Free City Read online

  The president is the new Tomé de Sousa, Dad commented to Bernardo Sayão, referring to the first Governor-General, who, upon disembarking at All Saints Bay on March 29, 1549 initiated construction on the nation’s first capital, And you are going to go down in history, Dr. Sayão. Look, Dr. Moacyr, I’m not interested in publicity or posterity, I’m interested in doing, Sayão replied, his broad-brimmed hat in hand, as always.

  At the Brown Ranch, they passed by Camp Creek—which had earned that name since, in 1893, members of the commission presided over by then director of the National Observatory Luiz Cruls had camped there in order to demarcate and study that valley of severe, majestic tranquility—as a botanist on the Cruls mission described it—and Dad mentioned, loud enough for the president to hear, that he’d been taking notes on everything and discovered that JK had his own “Golden Book” of Brasília, an official history of the place, according to what he related those present, paying no mind to what Dad had said. Only much later would Dad read the famous phrase that one of the two followers of my blog sent me, which the president recorded in his book that day: “From this central plateau, this secluded place, which will shortly be transformed into the brain of the nation’s most important decisions, I cast my eyes once more upon my country’s future and foresee the new dawn, with an unbreakable faith and limitless confidence in its great destiny,” also adding—the blogger is certain of this—that, having put an end to the separation between the coast and the interior, Brazilians will no longer live the way Friar Vicente de Salvador described in the seventeenth century, that is, like crabs, cleaving to the coast.

  I’ve reinstated this paragraph, which had been eliminated in João Almino’s revisions, to affirm that the visit came to an end without the president even noticing that Dad existed, but there would soon be a new opportunity to meet him, when Dad managed to accompany closely another of Bernardo Sayão’s bold efforts: the construction, at the Gama farm, in only ten days—from the 21 of October to the 31—of the first official residence of the president, a wooden structure built on stilts, designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer, which only avoided being called the Palace of the Dawn because JK liked the name so much that he resolved to save it for the definitive palace. Two days after the start of construction, on October 23, according to what I read in the papers that I dug up, Dad accompanied Sayão to Luziânia to receive the first trucks carrying material for the construction of the city, which had left from Minas Gerais and Rio on October 18. Ever hopeful that the president himself would show interest in his writings, he took daily notes—up until the end of the month—on the construction of the Catetinho Palace, the record stating, in the first of his many notebooks, on a date near that of the construction of Catetinho, that the wood from Goiânia took five days to arrive, since the sinuous roads had to pass through Campo Limpo, Corumbá, and Brazlândia, as a new, attentive blog reader—not yet a follower—confirms.

  When Catetinho was inaugurated on November 10, the president spoke to my father for the first time, asking him what he did for a living, and upon hearing Dad’s explanation he affirmed that during the years of Brasília’s construction he would receive innumerable visits from distinguished people, that’s all he said, but Dad took those words as acknowledgment that the president indeed needed someone to take notes for his “Golden Book” of Brasília, and this was more, much more, than Dad had hoped for. From that moment on, whenever allowed, he was seen with his notebook accompanying Bernardo Sayão everywhere, in broad daylight, two great men side-by-side, Sayão even taller than Dad, who inquired about everything that took place and compiled an almost daily chronicle, which he kept in a cardboard box. Dad even witnessed something that was said to be a regular occurrence, which one of the followers of my blog reminded me of: that Sayão, a man of action, averse to routines, formalities, paperwork, and cabinet members, authorized requisitions for materials on the back of scraps from packs of cigarettes, and that, whenever a machine operator didn’t understand his orders, he’d take control of the machine himself, demonstrating how it worked, sometimes even finishing the job. Dr. Sayão, I’d like to write an article about you, the most daring of Goianos, Dad proposed to him, I’m not a Goiano, Dr. Moacyr, I’m a Carioca from Tijuca.

  It was merely a trial run, on June 21, 1957, Sayão had managed to get Dad a few hours at Catetinho and afterwards at the lobby of the Newcap offices where the civil servants were receiving General Craveiro Lopes, the president of Portugal, the first foreign head of state to visit Brasília, and thus, for the first time, Dad felt entrusted with the task of accompanying illustrious visitors and recording, for History, their observations about the new capital.

