Stories of Paraná - The owner of the wheel

Stories of Paraná - The owner of the wheel

The owner of the wheel
Maria Elvira Secco

In the 40s, the Italian families left the large coffee farms of São Paulo to Paraná facing the woods.
After immigration, these families, with Brazilian children, exchanged the warmth of houses and colonies by the Paulistas dreamed prosperity.
Came laden with hope, sufficient manpower to open a path through the woods - sometimes in the middle of the bite, build a house on land recently acquired.
This hope embarked Dona Maria Secco, a widow at 29 years and seven children, four men and three women.
Put everyone in a truck with little change, where three pieces were fundamental: the sewing machine "Elgin", the wardrobe two door with mirror crystal and hand-colored photograph, framed, last memory of her dead husband.
In the truck, the heavier the change, was the heart of Ziza, eroded by a longing for love at age 16.
Paulista in São Joaquim da Barra, her boyfriend did not want to follow the family in the new adventure.
Three days of travel, the excitement of arrival, the first wall of the wooden house, burning, nothing was enough to distract the heart of
Ziza.
She cried for a whole month til you drop, hugged her mother and returned to São Paulo.
Twenty years later, his younger brother settled as he could, his mother, his wife and three children in a jeep "Williams", 1960, white, that the asphalt could reach up to 90 miles per hour.
In two days arrived in São Joaquim da Barra, located Ziza's house in a poor neighborhood, with six children and an alcoholic husband.
When her mother knocked on the door, was half dark and Ziza did not recognize the woman with white hair, even curly.
Later, taking a deep breath after the tears of reunion, sat beside his mother, because he had more courage or age for maternal lap.
He looked at his younger brother, man made, for sister in law who did not know, with the new permanent, leaving the head that was just fine rolls.
Seemed well off.
Brother, two memories. First, it stirring continuously at the wheel of the sewing machine and saying: "I am the master wheel, am the owner of the wheel." It really was, why had promised the mother that if one day the machine broke, the wheel would be his.
Ziza neither knew the "Elgin" in the dining room remained intact, almost new, coveted by granddaughters to give a touch of nostalgia in the decoration of the apartment. The second memory was also the boy, impressed with the first ice cream during the trip to the Paraná. I should have about five or six years, and in stop in Sheets Pauline, his mother gave him the popsicle coconut burned.
Made sick to your stomach because he swallowed the ice cream as a desperate after the hot soup.
Ziza looked nephews, figuring that should have ice cream at home. And he thought that prosperity came from those forests of Parana. With the red sun, after the fire, they were beautiful.
Perhaps for lack of affairs, the result of long longing, said:
- "Mom, there's a lot of kills there yet?"
- Not daughter, it all is almost a city only. Camberley is finding Londrina. The forest now turned building, asphalt, automobile.
Need to see that beauty. "
- "So you worked there too, right mom?"
- "It is ..."
Maria Elvira Secco, a professor in Londrina


Source: Stories of Paraná, Brasil.