I don’t know. But this year’s voting intentions polls will still be ongoing. And I heard about one in Bahia with a margin of error of about six percentage points, plus or minus.
This reminds me of the infallible method used by Dom Helder Camara’s mother to determine the sex of the child while he was still in his mother’s womb. I tell the story as it was told to me.
When a pregnant woman came to her wanting to know whether her child would be a boy or a girl, the mother of the former auxiliary bishop of Rio, and former archbishop of Olinda and Recife, would place her hand on the woman’s stomach, ask her a few questions, jot down notes in a notebook and then sign:
“It will be a boy.”
Otherwise:
“It’s going to be a girl.”
When she did it right, the mothers happily cheered the miracle, and her fame increased. If one of the mothers later appeared to say that the prophecy had not been fulfilled, Dom Helder’s mother would go back to her notebook and show the note she had written: Yes, you got it right.
Dom Helder’s mother used to record in her notebook the opposite of what she expected. In this way, he got things right when he got them wrong. If she were alive, she would have a lot to teach research institutes.
(Published here on September 30, 2004)