  Never forget this date, João, that phrase, and not much else, is all I remember about that event, which is, nevertheless, narrated in detail in the notebook that I carefully read before my conversation with Dad, confined within four white walls, on that first night, and in that notebook it’s written that Dad showed up late at Newcap, and that he didn’t witness a single conversation at Catetinho, that he was only able to see, from a distance, the general accompanied by his wife Berta, aside from hearing a serenade in the middle of the frigid night, when the temperature got down to three degrees celsius. It didn’t work out this time, but one day, my son, Dad told me, this box is going to be valuable, they’ll have to rummage through it when they want to find out how everything began.

  On the day of its inauguration in February of 1957, Dad, Aunt Francisca, and me—as well as Aunt Matilde, at that point—were among the four hundred people living in the city that was coming into being, on lands parceled out from the Bananal, Vicente Pires, and Gama farms, and whose principal avenues were opened by Newcap just a few months after we arrived. In 1957, Dad started training me to be a tour guide in that city, the Free City—“free,” mainly because its merchants were exempt from paying taxes. Visitors found me amusing because I knew everything about the city, by the beginning of that year I knew each one of its three hundred and forty buildings, its houses and stores, both dry goods stores and groceries, and in time I’d come to know its restaurants, fabric stores, barber shops, dye houses, carpenter’s shops, butcher shops, pharmacies, its two schools, its movie theaters, its bars, its wooden pension houses and hotels, which advertised the comfort of their spring mattresses, and then the Baptist, Kardecian, and Presbyterian churches, as well as, in the central plaza, the São João Bosco Catholic church, which Valdivino helped build, where a vigil would one day be kept over the body of Bernardo Sayão, and where I confessed my fantasies about Aunt Francisca to Father Roque Viliati.

  I knew the name of every hotel in the city, from the first, Hotel Brasília, which Dad told me brought back memories of his encounter with Lucrécia, the famous prostitute, to the ones that were built later on, Paradise Hotel, Dom Pedro II on Central Avenue, the Portuguese Pension House on Third Avenue, the Normandie, the Wine Palm, the Jurema, and the Santos Dumont.

  Dad said that in this last one, which was owned by a former Polish refugee, the young and attractive Countess Tarnowska, he had met two foreign writers, the poet Elizabeth Bishop and the novelist Aldous Huxley. The countess owned a movie theater in Anápolis and decided to open another one in the Free City in its early days. The movie theater, where Dad would sometimes take me, against Aunt Francisca’s wishes, was initially housed in a building that looked more like a wooden barn than a movie house, but later on it moved to a new location in one of the biggest buildings in the city, a structure made of corrugated iron, where they played slapstick comedies from Rio starring Oscarito and Grande Otelo, films produced by Vera Cruz starring Eliana Lage, Marisa Prado, Anselmo Duarte, Ilka Soares, and Alberto Ruschel, as well as many foreign films, like An American in Paris with Gene Kelly and the Italian neorealist films of Rosselini and Vittorio de Sica. I didn’t see all these as a kid, but I saw them later, or at least heard about them, recognized their posters, vaguely recalled comments that Dad or Aunt Matilde made about some of them, or else they were seen
by the three readers of this blog who commented on my post this week and are primarily culpable for any imprecision therein.

  The countess was just one among many foreigners, whose names I’ve forgotten, names that were Arabic, Jewish, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, Belgian, French, Russian, Greek, and Polish. As Dad declaimed, reading from a foreign newspaper back in those old days: “it doesn’t matter where they hail from, whether they are Brazilians or foreigners, because no matter who arrives here, they soon partake of the enthusiasm they live with in this city, suddenly aware of the fact that something grandiose is being created here.”

