The Collector of Leftover Souls by Eliane Brum

Author:Eliane Brum [Brum, Eliane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-64445-104-5
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2019-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

Class Struggle

For the wealthy, old age may be more painful because it is made up only of losses. Everything slips through the hands of the elderly, especially power and choice, from diet to living place. They are powerless to choose with whom they share quandaries and companionship, and humiliated by their dependence on strangers, even to take a bath. The poor arrive at the gate carrying a suitcase containing less clothing and a greater ability to reinvent themselves. Forever reduced to the minimum, they come skilled in the art of seizing possibilities. Their lamentations have always died in their chest.

Rossi Rodrigues, retired seamstress, discovered if she accepted the world of the living, she would end up departing for the world of the dead, a misfortune that always seemed in very bad taste to her. “Lord help me!” she exclaims with a grimace. Rossi came here seventeen years ago because she is not someone to live with a son or shove herself into her daughter-in-law’s corner. She uses the home like a hotel. Since she doesn’t have to worry about what tormented her throughout her youth—food and housing—there’s more time to poke around where she shouldn’t.

As a composer of Brazilian brega music, what Rossi really enjoys is mending the world. In her old age, she is making the dream of her youth come true, earning respect both inside the home and out. She is well informed enough to remind the rich, during the surliness of their inevitable clashes, that if it weren’t for the poor, the home would lose out on philanthropic contributions and no longer be tax exempt.

Early each morning, Rossi listens to a series of radio programs to set her schedule. There’s not a single protest where her flag isn’t hoisted high, no accusation that she doesn’t investigate with her own eyes, no debate in which she doesn’t voice her opinion, no lecture at which she doesn’t learn at least a new word. She is involved in the Catholic Church’s health care ministry, prison ministry, and as many others as she can. Rossi was there at Candelária, protesting the mass murder of street children; at Santa Genoveva Clinic, protesting the abuse, neglect, and deaths of the elderly; and at the World Social Forum, protesting capitalism’s murderous savagery. She has been to Brasilia more than once.

She never tires of dismaying the home with her T-shirt collection, the most eye-catching of which bears the initials of the Landless Workers Movement. “I came here to live, not die,” she proclaims. Rossi looks in the mirror, checks her wrinkles, and touches them one by one to make sure they’re all in the right place. “I love these wrinkles of mine. Each one a son, a grandchild, my life.”

Anyone who sees this devotee of Saint Hedwig at mass, knees scraping on the ground, cannot even begin to suspect what is going on inside that head of salt-and-pepper hair, in that sweet heart beating so earnestly inside a flowered granny dress. “Look, I’ll tell you,” and she does: “If I weren’t so Catholic, I’d bomb the president’s office in Brasilia.

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