mine. This place was in shambles before I came.
I kept waking up hearing the sound of someone lighting a match inside my bedroom for many nights. I always jumped out of bed and turned on the lights, but I never found anyone there, and the deadlock remained in place. I thought I was going mad like my employer, who talked to herself around the house, holding her belly and telling the empty rooms that it was hers, hers, I don’t know what it was, but it was all hers. Sometimes, I smelled kerosene. In one of those nights, I woke up, restless, and left my room. From my doorstep, I heard a fight coming from the house, a violent fight, with screams, broken things, and the sound of skin striking skin. On the following day, my employer spent the entire day quiet, holding her belly, with huge sunglasses that hid her face. She grasped my arm, the skin of her hand looking so thin and delicate that any sudden movement from my part could have broken it, and she removed the sunglasses. Her eyes looked even greener, clashing against the purple bruises around them.
“I’m lonely. Very lonely. I have no one,” she said, crying.
I wanted to know how someone so rich could be lonely, if she could go anywhere she wanted, whenever she pleased.
“Do you want me to call someone, ma’am?” I asked, but she started screaming, pushing me out of the room and locking herself there for the entire day, sometimes in silence, sometimes yelling and knocking down the colonial furniture, all of it so heavy.
Someone burned rubber down the road, in front of the recently doubled entrance of the house. A handful of protesters were there, and I went to the sidewalk to ask what they wanted. An elderly man told me that I should be careful when working for monsters, that my employers had evicted so many families off their lands, that they treated the workers of the power plant like they were animals, that so many people had already died in the sugarcane plantations, that politicians were murdered, that the cattle had contaminated the city’s river. I got scared when I saw my boss appear in a black truck, followed by three other identically huge vehicles. I returned to the house before he could tell his wife I wasn’t working. I heard screams and bullets while I washed the dishes, but I couldn’t muster the courage to look at what was going on. By the end of the afternoon, when I went outside with food for the dogs—I usually left on the patio when they were not around—I didn’t see anything else, only burned asphalt, blood stains, and bullet shells.
That night, I woke up with three ignited matchsticks inside my bedroom. I turned on the light, and once more I was by myself, but I smelled the burned phosphorus. I opened the door, and the night’s dew hit me in the face. I returned to my bedroom to find a candle and the match box I kept in a small drawer. I lit it and walked to the backyard. It was cold, terribly dark, the sky had no stars, full of clouds, I couldn’t see the dogs, they were black and barked at something, far from me. I walked a few steps, the candle barely lightening the floor ahead of me, and I heard children laughing. I turned to the side, frightened, and I heard rattling and the sound of people running around me. I started roaming aimlessly, lost in the darkness, not finding the way to my room, and I heard a gagged man trying to scream, I heard the sound of chains, a mooing cow, fire crackling in kindling wood, I smelled kerosene and burned flesh, alcohol and clotted blood coming from the stream, I saw the matchstick girl standing under the mango tree, holding two severed heads, with fire coming out of her eyes. Someone whispered in my ear that “this land belongs to no one”, and the candle was extinguished with a blow. The clouds made space for the moon, the light coming from it clearing my path, and I ran back to my place. I spent the entire night with my eyes wide open.
The following morning, when I left my bedroom, I found my employer collapsed between my room and the big house. I thought she was unconscious, or that she had tripped, but when I approached her, I realized she had no head. Screaming, I ran and yelled like a mad woman, asking for help, running through the house, asking for someone to come, for my boss, for the gardener, my screams echoing through the empty rooms and the silent place.
The dogs were outside, barking at the mango tree, not coming any closer. I approached it, and found a shovel, thrown on the ground. Beside it was a pile of dirt, like someone had buried something underneath. I remembered the stories my friends told me, of the lesbian girl who killed and beheaded her parents, and I threw up there, on the rotten mangoes.
I considered running away, running up the mountain or down the road, toward the shore, to find Juliana in the horrible place she lived, but I didn’t even had shoes to stand all those kilometers, I called the police, telling them I had found the dead woman, and I locked myself in my room.
The police found nothing. There was no body, no blood, no shovel. Smiling, my boss said it had to be a prank, since his wife was traveling to visit her family in England. When they left, he locked himself inside his office, and I searched every part of the backyard, finding nothing. When I was thinking about digging the dirt under the mango tree, I decided I was insane. That it couldn’t have been anything but a dream. That my employer was well, walking around in the land where buses are double deckers and red.
Two days later, I woke up in the middle of the night, not with a matchstick, but with the sound of gunshots. I looked out of the window and I saw him, my boss, with a flashlight pointing toward the old senzala, a construction a few meters away from my little room.
“It’s mine! Mine! This land is mine, get out of here!” he screamed, but no one seemed to be there. And he shot toward the darkness, the sky, the senzala.
The following morning, he brought a tractor and destroyed the place. A handful of men walked in and out the estate, with headgear, clipboards and measuring tapes. While I hung sheets to dry, I heard that he was going to tear everything down. The big house, the mill, the furnace, the water heater, he was going to destroy it all and build something new. A hotel, a parking lot, a gas station.