  The Free City also attracted people from all over Brazil, with a preponderance of people from Minas Gerais and Northeasterners. When the workers couldn’t live with their families in the work-camps, they moved to the commercial areas, which were dominated by Arabs and Northeasterners, or to the squatters’ villages that were going up: Vulture Hill and Kerosene Hill, Hope Town, Tenório Town, IAPI, Divineia, Vincentina, and Sarah Kubitschek. Just eight years old, I would explain in detail, to the astonishment of the newly arrived, that the lots were distributed in a program of commodatum, and since the deeds were not definitive, they would be returned to Newcap at the end of 1959; that permits were not granted for the houses, which would all be destroyed when Brasília was inaugurated—the first disposable city, the Free City was built to be destroyed. I knew what a commodatum was because Dad, at the same time that he was just getting on his feet with the unprofitable activity that was something like that of a historian or journalist, was also dedicating himself to a more lucrative field, for, as one of the first to arrive in the Free City, he had obtained “Brasília Obligations,” which gave him priority and advantages in the purchase of land, and little-by-little he became a commodatum merchant.

  At the beginning, Dad was pretty much my only companion, I loved and admired him, I must admit, I liked to watch him organize his papers, which were stowed away like precious stones, You’re a real Mineiro, Dr. Moacyr, I heard people say, and I understood that it was meant as a compliment about Dad’s talents, he was a genius in both letters and business and knew how to talk to everyone without committing to anything, always making the best of the circumstances. Sometimes he’d take me hunting, and it was on a hunt out near the Descoberto River, in the year we arrived, that we first met Valdivino. I later made friends with some of the kids who came there with their families, or parts of families, like mine, I passed the time putting collectible cards into albums, leafing through comic books, playing table-top button soccer or real soccer, I’d discuss the stories of Batman, Popeye, Captain Marvel, and Robin Hood with the few friends I had while we listened to Geronimo, Hero of the Backlands on the radio and were moved by this hero’s defense of justice in the fictional city of Cerro Bravo in the state of São Paulo, alongside his beloved, Aninha, and his sidekick, Kid Saci, fighting against Colonel Saturnino Bragança and the bandits—One-leg, Skull-Face, and Sparky—and sometimes we’d venture out in search of cashew fruit and pequi fruit, returning home with our legs and feet yellow with mud. Get straight in the bath, young man, Aunt Francisca used to command.

  Back then she seemed taller than she is in fact, her average height in just the right proportion to her full-figured body. No other woman had such beautiful black hair, and I liked her round face, her small, thin-lipped mouth—from which emerged a voice that, although mild, was clear and confident, from which I heard sobs and laments, never screams—and her sharp, black eyes—at times serious—which knew how to smile and enchant, and explored everything they encountered with curiosity, above all looking upon me with tenderness. She showed me how to press the keys of her accordion, I would take a seat on a chair, as if I were in a movie theater, to watch her in front of her sheet music, picking out the notes, my eyes and lips showing my happiness, and then a desire within me would cause me distress, a desire to play the accordion and embrace that soft, dark flesh, but soon I would control myself, reined in like a trained horse. The rain also played its music on the zinc roof-tiles, at first like the soft sound of a piano, later rich in percussion, as if the poured sand of the construction companies were falling down on our heads, and then a full, rhythmic orchestra, with no lack of roaring thunder, came upon us suddenly, the loud splashing sounds coming through the window, and the wind entered to caress the legs and thighs of Aunt Francisca. She smiled at me and at the accordion, always playing, and the rain bathed her smile in melancholy, further exposing her gentleness and tender heart.

  The rain brought with it a slightly chilly breeze, I rested my eyes on Aunt Francisca and tried to straighten out my crooked thoughts, which I sought, in vain, to correct with teachings from the church, but my imagination rebelled and, with the wind, traipsed along her face, her entire body. Suddenly, footsteps could be heard, and a drenched figure approached the door, it was Valdivino, who would visit with us for a while, admiring Aunt Francisca’s talents, same as me, then leave for more hours of work, for I had the impression that Valdivino did nothing but work, worked ceaselessly, and that when he had a few minutes for a break he came to our house, where he also worked, fixing pipes, installing a new showerhead, building a wall here, painting another one there.

