The Plasticity of Being

A Brazilian freelance journalist confronts the grim reality her past choices created when she covers a community of people living in a landfill and what they must do to survive…

Edilberto Santos takes three plastic bottle caps from the teepee fire in front of him. He crumples their burnt remains together with a spatula, kneading them until they form a semi-solid, charred paste, their blue, red, and green mixing in an uninvited, incomplete rainbow. He whistles a joyful song while waiting for it to cool. I have things to say but I don’t interrupt him. After three minutes, he grabs a cheese grater and starts scraping the paste in it, sprinkling the flecks into a bowl. Finally, he scoops the floury mix with a rusty spoon and eats it. His eyes focus on the camera as he chews it. Some of the flecks catch in between his teeth. It doesn’t bother him. He’s used to it.

I glance down at my pad to escape Edilberto’s gaze. The next question is highlighted on the screen. How does it taste? Did I write those words? What was I thinking? São João da Campânula is not a damn reality show. It’s a landfill and it’s home for about forty families. A knot throbs in my chest as I cross through the question to erase it.

“Are you all right, Dona Elisa?” Edilberto asks. He’s missing a few teeth. His eyes droop over his sallow cheeks. I shrug and force a nod. What does it mean to be all right after seeing a man eating plastic?

I slide a finger over my pad so my cam-drone buzzes away from Edilberto, focusing instead on the trash behind him. A few people trudge through the paths that open like clogged veins amidst the heaps. A kid fetches something from the ground, giggling with a man beside him. A woman enveloped in a broad shawl carries a fat mesh bag. She selects an object in one of the heaps, yanks it out, and peeks at it. It’s a plastic bottle, cracky and sullied with the tan of corrosion. She throws it in her bag.

I open my backpack, pick a sandwich, and hand it to Edilberto. A sandwich. Of all the food I could’ve brought to São João da Campânula, I brought only a few sandwiches. Ham, cheese, butter.

Edilberto eyes the marmita with mild curiosity—a Tupperware box with a dog sticker on its side. He runs a finger over it. It’s the only one I brought from Mamãe’s home when I moved to Goiânia after our silent war started. She had that one since she was a child. She was five when she pasted that poodle there. Over the years, the box had stored a whole assortment of her most delicious food—Bolognese spaghetti, fried cod balls, chocolate pudding with strawberries, and scrambled eggs when she was in a hurry. The last time I tried to visit her, I brought pão de queijo in it. She didn’t touch them. Mamãe loved me for thirty-two years. However, over the past nine years she’s hated me. And she has a good reason for it.

“I’m not hungry right now, but thanks,” Edilberto says. “I can keep it for the others, though. Can I keep the box? It’s cute.”

“Yes, of course.” No hesitation. I don’t understand why. For Mamãe—and for me—it should be an heirloom. Perhaps by getting rid of her marmita, I’d be officially detaching myself from the woman I loved the most in my life. I peer one last time at the barking poodle sticker, its edges frayed and threatening to unstick. “Keep it, yeah…” Those last words falter, but they come out anyway.

Edilberto smiles at me. There’s sweetness in there. Despite the missing teeth, Edilberto doesn’t look like a broken man. Not like I pictured all those people—the plastikeaters, as some having been derogatorily calling them since they were “discovered” by the media. I’d thought of them as sad, gaunt wanderers, aimlessly looking for solace in the landfills near Mairipotaba. In my nightmares, before I fully compromised in writing a story about their lives, they came to me as dolls made of plastic, revenge cooking in their eyes but their hands wilted together in begging.

The aggression of burnt plastic slicks the air. Not only due to the bottle caps that Edilberto burned. It comes from all over the landfill. Here and there, smoky snakes writhe toward the sundown. I skim through the list of questions I didn’t ask Edilberto. How does it taste? Does it hurt to eat plastic? How is your diet? Which types of items do you prefer?

Instead, I look straight into his eyes. There’s a deepness in there, brewed in the sweetness, that I doubt my own eyes possess.

“This smell…” I hesitate, swirling a finger in the air. “It’s—What does it convey to you?” I think of fires, faulty electronics, problems. Of things going wrong.

