Maria da Silva - A Glimpse of Brazilian Reality

By pedro marangoni

A glimpse of Brazil's harsher side. This is a story about a young girl's daily struggle to survive among the damned and forgotten of a favela. Her search to find a friend and a place of hope in a dark, cruel and pitiless world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: May 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781507172056

Book preview

MARIA DA SILVA

A glimpse of Brazilian reality

pedro marangoni

Foreword

Maria da Silva is not entirely a work of fiction but more like an unembellished glimpse of Brazilian reality. A thin book about the short life of a rubbish scavenger. The lack of superfluous descriptions here is intentional so the mind of the reader can recreate a setting that is more familiar to him or her. A place they might see on a day-to-day basis but whose essence they do not understand. Marias da Silva die every day of starvation and untreated diseases in a brief and tragic passage through life, taking with them a story that is overlooked by most. It is time for us to look at these people as human beings and this thin little book may help with that. I feel that this work is not mine. I am only the deliverer of Maria da Silva's message. I believe that if a few readers change after reading this, even if only by the expression on their faces when they see a rubbish scavenger - who lives from things unwanted and not from begging - the mission I have been given by chance will have been accomplished.

p.marangoni

This is not waking up, no one awakens to a nightmare.

Rolled up in a blanket on top of an old, mildew-ridden mattress, Maria opens her eyes, veiled in misery, but remains motionless. She is curled up with her squalid arms wrapped around her knees, propping up the threadbare blanket, a faded grey and red-striped rag.

The mattress, now just the foam part, was probably green or blue at some point in time but is now stained brown by the mud of the water channel where it was found. Mildew is everywhere but to Maria it smells of safety, the smell of home.

The human-shaped blanket continues motionless. But not the mind. Maria is a human being, despite the others, Gods chosen ones, who can’t understand how she thinks, feels and, above all, sees and evaluates her position in the world of men. She knows she is expendable and she has only one wish, to leave.

Maria doesn't want to wake up, arise and be required to live. Her living gets mixed up with surviving. Simply surviving, one day at a time, with no breaks, no rest. She knows that for animals the daily search for food is a way of life but why does she have to do it and what for? What does she get from it? What is so great about it? Satiating hunger or quenching thirst is not great. It is the fulfilment of a need that she would gladly give up in exchange for never having to wake up.

But she wakes up. An almost adolescent hag, skin and bones and a probable age of 18 to 20. Her hair is auburn, sparse and straight, and her pale skin shows through where the street grime has not left its stain. Her breasts droop, she only has a few teeth and her eyes show only a shadow of dignity.

Opening her eyes, waking up, is always an unpleasant shock - the start of the nightmare. She wants to close her eyes again and erase her conscience, escape from the real.  But she knows she won't be able to because what awakens her is not a good night’s sleep but a stomach grumbling for its never-ending, insatiable quota.

Born into the world with hunger as her companion, she knows that she has no rights and, therefore, little hope.

Much to her distaste, she begins to assume the guise of a living being. She moves her eyes - but only her eyes. Always hoping futilely that she is actually in the middle of an actual nightmare, a bad dream. She will soon suddenly wake up in a clean bed - with a brother, a mother, a father, a home, food, knowing how to read, write, greet people and be greeted on the street, truly exist.

Why then not transform into a street dog that doesn't need to think, see itself or make comparisons? She is not a dog, but she is also not human, what is she then? If she talks, nobody answers. Sometimes she is shooed away like a street dog but sometimes she is given orders like those given to human beings. 

Her eyes survey the shack