Junta
“The bastard’s dead!” Carla cheered as she threw the paper in front of Otávio. His aged eyes peered up from a book to read the headline.
“Well, I’ll be. Good riddance!” He picked up their coffees before standing and kissing his wife on the cheek, then poured both cups down the sink. “This calls for celebration! Such an occasion deserves real coffee.” He began to rummage through the cupboard, humming a song he had helped compose in his youth.
Carla studied the paper. “Died in his sleep last week, lucky bastard. His son Geraldo’s in charge now.”
“Well, Anselmo always did want a dynasty,” joked Otávio as he pulled a glass jar out of the cupboard, “such a shame he couldn’t live to see his dream a reality.” He spooned two large piles of coffee beans out into the grinder and began to twist it.
“I wouldn’t be so certain. Sending your son to be schooled in America seems like a pretty good way to turn him against your regime. It says here that ‘Geraldo promises reforms against his father’s brutal, undemocratic excesses.’”
Otávio snorted. “Brutal excesses indeed. Ah, we can always trust America to speak against a junta 40 years later.”
Carla went silent again as she continued to read. Otávio resumed his humming as he finished grinding and set the coffee to percolate. Just as he was filling her cup, Carla shouted and stood up.
“Otávio! He’s given a statement about political enemies who sought asylum! He mentions you by name!” She read excitedly: “To those brave fighters who fled the iron fist of my father, we welcome you home as heroes. Any charges against you by my father’s government, spurious or otherwise, have been dropped. I speak to the Carlos Villars, the Otávio Almanzis,” here she stopped and looked at him expectantly before returning from his questioning face to the paper, “the Lélia Guarnieris: come home.” She threw the paper on the table. “Otávio! It’s over!”
He lifted the two cups of coffee above his head to let her hug him and pressed his head against hers for a moment, cradling her sobbing body as best he could.
“Carla,” he said with a smile, “I could hug you better if I could put the coffee down.”
She pulled away, nodding and laughing as she wiped the tears from her eyes. As soon as the cups hit the table she was in his arms, shaking with relief. He held her tightly and smelled her hair mixed with the cooling coffee of his home as the sunlight from the window showed him the red of his eyelids. He kissed the top of her head and spoke softly: “the coffee’s getting cold.”
Carla quickly squeezed him once more before moving back and sitting down. She took a sip from her cup and started to cry once more. “Soon home will be more than just the flavor of coffee.”
Otávio put his cup down and spoke tenderly: “Carla… you don’t really think we’re about to go back?”
The confusion on her face broke his heart. “What do you mean? This is what we’ve been waiting for! Anselmo’s dead, his son’s repealing the worst of his laws—he’s accepted UN peacekeepers into the country. Bengell and his jackals have been arrested and are headed to The Hague as we speak! This is it!”
“You trust him so easily. What, because he went to an American college? Does The Humble succeed The Magnificent?”
“It says he hasn’t taken an epithet; he finds the practice pompous.”
“Pompous, mhm. Does he still call himself ‘Sar?’”
She hesitated. “It’s the inherited title.”
“The title his pig of a father invented.”
“His dead pig of a father. Look, Otávio, I have no love for the son of such a bastard but this is our chance to go home! I don’t know how you’ve managed to turn this into a bad thing.”
Otávio turned away, shaking his head.
She continued: “Do you think I’m being hasty? Forgive me, it’s only the forty years of homesickness. I’m not saying we go right now—I’m not so foolish as to take him at his word right away. But give it a year! See if he follows through! This could be our chance to walk the streets of Olivarero once more! See your sister, see my nieces! Be free in our home!”
“Free,” Otávio scoffed, feeling the word in his mouth for the first time in years. “Free.” He turned around to face her. “We are not free. This ‘Sar Geraldo the Epithetless’ does not give us our freedom! Nobody can give such a thing! Any freedom given out of kindness can be taken out of malice; it cannot be counted on!”
She’d heard the words before, said them and meant them. But now they felt foolish.
“The time for such slogans is four decades passed! Maybe one day our families will be truly free, and they will look back at us now and shudder. But I don’t care! I want to go home!”
Otávio put his hands to his temples like he always did when he was frustrated. “You say this sort of thing because you no longer read. You let emotions cloud your knowledge of the struggle. You are not at home where you are not free!”
“I am not at home anywhere! You have never let us find a new one! I’ve lived in this tiny apartment for thirty-four years and it has never once been my home! When I first met you, you talked of raising our children as revolutionaries, but you’ve never wanted to raise children ‘away from home!’” She threw her hands to her temples to mock him as she said this. “And now we are old. Too old to have kids, too old to even adopt in good conscience! And I was fine with it—I’m still fine with it! I regret it but it was my choice as well as yours. But finally, there might be a chance to feel home somewhere other than each other’s arms and you won’t take it!”
He began to speak in a tone she hadn’t heard in years, fiery and young: “It’s not freedom if it’s a gift! Freedom is fought for, died for!”
“I heard you the first time! But who will be fighting, who will be dying? You?” She poked him in his soft bicep. “You’re not a fighter anymore, neither of us are! Last year you couldn’t leave bed for a week because you threw out your back from sneezing too hard! The fight is over for us; the battle faded into the background of the world thirty years ago. Nobody’s even noticed that the white noise of our struggle has finally stopped—Anselmo’s death wasn’t even front page news!”
“That’s because our struggle hasn’t stopped! Another Sar has taken up the throne of his father and made some concessions so that Europe and America won’t guiltily feel the need to put tariffs on our exports! What a change for the common man!”
“It's something!” she immediately became aware of how loud she had become and began to speak in a slow, controlled tone, “it’s something. But this something is all we’ll ever live to see.”
He looked at her through a thin film of tears, spoke through his trembling mouth: “So that’s it? Forty years and you have no faith left in the struggle?”
“Not our struggle, no. Maybe our nieces and nephews will fight their own. I hope they do. But we’d need to see them first to tell, wouldn’t we?” Carla reached for his hand, which he quickly pulled away. For the first time in their forty-two years together, he looked very small to her.
She stood for a moment, uncertain of what to do. Eventually it became clear that he would say no more, so she poured the rest of her coffee down the sink as she spoke to him.
“As I said, I’ll give it a year, see if he really means it. I’m not a fool.”
Still, he gave no response.
“And if he holds to his word, if he isn’t overthrown by some rogue cancelador, I’m going home. I’m going to see my family, I’m going to see your family, and I’ll walk the streets of Olivarero as free as I’ll ever be. And I hope you’ll be there with me.”
Otávio made a move as if to speak, but said nothing. Carla moved towards the door.
“I’m going to go for a walk. I’ll probably be back late.”
And with that she left.
His coffee had gone cold, and he soon realized that he was finishing it out of habit rather than pleasure. And then he remembered that night when they had to flee so quickly he couldn’t even say goodbye to his mother, the twinkling lights of the city sinking behind the falling plain, Carla’s head on his chest as they lay in the brambles, the circling helicopters soon giving way to the slow wheeling of the stars.

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Pub: 02 Mar 2025 06:22 UTC

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