Mirani Barros was in a cab, heading back to her apartment in Rio de Janeiro, when she saw flames in the distance and wondered aloud to the driver whether some trees had caught fire. They were passing the gates of the Quinta da Boa Vista, the lush municipal park that houses the National Museum. It was the night of September 2nd. When Barros got home, she began receiving text messages from friends, urging her to turn on the TV: the museum was engulfed in flames. She went to her window to look. For the next few hours, she moved from the window to the images on the screen and back, as the sounds of explosions got louder, and the billows of smoke grew thicker.

Barros, who is thirty-seven, grew up in the small city of Barra Mansa, the daughter of working-class parents. She started college there, then transferred to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the public university that runs the National Museum. After graduating, she worked for a while in the state of Rio de Janeiro’s Department of Human Rights and Social Assistance, focussed on food-security policies—“low-income restaurants, food banks, that kind of thing,” she told me. She noticed that obesity was always treated as a strictly medical condition, with none of the interdisciplinary sensibility given to other topics. Most obese Brazilians were black women, like her, and poor; Barros wanted to investigate whether there were other ways to think about the issue. She got a master’s degree at another public university and became interested in anthropology.

The National Museum’s doctoral program in social anthropology is considered one of the best in Latin America. Barros applied after taking a six-class seminar offered by black graduates of the program, who help students hoping to take the entrance exam via the museum’s affirmative-action system. She passed a written test and a project evaluation, then had an oral exam and interview, on August 30th. When I met her recently, a few days after the fire, I asked her how she did. “Oh, I killed it,” she said, laughing at her boldness. The final results were to be published on September 28th. When Barros was watching the flames outside her window, she thought of the museum’s collections from ancient Egypt, and an archaeologist friend who had just been selected to manage a section of the palace. It was a while before she realized that the documents pertaining to her examination had also been lost in the fire.

The stories that have emerged in the days since the fire at the National Museum have been harrowing. Paulo Buckup, a zoology professor who specializes in fish and molecular diversity in vertebrates, broke down doors and ran into the burning palace, grabbing drawers full of specimens of mollusks. His colleague Alexander Kellner, the director of the museum, went on national television and described the experience of stepping into the museum while the fire was blazing. The flames had not yet reached the floor where his office was located, but he was told by a firefighter that nothing could be done: the hydrants at the site were not working. Many foreign correspondents have reached for analogies to give readers a sense of the disaster, but it’s hard to convey the museum’s significance: in addition to containing one of the richest collections of natural-history artifacts in the world, it was one of Latin America’s leading centers for postgraduate studies. It’s as if, in New York, the American Museum of Natural History and the New School, or a part of the Columbia campus, had been built on the same spot, and then was reduced to ashes.

I visited the site four days after the fire. The museum’s building and the garden at its entrance had been cordoned off. A few TV reporters and camera crews stood around, picking up statements from passersby. Papers flapped in the wind, hanging from a single clothesline that had been improvised on the grass: statements from other institutions and universities, showing support in the wake of the tragedy. Most of these statements were rather formal, buttoned-up, but one of them evoked the political anger that has risen in the wake of the fire. “Neo-fascists hate the universities,” it read.

The museum burned down; the country is burning down—that metaphor has been uttered repeatedly, in solemn tones, since the disaster. The more I heard it, the more I resented it, because it seemed facile and even sentimental, the kind of thing that people say when, bombarded and numbed by the news cycle, they need to convey empathy. But, then, I had no personal connection to the museum. It was only when I saw my wife, who grew up in Rio, shouting at a picture of the burning palace, that I realized how much it meant to people.

The museum was founded by Dom João VI, who was then king of Portugal, in 1818; after Brazilian independence, in 1822, it doubled as the residence of the imperial family. (The day that I visited, the emperor Dom Pedro II’s statue seemed to be intact.) There was a time when the museum embodied the most racist notions of its day. “At the end of the nineteenth century, the National Museum was the center of scientific determinism in Brazil,” Gustavo Pacheco, who studied and worked there for six years, told me. “They measured craniums and that sort of thing. It’s a history full of contradictions, just as Brazilian history is full of contradictions. But a country needs these places to understand itself.”

Pacheco himself has a deep love for the place. A diplomat, he now works at the culture department of the Federal District, in Brasília, where he oversees a memorial for indigenous peoples. He did his doctorate in social anthropology, in the same program to which Barros is applying. He also worked as a researcher in ethnomusicology at the museum. He is still waiting to hear what happened to invaluable old recordings from the Pareci and Nambikwara tribes, though he has little hope that they have been saved. Pacheco was promoting his first collection of short stories—a book he wrote over several years, drawing partly on his research at the museum—when he started receiving messages on his phone. “I got into the car, and before turning on the engine I cried for, like, fifteen minutes, in front of my two children,” he said.

Pacheco does not hesitate to connect the disaster to the larger issues facing the country. “No one in their right mind would claim that institutions are working,” he said. But he also balks at attempts to pin the fire on a single administration. “Everyone knows that the neglect had been there for decades,” he said. “In 1999, when I started my Ph.D., the museum already had this aura of decay, it was already full of termites. Ask people about the smell. It was a very peculiar smell.”

Barros’s son lives with his grandmother in Barra Mansa, and visits his mother on weekends. They have picnics amid the lush greenery at the Quinta da Boa Vista, but Barros had always postponed taking him to see the collections and artifacts: she believed that a visit to the museum wasn’t something trivial, to be done quickly, and she figured that the relics would always be there. She would lie with her son on the grass surrounding the palace, and sometimes she would say, “It was the Republic that gave us permission to lie down on the prince’s grass.”