The rain drummed against the corrugated metal awning outside Louiz Santos' watch shop, a narrow hole-in-the-wall tucked between a bakery and a pawn shop in S?o Paulo’s Bela Vista district.
Louiz hunched over my watch, his calloused fingers working with precision. The former S4 officer of the Brazilian 27th Logistics Battalion had the looks of a man who had seen too much but carried it quietly as he worked away.
"Would be an overstatement to say I spent the war behind a desk," he muttered without looking up, the screwdriver in his hand making delicate adjustments. "Despite what my brother-in-law likes to say. Sure, I only fired my rifle a handful of times in combat. But I wasn’t sitting around. I worked outside from dawn to dusk—sometimes through the night if the job wasn’t done."
He paused, his brow furrowing as he turned the tiny gears in my watch. "Dead bodies were a dime a dozen. And guess who was the lucky officer in charge of those?"
Louiz kept his eyes on the delicate mechanism of my watch as he spoke, his voice steady, almost detached. Outside, the rain had eased to a drizzle—cars still rumbled past, and the muffled bass of a distant nightclub thumped through the walls like a heartbeat.
"Mostly, we were tasked with field hospitals—retrieving the bodies from there," he said, pausing briefly to adjust a gear. "But more often than not, we got them straight from their company or battalion quartermasters. Fresh from battle. They’d drive to our position, unload the bodies from the trucks, and make sure the paperwork was in order. If we were going to bury them, we damn well had to make sure we were burying the right guy."
He exhaled through his nose, shaking his head slightly. "Most of them had already been looted. And by that, I don’t mean by the enemy. Their own units took whatever was still worth using—plate carriers, ammunition, any gear that could go back into circulation. But it wasn’t just the practical stuff. Their friends would take the sentimental things, too. Wedding rings, pendants, letters, phones… anything that might make it back to a wife, a mother, a kid who’d never see their father again. But if that hadn't happened, mostly with the bodies from the field hospitals then we were tasked with doing that. Put all the sentimental stuff in a cardboard envelope with the name of the poor guy or girl and we'd give it to their unit if we ever saw them again.
"But records were the most important," he continued, his voice calm, almost clinical. "Making sure the body matched the name on the list. Grave Registration Services handled that—meticulous people, like accountants, except instead of money, they dealt in lives already spent. Everything was documented, both on paper and digitally. We couldn't afford mistakes."
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He picked up my watch again, turning it over in his hands. "I took care of the practical aspects. ‘Land management,’ we called it—half-jokingly.
"It was an entire operation," he said, his tone shifting into something measured, methodical. "Nothing was left to chance. The engineers had templates for trench dimensions—two meters deep, at least one and a half wide, length determined by the number of bodies we had. Ideally, we’d have the time and space for individual burials, but in reality, efficiency was the priority."
He set down the watch, his fingers drumming lightly against the counter. "Site selection. The ground had to be firm, not prone to flooding, far enough from water sources to prevent contamination. We avoided high-traffic areas, places where advancing or retreating forces might churn the soil back up. Engineers checked the terrain, marked the dig sites, and when we had heavy machinery, we used it. Otherwise, if there was no gasoline for the bulldozers it was shovels, sweat, and time."
His eyes flicked to a clock on the wall, watching the second hand tick forward. "Bodies were logged, tagged, and placed in layers. When we had body bags, we used them. If not, we arranged them with the care we could afford. Tarps mostly, linens, whatever we could get our hand with. Lime was applied liberally—first on the ground, then between layers. It slowed decomposition, controlled the smell, kept scavengers away. Dirt was packed in stages, tamped down to prevent shifting, marked when possible. If we had to move fast, coordinates were logged and relayed up the chain."
Louiz reached for the watch again, turning it over in his hands. "Even in retreat, there was protocol. If we abandoned a site, we sent reports ahead—locations, estimated numbers, anything that could help identify them later. It wasn’t always followed up on. But we did our part. It was as if their deaths was all part of the plan."
"Nigerians, French, Belgians, Americans, Christians, Jews, Atheists, Muslims. Didn’t matter," Louiz said, his voice even. "We tried to keep them by unit. Not for camaraderie in the grave, but for practicality. When it came time to dig them up, it made identifying them easier."
He paused for a moment, eyes focused on the task at hand. "If their gear was intact, we could match names, units. But when they had nothing left but the body, it was the records and the markings that kept it all straight."
Louiz set the watch down on the counter, his hands moving with precision as he carefully adjusted the final gears. The soft click of each piece falling into place felt almost like a small victory. He paused, inspecting the face of the watch, then gave it a satisfied nod.
"Good as new," he muttered, wiping his hands on a rag.
He slid the watch across the counter to me, his expression impassive. The ticking filled the room again, steady and unrelenting, as if it had never stopped.
"All done," Louiz said. "Doesn’t take much to fix a watch. Sometimes, it’s just about knowing what needs to be done."
He wiped the last trace of grease from his fingers, then turned his attention back to the clutter of clocks and tools around him. The city outside buzzed on, indifferent to the work that had been done, the lives that had passed through his hands.