“Which smell?—Oh! I barely notice it anymore. But it smells like dinner.”

The story of São João da Campânula started with the company called Verdidea.

Once upon a time, Verdidea was the future: the bastion of sustainability and green technology allied with social and environmental responsibility, a powerful Brazilian—then global—force to correct everything that was wrong with the world. And, indeed, they showed what they were all about. In a decade, their projects of reforestation employed millions of micro-drones in the Amazon rainforest, with tech that healed the damaged soil, planted new trees, and rescued animals during fires—all the time learning the patterns of what they were doing, so they could improve themselves over time and avoid catastrophes. In five years, they managed to recover 85 percent of the previously unrecoverable deforested area. Verdidea freed more than eight hundred rivers from industrial waste all around South America; they brought water to the driest parts of the sertão.

Once upon a time, working for Verdidea was the dream job from engineers to lawyers, from botanists to PR specialists like myself.

Verdidea truly wanted the world to become a better place. As long as the world was theirs.

The story of São João da Campânula also started with me. Once, ten years ago, I came as a PR specialist to write part of it. Now, two years after the company’s breakdown, I come as a freelancer journalist to rewrite it the best way I can.

“You can look to the camera,” I say to the woman, pointing to the cam-drone whirring in front of her. Behind her, a dog lolls on a chair underneath her wooden shack’s only window.

“I prefer not to.”

“That’s okay.” I slide a finger on my pad so the drone swivels to the side and avoids focusing on her face. “What’s your name?”

“Ângela.”

She’s a woman in her mid-fifties, brown skin, curly hair falling over her shoulders like waterfalls. She exhales a sweet scent of unnamed flowers, generic enough to fit anywhere, anytime. Next to her shack’s door there’s a cauldron filled with plastic bottles. On it, scrawled in big red letters: Pick yours, leave for others. A repurposed dresser lies next to it with five cheese graters, all shiny and clean, delicately covered with a transparent raincoat.

“Hi, Ângela. My name is Elisa Assunção. I’m a journalist and I’m working on a story about your lives. It aims to bring attention to the authorities and—”

“I know who you are.” I freeze. For a moment I think Ângela knows exactly the role Elisa Assunção played in her very existence. She waves her hand. “Your type always comes here, asking questions, giving us crumbs to nibble. Then you go away. You’re predators, that’s what I say.”

I agree. Brazil was shocked when the news about São João da Campânula broke in the headlines. Plastic-eating people living in landfill. A new kind of poverty sprouts in Goiás. In their prowl for answers—How can they survive? Is it a hoax? Where do they come from?—journalists and authorities came and went to the landfill as explorers, merely digging for stories and opportunities, never fully finding the answers, never providing ways out.

I, on the other hand, have the answers already. I’m part of them, so I come with all of them, not for them. Instead, I come for any shreds of redemption I can find in that place. Like Mamãe used to say, Don’t try to repair your mistakes all at once. Some of them you’ll just have to swallow.

“Ângela, do you have kids?”

“Um-hum.” She glares suspiciously at the cam-drone. I tap the OFF button on my pad and the drone slowly descends to the ground, its propellers shutting off and its LEDs powering down.

“Tell me about them.”

“That’s what you wanna hear? Won’t you talk about plastic? Your type loves to babble about plastic.”

“I just want to hear about your kids.”

First, she gives me what I deserve: silence. Then, she gives me the stories of Mariana, Rogério, Adenilson, and Cleiton, of how they walk fifty minutes to school every day. She tells me how they find toys in the landfill and how she has to carefully select what isn’t dangerous for them. She tells me how she loves a man called Jango, who lives in a shack in the eastern border of the landfill, of how she found brand-new canvas sneakers just lying around, green and yellow with black stripes, perfectly fitting on her feet. The only thing I type on my pad is the cornmeal cake recipe she dictates to me, which she only prepared twice in her life because she never has the ingredients.

In the end, she tells me she’s grateful for that “Verde-something company” because her kids never learned what it meant to starve.

