And that a kelson of creation is love.

“Que estranho!¹” I remember I stopped Madrinha’s reading. I was what, five? Six years old?

Madrinha stopped the recording with a weary sigh, and fear and guilt almost had me running at once. “It’s actually a keelson; the poet used another spelling, in this case.” Her accent made it all look delicate, like the filtered cold air around us. “A keelson is a beam that keeps a ship steady. Perhaps if I showed you a picture, it’d be clearer?”

No, it wouldn’t. Ships glide in large bodies of water, and “a large body of water” was one heck of an abstract concept, considering there’s nothing out there but alizarin dust covering firmament and floor, mountains and then more dust from the plains behind the mountains.

And yet, there had been ships, once, the way there had been oceans once. Those long-lost ships had a keelson to keep them steady. And because of that fact, Madrinha tried to locate the information for me, her recording long forgotten.

Recording books for the populations both here and beyond the mountains, and retrieving information for students and other curious campers were her official duties at the compound. Taking care of me was extra.

In all honesty (and why else would I be writing this if not out of honesty?), I didn’t think I was missing out on anything, back then. Madrinha never looked at me with the joy she looked at her previous books, but she read me all the poems I could wish for, even if I didn’t understand the words. What if she looked at me as if I was a lost cause? I was only five or six years old—I didn’t know there had been once a cause, let alone that I lost it.
 

---

 
Não tive filhos, não transmiti a nenhuma criatura o legado da nossa miséria.²

I was ten years old, reading out loud in my mother’s native language for the first time. It was as beautiful as it was nerve-wracking—though at the moment it happened, all I had was the pain and not the beauty. “Could you please, please translate that last part?” I asked Madrinha. “I don’t think I got it …”

“No, you’ll learn how to read it the way the author wrote it. You’ll read it again and again until you understand it. This is your inheritance.”

An inheritance as useless as a keelson, I pondered. My mother spoke Portuguese, yes. But she had been gone for years at that point, and I didn’t remember her voice any longer. And as for my father … The fact that he could be next door, unable or unwilling to acknowledge me … Well, what can I say? The word that described the loneliness I felt didn’t exist in Madrinha’s pristine archives—believe me, I looked.

Night after night, Madrinha would transmit those stories over the wireless, and people would stop to hear it even when they didn’t understand a word. Therefore, the inhabitants of that rot and rust world had Brás Cubas in its original state, transmitted to whoever possessed the knowledge of the language.

Someone had to do that job—because miséria³ wasn't quite the same thing as misery. Because words had power even in our lonesome station, so far from the world Brás Cubas had once lived. Words are exacting and sharp: what you cannot name, you cannot explain; what you cannot explain, you cannot allow living.

That night was the first time I noticed how difficult Madrinha’s position was. She made it all look like a treasure hunt, pulling documents from the shelves and the boxes, making the texts sing as she spoke them up over the microphone, but the proper job was going on inside her head. She committed the stories to her head and made sure that they would survive should we need to demob to yet another asteroid.

Because of that, there was I, ten years old, being forced to read Brás Cubas out loud every two days for Madrinha, having every syllable tinkered and analysed down to the last phoneme.

It was my inheritance.

She should have used the word training. I would have understood it better.

Brás Cubas and his rhinoceros travelling through the wild prairies of the past were useless in case of an invasion or a deadly sandstorm outside—but perhaps, if I read it just one more time, it’d be mine, and perhaps the possession would make me understand who I was.
 

---

 
L’année 1866 fut marquée par un événement bizarre, un phénomène inexpliqué et inexplicable que personne n’a sans doute oublié.⁴

And then I yawned. The sound still echoes in this room, the way Madrinha’s answer still stings in my memory. “What’s the matter, my dear? Is it too hard for you?”

“No, I’m just … I’m just tired, that’s all,” I replied.

“Tired” wasn’t the right word. “Drained” fit the description better. I was fifteen, small and clumsy; I knew I couldn’t stand long period of vigil; I knew I didn’t want to be a soldier when I came of age, and the instructors weren’t that desperate as to use a short, brittle-boned mite in their rickety defense trenches outside the compound. So why did I think it was a good idea to try that job for size?