I was watching the mill being torn down when workers from the town hall arrived to stop the demolition, they were different from the ones I had met in the past. I came closer in case they needed my help to translate anything, but one of them spoke some English. The other, when he saw me, seemed to recognize me. He got closer and spoke:
“You’re looking like a little matchstick, girl. Those fingers look like chicken bones,” he said, and I got startled. “Aren’t they feeding you enough?”. And, when he realized I didn’t recognize him, he explained: “You don’t remember me, eh? You were too young. Your parents were friends of mine. I really miss them.”
A wave of deep pain went through my chest. It was the first time something rescued my memories of them. The fire that destroyed my mother’s house consumed all of our documents, pictures, clothes. My last memory of her had gone under the earth in her funeral.
We heard people arguing in the main house, the other employee screamed something in English, and the one who talked to me ran to see what was going on, and I tried to finish my chores, glad to end that conversation.
It was already dark when I finished cooking dinner. The demolition workers had already left, and my boss was still in his office with the town hall employees. I went to the other side of the house to check if they were going to continue for long because my boss liked to have dinner when the food was still hot from the oven, and I saw the office’s door was open.
I smelled blood and entered, and saw that one of the employees was dead. He was sprawled on the sofa, spread-eagle, with a deep gash on his neck. I got out of there, trembling from head to toe, unable to scream, and I heard someone laughing. On the other side of the corridor was my boss, in the entrance, facing a small stairway that led to the garden. He had both hands on his waist and laughed hard. I wanted to know why he was laughing, so I came closer, from behind, and saw, in the garden, one of the dogs playing with the body of that old friend of my parents. They barked and bit, pulling a strip of flesh, licking his head, running around him, waving their tails, burying a piece of his body that had been torn, and my boss laughed.
I ran away, searching for the gardener. I had seen him earlier in the furnace, as he sometimes slept there when he worked until late. The lights had been turned on, and he threw kerosene inside the furnace. I called for help, and he got startled, turning around in a hurry and dousing himself with fuel.
I felt like I saw flames in his eyes, and he snarled:
“What do you want?” he asked, but he didn’t allow me to answer, going at me with closed fists, licking his lips, and when I jumped back, I heard a rattling sound inside my pocket. The matchbox I always carried with me, as of late. I took it from my pocket, and drew a match, threatening to light it.
“If you touch me, I’ll burn you. I’m not afraid.”
He was, and stepped back. I ran to my room and locked the door. No one came after me.
I only left when the sun was out, and I couldn’t see anyone through the window. I was ready to leave for good, to walk out that gate and never return to that wretched place. I was tired of that land manured with blood and its rotten fruit. Maybe I would blossom somewhere else, if it wasn’t too late. But instead of leaving my room and going straight to the exit, I went to the furnace. He was no longer there, unlike the kerosene tin he had used last night. It was half empty, standing by two other full tins, and, when I approached the furnace, I saw two charred bodies.
I looked at the main house. The windows were all closed, since I was the one who opened them in the morning. The kitchen door—a place only I used—was wide open.
I went there, holding the kerosene tin like a baby. The kitchen was dark and empty, and I heard, coming from inside the house, moans and howls, like something out of a beating. My heart almost came out of my throat, but I couldn’t go back, like there were voices, many voices, whispering to my ear that I should keep going, that I should stop it for once, although I wasn’t sure what that meant.
I went down the corridor and peered into the half-open door of the room my employer usually locked herself in. The gardener was on her bed, on his fours, eyes closed, and my boss fucked him from behind, glaring at the great mirror glued to the wardrobe.
The gardener howled, and every time my boss thrust his body against the other man, he screamed:
“It’s mine. It’s mine! You. Won’t. Take. What’s. Mine!”
None of them heard when I closed the door, soaking the house with kerosene.
In the kitchen, I lit a match, threw it on the kerosene trail, and closed the door after I left.
I went back to the furnace while I heard them scream. They sounded like bellowing cows being tortured in a slaughterhouse. I found more tins. I threw them on everything, on the mill, the garden, the trees, the machines, I wondered if I would be arrested for destroying a historical site. If Juliana’s father, the architect, would be disappointed in me. But that didn’t matter, I already felt like a prisoner, and that memory meant nothing to me now.
Exhausted after running from one side to the other, I sat outside my room, leaning against the closed door, with the last kerosene tin by my side. The men still screamed, asking for help, while the fire consumed the house. I tried to focus on the sound of the birds and the trucks going down the road. I wondered if the lesbian girl was asking old drivers for a ride, killing them right after if they were perverts. When I reached for the matches in my pocket, they were no longer there, I must have lost them as I ran through the estate. Then I saw the matchstick girl.
She was inside, in my employer’s room, looking at me from the open window, smiling with an ignited match in her hand. The men continued to scream, like they couldn’t see the open window. I also saw children in the garden, under the cashew tree, I saw Black people, their skins way darker than mine, standing on the ashes of the senzala, I saw Juliana’s grandfather, his hands untied, I saw five women around my room, I saw many shadows around the estate, between the trees, in the stream, behind buildings, and all of them, at the same time, dropped the match on the ground, and set everything on fire.
The dogs ran toward me, and they looked at me with pity. In silence, they seemed to say:
“Go, go away. Find what is yours, search your own place, before the fire consumes you, and the land swallows you.”
I smiled, grateful for their compassion, and I looked at the burning mango tree. I had nothing, no one, I had no place to go, I was like that mango tree, resigned with its rotten fruit, waiting to decay, unable to choose any destination but the land. I wondered if the matchstick girl had been offered that possibility, or if she only had fire to choose from.