The enzyme was a breakthrough. It took only one year to go from plastic-gobbling bacteria to plastic-digesting isopods. Verdidea’s name stamped every front page around the world. The Great Pacific garbage patch was being exorcised from its plastic by isopods at a rate never before imagined. Microbes carrying the enzyme were spread throughout landfills in Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia. It brought awareness and funding for bioplastics research, decreasing its costs of production. The video of a girl snickering and lowering a plastic soda bottle into a pool of isopods went viral for months.

When Mamãe saw the news, she was washing a plastic bowl. She guffawed, then widened her eyes.

“Perhaps I should replace it for something else.” She raised the bowl. “Lisa, do you have something to do with that, with all those great things your employer is doing?”

I laughed at her curiosity. But yes, I had something to do with Verdidea’s rise to fame. As their main PR specialist, I knew exactly what to sweep beneath the carpet: embezzlement schemes, tax evasion, greenwashing, and all scandals that involved Jandir and Vando Batista, brothers and CEOs of Verdidea. It was all justified, given the nature of Verdidea’s noble undertaking. At that moment, laughing with Mamãe in the kitchen, feeling cozy and accomplished, I had yet to fuck a lot of lives.

On the fifth day of my trip to São João da Campânula, I have only a recipe written down and less than twenty minutes of video footage. At night, I choose to walk around the landfill’s paths—its veins—with my pad and my cam-drone turned off in my backpack. This time, I don’t bring sandwiches.

I trudge, observing the flocks of people coming and going from the shacks that surround the landfill. A trio of men jab small items from the ground with hook sticks. A few steps behind them, two kids argue about the true color of the moon. One of them believes it’s as strikingly white as unspoiled milk. The other one says it’s tawny like the pages of the books in his mother’s chest. In the sky, silky clouds strive to hide the secrets of the moon.

On a heap of trash, an old woman with a hunched back fidgets with litter, a statue against the nightly hues. She wears fruit baskets as shoes and gloves to pick up what she deems useful. I wave at her, experimenting with a smile even knowing it hardly fits. She frowns at me but doesn’t wave back. A few meters ahead, six people gather around a grill, two of them sambaing to the erratic sounds of a broken pandeiro. The others laugh and talk loudly about a soccer game, pointing at each other, gesticulating. The stench that glues to the air, sweating from the grill, is the one I’m growing used to. Perhaps it means home to them. It smells like dinner. When I arrived home late from college, the aroma of Mamãe’s beans cooked with garlic and paprika pervaded the apartment. That scent was like a tight, warm embrace, even though I eventually chose to abandon it to chase illusions.

“Moça!” I pivot to face a boy sticking his foot into a pile of trash. He gives out a muffled cry but doesn’t really care about it. He stretches his arm to reach something. “You’re tall. Can you pick that lunchbox for me?” His voice is jumbled. He’s chewing bubble gum.

“Of course.” I walk to the pile of trash and fetch the lunchbox for him. It’s stylized with the drawing of a fading funny robot. One of its edges is dented. A bug skitters out of a tiny hole on its side. I shoo it away. “Is it for school?”

The boy shakes his head. He’s about eight years old, shirtless, soot daubing his cheeks like tribal marks. Dollops of dried blood swell from his lips. Not bubble gum. He’s chewing a piece of plastic casing for wires. I hand the lunchbox to him, mouth agape. They rarely eat raw plastic. It hurts the mouth, pharynx, and esophagus. That’s why they partially melt it, work it into a paste, then grate it. Verdidea’s directors spoke of plans for easing the process of eating plastic, mainly in the upper digestive system, from the mouth to the stomach. They went bankrupt without ever outlining those plans.

The boy opens the lunchbox and shakes it to clean it from dirt.

“Are you the journalist?” he asks, wiping the funny robot that grins at us with its coiling arms wide open as if looking for a hug.

“Yes. My name is Elisa.”

The boy spits half the casing from his mouth and swallows the rest. I gulp at it, wanting to look away. If it were weeks ago, I’d probably retch at the sight. But now I know it’s part of my story. I don’t want to avoid it.

“My maninha says she likes you. She met you ten years ago.”

My heart misses a beat. I gape at the boy. I don’t need to ask who his sister is. Francisca da Conceição, the person I gave to Verdidea as a corporate offering.

