Castanha and Caju

I’ve declared an armistice. I’ve said all I had to say about the war; I’ve fought until my voice gave out until the words dried up. Now, I need a bit of quiet, a place where silence can smother the noise. There’s an urgent need to leave the world with its collapses and fires. I want to speak of the small things, the nearly invisible, that remain when the shouting fades. Because the world is also made of these things, these dust motes dance in the sunlight when no one is looking. And for now, that’s all I want to talk about until the day I decide to break this peace treaty with myself again.

I live in a house that fits Caju and me, my dog, just right. It isn’t big, nor does it need to be, just like a short poem, enough like the love that fits in the palm of your hand. Caju is an odd name in English, I know. In Portuguese, it’s the word for cashew—the tree, the fruit, and the nut that dangles outside the fruit like something left unfinished. My daughter named him. She always knew how to play with words like soft clay. She has a dog named Castanha, which means Chestnut. Castanha and Caju, a pair bound by affection, are two names that seem simple but hide a secret of their own—like the cashew tree, which grows in crooked lines, bending with the wind and sun, never apologizing for the shape it takes. It gives a strange fruit that burns the tongue, then turns sweet. A memory of something both rooted and flavorful, like the Brazil I left behind.

Castanha stayed with her; Caju is here with me. They’re siblings in longing—a longing that maybe only animals fully understand. When Caju runs around the dirt yard, it’s as if he’s trying to catch Castanha’s scent in the breeze. There’s a quiet beauty in that, an unseen dance, a song that can only be seen. He tells me secrets that words can’t grasp between one bark and the next. He shows me that life is simple and there is joy in simply being. In sharing space without grand expectations, just the comfort of being close.

And I miss my daughter. It hurts like a thorn from the cashew fruit stuck deep in the chest. Sometimes, I close my eyes and see her running around some imaginary cashew tree, that stubborn and twisted trunk we’ve learned to love. Caju watches me as if he knows that her absence is a gap we never entirely manage to fill. I think of her like a cashew tree. I might think of its fruit blown far away by the wind, hoping the wind will someday bring it back. But the wind is tricky; it only makes promises. And here I am, waiting for the wind to keep its word.

There’s no garden here, much less a porch. I don’t need one. Not in this heat that cuts like an invisible blade at 36 degrees Celsius. A porch would be a useless luxury, an impractical extravagance. The shade of the house is enough. And now and then, the thick smell from the dairy barn wafts in through the open window. It’s a heavy smell of manure and fermented heat. It always comes when the spirit is more restless, as if the kibbutz knows precisely when to remind me that not everything is under our control. The smell of dung in the middle of the afternoon—a message you can’t ignore. And strangely enough, it teaches me to laugh. To laugh at the unexpected, at what only life here can bring.

The longing for my daughter is like the shadow of a cashew tree that never quite reaches. Caju gives me a sideways look as if he’s hatching a grand plan to steal Castanha’s scent from the wind and bring it back home. But the wind is stubborn. We learn to make peace with this stubbornness of the wind. The cashew tree grows crooked, but it grows. And I wait as if waiting for the bloom of a cashew tree in a yard that doesn’t even exist.

I keep writing these chronicles because they are a way of breathing and understanding the life that flows here while the world falls apart. We carry on, Caju and I, at a slow pace, watching what remains. A man and his dog, each with their solitude and company. Castanha and Caju are roots that meet on the same tree and stretch far beyond our sight. They teach me that life is a simple story of encounters, of memories that neither the heat fades nor the barn’s smell hides. That’s what’s worth talking about: the things that remain when the noise subsides.

And then I remember: the cashew tree, stubborn and resilient, is a good teacher of longing. It grows as it can and does what it can with the soil it has. I, with my longing, try to learn the same.