The Great River

Idiot Digital x Fabricio Brambatti

Brasil Impossivel

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Death on the River

Some say that, in an age so distant that not even the waters of the Great River can remember it, Death was born.

Amid fish swimming in bliss, and the hooks of children trying to steal that happiness away, Death appeared.

She was born fully grown—inescapable, worn down by a life she had never lived, yet carried within herself as though it were a lesson heard a thousand times, learned a thousand times.

She rose from the water and looked around.

She saw many beautiful things.

A lush excess of green. Villages where people smiled for no reason at all. A carnival of life beneath the radiant beams of the sun.

She decided that this would become her home.

Wherever her gaze came to rest, things began to change.

The green no longer gleamed beneath the sunlight. For the first time, flowers bent beneath the weight of their own petals. The houses listened, like an echo, to the silence that one day would inhabit them.

Death walked through the villages, extending a gentle hand, offering the only gift she possessed: the End, and with it, a beauty that had never before existed.

It was then that the Great River truly became the Great River: the only place where life existed not despite Death, but because of her.

The two had forged the secret covenant from which all things are born.

The forest gave birth to new children—untouched species that wandered through it with gratitude and wonder.

The sun no longer wished to set and stole the hours from the moon.

Now the sound of Carnaval drifted through the air until it dissolved into the ocean.

Life sang as though it were a celebration.

And yet, precisely when everything began to shine again with a blinding Light, it also learned to tremble.

Farewells began to sound like final goodbyes.

In the villages, every departure seemed to deny the promise of return.

Everything revealed, like an unspeakable secret, its own fragility.

Everything seemed capable of vanishing forever, and therefore worthy of being lost.

Only what is loved is granted an ending.

From that day on, no one living by the river could pretend that Death was not there.

She walked among the houses.

She sat, immense, upon the riverbanks.

She wandered the forest paths, treading upon the footprints left by humankind.

No one dared meet her eyes.

Their gaze remained lowered, nailed to the ground.

And yet it was impossible not to see her.

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Crianças selvagens

In Veraluz, death and evil are not a choice for many. You learn them the same way you learn how to breathe.

In the alleyways you meet crianças selvagens — wild children — who still do not have hair on their faces but already carry the weight of iron in their pockets, ready to make a click at the first wrong signal.

Their fathers no longer lower their gaze before lying — “By now you are no longer meninos!” That is how they learn that childhood is over. Those who have food to eat in the evening sit at the table unmoved, whatever happens. They no longer distinguish the sound of fireworks from that of gunshots.

Every morning the Sun rises into the sky as if nothing had happened, as if nothing had ever happened here. The hills float above a sea of tin roofs, illuminated by the reflection of light on the metal that makes their tropical green shine. The antennas melt in the heat, bent by the wind rising from the Ocean. The houses, precariously balanced, seem as if they could stumble at any moment.

In the alleyways: the smell of wet lime, fried meat, sweaty bodies, flea-ridden dogs, gunpowder. Everything promises a celebration. It is always time for Carnaval. A carnival, to remind us that the world never stops rotting and shining. The drums that accompany the rhythm of the sirens, reflected in the sequins of the dancers; the choirs that explode and harmonize with the piercing screams of those who die in the alleyways. Why? Because it could not be otherwise.

At night, the headlights of cars briefly ignite the silence. They look like blades, cutting through the sky and opening wounds from which something seems as though it could arrive. Someone raises their eyes, holds their breath, waits for an answer, any answer. A grace, a miracle, a helicopter of the Polícia Militar. But it is only more artificial light, sliding along the walls and dying in the black river.

And the cachorros — the dogs — everywhere. They are the pure children of this city, of all the places in the world where Evil thrives like a bad piece of news that nobody wants to talk about, free to operate in silence. They sleep on the stairs and growl at the night, they eat when they can.

Christ stretches out his arms and seems to call them together. He is there for them, yes, his lost children in the alleyways.

He too has iron hidden beneath his tunic, because among these forests and this ocean those who survive are those who accept getting their hands dirty; the others do not last long. Goodness, if it does not pull the trigger, is crushed between the walls of the bairros.

Hide your own pure and innocent face, learn to stay silent and not let words that are too soft escape, pretend not to be good: always, always, always.

Christ does not wear white. It is the Sun that deceives, illuminating him with its transparent light.

This Sun that gives without ever holding back, from the height of its own estrangement — it can, yes, high, untouchable, unmoved, it does not see this dirty life that soils itself in the alleyways.

Christ is grey. He is covered in gunpowder, look at him carefully.

No one, like the inhabitants of this city, is capable of recognizing beauty and life. They sense them like a forgotten smell, like a man who knows how to remember a home without ever having even seen its walls. They simply know it.

It is a privilege that belongs to those who burn in the world of things that come to an end. Where everything can be extinguished in the second that separates one breath from the next, the one that will never come.

And every violence, all Evil, suddenly seems only like a long detour. To arrive where? A dark trace within a greater design, a road that we are not yet capable of recognizing.

Every betrayal, every lie, every sacrifice to feed hungry mouths, every time we immerse ourselves in the black river, risking never finding the shore again. To find something, what?

Love. But ours is only the poorest name we have, among all coins the least valuable. If desire is not the act of reaching toward something, but the beginning of feeling the emptiness it will leave behind. When we stop wanting to possess, we are asked only to let everything else fall: like old plaster, like dead skin, like the masks that, on the morning after the celebration, remain on the asphalt, without a face to fill them.

Salvation. But here believing in it costs too much. Where we are going, we do not know.

And we dance, we laugh, we drink, we kill. We celebrate, we make Carnaval, so as not to remain in the silence that, like a black hole, pulls us in.

Someone says that the river leads to the sea, but no one has ever seen its mouth. There are those who swear they have never even seen its course, except in dreams.

But it exists — it exists! — the sound of its waters flowing can be heard among the alleyways.

Certain nights, if one listens long enough, it calls each person by their own name. It knows the day when each one of us will return to its waters, leaving the current with the weight of what we have carried on our shoulders for a lifetime.

The river has known us forever. It is the silence from which we were expelled so long ago, exiled far enough away to be able to desire our return. Toward which we continue to return without realizing it, for the span of a lifetime. We brush against it in bodies, in homes and prayers, in the cities we build and in those we destroy.

In the end, only its black curve remains, down there, gathering everything and everyone. Where things go to end. The water that gathers bodies and their warm blood, prayers and guns, hopes and the silences behind which we defend ourselves. It drags them down, to the bottom, where every name is lost. Only what was there before remains: water and silence.

Everything that the world dirties, the river receives. Everything that time hardens, the river dissolves. It is where life stops defending itself. Like a mother, it welcomes without choosing.

The Great River is Woman.