When would Verdidea put a base on the moon like the other billionaires were doing at a rapid pace? Questions like that whirled on the news all the time, but it never made Jandir and Vando Batista’s eyes shine. Their next big project was thankfully rooted on Earth: ending world hunger. For that, they had to choose between two paths: solving what prevented food from arriving at everyone’s tables or devising new feeding solutions. The former involved politics and tackling the core of the economic system itself, from which they greatly benefited, so they left it aside. The latter was what motivated them.

The plastic-breaking enzyme working in mammals was Verdidea’s secret—forbidden—breakthrough. After the plastic was digested into monomers, very specific bacteria carried its constituent parts through the digestive system. Grouped with other microbes artificially inserted into someone’s microbiota, those monomers could be converted into carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, and other nutrients. It was a giant leap from what Verdidea had been using in isopods for three years. (And by the way, the Great Pacific garbage patch had shrunken 25 percent since the crustaceans were employed there. Headlines flashed that Verdidea was the company that should run the world.)

With the enzyme-bacteria system working in humans, no one would need to starve anymore. Virtually anything around people could be easily turned into food. Plastic was ubiquitous in cities. The food supply chain would be disrupted. Transport, distribution, aggregation, and processing might all be rendered secondary and, with a whole assortment of new processes, different textures and tastes could be acquired. Feeding people would be a decentralized process without lots of points of failure. Costs would plummet. It would all become excruciatingly cheaper than producing any kind of food, and with the way Verdidea planned to employ its enzyme-bacteria system, eating plastic could also prove to be healthier than eating ultra-processed food. Not only would famine end, but people would have quality nutrition all around the world. The abrasive and obnoxious stench of burnt plastic that would pester the cities could be solved soon after. Verdidea was certain they could do anything. I was certain I could make the world believe in that.

Mamãe and I had gone through rough patches when I was a kid. Mamãe had to work overnight as a prostitute to take care of me during the day, and on weekends she got temporary gigs as a window cleaner so we had food on our table. So more than a meaningful job, Verdidea’s project became personal to me.

The next step came when the process worked successfully on mice, then monkeys. So they needed volunteers. I never fooled myself about what that word meant for them.

There were poor communities near Mairipotaba comprising displaced people from Goiânia’s massive gentrification. They were jobless, many of them starving, not a few resorting to landfills to find food and junk to sell at paltry values. It was near those communities that Verdidea decided to build a new headquarters. It was me who wrote articles and called press conferences to convince Verdidea’s shareholders that it was a good idea. I worked day and night to fabricate the vision of Verdidea sinking its roots in the middle of Brazil and making them sprout deep and wide, bringing progress everywhere they touched, so when it came to the public it would all be beautifully justified. All in the name of ending world hunger. Meanwhile, Verdidea’s lawyers scoured the law for loopholes that would allow them to start experimenting on humans—and, as I later found out, Verdidea deceived the ethics committee responsible for the project, presenting to them an entirely different set of parameters.

In a one-hour speech, I convinced Verdidea’s shareholders that it was a good idea to make São João’s citizens eat trash. Three months later, they applauded me and green-lighted the project.

The story of Francisca da Conceição started when I found her lone shack, half a kilometer from São João da Campânula, the widest of the landfills. Her hut was surrounded by shrubs and flanked by a muddied-water stream. When I arrived, the wind plucked fiercely at pants, shirts, and sneakers hanging from a clothesline. Somewhere inside, sertanejo wheezed from shabby speakers. It was the furthest I had the guts to go into the Mairipotaba’s communities, not so far from Verdidea’s new headquarters—next to where I went to live after I left Mamãe and the cozy aromas of her beans with garlic. But most important, it wasn’t within the humiliating heart of São João.

I’d learned through Verdidea’s reports that an eighteen-year-old girl lived in that shack with her mothers and that she stayed alone during most of the day, when her mothers left to scavenge the landfills and hawk in the streets of Goiânia.

Francisca was a thin girl with a protruding belly. When I first saw her, she wore a crop top and jeans so spent they almost surrendered to white. Her shack only had two mattresses, a TV set, and a crooked, doorless wardrobe.