“You try too hard to impress people that don’t even like you all that much,” Madrinha’s disappointment chafed me more than the borrowed clothes my colleagues made me wear for the night of vigil in the parapets, laughing all the while at the mischief they were committing.

I knew I’d be the butt of the joke, and yet I went to them willingly. I knew they didn’t like me, and yet I tried to shut them up, the way I tried to defend myself from the thorns in Madrinha’s voice. “I’m not trying to …”

“Please. I was your age, once. Nobody writes songs about the librarians, now, do they?” She shrugged as she took the book from my hands. “We’ll get to Captain Nemo in another opportunity. Let us try something less taxing for your brain.”

I didn’t reply—I wish I could say it was because she had shamed me into silence, because I repented deeply and regretted causing her pain.

The fact is that I didn’t reply because I was fast asleep by the time she returned with another book.

I only managed to get through Captain Nemo’s story months after, and it took me a good chunk of time to finish it—because Madrinha thought that, since I was old enough to be parading in the parapets, I was old enough to read on my own, while she toiled away fixing her microphone so that the broadcasts could go on.

Looking back, it felt I took longer to read than I actually did. Then again, time is relative.

Time is relative and so were we all—living our days and nights by decree, because there isn’t a sunrise or a sunset outside. We wait for hours for sandstorms that seem to last only a minute (enough to cause havoc to our life-systems, though). At least the concept of time in the stories in the archive made some sense—they had days and nights, and months, and years.

And what did I have?

The files were wonderful, but files wouldn’t hug me; the words I learned communicated nothing. I was talking and talking, and who was listening? At least the soldiers talked to one another, if only so they’d know what they’d shoot.
 

---

 
She’s not any common earth / water or wood or air / But Merlyn’s Isle of Gramarye / where you and I will fare.

“Madrinha, do I look like my mother?”

She didn’t take her eyes off her book as she answered, miffed at the interruption, “A little, yes. Your eyes are like hers. Your skin colour, too. Why are you asking?”

Oh, rest assured, she knew why I am asking. She had seen me with that lad.

I was eighteen and he was nineteen. There’s no such thing as seclusion or secrecy in this station, and the fact he wasn’t afraid to be seen with me—the poor her who lived in the archives—meant the world to me back then. He didn’t chase me as if I was a pretty object to be conquered; then again, he also didn’t take me as if I was what was left after the scramble for mating partners. He courted me as if I was someone, full stop.

He was someone I could talk to.

But if that went on the way it looked like it would, soon we’d have to talk about bloodlines. I felt like Wart in the book Madrinha was broadcasting that night: a fatherless, motherless creature who doesn’t know where to turn to for solace. So what if Wart’s blood destined him to greatness? The memory of his life as a barely tolerated baggage must have stung even after he became the leader.

“We’re related to everyone else in here,” Madrinha shrugged. “Is that what you are afraid of? That this man might be too close in the family tree?”

“I’m afraid I’ll end up like my mother, that’s what I’m afraid of!” I didn’t want to beget another burden for someone else to pick up, that was I what I wanted to say. Because men flee, people turn their backs, and Madrinha wouldn’t live forever. But the words failed me, and my heart sank, and suddenly I didn’t feel like talking anymore.

Looking back, perhaps she should have insisted. It would have been better to talk about it, difficult though it was—wasn’t that the reason words had been invented?

But she picked up the book and carried on reading it out loud, and didn’t mention the subject again.

The lad, you ask? Oh, he floated on. His fate was to stand outside in vigils, carrying a ray gun with his companions with ordinary bones and muscles. His companions laughed him away from me, and he followed the inaudible drum, as he was fated to do. And yet, I could see him from the window of the archive every now and then, when I was cleaning the archives, or helping Madrinha with her microphone.

That was the way of the world. To the lad, the dust-filled air and the guns; to me, the imagined seas and kingdoms weaved out of Madrinha’s voice. It didn’t matter what I wanted. Agency and power were as much a figment of someone’s imagination as the keelson of a boat, or the boat itself. You learn to do without it, the same way you learn to pronounce phénomène and Gramarye the same way you spoke of love: one phoneme at a time.
 

