The Climb Up the Hill

It was on a Tuesday at the tail end of winter that Marta climbed the hill for the first time since her son's burial.

She hadn't planned to climb. She had planned, as on every Tuesday since August, to leave the technical school at ten past four, stop by Seu Joel's bakery, buy two rolls she wouldn't eat, and return to the silence of the house. That was the routine she had built for herself the way a person builds a crutch — a sequence of small gestures to get through the day without falling. She never ate the rolls; she left them drying on top of the sink, and at the end of the week gave them to the birds in the yard. It was an absurd luxury, but Marta had learned, over the last eight months, that grief lived on small absurdities: gestures that made no sense whatsoever to anyone else and that, for her, were the only thing she still managed to do.

That Tuesday, though, passing in front of the bakery, she didn't go in. Her feet carried her onward, toward the cobbled street that ended behind the cemetery, and from there toward the path no one used anymore — the path that climbed Santa Clara hill up to the old chapel at the top.

Marta didn't realize right away where she was going. She walked the way people walk when they haven't yet decided on the sentence they're about to say but have already opened their mouths to begin it. Her feet knew before her head did. It was only when she saw, ahead of her, the first bend of the climb and the tall grass covering the beaten-earth track that she stopped, clutched the strap of her bag against her chest, and thought, with a strange calm: so this is it.

The climb was steep, and she wore flat shoes, but sturdy ones, the kind a sewing teacher wears to spend the day standing in front of the machine. Her legs, which had forgotten what exercise was, began to burn by the third minute. Marta welcomed the burn. There was something about feeling her body — the tiredness, the cold sweat between her shoulder blades, her heart pounding in her ears — that lifted, for an instant, the weight from that other place, that exact spot beneath her left rib where, since the fourth of October, she carried an emptiness the size of a six-year-old boy.

The chapel appeared first as a white smudge among the trees, and then whole, when the path made its final turn: small, whitewashed in old lime, with a single doorway of dark wood, and around it a clearing of overgrown grass where, in the days of Marta's great-grandmother, they used to hold church fairs. Not anymore. Nothing happened there now. The diocese had abandoned that chapel so many years ago that the townspeople themselves had stopped talking about it, the way people stop talking about a distant relative who hasn't died but also doesn't write.

Marta took the last few steps to the door. The wood was locked from inside with a rusted padlock — a symbolic thing, more an announcement of abandonment than any real barrier to entry. She skirted the wall, walking slowly along the corners of close-cropped grass, and ended up around the back.

It was there that she saw the cracks.

There were three, aligned along the back wall, at the height of a standing person's chest. The old mortar had given way over the years and the brick showed through the gaps, dark and porous, like an open mouth waiting for something. Marta suddenly remembered a story her mother had told her as a child: that in the old days, people would leave requests for God in the cracks of churches, written on little scraps of paper, because the wind and rain carried the prayer up to heaven faster than any human mouth could. She hadn't believed it back then. She didn't believe it now. But something inside her believed, for the first time, on her behalf.

She sat on the stone that served as a step at the back. She opened her bag, took out the little blue-covered notebook where she jotted down her students' measurements, and tore out the last page. She took out her pen. She sat looking at the paper for a while.

Eight months earlier, in that very same week, Marta had stopped praying inside her house.

She hadn't decided to stop. It was like ceasing to do something you've always done without noticing — like, on the first cold afternoon of the year, realizing you left your coat in the bedroom closet and finding you've been going through the day cold. That was how prayer was after Davi: it used to fit into every hour and every room, but Marta could no longer reach it. She still had the gestures: bending her knees at the edge of the bed, folding her hands, closing her eyes. But where there had once been a voice inside her talking to Someone, there was now a hollow echo — as if she were speaking into an empty room whose door had been subtly moved while she slept.

She had learned to live without praying. It was worse than living without eating.

Maybe that's why — Marta thought, the blank page on her lap — maybe that's why I came up here. Because here I haven't tried yet. Because here, on the outside, maybe it hurts less.

She brought the pen to the paper. It took a while. Her hand trembled a little. But once she began, it came almost without thinking — as if something inside her had been waiting two hundred and forty-four days for that exact scrap of paper resting on a pocket-sized notebook, on that exact stone behind a forgotten chapel.

She wrote:

God,

I'm Marta, and You already know who I am, so I'll get straight to it.

It's been eight months since You took my son. Davi was six years old. He had just gotten a new bicycle, red, and was learning to ride with no hands on the handlebars. You know the story. I'm not going to tell it again — I can't.

I prayed my whole life. When my husband died, five years ago, I prayed. When my father died, before that, I prayed. When I found out I was pregnant with Davi at thirty-two, and the doctors said it was risky, I prayed. You were always there, on the other side, even when the answer wasn't the one I wanted. I always knew someone was listening.

But on October 4th You weren't home. I went to pray and there was no one there. And every day since then I've tried and the room was empty.

I didn't come here today to forgive You. I didn't come to ask for anything. I came because inside my house I can't do it anymore, and I need to talk to someone. If You are who You really are, You'll understand why I couldn't say this on my knees beside my bed, with Davi's photo on the dresser.

I'm going to leave this note in the crack in the back wall. If it's really You, do something. It doesn't have to be a miracle. It doesn't have to be bringing anyone back to life — I've given up asking for that. Just answer me somehow so I know it was meant for me.

I don't know how to pray anymore. But I still know how to write.

Marta.

She read it over. Her hand, by now, had stopped trembling.

Marta folded the paper in half, then in half again. She stood up, feeling her back crack. She went to the first crack in the back wall — the middle one of the three — and pushed the note in deep, until the paper disappeared into the darkness of the brick. She pushed it further with her index finger. She wiped her hand on her coat.

She stood for a while looking at the wall like someone waiting for it to answer right then and there. It didn't answer. But Marta hadn't really expected it to, either. Waiting was something she had unlearned in October.

When she turned to go back down, the sun was beginning to sink behind the eucalyptus trees, and the air had cooled another degree. Below, the town — São Bento da Serra — appeared whole in the valley, its red tile roofs and the tower of the main church piercing the center like a needle. From up here, it looked like a town where nothing very terrible had ever happened. Marta knew that wasn't true. But it was beautiful.

She went down the hill more slowly than she had climbed it, because her right knee complained on the descent. Somewhere along the path, without noticing, she found herself crying — not in sobs, just silent tears running down, the way rain comes at the end of a hot afternoon. They weren't tears of pure sadness. They were tears of something she wouldn't have been able to name that night, but that, once she got home and took her hot bath, and lay down early without praying as had become her habit, she would realize: for the first time in eight months, something had shifted. A small displacement, the size of a page folded four times.

Up above, behind the whitewashed wall of the Chapel of São Lázaro, the late-afternoon wind stirred in the middle crack. The note didn't come out. It settled deeper, as if the wall, after so many years of silence, had swallowed dry the first thing it had ever been given.

Marta didn't see it. She was already home. But the wall, on the other side, would wait nine days before another pair of feet climbed that hill — and when they did, they would come from below just as hers had, but from inside the chapel, and they would belong to a man who believed in nothing, and who, in that exact spot, would begin to stop believing in his own disbelief.

But that, Marta wouldn't know for a long time yet.