She invited me to sit on two plastic chairs outside and offered me a warm cup of coffee. I accepted.

“Do you eat?” I asked after I explained who I was and where I came from. At that point, I hadn’t been fully clear about my intentions of asking her to be a volunteer. But she certainly knew people like me only went there when they had something to gain.

“I do.” Francisca sipped at her coffee. She was a very shy girl, clearly not used to visits, much less by overdressed women.

“How is it so?” I looked around, indicating that there wasn’t much beyond a makeshift oven and a few supermarket bags lying next to the shack. “Do you make your own food?”

“Sometimes.” She shrugged. “But mostly my moms scavenge things from the landfills then sell them in the city. Then, they come back with some quentinhas. Sometimes it’s rice and chicken, other times just a lettuce salad.”

“Is it always enough for your family?”

The question caught her by surprise. Her gaze lost focus, the cup tight between her fingers, midway to her mouth. After a while, she shook her head. I was pulling the conversation to the point where I wanted, but not without pain. Speaking of hunger when you were not feeling it wasn’t always easy. It seemed unfair because you were sated; but it also filled you with a senseless kind of hope, as if that bellyful moment could linger and maybe, just maybe, you’d never have to be hungry again.

“Sorry about the…sensitive and weird question…” I said. “But if you were hungry right now, would you eat those bags if you were sure they would sate your hunger?”

“Do you mean…” Francisca blushed. “Eating what’s inside them?”

“No. I mean the bags themselves.”

“I would.” No hesitation.

I only remembered two moments of my childhood when I felt really hungry. I never forgot them. Sometimes Mamãe’s work wasn’t enough to feed us—the excruciating drama of many Brazilian families. Inflation corroded her meager wages and there was one occasion when we spent an entire day without having anything to eat. But they were enough for me to remember my own yells echoing throughout the apartment, unaware of the fact that food didn’t magically sprout whenever I wanted. Mamãe silently sobbed in a corner, knowing that even if she worked harder the next day there was no guarantee that there would be food on our table.

“I would too,” I whispered to myself.

It was later that day I offered a magical solution to Francisca. For now, she only had to come with me to Verdidea’s labs and sign some papers. For someone with a hole to fill, she couldn’t say no.

Today, Francisca doesn’t live in a shack anymore. She lives in the middle of São João da Campânula, in a house with its bricks exposed and a corrugated iron roof. Clothes hang from the clothesline tied to two poles outside her house. The wind that buffets at them now carries the landfill’s polymeric stench. From somewhere nearby, samba shackles the evening, scratching the air with streaks of happiness, threatening to extinguish the smell by the sheer pressure of joy.

I wait for Francisca, staring at her closed door, snapping my fingers and trying to control my breathing. A man walks by carrying a bag of plastic bottles on his shoulder. He nods at me. Behind the set of houses that clutter that part of the landfill, the old woman with a hunched back kneels on a mound of trash. Or perhaps it’s another woman wearing fruit baskets as shoes, another shadow against the moon-paling backwash of the night. Behind her, beyond the warts of junk that pockmark São João, I see the imposing and abandoned headquarters of Verdidea—all that remains of the company that vowed to heal the world. A chill runs along my back when I remember all the nights I spent in that place, a haunted palace built on unstable stocks and the lives of the destitute.

“Are you okay, Elisa?” The voice startles me. It’s still the same but with a quality of roughness to it.

Francisca isn’t as slim as ten years ago, but the same curious half-smile shapes her lips, except her shyness seems to have melted away in the same humble kind of sweetness I saw in Edilberto’s eyes. I shiver from head to toe when I shake her hand. I expect a slap, a reprimand; any sort of revenge for having transformed her and those around her into garbage eaters. None of that happens. After all this time, I have only one question for Francisca, and not one of those noted in my pad—How does it taste? Does it hurt to eat plastic? How is your diet? The one I have for her is different, and one that applies to her and to myself: Was it worth it?

Like the coward I am, I don’t ask it.

“We’ll have dinner tomorrow for my brother’s birthday,” she says. “Do you want to come?”

“I do,” I say as fast as I gave away Mamãe’s Tupperware.

I’m sorry for what I did to you, the words quiver on my lips. I don’t say them.

