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I didn’t choose to be born. It wasn’t my choice. I breathe because I have to, and I decide to live every day. Being alive is not the same thing as living, when being born was the first death of them all.
Where the black clouds kiss, I’ve found Rio Mau, a small town in Penafiel, lost between valleys, slopes and a big river. I don’t know if the name tells the story, but I didn’t even try to know. There I’ve found a breath of fresh air - an association – Association for Development from Rio Mau. People from the town; needed people. The association is focused on those who already gave everything that they could.
Every morning they take care of the hygiene and medical care. After, according to their hearts, they return to distribute several meals. To every damned soul; Each house a story, each story a need. The voices, if they could speak, they’d ask to be silent forever.
The corners hide secrets. The colors are dark, darker than from an old painting. Under crosses and altars the emaciated bodies are covered. The sheets have a few to cover; they cover the scars and memories from people that no longer exist.
Every day like a ritual, the volunteers continue their work. They feed, they clean, they medicate. Mostly, they treat bodies from which souls are long gone. They paint death with some vain colors of life. Are we still a person when we depend on other people? Which conduct makes me human if I don’t feel a saviour?
Despite all that, the strength that moves them is tremendous. Repeated gestures, a surgical synchrony and a stifling humility. Mixed feelings. I feel that I’m surrounded by fallen angels from heaven. Angels disguised as wonderful human beings; with an apron or a smock, the Rio Mau’s angels.
I feel small. I wonder if even feeling something makes any sense. This lethargy that consumes me, doesn’t say nothing about me. Tells me that the compassion that I obligate myself to feel ends even before it comes.
The truth is ungrateful. What I see is frightful. The skin no longer exists. A shell, a dried shell, makes each body a cocoon. There is nothing, or anyone that would choose these words to end their stories. Tragedy, is to me, each day that some have the right to live. The irony. The darker side of humanity. I feel dirty, surronded by all this images, they make me feel away from the human being that I am. I can’t feel anything else.
Each room looks like a tombstone and each visit has the smell of a funeral. I try to analyze the looks, to understand the meaning of each visit. If the bodies could speak they’d ask me to help them to maintain their dignities. To help them to rewrite each epilogue.
Certainties, just one. That in the day that my eyes couldn’t see anymore, my hands couldn’t touch anymore, my feet couldn’t walk anymore and that my body doesn’t suit me anymore, that I’d be allowed to lay on the person that I was before; and that the sleep take me away forever. Because, in the end, what life is to live and what death is to die?