Entrançar mãos de velha

Maio de 1956

"I have come up with all sorts of solutions, but I haven't found society yet. I don't know how attractive I might be in the eyes of men, they seek me out, they attach themselves to me, and I always feel uneasy when we go the same way, even if only for a few moments. If you ask me what the people are like in these places, I will answer: like everywhere else. The human species is singularly uniform. Most of them work almost all the time to live, and what little they have left free weighs so heavily on them that they seek every possible means to free themselves from it. O fate of man!"                                                                                               Werther,GoetheMy grandmother got married at the age of 22, she would have been about 20 at the time of the photograph. Maybe this is what her hands were made for: holding her purse, washing clothes, going to the fair, working in the fields, but not for showing love, as hands can show love by touching them. My grandmother has put her hand on my shoulder, but she has never put her hand on my face. She has passed her foot on my foot and said it was cold, and with the same hands that did not pass her hand on my face, she knitted socks to warm my feet. If my grandparents had touched each other in this photograph, if Grandpa had wrapped the arm he wrapped around himself in my grandmother's arm, we would be facing other hands and other bodies. These bodies are in suspension, if I took my hands off my grandparents' bodies to suspend them in an eternal decantation, they would no longer be this unknown species, they would free themselves from themselves and maybe they would touch each other. So the bodies remain suspended, in this instant that they don't touch each other, in a first photograph. If the next 55 years that the grandparents were together took a photograph in the same place, year after year, with a photographer pointing a lens at them that will capture just that second, would the next photographs be different? Maybe not, but in some of them hands could touch and finally arms could entwine. to my grandmother who has hands that do.

Maio de 1956
publication with archive photography