Stories da roça

Carnival, the carnal festival, the gratification of desires, the indulgence in carne and all things flesh, is over. It ended last week with quarta de cinzas. All good Catholics are now repentant, and starting last Friday are diligently attending mass, doing penitence, and reflecting on their sins.

I’m not Catholic, so I don’t quite know how these things work, but our neighbors are, and the smell of fried fish is prevalent.

On Thursday Geraldinha was here to do the housework I’m too lazy to get around to and, as usual, she was indulging me in her stories. It started off because I was explaining this hilarious clip to her about what a spoiled generation we have become ("we" meaning me and my peers, not her) and it got to reminding her of the journey her family would make for the first mass of Lent (Quaresma). Her stories are so wonderful I decided I should make a new category and post them here more regularly.

Although she would later convert to an evangelical church, after sneaking out of the house with her sister one night and attending a tent revival meeting, for which her parents nearly disowned her, she was raised a strict Catholic. As such, attending the first mass of Lent held on Friday was very important.

When she was a child her family worked for a time on a plantation far from the nearest town. In order to arrive on time for confession and mass, the family had to leave the plantation at 3:00am. At the time there were seven children, although her mother would eventually give birth to ten. They only had one horse, so her father would ride, securing two small children on the withers in front and one on the rump behind, while her mother, holding a baby, and the three other older children, including Ger, walked. (You know it didn’t occur to me to ask why her mother or one of the older children couldn’t have secured the younger children on the horse while he walked. Hmmm…)

Each of them owned only one pair of shoes and they walked barefoot carrying their shoes around their neck so as not to ruin them. After a while they began to get tired and didn’t have much energy left to make it up the many hills on the windy dirt road so they would divvy up the horse’s tail in three parts and each of the older children would grab on. When they reached a hill, her father would give the horse a slap on the butt and holding on to the tail the kids would get a tow up the hill. That poor horse! Talk about a beast of burden. She said it was great fun.

When they got to town, the family would go first to her uncle’s house so they could wash their feet and put their shoes on. Then they would hurry to the church in order to have time to confess before the start of mass. After all that, what more penitence could the priest possibly ask of them?

But Geraldinha tells me that she and her siblings would look forward all year to this journey and the night before they were so excited you might as well have told them they were going to Disneyland. Although of course at the time, she confessed, she’d never heard of Disneyland.