Bankruptcy · fiction
I lost the harvest and lost everything
A story about the farmer who watched hail take a year's harvest in twenty minutes, and about what the land keeps when the harvest is gone.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
A vision — a short story.
The hail lasted twenty minutes. The harvest had taken a year.
It was on the altiplano, where the sky is so close it seems you could touch it with the tip of a hoe. The farmer was at the door of his adobe house when he heard the noise, at first like someone throwing rice on a tin roof, then like an army. The stones of ice were the size of quail eggs. They fell white on the red quinoa, and the quinoa lay down like someone surrendering.
When it was over, the silence that came was the loudest he had ever heard.
He walked through the field with his boots sinking into the icy mud. The plants were on the ground, broken, mixed with ice that was already beginning to melt. His wife came behind him and said nothing. There are losses in which speaking is a disrespect.
That night, he did the sums by candlelight, because the power had gone down along with the sky. The seed bought on credit. The fertilizer. The tractor borrowed from the neighbor, which he was going to pay for with part of the harvest. The children's school in town. The sums were simple, and they all came to the same result: nothing.
That's when he saw.
He can't say whether he slept. He saw his grandfather, who had died thirty years earlier, kneeling in that same field, planting with his hands. His grandfather used no tractor and no bought fertilizer. He planted and talked to the earth in an old language his grandson understood only by half. He saw his grandfather lose a harvest too, in a frost from before he was born. He saw his grandfather sitting in the same doorway, with the same silence. And he saw his grandfather, the next morning, sorting a handful of seeds he had kept in a clay pot, hidden under the bed, in case the sky got angry.
The vision went on, forward now. He saw his daughter, a grown woman, in a time that didn't yet exist, with a screen in her hand, receiving a warning in the morning that hail was coming. He saw his daughter covering the field with netting, selling the harvest to someone on the other side of the country with no middleman, getting paid the same day. He saw that she lost too, sometimes. The land never lets anyone win every time. But she didn't lose alone.
When he opened his eyes, the candle had burned out.
He got up and went to the bedroom. Under the bed, where no one had looked in years, was his grandfather's clay pot. He had forgotten it. Inside, four handfuls of old seeds, dry, alive.
It wasn't a harvest. But it was a beginning.
The next day, he went to talk to the neighbor with the tractor. He said he wouldn't be able to pay that year. The neighbor looked at the sky, then at him, and said the hail had passed over his field too. The two were silent for a while. Then, without arranging it, they went together to the third neighbor's field, to see how he was doing.
The farmer understood that the land doesn't keep only seed. It keeps people. His grandfather had left in the clay pot what was needed to start over, and he had also left a way of standing up: no shame in losing, shame only in giving up.
Bairo says he built, in six months in front of the computer, the foundation of a platform designed to put those who produce, those who trade and those who buy in direct contact. Read: The frequency of silence.
The way forward
Losing the harvest isn't losing the land, nor the knowledge of the one who plants. Talk early with those you owe and with those who lost alongside you: a shared loss weighs differently. Always keep a pot of seeds, of money, of friends, for the day the sky gets angry.