  Aunt Francisca’s gaze kissed me as she stroked her accordion with a flannel cloth, leaving it radiant, the way she did with the furniture in the living room, which she polished with peroba oil, bending down or shaking her hips, as when, in the kitchen, she made sweets out of caramel, coconut, and papaya. She was always active, didn’t stop moving from morning to night. When she wasn’t busy at the restaurant of the Social Welfare Alimentation Service, known as SWAS, she took care of the house, going from one end to the other, making sure the living room never got messy, the sinks never got grimy, the furniture never got dusty, and the wardrobes never got moldy. Sometimes I couldn’t control myself, and my affection for Aunt Francisca would come out as pinches on her arm or tugs on her hair, my amusement complete when she’d take off her sandal and run after me with it, never able to catch me.

  She expressed an opinion about everything around us, especially Dad’s tastes and decisions, Why don’t you have a linen suit made, we have a good tailor here in the Free City now, you need to look more refined, Mister, For walking around in the mud?, he’d reply.

  On Sundays, Aunt Francisca would paint her fingernails and toenails, wearing a nightgown with buttons in the front, which allowed for a glimpse of her bra, she’d come out of the bathroom smelling of perfume, plucked her eyebrows with tweezers in front of the mirror, and painted her lips red, then put on a modest dress and went to Mass with a scarf about her head and rosary in hand. Upon her return, she’d mention a possible girlfriend to Dad: Today at church everyone was staring at Mr. Ferreira’s daughter, beautiful yellow dress, matching shoes and handbag, a fine young lady, don’t you think?

  She and Aunt Matilde couldn’t have been more different, a difference that I noted on the clothesline, where I observed the colored panties of Aunt Matilde and the white ones of Aunt Francisca; Aunt Matilde’s large corsets and Aunt Francisca’s smaller ones; the sleeved dresses of Aunt Francisca and Aunt Matilde’s sleeveless ones; Aunt Francisca’s petticoats and Aunt Matilde’s shorts.

  I’d leave early for Mass with Aunt Francisca. She was the one—never Aunt Matilde or Dad—with whom I’d pray the rosary at nine o’clock at night, before going to bed. She was the only one who praised me for wanting to be an altar-boy, and for thinking about entering the seminary, during a period when I even desired to be a saint, capable of improving the world through my virtues and example, earning a guarantee of free entrance to heaven in the bargain. Valdivino is a saint, Aunt Francisca used to say, and I at least wanted to be his equal.

  On Sundays, while Aunt Francisca got ready to go to Mass, always wearing long-sleeved dresses, Aunt Matilde would put on a pair of tight jeans or a pair of shorts that showed off her long thighs and plop down in front of the hi-fi, a big, wooden piece of furniture supported by
matchstick legs that took up almost half of the side-wall of the living room, beneath the beautiful pendulum clock that we’d brought from the farm at the Das Almas River.

  When we returned from church, she’d still be there listening to the latest hits, either on the radio or the phonograph, where she’d play the new records she received from Rio over and over again, to the point of driving Aunt Francisca mad. At such times I identified more with Aunt Matilde than with Aunt Francisca. While Aunt Francisca liked to listen to romantic songs, with a touch of melancholy—“Goddess of Asphalt” by Nelson Gonçalves, “Loneliness” by Dolores Duran, “Sorrowful Ballad” by Angela Maria, or Maysa singing “I don’t exist without you”—Aunt Matilde had a more diverse taste, and would listen to “All the Way” by Frank Sinatra, an album of Nat King Cole performing “Ansiedad” and “Cachito” in Spanish, and she discovered João Gilberto’s bossa nova through songs like “Bim Bom” and “The Morning of Carnival,” as well as the new, lively rhythms of Celly Campelo in songs like “Stupid Cupid” and “Pink Ribbons.”

  Their tastes also differed come Carnival. I recall that during Carnival of 1958 Aunt Francisca’s favorite song was the samba “Madureira Wept”: “Madureira wept/ Madureira wept in sorrow/ When the voice of destiny/ Obeying the divine/ Called for her star . . . ” But Aunt Matilde had her fun listening to the Carnival march by Dircinha Batista: “Mommy, I failed/ Mommy I failed the test/ For the very first time/ Little daughter, little daughter/ Little daughter dear/ Was it French?/ Was it Portuguese?/ I don’t know, mommy, I can’t even suspect/ The test was so tough, mommy/ That I shipwrecked!”