Dreams · fiction
My dream seems impossible
A story about a girl who, on Sunday mornings in the nineties, watched Senna race on TV and decided to do something that didn't have a name yet.
A vision — a short story.
On Sundays in the nineties, the whole house woke up early because of a man in a yellow helmet.
The girl was eight and understood nothing about racing. She understood the noise of the television, her father standing in the living room, her grandfather in slippers holding his coffee without drinking it, her mother pretending not to care and peeking from the kitchen. She understood that, for two hours, the whole country held its breath along with that man.
On one of those Sundays, it rained on the track. The cars slid, the wheels threw up curtains of water. And the man in the yellow helmet drove through the rain as if the rain belonged to him.
"How does he do it?" the girl asked.
Her grandfather, without taking his eyes off the screen, answered:
"He decided beforehand."
She kept the phrase the way you keep a pretty stone in your pocket.
She grew up in a small town in the Brazilian interior, where girls became teachers or nurses, and both were beautiful things, but she wanted something else. She didn't know what. She only knew she wanted to build something that could go through the rain without sliding.
At school, she said she would be an engineer. They laughed. At university, she said she would design cars. They told her there was no place for a woman in that. At her internship, she said she would make a car that didn't need a driver. Her boss patted her on the back and said that was the stuff of movies.
Every no she kept in the same pocket as the pretty stone.
One night in 2009, working late in an almost empty engineering room, she had a kind of vision. Tired, she rested her head on her arms on the desk and saw.
She saw her parents' living room, in the nineties, her grandfather in slippers, the rain on the screen. She saw the man in the yellow helmet. She saw an old magazine in which he said every driver has his limit, and that his was a little higher than the others'. And she saw, further on, in a time that didn't yet exist, a wet road at night and a car with no one at the wheel taking an elderly woman home safely. The woman was asleep in the back seat. The car went through the rain as if the rain belonged to it.
She didn't know whether she had dreamed or remembered. But she woke with a certainty that hadn't been hers before: she had already seen it finished. Now she only had to build the middle.
It took sixteen years.
It wasn't her alone. It was hundreds of engineers, in several countries, each building a piece. She was one of those pieces. An algorithm that teaches the car to feel when the ground is slippery, before it slips. No one knows her name. She doesn't mind.
On a Sunday in 2045, she took her father, now old, for a ride in one of those cars, on a wet road. Her father held on to the door handle the whole time, afraid. Then he let go.
"How does it do it?" her father asked, looking at the road.
She smiled.
"It decided beforehand, Dad. I mean, someone decided beforehand for it."
Her father didn't understand. But she did, and that was enough.
Bairo opens his own story with Senna, who decided to be the best, and with the line attributed to the opening of Walt Disney World: "He did see it." Read: Fifty-five years later.
The way forward
Before the dream comes true comes the decision; keep it in your pocket like a pretty stone. Every "it's not possible" is information about the road, not about you. And accept being part of something bigger: big dreams are usually built by many hands.