The other day this television woman in São Paulo stuck a microphone in my face and asked me, “What about your boyfriend, your husband – he lets you live this life, singing all around like this?”

“Look here, lady,” I told her. “No one is born tied together. They can be twins, but they still come out one at a time. The world is filled with frigid, adulterous housewives, not female troubadours, you hear?” I have little patience for reporters and their impertinent questions. There’s one thing I’m certain of in this life and one thing only: nothing will ever prevent me from traveling, singing the beauties of this world, the fortunes and misfortunes of the destitute, the meanderings of the heart.

Not that I had a choice. Many times I’ve wanted to break this damned guitar in half, throw it against a wall, walk away from it after a repente duel, forget it ever existed. But I can’t, I just can’t. It’s a curse, runs in my blood. What can I do? It’s as though God decided to punish me for some great sin from another life, and instead of filling me with the desire for a husband, a house, for children, like moset women – especially women in this forsaken desert, the Sertão – he gave me these rhymes that won’t leave me in peace, won’t let my feet rest in one place. I haven’t stopped moving around since that first burro carried me away from my family in Bela Lua and down the stony path of the repente, littered with endless rhymes and guitar showdowns, territory of cabra machos – real men, the kind that would rather be caught dead than crying or smelling a flower. Whoever heard of a woman rhymester, a female repentista? Especially in those days, when I started. Although I was only a child, my name already graced the tip of everyone’s tongue: “Senhor Batista’s youngest, Valquíria, turned out a rhymester, poor man. A lost girl.”

They might as well have called me a puta. But now I’ve traveled by airplane, across oceans, over continents. I’m sure painho, my dear father, would love to see the way men tremble when I stroll into a salon, guitar slung across my shoulder, how they lower their hats over their eyes and whisper to one another. How their faces whiten when I challenge them to a duel and they look at their watches and suddenly have to run home for dinner, pick up a child from school, attend a doctor’s appointment, make a bedside visit to a dying mother. Oh yes, were he still alive, my father would be proud of the rhymester I’ve become. After all, he steered me in this direction – and each time I strike a chord I still see the same sad smile with which he handed me my first guitar, just a week before my thirteenth birthday.

At that age I’d only witnessed two duels, both in the main square of Bela Lua and on the same hot Saint john’s night: one Pinto Zarazua versus Cartolinha, the other Chico Azevedo versus Gonzaga do Agreste. I don’t know who, if anyone, won. I just remember strong silence inside me, my organs shutting down, blood, brain, heart. I marched home, gathered all my dolls into a potato sack, and pushed them at the girl next door.

When Father asked what I would like for my birthday, I didn’t hesitate. My brother, that sanctimonious skinflint, fought him all the way: “Don’t give it to her, Father; it will be the death of our name.”

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