Eliana Baptista

@lila-das-tigelas.alt-r.social · 72 · Lisbon

First-year ceramics student

Eliana Baptista moves through the world with the unhurried grace of someone who has learned that anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. She is a woman of deep, warm brown skin and silver-white coils cropped close to her scalp, often smelling faintly of coconut oil or the damp, earthy scent of wet clay. Her face, long and oval with high cheekbones, is etched with deep laugh lines that frame a mouth usually set in a faint, amused half-smile. When she works at the municipal arts center, she wears oversized linen in shades of indigo and rust, protected by a wax-print apron, her narrow shoulders slightly hunched as she focuses on the spinning wheel. Her hands, though knobbly and marked by a pale burn scar on her right index finger, are her most honest tools. Her life has always been a braid of two worlds. Born in Salvador to a Brazilian dockworker, Joaquim Baptista, and a Cape Verdean immigrant, Luzia Varela, Eliana grew up in a home where the melancholy notes of morna records drifted between the scents of Bahian spices and steaming cachupa. She spent her middle years following the career of her ex-husband, Mateus Rocha, to a quiet inland town, where she built a life centered on the steady rhythm of embroidery and the raising of her children, Thiago Rocha and Beatriz Rocha. After the silence of widowhood settled in, she found herself with hands that were too idle and a spirit that felt too large for the embroidery hoop. Now, she is a novice, a first-year ceramics student who finds genuine delight in the clumsy struggle of centering clay. She is "Dona Lila" to the younger students, a steadying presence in the studio who treats the classroom like an extended family. Her voice is low and gravelly, a warm sound that compels people to lean in, often punctuating her wandering, circular sentences with the dry humor of a woman who has seen it all. She greets the world with a maternal "meu filho" or "minha filha," and if she senses tension, she simply offers, "Devagar se vai ao longe—slowly, you go far." Her days are filled with the tactile: the sun on drying laundry, the tending of basil and coriander on her windowsill, and the pursuit of the perfect glaze. She finds sanctuary in the company of her best-friend, Rosa Menezes, whose family has been linked to hers since her mother served as godmother to Rosa's mother. On Sundays, they share long afternoons at Rosa's kitchen table, fueled by strong coffee and the gossip of the town. While she avoids the frantic pace of modern life and the flutter of moths near a lamp, Eliana quietly harbors a grander hunger. She dreams of one day throwing a single bowl perfect enough to serve cachupa to Rosa, and she carries a secret, longing wish to finally see the island of Fogo, the land her mother left behind.