1000 Words: Portinari's "Os Retirantes"

Prose to the Painting

Candido Portinari’s “Os Retirantes”

From the plains of the Nordeste, scabbed skin and weaving the land, cotton-mouthed dry, weary, under the moon-sun suspended in aquamarine blue, Os Retirantes gaze upon your viewing with blasted eyes, crooked limbs, pierced lips, in muted, delirious agony. One mother clutches her lifeless child, bare bones exposed, naked, sliced from sandy wind, her pink dress is not flowing. No, never flowing, but garbled, heavy, stained, soiled with blood and secretions of the unknown, unthinkable.

Grandfather, eyes ablaze, asymmetrical, holds a walking stick–too straight and narrow for a tree branch, but a natural limb either borrowed from a decrepit fence post or the early studded basing of an abandoned domicile. His teeth, not shown, are crooked, anyhow. Shirtless, his body hair of the arms and fingers are crisp, knife-like, bush-like, thorny and wiry.
His body so taken by time and weather, circumstance and nature, his skin appears muscular, strained, as if he has taken the deepest breath known to man and with a tightening and then cacophonic pop, he has skinned himself.

A pack of limitless crows dart and dance and glide the fading sky. They eclipse all things that resemble death. Mountain tops, hatred, doom, the carcasses of the forgotten. Also, things which are alive. Especially those things that are alive. What they want is death. Sweet and recent, plentiful. It is no wonder some poet referred to them as a “murder”. They touch the edges of the stars inside their formless flying. Four of them appear to hold up the moon, each lending a solitary wing.

The tallest figure, made so by the humongous weight and heft of her cargo–cotton clothes, emblems and tapestries of the homeland, towers over the image and desperately wants to break free from the canvas. She clutches the cargo with the grip of an eagle’s talon. Her child, rests in her arms snugly, organically, as if it were a loaf of bread. How, in some moments, they all wished it were. In fact, if anyone of them could be eaten, it would surely make a day easier. The child is too young; her fate and the dilapidated state of affairs is unknown to her. She locks eyes with her baby sister, naked and malnourished. She wears a faint smirk. She smiles earnestly. It is the truest smile. Because there can be no smile from her based on imitation. For who could she imitate a smile from? Perhaps the crows. Only the crows.

The mother holding her wears a crimson sweater, the color of cinema blood. Her forearm, strengthened but strained, is trained on the shucking of corn, the sweeping of debris, the pulling of herbs of the earth. Her hands are manly, her hair is black, knotted, speckled with clay, iron, lice. It is matted too harshly to flow. Her eyes locked in on the future. She looks away, mouth agape, seeing that future, she is horrified. Her life has been one long gasping glimpse into the harsh, famine future.

The father, with his straw hat, his stick-and-cargo, pleads endlessly. It is not an innocent plea. It is plagued, saturated, dense with guilt. He knows it could not have been his fault. He knows he cannot control the land, the produce, the crops, the political firestorm. Yet, he senses disastrous, damning, guilt. Whatever may come his way, whatever lowly crust of bread, whatever poor pour of coffee, whatever bandage, sandal or meal his family will share will be one of a stranger’s true charity. What a position for five children, one of them half starved. The others a quarter starved. What a position for two elder’s, his wife. What a position for himself. His knees ache and are bleeding from kneeling on the rocks in prayer. His boney, muscular feet are calloused and fierce. Strong but also weakening. His god has not yet answered. But there is always tomorrow. The band of his hat produces one long lashing against his throat, up to the ears. His long hands, stretched out, brick by brick, grasp all they can possibly hold. Every vein is strained, every limb crooked, bruised. His ankles, defined by black strokes which are loops, are busted, swollen beyond immediate repair. He grips his child. His eyeless child.

His third born: he wears a green poncho and nothing else. Knitted for himself and his sister, he is expressionless, caught in between the monumental despair of his older family members, and this, his terrified vision of the young. In between, he is isolated in his monumental lack of instinct. All trust of this world may be blasted away. Time will tell. He has it in him. The snapshot does him little justice.

The firstborns stick together, for they have forged trust and strength among themselves. Their own bond is truer and more absolute than even the father and mother. They share blood and a time without the newborns. They learned, years ago, they can rely on each other. But this reliance is not set in stone. It is fortified, but incomplete. They cling to the father, who to them, still represents the maker of decisions. The one, wearing a checkerboard patterned shirt that is ill-fitted, shrunken to the size of a washrag is simply waiting. Waiting for the moment of civilization. What he yearns for, in his eyes, his head cocked in expectation, is civility. Then and only then will his genitalia be properly covered. It will be then that he can stroll the earth and the land less timid, less exposed and vulnerable.

Huddled in their pitiful mass for warmth or comfort, for solidarity or shield, they are pleading with their homeland in Brasil. They wish for the sun to shine as it should. For the rain to work its wet magic. For a crop plentiful. Where work could be done, proper meals could be splayed out royally, where children grin ceaselessly, and the joints and bones can rest without fear. That is the only direction that has any meaning.

JSV

2024

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