Don’t try to repair your mistakes all at once. Some of them you’ll just have to swallow.

“Thank you for the invitation,” I say instead, gulping.

“I made dinner for you.” Mamãe was dry and brief when she called me one week after I told her about Verdidea’s plans with the enzyme. It happened a month after meeting Francisca for the first time and having her enlisted as a volunteer. “Can you come home earlier today?”

“Yes, Mamãe,” I said to my pad on the table while I slid my fingers through the volunteers’ profiles on the big screen at my office. Francisca was a go. There were five others, including one of her mothers, that were inclined to accept Verdidea’s offer as well. Volunteers would be provided with temporary housing and five months’ worth of the current minimum wages. But the big prize lay at the end of the road: they’d never have the risk of starving.

“Are you listening?” Mamãe’s grave voice shook me up. I rubbed my forehead.

“What?”

She sighed very slowly, which came out as an uncomfortable hiss through the pad’s speakers. “I asked you not to eat anything. I prepared something special.”

And when I went home, I found out what it meant.

On our dinner table, there was only one Pyrex dish at the center with an oozing black pudding that looked like charred cloth and smelled like burnt popcorn.

“Overcooked?” I said, kissing Mamãe’s forehead as I laid my backpack on the floor. She didn’t kiss mine back as usual.

“No,” she said. “Have your seat and let’s have dinner.”

I frowned at her. “But what’s that?”

“Our dinner.”

“Is it…overcooked mashed potatoes? Seriously—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Her eyes didn’t lock onto mine. “It won’t leave you hungry.”

I saw where she was heading and closed my eyes. When I told her about the new project in Mairipotaba, I said I’d probably have to spend some time in Goiânia. She didn’t take it lightly. She closed herself and spoke curtly with me in the following days. Up to that point, I’d thought it was because I was going to spend time away from her. I understood. I was all she had, so it was natural that she’d miss me. But there was something else.

“Mamãe…”

She pulled the chair. It scratched on the floorboard. I flinched while she sat.

“Mamãe, stop. You don’t need to eat that.”

She shrugged, scooping the black pudding and putting it on her plate.

“That’s what we have, isn’t it?” she said.

I pulled the other chair and sat beside her, seeking her eyes with mine, finding nothing but pain and evasion.

“The project with the enzyme is an option so no one will need to starve ever again.”

“The kid that I raised, the one that praised my soft pão de queijo”—her voice came out grated, her teeth chattering—“the one who was all yummy-yummy at my feijoada, would never want to see people eating garbage.”

“It’s not garbage, Mamãe! Don’t you understand? It’s the solution for a problem that has existed for thousands of years.” But those words tasted sour on my mouth. Those were the words of Elisa Assunção, PR Manager at Verdidea, disinterred out of a presentation to shareholders, not those of Elisa Assunção, daughter of Maíra Assunção, raised amongst the whiffs of motherly feijoada.

“It’s no solution, girl. It’s just the same problem with a different painting. They won’t give people options with dignity. They’re giving them what they always did: the leftovers. Eating is not only satiating your hunger. It’s a process that carries dignity. If you think it just serves to satiate your hunger, then eat the fucking dinner I prepared.”

“Mamãe, I can show you the documents.” I reached for her hand, but she recoiled, her mouth a thin waning moon. I wanted to talk about the documents because I didn’t want to find the truth in her words. “They’re classified, but I have access to them and I trust you. You’ll learn what this is really about. There’s a report that—”

“If you keep insisting that a poor boy should eat that fucking bottle…” She pointed to a soda bottle lying next to the bin in the kitchen. “Then don’t come back here.”

Mamãe took a mouthful of the black pudding.

In the humiliating heart of São João da Campânula, we dine.

There are about twenty people scattered on seven plastic tables around Francisca’s house, all partaking of the beer and food I brought—feijoada, pequi rice, galinhada, and green corn mush. I wish Mamãe were there too, joyfully saying how she’d change each of those recipes, how she’d sprinkle coriander in this one and nutmeg in that one.

I sit at a table with three other people, but I remain silent, just smiling at everyone who dares to look at me.

