Free City Read online

  OTHER WORKS BY JOÃO ALMINO AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

  The Five Seasons of Love

  The Book of Emotions

  Free City

  João Almino

  Translated by

  Rhett McNeil

  CONTENTS

  Introduction:

  Seven Nights and a Burial

  First Night:

  From A to Z

  Second Night:

  With Body and Soul

  Third Night:

  Landscapes with Termite Mounds

  Fourth Night:

  Lucrécia

  Fifth Night:

  Building the Mystery

  Sixth Night:

  The Field of Hope

  Seventh Night:

  The Desert and Oblivion

  Yes, Brasília.

  I marveled at time

  which is already covering with years your flawless mathematics.

  —Paulo Leminski

  And in his memory they remained, in perfect purity, castles armed and ready. All of it, which would be duly revealed in its own time, had been, at first, strange and unknown . . . This great city would be the most elevated one in the world.

  —Guimarães Rosa

  Just like the migrant workers of Brasília, I, too, considered myself to be a “builder of cathedrals.”

  —Juscelino Kubitschek

  Introduction: Seven Nights and a Burial

  At one point I thought about throwing out everything that I’d researched and written, setting aside my memories, fears, and anxieties for a volume of memoirs in which I would recount not only my childhood in the Free City, the city that came to shatter the silence that had dominated that plateau for millennia, but also my interest in journalism, the story of how I met my current wife, and the birth of my three children, relegating my research to newspaper articles and concentrating on the words of my father, words that I’m still revising after a conversation with my aunt Francisca during his burial.

  But no, my narrative remained a mixture of my memories, those of my father, my research, and aunt Francisca’s observations, and I made the mistake of handing it over to a writer who rid it of all its commas and periods, filled it with slang terms and scenes of violence, informed me that it would be necessary to add a moral and philosophical dimension to it, and even asked me if it contained some sort of lesson, which I found absurd. Because of this I decided to send it to the publisher straight away, even though it lacked a moral element, a philosophy, and a lesson, only to get upset later on when I received the polite response that it didn’t fit in within the guidelines of the publishing house.

  I considered selling my car to finance the publication of the book, cut out all the florid prose, and reinstated my periods and commas, since I didn’t have time to waste on stylistic ornamentation anyway, and I also consider it to my advantage that I’m a journalist: describing Lucrecia, who is looking at a bird, I would never say that the wind wafted tenderly against her visage, nor that her beauty was adorned with amorous smiles, nor that her eyes gazed upon the boundlessness of the savannah or that they fluttered like the wings of a bird over scarlet fields. When I was halfway through, a critic who called himself my friend criticized not only my style but the content as well, Your experiment is going to be a disaster, he predicted, and I attributed this prediction to a difference in our politics, since we were on opposing sides, he considered me a reactionary and even now he walks past me without saying hello, but I owe to him the suggestion to create this blog and publish the story little by little here, like a nineteenth century serial—as such I was able to keep my car.

  I don’t presume I know everything that happened back in those days, I may have made some mistakes, written too much or too little; you all know that memories and research projects are flawed and incomplete, so it’s best to confess right up front that I’ve forgotten a lot of the facts, and that, of the ones I remember, I don’t always remember them accurately or precisely, and for that reason this is a text to be modified by its readers, as if I’d created a Wikipedia for this story, with the only rule being that I’m the only one who is allowed to meddle with my memories and those of dad and Aunt Francisca. As for the rest—the description of events that gives us the impression of belonging to the spirit of the times—you readers of this blog can revise as you will, and if you have any incident to relate or commentary to make, don’t be shy.

  Throughout the process, I added a personal opinion here and there and amended what I know with what had already been published about Brasília up to the current year, 2010, thus becoming greatly indebted to Isaías P. Ferreira da Silva Junior, whose work examines in minute detail the flora and fauna of the region as well as its first inhabitants, and follows the details of the construction of the city, a task that is at once that of historian, anthropologist, and sociologist. And he is even more indebted to many, many others, who, through historical accounts, sociological and anthropological analyses, memoirs, testimonies, statements to newspapers, reports, chronicles, poems, short stories, and even novels, sought to paint a picture of the Free City, also known as Pioneer Camp during the period of Brasília’s construction.

  My father remains the source of inspiration to publish this book, since, when he was attempting to reconcile his growing interest in the construction of the city with his journalistic activities, he told me that writing was also a type of construction, that one went along laying brick upon brick, and with that lesson in hand I have spent many years carrying his journalistic torch forward, and it is because of this same lesson that I am now arranging the bricks of this story into their present shape.

  Finally, I would like to thank João Almino for his revisions. I met him in 1970 when he first set foot in Brasília, and he was the one who first encouraged me to start writing this story. Up to this point, this is the only paragraph that you all, the readers of this blog, have commented on, since you all just have to know what my name is, or at least whether or not I’m João Almino, as if the import of the story could change depending on who its author is, but never mind all that, I’m maintaining my anonymity for the simple reason that it gives me more freedom, most importantly the freedom to be honest.

