In the Serra the sun doesn’t bleach the land, only paint and fabric. It’s a shock of rich green pooling in your vision like blood against a blinding sky.
At the peak you see the entire world unfolding far below the bottom of your feet, an infinite expanse of mottled grays buried in mist and distance.
The landscape is an unknown, last walked on god-knows how long ago by immigrants conscripted to mark the frontier. Stained by god-knows how much blood spilled in the desperate search for the new, in escaping the old worlds and old lives. Salted by the sweat of long-dead horses and cattle.
I have a minuscule amount of Mapuche blood and a larger amount of gaucho blood of countless mixed descendências. I never learned my own history. I have the blood of the soldiers of the Farroupilha Revolt and blood that died for Getúlio Vargas and blood of desperate hungry people with heavy bodies and heavier hearts.
And now I live under a different blue sky on the other side of the world. With gnarled dying oaks and pink garlic and tea trees. If the Serra is the top of the world then this is the bottom, where mangrove trees and brown water break against a dying gulf and white sand.
Despite the warmth, my body still runs cold, thinking the sky is the same blue as before. The palmettos close in, cradling me with their serrated leaves. Spanish moss knits itself into blankets around me. It’s quieter without the wind; slowly, the scrub jays fade, and slowly the ospreys disappear. Home is under two blue skies, on opposite sides of the world.
