NewsLatin America"What color is hunger, mom?"

“What color is hunger, mom?”

I read that in the big and rich Sao Paulo, the largest city in Latin America and a state like all of Spain, a girl from a suburb asked her mother what color hunger is. She didn’t ask what hunger pangs taste like, she knew those too well, but what color. Children are that creative.

One must have felt the bitterness of hunger, as millions of Brazilians feel today, something that becomes more acute on Christmas Eve, to ask if it also has color in addition to its bitter taste.

This new paradoxical situation of an increasingly rich world with a greater amount of hunger per square meter is what politicians, all of them, should be studying and solving before anything else.

And it is perhaps because the majority of humanity, better or worse still, continues to eat to survive that we have not been able to understand the raw cruelty of hunger.

I write knowingly because I belong to the group of those who knew the knocks of hunger. It was during the Spanish civil war that was followed by the hateful and painful Franco dictatorship. Yes, then, we knew what hunger was, the sweetness of a piece of white or black bread, wheat or barley.

I also personally met her at the religious school where I studied high school. We were young and our stomach was always complaining. In Spain they were years of scarcity. A lot of time has passed for me but the dreams of the oven in the village of my childhood from where the loaves of bread with the smell of heaven came out hot as suns are still alive in my memory.

At school they gave us coffee with milk for breakfast, a pointed bread roll that was finished in two bites. What did we invent? Cut each day the two peaks of the bun, keep them to have 14 at the end of the week and be able to fill the bowl of milk. The sad thing was that sometimes some crook discovered where I kept them and stole them. That Sunday was doubly bitter.

During the summer they took us to some army camps in the Picos de Urbion in the middle of the mountains. At our age and walking 20 km every day at that point our appetite was devastating. That’s how we invented everything. We divided into groups to try to find something to eat. In mine, some of us went to fish trout with our bare hands under the stones of the river and others, especially the Asturians, tried to milk a cow. It was a banquet.

At Christmas, sometimes the families sent us a tablet of hard nougat. What did we do to make it last longer? We cut it into little pieces and wrapped them in newspaper like candy to make them last longer. That has passed for me, 75 years, and it still seems to me now.

Perhaps because I belong to the group of those who believe that past times were worse, I also think with some anger that today there should be no shortage of food for anyone or Christmas without a treat for a child. I am wrong and I am certain that this Christmas and in this rich Brazil, millions of children will go hungry again.

Yesterday, in the small fishing village, near Rio where I live, I witnessed in the market, at the gates of my house, a scene that even if I lived another 90 years than I have already completed, I would not be able to forget. She was an old woman, with a gaunt face. she was alone. She went to buy some bananas. She took two, of those that are cooked. She went to the register to pay. On the way she looked at the coins that she carried in her hand. She thought for a few seconds. She turned back and put down one of the two bananas she had picked out. I was tempted to pick the best bunch from the market table and put it in her bag. I didn’t do it so as not to humiliate her, but I promised myself that my first column would be dedicated to the drama of that old woman who left sad with a single banana in her hand.

At home I couldn’t read the curdled newspapers, as always with political corruption scandals while there are people, the elderly and children who go hungry and even pure bread, with nothing, has become a delicacy and a luxury. Anger rose to my eyes.

A few days ago, my colleague, Naiara, a correspondent for this newspaper here in Brazil, asked me in surprise why in my recent book of poetry lost alphabets, I dedicated one of them to “bread”. And it is that, in addition to my childhood memories of hunger, I still have the scene lived here in my house, with a survivor of the Auschwitz Nazi extermination camp.

My wife had prepared a meal and had made homemade bread. When our diner sat down at the table, he apologized for eating only bread and told us that in the years of hell in Auschwitz his dreams, his most ardent desires, his nightmares, were a piece of bread, hard or soft, it didn’t matter. It was bread. And yes, she ate only bread. Shortly after we learned that she was gone forever. I will never forget it with my wife’s hot bread in her hands, eating it in big bites.

Yes, hunger today in a world rich in technology, in miracles of science, where Homo Sapiens manages to live more and more and already dreams of conquering and inhabiting the cosmos, that there are still children without being able to eat at Christmas and asking angelically what color hunger is, judges us and condemns us. Yes to everyone.

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