Rita Vieira

I lay out the white linen on the floorboards,
The plastered skin, lets my hand pass between bones and muscles. She has the appearance of an old woman, With long hands and stubby, wrinkled fingers, Like an old woman's hand that one day runs her hand through my hair and braids it, I stroke her hair too even though I don't see it and she doesn't feel it. I hope she is not afraid of me. She doesn't exist, but she rests under the white floorboards. I ask her never to wake up so that I can continue to see her.

I bow my head to her:

One day Ines, delivered at the final moment, refuses: covered with a certain virtue and naivety, of one who is not devoted to a temple or to Men. Her hair grows, which covers her. The celestial light that blinds me grows. Hands knot her hair, made of virtue; hands stroke her hair, made of ingenuity.I stroke her hair, but it's like a force that tears it to pieces. Ines doesn't cry, because she is reborn with a lamb in her arms, wrapped in great flames that don't burn her.I stroke her hair, I braid it so that she doesn't sweat, I place my hand on her head so that she can see the honesty of someone who will never braid the lamb's wool.

I veil her breasts:

"But I have my whole breasts in my soul" says Agatha, because they want to tear them out of her. I put my head against the one who fed me, because he sustained someone who will welcome me one day, I will not have Agatha's soul because I don't believe, because I pray to temples and men.

I hold up my hand:

If I wrap all my fingers with a thread they will fall off, but the truth is that the intention was always to give her my hand. So I leave it as a warning to spread the fingers, so that I can hand it over more often. I examine it wet, which makes me wet too, and I say that I can now dip my head, but I cannot dip my hands.

The arm is drained so that the tip remains, "Like a vast program against the dust, against the erosion of the night's operations, an arm, only an arm, goes free, the useful part surrounded by debris, the special devices concealed behind, mysterious weapons incorporated." (Cesariny) I close: in a last hand wrapped in a blue handkerchief.

The hand, rested, without old and without hair, sent so that I may re-read it, and so that one day I may have an answer to this wake of mine.

The grandfather and grandmother, and to the perhaps grandfather and grandmother, to those who were more and so grandfather and grandmother than the grandfathers and grandmothers, who left me hands and fingers, and that I finally give them my hand, so that they take it in a linen bundle, and send it on.