---

 
Ayer estuve con Trafalgar Medrano. No es fácil encontrárselo.⁵

And then I stopped: Two and a half pages, and Madrinha was already snoring. That was unexpected: she loved this book, after all. Was it my voice? Was I pronouncing things wrong? It wasn’t my first transmission, but it was my first time tackling that particular text and I could have done with some handholding.

I could have woken her up. But I shrugged and returned to the adventures of Trafalgar Medrano through space, time and the old-fashioned bar where he holds court.

I was twenty-five and getting very good at pretending Madrinha wasn’t well by then, the way I was already too good at pretending that I wasn’t taking her job. Madrinha couldn’t pull the book cart anymore, so I did that for her. She couldn’t open the heavy chests anymore, so I did that. She sometimes forgot how to pronounce a word, so I filled her in by pretending I didn’t understand it. “Madrinha, is it pronounced es-TUH-veh or is it ES-tuh-veh?”

I still don’t know whether she saw through my ruse. I don’t want to know, honestly. I needed that particular fantasy to keep going: the idea that Madrinha would always be there, like the books would always be there, like the stars and the space would always be there. But by the time I was transmitting stories in Spanish, the younger set already knew better to bypass Madrinha, coming for me with their questions and requests for stories and relics.

Those young ones were the sons and daughters of my colleagues, those poor souls I once tried to impress with the vigils at the parapets, now either dead or as good as dead—soldiers age faster than average, after all. Time is relative, but anxiety and paranoia aren’t, and those can eat you in a blink of your eyes.

The one thing that remained the same was the archive—and even so, this too was relative. It stayed the same because I was changing, taking charge, taking more room. I stayed alive because I was filed liked one of the books, talking to the walls three times a day with tales of a past that grew ever more distant with every hour.

People here pretend they’re done needing those things, that there’s no room for them in this invented future above the stars. And yet, here we are. You can remove humanity from its habitat and blast everything to smithereens, but you couldn’t remove the longing, the love, the hoping and the nostalgia from their bones. My newfound audience didn’t know a keelson or a bar or a rhinoceros any more than I did. I was an enchantress to them, someone who summoned up tales for their amusement.

I liked this. So I went on, and let Madrinha snore.

By the way, estuve is pronounced es-TUH-veh. It means I was there.
 

---

 
And that a kelson of creation is love.

I found a picture of a keelson in the files the day after they cremated Madrinha. It isn’t a lonely beam, as I had always imagined, but a structure of many beams running the length of a ship, keeping the pieces of timber together.

I needed to turn on that microphone—death wouldn’t stop the transmissions. Those were Madrinha’s last words: to the end, she loved her books more than she could ever love me.

It doesn’t hurt me to know that. I’m ready to admit the feeling is mutual. This is why love is a keelson and not a rudder or a mast or a bow: because it’s a beginning, but not enough on its own. To love something is to build upon it.

Madrinha’s built me a world; she built me, the reader; the person writing to you now, with my brittle bones and unknown parentage. What made me any different from a keelson or a ship?

“But what is this kelson thingie?”

I turned around. That lad had grown old, like I had grown old. But to my eyes, he was the same one that stood by my side once; the same one that walked away when I took Madrinha’s place, the same one that kept peering at the paradise lost from the window while he paraded with his gun.

I wouldn’t dare to say he waited for me—time never waits for anyone. But now, as we stare into one another, the word comes naturally to the lips.

This is creation, I thought to myself. A word with a meaning, after all.

“It’s keelson,” I said. “The poet chose a different spelling. Come inside, I’ll show you. There’s a picture in the files.”

⸺

¹ How odd! in Portuguese.
² “I had no children, I did not transmit to any creature the legacy of our misery.” This is the last phrase from The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, by the Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.
³ Miséria in Brazilian Portuguese is more associated with poverty and squalor than with sadness—misery, in English.
⁴ “The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten.” This is the original opening phrase of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, by French author Jules Verne.
⁵ “I was with Trafalgar Medrano yesterday. It isn’t easy to find him.” This is the original Spanish opening line for Trafalgar, by the Argentenian author Angelica Gorodischer.