Dona Zefa

Zefa blesses away the evil eye, brews tea for the feverish and catches babies who decide to be born in the small hours. She tends the ground that was her mother’s — the first past the traveler’s fence, the way anyone must go to reach Seu Benedito’s plateau — and won’t sell it: “a mother’s ground isn’t sold, it’s passed on.” But she trades, and trading, she says, is how things work there: she sends the traveler up the hills for wild rosemary, wild rue and castor leaves, which only grow where the morning sun hits, because her knee no longer gets halfway up the trail. At home she has a prayer niche, a basin and a barrel, which is where remedies get made.

She lives with her grandson Cosme, whom she has raised since he was seven, when his mother died. She knows about the job in Salvador before he tells her — in that house, she is the one who reads the letters — and decides not to hold the boy back: her own mother held back her brother, and he died right there, at sixty-two, thinking life would start later. She is of Candomblé, goes to Mass in the morning and to the terreiro at night, and sees no contradiction in it: “the ones who made up that there is were people who came from outside to tell us what we are.” In the 2D she is the one who shows the traveler the three faith markers, without choosing for them.

Faced with the unsigned invitation she is the most suspicious in the village: “whoever invites the whole village and doesn’t sign doesn’t want visitors, son. They want people” — and she tells you to carry salt in your pocket, without explaining. She says the bridge fell because nobody asked the river’s leave when they built it; her father laughed, and he was the one the flood took in seventy-seven. She accepts sweets, never cane: she spends her life stitching up what the cane tears apart.