  JA

  First Night: From A to Z

  “Brasília is a novel worthy of being told,” a phrase that I pulled out of one of the many notebooks that Moacyr Ribeiro, my father, buried inside a box on the day after the city’s inauguration, was uttered at a time when my father was collecting statements made by foreign visitors to the city under construction. On the cover of the notebook there was a landscape in green, yellow, and blue, with the word “Onward” in red across the middle of it, with beautiful palm trees and five boys running off to explore it, knowing just where they’re headed, wearing cowboy hats and red bandanas, knee-high socks, long-sleeved shirts with the sleeves rolled up above their elbows, broad leather belts, each with a canteen of water, and the one in the middle holding the Brazilian flag, its pointed pole ready to be planted squarely in the future, and two stripes at the bottom of the picture and another, thicker one below them, off to the right, where Dad had written “Construction of Brasília 1956-1960” and, on the last two lines, “Comments by people from around the world.”

  I had to get Dad’s statement before he died, which was also a way for me to patch things up with him during the delicate period he was going through and right the wrong of having been estranged from him for so long, actually, ever since I’d walked away from him, six years after the Valdivino incident, in the middle of an argument that I’m still trying to understand and that started when I told Aunt Francisca the things I’d heard about Dad, and, even so, she still didn’t refuse to marry him, It’s all a lie, she said, Well then, tell me the real story, No, I’ve go
t nothing to tell you, she replied. It was then that I, using as a catalyst a disagreement we had over an article I’d written, left home ranting against my father and moved into Aunt Matilde’s apartment, but always remained uncertain and needed to know what truly happened before he died.

  These days, months after the seven nights I spent with him and the seventh night, the night of his death, I wonder if I was his murderer. Maybe it’s in order to redeem myself that I combine phrases from his buried papers with stories that I’ve read and heard, especially the ones that I heard from him starting the moment I noticed the joy in his eyes when he saw me at his side, for joy is sometimes expressed with tears, such as when we encounter beauty, justice, or kindness in their purest state. Weariness of this world and acquiescence to the approaching hour of his departure from it were transformed, little by little, by the pleasure he took in my conciliatory gesture. I couldn’t believe everything that he told me, and that “everything” seemed insufficient, but I recognize that, in his tremulous voice, he spoke quite a bit, as if he needed someone on whom he could unload the stories that he’d always kept to himself. During the day he was quiet and sometimes I’d leave to have lunch with my wife and kids at our house in Lago Sul, meet up with my friends at the newspaper, or go to the University of Brasília library to do research, but at night I’d read aloud to him and he’d revise a sentence here or there and tell me lots of stories, sometimes until the wee hours of the morning, about Valdivino and the crime that possibly never happened.

  Given the state he was in and his eighty-two years, whenever Dad would forget a detail he’d just invent another or even fabricate exact dates, but I, too, had witnessed quite a bit when I lived in the Free City from ages six to ten, before I moved into one of the houses in the W-3 South section of the Pilot Plan with Aunt Francisca, and, thus, I was able to complement and amend my Dad’s memories with those of my own. All I had to do to start constructing the story was fill in the dry sentences he told me with sunshine, dust, tears, and fear, as well as everything else the story of the Free City should be made of: machines and tractors, cement mixers, excavators, bulldozers, steamrollers, asphalt plants, cranes, pile drivers boring into the ground, simple slats of lumber, as well as nights, bars, and prostitutes. A story that I could turn into an epic poem about men and machines creating a new city, migrant workers, tons of them, especially men who arrived without their wives, hoping to land a job with a construction firm, carrying their wooden trunks or bundles of clothes, an aluminum mug and a knife hooked to their belt, just like Valdivino used to have.

  It’s been six months since Dad died and I decided to finish the book, months that have, at times, shrouded these words in mourning clothes, and, at other times, helped me unearth some flashes of life from my forgetfulness, as I search for phrases in the desert. I am so preoccupied with this that my friends at the paper have noticed my indifference to the current political debates—me, who used to be so nonconformist and combative. My life is passing by on two separate planes: I take the kids to school, call the plumber to fix the kitchen sink faucet, clean the pool, and, at the same time, it’s as if I’ve been living in another world, with a single, eternal history, which I don’t yet completely comprehend, and which I myself am attempting to compose.

  I’m sitting at the table on the porch with this nearly-complete chapter and others that are underway, full of notes and sections already written, my elbows on the glass tabletop, smoking my pipe, drinking coffee or a Campari, listening to the frogs in the early evening, thinking back on other frogs, and suddenly a shroud covers everything, even the beautiful landscape in front of me, and this story starts to turn sour. I stop, take a breath of fresh air, look out at the city lights shining on the lake, rummage around in another corner of my memory and work late into the night, blazing trails of disquietude, sometimes for hours and hours without writing a single line. At other times I struggle to restrain the flood of words that flow chaotically from a powerful memory, like when they told me the details of Valdivino’s possible death, and I felt betrayed by Aunt Francisca and left the house upset with my Dad. The worst is that until now this blog has been completely useless, there hasn’t been a single follower, a single useful comment, perhaps because I want to hide the real motive for writing this, a motive that’s mine alone, the motive of someone who seeks to disguise human suffering and martyrdom with words, of someone whom the gods have abandoned and yet still hopes to be reborn and discovered, of someone who still feels guilty for the death of his father. But I don’t want to talk about myself, I’m not as crazy as the doctors say, I’m not paranoid, nor am I just imagining things, my madness was only temporary, and that was many years ago anyway.

