A crash course in changing the world.
Making the Bread Called Tomorrow JULY 1997
OLD DON ANTONIO used to say that the ingredients needed to bake the bread we call tomorrow are many. “One of them is pain,” Old Don Antonio adds now, while he piles firewood up next to the oven.
We go out into an afternoon, shimmering after one of those rains that July uses to paint the earth green. Doña Juanita has stayed behind, preparing the sweet cornbread that around here they call marquesote, the loaf shaped by its sardine-can-baking pan. I don’t know how long Old Don Antonio and Doña Juanita have been together, and I have never asked .
Today, in this jungle afternoon, Old Don Antonio speaks about pain as an ingredient of hope, and Doña Juanita bakes him a loaf of bread to prove it.
For several nights, illness has troubled Doña Juanita’s sleep, and Old Don Antonio, unable to sleep in his devotion to her, relieves her pain with stories and games. This very dawn, Old Don Antonio had set up a grandiose show: Playing with his hands and the light from the hearth, he creates a multitude of shadow-puppet jungle animals. Doña Juanita laughs at the night-walking tepescuintle, at the restless whitetail deer, at the hoarse howler monkey, at the vain peacock and the loud parrot that Old Don Antonio paints on the canvas of his hut.
“It didn’t cure me, but I laughed a lot,” Doña Juanita tells me. “I didn’t know the shadows were so happy.”
That afternoon Doña Juanita bakes a marquesote for Old Don Antonio, not to thank him for the useless medicine during a night of joyful shadows.
And she didn’t bake it to make him happy either…
She baked it as evidence that a pain shared brings relief and casts a joyful shadow. That’s why Doña Juanita bakes bread, that her hands and Old Don Antonio’s firewood birth inside an old sardine can.
And so that it shouldn’t go to waste, we ate the evidence of Doña Juanita and Old Don Antonio’s shared pain with some hot coffee, we ate the pain turned into shared bread and light…
WHAT WE ARE TELLING you happened long, long ago, that is, today…
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