THREE COPPER RINGS

Leave the blanket where it was, said Ilva. The man held the fold against his chest. If they come to count sleeping places, the house loses the selection. The afternoon heat filled the kitchen up to the height of a mouth. Above that, the ducts bolted to the taipa carried refrigerated air to the service cabinet. The grille Renan had installed held back the larger ants, but the small ones crossed the rust and collected the three grains fallen from the sieve. One of them carried the biggest to the gutter, lost it in the crack and went back to fetch another. The blanket covered the empty bag near the corridor. Unfolded, it made a narrow bed. He folded it again. Antônio told us to stay, said Ilva. He told us not to leave. That's different. He waited for her to finish. The sentence stayed between the two of them, beside the covered portion drying under the upturned bowl. Ilva crouched in front of the bar's oldest bench and pulled out a plastic box whose lid had sunk in the middle. Inside was a loosely woven fabric, stiffened by dust and grease. One side still had three copper rings. The other ended in broken threads. Nael raised his head when he saw the piece. That had been the net on the first window of the guesthouse, when Antônio still let his son sleep in the back room. After the boy left for the capital, the net served to sift corn husks, cover the broken refrigerator and protect the pans during a season of beetles. That piece was what was left. The man opened the fabric on the table. In the centre, a darker area outlined the size of a child's head. He passed his hand near the mark without touching it. It could make a bag, he said. It could close off the corridor, answered Nael. Both uses fitted in the same weave. One would let the man gather the shirt, the blanket and the little he had brought. The other would create, in front of the kitchen, a visible separation, a place where he could sleep without blocking the way. Nael held one ring, judged the corrosion and let it go. He did not choose for them. He went out to the yard with the portion of farinha in his hand. Through the window, the Cerrado appeared at three heights of loss. The grass by the tank still kept a few green blades. Then came the brown band where the pequi seedling had dried. Further off, the dust from the mine covered the low leaves with a grey skin, and the trees that remained broke the horizon at wider intervals than the summer before. The mineral torn out of there would go into magnets for machines that had not even been installed yet. The thirst had arrived before them. Ilva stretched the fabric between two supports in the corridor. It was almost two hands short of the wall. The man took out the strip he kept rolled at the bottom of his bag, the same strip brought from his mother's house, and measured the missing length. If you cut it, it doesn't come back, she said. It already doesn't. He set aside the least worn part of the strip and threaded it through the copper rings. There was no blade at hand. He used the rough edge of the ring itself, pulling the fabric back and forth until the threads gave. It took time. Sweat fell on the table and opened two circles in the dust. When he finished, he tied the net to the corridor support. The old window screen became a partition. Behind it fitted the bag, the blanket and a body lying with its legs drawn up. From the kitchen, only the shadow of the objects could be seen. The tracking cameras on the facade adjusted their focus when the fabric moved. No notification appeared. The house, however, had stopped offering an empty space to the installers. There's room for the two of us, he said. The strip was yours. Antônio can tell us to take it down. He can. And you. Ilva picked up from the floor the end left over from the net. It was too small to cover a bowl and wide enough to wrap the strip on her hand. She folded it once and placed it beside the blanket. The man took the washed bowl behind the partition. Then he came back and brought the others, one by one, leaving Antônio's in its place. His stayed between Ilva's and Nael's, without a hand's width between them. In the yard, the earth where the pequi had died opened a thin crack. Inside it, a dry root remained attached to a grain of dark clay.