The song “O Show Tem Que Continuar” blasts from two big speakers strategically positioned on each side of the field. We’ll find the tone, a chord with a beautiful sound, and make our voices good; then we’ll be happy. Children play with a hose, frightening the heat away. Night has fallen but the sky is still daubed in the summer’s blue dyes.

Ângela is there with Mariana, Rogério, Adenilson, and Cleiton. She wears her cool sneakers and kisses her man Jango’s cheek. The hunched-back woman is there. She sings loudly. Then we’ll be happy; look, we’re on air again; the show must go on. Edilberto is there too, picking at something he brought in Mamãe’s Tupperware. He smiles as he stares at his friends—his family—chatting and singing and drinking and eating. When our gazes meet, he winks at me. He’s eating melted plastic bottle caps. It’s home to him.

“So, you came to write a story about us?” Francisca puts a hand on my shoulder. She has her other arm wrapped around her brother.

“I—Yes, I did.”

“And how is it?” Francisca picks a chair beside me and sits. I nod at a glass of beer, but she shakes her head.

I grin at her. “I’ll start over.”

“Why?”

“It’s just—My mind was elsewhere. I think it needs a complete overhaul.”

I don’t want them to become aberrations and exotic curiosities in the eyes of the public. I want them to be who they are: people. I want to write about the families living in São João da Campânula—about Mariana, Rogério, Adenilson, and Cleiton’s daily journey to school; about the samba of their evenings.

I have other questions to ask them. How was your day? What’s something you created recently? What makes you laugh? Who makes you laugh? Others will come to write about plastic. I’ll leave that to them.

“Francisca, let me ask you something.” I dare to put a hand over hers.

“Of course.”

“Was it worth it?”

She stares at me for a while like she did when I first asked her if her food was enough. “Was it worth it digging trash after food and things to sell? Was it worth it to beg in the streets? When something isn’t an option we don’t ask if it’s worth it.”

The “famine issue,” as the Batista brothers called it—as if it was just a minor inconvenience like forgetting a sandwich on a grill—was never only a question of actually eradicating famine. Since they never addressed poverty or housing, eating plastic became a symbol of desperation and lack of options, not of hope and progress. People in the landfills already picked their food from the trash. That wouldn’t change.

I wish I could say I was the one responsible for fracturing Verdidea’s business. I wasn’t. Their stocks plummeted when they abandoned the Amazon rainforest project, then again when I couldn’t shield them from the scandals—unknown up to then—involving several of the Batistas’ other companies that employed forced labor. I was horrified, but I chose to believe they didn’t know and that they could correct their mistakes. I still had my hopes high that they could address many of the world issues, including famine, food quality and distribution, housing, and poverty. It was only a setback. They were the solution. It was a selfish, self-destructive behavior. How could I have dedicated fifteen years of my life to them if they couldn’t achieve those goals? Was I merely industrial waste along with all the other workers being steadily laid off? In my desperation, I even tried to push an article defending Verdidea’s views. But not even the Batistas believed in the company anymore.

The final strike came when the people living in the Mairipotaba’s landfills were exposed as the plastikeaters. It was when I learned Verdidea was already genetically altering São João da Campânula’s dwellers to make their bodies produce the enzyme-bacteria system in their digestive tract. I thought I’d be informed when it happened. I’d thought I’d see the results, the smiles of people with enough sustenance to survive. Verdidea’s directors didn’t show me anything, perhaps because they knew I was only sustained by an illusion.

In the end, what toppled me was the front page of O Globo showing a blind old man with plastic cotton swabs on his tongue. It was then that I couldn’t take it anymore.

Mamãe used to say we shouldn’t blindly pursue our dreams. Sometimes it was okay to put them aside for a while or to abandon them altogether. Our dreams are the fabric of who we are, Lisa, but we’re changing all the time, re-sewing ourselves.

Nine years after leaving home, I knock on the door of the only woman capable of helping me sweep my dusty dreams from beneath my feet.

“Mamãe?” I stammer as an old woman opens the door. There’s deepness in her eyes, a mix of sadness and longing that brews into a bittersweet gaze when she sees me crying. “I brought cornmeal cake for us.”

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