Instructions for the Rain

The first word he did not understand made him cry—not from confusion, but from the echo of it. Henrique Duarte, twenty-seven, translator of obscure briefs, stared at the envelope left beneath his Copan Building door during the night. The handwriting on the label wavered like fireflies trapped behind frosted glass; still, it felt familiar, as though sketched in another century by a hand he himself had forgotten being.

Inside lay thirty-two rust-colored sheets that smelled of lightning after rain. The printed symbols danced between balding ideograms and sand-swallowed consonants. They belonged to no catalogued alphabet, yet Henrique shuddered as he recognized them from the blurry territory of childhood dreams: sunken plazas where fish hung from clotheslines, libraries trembling under silent thunder.

“Translate me,” the paper whispered, though it made no sound. By chance—or fate—that week was barren of paid assignments; every publishing house seemed to be hibernating. Translating a oneiric language sounded foolish, but bills needed paying and, above all, there was a nearly physical impulse: he had to find out what happened when a dream began to speak awake.

He sat, stroked the sleek back of Babel—the black cat he had adopted (or been adopted by) on the day he signed his first literary contract—and plunged into the text as one who, for lack of a river, learns to swim inside a mirror.

The translation, he soon saw, obeyed no method. It was not a matter of equivalence but of resonance. For every strange sign, a vibrant memory surfaced, as if the word had been etched into his own mineral salts. With no dictionaries or grammars at hand, he wrote in a steady flow, guided by an intuition older than vertigo itself.

First translated paragraph:

_Rain only begins when the world remembers how to forget._

Immediately the apartment’s air thickened; a fresh scent of wet earth rose from the scuffed parquet floor. Henrique laughed, nervous—coincidence, obviously. Yet that afternoon, from the curved window on the tenth floor, he watched an impossible phenomenon—over Praça Roosevelt, the São Paulo drizzle was falling upward, returning to the clouds like silver ribbons being rewound. It lasted half a minute. Then everything normalized, save for the stopped cars: motorists gaping, trying to decipher the event in stumbling sentences.

The next night he advanced two more pages. He translated about “rivers of memory flowing backward, erasing the banks that contain them.” When he saved the digital file, a hollow opened in his mind: he forgot the name of the teacher who had taught him his first letters. A cherished memory, kept like a talisman, now reduced to a warm sense of a presence without a face.

Panic came, but brought fascination as well. He felt himself a pioneer in a territory where every line demanded real payment—a currency exchanging language for world. He continued, seduced by danger.

The city responded with small fractures of meaning: clocks lagged five minutes and apologized, tic-tac-tic-tac—sorry; bakery signs scrambled vowels; friends sent voice messages filled with “uh-huh” because the precise word had fled. On talk-show interviews, communication experts floated theories about “collective outbreaks of sudden aphasia.”

Henrique sealed himself off. He stocked supplies, drew the curtains so as not to measure the progress of the chaos, and dedicated himself to the manuscript. The more he translated, the more the dream-language spread through his thoughts, swapping everyday expressions for mute scintillations.

By the end of page ten he no longer said “water,” but _dharaz_—a term that seemed to slither down his throat as though meant for another vocal tract. He tried calling Babel, yet the voice came out with inverted intonation, the tonic syllable cast into a vacuum. The cat perked its ears, intrigued, as if finally understanding every nuance.

One of those dusky evenings his phone vibrated: Alicia, an ex-girlfriend with whom he kept a fragile friendship. Her voice trembled:

“Henrique? I went to buy coffee and… and… what’s the name of the thing that holds the sugar?”

“A sugar bowl.”

“That! I couldn’t remember! Everyone’s forgetting words. Do you know anything?”

He hesitated. Could he confess he had unwittingly signed a grammatical pact with forces unknown? He only said it was a “passing phenomenon.” He hung up before guilt overflowed.

Page fifteen revealed that the world is woven by “semantic knots”—points where reality and word stitch together. Translating that manual unravels each knot. Hence the reverse rain, the dissolving memories.

Henrique broke into a cold sweat. If he kept going to the last sheet, there would be total de-programming: no grammar, no remembrance, perhaps no form at all. Still, he noticed something encoded between the lines: after the grand silence, when everything became pure potential, it would be possible to “sew an inaugural verb, fresh as the first drop.” There was, therefore, the promise of recreation.

He could become tailor to a new cosmos—a temptation intolerable for a translator who’d always lived in the shadow, reproducing other voices. For the first time, he would write the origin itself.

