16. The Paraná Far West

We say… Brazil… and we imagine impenetrable tropical forests, beaches with smooth sand lined with coconut trees, plantations where sugar canes rise like immense reeds; and we recall the wet plains enlivened by the tender green of the banana trees, the fazendas¹ with coffee shrubs aligned as far as the eye can see, we think of the grassy stretches of the south where innumerable herds graze.

But Brazil, it’s also this landscape that could be European, a cirque of old mountains eroded to rounded shapes, a small woody valley, a clear water stream where you can catch crawfish. It’s in this bucolic

setting that I went to set up a linen hackler, God only knows why. I spent a few beautiful years in this verdant Far West, populated almost uniquely with Polish and Ukrainian colonists. From time to time, I would go back to the world, putting myself back in the noise and the smoke of the cities…

The retted straw bundles dry in the meadow and it must be eleven o’clock, for my little workingwomen are off to lunch. A few of them were quite pretty
1. Very big ranchs.