  There was a time when I was eight years old and Dad was my idea of a great man, severe and just in his decisions; a time when he was cultured, intelligent, knew everything, and treated me as if I were his real son, his authority manifested in his powerful gestures and terse speech. The misfortunes that had befallen him before he came to the Free City hadn’t yet made him bitter. But I didn’t get to know him all at once; the image that I have of him was formed over the course of many years, and even now, after his death, isn’t complete. With novels, one would expect that there wouldn’t be any doubts about the moral makeup of the principal characters or the crucial facts of their lives, so it’s a good thing that I’m not writing a novel and should just be content with the things I know. Why try to correct on paper something that was wrong in life? Why try to fabricate an answer to something that only and always presents itself as unknowable?

  If I could, I’d continue my conversation with Dad. I miss him, and my heart keeps combining feelings, of tenderness and hatred, that shouldn’t be mixed together, as I mull over his words and a strong breeze beats against the palm trees, whispering conjectures in my ear and helping me pound the keyboard of the computer.

  I look out at the other end of the garden, where, in the darkness, small trees that I planted a year ago shake nervously. I see a figure out there. Dad! I call out. Silence. I can still hear his voice, like an echo, down in the depths of my fear. What is he saying? He’s repeating Íris’s version of the story: Valdivino never died. I no longer object to this; that old anger, revisited, is merely a memory of anger, and I accept what he tells me in his fragile, sickly voice, carried by the wind. Dad! I call out once more, and tears fall from my eyes while a maelstrom of contradictory images, ideas, and feelings whirls around in my head, and then I see myself as a child, the little crybaby whom Aunt Francisca would scold, then caress on her lap.

  As soon as the lights from the generator were turned off, I’d close my eyes, but I was never able to see the beast of slumber that Aunt Francisca told me would come to put me to sleep, and I was afraid that Valdivino would appear to me and blame me for his death. Children are like that, he would appear to me in moments of fear, in his timid, superstitious manner, asking questions that made no sense, crying about something or other, crying so much in my dreams that a pool of tears formed around me, and even so I wasn’t moved. But was he dead?

  My present-day insomnia is an extension of those hours when, in the darkness of night, I heard sounds of drunkards out in the street, my dog Typhoon barking, macaws that lived out behind the house or a lone owl, and I’d open my eyes to the kaleidoscope of grays and blacks that turned into monsters on the walls.

  To give the story some life, all I had to do was transport myself back to a day from my childhood, imagine myself in the middle of an avenue in the Free City, and then I could see my aunts sporting fine figures and scowls, Valdivino seated at a table transcribing letters, Dad talking with someone in the doorway of a bar, a little girl with braids and dark eyes riding a bicycle, Typhoon following behind me, and I could see the colors of the shops, the wooden buildings, bulky black cars parked on the side of the street, their white-wall tires exposed, and then the smell of gasoline would emerge, the smell of oil, the smell of trash heaps and horse manure, and the stories of crimes, sins
, despair, and grandiose futures would appear on an enormous, colorful screen.

  I look out upon a day from my childhood and see three male characters conversing in front of our house, where Aunt Francisca has just set out some chairs, and I don’t even need to describe to you the wooden house with no sidewalk, identical to all the others that you see in photographs from that era, in front of which, as I was saying, the three characters were having silent conversations, communicating phrases in gestures, uttering words that I can’t hear, or, if I do hear them, that I can’t understand, and which, if I understand them, don’t interest me, one of them with an oval face, white and freshly shaved, a trace of displeasure in it, a sharp, playful look in his eyes, the expression of a very successful man, one who had accumulated many experiences throughout his life. Typhoon is sitting beside him, listening to his conversations with ears perked up. This is Dad.

  The second one, whose hands hide his hat as he doffs it, has a muscular, well-formed body, a strong, straightforward look on his sunburned face, a well-trimmed moustache, and anyone who looked upon him would envy his felicitous appearance. This is Roberto, back when it wasn’t yet clear whether he’d be the boyfriend of Aunt Francisca or Aunt Matilde.

  The third one, of an unpolished simplicity, with a hat that’s much too big for his small head, is a talker, looks intelligent, and is the only one with spurs on his boots, having arrived on the back of a mule, but if he garners my attention, it’s because of his fragility. When he takes his hands out of his pockets, he gesticulates endlessly, swaying forward and back on his chicken legs, and gives the general impression that he’d be blown away if the wind were to catch him. The other two look him up and down when they pass by him. From this description, you will have already guessed it: This is Valdivino.