But the toll mounted. By page twenty he had forgotten his father’s face. In the mirror, the outlines of his own features seemed to blur. Babel, ever larger, pressed its head against his knee with near-human solicitude. On TV, anchors spoke of a “global designation crisis”; lips moved, but captions failed to accompany.

A linguistic blackout loomed. Yet in dreams Henrique visited luminous halls where translucent beings—perhaps avatars of primordial phonemes—taught him the “matrix of reconstruction.” They spoke without sound; he understood everything. Upon waking, he tried to sketch the symbols with shaking hands, but the lines fled like water spilled across marble.

The antepenultimate page read (and he rendered):

_When the penultimate sign is translated, the translator will lose both name and pronoun. Only then may the Root-Word be uttered uncorrupted._

Henrique realized he no longer referred to himself as “I”—he thought of himself in slow camera, a focus without label. Everything was part of the process.

Outside, Avenida Paulista had become a mute theater: traffic lights blinked incomprehensible patterns, but drivers advanced in instinctive harmony, like shoals. Graffiti on walls morphed into shifting arabesques; pigments loosened, rose, evaporated. Fear lingered in people’s eyes, but diluted in perplexed resignation.

That was when Alicia appeared at his door, panting after climbing ten flights because the elevator had “forgotten” to stop there. She carried a laptop and a notebook packed with illegible scrawls.

“You’ve got something to do with this, don’t you?” she asked, voice hoarse, almost vowel-less.

Henrique tried to answer, but syllables slipped away like live fish. He touched his own chest—gesture of powerlessness.

Alicia raised the notebook: inside were diagrams resembling those on the manuscript pages. She too had dreamt the language and, not knowing why, reproduced it compulsively.

“If it’s going to end, at least…” she made a broad gesture, “…let it be together.”

He smiled—or whatever passed for a smile, because emotion now filtered as chromatic pulses in the iris. He took her hand and led her to the table. Babel curled around their feet like a seal of approval.

They worked side by side, though speech was impossible. Communication flowed by touch, shivers, converging breaths. A soundless syntactic dance.

When only the final word remained, the world outside seemed suspended. No engines, no birds—only the rush of blood in their ears. Bulbs forgot the concept of light, yet the room emitted its own milky glow, as though dawn sprouted from the papers.

The terminal word trembled alone at the foot of page thirty-two. It held no vowels or consonants, merely an impossible curvature—something between a whirl in water and the breath before breathing.

Henrique grasped the pen; Alicia steadied his wrist, lending him the weight of presence. Babel, upon the table, gently laid a paw on the margin of the manuscript.

He—or what had once answered to “Henrique”—wrote. Ink met paper and the world’s noise ceased.

First came a vibrant pause, as though all reality inhaled to hold its breath. Then the borders melted: furniture turned to echoes of function, walls dissolved into the breath of rain, bodies became thinking mist. They plunged into a clear ocean where no synonym was needed, for each being intuited the other in semantic transparency.

At the center of that hush, a spark asked for shape: not an imposition, but an invitation. Who would respond? Henrique felt the question inside himself and also outside, like a tide. Alicia, Babel, the consciousnesses beyond the window—all shared the same impulse.

Then, some collective entity—a choir including branches, antennas, corneas, and memories—imagined a simple timbre, a damp gesture, akin to the heart’s drumbeat at birth. And the gesture became sound, the sound became meaning, the meaning became the first drop.

It rained—but neither falling nor rising. Water erupted from every direction, filling without flooding, fresh as a newborn idea. A language was born without loss: it imposed no limits; it revealed correspondences. Each syllable was a bridge, not a wall.

When the glow waned, Henrique and Alicia recovered gentle contours, like pencil sketches on mist, aware they could redraw themselves endlessly. Beside them, Babel now held eyes that mirrored galaxies yet still purred with old feline sweetness—the memory of a prior world kept like a childhood keepsake.

They looked at each other—a gesture containing all possible conjunctions. On the horizon, São Paulo re-erected itself in malleable architecture, skyscrapers breathing slowly, trees intoning green verbs. Nothing needed translating, for everything was immediately understood, yet there was room for games of reinvention, and that felt deliciously human.

Henrique brought a hand to his heart—the organ beat in the new idiom. He whispered (if whispering still existed):

“Restart.”

No echo replied, for the word was already everywhere, coinciding with the very act of germinating.

There were no more words, and yet, everything had been said.